“Can you believe what’s happening, mister?” a high school student asked me. We had been reading an article in class about Juan, a USS Lincoln sailor who found out that his father was detained by ICE agents.
ICE raids and war. That’s what’s on the news, and my students are paying attention. They are trying to make sense out of the times we are currently living.
“Yes, I believe it,” I responded. “It’s apparent that they are attacking immigrants on the street, but it’s the sons and daughters that sign up for the military.” These students know that I am a veteran who was deployed during the Iraq war.
“I can also be detained by ICE even while carrying my veteran ID and my US Passport,” I added showing them the IDs.
What is more wrong about the situation is that the capitalist system sends the sons and daughters of the working class to go and kill their brothers and sisters in other countries to serve the interests of the capitalist rulers who are attacking their own families.
We discussed why this was happening. The article reported that sailors on the destroyer USS Lincoln were not getting sufficient food or medical care while out at sea. For six months, sailors reported they lacked drinking water and sanitary supplies. The US destroyed desalination plants providing fresh water to Iranians, but they can’t provide fresh water to US sailors.
The sailors on the USS Lincoln are caught up in the US war with Iran. When the US started bombing Iran, starting with killing schoolgirls in Minab, the Iranian government used drones to destroy a US base in Bahrain.
And this is where ships were stocked. The Navy had to move its supply station out of range of Iranian missiles, to the US base on the island of Diego Garcia, 2200 miles from the Persian Gulf. After 268 days at sea, the sailors finally got shore leave in Thailand.
When imperialist wars are fought overseas, the direct connection between attacks on immigrants, mistreatment of sailors, and the deaths of our class siblings in Iran is apparent.
The experience of Juan and his father makes it clear for both workers and soldiers that capitalist and imperialists do not care for any of us. They want to divide workers with racist attacks while at the same time using and abusing the sons of those same workers in their imperialist wars.
This is their strategy—and their fatal weakness. That’s how we know we can win soldiers to turn the guns around for communist revolution. And this is why I joined the Army many years ago to organize for communist revolution because it was the same case during the Iraq war as it is now during the Iran war.
Many young people who will enlist in the military will come from high school classrooms similar to mine. We encourage them to join the military to organize for the needs of our class and not the racist or imperialist needs of the bosses. Soldiers, sailors, and Marines in all countries must turn the guns around to join workers in an international communist revolution.
Can you believe that can happen? I definitely can!
—Red Veteran Soldier
Read Soldiers, Sailors, Marines: Crucial to a Communist Workers’ Revolution here
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