Every Nov. 11, American veterans are honored in a variety of ways. While 43 percent of Americans think our current military involvement in Afghanistan is a "mistake," 76 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the military as an institution, according to a Gallup poll from August. Matthis Chiroux, a veteran who spent five years in the service and received an honorable discharge in 2007, thinks that this confidence is dangerous.
"The cultural glorification we do of the soldier archetype is so over the top and you feel that when you're in the military," he told the Daily. "You are expected to be a killer, to be a physical manifestation of American might, to say ‘I am the coolest f−−−−−− thing since Jesus Christ. I got this f−−−−−− gun, and I work out, and I yell at people, and people are scared of me and that's what it is to be a man.' That's not the way the world works."
Chiroux made his way onto the national stage in 2008, when he refused to be deployed to Iraq for a second tour with the army, speaking directly to Congress.
"I wasn't going to go to Canada — didn't want to uproot everything and just disappear," he said. "If the army was going to ruin my life, I wanted to make sure they knew it."
Chiroux is one of the many soldiers who have returned from war and decided to enroll in college — he is currently in his third year at Brooklyn College.
"[Going to university after being in the service] carries a whole lot of weight in the soldier's imagination," he said. "So many young men and women join the military thinking it will be their path to college. From day one, I was fantasizing about what college was going to be like — I could just survive five years of this s−−− and then I get to go to college, which is going to be where I become a person, finally. I thought of it as when I would finally be free. Ultimately, it was a very different experience than I expected — one that's been very difficult at times."
The National Survey of Student Engagement recently reported that although veterans study as much as other students, they have an incredibly difficult time adjusting to college life, and many of them feel that their schools do not offer them support services through which to become better acclimated and connected to life on campus.
"You can just see there are all kinds of walls built between the veteran student and his or her peers," Chiroux said. "One of the biggest hurdles is simply getting out of the military, which is a very difficult thing to do, especially if while in, you sustain some kind of trauma, which I believe is everyone in the military. Another hurdle to overcome is finding a place for yourself, which is not just adjusting to what it's like not being in the army, but actually finding a place in society. Oftentimes there doesn't really seem to be one; it's on a pedestal or in a parade."
Chiroux enlisted in the army soon after he graduated from high school, but not because he wanted to: He got into trouble with the police and was given the choice between being prosecuted as an adult in federal court or enlisting.
"I always say, I'm living proof that we do not have an all−volunteer army," he said.
After his five years in the army, during which he served as an army strategic communicator and journalist, touring in Japan, Germany, Afghanistan and the Philippines, Chiroux returned to the United States in 2007. He got an apartment in Brooklyn with the one person he knew in New York, a fellow veteran. The two engaged mostly in reckless behavior after returning to civilian life, Chiroux said.
"I was drinking excessively and being very physically impulsive," he said. "One Sunday morning, I'd been up all night with a couple of women I was hanging out with — it was around 9 a.m. — and somehow we managed to get up on top of a skyscraper right next to Ground Zero. I was wasted and I remember standing on the edge of that building and looking down at the ground and seeing the wall stretch down from the tips of my toes to the sidewalk, 68 stories and the wind blowing. I went off like a rocket and it took me a while until I finally realized I may be having a good time, but there's something wrong with me."
Such self−awareness is difficult for many veterans to manage, Chiroux said, particularly if they're dealing with post−traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a reported 319,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are. Chiroux's New York apartment−mate is one of them.
"She was very deep into cocaine and she couldn't come down," he said. "It was like she was trying to relive the rush of combat."
Substance abuse is one of the most common consequences of PTSD, Chiroux said, and the most common way he has seen veterans self−medicate is with excessive amounts of alcohol and cocaine.
PTSD has afflicted soldiers for generations, but the number of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with the disorder has been alarmingly high. The rising number has been attributed by some to an increase in the amount of time that modern day soldiers spend at war. The length of soldiers' tours in Iraq can sometimes be as long as 15 months and nearly half of the 525,000 active−duty soldiers have been deployed for more than one tour.
While Chiroux had served for a year on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he has since parted ways with the organization after receiving a lot of backlash from military communities for last March burning an American flag in Lafayette Park at an anti−war rally.
"I came up in front of the crowd with an American flag handkerchief and I told them I thought this represented freedom and justice and love, and now that I've been in the military and seen what this flag covers up, I don't believe that anymore," he said. "I was a slave to this flag, a form of slavery particular to veterans. And I burned the flag in front of this crowd. When you see a veteran, who is supposed to lead the way to prostrating ourselves in front of this sort of empire, burning a flag … it's different than seeing a college student burn a flag."
"They buried my friends under the flag and that's why I burned it. That flag killed my friends; soldiers had that flag on their arm when torturing people at Abu Ghraib," he continued. "The military, they get to give you a symbol, tell you what it means and send you off to die with it. They're going to wrap your story in that and burn the truth beneath it — why wouldn't I burn it?"
