SHITBIRD

Your United States military is a many-splendored institution built on centuries of bright honor and revered tradition. If it’s also got its skeletons and missteps, you may want to kindly squint past that. Serving under arms is a harder path than most Americans want to walk and if you’re not one of them, then sit down and let us tell you the stories of us.

The hierarchy is strict in old-fashioned ways that are decreasingly familiar to 21st century clubbers, gamers, and corp drones. Nothing is a suggestion; if you want to buck the system, you better have every last duck lined up, cleaned, de-feathered and roasted before you decide to make a stand. Consequences can include military prison, which is markedly less plush than Ghislaine Maxwell’s country club suite since she started playing ball with the Epsteinologist-in-Chief.

Sometimes you have to dig in, anyway. Usually that’s called “taking care of your people,” and requires jumping the chain to involve someone who has bigger things to do than field your complaint — but you gotta take care of your people.

Leadership starts with you, but taking care of your people doesn’t mean they won’t pull shit details. What are “shit details?” Run-of-the-mill duty that is boring, mindless, grueling, or sometimes just disgusting — overseas, it can involve thermal reduction of fecal volumes, AKA “shit-burning.”

Shit-burning is a punishment detail performed by “shitbirds,” but it’s only the bottom rung of your army’s endless production of shit details. With apologies to Rudolph and Gene Autry, There is CQ and fire guard, wash racks and floor buffing, Comet in bathrooms where honor is nothing…

But do you recall, the most shittiest detail of all?

Posted to mindless guard shacks, deployed without an ROE… and if you ever saw it, you would know it shouldn’t be.

We have uniformed troops walking the streets of American cities now, which is exactly not where they should be. Your military exists to protect the homeland from attack; to keep our enemies at a remove. For the most part, it does a bang-up job — noticed any French Foreign Legionnaires patrolling our streets lately? Any incursions by los Federales? No, not even after Pete Kegsbreath’s semi-accidental invasion of Mexico.

The U.S. military is a terrible warhammer. Its unprecedented destructive potential happily has never been completely explored. If we sent line units to Ukraine, we’d be eating discount Black Sea caviar in a week. No sane person wants our military coming to their neighborhood. “Break things and kill people” is a mission for somewhere else, long before it ever gets close to you. You want to believe this in the abstract. It’s much better than finding out for yourself.

We even have real specific laws about that, which this administration flouts as cheerfully as it ignores society’s tiresome scolding over its international bribery, unbridled self-dealing, and the aggressive normalizing of child rape and journalist dismemberment. Pres. Trump does not give one dismal, mushroom fuck what you think about his authoritarian crime syndicate, but the law does and it’s up to Congress to, at some point, hold him to it.

And it’s up to you to hold Congress to its oaths and duties.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (updated several times) clearly states that your military is not to be used for domestic law enforcement. That’s what it says. Despite well-heeled attorneys martialing squadrons of angels across pinheads, it’s not a complex law. Deploying active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to reinforce law enforcement was illegal. So was deploying the Oregon National Guard to Portland against the wishes of Oregon’s governor — while there is an exception to Posse Comitatus for National Guard emergency responses, it explicitly requires the governor’s personal authority.

Deployment of West Virginia National Guard troops to patrol the streets of Washington D.C. likewise abrogated Posse Comitatus. The entire point of the Act is to prevent U.S. troops being used for law enforcement on U.S. soil. Despite various administrations throwing legal sand straight into the eyes of blind justice, sending soldiers to patrol urban streets was and remains an illegal deployment.

To no one’s shock, that illegal deployment has now resulted in bloodshed. Two Guard members on “high-visibility patrol” were shot. They linger in critical condition.

Your idiot President, always one to put out fires with gasoline, immediately ordered 500 more troops to D.C. because laws do not matter to the lawless. Those soldiers’ blood is on his hands. More will follow. Maybe that’s his goal.

Do not imagine this as some exhortation to violence. You must not attack federal (or federalized) troops. The last thing you want on your curriculum vitae — or your conscience — is murder.

But reality forces us to note that the United States of America holds about a half-billion guns in private hands: damn near two to every voter. Our tradition is not to touch our forelocks, curtsy submissively, and extend our traveling papers with a trembling hand. Hell, we’ll shoot the neighbor’s maid if she knocks on the wrong door. With ICE already kidnapping people outside of due process or warrants (hilariously now including a family member of the president’s press secretary), our national patience with being herded around seems likely to wear very thin, very fast.

So it isn’t a question of whether there will be more violence, but when and how much. When this administration predictably flexes its tiny authoritarian fist and throws a division-level tantrum in Chicago or Los Angeles or Seattle, this republic will be shaken to its constitutional core because your military is — by tradition, custom, and law — intended to transcend politics. It is established as an institution purely devoted to defending the U.S.A. and her citizens. It isn’t to be a conservative bastion of head busters, nor the cavalry riding in to save liberal pluralism.

Those are the jobs of law enforcement, and of civilian government. The military must always answer to a civilian government, which must always answer to its voters. That’s how this shit works, when it works at all.

But about those shit details (remember the shit details?): one of the classics has always been guard duty. Every soldier hates it whether you’re stuck in a shack, perched on a wall, driving the perimeter, or walking a mindless patrol. Now imagine you were shot down in the line of mindless patrol duty but there’s no Purple Heart because you weren’t in combat; no Soldier’s Medal because you didn’t save shit. You were just a walking, talking downrange target holder and what you get for your troubles is a VA disability rating, maybe (assuming Republicans don’t shutter VA health care and benefits to redirect tax money at billionaires), and a hole.

Can’t be great for morale.

Not that it’s all about medals. Soldiers aren’t in it for big paydays or a sweet, sweet cookie. Most have a powerful sense of duty, pride in what they do for their nation, and a forthright willingness to put their lives on the line.

Their sacrifices should matter, though.

Of course, the “Department of War” could always decide to go ahead and pin Purple Hearts on their chests. All that requires is to redesignate America’s civilian populace — once called We, the People — as an “armed enemy.” That would also get the Pistol Pete’s “Dept. of War” off the Posse Comitatus hook, because they wouldn’t still be engaging in illegal law enforcement.

They’d be at war.

In this scenario, you’re that enemy. We all are. If we weren’t, our favorite president wouldn’t have to send men with guns to keep us in line, right?

Except we’re also the wallet that pays for those supernumeraries to be where they should never have been in the first place. Congress has the power of the purse (i.e. the legal right to spend our money), but we have the power of deciding which House members and senators keep their jobs.

Call your senator. Call your congress(wo)man — especially if they’re a Republican. Tell them you don’t want war in our streets; our destiny is finer than that. Tell them you respect our military too much to see it used as a play toy for an obscene ego, or a catalyst for authoritarian crackdown. Tell them Americans don’t countenance secret police in our schools and churches, and we don’t bend the knee to military patrols. Remind them that this is the land of the free, not the home of the knave.

Tell that public servant of yours to stop waiting for the 973rd smoking gun, or opinion polls openly demanding his public execution. Tell ’em to saddle up and impeach that raging imbecile out of our White House before he finally, completely tears this republic asunder.

To my brothers in arms: Godspeed. Listen to your NCOs, and follow our Constitution. Don’t let some slovenly draft dodger make a shitbird outta you.

To voters: support your troops, but don’t task them with solving government. I can’t tell you enough times or in enough ways that this is not their job or their skill set. If you’re (still?!) calling for the army to drag Trump out and stand him up in front of a military tribunal, you are a smooth-brained thrall. In that scenario, we all lose — see above under “break things and kill people.” Only angry power bottoms beg a military junta to rule them.

And to Congress: for once in your spineless term, do the right thing. Impeach the real shitbird. Let his fat ass break rocks at Leavenworth.

I hear it’s good for the circulation.