Joel Blaxland

Joel Blaxland (1978- ) served in the United States Army as part of an elite fighting force, the 75th Ranger Regiment. He believes that military training is like a two-pronged attack. Dehumanize the enemy and then dehumanize the soldier that is supposed to kill the enemy. Blaxland was interested in learning more about the Iraqis and the Afghans and often considered what he might do if the roles had been reversed. He was honorably discharged from the Army.

Interviewee Unit/Title

75th Ranger Regiment

Years Active

2001 - 2010 (?)

Enlistment

Joel Blaxland was born in 1978 in Owatonna, Minnesota. My father was out there for college, so that’s where I was born. He graduated high school from Salisbury in 1996 and then, not sure of what he wanted to do, he enrolled at Lehigh Carbon Community College. At the time, he was also working as a nursing assistant at Cedarbrook Nursing Home in Allentown. Blaxland then decided to enlist in the military and he left for basic training on March 19th, 2001.

Training

75th Ranger Regiment

Afghanistan

Afghans

Airborne School

AIT (Advanced Individual Training)

Blackwater

Civilian Life

Fort Benning

Georgia

Haditha

Haji

Iraq

Mecca

Navy SEAL

Night Vision Goggles (NVGs)

Rangers

Ravens

Reenlistment

School of Infantry

September 11th

United States Army

United States Navy

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Deployment

Because he came in contact with so many Afghans before he went out on a mission, Blaxland realized that not all Afghans are terrorists just like all Muslims aren’t terrorists. He felt that the men he met were very similar to him in that they had families and jobs. Prior to leaving, he had been warned that he was going into the Wild West and that there would be lawlessness. He says that he never felt that he was fighting the Taliban because it could have been anywhere with any enemy. It was the idea that they, as Americans, were there to kick down the door and who is behind that door doesn’t matter.

To Blaxland, it didn’t feel as though the Afghans were being liberated per se. In fact, the first Afghans he spoke with thought they were the Soviets. After he was finished with the Regiment, Blaxland ended up going to another unit to try to grab that kind of feeling of sex appeal again because he felt it had kind of been lost in the Regiment. Training was more rigorous than when Blaxland was deployed. In fact, he felt like he maybe got to know his wife better on deployment than he did when he was back in the States because when Blaxland was deployed, he could call or email her every single day. When you’re deployed, there is a lot of repetition and everything becomes second nature. There is also a repetition in saying that the person you’re shooting at doesn't really matter and it makes it easier to kill. Blaxland describes a moment right before his last deployment with the Regiment. They had just come over this super violent hump in Iraq and the people in charge said that they we were going to be shifting to Afghanistan. And there was this murmur about maybe they weren’t going to be deploying to Iraq anymore, they would just be going to Afghanistan. His colonel stood up in front of the whole battalion and said, “I just want to let you guys know that the President hasn’t told me that my mission for you guys has changed. Our mission is to fucking kill terrorists, and that’s it.”

The idea of race and culture chasm was pretty prevalent. Blaxland remembers even before deploying, the term “haji” was being used as kind of like a demeaning, “We’re going to go kill hajis.” Blaxland’s reaction was, “Wow, I don’t know what that means, but that sounds like it could be like a bad term.” But then he found out in 2006, from an American interpreter, that the term is an endearing term for someone that has made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He thought it was stunning that Americans twisted this cultural type of identifier that is a positive one and instead turned it into this negative, thinking that the idea that they’re making this pilgrimage to Mecca somehow translates to them being extreme Muslims. He says that he saw platoon leader and squad leader disconnect and not even contact family while on their mission. But Blaxland couldn’t wait to get home. He had two small baby girls at home as well as his wife and he was anxious to get back to them.

Blaxland believes that the training is like a two-pronged attack. Dehumanize the enemy and then dehumanize the soldier that is supposed to kill the enemy. When he got to the point where he was going to have to reenlist, it was going to be open-ended enlistment because then the military can avoid having to give you reenlistment bonuses. Blaxland’s first reenlistment was a huge, huge bonus. Blaxland was on the path of becoming a platoon sergeant but in thinking about everything decided that he didn’t want t become as disconnected as his platoon leaders where they military became everything. He says that the military doesn’t want rational, self-guided, self-directed critical thinkers because those people won’t go and kill another person. There is a dialectic there where they want you to be a robot but they also kind of frame it in such a way that they want you to be like this autonomous thinker. They say, “You’re a small unit, you’re given a certain degree of latitude.” Blaxland found this mindset disturbing.

When asked what the difference is between he and a robot, Blaxland says that we’re at a point where the recruiting pipeline is so effective that even if we shut it off we are still going to have guys banging on the recruiting door to get in. And so it is important that we have a place for the men that are in there. Blaxland argues that an exorbitant amount of time and money has been dumped into his training. He says that Ranger school per man is approximately $120,000; just for one man to go through Ranger school, and that might even be low. That was 61 days at $120,000. And yet, the military is also putting money into developing these robot-like weapons.

Blaxland notes that NVGs (Night Vision Goggles) changed a lot when I was serving. At first, it was single, then it was double, then it was four tubes, it just, over time it changed dramatically. But the purpose is always to make a more effective killer.
In terms of the idea of being more dehumanizing to the enemy, Blaxland doesn’t think the choice of weapon aids in dehumanizing the enemy since, at that point; the enemy has already been effectively dehumanized. Blaxland experienced a metaphysical like trouble with the night vision goggles and would flip them up at every given opportunity because the disconnect bother him. He says it isn’t like what you see in the movies at all. He also used a gun equipped with holographic sight. For Blaxland, the use of optics was something he found confusing and didn’t feel there was much of a need for it. He also notes that he was in a RECY platoon, which is basically a reconnaissance platoon. At one point, they went to Yuma and were there for six weeks doing UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) training and had to physically throw missiles. They were called Ravens and weighed less than ten pounds. He notes that he saw a marked increase in radio-controlled drones during his enlistment period.

Coming Home

In terms of making a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, Blaxland says one reason not often discussed is the rules of engagement, which changed every single deployment he was on and even changed within deployments. Not having a clear understanding of what to shoot at and in what circumstances creates a situation in which incidents like Haditha occur. Because he didn’t spend a lot of time with Iraqis and Afghanis while in the US, Blaxland took the opportunity while deployed to get to know civilians when he could.

He found himself empathizing with the civilians and thinking how he would respond if in their situation. Blaxland says that his unit discouraged using rage as a motivating factor. Instead, they were encouraged to use surgical precision, tactical precision, and mission essential skills. Still, Blaxland thinks that there is a place for rage, or barbarism, because it fuels a desire to keep your skills sharp. It’s a delicate balance while also trying to retain your humanity. He says that at some point, struggling with the person that you are and struggling with the person that the military wants you to be, pulling from two different directions, it’ll snap sometimes and the result is Haditha or Blackwater. Blaxland thinks that maybe the only way to reconcile this discrepancy is to replace the solider with a robot or a computer.","attr0":"abstract"}