What Just Happened!?! Becoming Consistent Life Despite Myself, Part 2
by Thad Crouch
This is the second part; the first part is:
Becoming Consistent Life Despite Myself. Part 1
Early May, 1988. Interstate 65, Alabama
A Greyhound bus passenger asked about my “Airborne Infantry HOOAH!” t-shirt.
I proudly inform him, “I’m an army infantryman and just graduated airborne school.”
“What’s an Infantry?” he asks.
“Infantry are combat soldiers. We kill personnel and destroy equipment.” I said with all the false pride and folly of teen who had never been in combat and was convinced that war was awesome like in 80’s combat action movies.
“No!” he interjects incredulously. “What’s your job description?”
“Yes!” I proclaim defiantly, “‘Kill personnel and destroy equipment.’ That is my job description!”
“Could you shoot someone?”
“Shoot someone? Yeah. Booooring! I’d rather look ‘em in the eye and stab them to death!” I actually said that loudly, with intensely aggressive piercing eyes, like a psychopath. In the days before cell phones, half the bus was listening.
As a teen, I studied and taught Filipino knife fighting. I idolized characters portrayed by Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. Even at seventeen, I somehow knew money, a mansion, sports cars, and sex couldn’t fulfill me. Life seemed pointless until I decided great purposes are fulfilling. I chose protecting American lives, freedom, democracy, and human rights around the world. After all, that’s the purpose of the U.S. military, right?
I took a rare two-year enlistment opportunity. In those two years I got my airborne wings, my Expert Infantryman Badge, and proudly assisted the Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) counter-insurgency training of Latin American soldiers to fight communists and protect freedom, democracy, rule of law, and human rights in Central and South America. I used my MCI long- distance card to call my mother on a payphone to tell her I was training Latino troops who are actually fighting communists. She was tearfully proud.
Thad’s father pins on Airborne wings
I crossed many milestones between infantry soldier and war tax resister. The most shocking milestone came within two years after my life-altering prayer experience described in “What Just Happened!?! Becoming Consistent Life Despite Myself. Part 1,” which resulted in hours of daily contemplative prayer, getting a spiritual director, and becoming more active in the Church. This time it was a vision rather than a Voice. I saw myself as a soldier escorting civilian refugees on a dirt road in a war zone. I don’t recall seeing what lay ahead of us. There were fields on our right, a forest on the left, and a smoldering city in a desert behind us.
Suddenly, an enemy armored personnel carrier (APC) attacked from the tree line on our left flank. This anachronistic APC had horizontal slits in the sides like an old-timey armored wagon. Enemy troops could safely fire at us through the slits and we had a Chuck-Norris-Oscar-performance-as-a-war-tax-resister’s-chance of placing a shot through those slits and hitting those @h0L&$^s. —well, from a distance, anyway. I ordered the refugees to get in a ditch, ran toward the tree line, and I hid behind a tree —without being seen.
When the APC passed by, I put my M-16 on full auto, lept like a panther, grabbed the armored personnel carrier roof with one hand, and stuck the rifle barrel into that slit. I put my finger on the trigger.
At this point it seems like a dream. I’m fulfilling my purpose and former job description. I am totally a like Chuck Norris character in that moment.
At point blank range on full auto with a 30-round clip, it was unnecessarily gratuitous to peer through that slit. I wanted to look ‘em in the eye when I killed them. Just. To. Watch .Them. Die.
When I looked into the eyes of my enemies I saw them. I saw them. I suddenly knew that they were my brothers and I could not kill them. I let go of the vehicle, fell into darkness still clinging to my weapon, and abruptly startled myself awake —or back to normal consciousness.
What Just Happened!?!
This experience didn’t quickly or easily integrate into my life like my previous realization about the death penalty. My moral identity —my very sense of self — was indescribably shattered!!! It seemed like the whole world fell out from under me. I desperately clung to pieces of my identity while feeling an intense mix of cognitive dissonance, fear, confusion, and shock. Writing this, decades later, I started shaking and crying remembering how it felt. I was so discombobulated that I’ve never been able to remember where I was when it happened, or if it was a vision in a prayerful trance or a dream after falling asleep in prayer.
I had been one of 32 men in my regiment — out of the 404 who attempted — to earn that Expert Infantryman’s Badge that year. When the colonel read the award certificate he said, “May they change to combat badges before long.” With no prompting, we all yelled, HOOAH!” For several years, it was my prize possession. My sense of pride, goodness, and accomplishment was largely rooted in being soldier willing to risk his life for a noble purpose. That pride was crumbling and contrasting with my recently deepened identity as a Christian who highly valued human life.
I had so many questions for my spiritual director, Sr. Camille Martinez. She pointed me to ancient and modern nonviolent Catholics. She gave some Pax Christi literature. I transferred to Loyola University New Orleans and chose a Religious Studies major.
I took a class on social & political inequality and learned that U.S. troops often carried out policies for economic and geopolitical gain to the detriment of freedom, democracy, and human rights. I did not want that to be true, so I kept researching while forming moral questions. If this is true that our nation that does such evil things and I value Christ’s teachings, human life, human rights, freedom, democracy, am I culpable as a citizen? As someone with freedom of speech and a right to redress grievances, should I be doing something about this?
My professor offered us extra credit to attend a Pax Christi event with a Haitian asking us to petition Congress and President Bill Clinton to oust the military dictator and restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president, back into Haiti. He also asked us to close the School of the Americas. Had I not been studying the use of our military, I would have screamed my defense of the SOA to the crowd, but I was learning to listen. When he told us that SOA graduates were kidnapping, torturing, killing, and disappearing their own citizens — the “insurgents” whom they countered, who struggled for democracy and rights – I began slipping out of my chair. I had only begun questioning my responsibility as a citizen, and now I was suddenly confronted with my culpability for training terrorists. My heart wanted to vomit!
Transformation isn’t always so dramatic. Mine continued slowly as Loyola, Pax Christi, and the poor of New Orleans educated my heart, though it did once again feel like vomiting when confronted with having been blind and done nothing to counter dehumanizing racism so embedded in U.S. society, and to some extent, myself.
Fort Benning protest; Thad on left.
I went on a two-week Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Haiti, then under U.N. occupation, at the encouragement of a Pax Christi friend. I shook hands with President Aristide in the Haitian National Palace and met people who were imprisoned and lost loved ones in the coup years. I went to Nicaragua with a Maryknoll campus minister and lived a month with Sandinista peasants who had been my “enemies” in the ’80s. I saw the Haitians, the Sandinistas, the New Orleans African Americans, the homeless men, and the people of Central and South America as my sisters and brothers. The attacks on their lives and dignity by systemic racism, greed, and militarism were as moving to me as the first time I, around the age of twelve, had heard about abortion on TV news and asked my mother what it was. I was eleven when my baby brother was born. I had felt him kick in my mother’s womb. I was horrified that anyone would kill their child, because I didn’t need to do research or have a poignant spiritual experience to know that biological brothers were my brothers.
As I write, I’m newly struck that brothers and sisters we see as enemy soldiers probably see their military purpose as being just as noble as I once saw mine. Perhaps the best thing we can do to promote the Consistent Life Ethic is to peer within, look into each other’s eyes, and help each other see clearly who we are — who we all are.
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For more of our posts from Thad Crouch, see:
What Just Happened!?! Becoming Consistent Life Despite Myself. Part 1
Culture of Conscience: Would You Pay Taxes that Fund Abortions if Hyde and Helms were Repealed?
Mourning After & Hoping for the Future, We Call for a Consistent Life Texas!
For more of our posts from people’s personal journeys with the military, see:
Coming to Peace and Living a Consistent Life After Military Service / Eve Dawn Kuha
Becoming a Catholic Conscientious Objector / Tony Magliano
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