The 2005 DPSRC report found that because recruiters and basic training officers lack clear instructions on how to handle evidence of extremist affiliations and also fail to share information, “military personnel cannot evaluate the full extent to which problematic persons associated with particular groups are trying to enlist in the military and their apparent strategies for doing so.” It concludes, “Personnel are unlikely to be able to detect anything beyond what would appear to be isolated incidents.” Finding evidence of participation on white supremacist websites would be another easy way to screen out extremist recruits, but the same report found that the DOD had not adequately clarified which web forums were gathering places for extremists. In fact, even in cases where active-duty soldiers have been caught posting to such sites, the investigations have been terminated. It appears to some insiders that this incoherence and confusion is consciously fostered to allow the recruitment of extremist soldiers to continue, and to avoid their discharge. “Effectively,” the report concludes, “the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt . . . they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”39 This went for Islamic fundamentalists, too. When Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly murdered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, it was revealed afterwards that the military had been aware of his Islamic extremist ideology but had done nothing to stop it. Hasan had been in contact with his ideological hero Anwar al-Awlaki—the extremist cleric exiled in Yemen who was assassinated by the Obama administration in 2011—and the military had either not trained its personnel well enough or had told them to turn a blind eye to extremism.
Carter F. Smith, another former military gang investigator, defends CID, who he worked with in 2004–6, telling me, “They don’t bend to the whims of the commander as much as people on the outside say. They piss a lot of people off. If they wanted to push something they could, but it takes a lot of emphasis on what’s right.” But he is not surprised by the lax 2006 CID “investigations.” “When you need more soldiers you lower the standards whether you say so or not,” says Smith, who served as military investigator from 1982, and from 1998 to 1999 was the chief of the gang-hate group investigations team. “The increase with gangs and extremists is an indicator of this.” He says the pressure to maintain numbers might make an investigator “ignore stuff . . . Say an investigator sees a soldier with a tattoo that reads ‘88,’” he says, “if you know 88 is Heil Hitler, but the soldier gives you a plausible reason and you don’t look for any memorabilia, you can let him go . . . It’s not that they aren’t concerned about white supremacists,” he adds, “but they have a war to fight and they don’t have any incentive to slow down.”
Iraq as Race War
For neo-Nazis to prosper in the US military, a general culture of racism is undoubtedly a prerequisite. Forrest stood out because of his skinhead appearance and tattoos, but his casual use of the derogatory term “hajjis” and perception of Arabs as “backward” became endemic throughout the military during the War on Terror. “Racism was rampant,” recalls veteran Michael Prysner, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. “All of command, everywhere, it was completely ingrained in the consciousness of every soldier. I’ve heard top generals refer to the Iraqi people as ‘hajjis.’ And it wasn’t auto-ingrained in the soldiers, the anti-Arab racism came from the brass, it came from the top and was pushed into the mind of subordinate soldiers.” Prysner believes this kind of racist attitude is consciously fostered to make the military operations easier to carry out. “Even before the invasion racist language was always used against the Iraqi people,” he said. “Attributing their condition to cultural backwardness, painting a picture of backward people helped this idea that they needed the US to go in. When you are carrying out missions this is what was on the mind of the soldiers, so the soldiers conduct themselves terribly; we weren’t acting with human beings to protect them, we were there to control every Iraqi who was subordinate to us, and everything was justified because they weren’t considered people.”
Another vet, Michael Totten, who served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne from 2003 to 2004, agrees: “I think at a fundamental level there’s a type of superiority complex, a heightened sense of importance; the military carries this attitude, in my experience, towards the people of Iraq. The Iraqis were seen as substandard, second class, a lot of times they weren’t seen as human, they were seen as an obstacle, more of a burden, I didn’t feel that we were going in as liberators, I felt I was there for the sake of being there.” On neo-Nazis like Fogarty, he doesn’t think they would stand out at all. “It wouldn’t stand out if you said ‘sand-niggers,’ even if you aren’t a neo-Nazi. At the time, I used the words ‘sand-nigger,’ I didn’t consider ‘hajji’ to be derogatory. I have changed since I came back, obviously.” Even racism between soldiers was rife. In late 2011, eight soldiers were charged after the suicide of Chinese-American Private Danny Chen, a nineteen-year-old infantryman from New York, who shot himself in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The charges were brought against the soldiers for an alleged long history of assaults and racist taunts which led to him taking his life. Geoffrey Millard served in Iraq for thirteen months, beginning in 2004, as part of the Forty-Second Infantry Division. He recalls General George Casey, who served as the commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, addressing a briefing he attended in the summer of 2005 at Forward Operating Base, outside Tikrit. “As he walked past, he was talking about some incident that had just happened, and he was talking about how ‘these stupid fucking hajjis couldn’t figure shit out.’ And I’m just like, Are you kidding me? This is General Casey, the highest-ranking guy in Iraq, referring to the Iraqi people as ‘fucking hajjis.’” (A spokesperson for Casey, who later served as the Army Chief of Staff, said the general “did not make this statement.”) “We had a frago [fragmentary order] come out one day that actually talked about how the DOD wanted us to stop using the word ‘hajji’ because it was seen as a racist slur, but I still heard [another general] use the word hajji. He’d have to correct himself, but it didn’t change his thought pattern.” Millard was later an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War and says he has seen white nationalist tattoos during outreach operations. “Since we’ve been doing outreach to bases there’s this [White Power] tattoo that I’ve seen a couple of times, and a couple of other different racial symbols. They’ve got rid of the regulations on a lot of things, including white supremacists . . . The military is attractive to white supremacists,” he adds, “because the war itself is racist.”
Forrest never saw what the beef was—much like the military itself. “As long as you don’t bring personal beliefs to the military it’s not a problem,” he tells me. “If I was goose-stepping maybe, but I served my country honorably. I’m a soldier who is trying to come home, I have got two children, I’m not gonna be preaching politics while my driver’s a nigger.” He pauses. “What about the Bloods and Crips?” he asks, exasperated, before we go our separate ways. What about them? I ask. “I seen a million Bloods and Crips,” he says nonchalantly. The Bloods. The Crips. Two of the biggest and most dangerous gangs in the US or any other country on the planet. “I seen a million.”
STRAIGHT OUTTA BAGHDAD
When these cats, these gang members, come back, we’re going to have some hell on these streets.
Miguel Robinson, Airman First Class and Los Angeles Crip, 200740
On the eve of America’s most patriotic day in 2005 a group of US soldiers from the army base in Kaiserslautern, southwest Germany, took a drive down to the park pavilion in a nearby forest. The twelve soldiers in the group were in high spirits: aside from the July Fourth festivities coming the next day, some of them were due to finish their first eighteen-month tour of duty, including a spell in Iraq, within a matter of weeks and would be returning home to their long-suffering families. Among them was twenty-five-year-old Sergeant. Juwan Johnson, or J. Rock to his friends, a member of the