What We Never Told Our Veterans About Freedom

✍️ The untold story of veterans' despair and the real cost of war.

I am not a veteran. And I have spent more time on the battlefield than most vets. What I am sharing here is lived experience, not something inferred from my readings of the newspaper sitting in a comfortable and safe western home.

I will never celebrate Veterans Day, not worship or contribute to the hypocrisy that sustains the barely hidden truth that we all conveniently and complacently accept for fact.

The use of force is not to protect our freedom, it is to protect our privileges.

I choose to support those broken and betrayed souls who have fallen victim to this cruel deception, but I will not lend my voice to the hypocrisy. I will never glorify the veteran, the military, or any institution that perpetuates systemic violence.

When freedom is in fact privilege and injustice, the act of fighting for this so-called 'freedom' becomes an irony in itself. Young men are convinced to go to war, risking their lives for what they believe to be a noble cause. Yet, the reality on the ground paints a different picture.

I've never witnessed a soldier kill a communist; instead, I've seen them kill poor people who are just trying to live their lives and find happiness—much like you and me. The act of killing is deeply unnatural and profoundly challenging. Some cultures attempt to desensitize us to this act, teaching us to suppress our emotions to make it possible.

To kill another human, you must first kill a part of yourself.

During my time in Uganda, I observed firsthand how children are trained to become killers: blindfolded during target practice, only to discover, when the blindfold is finally removed, that they have been shooting at humans. The emotional security system that tells us 'this is wrong' gets switched off, and the numbing process begins.

In the west we use freedom as the blindfold, and when the blindfold is removed, what is left? The veteran’s despair.

Returning home from an unjust war (and they are all unjust), most veterans realize they have been manipulated by propaganda, serving as the enforcement arm of an oppressive system. This realization is devastating. Now do you still wonder why so many of them commit suicide or find their ways to addiction?

At a young age, I refused to serve in the military. I was influenced by a deep antimilitarist culture stemming from people who had lived through two world wars. I remember listening to Boris Vian's song "Le Déserteur," and I knew I was not here to kill people. I was sentenced to two years in military prison, I chose to desert, leaving my country behind. It created chaos in my life, but it also forged the core of my being:

I never do what goes against my soul’s deepest truth and that is called freedom.

Ironically, despite never bearing arms, I have spent more time in war zones than most veterans. For over two decades, I worked to bring relief to civilians in distress across numerous conflict areas. I thrived on adrenaline, collected my fair share of PTSD, and saw things that are beyond words to describe. I’ve been held at gunpoint, detained, jailed, interrogated, and witnessed death countless times—but mostly despair, torture, and rape.

Trust me when I say, nothing good ever comes from a gun.

In the years it took to tame my PTSD and adrenaline addiction, one principle guided my recovery: I was always on the right side of the gun, which meant never holding it. I can't imagine how I would have healed if I had been responsible for any part of the violence I witnessed.

Our culture's portrayal of violence, seen in countless movies featuring guns and killings, contributes to this numbness. It's part of a numbing process that conditions us to view violence as normal. A few years ago, on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, I saw a giant billboard advertising for a new movie. It just said one thing: WAR. And nobody blinked. If it had said SEX, there would have been public outrage.

We censor intimacy, but not brutality.

The apotheosis of hypocrisy is evident when you consider that the vast majority of the world's guns are produced by the five members of the UN Security Council. This stark fact highlights the profound hypocrisy at the heart of our global governance.

We battle terrorists we once trained, overthrow dictators we installed, and sell weapons while spreading violence. We drop bombs from drones on countries we've never set foot in, meticulously guided from the comfort of our Western offices. We arm nations that turn those weapons on civilians, turning a blind eye—only to feign surprise when the violence boomerangs back to us, safe in our cocoon of privileges.

We revere violence. It’s our collective addiction.

And it has consequences beyond the battlefield. The more we numb ourselves, the more we accept the unacceptable. Stay in dead-end jobs. Numb with caffeine to wake, with alcohol to sleep. Accept relationships that are hollow. Avoid questions. Avoid truth.

The more we numb ourselves, the less we feel; the less we feel, the more we resort to violence to break through our numbness. This creates a vicious cycle with devastating consequences.

"Because once you feel again, once you awaken, the entrenched systems of control and manipulation lose their grip on you. This reawakening to our true emotions and connections is not just a personal triumph but a profound societal shift. It marks the beginning of a liberation from the cycles of violence and exploitation that have long dominated our world.

Let us return to the basics, to the core of what truly makes us human. It is not the grandiose acts of heroism or dominance that define our humanity, but the simple acts of kindness, empathy, and love. These are the values that can build a world worth living in, a world where peace is not just the absence of war, but a flourishing of life in all its diversity and beauty.

Make love, not war.

This isn't merely a slogan from a bygone era of protest; it's a profound call to action. It challenges us to look beyond our conditioned responses and engage with the world and each other in ways that heal, rather than harm. By embracing love over war, we choose a path that nurture rather than destroys, uniting us across divides and fostering a future where all can thrive.