An Interview with Vince Emanuele.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
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US Iraq War veteran speaks out before Australian tour
June 25, 2013
Question: What attracted you to enlist in the US military as a marine?
Answer: I think the process was long and quite complex. First of all, I was a product of American culture which is, of course, an extremely violent culture. In other words, like many American children, I grew up playing “Army.” Specifically, we would pretend-shoot our friends with plastic guns, watched countless movies that glorified warfare and played very violent video games in our spare time. In short, I was trained to be a murderer for American Empire from a very young age. I think this is a very important component to the process of indoctrinating America’s youth with militaristic ideologies. No matter what, without the process of early-age cultural indoctrination, many young Americans would be much less inclined to join the US military.
For the sake of time, I’ll mention a second component to this process. To me, it’s quite obvious that the US military provides a unique space for expressing and, more importantly, bastardizing gender roles. So, in my case, I was simply fulfilling the traditional “masculine” role of the big, tough, angry, murderous, bar-fighting, heavy drinking, womanizing asshole who cares about nothing more than superficial cultural practices and killing people. You know, the perfect American. In this context, I fell into the trap of performing expected gender roles with murderous results. There is nothing “tough” or “cool” about imprisoning, torturing or killing people. I learned this lesson quite quickly.
Now, while those are my experiences, I must also mention that the process is much more complex, especially for Americans coming from Native American, African American and Latin American backgrounds.
In those particular communities, joining the US military provides a conduit to decent paying job-training programs, housing, healthcare, education and so forth. Remember, here in America, we went through the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression of 1929. So, unfortunately, now, we have what many have called an “economic-draft.” Thus many individuals join for college money, medical benefits or job opportunities. More
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