Major Extremism

Yelling began as the bus lurched to a stop. We all had the same instinct: We’d do anything to make it stop.

We flew into formation, stood shoulder to shoulder, unblinking eyes looked straight ahead, not daring to move even when drops of sweat slid from the base of our necks all the way down our backs and into the crack of our asses. Don’t stand out.

This is how they shock your system the first time. It’s all a part of necessary programming. We’d be there for at least two hours, in the heat of the South Carolina summer day, straining our arms, dropping our gear, doing push-ups, jumping to our feet, hoisting 50-pound duffel bags into the air. We’d grunt and gasp and sweat and cry.

This was US Army Basic Training.. No turning back now. We forced ourselves past the pain, nausea, and the fear. We ignored the little voice saying, “Stop, this is crazy.”

This was easy for me—it’s like a switch I can turn on and off. That little voice, silenced. My gut, ignored.

Soon, I would no longer exist. My life would be only Army. And what they counted on, what programmers always count on, was that once we pushed past reason, we’d never again question.

A piercing thought: Did I just join another cult?

***

One Sunday in February 2021, I saw an email come through with a name from another life: Major William Jeffrey Poole. I sighed, thinking it would likely be a request from an investigator calling to meet with me for my ex-husband’s top-secret clearance review. We hadn’t been married, or in touch, for more than a decade, so I could think of no other reason for them to contact me. I wouldn’t have much to tell them—sure, he’d been controlling and toxic during our marriage, but that wasn’t what they’d be interested in.

They’d want to know if he had ever committed treason, had ever advocated for the overthrow of the U.S. government. When talking about an Army Major, these things are usually just-check- the-block “no” responses. Not this time.

They wanted my cooperation on an entirely different matter: He had been accused of advocating armed insurrection against the government—to include killing fellow service members.

My heart pounded, my blood raced, and my mind flipped through old clues. As I pictured Jeff, now a self-described white supremacist, I realized I did not feel shocked. There had been signs of radicalization—I just hadn’t noticed. I’m a former military intelligence officer, with two deployments studying terrorist networks overseas. I’ve gone out on patrols and I know what indicators of violence look like. Why hadn’t I seen the indicators in my ex? Why hadn’t the Army noticed the kind of extremist leader they had in their midst all this time? How had he gotten so far up the ranks while being so toxic?

Jeff, like so many others, had fallen into a cult. I understood all too easily how that could happen—it has nothing to do with intelligence, income, or even religion. It has to do with an

individual searching—often due to fear of the ‘other’ and a strong sense of impending doom—and finding a group that enthralls them with ideas, and holds them in isolation long enough that they begin to reflect the group norms around them. Not able to see through the circular logic and conspiracy theories, they continue on even when the promised Apocalypse never arrives; following their leader unquestioningly—even to the steps of the US Capitol.

I knew these answers. I’d been trained on extremist ideology—on cult-think—since the day I was born.

***

A childhood in the religious cult The Children of God had prepared me as a soldier in “God’s Army.” Just like Basic Training, it was all long lines, cardboard food, perennially empty stomachs, and marching to cadences that reinforced what we were supposed to believe. I was always next to a handler, sleeping and waking, always watched, always commanded. My mind couldn’t wander, not even an inch. We were the chosen ones, the 1%, with the need-to-know information passed down from God to our prophet. We were ready to die for our cause, down to the last child.

The words “religious extremism” on television on September 11, 2001, seared my brain in an uncomfortable way. A voice inside my 14-year-old-self told me our group elders saying this was “God’s just punishment on the wicked” was wrong. For my habit of questioning, and for daring to go outside the walls and seek the company of the other, both unforgiveable sins of individuality, the cult excommunicated me when I was 15.

Slowly, I began to understand: Isolation, a special mission, and the unwavering belief that we were right, reinforced by everyone I knew, had programmed me and thousands of others to ignore the inner voices that should have been cues to walk away. It had given us something to believe in, and a band of brothers and sisters willing to live and believe exactly the way we did. Our parents refused to question each other, and they clung to the cult for decades—or generations, as was the case in my family—even as they watched their children suffer for it.

On my first day in the Army, I could see it again: the ingredients were all here—the isolation, the special mission, the pressure, the slurs applied to us ‘stinking mouth-breathers’ as we tried to forsake all our past training and learn to be nothing but soldiers. We were being programmed to live and breathe Army.

I noticed throughout my time in the Army the many, many ways we had to drink the Kool Aid—to ignore the prick in our conscious telling us that something is crazy. The times we talk about values but act against them to progress in the system. When our rhetoric pays homage to ‘People First’, but we worship at the altar of ‘lethality’, even when it’s our own people being hurt.

While deployed, I cringed at the hateful rhetoric I from my coworkers toward our Afghan partners and the local people. I couldn’t leave it alone when teammates used racist words to define them. You’ve heard the words—especially if you’ve served. They’re ubiquitous. They’re used without thinking. And they do what slurs do best. They dehumanize. They radicalize.

I could never bring myself to participate in the jokes, the slurs, the racism, the islamophobia, the unbridled hatred of the other—of anybody who wasn’t us. As much as I can appreciate that the

U.S. military must program its troops to think like machines, think like a group, and be immune to the humanity of others to prepare us to conduct violence on behalf of state, I knew too much about what group think and hatred can breed. I could easily remember the slurs we used in the cult: Systemites, backsliders, apostates. As an intelligence officer, I studied the rhetoric of the terrorists, how they expertly used language to dehumanize us, to fuel religious war.

When we use slurs, and the group around us accepts them, they become more than tacitly condoned—they become a tool employed without thought, to make someone the ‘other’. Once we’ve gotten far enough into the cult that we can no longer fully see the humanity of those on the outside, our radicalization is nearly complete.

I think of my ex-husband, back when he was just Lieutenant Poole—he was bright, passionate about making a difference in the world, maybe entering politics after the military. I can see how his desire to fit in drove him more than most people—at first with fraternities and shooting clubs, and then in the Army, moving from a support role into combat arms, following the drive to be more elite, more glorified. Climbing the ranks brought him into more isolation, a more important mission, a more important group, more masculine, more white.

I’m sure in some way, the early signs of his extremism appealed to me too—I was a lost girl, struggling to construct something resembling a life after escaping an extremist reality of my own. There’s a safety in having a strong group that echoes your own beliefs back to you, a comfort in knowing your exact place in the world. Then I’d started to see the signs: the need to control me, the inferiority complex that drove him to embellish every accomplishment, the slurs, the repetitive but catchy rhetoric that was never quite logical, the bent towards violence—and I’d gotten out.

As a life-long student of organizational and human behavior, I know we love to hold strong beliefs and dedicate ourselves to missions worth sacrificing our lives for—but we hate cognitive dissonance. When two strongly held beliefs conflict with one another an interesting thing happens in the mind: we become able to justify anything.

While parallels between the US Armed Forces and fringe extremist religious movements may not seem obvious, I have recognized those possibilities since my first day in US Army Basic Training. Like a cult, militaries indoctrinate their members to think and behave according to an unquestionable set of values, in isolation from the wider world. Both foster a mindset of heroically subduing individual interests in pursuit of greater good, always ready for the next set of orders, worshipping at the altar of mission before self. The result is that the US military creates, even if unintentionally, the conditions for radicalization and extremism to take hold. When there is programming, the code can be written wrong—and it can become something else, entirely.

Major Poole isn’t the only one, of course. US Veterans were represented in large numbers at the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. We discovered that Ashli Babbitt served in the Air Force; were horrified as it became clear that Larry Brock, zip ties dangling, prepared to capture/kill on the House floor, was formerly a senior military leader. The Qanon Shaman himself, Jacob Chansley, was once a Navy sailor. An NPR analysis determined some one-in-five defendants in the Capitol Riot cases served in our nation’s military. Members of my family were there too—an aunt who’d once been responsible for teaching me to hate America, thirty years later stood on the steps of the Capitol—for ‘Patriotism’.

In his online screeds, Jeff explains how ideas, statistics and memes—all from the alt-right sites he was drawn to for ‘allowing free speech’—contributed to his eventual radicalization, of which he seems proud. It reminds me of the proud Uncles and Aunties that surrounded me in communes growing up in the cult—sharing their religious conversion stories, proud to have been radicalized in the Final Stand for God.

So here I sit, with the discomfort of my own cognitive dissonance, someone who loves the Army, who dedicated years of service, trying to accept that anyone, no matter how good or how honorably they served, can become brainwashed and never even see it. And that the military environment only makes this more likely, not less. And I examine my own programming—questioning my beliefs about organizations I’ve always held dear. I question long enough to see that, as veterans, we aren’t unquestionably honorable—honor is something we have to work for, a choice we have to make every day, good versus evil. Those programmed to be loyal to any group can find their loyalties subverted to other, darker teams with more extreme missions, often without even seeing it until it’s too late to put down their duffel bag of extremism and walk away.

The first step to solving any problem is to recognize it. Then we can move to the how’s and the why’s and begin to plan the battles that will help us win this war.

Written June 2, 2021