Podcast: “I was always the ‘Good Sailor'” – Mike James

Transcript

Matthew Breems:
This is the Courage to Resist Podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans for Peace. I’m joined today by Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran Mike James. Mike served as a mass communications specialist in the military. Although he was a rising star in his field, he felt compelled to end his military career early. He soon thereafter began experiencing PTSD and became an antiwar supporter.

Well, Mike, it’s great to be talking with you this evening. Your perspective as a veteran is slightly different than most of our guests in that you’re not a Vietnam veteran, but you are a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I understand as a young man at 25, you joined the military. What was your reasoning for that at that time?

Mike James:
Okay, so when I joined the Navy, at that point I had a degree in photography and I experienced 9-11 like a lot of other Americans, you know, on TV. And I remember it affecting me a lot. And I remember as the years passed on, the anniversaries of 9-11 seemed to affect me even more than when it officially happened. I remember driving to college one day and seeing a “Remember 9-11” sign on the highway and it really affected me deeply and I cried all the way to school. And that kind of universal, American trauma that had happened, it was something that I was dealing with. I didn’t understand really what it was. I didn’t understand the politics of it or the international perspective.

So at that point at 25, I had a degree in photography. I was working as a freelancer doing a lot of commercial work and weddings and that kind of thing. And I thought, “Well, I’m still young enough to join the military. I’m strong. I want to go out, I want to pursue a career, I want to travel, I want to get the GI Bill, get educated.” And I figured I’d go to the recruiter and see what they had to offer. So I went straight to the Navy recruiter and I told him, “Look, I have this degree and I’d like to be a photographer in the Navy and if you can offer me that in a contract then I’ll join.” And they did. So I was 25 at that time. They put me on a six month waiting list to get into DINFOS school, so the Defense Information School. So I had to wait six months to get a spot at that school.

So I went to boot camp and did well there. I felt like I was pretty natural in boot camp and then Defense Information School was fun. I got there and there was just a lot of young people that were eager. They were a lot like me. They were there because it was basically a jobs program. We spent a lot of time in small groups talking to each other about why we joined the Navy and I found that pretty much across the board, everybody had joined the Navy because either they wanted to travel or they wanted education. They wanted the GI Bill. And I found that really interesting because I mean really there was nobody there that really believed that the wars were important or necessary or even justified. Everybody was there essentially for financial and adventure reasons.

Matthew Breems:
So you get done with your training. What was your first role or assignment after that?

Mike James:
So my first assignment was with Patrol Squadron 40 out of Whidbey Island. It was a P-3 Orion Squadron. The idea was to do maritime surveillance. We flew out of the Puget Sound and we did traffic lanes and mostly shipping traffic. It was funny because I had trained in public affairs at DINFOS, but as soon as I got to the squadron, they really weren’t interested in public affairs. I mean they were submarine hunters. It was a secret mission for the most part. And so they thought they just got an intel specialist that could use a camera. And I thought, “Whoa, whoa. I just spent six months learning public affairs, this is a strange place to be in.” So anyway, so there I was in a secret compartment and we are basically just surveilling maritime traffic.

Obama was in office and he decided that he needed a surge in Iraq. So I think at that time there was something like 60,000 additional troops that were coordinated to go in. So the Navy P-3 Orion Squadron, even though our role traditionally was maritime surveillance, President Obama decided that we should go in and track patterns of life and insurgents in Iraq. So we started to train for that. We did the gas mask training and we got desert uniforms and then we ended up deploying to Ali Air Base in the southern part of Iraq, which is right next to the ancient city of Ur where the famous Ziggurat is.

I remember nobody could give me a straight answer on who lived in southern Iraq, “What were the religious factions? What language did they speak? What were the cultural aspects?” Nobody knew any of that stuff. It was all just like, “We’re going to Iraq and we’re going to fly around and we don’t really know what we’re looking for or why, but we’re going to go there and support this surge.” That was a consistent theme throughout my military experience I think.

Matthew Breems:
Once you got to Iraq, what was some of your first impressions?

Mike James:
So the Ziggurat of Ur was a really powerful impression to begin with. I looked it up a little and researched it and I thought, “Wow, this is a one of a kind, it should be an international tourist attraction where everybody should be coming. All the major Abrahamic religions should be here and they should be witnessing this.” But, and I thought it was going to be an amazing thing to go see. And when I got there, it was just one of the most desolate deserts on the face of the planet that had been totally destroyed and just made even worse by the 20 or 30 years of war that proceeded me being there. Consistent were the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s a lot of those battles were fought there and all of the southern Iraq was kind of littered with the detritus of war from those wars, MiG planes and personnel carriers and unexploded ordnance.

Saddam Hussein, I understand, had blocked the rivers up north to supply Baghdad with water. So the Marsh Arabs that had traditionally lived in southern Iraq essentially became victims of genocide and were wiped out. I would say probably in the six to seven months that I was there, we received incoming fire from mortar rounds at least 20 or 30 times while we were there and several rounds hit the flight line. Several hit the housing units, which were essentially shipping containers. We lived in shipping containers while we were there and several of those were blown up. So there was always kind of the threat of incoming fire from the neighboring town, mostly of Al Nasiriyah I believe was the area where we were.

Matthew Breems:
Describe to some of your day to day activities. What did your time there look like? What were your guys actually doing and accomplishing?

Mike James:
Well for me, I was a mass communications specialist, a public affairs person who worked in an intel unit, a secret compartment. So I wasn’t necessarily quite an intelligence specialist, so I didn’t need to know everything. I didn’t need to see everything and I kind of didn’t want to know or see everything. So I found myself continuously just trying to work more in public affairs type things and what is there to do for public affairs in a war zone because there aren’t really any good stories to tell. There’s nothing good going on really. What I would do is I would just kind of go out and I would take a lot of portraits and just try to find any kind of semblance of humanity. I would just go out and just take pictures of sailors, ask them to tell me about their stories. And then oftentimes we would send out those photos to family readiness groups back in the States and in Washington state where we were stationed. And that pretty much sums up my experience in southern Iraq.

Matthew Breems:
So it was fairly uneventful for you?

Mike James:
Yeah, I mean between incoming fire and the dust storms. We were there in the summer and the summer temps, we had a month where it was like 130 degrees or higher for a whole month.

Matthew Breems:
So as your tour was wrapping up there, what was the next phase of your military career looking like?

Mike James:
Well, I came home from Iraq, we went back to the Puget Sound and we went on with a kind of normal training and I realized that I was just going to be kind of out on this Island in the Puget Sound for the next year or two years. And there wasn’t much going on. So I actually volunteered to join the Individual Augmentee Force to go to Afghanistan because I was a photographer and that’s where the game was. So essentially what happened was I separated from my Navy unit and I went to Army Infantry bootcamp for sailors. That lasted about a month. And then I deployed to Afghanistan as an Individual Augmentee to support NATO. Me and some other Navy IA people flew into Bagram, which is in the north central part of Afghanistan. And then we took personnel carriers down into Kabul.

And that was an incredible experience. It was pretty terrifying because these personnel carriers are just giant metal coffins. And just to think what happens to those things if they catch fire or if they’re hit by improvised explosive devices was just horrifying because there was no way to get out of those things. So that was a pretty scary experience. And I knew I was really living life then, but we drove down into Kabul and I ended up in a public affairs unit for NATO training mission, “Afghanistan and TMA”. And that was essentially the core of the nation building operation in Afghanistan in the central part of Kabul. I worked in the Green Zone, which was a compound where the American embassy, the presidential palace, the ministry of defense and Camp Eggers where, which is where most NATO troops were working as well as some other NATO bases were around there.

And I ended up working, I think first for the American general, General Caldwell is who I worked for first as part of his personal public affairs cadre. And then over the course of the year that I was there, I worked for several, I worked for General Patton and I also worked for Canadian General, Michael Day. And I all kind of worked in their personal little cadres and it was really just an incredible experience with tons of visibility from the brass. They could all kind of see what we were doing and we were all responding to what the brass wanted and interacting with them on a daily basis.

So some of the things we would do is we would take VIPs and media out to Afghan training camps to their bootcamps or infantry camps and artillery camps and stuff like that. So we would go out and document different NATO soldiers, which were at the time, I think something like 32 different countries were participating in the nation building activities. It gave me kind of those liberal, comfy feel good feelings that maybe this really was a legitimate international force who was there to provide peacekeeping and material support for “freedom fighters”, I guess is what Americans referred to them as maybe at the time.

Matthew Breems:
So when you were over there, when did that feeling start to change for you when you really started kind of having your eyes opened and your perspective changed? That our involvement here was not good and it was just more of the status quo for American military dominance in the world?

Mike James:
Well, I was really lucky to be able to interact with a lot of Afghan interpreters who are to this day as some of my–I just have really strong feelings for those guys that I interacted with because I knew that by them supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan, they really were risking their own lives on a daily basis. And not only that, but risking the lives of their families. And they opened my eyes to a lot, just there was one guy who had just continuously tell me, he was, “Just don’t trust anybody out here. Never trust anybody at all.” And because the nature of that thing is just such a mess, you never know who anybody is, who their allegiances are. Even though I knew the military industrial complex was mostly a conglomerate of corporations who are there to extract resources and dominate through imperial power.

There was still some level of I was still okay with it. I was there to build a career. I was there to take photos and to experience the military from the inside. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. That I was still okay with it. I was still going along with it. I think that those feelings are probably the same for thousands and thousands of active duty military service members right now. I think there’s a lot of kids in there who see the world the same way they see, they know the industrial military complex is a mess. They know that the U.S. having 70 something military installations around the world is a disaster. But they’re still in the military because it’s a path to a career. It’s a jobs program and they still haven’t come to terms with the evil acts that they’re participating in with straight out war crimes and acts of genocide.

It wasn’t until I got out of the military and I came home, I was still digesting it for a couple of years. I was trying to understand it, trying to make sense of that crazy world that I had participated in. I mean, I hate to admit it, but Bernie Sanders campaign, when I started to understand, I was started to introduce to socialism and imperialism and starting to get my head around what that really is. And then I went deeper and I started reading the Russian revolution stuff. I started reading about Stalin and Lenin and Marxism and all that kind of thing. And I started to be able to understand the vocabulary to talk about my military experience is when I started to come around and be able to think about it intelligently. One of the big problems that we have in the United States with soldiers that come home from these wars and we still have something like 22 suicides a day.

A lot of people dealing with post traumatic stress disorder. I really believe that there’s probably a couple of factors that are contributing to that and they have to be the fact that they come home and they still don’t understand what they did. They don’t understand the forces that they participated in or the regional conflicts that they participated in. They come home and they come back to a declining economy. And a lot of these guys are suffering from poverty and the reason they’re suffering from poverty is because the United States spends the vast majority of our money on military spending. Instead of spending on infrastructure or social programs or job programs for young people. All this money is just still going right out the window into senseless imperialist pursuits.

Matthew Breems:
Would you be willing to talk about how your time in the military really left you in an emotional and mental place that was very unhealthy to you? And just describe how that came to be and what that looks like for you.

Mike James:
Yeah. Okay. So I got out of the military in 2014. My last duty station had been with Defense Media Activity, which is the central public affairs unit for the Pentagon essentially. I was working at Fort Meade, Maryland, still making propaganda. And I thought “Man, I do not want to be a careerist.” Where this point where you’re just hanging on and you’re just trying to get the next good duty station. Everybody’s trying to go Hawaii or Guam or they’re just trying to position themselves for a career in something that they know is, or that I knew, and I think a lot of service members know, is just intrinsically chaotic and stupid. I didn’t want to participate in that anymore. And so I got out of the military really without a plan.

I came home and I literally, I lived with my parents for several weeks because I just, I had no plan. Even, despite the fact that I had been working at the highest levels of public affairs in the Pentagon, I was well decorated, I had won several awards as a photographer. All my evals were very good. I always had good reviews. I came home and I was like, “Man, I just don’t want to participate in this anymore. Where am I going to go from here?” And I really battled with that for several years and I probably still do battle that experience.

And like I said, I think that’s where a lot of this post traumatic stress stuff is coming from. There’s this general sense of “Support the Troops”. People thank you for your service, but not too many people really understand what that means. Not too many people can support you or want to support you in the ways that you really need them to after an experience like that. Even family and friends they just don’t get it. They can’t get it unless they did it. And so I did feel isolated, but thank God I discovered, leftist politics because I did, that’s where I started to find that people who do understand it. That I can speak the same language as them, that we understand the same vocabulary. That I can organize with these people and go out and find it. Try to find a way to define purpose and to make sense of my crazy war experience.

The people at the VA, which I do support the VA, it does need to be saved because they do provide a very specific set of resources for veterans. Even the people who work at the VA, they’re still in line with the military industrial complex. They still support it. They think by and large that they have to agree with the status quo, that they have to continue these senseless wars. And so those people aren’t even really equipped to help me deal with the things that I need to deal with.

Matthew Breems:
Yeah. If you’re sort of a pro war as an organization, it’s pretty hard to provide resources for people who were left traumatized by that war and aren’t pro war.

Mike James:
That’s right. Yeah. And that’s how I feel when I go there. When I walk in there and when I see that picture of Trump on the wall and these older veterans that are still walking around with their Trump hat, It’s like, “Man, you guys just didn’t learn anything. You poor soul.”

Matthew Breems:
You know you’ve taken some of the repercussions of being in a war zone, this post traumatic syndrome and fallen into some activism. What are some of your ideas and thoughts about what you’d like to do in the future, activism wise?

Mike James:
I have a pretty big archive of photography from my Navy career all the way from the Puget Sound to Iraq, Afghanistan and back to Fort Meade, Maryland. I have a pretty big archive of stuff and I have the vast majority of it. I still have on hard drives and CDs. I’m lucky because none of that stuff is really secret. None of it is secret. It was all intended for public affairs uses when I shot it. I was always the “good sailor” where I knew I shouldn’t be shooting secret compartments and that kind of stuff. So I don’t have to worry about that. So I do have this vast archive of photography from my Navy career and I’d really love to publish my best photos in a coffee table type format or some kind of internet format or something like that.

I’m totally open to suggestions and assistance from other veterans or activists who might have an idea of how the best way to publish these photos. I’d like to do that with the context of how I feel now writing about my experience reaching out to other veterans to share my experience and help to contribute and maybe fight this crazy PTSD problem we have and the suicide problem that we have. When I attended the Veterans for Peace Conference at Spokane, honestly I was an emotional mess the entire time I was there. Just there was something about it, just having access to those people and just knowing that they had witnessed, experienced similar traumas and thought about those traumas in similar ways that I do.

I wish I had an incredible story like the mutiny aboard the SS Columbia Eagle with your last guest, Al Glatkowski. I mean that was an incredible story, but I don’t have a story like that. I was a good sailor with good reviews across the board. I had an incredible career that I could have extended if I wanted to, but I found myself pretty much just traumatized by my experience and left dealing with the fallout for many years. And it’s just now really that I’m starting to come to terms with that experience.

Matthew Breems:
So Mike, if people want to see some of the photos and work that you’ve done already, I know you have a website where that’s available for our listeners. What’s that website if they want to look at your material?

Mike James:
Sure. So I have an online portfolio that is a little strange. I know I need to clean it up and remake it. I need a new website that’s dedicated directly just to my military experience. But my website as it is, is www.MSJP.co. So it’s strange and short. Insured stands for Mike S. James Photography.co. Now, if you go to my website, if you look in the header, there are buttons for Iraq, Kabul, and Ur as in “U-R”. And under those headers you can see some select photographs from my deployments.

Matthew Breems:
And Mike, if you were face to face with a young man or lady that is thinking about enlisting in the Army or enlisting in the Navy and they’re all gung ho for America and freedom. “Let freedom ring, make America great again.” What would you say to a young man or woman that’s in that position?

Mike James:
Well, I’d say first of all, you have to refresh your political education. You have to look who the real heroes in American history are like Geronimo or Martin Luther King, Jr or Malcolm X. Research these people that actually believed in something and fought for real justice and equality. Because really the history of the United States is very dark. It is a settler, colonial state. It is built on empire. It’s built on genocide, it’s built on slavery and it’s a dark, dark history and you really have to embrace that. You have to understand that. Get your head around it. And once you get your head around that, I’m pretty sure that you’ll lose your taste for the military. It isn’t just a jobs program. You’re going to go out there and you’re going to get subjected to some really evil stuff. Things that you wish you never did or never participated in.

Matthew Breems:
Well, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan with us. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

Mike James:
Thank you very much.

Matthew Breems:
This Courage to Resist Podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam full-disclosure effort of veterans for peace. This year marks 50 years of GI resistance to the U.S. War in Vietnam, in and out of uniform for many of the courageous individuals featured. This episode was recorded and edited by Matthew Breems. Special thanks to Executive Producer Jeff Paterson. Visit Vietnamfulldisclosure.org and couragetoresist.org for past episodes, more information, and to offer your support.