Between Wanna-Warriors and Toxic Pacifists: Where Grunt Works Stands

This morning's strikes on Venezuela prove why we need a veteran perspective on resistance - one that rejects both the warrior cult and the civilian moralists.

Grunt Works exists because both the warrior cultists and the civilian pacifists get veterans wrong - and in getting us wrong, they miss what resistance actually looks like.

On one side, you've got guys like Eddie Gallagher, treating war crimes like badges of honor, celebrating violence as proof of manhood. They mistake brutality for strength and confuse serving your country with serving yourself. They're wanna-warriors even when they've seen combat, because they've turned the scar into a trophy instead of tending the wound.

On the other side, you've got academic pacifists like George Kalantzis who write about peace from faculty lounges while excluding veterans from the conversation. They treat violence as a theoretical problem and veterans as either tragic victims or moral contaminants - never as people who might understand something about resistance they don't. Their pacifism costs them nothing, which makes it cheap.

Here's what I learned in Iraq and in the fifteen years since: Violence is a cheap tool with a high cost. It's always available, requires minimal skill compared to organizing or persuasion, and it marks you. Not as a sin that damns you, but as a wound that scars your character. Even when you had no choice, even when you tried to act with integrity within terrible constraints, violence changes you.

I went to Iraq. The war wasn't just. I sought absolution for participating in it, and I received it. That doesn't make me a monster or erase every moment I tried to do right over there. But trying to act virtuously within an unjust system doesn't sanctify the system or remove the scar.

The question isn't whether violence is always wrong. The question is: what conditions would make it just? Show me a world with a legitimate international authority that can hold nations accountable - not the toothless UN we have, but an actual arbiter with enforcement power. Show me universal conscription that distributes the burden fairly instead of letting rich kids buy their way out while poor kids volunteer because they need healthcare. Show me nonviolent service options that honor conscience while maintaining civic responsibility.

Show me those conditions and I'll show you just war. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the United States just attacked Venezuela unilaterally, where nations grade their own moral homework, where "defensive war" means whatever the dominant power says it means.

So when I came home, I kept fighting. W.E.B. DuBois told Black veterans after World War I: "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting." That's the posture. The enemies changed - from insurgents to academic gatekeepers to corrupt utility companies to systems of discrimination - but the fight continues.

Grunt Works is about demonstrating what virtuous resistance looks like. I've filed civil rights lawsuits, federal complaints, theological critiques, built alternative institutions. I use the systems that remain intact to pressure bad actors back toward good faith. I don't need to use violence, I leverage their own stated standards against them - laws, regulations, their professed beliefs and ideals.

This is satyagraha for Americans. Soul-force, or if you prefer Aristotelian language, as I do: character-force. You "win" by absorbing punishment without either surrendering or becoming the enemy. You win by exhausting every other option before violence, because there are SO many ways to resist. You just need to be creative.

The warrior cultists think strength means dealing damage. The civilian pacifists think peace means avoiding conflict. Both are wrong. Strength means bearing burdens indefinitely. Peace means fighting for justice with tools that don't create new scars.

Military service under current conditions isn't virtuous resistance - it's participation in systems that lack legitimate authority and exploit economic desperation. Individual moments of integrity don't sanctify unjust wars. But veterans aren't moral contaminants either. We're people who carry scars from trying to act with limited information and even more limited control. Our job now is to tend those scars honestly: don't pretend they didn't happen, don't pretend we loved it, and don't pretend we could have stopped everything we couldn't stop.

The universe put us in the shit. We did what we could. Now we're home, and the fight continues - just with better tools that cost less of our souls, and of others'.

That's what Grunt Works is: a place for peace-workers using every tool at our creative disposal, except the ones that scar us again.