Legacies

I’ve seen this movie before. I saw it in Iraq, and I saw it in Afghanistan, and the third act never changes, just the cast, just the terrain. When I was overseas in Iraq and Africa (I rarely went outside the wire in my short time in Afghanistan, so it doesn’t count), there was no mission too dangerous or too gray for us to greet with enthusiasm. We didn’t flinch from violence; we chased it. We were primed to kill. We wanted to kill. I itched to find the enemy, and the truth sat right behind the teeth: give us the bad guys, give us the worst neighborhood, give us the freedom to unleash the angry, coiled thing inside us. Some of us wanted to brutalize the enemy. Some did. And most of us believed, in the moment, that this was our job. That this was righteous. That this was what the country wanted from us. If you fly planes into our buildings, you die.

“You” did a lot of work for us after 9/11.

But the problem, the thing that crawls back inside your rib cage years later, is that the country never pays the bill. You do. Your friends do. The guys who survive pay the tab for the missions everyone celebrated at the time. The firefights that looked so clean on PowerPoints rot into memories that don’t fade, only curdle. And in the dark, you remember the gray. You remember the decisions you made with adrenaline screaming in your ears. You remember your first gunfight and how your hand hurt for days from how hard you were squeezing the pistol grip on your M-4. That distance between who you were and who you are is what moral injury really is. It’s not PTSD; it’s not nightmares or jumpiness or noise. It’s the collapse of the story you told yourself to get through the war, the collapse of the person you thought you were.

And now I’m watching the early chapters of the same story play out on American streets and in Caribbean waters. The illegal executions happening off small boats in the Caribbean, the ICE raids conducted by masked men who believe they are doing something clean and heroic, this is all Act I. They think they are defending the nation. They think they’ve been given permission to unleash that old, hungry instinct to hurt someone in the name of order. They don’t realize how short the half-life is on that kind of righteousness.

I promise you, ten years from now, we will have thousands of men who once took pride in wearing masks on American streets or shooting “Venezuelan drug mules” out on open water. They will age out of adrenaline and into consequence. They will remember things differently; they’ll remember them clearly. They’ll wake up one day realizing the violence they executed, the way they executed it, wasn’t a show of strength but a moment when the state handed them permission to become someone they are not built to live with forever.

And ICE? Mark my words: there will be ICE officers collecting pensions for psychological disabilities suffered while dragging screaming mothers away from their children. This will happen. I promise you this. Because that’s how moral injury works, it doesn’t announce itself at the moment. It waits. It festers. It blooms years later when the uniform is in a drawer, and the adrenaline is gone, and all that’s left is the memory of what you did to people who posed no threat to you. And that’s when the reckoning arrives. Most of us, even at the very tip of the spear, were not, are not, clinical psychopaths. We know right and wrong.

We’re deep into the third act for the GWOT generation. I’ve watched so many of my peers, men who were smart, capable, disciplined, and, yes, proud of their violence, collapse under the weight of what they did overseas, or what they couldn’t stop. So many struggle now. I’ve got three separate group texts with different clusters of SEALs, all running at the same time, all wrestling, almost word for word, with who we were then and what it’s done to us now. Divorce. Alcoholism. Arrests. Suicide. More dead by their own hand than by any enemy we ever fought. Look at the veteran suicide numbers. Look at the former operators quietly slipping off to Mexico for ibogaine because the thing they were most proud of each morning, their willingness to do violence, ultimately curdled into something corrosive.

These aren’t weak men. They aren’t cowards. They were men who leapt at the chance to kill the enemy, and if the story ended there, it would be a clean, heroic arc. But it never does. In the end, they were asked to do things the conscience can’t metabolize forever.

American war criminals, the Calleys and Lorances, don’t rot in jail. History shows we’re pretty bad at accountability at the top. But the men who enable them? The ones who pull the triggers and kick in the doors and drag bodies into boats? They’re the ones who rot inside.

What we’re watching now, the masks, the raids, the killings far from battlefields, feels familiar because it is familiar. It’s the first reel of a movie I’ve seen too many times. And I know how it ends, not in victory parades or triumphant memoirs (aside from those psychological defects for whom it was a game, like Chris Kyle) but in quiet rooms, years later, with men who can’t forgive themselves for the things they once cheered.

And the worst part is that none of them realize they’re already in the opening scenes. They won’t know it until the credits roll, and they’re left alone with themselves, with a cell phone in one hand and a Glock in the other, torn about which one to put up to the side of their head.

Like Rumsfeld before him, that will be Hegseth’s legacy.