Goff’s career as a soldier in Army Special Operations (Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) took him from the invasions of Vietnam, Grenada and Haiti, to the training grounds of the cruel and corrupt Colombian and Peruvian armed forces. He taught Military Science at the US Military Academy at West Point, conducted classified missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and was deployed with the ill-fated Task Force Ranger (of Black Hawk Down fame) to Mogadishu. There are snapshots of those experiences in this book.

But this is not a typical soldier’s memoir. Goff engages in neither machismo nor maudlin soul-searching, and he is not content to merely tell stories. He interprets his own experience through years of study since he left the military, and attempts to draw lessons from it – lessons about politics, about world systems theory, about foreign policy, about war, about ecocide – dissecting the conjuncture with the sharpest tools he can find in an armamentarium of military science, chaos theory, deep ecology, feminism, revolutionary Black nationalism, and Marxism. From here he draws some starkly brutal conclusions about the risks we all face in the dangerous last days of an unstable empire.

Full Spectrum Disorder is a hard-eyed challenge to the political left and the military itself to confront each other as potential allies, it challenges the dominant intellectual division of labor during the “exterminist” stage of late imperialism, it challenges both leftist orthodoxy and the “moral imperialism” of liberals, and it serves as a primer for rebellion in the New American Century.

Goff is the author of Hideous Dream (Soft Skull, 2000). His work also appears in American Soldier: Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, edited by Nate Hardcastle and Clint Willis (Thunders Mouth, 2002). He is working on his next book, Sex & War, about gender and the military, to be published in late 2004. Now living in Raleigh NC, he is an activist, spouse, father, and grandfather.

I read a story in April 2003 – just a passing news story a couple of weeks after Baghdad fell – about Iraqi kids throwing rocks at soldiers in Baghdad. I have a rock throwing story myself, one that I’ll share here.
The first happened early in the invasion, when my Special Forces team and six other teams were jammed together inside the Haitian Army caserne in Gonaives, dealing with scenes of wild jubilation every day that bordered on riotous. The perception in Haiti during the opening days of the invasion was that the US was returning the rightful leader of the nation, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, even though the US had worked diligently behind the scenes to discredit and defang Aristide before they brought him back in the saddle of a US military occupation. The celebrations – with a latent undercurrent of sullen revenge in the tributaries – were the real thing. We, the American occupiers, found ourselves in the paradoxical position of being perceived as a (suspect) liberation force, even as we were directed to work jointly with the Haitian military police. I had personally queered that pitch on Day One in Gonaives when I led my team to arrest four Haitian soldiers and two of their collaborators for menacing a crowd with M-1 rifles.
It was only the next day that during one of the turbulent demonstration/celebration in front of the FAdH caserne, that some well-drilled marksman of the stone pitched a rock half the length of a football field and knocked the cowboy shit out of a FAdH NCO.
The Haitian sergeant, long accustomed to ruling over the locals with a sidearm and a baton, blood running down the side of his head while the crowd cheered madly, snapped. And his rage began to infect his fellows. Within moments, the suppressed fear and resentment of the FAdH boiled to the surface, and the chatter indicated they were about to say, Fuck the Americans, we are about to kick some civilian ass!
So my team, then other teams, reacting to the sudden outburst, shouldered our own weapons, but our eyes were fixed on the FAdH themselves, some of whom noticed, and some of whom were too agitated to understand that they were in immanent danger of being shot. Only the panicked ministrations of a FAdH commander, himself a mass murderer of wide repute, calmed his troops and prevented them being slaughtered in their own caserne by their new cohabitants. We then had to pull additional guard shifts to keep an eye on our new friends.
This happened in seconds. This was triggered by a rock.
So what is the significance of rock throwing here, and what does it have to do with the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan?
Rock throwing is the ultimate asymmetric warfare. It erases all the markers of combatants that formalize warfare. It is completely democratic. It is a first step across an invisible line between obedience and resistance, across the boundary of the taboo against physical resistance. It is unabstracted combat, combat that stays close to its cause, like Palestinian kids hurling stones from behind their own demolished houses. It is agile. It provokes, then moves. It requires no technology. It catalyzes dramatic changes with minimal effort. It destabilizes.
Our actions at Gonaives had made temporary heroes of us, and created profound resentment and suspicion among the Haitian soldiers toward us. That was contrary to the intent of the Task Force commanders, and by-and-by it was "corrected." The "liberation" turned into an occupation.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the situations are substantially different.
No more than a handful of the most venal opportunists from Iraq supported the invasion, given that the United States military, slaughtered and maimed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the first invasion, killed untold numbers of retreating Iraqi military, then proceeded to subject hundreds of thousands more to a slow death by malnutrition, disease, and medical neglect via sanctions. In Afghanistan, the US attacked an already shattered society, killing thousands of civilians, because Saudis and Egyptians had flown airplanes into US buildings.
The direct brutality of US bombs and sanctions had been part of everyday life for twelve years before the latest US invasion of Iraq. So there was no welcome mat laid at the feet of the invaders.
It’s different. Here’s what’s not different though.
The troops responsible for carrying out these occupations are carrying out seemingly contradictory directives based on political maneuvering to which they are not privy. This begins as confusion then develops into frustration, then an indescribable psychic fatigue, and finally into hatred of the place and its people.
Those who have no desire to collaborate with the occupiers will keep their distance – or more – attack them. Not many attacked us in Haiti, but in that case those with firearms were the same people who were confident that after our "liberation" show was over, they would be safely reinstalled.
Those who did approach the American troops had agendas. Lots of agendas, and all hidden. After every revolution, there is a Thermidor period. After every occupation, there is a Scam period.
It was a time to settle scores. A time to brown nose the new rulers. To maneuver for jobs and positions. And every time there is a conflict of interest between occupation grifters, they compete for the attention and credulity of the occupying troops. This begins to leave the impression – among the troops – that the whole society is a pack of scheming, pathological liars. They are, after all, being approached by the most unethical sectors of that society.
When I was in Haiti, I had a couple of advantages over the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. First, there were clear class lines drawn there in an otherwise homogeneous society. Haitians are not divided into several ethnic and religious groups. There is some diversity of religion because of the plague of evangelist proselytizers there, but the culture of Haiti is distinct and all-encompassing, even among the Protestants who, in a real crisis, will head over to the nearest Voudon temple for a ti loa, just to hedge their bets.
In Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there was another common denominator. Military Intelligence. Yes, there is such a thing. Sort of…
The US military does nothing to correct the yawning cultural ignorance of the troops, or the officers for that matter, who have been trained in Huntington’s Model (about which I will speak later in this book). A typical military Intelligence Summary (INTSUM), which presumably sweeps away some of that ignorance, serves primarily to expand and ossify ignorance. These INTSUMs can be rib-rocking collections of error, innuendo, stereotype, and idiocy that are worthy of the Comedy Channel. In preparation for Haiti, we were warned of "voodoo attacks."
I shit you not. Voodoo attacks… with secret poisonous "powders."
INTSUMs can not be satirized.
I have little doubt that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been forced to sit through many of these perfidious sideshows, and even less doubt that – barring any counter-narrative – the majority believed them. Troops preparing for Haiti largely accepted the reports of magic powders, cannibalism, and all the rest. The most tragic thing many of them were told, that many of them believed, and that will disabuse many of them of their naïve faith in officialdom, was that they were liberating somebody. Now they all know better.
Iraq and Afghanistan have been forced to sit through many of these perfidious sideshows, and even less doubt that – barring any counter-narrative – the majority believed them. Troops preparing for Haiti largely accepted the reports of magic powders, cannibalism, and all the rest. The most tragic thing many of them were told, that many of them believed, and that will disabuse many of them of their naïve faith in officialdom, was that they were liberating somebody. Now they all know better.