Two Marine Vets with Divergent Worldviews Team Up to End the Forever Wars

A diverse crew of former service members are hellbent on forging peace

If John Lennon’s lyrics proclaiming that “War is Over (If You Want It)” actually rang true, Dan Caldwell and Alex McCoy would be out of jobs.

Despite years of polls indicating that Americans are ready to leave the Middle East and focus on the home front, we remain mired in conflicts that show no signs of stopping. Even as American military casualties have been curbed dramatically since the early aughts, one need only scan The New YorkTimes’ under-looked Afghan War casualty reports to understand the scope of death still present in the region today. Many of those killed these days are civilians, and many of their deaths came at American hands. Late last month, the Washington Post reported that over the last five years the Pentagon has issued hundreds of civillian casualty payments totaling at least $2 million. For those who’ve so far survived these conflicts, life is often precarious and scary. Just today, the Times reported that at least 37 million people have been displaced by the War on Terror.

While in private President Donald Trump reportedly has little respect for the “losers” and “suckers” who’ve perished or were injured in battle, he’s publicly proclaimed a willingness to end the Forever Wars. He’s taken a number of small but significant steps to get us there, chiefly the US-Taliban peace deal. (There are numerous other steps Trump’s taken to ramp up killing, including a record number of air strikes across Africa and the Middle East.)

Vice President Joe Biden’s similarly expressed a desire to leave the Middle East, but hasn’t yet delivered a tangible plan to do it.

Both McCoy and Caldwell served in the Marine Corps, and are working earnestly to push Trump, Biden, and scores of other lawmakers to make good on their rhetoric. They represent two cogs in a promising new peace machine powered by veterans of all political persuasions.

Caldwell, for instance, is a libertarian from Arizona who’s long moved in the Koch orbit. McCoy is a liberal native of Rhode Island who now works for Common Defense, a lefty veteran group with backers like Tom Steyer.

Despite overarching political disagreements, the two are on the same page when it comes to American foreign policy. Their mind meld is illustrative of a broader new trend in which left, right, and center are teaming up to take down Washington’s flock of hawks This fascinating fusion is best demonstrated in the work of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose founding donors include Charles Koch and George Soros.

As Quincy’s drafting up plans to leave the Middle East and bolster diplomacy, people like McCoy and Caldwell are working to elect and support lawmakers who will support these plans.

This work is difficult, in large part due to a recalcitrant group of lawmakers and special interests eager to maintain the status quo. But this movement has the people on its side.

On a recent sunny afternoon, I spoke to Caldwell and McCoy about their personal political awakenings, the necessity of community organizing, and the best way to wash away war-mongering from the American body politic. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Battle Borne: To start off, you both are Marine vets, so my first question is: Why do Marines eat crayons?

Dan Caldwell: You know, I don’t remember that being a thing in the Marine Corps when I was in. Maybe it was and I just didn’t pick up on it. I mean, Marines do a lot of dumb stuff. It’s a running joke in the military that Marines are the dumbest branch, but if you actually look at the kinds of people who join the Marines — and the kind of positions the Marines fill within the military — it can create that sort of stereotype. I love dumb Marine jokes, dumb sailor jokes, they’re always good to just humble yourself, a bit.

Alex McCoy: Yeah (Laughs.) My serious answer on this is that the Marine Corps is different than other branches in that it has a much more bottom-heavy force structure. There’s lots of first-term service members in the Marines, relative to other branches. And there’s lots of churn of ranking people joining in and getting out. The higher proportion of junior enlisted folks in the Marines means it’s a lot of young people. There’s also a lot of sitting around and standing by. As a result, there’s kind of an attitude that we are the dumb grunts compared to other branches with more professional, career-types of people.

The other answer is that crayons taste good. My favorite color is red.

BB: Perfect, thanks for clearing that up. Next, I’d like to transition to the two organizations y’all work for. Clearly on many issues they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. But there’s now this new fusion on the left and right — or at least subsections of the left and right — over putting forth a new, more restrained foreign policy. I’d love if you guys could each start off and, in this world of hyper partisanship, offer a few complimentary words about each other’s advocacy work.

Dan: I’ve been personally impressed by Common Defense’s model of going in and training veterans to be better activists. They’re basically giving veterans the tools to both be part of Common Defense but also be better activists within their communities for other organizations. Their Veterans Organizing Institute is something I’m impressed by.

We have something similar through our Grassroots Leadership Academy, where we aim to train both veterans and non-veterans to be not only better activists for us but for other core causes in and around their communities.

In addition, I like how Common Defense identifies certain races and then really invests in grassroots activism. In the type of world we are living in, with people getting their information in different ways, the traditional models of TV and direct mail aren’t as effective. They still need to be part of any successful advocacy or political campaign, but that human-to-human contact — that traditional way of persuasion — still works. And I think it’s good that organizations across the spectrum are investing in that. Common Defense is really filling that void on the left.

Alex: Thanks for that. I will say about Concerned Veterans of America that it is a rarity, I have found, in politics to encounter people who have consistent principles. As a Marine, as an American, as a person, I value integrity a lot. I value people who say what they mean and mean what they say. With CVA it’s never a mystery what their position is going to be on the issues of the day.

I think that’s very important if you’re going to be organizing veterans, because veterans have a bullshit detector second to none. We see very clearly in the data we look at that veterans are less likely than average civilians to identify with either political party. They’re less likely to be consistently partisan but more likely to vote.

Veterans aren’t going to trust you if you’re a weathervane or a shill for Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell and that’s it. So I really respect CVA because, on the issues where we are aligned, they reliably advocate on them when it is both convenient and when it is inconvenient. When it means taking tough confrontations with people ostensibly on their side of the aisle and when they’re riding the wave of momentum. They are consistent. They have integrity on the issues.

And there’s going to be a future for this democracy only if we can have good-faith debates about our different perspectives, and that requires people with integrity, not people who are just maneuvering.

The second piece I’ll say about CVA is they show up. There are a lot of “organizations” out there that have big Twitter followings or a lot of money to spend. But when you really boil down to it, they don’t actually have members and they are not actually out in the community doing the work. When we’re out in the field, the people we continually run into over and over again are with CVA. It’s not other people who claim to speak for veterans. It’s not, you know, the people in D.C. who rent a WeWork claiming to speak for people when they actually don’t.

BB: Is that WeWork per chance, run by VoteVets?

Alex: I’m not interested in talking about VoteVets in this context. I wish them all the best. We have other veteran partners out there, and generally the people we meet out in the field are people like CVA.

BB: Great.

Dan: Two things: VoteVets, for CVA, have been great partners as well. I think that one thing we are excited to see happening is this really great trans-partisan coalition coming together of groups like Common Defense, Vote Vets, Win Without Warand others on the progressive side of the aisle. And then you have groups on the right — there’s a great new group that’s sprung up called Bring our Troops home run by Dan McKnight out of Idaho. They are doing some very interesting things in state houses. They’ve been great partners.

Then there’s more traditional, what would be considered Tea Party organizations like FreedomWorks who have gotten involved in this. The National Taxpayers’ Union has gotten more involved on foreign policy. And then you have organizations in the think tank space like the Quincy Institute doing a lot of things on the ideas front.

It’s really exciting to see all of this happening. And yeah, there will be times when the groups don’t all agree on everything — there was some disagreement over what happened in Syria last year. That’s going to happen sometimes. But there are many shared principles that have brought us together and remain our North Star. When we all come together on things like the Gaetz-Khanna amendment from last year or some of the actions around appealing the 2002 AUMF earlier this year, or the Iran War Powers Resolution, good things happen. Things that haven’t happened, frankly, in 30 or 40 years in this country.

One last thing on Common Defense I’d like to point out is that one of my best friends from the Marine Corps, Steve Kiernan, is one of their activists. He was my team leader when we served together at Camp David. He served in Iraq, was wounded. He’s currently in Oregon working on becoming a professor. And we don’t agree on all things, but it speaks volumes that he’s organizing in a group like Common Defense. When they were out in Washington last fall doing some lobbying it was good to go meet up with Steve and the rest of the Common Defense team and have some drinks together and share not just military war stories, but Capitol Hill war stories as well.

BB: You each served in the post-9/11 era. Can you each speak to what personally changed your views on American foreign policy? I doubt it was as simple as an ‘Aha’ or light bulb moment. Maybe it was. But please share how you came to your current positions.

Dan: I was raised in Arizona, where there’s a very strong tradition of Libertarian-leaning conservatism that questions not just government at home but our role abroad. That experience growing up in the state, and being around people like my grandfather and some of these less traditional Republicans, imbued me with a skepticism of government.

I didn’t immediately come to my views around restraint, they’ve evolved over time. But I think some of the things that formed my foundational principles helped me later arrive at my current beliefs around foreign policy.

To be totally honest, my feelings after 9/11 were that we should be going abroad and killing the terrorists that attacked us. In fact, I remember an assembly at my Jesuit high school where there were prayers for peace, and stuff. And I was actually upset by that. I remember going up to the microphone and saying, ‘We should kill them all.” That attitude at the time was driven by anger. And to this day I believe we should have gone after the people that attacked us and killed them. That drove me to join the Marine Corps.  

When I was in the Marines it was a really good experience, but it was really war focused. My first two years I was in non-deployable units. But the attitude was still, “You’re going to Iraq; you have to start preparing for it.” When I finally got to the Fleet Marine Force that was all we trained for and talked about. It consumed everything.

When I went to Iraq, to be honest, it wasn’t an intense deployment. There wasn’t a lot of combat going on. It was right at the end of the surge and, interestingly, you could leave Iraq at this time thinking, “Huh, maybe this could actually work.”

But when I got out of the Marine Corps and got back into school, I started reading about why the war started, a lot of the lies that were told. And then I graduated, and a lot of things started to happen in the Middle East that showed some of the “Iraq is good enough and sort of stable” theories were built on a false premise that was temporary and fleeting.

By 2014, when I joined Concerned Veterans of America, every place that I had served in Iraq was under control of ISIS. It was basically all for nothing. And that solidified my belief that our foreign policy was not making us safer. Instead it was wasting lives – both American and non-American lives— and wasting trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing. I read more, I educated myself more, and really came to the conclusion that, to put it simply, being more aggressive doesn’t make us safer, especially when it comes to the Middle East. In fact, it usually makes us less safe. It empowers our enemies.

Alex: For my part, it’s weird. People assume that to join the military you must agree with the war it is fighting. And I’m very much the opposite of that. I always was against the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror. In high school I was giving presentations on Abu Ghraib and white phosphorous and things like that. I didn’t like George W. Bush, I had punk rock posters, you get the idea.

I joined the military, in part, because like many people who joined, it was the family business. My dad served 24 years in the Navy, was the Duty Officer on his cruiser as Lieutenant when 9/11 happened. He got that call from the Pentagon saying, “I know the Captain hasn’t gotten back yet but you’re the Captain now. Go cast off and shoot down any planes in the air.” I grew up as a Navy brat moving all over the world following my dad’s Navy career. I was in Japan, England, San Diego, Virginia.

I joined in January 2008. This was the height of the two-front war, the middle of the surge. I was part of the commandants 202,000, or whatever — when the Marine Corps manning got increased and they lowered standards for people like me, who had smoked weed once, or so I maintain.

I joined because I, like many Americans, didn’t have a ton of good prospects other than the military. That wasn’t to say I was forced to join, but I made an assessment, a path to opportunity for myself.  I’d seen the ways the military benefitted my father, and I felt a duty, too, that if this was the war of my generation, I should do my part. That didn’t mean I thought it was a good, smart, or productive war. But I felt like I had a responsibility to be part of this big effort by my country.

When I arrived in January 2008 to boot camp it was in the middle of the Democratic primary. My political awakening was sitting in a hotel during MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Stations) before shipping out to Paris Island and turning on the TV and watching Michelle Obama give a speech that I was very impressed by.

I still have these letters I sent to my father being like, “I really like this Obama guy a lot,” and him writing back “Naww, it’s not going to be the guy with the funny name.” I remember being in MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) school on Election Day 2008 and watching Obama’s victory speech.

All this is to say I didn’t undergo a sudden revelation on these issues. I grew up with a general consciousness that the people who have been making decision on foreign policy are extremely disconnected form the sentiments of regular people who I had been around in my humble middle-class community.

Even so, I knew what I signed up for, and I expected to be sent into this war. Instead, I was assigned to the Department of State as an embassy guard in Saudi Arabia, Honduras, and Germany. I recognized there something that resonated with me: a rising rank-and-file generation of idealistic, principled, grounded, worldly and open diplomats.

And then there was the elite, pinstriped Georgetown upper-class person who saw the world as a giant Risk board and it was their divine right to move the little pieces around. And those little pieces were us, they were real lives. Decision were not being made due to national interest. It was out of egotistical or personal reasons.

I look today at the frankly unhinged views today about Iran that many people in D.C. have that are totally out of proportion to Iran’s dangers. Plenty of people in that government do bad things but it’s not an existential threat to the United States. We’ve made a lot progress – most notably through the JCPOA Iran Nuclear Deal that Obama negotiated. More than that, we’ve demonstrated how progress can be made in Iran. But there’s still this hawkish group of people who want revenge from the hostage crisis from the 70s, or whatever. I don’t really understand what it is, but it’s always really bothered me.

There’s a class divide in our foreign policy space where the only voices that seem to matter are “Senior Resident Fellow at Think Tank Number 3,” and the Generals. All of whom have different institutional interests than regular Americans, and the people in the countries we go to war with.

So, I didn’t have a big conversion, I simply became more grounded in how all this works.

BB: Final question, but it has multiple parts. First, I wonder who you each think is more likely to end our foreign entanglements in office should they have the next four years: Trump or Biden? I’m talking about the “Big Kahuna,” a comprehensive package that fundamentally restructures our current imperialistic outlook on the world.

Relatedly, I’m interested in your own distinct analyses on what’s required to reshape American foreign policy? To repeal the AUMF? To have Congress regain its authority over war making?

Dan: In regard to the first part of your question, I’m concerned that by the beginning of 2021, regardless of who’s president, some of the political pressure to end these wars will dissipate. Some of the current political incentives that stem from the election will no longer be there.

I personally believe, and I’m not necessarily speaking for my organization, which isn’t playing politically in the presidential election, that there’s more opportunities to end the current wars under a Trump administration.

But I worry that there will be so many other things going on – in regards to dealing with the pandemic or the economic recovery or a major Supreme Court nomination – that there won’t be the political pressure that currently exists to follow through and truly end these conflicts — not, by the way, play the game where you rename combat troops “advisors” or have troops rotating in and out of the country so they don’t officially count. Obviously, countries like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan should retain people like Alex to guard embassies, but we need to actually, truly end these conflicts.

Considering Vice President Biden’s record and the people he’s surrounding himself with, I do think there is more opportunity under Trump. But my message to the left, right, and center is: regardless of who is president we need to hold them accountable if they aren’t following through on their promises to wind down these wars.

This is going to be a fight that lasts until 2021 or 2022 because, in regard to the second part of your question, there is this institutional bias against ending these conflicts inside Washington.

Who are the lobbyists, who are the people pushing to maintain our conflicts? There isn’t’ even an equivalent on the right or left right now advocating for staying in these conflicts. It’s really just a bunch of op-ed writers at the Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. It’s people at traditional think tanks, it’s groups like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and congress members like Jason Crow and Liz Cheney who are really fighting against this.

But they are out of step with the advocacy community on the right and left, and also public opinion. The numbers are overwhelming, we are talking over 70 percent of both Republicans and Democrats wanting to get out of Afghanistan, for example.

On the other side of them is this bubble, this blob, this foreign policy elite that is out of touch. There’s a lot of discussion around the military industrial complex. And yes, people profit from not ending these wars. But there are parts of this complex, particularly shipbuilders and other people that benefit from having a stronger Navy or Air Force, that are not benefitting currently from maintaining a massive presence in the Middle East. Many contractors have even started to say “Look, this is taking away resources from things we’ll need for the great power competition between China.”

It’s a bizarre situation on Capitol Hill and in think tanks where it’s like they are stuck in 2008. That’s what needs to change. Lawmakers need to realize the political incentives around this issue are different and they shouldn’t be afraid to step out and support ending these wars. They won’t be punished in terms off lost donations or lost election like they may think.

Alex: Look, my take on the first part is not going to be a surprise. I’m going to say Joe Biden. My perspective on Trump is that there have been more troops in the Middle East than there were when he started. Our Pentagon budget has gone up and up and up. We’ve seen a massive increase in airstrikes and deployments of special operations around the world.

What Trump has done very effectively is realize the public wants an end to the Forever Wars. He’s done a very good job of tapping into that desire. It’s a big part of why he won in 2016.

All of the Bush-era, former Republican national security elites who endorsed Secretary Clinton hurt more than helped her. The same is true right now for Vice President Biden.

That said I have reasons to be optimistic about Joe Biden, so let me lay them out. Number one: Biden is the embodiment of a generic Democrat. His record has essentially been in the middle of the party his entire career. So while it’s great to have someone like Bernie Sanders, who has a principled position on these issues and is willing to fight on them, even if it’s unpopular, we can work with a president that feels like he can be moved by the consensus within his party. Because the consensus on these wars has moved.

We were very afraid inside Common Defense that once Trump was elected on a pledge to leave the Middle East, Democrats’ response would be to say, “Ah ha! Now is our chance to prove how tough we can be. We are the ones strong on terrorists.”

We were afraid there would be this regress back to 2004 where Democrats feel self-conscious about being perceived as pansy liberals. In response to that fear, we went out and created a political pressure within the Democratic Party that hawkishness is not helpful. We wanted to solidify the Democratic consensus to end these wars no matter what Trump says.

The two parties should be competing over who is going to end these wars better, more responsibly and faster. That is where we should be competing. Not who can be tougher and more deadly.

Starting with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, we got leaders to sign our “End the Forever War” pledge. We had seven presidential candidates and dozens of members of Congress sign that pledge. While Joe Biden did not sign our pledge, his platform on his website says that he is committed to ending Forever Wars. He used our language. And while we will need to push on the specifics of that — his version is bringing troops home but still having air strikes and special forces; to me that still counts as war — he has acknowledged the need to get out. So has the Democratic Party in their new platform, which also rejects regime change as a policy of the United States. For us, while it is clear Joe Biden is not as far along as someone like Rho Khanna, he is definitely evolving on this issue and recognizing the growing consensus.

So are other Democrats. It is becoming increasingly untenable to treat foreign affairs as something Democrats don’t care about. It’s setting in that Democrats should no longer trade away war to get deals about other domestic issues. We won’t give more defense spending in exchange for some healthcare and some social services and some education.  

This has happened due to organizing, due to our members, and those in other groups, visiting congressional offices, sitting down with lawmakers and saying “Look, I’m a veteran, this is my story, you need to put a stop to this.” We got the chairman of the House Rules Committee, Jim McGovern, onboard because four or five veterans in his district got together, requested a meeting, told their stories of deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, and their perspective on this issue. He was persuaded. More and more of that is happening, and it’s not going to stop no matter who is in the White House.

As far as the obstacles, I share Dan’s assessment: there’s nobody marching the streets saying “We want war!” or “We need to do maximum pressure on Iran!” No one holds these positions.

BB: Great! Well, that answers my questions. I really appreciate the time. Anything else you’d like to add?

Dan: I would just say again that we can’t get complacent come January 2021, no matter what happens. Obviously Alex and I have slightly different perspectives on who would be best equipped to end these wars, but it’s going to require sustained engagement from this left-right alliance of activists to actually end these conflicts. It’s going to take pressure on the White House and Congress. I think the passing of the Crow-Cheney amendment was a bit of a surprise for some of us. That shows that, in Congress, there needs to be a lot more education. There are people who want to keep us in these wars, so we are going to have to really focus in the coming months and years to ensure we aren’t forced to keep fighting wars that we don’t need to fight anymore. It’s totally absurd.

Jasper, thanks for your time on this. And Alex, good to talk, as always.

Alex: Yeah, you too, Dan. Listen, to wrap up, I want to say that a lot of our members were quite active in the Bush era anti-war movement. And what happened when Obama got elected ostensibly as an anti-war candidate is that the movement demobilized. People thought he’d end the wars, and he didn’t. And the left was cautious to criticize Obama. But I can tell you that dynamic will not be the case if Vice President Biden enters the White House. There will not be a demobilization this time.