When Cops and Soldiers Choose Sides

There’s a book by the journalist Sebastian Junger that I sometimes hear former soldiers reference, called “Tribe.” It asks what draws Americans to fight in these foreign conflicts and why they miss the wars when they’re back at home. Junger lands on the idea that there are pieces missing from American society — cohesion, a sense of purpose — that come naturally in extreme situations like war. So the troops are running from something and toward something at once. This is likely true, and I’ve experienced it myself, but we should also understand that our problems at home are rooted, in no small part, in the same wars to which these soldiers have been fleeing. The irony of the book’s title, in this age of tribal politics, is not lost on Junger; the book is also an attempt to diagnose the causes of America’s division. “Modern society,” he writes, “has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

Junger is one of those war correspondents who defines himself by conflict, wrapping the danger around himself like a photographer’s scarf, which is another way of grooving on violence, and I resent this in part because I worry that it afflicts me too. “Tribe” contains a perfect anecdote that acknowledges the fundamental obscenity of any journalism or art or self-styling built on the backs of people who are suffering. Junger was giving a talk about war one day when “a very agitated man stood up and started screaming that he was a Vietnam vet,” he recalls, “and I didn’t understand the first thing about war — it was all obscene, down to its smallest detail. Then he stormed out.”

Junger describes the veteran as someone “clearly in need of some way to vent,” but there is a refreshing simplicity in the truth the man has revealed. I find, often, that he has become part of my internal monologue regarding any representation of war, including in my own work, that portrays it as having something to do with valor or heroism or saving Private Ryan or bands of brothers — obscene! — or as being anything, really, other than senseless, abject suffering. Obscene, obscene, obscene. War might be necessary sometimes, but it is also dead children, and nothing else. And so it was that I became preoccupied with right-wing militancy. In October 2016, after spending a day documenting mass graves in Iraq, I returned to my hotel, turned on my laptop, and searched for news about the American election. I saw a tweet by a former U.S. representative who vowed to grab his “musket” if Hillary Clinton won, then read a story about a self-styled militia whose members said they were training for a potential fight if she became president. I began to notice more and more of this sort of talk, and the idea that Americans could be threatening civil violence at home — obscene! — sent me down a rabbit hole that only deepened when I returned to Trump-era America after a long stint abroad.

The difference with Iraq, of course, is that there is no war in America, and most of the people threatening war have never experienced one. What makes this obscenity even more pronounced is that there are people all around the world trapped in real wars who’d give anything to escape them. Too many Americans can’t appreciate their own good fortune at living in a country that — however many and real its problems — is not at war within its borders and can’t see how different that reality would be from whatever they’re imagining as they sink ever deeper into their tablets and phones. My concern is with whether we’re moving any closer to that nightmare. Even if it remains distant, any step in that direction is unacceptable to me.

Typically, the standard for journalism about right-wing militant groups has been for the reporter to “embed” with them by visiting a shooting range or attending a scenario-based civil war training. But the real story is in sitting with them in their quiet places as they’re stewing, conspiring, daydreaming — while also noting all the ways they’re otherwise leading normal American lives. The dramatic tension comes in trying to discern when we’ve crossed from their headspace into reality, like in the HBO drama “Mr. Robot.” In that show, a 20-something hacker with anti-capitalist leanings interacts with a figment of his imagination, his dead father, who appears as he did in the protagonist’s childhood, an avatar of a more innocent time. Their conversations drive the hacker to destructive acts that channel the currently cross-partisan impulse to just burn it all down. Dreaming of the revolution is low-stakes until it isn’t. In the same speech in which Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, talked about antifa using IEDs, he encouraged people to form local militias to protect their towns and counties, saying they could be just like America’s founders. A month later, Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people while patrolling at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Look closely at America’s unraveling and you can see the zero-sum mentality that has been socialized through the war on terror for two decades. If the people on the other side are terrorists, insurgents, and extremists, then the sins of your own side can almost always be rationalized. Rhodes called Rittenhouse a “hero” and a “patriot,” which perhaps was to be expected. More alarming is the rush by more mainstream conservative figures to champion Rittenhouse as a cause, as well as the revelations from a data breach earlier this year that at least one police officer has donated to his legal defense and several more to a fund for the officer whose shooting of a Black man sparked the protests that brought Rittenhouse to Kenosha in the first place. One telling image of today’s America was briefly on display this spring when police in Minnesota raised a “Thin Blue Line” flag during protests over the killing of another Black man, Daunte Wright, with Derek Chauvin on trial 10 miles away. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers have lately become the subject of FBI investigations into January 6, but their years of focus on bringing people from the police and military communities into right-wing militancy may have a more lasting effect than whatever they did at the Capitol. Rhodes, a veteran himself, never deployed overseas but understands that any real civil conflict is defined early on when members of the security forces pick sides.

Zero-Sum Game

Many liberals have a zero-sum mentality of their own that exacerbates the problem of American militancy and also causes them to misapprehend it. If I told one of my neighbors in the deep-blue suburb where I spent the last few years that there are cops among the militias, they’d say, Of course. Cops are racists and fascists. They also don’t know any cops. They don’t think about what a police officer represents to many people: an upstanding citizen with a desirable, admirable job, endowed with public trust and responsibility or, at the very least, a bulwark against chaos.

I recently visited a woman in a neighborhood in rural Vermont where a politically mixed group of families have taken up arms, literally, against a man who opened a firearms training facility next door and then began hosting a local militia and threatening people who complained. She has fought back with town board petitions, local organizing, and stare-downs with strangers as they drive past her house. Adding to her fears, she’d heard that a handful of police also trained at the facility in its early days, which made her wonder if it had backers among local law enforcement. She’s a National Rifle Association member who flies a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag and considers herself a supporter of police; even her left-leaning neighbors are the kind of people who’d donate to a Police Benevolent Association fundraiser. So think of it again from the woman’s perspective: What would it mean for police to be sympathetic to militant groups, and where would it leave you in trying to convince your friends and neighbors that the militants were the bad guys?

She showed me the body armor and weapons she has positioned against her bedroom windows. How much of the threat is real and how much in her mind? That’s a question for many Americans these days, and hypervigilance is one of the ways the war on terror has helped break society down. I get messages from people around the country who tell me they’re worried about those around them. “I have neighbors down here in Tennessee who have been drooling at the mouth to see a bloodbath,” one woman wrote. “I believe our right-running brothers feel destitute and powerless. No place at the Democratic or Republican tables where the wealth and power are passed around. Nobody needs them anymore, and that’s about as sad as it gets. I weep for them, but they are definitely leaning toward what the Bible calls bloodlust.” Someone else sent posts an old high school friend had put on Facebook and asked if he should report him to authorities. A man in the Midwest wanted to know if there were Oath Keepers among his local police because he believed that they were harassing him. “A number of people from this area … went to the January 6th rally,” he wrote. “Several hardcore Q-Anon types hang with law enforcement and they are also hardcore Trump supporters.” A former corrections officer and soldier in his 60s described his reaction to watching the Capitol riot unfold on CNN. “All of my firearms were loaded, and I had Molotov bottles made up,” he wrote. “Had the Capitol fallen, my Trump-supporting neighbors were dead meat since there would no longer be ‘Law & Order’ or a nation. … Deadly serious, and I’m not alone either. I took an oath too, in fact, I took a couple of them. You can let the right-wing know about this.”

Since January 6, meanwhile, our perennial hunt for terrorists has moved closer than ever to mainstream politics. Another left-leaning officer, this one in the U.S. military reserve, told me the term definitely applies to the people who stormed the Capitol. “They were attempting to use force and intimidation in this case to literally affect a political outcome,” he said. He has attended social justice protests and is sympathetic to antifa; I asked if applying the “terrorist” label to people involved in the Capitol riot could help conservatives deploy it more effectively against left-wing protesters. Did he see anything wrong with so many Americans reverting so often to this word and its expansive meaning? “Right there is part of the problem,” he said. “Even if it fits in one instance, it sets things up with equivalency. The problem is, I struggle with what is a better term.”

We discussed his fears that right-wing militants could launch an insurgency one day, which he considered a “minority of possible outcomes,” but one worth considering. He walked me through his analysis of how it might start. “It doesn’t take a lot of people to shut down some major pieces of infrastructure and cause incredible problems, and it only takes one relatively small group of extremists to recognize that and to act on it and to be smart enough to mostly keep their mouths shut,” he said. “And then the question is, do they portray themselves sympathetically? Does government action and direct action rally people back to [the insurgents’] side, and how do political leaders on the right react? Where [else in America] does this trigger more small insurgencies and copycat-type events?”

His understanding of insurgencies came mainly from his time in the military, he said, and study of COIN, or counterinsurgency doctrine. I asked if 20 years of war overseas had made domestic insurgency more likely. “I would definitely say so,” he said, “and it doesn’t even have to be a vet. It can also be just somebody who’s paid attention to the forever wars.” Could it have affected him, too, and the rest of society? “You could look at some of this, especially the extreme distrust of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans in the wake of 9/11, and just the belief that there could be a terrorist next door, as kind of the beginning,” he said. “And the fear of Islamic terrorism morphed slowly into this idea that, ‘Oh, well, there’s other groups. They don’t have to be Muslim. They can be other things at home, you know, like BLM or antifa.’ I definitely think that’s something that both sides of the political spectrum have the capacity for, and maybe that is just the effect of a shared trauma and shared fear.”