From Recruiter to Critic

In February 2007, Institute for Southern Studies correspondent Ben Carroll interviewed Jimmy Massey, a 35 year old Marine veteran who currently lives in western North Carolina. Massey joined the Marines Corps in 1992 and served for twelve years, during which time he worked as a recruiter and completed a tour in Iraq. Upon returning from Iraq, Massey retired from the Marines and developed several physical and mental disabilities. After talking with other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Massey helped co-found Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization which calls for the immediate end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Ben Carroll: What prompted you to join the Armed Forces and what was your experience after you enlisted?

Jimmy Massey: I went to a technical college in Houston after I graduated in 1990. . . . I was holding down two jobs and my stepfather was laid off. I decided to drop out and take a sabbatical, find myself, earn some money, and then go back to college. . . . But shortly after I dropped out, I took a job working in the oil fields in and around New Orleans. Being young, I discovered Bourbon Street, and fell in love with Bourbon Street. I lost my job, lost my apartment, and I was basically living out on the streets. I was living in Lake Pontchartrain Park, homeless.

On my way to a job interview to wash cars, I passed by a Marine recruiter at a gas station. I was basically panhandling for money to get something to eat. And when I saw the recruiter I was like, “Ok, this is my lunch. I’ll go talk to this guy and get him to buy me lunch. We’ll see what the Marines say.” So I started making conversation and after he figured out that I was a high school graduate, I told him I would do the interview if he bought me lunch—which he did. At the end of the conversation I was nodding and thinking, “Ok, the Marines is something I want to do.”

You know, I can’t say that my overall time with the Marines was totally negative or just indifferent. They did teach me certain things, traits in life that have helped me out. However, generally, those traits are only for one purpose and that’s to get you to kill when the time comes. I don’t have any regrets going into the Marines. I have regrets that we have a president that has chosen to use the military in an imperialist and fascist way, rather than using them for good, rather than using them for the potential humanitarian missions that the Marines could accomplish. I don’t hold the Marines responsible for what’s happening in Iraq, I hold the administration responsible.

BC: After you joined the Marines, you became a recruiter yourself. What was that like and what kinds of things did you do as a recruiter?

JM: When I went into recruiting, I was full force. I knew that if I wasn’t successful at recruiting, my career in the Marines was over. When you get to recruiter school, it’s a very sterile environment, kind of like being in a hospital; it’s not a real-world scenario. So when you get out on the streets of America and you start reflecting back on the things they taught you in recruiter school, it really doesn’t apply anymore. I had a senior Marine that took me underneath his wing when I first got on recruiter duty, he showed me the “right way” to recruit, not the recruiter school way. And I found that the “right way” to recruit involved fraudulent enlistment, deception, and so on.

There was a particular incident where I signed up a mentally handicapped young man. . . . To make a long story short, this young man went to boot camp and was kicked out, saying that he defrauded the U.S. government and hid his medical problems. I knew this was a complete lie. I knew of his medical problems, we just covered them up. Congressman Charles Taylor’s office investigated the incident and found unsubstantiated evidence towards me, saying that I didn’t do anything wrong. However, I knew that I lied and told this young man to cover up his medical problems. It was after that point [that I started to become indifferent to the military], because you’re taught from the very beginning when you go into Marine Corps boot camp about honor, courage, and commitment, that Marines don’t lie, Marines don’t steal—all [this] Boy Scout ethos and morality. When we got on recruiting duty, that creed and code no longer existed.

They’d use intimidation, fear, and whatever they could do to try and make you productive. At that point, I had to come to a moral decision in my life, a moral dilemma: am I going to continue to go forward with this knowing what I know, or am I going to speak out? I began to speak out when I was on recruiting duty and quickly raised a lot of flags. They tried to relieve me because I was speaking out and I wasn’t pulling the quotas. I was pretty indifferent and actually considered getting out of the Marines.

BC: You were in Iraq, from the beginning. What kinds of things did you see and what was it like to be a U.S. solider in Iraq?

JM: When we first got into Iraq, we were treated as liberators. The Iraqis would come out and bring us food, tea, bread, and flowers. It was like that pretty much up until the day I left. But there were problems, we started to lose the Iraqi people. I saw a lot of needless deaths, especially civilian deaths. When the Iraqi people started seeing this needless death, and the harshness and cruelty of the American forces, that’s when the tide started to slowly turn. When Abu Ghraib happened, the Iraqi people said at that point, “These people aren’t our friends and they’re not here to do what they said they were going to do.”

Another thing really broke my heart early on at the beginning of the war . . . we would take the reporters and the embedded journalists and we would show them all the humanitarian food, all the humanitarian medical supplies that we were going to give to the Iraqis to help alleviate these thirteen years of sanctions. But we didn’t take them—we left them in Kuwait. So we invaded a country with no humanitarian supplies. I was thinking to myself, “How are we supposed to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people when they come up to us and ask us for food or medical supplies and we don’t have anything to give to them?” That was before we even invaded the country and it just got progressively worse.

There was a young Iraqi boy, a diabetic, who came into our camp in Karbala, Iraq. He was looking for insulin. After a couple phone calls, medical personnel finally came to our camp and notified me that there was nothing they could do for the child. In fact, that child and his relative had been to all the Marine camps in Karbala looking for insulin with no success. So I asked the medical officer, “You mean to tell me we can travel thousands of miles across one of the harshest deserts in the world, bring thousands of gallons of fuel for us, food for us, medical supplies for us, but we can’t find one syringe with insulin to give to this diabetic boy?” It’s a very sickening feeling to go to a child and have to look him in the eyes and say, “You know what, son, I can’t help you. You have to leave my compound.” Just the look in his eyes, he just lost all hope. It was like he was just dreaming. And here my Marines are high-fiving this kid, playing with this kid, and I have to come back and tell him, “You’re a dead man. You’re dead. There’s nothing I can do for you.”

It’s harder when you’re in a position of leadership like I was. You take an oath swearing allegiance to the Geneva Conventions and international law, and when you do things like this, it really makes you question what our true intentions were in Iraq.

BC: Reflecting on those experiences, you came back and decided to cofound Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Could you speak a little bit about what prompted you to start this organization and what kind of work you all are doing now.

JM: I started doing research online and looking up the newspaper reports about my battalion and what we did. The more I read, the more I became disgusted. I saw quite clearly that it was propaganda compared to what we actually did. I was angry, the more I read, the more I saw on CNN . . . I called a writer for the Mountaineer [the local paper that had taken an interest in my story] and said, “I’ll tell you what. If you want an interview, I’ll do it. But I don’t think you’ll publish it.” And he said, “Well, let me be the person to make that judgment.” And he published it, word for word. I had become a member of Veterans for Peace; after it was published, they contacted me and they said, “We’ve got this Veterans for Peace conference in Boston and we’d like you to come. If you want to, you can speak. If you don’t, that’s up to you. . .” So I publicly spoke out for the first time at the Veterans for Peace convention.

The president for Veterans for Peace at that time was a man by the name of Woody Powell. Powell called all of us into a meeting room—me and seven other young Iraqi veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan—and gave us a proposal and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, how would you like start a nonprofit organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War.” We looked at each other and said, “Ok.” And that’s the story. We formed IVAW in the summer of 2004.

The taxpayers of America have paid my salary for twelve years. They’re going to continue to pay my salary because I’m disabled. I could either sit at home, go fishing every day, live a relaxed life, take the taxpayers money, or I can do something about it—create a change.

BC: North Carolina calls itself “the most military friendly state in the country,” inviting military business into the state. How do you feel about this and do you think this is a good thing for North Carolina?

JM: Throughout history, every society that has based their economy solely on war profits and building war revenue has ultimately failed. And my concern is that the state of North Carolina is building that kind of business and revenue, rather than building business and revenue that is in support of humanity. These types of industries embolden the war effort. If you show the world that you’re about war rather than peace, then that’s the exact type of perception the world is going to see. . . . [I]t’s very sad for me to say that my state’s major economy comes from the war. When I see these billboards around North Carolina, I don’t think it’s something to be very proud of. I think it’s something to be ashamed about to say that we have to rely on a system that kills other people in order for us to live in the state of North Carolina. If money is coming from these industries, from the military industrial complex, then it’s blood money, and the people of North Carolina have blood on their hands.