The (Non) Virtue of "Serving Your Country"

I was having a conversation with a very good friend of mine whom I served alongside in the Army the other night. To give you an idea how much I value him as part of my life, my daughter knows him as her uncle, and she calls my buddy's little girl her cousin. It started off of comments made on one of my Facebook posts, to which some guy went full asshole on about how evil soldiers are. The guy who made the comments was a nutcase, but he wasn't entirely wrong:

There is nothing noble about war, and being a soldier doesn't make someone a hero.

Repeat that one to yourself for a second and let it sink in if you're of the opposite persuasion. The conversation I had with my friend revealed what really is a widely-held belief here in the United States: wars may be just or unjust, but soldiers have an inherent heroism. Going to war to defend freedom carries with it some kind of nobility, the kind that only a truly just war can impart. Where does this come from, though? How could the pursuit of war ever be noble, and how could those people, funded by the men and women calling themselves "government", who volunteer to go fight it ever be considered heroes? Essentially what I drew away from our conversation was that the sacrifice that soldiers make for each other is what is noble about them, and that is what places them firmly in the camp of heroes. However, this doesn't hold any water if you examine it critically.

First, let's dispense with the notion that there is such a thing as just war. There isn't.

War is large-scale conflict waged between two groups of people, each calling themselves separate governments, for the purpose of settling a territorial dispute or some other arbitrary dispute. The only justifiable act of violence is the act of defense, by individuals themselves or by groups on behalf of individuals who have voluntarily entered into a contract with said groups to provide this service. As governments operate without regard to the consent of the governed, they can't possibly be in the second camp, making any military act they engage in inherently immoral. Since neither of these groups can legitimately claim authority over the territories they each claim, there can be no legitimate defensive action. Moreover, all armies are funded through violent expropriation, making their very existence immoral. All war and all state-funded armies are immoral.

So now that we've established that war is immoral and there is nothing noble about engaging in it, where is the nobility in being a soldier? The short answer is there isn't any. Soldiers are individuals who volunteer to carry out the will of the state in exchange for payment for services rendered. While much has been made about soldiers having a duty to disobey unlawful orders, what does that mean in practical terms? A drone pilot that is tasked with taking out a terrorist cell fires a missile into a house in some distant country. The intelligence he has been given tells him there are high value targets inside, when in reality, it is simply a radical cleric with a number of friends and family. How could he know that he should have refused the order to fire? Moreover, if he had known and fired anyway, wouldn't he have been given a pat on the back with a "job well done, son" afterward?

Except in truly extreme cases, soldiers tend to follow orders, for the same reason they are lauded as heroes bearing a certain nobility: they're looking out for the welfare of the guys and girls to their left and right. When you're thrust into combat with possible enemy combatants all around you, most people focus on their squad or platoon, rather than considering the consequences of engaging what might be an enemy but really isn't. More than that, though, they are given the order from their commanders, so in their minds, they're justified. At that point, it's about keeping their battle buddies alive and making it back to base in one piece. Nothing wrong with looking out for your friends and watching their backs, right?

The problem is that they're engaging people in another country on behalf of their state. Functionally they're no different than a rival gang moving into another gang's territory to try to take control of it or force terms. The only reason soldiers are afforded nobility is because many people cling to a delusional belief in the state, and that it is some sort of non-corporeal entity on the same level as a deity. They worship it, and so, by extension, its workers and hired guns, so long as they "obey the law" and "uphold the Constitution," are justified for the single most destructive and horrible endeavor in human history.

There's nothing noble about being a soldier.

A soldier is no more than the foreign policy enforcement agent of the state. They serve the interests of politicians. They don't "fight for freedom and liberty;" their entire existence is predicated on threatening people with violence while expropriating them. They're agents of the state, and as such, they're engaged in the same immoral enterprise as every other agent, from the tax man to the court clerk.

Remember, kids: engaging in violence on behalf of men and women who pay you by stealing from people isn't noble.

Andrei Chira is a vaper, voluntaryist, and all-around cool dude. Formerly a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, he now spends his time between working at VapEscape in Montgomery County, Alabama, contributing to Seeds of Liberty on Facebook and Steemit, writing short fiction, and expanding his understanding of...well, everything, with an eye on obtaining a law degree in the future.