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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
How Vets are Resisting the War in Iran w/ Anti-War Veteran Zack Henson (G&R 482)
00:45:38
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red Podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I am joined by
- [00:24]
C
Bob Bozenko in Niles, Ohio.
- [00:27]
B
And today we're doing another Iran show. We have a return guest which is Zach Henson, who is a vet, longtime member of About Face and actually co chair of About Faces board. Zach, welcome to welcome back to the Green and Red Podcast.
- [00:44]
A
It's great to be back. Great to see you guys. Scott BOB yeah.
- [00:48]
B
And so obviously, just a little background here. We're in a we're in week five, entering into week five of the war against Iran. It's a very unpopular war. We're seeing gas prices shoot up. There's a lot of misinformation and censorship going on from various parties involved with this. And then also in the two things that have been in the news cycle in just the last 24 hours, just to also drop, put some context, is we saw Pete Hegseth fire Army Chief of Staff Randy George replace him with someone who has much more personal loyalty to Hegseth and Trump. Two other generals were subsequently fired as well. And then also the news this morning is about how an F15 has been shot down over Iran. Maybe we could just start a little bit. And then there's also all of the speculation and possibility of a ground invasion of Iran. And so all of that sort of in the mix. But I think maybe we the first question to start off with is, Zach, what are y' all seeing in about phase? Y' all are a group that interacts with active military. Y' all are a group that acts with interacts with vets. I'd just like to hear like what the sort of buzz that's going on within About Face around all of this.
- [02:00]
A
Yeah, obviously there's a lot of opposition to the war in Iran, its downstream effects, how it's going to affect service members, and more importantly, not more importantly, but just as importantly, how it's going to affect Americans geopolitically. This is a disaster. The economic effects of it are going to be a disaster. And it's a little bit different because there's not as big of a ground invasion and engagement as there was during the Iraq war. You're not seeing the same kind of in the street resistance that you would in the past because it's not affecting people as Directly, but we're planning on seeing more of that among active duty. There's a lot of fear and uncertainty. I think it's like a lot of people are holding their breath. There's a lot of rumors of people resisting finding excuse finding excuses to not go. There's some rumors about as there was like there were like fires on the Gerald Ford. There's some rumors circulating that like maybe there were people on the Ford that started those fires and clogged up the toilets and made it made the aircraft carrier have to return to base. But so far I haven't heard anything that was particularly. It could just be that it's an old aircraft carrier and it was out on deployment longer than it usually would be. So it might have just fallen apart in a lot of ways. There's a lot of what we're hearing as well is that injuries sustained from bombardment in the Middle east are being underreported by US Media. And as far as like resistance goes, I think that there's a lot of breath holding going on in terms of do we commit to a full on war resistance effort that's built up and strategized the same way that we would have with the war in Iraq or is that kind of like getting the wheels moving in the process and then like the conflict winding down? I think that a lot of the stalling that the administration has done to keep us guessing about when it's going to be over is intentional and I think it is kick up in that a little bit. So take for instance in comparison like Venezuela, we invaded Venezuela, we kidnapped the president. Right. There's not really time to organize like an oppositional movement to that. There can be a reaction. Right. We can say that we don't agree with this action in Venezuela, but like it's already happened by the time you put it out right now there's a bombing campaign and a naval campaign against Iran, but there's not, there's not boots on the ground officially and not in the same way. And there's there have been a lot of indications among people that the bombing campaign would be over, at least in the beginning like that it would knock out Iran. Iran is obviously adopted for a long term asymmetric warfare strategy. I don't think that's going to be the case. So I think that now there's more talk of how we're building up like a long term resistance to the war in Iran. It's also the political climate is different because what we're seeing is that with the war In Iraq, there was a lot of popular support for the war as much as there was popular resistance against it, because we were very much in a post 911 patriotic mood. And invading the Middle east seemed to a lot of people like an obvious thing to do or like a good thing to do necessarily. The, the war in Iran is just almost immediately poorly received by everyone. And so all these factors I think keep a lot of people in movement guessing. Like, how do we react to this?
- [05:36]
C
Last year when we talked to you, it was right after Trump's big military parade, which really ended up being a debacle. And then later last year you had this huge controversy when Mark Kelly and Slotkin and Crow and a few other Democrats made a video to soldiers specifically saying you don't have to obey illegal orders, which is really a pretty big deal. Especially we're talking about six very moderate pro military representatives. Did that kind of elevate the issue? Did you at about face start getting more kind of inquiries and getting more soldiers coming to you and saying, hey, what can we do about this?
- [06:16]
A
Definitely, I think that put it out there. Another side effect of that is I think a lot of organizations were about face was definitely grappling with like, how do we phrase that in such a, such a way that doesn't make us like as liable or able to be attacked because of that. There are some antique rules about what you could say for people to resist orders or to disobey orders at the same time as trying to stay in line with that, because as the administration is pretty bald faced about its attempt to dismantle any sort of like left leaning resistance to its politics in the United states. Right. With NSPM 7 and with other moves against nonprofits trying to remove 501c3 status, there's like a lot of fear around that. And I think that the politicians saying that and coming out with it coming out, and the sort of like weak response that the administration had trained to go after them, it was not as strong as it could be. I think that kind of has opened the gates for people to be a little bit more outward and not couch their language. And here are your options if you want to resist more. And there are more calls now for just saying you should outright resist orders that you think are wrong that are immoral. Don't worry about the particular legal pieces, that's obviously important. But like the messaging needs to be about whether or not you think these things are moral. Because even if technically, like some orders are legal, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should do it. And I think that that was helpful. We definitely have gotten more interest from people who are active duty and National Guard about what are my options if I see things like how can I resist? What if I can't refuse orders? Because I'm sure, as you guys know, refusing orders is one of those things where like, you're really taking a huge gamble because if they're, you in theory have an obligation to refuse illegal orders, but you only know that those orders are illegal post facto. So if you see something's illegal and you're operating in good faith and then a court decides that no, those are actually technically legal, you're fucked. Like, it doesn't. There's not really like a lot of protection for you. So advising on that is difficult. But there are a lot of people who have come forward and reached out to us with asking what their options are and asking what they can call like the GI rights hotline, if they can find a way to conscientiously object. There's been movement, I think someone was proposing, I can't remember where they're posing a bill that like you could do limited conscientious objection. Like you could conscientiously object not just based on your religion or your belief system, but because you believe like a certain type of action is against your belief system. So for instance, you're consciously objecting to the idea of rounding up citizens and throwing them into like detention facilities. Right. And you can support your case now, whether or not that's something that's going to happen. Unclear. This is a roundabout way of talking about a lot of things, but to answer your question, a lot of increased interest after seeing those politicians that come out and say, especially with Mark Kelly saying that you should resist legal orders. I think it opened up, it put the question out in the open.
- [09:22]
C
It also seemed because Kelly is very moderate guy or hero as much as can be.
- [09:28]
B
So I think Astronaut.
- [09:30]
C
Yeah, Astronauts. So all Americans say that this isn't some crazy hippie, but I've read that the hotlines you mentioned seem to be getting like significant.
- [09:39]
A
Yes.
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C
Traffic right now. And I was just wondering if you've heard this because this, I don't know what's anecdotal, what's real, but it said a lot of soldiers are saying I don't want to die for Israel, but they were surprised by how many said that attacking like blowing up that girl school, that little girls school in Iran was the red line for them. Are you hearing that kind of stuff?
- [10:01]
A
I haven't heard that being like the red line. Obviously people have mentioned it as being terrible. I think that a lot about this conflict is interesting because for those of us for whom it wasn't already broken, a lot of the mythology about American military morality and supremacy is being challenged by the war in Iran. We bombed a girl school. We're definitely, it's really hard to justify that as just a little mistake, especially if it is a little mistake that we made and we accidentally bombed a girl school. Then like our intelligence is obviously garbage because it's something that you can tell from satellite imagery. I can do it right now going on Google Maps and saying that's clearly not part of a naval installation. Right. So we're either terrible at that or we did it using some sort of AI model, or we just did it careless. We just did it carelessly. And I think that gets that idea and brings down the anthropological image we have of infallibility. And I think that in that sense it has made a big impact. The not going to war for Israel I think is a very popular line. I think that has captured a lot of people's attention, especially after the war in Gaza or the genocide in Gaza, I should say. You can't keep pumping out all this mythology about us being just and us having equanimity when we are sending weapons to Israel to bulldoze an entire society. And people have seen that and we weren't directly involved the same way that we are at the war. Iran we weren't. There weren't American planes dropping bombs in Gaza. But now we're side by side with Israel in a war where it's unclear what we're doing. Like what? How does this benefit us in any way besides some like vague notion of supporting our allies and projecting American power? It doesn't make any sense. And even people who are 18, 19, 20 years old can see that, especially at the last two or three years that like we're not the good guys, we're clearly doing bad things. And even if you believe that Iran is run by wild eyed terrorists, like the way what we're doing is not effective, so if it's ineffective, it doesn't benefit us, why are we doing it? It doesn't see the irony is like it doesn't even seem to really benefiting Israel either. It's just weird radicalism. And I think that does. That is a line of criticism that has a lot of purchase amongst soldiers and that is something that has come up and has and people have mentioned as being pretty incisive.
- [12:38]
B
Thinking about it like A lot of influencers, both on the right and the left very much speak to young men, like military age young men. We're seeing both like we're seeing. Not that I like them or their politics, but Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson are like, very much against this. But then there's a lot of influencers on the left who are like, quote, unquote left, who are also very much against the war. How much. Do you have any thoughts around how much those criticisms are actually affecting morale and active duty soldiers becoming much more reluctant to participate in this?
- [13:12]
A
I haven't seen that come up directly, but just having had conversations in the past past with current and former service members, not all of whom are like on the younger end of the spectrum. So you're not going to see people who listen to like Nick Flynn does a lot, but people who maybe would have listened to Tucker Carlson. Is that the schism within the MAGA movement around that is very real, especially because it undermines the message of America First. Obviously this like, protectionist, isolationist bent in the Trump administration is obviously BS because we are entering into more wars now than we have in the past and it's haphazard getting involved with these conflicts. I think that does have a big influence on people. I think that amongst conservatives, I don't think there are still people who would view themselves as like, moderate or even liberal. They don't necessarily support the war as it's done, but they're not categorically opposed to waging war in Iran. I don't think it's going to have an effect on them, but I think it does have an effect on some of the. Some of the kids who are 18, 19, 20 years old who grew up with YouTube brain rot. They've been listening to a lot of these people and it's. I don't know that it's going to cause people to want to resist or disobey orders, but I think that it is causing some cracks to appear and how the glass shatters be once those cracks really take full form, I'm unsure, but that is something that I think is going to have an effect.
- [14:43]
C
There are now like what, 40, 50,000 troops in the Middle east, and they're not new. I think in general, you have a significant.
- [14:50]
A
There's about 10,000 more than they're usually.
- [14:52]
C
Yeah, exactly. A lot of people saying there's now 50,000. No, they've actually been there already. But do you have any sense of whether you're hearing from them or from people here who are afraid of going. One thing, which is an aside, but I think it makes sense is I recently read an article where strippers are saying they're getting way more coming in which because they're. They were afraid of getting deployed. So are you hearing from both people here who are afraid of getting deployed or for people who are already in theater?
- [15:21]
A
We're hearing more from people here who are afraid of being deployed. My guess is that like the lockdown in theater is pretty strong. There's not a lot that has come out of theater. And especially with younger generations, including my aunt, my own and younger, there's not a lot of hesitance to just send TikToks and Instagrams and like live streams of what you're doing. And people have. People definitely do that and like the active military. But I'm guessing that there's a lot more guidance from leadership to lock that shit down. Cause we haven't seen a whole lot like the videos that I've seen coming out the. I follow a lot of like open source intelligence channels that are. There's actually videos of like rocket attacks that people have posted. But it's interesting because at that age you do see a lot of people who are raised on like Battlefield and Call of Duty and it all feels like a game. So a lot of the commentary I see out of that is less about if it's going to affect them and more about just the technology of these toys is cool, right? This looks cool. It like it's cool for it to explode. And we've got these super awesome American missiles that can shoot down Iranian missiles and it's cool to watch the fireworks. And what's interesting is that I've seen a lot of. I've seen like the exposure of those videos drop off a lot more and it hasn't been. There's nothing that's like popped back up where it's. People are like, oh no, we're actually getting hit by these now. Because as we've run out of interceptor missile stocks, more of those missiles are landing and the Iranians are more likely to hit soldiers that are in hotels, especially in like Kurdistan and Kuwait and Bahrain. But I haven't actually seen a lot. It's probably to do with the fact that people in the theater like their, their communications are locked down. I don't know. Have you had any call INS or heard any or anything about that?
- [17:12]
C
I was asking you that because like every day I see videos that allege that American bases are being hit. Then I'll try to double check to see where they're coming from. And it's not a source I'm familiar with, and obviously the New York Times isn't going to report it. But the Times did report. When was it last week, that, like, a significant number of American soldiers are working remotely, which would imply. So I just. That's why I asked her, you know, what. What actually is happening, because I get the sense that these. There is a fairly significant Iranian response that is attacking American bases in these other states. And I wonder what. That can't be good for morale either.
- [17:53]
A
Yeah, the US Very quickly after its initial attacks, like, started clearing out US bases. You can see from very early on in the conflict, like, Iranian drones managed to hit ANTPY2 radar installations, which are, by the way, like, I think half a billion dollars, if not a billion dollars. They've knocked out a couple more of those. It looks like a lot of vehicles have been removed from Al Adid and Al Asad. There are about 10 big bases in the area, and a lot of those have been emptied. Victoria Base and Baghdad. The Baghdad. The US Embassy in Baghdad has been hit about like over a dozen times. Like bad hits. Not just like the drone crashes nearby, but hit pretty hard. And I think they're emptying that out too, but they're still running operations. And when I was deployed in the Middle east, we ran a lot of opera. We ran a lot of what we did. We just lived in hotels in Bahrain and then we just came in every once in a while. And that's when I was working, doing work with special operations. So a lot of that stuff was just off the base. But obviously if they're still performing the same functions that SIF fleet was doing before, and they have an increased number of personnel, but that these bases have been largely emptied and a lot of vehicles have left. You can see that from, like, satellite imagery. Obviously they went somewhere, right? And they're doing work somewhere. And it looks like a lot of that is in hotels in Bahrain and Dubai and then maybe like alternate air bases and Iraq and Kuwait.
- [19:25]
B
One question, just real quick on the sort of theater lockdown. It seems like the. The Israelis did not have a lockdown with what their soldiers were doing in Gaza because they were, as much as like people in the resistance were posting stuff on TikTok, seems like a lot of Israeli soldiers were doing that as well. And do you think is that theater lockdown of communications out, is that normal? Or do you think that's something as a result of the genocide in Gaza that really fueled anti Israel, anti US Sentiment globally.
- [19:56]
A
You mean the lockdown being like maybe the communication? Yeah. And for US Assets in the Middle east, probably that's a response, not less to like Gaza and more to just. More to just. There are a lot of intelligence operatives from Russia, China and Iran in the Middle east and they're able to pick up where things are located a lot easier based on like they, they do social media analysis very well. And that's not something that like Israel was really concerned about. Like when they're, when people are giving thumbs up in front of blowing up a mosque or a school. Like, there's not really like a security threat. I think that probably a lot of that does come from like, operational concern, security concerns, as it should, which is like, interesting probably also they want to downplay casualties and they want to downplay how badly like the US Is getting hit in the Middle East. It's a lot worse than what people tend to believe. I, like I mentioned I'm following more like alternative news sources, open source, just like raw videos and stuff. Watching what gets filtered out, what makes it to like CNN or the New York Times doesn't really express like the gravity of the situation. The fact that we've had to flee like 10 of our bases and work from hotel rooms and have lost a lot of radar installations and Patriot batteries and a lot of the defense defenses are down. Like, you don't really see that reflected as much. It's starting to come up now because it's unavoidable. Right. The fact that the war keeps going and their refineries keep getting hit. You can't really hide that the way that you could in the past. But I also wonder if it's like. I'm sure that a lot of units basically are just like, you guys can't have your phones. Like, you can't connect to the Internet except if it's through the base. And then like you're filtering things out. They're not going to be connecting to the Internet, most likely through like, local telecom. They're going to be connected through like US controlled Internet, which means it's easy to just block social media altogether. So you're going to be seeing a lot fewer of those videos. But yeah, I think another thing to speak to that is the fact that I can't. I think it was Massey that walked out of a, of a, of a hearing about like, intelligence because basically the, they gave a closed hearing to Congress about the state of the war and a couple Congress people were basically just, they're not telling us anything. We asked really basic questions about like, how many missions are we running, how many casualties have we taken, how many of our assets have been destroyed? And they just wouldn't give a straight up answer, even in classified briefing.
- [22:33]
C
Yeah.
- [22:33]
A
And so I think that they're hiding a lot there.
- [22:36]
C
Even that was both Republican and Democrats came out like Seth Bolton. Nancy Mace is pretty crazy.
- [22:41]
A
Nancy Mace is who I was thinking.
- [22:42]
C
Yeah.
- [22:42]
A
Yeah.
- [22:43]
C
And when she's skeptical, we. It's a big deal because she's the big issue. I think today is because Chuck's been threatening this like he typically does forever is sending combat troops in and whether it be an attack on I. I assume Carg island would be the most. I'm not going to say logical because there's no logic to it, but the most likely attack, which I think is, I've been referring it to it as America's DN BN Fu. Are you getting any hearing from people saying, I'm not going to. I don't want to do that. I'm not going to do that. Carg Island. I don't know if you want to explain it because you understand military operations way better than I do, but I don't think I don't people understand, oh, we can send so many troops in and we'll take care of Car island in three or four days. What are you hearing about that?
- [23:26]
A
So the reason you would want to do that is to cut off the ability of Iran to sell oil while also keeping the oil infrastructure there. So if there's regime change, they can continue with production and export afterwards. That's why we haven't just bombed the hell out of Carg island because it's a very easy thing to do. The other concern about doing that is that if we capture Carg island or if we destroy the infrastructure there, that's going to jack up oil prices even higher. Like Iranian oil exports, we released sanctions on those and on Russian oil exports because we need more oil going into the global supply or else prices are going to skyrocket to 150, 180, $200 a barrel. So, like we need that oil to keep flowing as much as we want to strangle the irgc. But if we were to try to take the island, I think that there's two Marine Expeditionary units heading towards the Middle East. Three got another carrier going there. They talk about taking the island. If we took it, it would probably be, I'm sure that the Iranians have all sorts of booby traps and bunkers and stuff set up there. I think that we would probably be able to interdict, that we'd probably be able to deal with that in some way. But the trouble with Card island isn't taking it, it's holding onto it. There's not a lot of lead time. It's 25 km from the shore of Iran and they can launch ballistics or drones there all day long. I'm sure that they have every important defendable point on the island. On Shahed drone speed dial, they can just like press a button and it immediately goes there and they can just hit that left and right. The only way that we'd actually be able to stop especially the drones is to keep planes in the air like 247 to shoot them down. And that's, that's going to be extremely expensive and difficult to sustain. If we tried to attack it with boats, they're going to hit those boats with all sorts of drones, all sorts of underwater, underwater drones. They have a couple of like autonomous torpedoes which they haven't really busted out yet. Maybe they're destroyed, but you haven't really seen them. They could be used to attack ships. They could, the US could opt to do like an air based landing. I think they're like a year ago they did an exercise in the Pacific where they're able to like fly troops like a thousand kilometers to land on an island. And I think they did that with four or 500 marines. This, they could do that on a larger scale but you'd basically have to set up an air corridor which would be very costly. And then you get them on the island. And now we've, now you've gone through this gauntlet of getting shot at by shahed drones and ballistic missiles and underwater drones and you take the island, okay. Now it's just going to get pelted by short range ballistic missiles of which Iran has thousands. And they're, and it's not a very big island, it's 20 square kilometers. Iran's going to hit a lot of that. The US probably park its troop or troops around the oil infrastructure. So Iran would have to destroy that in order to hit the troops. Which if Iran doesn't think it's getting that island back, I don't think they're going to have as big of a problem with that as people think they would. Expeditionary units carry supplies for two weeks, right. How are you going to get supplies to them to sustain them? Right. You're going to have to rerun this same gauntlet every two weeks to bring them food. It's going to be A nightmare. And in terms of ballistic missiles, we'd have to put up more Thaad and Patriot batteries to shoot those down. We're already low on those interceptors with the speed at which if Iran suddenly It's shooting about 60 ballistic missiles a day, if it redirects half of those to Carg island, we're throwing up 90 interceptor interceptors a day. Like they, if they use cluster munitions even more. Like it's, we're going to burn through even more of our interceptors even more quickly. And I think to date, I think we've burned through our global supply. I think we've burned through 30 or 40%. I don't know. Someone draw me a picture of how we hold that island for more than a month. I don't know. And once we have people there, then it's a long term war as much as it's, as much as it's, hey, this is not some checkmate where you catch the island and then Iran's going to capitulate in a couple of weeks. This just lengthens the, the conflict for longer. And I think once you have American troops on the ground, as unfortunate as it is, Americans don't seem to really care about us dropping bombs on other countries the same way that they care about service members getting killed. And a lot of people will get killed in the process.
- [27:52]
C
What's really crazy is I've never seen a potential battle be discussed so openly. Trump made that stupid quip to the prime minister of Japan about we like sneak attacks. He's bragging about this and Hegseth is talking about it. They're basically promising war crimes. So if you're a soldier and the commander in chief is telegraphing, obviously Iran hears this too and is able to prepare for it. How does that, what does that do? If you're a soldier and you're maybe going to be sent into this really grave situation and the President, Secretary of Defense are giving away all your secrets ahead of time. What's that make you feel like?
- [28:27]
A
I mean, there's, that there's also a little bit of the, I mean, it's an obvious target. Not really going to be a surprise tag. It's an obvious, that it's been in video games. Right. Target island is like a map. Exactly. On some video games, they might try to take other islands. If they're crazy, they could try to take Ketchum Island. I don't know if you've heard of that one. It's like a, it's like a stronghold from launching torpedoes, drones and ballistic missiles and anti ship missile cruise missiles. But that's even, that's actually like even more well defended. That's, it's got like hundreds of bunkers in there. That would be a bloodbath there. There's also Abu Masa island, which is, it's contended over by the. I believe Kuwait or UAE has claimed. It's UAE has claimed control of that island in Iran. It says it's theirs and so they could take that island and then maybe that would be a Trump out of saying we've liberated this island or some such nonsense. But like strategically it's not going to make much of a difference. I honestly don't know what they're thinking because all of it seems insane. I think when Trump stands up and talks about strategy or talks about what we're going to do next, no one, including him, knows what he's actually going to say or do. I was a little surprised but not totally shocked by the fact that Trump gave a speech on April 1 about what the future of the war is going to look like. And he pretty much just played the hits is actually Obama caused this war. Biden gave them money. This is the strong. We beat them every day. We defeat them again. You know, it asks who makes me ask the question, how many times do you have to win this war before you lose it? Because apparently like we've already done it 20 times. He didn't really say anything new, which is probably why the price of oil skyrocketed immediately after that speech. Because there is no solution here. And putting my red team, blue team hat on as the United States, like, I don't actually see a way out unless we just basically capitulate to Iran's demands. We're not gonna, they're not gonna stop, right? They're not gonna stop doing this. They're not gonna stop like destroying oil infrastructure and any escalation that we do, they're able to like respond to that escalation because they could go after nuclear power plants in Israel, they could go after desalinate. They went after desalination plants and Kuwait and U.A.O, uAE. It's like kind of game over for a lot of stuff. There's those take a long time to build and it's not really easy to turn that back on. So I, I don't know. I think a lot of people are like waiting with bated breath because they don't know what's going to happen. And Trump is so unpredictable that what are we going to do? He talked about retrieving uranium. I don't know if you guys have seen those ideas. Right?
- [31:15]
B
That was, I was, that was my next question.
- [31:16]
C
Yeah, I was just going to ask you that.
- [31:19]
A
That's a nightmare. That's.
- [31:21]
C
Those are like buried 330ft underground, concrete, heavily guarded.
- [31:28]
A
Like, I guess we could drop mines around there or something. I don't like. If we created a perimeter, cargo planes
- [31:34]
C
letting the trucks out, getting construction crews out.
- [31:37]
A
That's months. Yeah, that happened.
- [31:40]
C
I study Vietnam. I think we've talked about that before. And one thing that always struck me when, because the hawks would say, let's cross the 17th parallel and go straight to Hanoi, basically, if that had happened, the American soldiers would have said you. And laid down their arms. They're not, they're not. If he were to order actually a mission that would, was to extract a thousand pounds of uranium which is Chernobyl and waiting. Do you think soldiers would just say, no, we're not doing that?
- [32:07]
A
Yeah, I think I, I don't think the special operations troops who would be setting up the perimeter and capturing the territory initially would, but like it would become untenable pretty quickly.
- [32:19]
C
Yeah.
- [32:19]
A
And when Trump starts talking about other options, I think people in the region would, our soldiers in the region would start trying to figure out what are we doing. Are you talking. Let's. If this isn't working and you want to quote, unquote, solve the problem. Are you talking about a ground invasion of the entire country? Because then that's really crazy. That's. Then you're going to see huge resistance to that. I don't think that people are as gung ho patriotic and stupid as you think they are. Like I. People, not you guys. But in general, they're self aware and they, they have some sense of survival and a lot of more now than ever, the bulk of the military, it's not like they're there for patriotism. They're there because they're, they want to get free loan, they want to get better support, they want to, they want to pull themselves. It's the poverty draft. Right. If you do those things where people walk around and they're like, why did you join the military? So I could. Because I couldn't afford to go to college, because I wanted to get my college loans paid off. Because this is the best oper, the best opportunity for me to elevate myself from poverty. Those people who are doing that are not going to go die. For Trump to like lower oil prices, like really, that's, that would cause a huge movement and I don't think that they could get away with a draft. Like, I really don't. It's. It's not the 1960s. They're not going to be able to, like, draft people as easily. And that was a disaster before. You'll see things explode. And thinking about the bigger picture, another thing that this conflict has done is it's choked the world's fertilizer supply. So you're going to start seeing food get more expensive in addition to gas getting more expensive and inflation going up. And you're going to have a lot of people who are really upset. And if you're telling people that their food's more expensive and the gas is more expensive, and now you're going to have to go fight Iran for no apparent reason and no clear exit plan and a basically unwinnable war, mass chaos is going to break out. It'll be nuts. It'll be like the late. Be like the late 60s civil unrest times 10. Not a lot to look forward to there.
- [34:29]
B
But no, it's all going downhill pretty quick. Just to kind of shift a little bit just because. Just keeping an eye out, just to keep an eye on our time too, is there's all of these different things that are going to potentially happen. And what is about face planning? What is some of the response going to be like? What is. What do you, as far as active military dissent goes, or people in the streets or political advocacy within the system or what have you. What is some of what you're planning?
- [35:01]
A
Because we're a national organization, what we're encouraging a lot of people to do, we saw that, saw the value in doing this when Minneapolis was going on earlier this year is we're trying to get a lot of people to engage with their local communities and engage with their local organizers so that we can plug into that. And a lot of what we're going to see need to happen is a mutual aid and community organizing. And so we act as like a clearinghouse for people exchanging information about how that is happening, we're probably going to also see a lot of domestic suppression of like, civil dissent and about faces putting together a, like a rapid response team. We're codifying that. We've done that in a couple cases where there's cities where especially like DHS or ICE is turning it into an occupied city like Minneapolis. And we've, we've learned a lot of lessons from that. We do training with local organizers on how to do security and how to, like, organize themselves in a more, you know, I guess for lack of a better word, militarized military fashion to get things organized and get people disciplined. So we're setting up the ability to do that and basically have like on call organizers be able to like deploy somewhere and then connect with local organizations that our other members have connected with. This is like a more general strategy because like I was saying before, like, things are only going to get more tense in the coming months, especially leading up to the midterms. There's a possibility that, you know, because of the security situation and civil unrest and fears of terrorism from Iran, we're going to deploy DHS and we're going to deploy National Guard and we're going to deploy hundreds of thousands of people to cities. And then obviously something is going to be. Some spark is going to light this tinder, some event is going to happen and it'll be like George Floyd In 2020, there'll be mass civil unrest. And how we're able to plug in and use our skills as veterans is going to be a huge part of what we can contribute to the movement. So that's a big part, is like basically translating our skills to push them down to local organizations. And then in terms of military resistance, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing, which is have an open door and provide legal and just basically any kind of support we can to people in the military who are looking to conscientiously object or get out or refuse orders. That's just our right to refuse campaign was pushing. We were pushing on before. If you go to the About Face website, we have resources for people there to reach out with help confidentially. So those are like the big prongs. We also do intelligence research and put together reports on threats that we see likely ICE deployments, likely DHS responses and like, how to respond to that. What's been working? We have a group called mambo, which stands for Monitoring and Analysis of Military and Border Operations, which has been put together to produce reports on. We see that DHS is looking at doing some sort of domestic oppression in this area or another immigration roundup. So these are the major players in the area. These are organizations you can plug into and using the skills of a lot of our former intelligence analysts to put information like that together. So those are like the three prongs that we're pushing on right now.
- [38:26]
B
Have your chapters been involved in a lot of the ICE in LA or ICE in Charlotte or what have you. Have y' all seen all the chapters responding there?
- [38:35]
A
Yes. Yeah, they're usually involved Usually About Face isn't the only organization that people are involved with. And we encourage people to, you know, About Face is a large national organization that's mostly focused on anti imperialism and anti war. But most people, most About Face members are also informed, excuse me, also involved with other forms of activism. And the domestic deployment of National Guard and active duty troops is definitely within our wheelhouse. And that's necessarily going to require us to engage with other organizers. So we see a lot of chapters getting involved. I've seen some, I've seen some radios
- [39:16]
C
recently of About Face comrades going to congressional offices. Is that kind of one of your campaigns right now as well?
- [39:25]
A
Yes, that happens in a kind of. We have like packets that tell people what to do. We will go after senators who can vote on like a War Powers act or a resolution to oppose the war in Iran or domestic deployment that we haven't been doing as much lately because we're not going to convince MAGA GOP people to change their minds on this. We generally would target like Democratic politicians and they don't have a lot of power right now. So it's, it's. We've shifted more to like, material support of like, resistance efforts and like these ICE Watch and response networks, like trying to plug in and get people to work with them. But that's still something we do.
- [40:06]
C
I've gone to a couple no Kings rallies and was really heartened. And I live in a fairly small town area. The ones I go to, a lot of vets were at the no Cage saying Vietnam vet, Gulf War vet kind of thing. Is that something like they're just doing
- [40:20]
A
it on their own or is that something you do? You. We see a lot of people doing it on their own and that is like a good opportunity to like, you know, bring people in. A lot of people's politics aren't as developed. They're not as they wouldn't consider themselves leftists. They consider themselves like moderates. But it's a good place to talk with people and build those connections. And a lot of people have come in through those protests. We get more people coming in through seeing us at the anti ICE protests. And no Kings is such a wide net that we still have a presence there, obviously. And a lot of people come in that way, usually about faces and people's like, first step. Although sometimes it is if you're coming in and you're socially liberal, fiscally conservative, you're not really going to find your way to a leftist organization. But like, sometimes people do.
- [41:05]
C
We'll probably Chalk that and put it out. Because we're hearing so many like super radicals just shitting all over no Kings and shitting all over people organizing. And so that's what you just.
- [41:15]
A
I don't shit on people's. Yeah, I don't want to on people's organizing, but no Kings. A lot of people criticize no Kings because it's just a march on a Saturday. Like they know, they don't really care. But I do think it is useful for people to get out there and to get funneled into more like direct radical action. And a lot of people have come in that way because they look around and it's okay. We're holding up signs like that's not working. What's our next course of action? And not just go home. So how do I find an organization that's doing more material work?
- [41:49]
B
I think the last thing we wanted to touch on is just around some of the domestic politics because I think this is important. Another thing that actually happened in the last 24 hours with the news cycle is that Pegseth put out a memo saying that he was going to allow off duty troops to carry their private firearms.
- [42:06]
A
Yeah.
- [42:07]
B
And just wondering what are some of your thoughts on that? We know that that's fraught with peril in the very least.
- [42:15]
A
Yeah. I think this is one of those things that is like red meat for manosphere. Red pilled people to look at and say there are warriors, they should be able to carry guns and defend themselves. If there's like a mass shooter on base, which at face value kind of makes sense. But the reality of the situation is that's probably going to empower more disgruntled, disaffected young men who are on base to become mass shooters because it's going to make it more accessible to them. And what I would expect to see from that as well is that the rate of suicide goes up because it makes a form factor of committing suicide much more available. And if you know anything about, and I'm talking about men for the most part because that's overwhelmingly like who makes up the armed forces. Especially like on base, you're going to see a lot more dumb arguments result in shots fired because people just have pistols and they're walking around and they have an undue sense of familiarity with weapons and it's going to become an extension of anger for them. So I don't think that's going to have any effect protecting anybody. I think it's just driven by this like very simple mentality. There's always. So I believe he said that there's a deny like it's like you have to commanders have to go out of their way to deny people the right to carry on base. Yeah.
- [43:36]
C
My first thought, there's already a suicide crisis in the military and this is contribute to.
- [43:41]
A
Yeah. It's definitely going to make it worse.
- [43:43]
B
I also we haven't had him on but read Seth Harp's book about drug trafficking and substance abuse.
- [43:49]
A
Oh.
- [43:50]
B
At Fort Bragg. I also feel like that will contribute to the substance abuse combined with the firearms will also lead to escalated violence and escalated suicide. Escalated number of suicides as well.
- [44:01]
A
100%. Yeah. Especially if there's despair going on because there's like a perma war in the Middle east and people know they're going to be shipped out to get pelted with rockets like that sense of nihilism and why not is going to increase significantly.
- [44:14]
B
Yeah.
- [44:16]
C
And thanks so much especially for taking
- [44:18]
A
time out from your vacation or visit. Yeah, of course.
- [44:21]
C
Unfortunately, we'll probably talk to you again. I don't think this is ending soon, although who knows. Trump could tomorrow say we won and who knows, right. As soon as he gets his insider trading in his predictive markets in. So who knows. But I really appreciate it.
- [44:36]
A
Yeah, of course. I always like talking with you guys and letting me ramble on for a little bit. So it's all good.
- [44:41]
B
It's all good. Folks. We've been talking with Zach Henson, veteran and member of About Face. If you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you really and if you listen to this on audio platform, give us a rate and review. If you really like us, go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit that support button or become a patron@patreon.com backslash green red podcast. Zach, have a good trip and hopefully we'll, I'm sure we'll talk to you again soon. Yeah, everyone, everyone else out there make trouble and misbehave and we'll talk to you again.
- [45:12]
A
All right, Scott. Bob, it was great talking to you.