Welcome back for Part Two in the Media Made Me series: The Wartime Generation Without a War. In case you missed Part One, you can read that here. In this series, we’re taking a deep dive into why the vast majority of millennials and Gen Z Americans grew up without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars being a central feature of their lives.
Last week, we talked about how the entire nation was glued to their TVs while we made the initial decision to invade Iraq, nationwide consensus developed by false reports of weapons of mass destruction, and the censorship of dissent in an atmosphere where 71% of Americans believed war was the answer.
In the next three parts of the series, we’ll discuss how a nation once glued to their TVs slowly lost interest in the wars being fought on their behalf. Even as civilian deaths piled into the hundreds of thousands and soldiers continued to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, coverage waned over time to infrequent updates. Today we’ll talk about the demographic changes that made that winnowing coverage especially impactful.
Changing demographics
As I talked about last week, coverage of previous wars like Vietnam had mainly been performed by veterans of previous wars. In 2001 and 2003, newsrooms would likely have done the same, but editors had a substantially smaller pool to choose from when it was time to deploy to the middle eastern front.
In 1980, 18% of US adults were veterans; by 2021 just 7% of adults were veterans. A drop of this magnitude has a substantial effect on the amount of military experience in a given editorial room as decisions are being made about coverage choices, with fewer journalists today having the front line knowledge necessary to pick up on stories that could be important for the American people. And outside of the journalism industry, this has effect on demand as well; veterans are much more likely to be engaged and interested in current US military affairs.
Because of the concentration of military service within military families, this drop in veterans overall is even more noticeable in the share of the population with ties to the military.
Like the veterans themselves, family members of active duty military are much more likely to seek out current military news, and the number with direct ties to the military information machine continued to drop as time went on. In 2011, 79% of people aged 50-64 had an immediate family member who served in the military. For adults aged 18-29 at the time, that same number was just 33%.
This changing shift is called the military civilian gap, and it has only increased since 2011. Currently, less than one half of one percent of Americans are active-duty military. In practical terms this gap meant that months could pass by without Americans hearing anything about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars at all. Coverage of the wars dwindled over time on millennial platforms like Yahoo! News and cable news, and direct information was cordoned off from large swaths of the public.
Living in the aftermath of the military civilian gap
One thing to understand is that throughout American history, there's always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship, or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements, those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.
The above is quoted from Professor Kathleen Belew of the University of Chicago in a chilling, yet desperately important documentary called “Documenting Hate: The New American Nazis” from “Frontline” (2018). As Dr. Belew herself notes, the number of military service members involved in the white supremacy movement was so low as to be statistically insignificant in 2018. But the organizational goals of the white power movement have always preyed on the sense of alienation veterans experience when they return home from combat.
And the effects of the white power movement on veterans have only grown in the years after this documentary aired. In a later documentary from “Frontline” in 2022, we can trace the explosion of this movement all the way up to the very top of the ranks in the person of Michael Flynn. In “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” we watch as a retired three star general once considered an intelligence genius becomes the leader of a far right movement trapped in the dressings of a religious war.
For those who covered the war and traced the effects that followed us home, this melting pot of religious extremism, ultra-conservative values and white power are all a throughline that created the Christian Nationalist movement as we see it today.
“I think we always treated these as far away wars that would never have second or third effects on the United States,” said reporter Nancy Youssef. “When I look at Mike Flynn, I think, those wars changed us too.”
From the makeup of extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, to the leadership of the Christian Nationalist cause, the effects of the gap between the military and civilian population are front and center in an objective look at the political reality we live in today.
These outcomes are years down the road from the lack of civilian oversight, civilian interest, and civilian outrage for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that could possibly have intervened as the wars took on a religious bent for leaders like Mike Flynn. If we had understood the reality on the ground, the lack of progress and decisive leadership in the arenas thousands of soldiers were being sent to for 20 years, maybe we could have created a different reality for the veterans of today.
The fourth estate exists to step in when demographics keep a story out of the light. As the populations associated with the military become smaller, and corners of that population become dominated by extremist ideology, it becomes even more vital for our journalistic institutions to step in and connect civilians and the military fighting ostensibly on their behalf.
Taking Cover from NPR
For me, understanding the complicated, sometimes infuriating story of the men who built the Horno Ridge Memorial you see pictured above is a rare example of the kind of storytelling that bridges the gap between those who served and those who were kept in the dark.
Tom Bowman and Graham Smith, two reporters who had embedded in Iraq to cover the war, use their war-time credibility and deep respect for the men who’ve served to get close to the Marines at the center of the story to try and get them the answers they deserve. In intimate interviews over dining room tables, on a hike where you’ll legitimately wonder if Graham needs an inhaler, sipping tea across the world in Baghdad, the humanity of the loss underneath this cover up is peeled away one episode at a time.
In a schoolhouse courtyard in Fallujah, First Marines, Second Battalion was torn apart by friendly fire that killed three and injured more as a battle-weary crew joked around a picnic table. For fifteen years, the truth about that day was hidden from most of the Marines in their unit in a cover-up protecting the son of a prominent politician. Until this investigation, the Marines and their families were lead to believe that they suffered this loss at the hand of terrorists, not fellow Americans.
As Bowman and Graham uncover this cover up, we sit with wives and sisters who for years didn’t have the answers they needed. We hear the heartbreak of a Marine finding out from a journalist instead of their General that they are emotionally scarred for life not because of an insurgent, but because of two index cards being reversed on a board.
In the most moving episode of the series, “Finding David,” the team tracks down David Costello, a man so broken by his time in service that drug addiction has made his civilian life its own kind of war zone:
“I would try - at some points, I would try to act like I was normal and mow my grass, and I would function, and then other times I would be broke, desperate, committing crimes - stuff I would never do. I was not raised like that. I just - I - all I could think about was drugs. And I just wanted - because when I would withdraw, all this stuff would come back, all these memories, and I wanted it to stop. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted the physical pain, I wanted the mental pain to stop. And I didn't know how to stop it.”
Taking Cover does what all Iraq war stories must do now: dwell in the aftermath. The Marines at the center of the incident are twenty years down the road, just trying to make sense of living through hell at 18, 19, 22 years old.
The team’s methodical approach to conversation, empathy, and vulnerability is the exact antidote to the gap in understanding for civilians. There is not a glorification of battle or a celebration of heroics here; there is simply an unwinding of the truth from the perspective of those who lived with the lies. This is a story about political malfeasance, but Bowman and Smith are storytellers focused on who suffered, and on how we can do better next time.
This is not a podcast about the integrity of the unit who was devastated in Fallujah. This a podcast about our failure as a country to care for the men by failing to give them the truth they needed to move on or the resources they needed to heal, and maybe even by sending them to Iraq in the first place.
Binding the gap
Preventing the growth of extremism has always relied on reintegrating a group into society as a whole. As we continue to look frankly at the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can’t lump the experiences of those who served into that narrative. Understanding the reality on the ground, how soldiers experienced the wars themselves, and looking at what is needed now to bind us back together are all essential tasks moving forward.
While the demographics we’ve discussed in this post today explain why most civilians were not exposed to the reality of the wars, it does not excuse the media’s negligence in exposing these stories when they could have been changed. Hopefully the institutions of our fourth estate will see the failures of the past two decades and rise to the challenge of intervening and understanding the aftermath of the wars as they are happening in front of us now.
Make sure to subscribe so you can get part three of this series! We’ll be taking a look at how education in America kept the Iraq and Afghanistan wars out of the classrooms.
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