The Testimony of a Christian Anti-Militarist: Part 1

A Two-Part Christmas Essay

About the author: Tre is a Black Lutheran Marxist "Popular Theologian" and solidarity organizer in Minneapolis, MN. You can find more of their writing at childofjob.substack.com.

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Pictured: Tre, the author, in 2014 and 2024.

Camp Ripley, Minnesota
October 2014

I saw my breath in the air as rain drops fell on my blank-firing rifle. Turtling into my poncho, I pulled my watch cap over my head just to my eyebrows. On both sides I was flanked by 5 others, waiting in the woodline for the enemy to walk past and begin our ambush. My uniform was soaked, my boots filled with water, and my heart was pounding. Slowly, the sound of boots marching on gravel grew from faint rumbling sounds to the tell-tale scrapes that a tired boot makes at the ground. About 15 bodies appeared down the gravel road, clad in their uniforms. When the entire column was aligned with our position we opened fire, the staccato of rifles echoing and cutting through the damp air, smoke coming off of barrels. By the time the firing stopped, 15 bodies sprawled out on the ground.

“End ex!”

Suddenly the 15 bodies stood up, groaning in frustration, and those of us in the woodline came out to meet our enemy who, after the end of the exercise, had become our friends again. Our volunteer “officers” led us in reflection, walking through where the opfor (oppositional forces) had made mistakes and where we in the woodline had made a successful ambush. It was the last day of field ops and I was already thinking about getting home in time to finish my homework. In 2 days I would begin the last 2 months I would spend in my middle school.

After our debrief we fell into formation and marched in a neat but sloppy double column back to the plywood and tin roofs that made up our “Forward Operating Base.” I and 6 others filed into our tiny hut and quickly pulled our cots together, hanging our flashlights from the ceiling to give ourselves light as we began to cook our MREs. The conversation in the hut began like any conversation among adolescent boys hopped up on patriotism, violence, and glory. We shared stories about our last 12 hours out “in the field.”

“Did you see Marten’s face when we opened up?”

“If that was real we would have slaughtered them.”

“Literally Call of Duty, man!”

As we continued to eat our freeze dried food, the conversation turned to merely adolescent jokes. These jokes included the terms “towel head,” “sand-nigger,” and others. With each eruption of laughter the jokes grew more and more obscene. Then, someone piped up:

“Honestly man, they should send the marines into St. Louis and I bet those hoodrats would shape up. No different than Iraq.”

Suddenly my brain whirled to a stop. Just 2 months prior I had heard the news of Michael Brown being murdered in Ferguson. When I first heard about it, I thought that it was merely an aberration in the American values of freedom and democracy. These were boys that I had grown up with since age 10 when I joined the United States Naval Sea Cadet Corps. We had undergone a grueling boot camp together at the real Naval Recruit Training Station only 4 months prior, where many of us had broken down in tears only to be held in the arms by our comrades due to the onslaught of punishment and physical activity. These were the same boys I was constantly told that I would one day be going to the Middle East with to bring freedom and democracy to “those people” who hadn’t had a taste of it yet and needed to be shown what it was. This is not how I imagined the future soldiers of the United States would talk about such a violent violation of a Black man’s rights. How were we supposed to one day spread freedom and democracy if my fellow comrades didn’t even believe in freedom for people in our own country who looked like me?

This was the moment that the naive dream of being a great liberator through the US military began to unravel. Over the next few months the racist jokes about people of color in our own country and abroad began to bother me more and more. These weren’t jokes, I realized, these were people’s genuine beliefs (even if they were taught to them by their Fox News-watching military families). My family had always taught me that the military was bad. They never liked me being in Sea Cadets and only tolerated it because they saw it as a feasible path out of poverty and into college. My Grandfather, who raised me, detested war and firearms alike and had called himself a socialist for decades. He had doubts, and made them known to me, about the ability of the American military to bring real freedom to other countries. I began to ask myself: Did I swallow a lie? Was all of what my officers had taught me just propaganda?

At the same time, I had also begun attending a new church, St. Luke’s, back home. Though we had a few veterans in our attendance, we always prayed for peace, love, and acceptance to be the way of the world. Not only was the realization of the deep racism of my fellow future soldiers incongruent with what my family taught me, it was also incongruent with what I was being taught at church, the place where I was being formed morally. How could an institution supposedly spreading freedom and democracy be incongruent not only with my family but also with my faith?

This continued for another 4 months, and as my participation in Sea Cadets became less and less enthusiastic, I grew to be disgusted by the people I had called my friends for 4 years. It all came to a head the moment I decided to quit, after a long conversation with my Grandfather after learning I could get a scholarship for choir to college, which would potentially make ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) not necessary. We decided together that I should quit and focus on other things in my life that brought me joy. So the following drill in November I walked into my Commanding Officer Uhlig’s office and resigned from the program. I had already packed my seabag with my uniforms and it was sitting in my Grandfather’s car. Commander Uhlig questioned this decision at first but relented after I made the excuse that “other extra curricular activities were taking up my time and I had to make a choice.” As I made my last about face and walked out of his office, it felt like a weight had come off my chest, a sign that I had made the right choice.

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The question remains:

What made me, at age 10, beg my anti-war and left-wing family to effectively become a child soldier training for a future American war? The answers for me were the same reasons that drive thousands of other Black and Brown youth to join the military: an attempt to escape my material conditions of poverty, and my acceptance of the dream I’d been sold of American exceptionalism.

Like many others, my home life was terrible. My father was absent, my mother was disabled and worked a shitty gas station cashier job to get by, while my retired iron miner Grandfather did his best to be a father a second time. It was clear to me at a very early age that our situation was pretty bad, and it came with suffering that I could clearly see in my Mom’s anxiety towards the end of the month as our funds ran low. It was also very clear to me, thanks to my family’s urging, that the only way out of this situation was an education that we couldn't afford on our own. I didn’t want to live like this, and I didn’t want my family to have to live like this. But no one had been to college, and we didn't have the money to pay for my education. My own anti-war Grandfather had joined the Air Force after graduating high school in 1961 to make an income, and in school I read stories of various men who had joined the military to get a leg up and hopefully earn respect. I am not the first young man who has looked towards the military as the answer for the gendered demand of providing for others and gaining respect (or, power).

I also was exposed to a uniquely intense post-9/11 world. My hometown, Bloomington, Minnesota, was home to Thomas Burnett, famed United Flight 93 mutineer. On Veterans Day in Kindergarten, the VFW did a flag raising for our school to honor Thomas Burnett and all those who had died in the Global War on Terror (so far—this was 2005). They brought blank-firing M1 Garands and did a gun salute. This is just one small piece of the post-9/11 War on Terror propaganda that flowed through my hometown. Even though I was very young, I was also exposed to all the classic pro-war media of the time: Jarhead, live CNN footage of Fallujah, reports of the growing number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and every September 11th reels and reels of the towers falling followed by appeals to “defend freedom and democracy.” As I continued through elementary school, particular attention was always paid to the role of US military might: brave minutemen dying to fight the British, ending slavery in the Civil War, and fighting Nazis in World War 2. This grand historical narrative spoke to my naive idealism. I felt deeply, even at a young age, that all people deserve to be free and to have a say in how their own lives were governed (a gift from my Grandfather). The only way to spread that freedom and democracy—or so I had been told by my public school education—was at the end of the barrel of an American soldier’s gun, after the rubble subsided from American bombs.

I don't think my story here is particularly unique. I imagine that this is the story that leads thousands of other young Black men to join the military. But I tell you my story to show just how young this conditioning begins, and how easy it is to get pulled into it. Today, I often make the point that I made a choice eventually that college education and respect wouldn’t be worth the death of Brown people on the other side of the world. And this is true—I did make that choice consciously at 14—but I also recognize that this choice was only possible because of the moral and political foundation of my near-socialist family and my faith upbringing.

This is Part 1 of a two-part essay by Tre, a Black Lutheran Marxist "Popular Theologian" and solidarity organizer in Minneapolis, MN. Read Part 2 here.