As political tensions continue to rise across the world, I've made the decision to speak openly and frankly about a time in my life I've struggled to come to terms with. And I hope, if I may, to impart some reasoned thoughts on the world today based on that experience.
I’m not a political analyst or historian, I’m not even a college graduate, but as we will discuss below I’m intimately familiar with how the sausage gets made when it comes to military propaganda. And I feel like I have some responsibility to share what I know about the biz with a world thats getting flooded with it on all sides.
I do not expect to change anybody’s mind about anything, but if everybody who’s had an experience like mine talked about it more openly, folks might have a better picture of how at least THIS aspect of the world works.
This piece will be doled out over the next month because it is a story that requires context and as such is a bit long winded, I hope you’ll all be kind enough to check out parts two and three when they drop.
Alright lets get into it. To put it as bluntly as I can for 8 years I was a propagandist for the United States Army.
I wasn't called a propagandist. I was called a public affairs specialist or 46Q if you like talking in codes. I wrote press releases and news articles for the Fort Carson Gazette that were posted to wire services and sometimes printed in other places. I was pretty good at it. I had the top ranking story on CNN IReport for a whole week once, it was mostly because the picture had soldiers using blow torches on a bridge on the Tigris River, and I managed to get a shot without a bunch of garbage in it.
Soldier, Blowtorch, Tigris. Now those are some good keywords.
I even wrote the second best feature story in the entire army one year, at least according to the Keith L. Ware award for outstanding journalism. It was about the Ft. Carson Mounted color guard, a small squad of soldiers you might see at a parade carrying flags, winning a civil war era horsemanship competition in Wyoming. They were all wounded warriors recovering from trauma sustained in Iraq or Afghanistan. The pictures, again, are probably the reason it stuck.
I have a plaque about it somewhere. Pretty sure it’s in my closet.
I can also say for what it’s worth, everything I ever wrote was, to the best of my knowledge, true and accurate. I made some mistakes as all young reporters make. Misspelling names, getting titles wrong.
There's even one embarrassing photo I took and submitted for publication thankfully caught by the gazette’s editor of a soldier holding an M2 50 caliber machine gun (very big and heavy) in front of his hips like a big ‘ol penis in the background. If he'd made it into the paper he'd be a legend and I don't even want to think about what my boss would have done to me.
It’d have probably a 73 minute lecture on attention to detail I'd have to observe from front leaning rest between bouts of 50 push-ups. That happened a lot.
At this point, you’re wondering, when are we getting to the propaganda, to which I’d say, a lack of context is one of the largest issues in the dissemination of information both today and across human history so buckle up we’re going to be here a little while.
The man who delivered the aforementioned diatribes was my supervisor for the first 4 years of my enlistment, and while I learned everything I know about writing at his perpetually booted feet, he’s also a big part of the reason I couldn’t hold a full time job for the second half of my 20s.
Sergeant First Class (Name redacted) was a man who believed in one thing and that was the God Damned United States Army. He told me he sold all his clothes before boot camp because he figured the army would give him everything he needed.
A true believer, when I met him, (Redacted) was the single most deployed public affairs soldier in the entire army. A Hero!
He was also a legitimate madman that would keep me in the office until 8-10 pm “because good soldiers didn't leave before their NCOs,” and he was avoiding his wife.
To sum up the essence of our working relationship he once told me "Ingram you're the best writer and worst soldier I've ever led." It was probably more than once. His sermons always wound up just as general aural and emotional trauma in the end. It's hard to remember a lot of the finer points so many years later.
I also had a wildly insecure captain who bit my head off if I ever found an error in his copy, and a colonel I'm not equipped to diagnose but who once lost his shit when I fixed a printer he couldn’t. Got (Name Redacted) to write me up for it. Its probably not even the stupidest thing he wrote me up for.
While I’m talking shit I don't want to paint myself like some sort of put upon hero here.
If my military experience is a MASH rip off, then I'm Radar at best, the lowest guy on the totem pole, ineffective but sweet. Hell, I was probably really Gilligan, lost and on the wrong set.
Because (Name Redacted) was right, I was a pretty piss poor soldier.
Middling at physical training, competent with my rifle but never near the top of the class, and because we were a division shop rubbing shoulders with more officers than grunts, I barely used a Humvee much less serviced one before we deployed.
I also had (and still have) ADHD, a smart mouth, and an utter hatred for being told what to do that I'd sort of hoped the army would beat out of me.
It didn't.
And since my job as a journalist was literally to ask questions, when I curbed those tendencies my work was shit.
I'm mentioning all this because it's important to recognize one's biases when discussing subjects like propaganda.
I also held core beliefs about freedom and accessibility of information and the importance of transparency in the press when I joined up. Both were borne out of the fact I’d grown up in the developing world and figured most Americans simply didn’t know how we were destroying whole economies for cheap electronics and nicknacks and coffee and such.
I also believed the war in Iraq was wrong, and Afghanistan at least a mess, but I figured American citizens had a responsibility to sign up and fix our mistakes and I wanted to be a part of that.
In short I was a slightly left of center kid with a few pretty far right ideas still and a few folks on both sides of the isle might find a bit strange.
That being said, like many I mostly joined the army because I was a mess, hated college and the recruiters told me in 6 months I'd be a professional writer.
It’s the only thing I’d ever really wanted to be, and after basic, during Advanced Individual Training, my crash course in journalism and photography that lasted a whopping 8 weeks, I managed to get off Ft. Mead and into Baltimore where I had a hack of a tattoo artist hack the latin word “Veritas” on my arm.
They gave us a lot more free time in AIT than basic, and I’d been reading writers who'd fought in wars, guys like Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Hemingway.
Their stories about the absurdity, tragedy, and pure stupidity of war rang pretty true even stateside in that shit show of a unit.
One of our sergeants was running through every female trainee he could get his hands on, using his power for, well, the things men use their power for. Everybody kinda knew it and nobody did anything about it about it including me.
I hear hear he got popped later. I hope his wife got his retirement. This guy was a 46Q, a public affairs specialist, a reporter. He had the job I was training for and he had no integrity. So now I've got truth written in Latin on my arm. It seems in retrospect a very Hemingway response to a Heller problem.
And as the rest of this story will demonstrate there’s a lot of that in the military.
All of that to say between the fuckery I'd seen in school and over a year learning the craft in a planking position from one of the most knowledgeable and damaged men to do the job in his generation, I went to Iraq in September of 2010 for a year long deployment where I learned you might never tell a lie and still make propaganda. Because often propaganda is simply what you don’t print.
But that’s a story for next Time! I hope all this shoe leather was engaging for you guys, the next bit is the juicy stuff! One of my first stories in Iraq gets suppressed! You want to hear about that dontcha!
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And if you find this series helpful or interesting or even just entertaining, please share it with your friends, I know these words aren’t going to change the world, but I’m trying to do my part for the cause over here the best way I know how.
Until next time