The Woke Years in America’s Longest War: A Retrospective

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Targeting “Wokeness” in the Military

Early in his tenure as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeted the problem of “wokeness” in the US military. The US lost the wars it fought in the 21st century, the Secretary asserts, because of a corrosive feminizing of the war machine. After repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth became a Fox News host. He gained prominence for rallying around service members convicted in military courts of war crimes—an ominous portent of things to come.

Outrage over “wokeness” has circulated in rightwing media for years now, initially as attacks on student groups and academic programs associated with race and gender studies. The Trump regime has extended this war against wokeness to all branches of government, including calls for the erasure of the contributions of women and racial minorities to the armed forces. The rhetoric resonates deeply with white Christian nationalists and their fascistic whitewashing of US history.

Reactionary Masculinity

But most palpable in this crusade is its reactionary vision of masculinity. Hegseth vows to return the military’s focus to killing the enemy unconstrained by the law or rules of war. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he raps. “Violent effect, not politically correct.” And as the US and Israel wage war on Iran, Hegseth barks threats like a playground bully: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” As the US escalates into genocidal attacks and threats to destroy an entire civilization, Iran is showing that it can very much punch above its weight.

Mental Health, War Stress, and Military Adaptation

In 2010, I submitted a proposal to the US Army to make a documentary on how the military was handling mental health problems among troops in Afghanistan. Repeated deployments—some service members signing up for third or fourth deployments after being offered cash bonuses—raised public alarm over the emotional costs of the Long War. Further, the Defense Department’s expanded reliance on Reserve Units, as well as rising suicide rates in veterans, added to public concerns. In response, the Department of Defense for the first time in the history of American wars embedded Combat and Operational Stress Control (COSC) units in forward operating bases in Afghanistan. Multidisciplinary teams—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists—were placed in military bases in combat zones to provide short-term interventions for soldiers suffering psychiatric symptoms or acute stress reactions. The mission of the stress control units centered on returning soldiers to duty quickly rather than evacuating them.

Proposal to Document Combat Stress Control

My proposal to the Army went something like this: There is a military literature that dates back to Freud after the First World War discussing ethical conflicts for military clinicians in treating soldiers showing symptoms of emotional breakdown while returning many of these same soldiers to duty. The public needs to be educated on how the military is responding to these conflicting demands and to learn about the expanded role of combat stress control in the war in Afghanistan. As a clinical psychologist, academic and documentarian, I am uniquely equipped to tell that story.

The proposal process through the Army and clearances through the Pentagon and ISAF/NATO in Afghanistan were indeed daunting. As a feminist scholar and anti-war activist, my chances of approval would seem doomed from the start. But a convergence of forces opened space for this project.

A Moment of “Wokeness” in the Military

Indeed, 2010 was a year of wokeness in the military. The officer in the Oregon Army Reserves who supported my project and recommended me to her superiors had just been promoted to Colonel. She had also married a woman in Oregon earlier that year as the military was assessing the costs of its policies on homosexuality. (By 2008, more than 12,000 officers had been discharged from the military for publicizing their homosexuality.) On December 18, 2010, the Senate overturned the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy by a 65-31 vote, which President Barack Obama signed a few days later. The repeal allowed gay and lesbian military members to serve openly in the armed forces.

It was the year when military units across the country were required to create task forces on sexual assault in the military and when military commanders were required to investigate complaints of sexual abuse or harassment.

It was the year when training for units deploying to Afghanistan included lectures on the oppression of women under the Taliban and on boosting public support for the mission by positioning the US military as the defender of Afghani women.

It was the year when service members were encouraged to get counseling and to interpret their feelings of vulnerability and disabling symptoms as strengths. Posters in VA clinics invited veterans to see that “it takes a strong warrior to get help.”

The New Military

At the center of this era of the New Military was the expanded role of mental health professionals in the management of warfare.

My film, MIND ZONE: Therapists Behind the Front Lines–stayed true to the promise of my proposal. But like wars themselves, documenting wars carry unintended consequences. Some of the supporters of MIND ZONE felt betrayed by the film while others–including featured clinicians–defended the documentary as presenting a respectful picture of the pressures they were under and the complexity of their mission.

The Army had given me complete editorial control with two conditions: 1) that the film not expose information or sites that would risk the military operation and 2) that the film not include images disparaging of US service members. After reviewing a cut of the film for distribution in early 2012, the U.S Army Office of the Chief of Public Affairs in Los Angeles signed off that those two conditions were met.

Colonel David Rabb

Filming started in 2011 as my crew and I interviewed Colonel David Rabb whose story is closely followed in the film. He often expounded on the new ethos of the military. He was a social worker and Army reservist working in a VA center in California and as a Black man he had complaints about racism in the promotion of people of color to higher ranks. But he was a true believer in progress in the military and of the righteousness of campaigns ushered in with the War on Terrorism.

“This is a very different leadership in the Army than the one of my father’s generation,” he explained. “This is no longer the world of the drill sergeant barking orders and humiliating those under his command.”

Ethical Tensions

In June of 2011, my crew and I filmed Col Rabb’s unit—the 113^th Medical Detachment—as they trained at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington State and as they prepared to deploy to Kandahar, Afghanistan later that month. The previous year, reports circulated in the media of soldiers with a Stryker Brigade based at JBLM accused of killing Afghan civilians.

Members of this platoon were accused of staging combat situations to deliberately murder unarmed Afghan civilians for sport in Kandahar province and collecting body parts as trophies.

Further, military psychiatrists at JBLM were under Congressional investigation for reclassifying service members diagnosed with PTSD to make them re-deployable. These cases weighed heavily on the 113^th as they navigated the daunting mission ahead.

There were other haunting pictures that complicated the mission of stress control. In a training session for Oregon Army Reserve members joining the 113^th, one extensive presentation showed torture scenes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—pictures that circulated widely in the media—as a lesson on the risk of troops descending into sadism. The Department of Defense had faced a full-blown crisis over images of American service members torturing and sexually abusing prisoners. Stripping prisoners of their clothes was a common form of sexual humiliation and degradation there. Obama, who had initially agreed to release photographs, changed his mind after lobbying from senior military figures. Obama stated that their release could put troops in danger and “inflame anti-American public opinion.” Further, pictures of political prisoners tortured through “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo Bay represented another public relations crisis for the military.

For many parents who sent sons and daughters into these conflict zones, the fear was that the military was turning their children into monsters.

War Narratives

The war in Iraq had become a bad story. The war in Afghanistan was a better story for the military and for President Obama as he authorized in 2009 a massive troop surge. For Obama, too, the campaign in Afghanistan was “the necessary war.” In that classical psychological defense of splitting, of cordoning a messy situation into good and bad elements, Obama sought political refuge in Afghanistan. It was a righteous cause, unlike the war in Iraq that his predecessor George W. Bush had launched against the protests of much of the world.

I was authorized to embed with a Combat Stress Unit deploying to Afghanistan because commanders were proud of this expanded form of caregiving in the theater of war. As a psychologist, the film became a case study in the problematic role of my own profession and other mental health professionals in the conduct of war.

Reception, Decline, and Historical Context

MIND ZONE was produced by Herzog & Co and completed in 2012. After Obama drew down troops and declared the war in Afghanistan to be essentially over that year, distributors lost interest. The film was now an old story.

Spanning four presidencies, the war cost over 2 trillion dollars and resulted in massive casualties before ending with a troop withdrawal in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power.

The war killed an estimated 176,000–212,000 people, including 46,319 civilians.

None of the political or military leaders promulgating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been brought to justice or faced demands for accountability. We shall see if the current regime of warmongers confronts a different fate.