What America’s Veterans Want You to Know
What America’s Veterans Want You to Know
Thirteen former soldiers examine the deception, trauma, and consequences of their deployments in a powerful new documentary about the true nature of America’s war machine
Not every veteran wants to be thanked for defending your freedom because many of them know that that’s not what they spent their time in Iraq and Afghanistan doing. This is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable but the purpose of Catie Foertsch’s gripping new film is to peel back dangerous platitudes about US foreign policy, not put people at ease.
What I Want You To Know is a thoughtful, fearless documentary about the two defining American wars of this young century, as told by the men and women who fought them. Some may find this film difficult to watch but should still take the time to see it because the stories it features are too important not to be heard.
Because the parameters of acceptable mainstream debate are so restrictive, most Americans are fairly misguided about the US government’s overseas interventions. Speeches and headlines have for years offered well-worn clichés but have kept criticism of our wars largely out of view. Projects like this bring these conversations to the foreground where they belong.
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For about 20 minutes, people wondered how a plane could accidentally hit a skyscraper on such a clear day. Then, in an instant, everything changed. For thousands, the horror of the September 11th attacks translated to a call to action.
An entire generation put their lives on hold in pursuit of what they considered to be a worthy and noble cause. Military recruitment soared as the country’s youth ventured off to basic training, ready and willing to help protect their country from terror, to liberate foreign populations from tyranny, to replicate the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation. They were willing to spend years away from the people they loved to achieve these goals. They knew that some of them would never return.
Sgt. Tom Laaser, one of the veterans featured in the documentary, recalled his desire for a combat role from the moment he signed up. Maj. Danny Sjursen remembered having the same reaction once the towers came down in his city.
What I Want You To Know explores how the realities of our wars in the Middle East eroded these convictions and the toll it took on the soldiers who spent years pursuing objectives they swiftly realized could never be met.
Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, for instance, a Scout Sniper in the 1st Infantry Division, was convinced that he and the soldiers he’d gone to Iraq with would be part of the US military’s final deployment to the country. As Reppenhagen recalls in the documentary, it took a little more than a day of being in country for him to realize that America’s troops were attempting to solve problems that potentially would never be solved.
The image below, a handwritten message scribbled on a whiteboard at a US military civil affairs office in Ramadi, Iraq in 2007, encapsulates the relative apathy of a lot of people in the West.
Many Americans would struggle to locate Kabul on a map, would have a hard time coming up with a single Afghan province, and don’t have the slightest idea as to what happened in the country’s last parliamentary election. Nevertheless, many of these same people have a very firm opinion on America’s longest war.
At various times throughout the 20+ years that US forces occupied Afghanistan, many were oblivious as to what region of the country the fighting was concentrated in, but they were certain that it should continue. Many others were indifferent to if it did.
The public spent much of the Bush administration waiting for our missions to end, before gradually realizing that these conflicts weren’t really designed to have a conclusion. People’s attention drifted elsewhere, and the nation’s wars became “elevator music” to most of the country as Cpt. Erik Edstrom – an Army Ranger and a recipient of the Bronze Star – is quoted in the documentary as noting.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were folded into the background, but the fighting persisted.
What I Want You To Know was co-produced by Capt Tommy Furlong and Sgt. Travis Weiner, two former soldiers who’d completed respective tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and tell their stories in the film. As they and the 11 other individuals who lent their voices to the project relayed, the gradual realization of what America’s so-called “War on Terror” was actually all about was nothing short of devastating.
The Pentagon primed its soldiers for battle in a variety of ways. Heaped on top of the avalanche of nationalistic propaganda which consumed American life in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a wholly unrealistic training system which misrepresented what soldiers would experience abroad. On paper, they were there to ensure that these countries would never serve as a launchpad for attacks against the US and to hand over security control to the militaries they were training. As the veterans in the film repeatedly point out, it didn’t take these soldiers long to realize that these goals would never be met.
The generic objectives that drew applause at the State of the Union didn’t square with what soldiers were actually experiencing on the ground. There was no clear definition of success and no quantifiable metrics for how to achieve the lofty goals continuously repeated by American lawmakers. The notion that “freedom isn’t free,” that we had no choice but to “fight them over there so we didn’t have to fight them over here,” and every other banality favored by congressional and presidential speechwriters had little to do with the day-to-day realities of what our soldiers were facing. The US government’s objectives weren’t real, would never be accomplished, and nobody in power seemed to care.
The politicians breathlessly repeating the government’s nonsensical objectives didn’t appear to mind that most of what America’s soldiers were doing was just trying to keep themselves and their friends alive. As Maj. Sjursen recounts in the doc, his days were mostly spent driving in circles while waiting for the next IED to explode.
Of course, the documentary isn’t just about what US soldiers endured during and following their deployments, with a sizeable chunk of the film also dedicated to the suffering of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the film, the veterans take turns describing their daily patrols, the endless cycle of home raids, the constant harassment of families just trying to live their lives, and the indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians.
“We’ve killed people planting roadside bombs, and we’ve killed people changing tires on the side of the road,” one veteran notes in the film.
They’d left home to fight one war but were stuck perpetuating another. As the conflicts continued with no end in sight, the families they’d left behind were constantly being told that victory was just around the corner. That too was soon revealed to have been a lie.
In the summer of 2016, the Washington Post received a tip that retired Army general Michael Flynn had made some comments in which he was highly critical of the war in Afghanistan. The remarks were given in an interview that Flynn had given to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) office as part of the organization’s Lessons Learned project first initiated in 2014. When the Post learned that more than 90% of the 600+ interviews were excluded from the reports published by SIGAR, the paper spent three years in court to pry more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished material from the government’s grasp. The result was the Afghanistan Papers. This six-part report [which is discussed in the film] detailed how multiple administrations had intentionally misled the American public about how the war was progressing.
Nobody was arrested. Not a single individual was terminated or was forced to resign following the publication of this explosive story. The country went right back to sleep and the nation’s war machine kept humming along.
“Anyone who joins the Marine Corps or the military is demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice their life for their country,” Capt. Sarah Feinberg, who’d earlier in the film recounted being fully convinced by Colin Powell’s infamously deceptive 2003 testimony before the UN Security Council, notes toward the end. “I think our politicians and our military leaders have a responsibility to, at minimum, tell the truth about what we’re doing.”
It's safe to say that this is a responsibility our political leaders have long abandoned. Because they’ve never faced any consequences for lying the country into two wars that killed more than 7,000 American troops and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians, films like What I Want You To Know are essential.
I urge everyone to see this documentary when they get the chance.
If I were to try to relay everything that I wrote down while watching this documentary, I’d end up transcribing the entire thing and I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to end with one final quote from the film, words that I found particularly powerful and revealing.
“If folks think it’s unpatriotic or unamerican to question our government’s decisions on foreign policy or going into war, then you call me unpatriotic or unamerican. I think it’s the most patriotic thing to do is to question your government, especially a foreign policy or a conflict where we’re sending 18 year old kids to die or get hurt. I would hope every American citizen would question why we’re doing that.” - Alan Pitts, 44th Engineer Battalion. 2nd Infantry Division.
The film will be screened tomorrow in Manchester, New Hampshire, with additional screenings scheduled in California and Ohio early next year.