How the Fuck Did We Become What We Swore to Fight?
I Was 17 When I Wrote About Killing Children. Now I Watch My Comrades March Against Americans.
*Updated on June 13, 2025
I've been going back through my journals lately: pages written by a version of me who didn't yet know what questions would shape her life. One entry stopped me cold. I was seventeen, getting ready to enlist, and I wrote about Afghanistan. Iraq. About the possibility of being ordered to drop a bomb where I knew civilians would die. Children would die. I didn't write in sweeping political rhetoric. I didn't pretend to have a solution. I wrote it exactly like I felt it: scared, small, and unsure.
What if I drop a bomb and they die? What if I freeze? What if I obey and have to live with it?
I think I'll do what I'm told And that scares me more than anything.
It scared me then, and it unsettles me even more now. Rereading those words at thirty-seven, knowing that uncertainty was never trained out of me. Just buried. Under rank. Under doctrine. Under the mythology of honor.
Back then, I was enlisting in the shadow of 9/11. Everything was painted in red, white, and trauma. I believed service meant protection. I believed in the illusion of clarity: us versus them. I believed, as I wrote, that the Marines could make me someone no one could hurt. What I didn't yet understand was that they would also teach me how to hurt others without question.
Under Trump's second term, C-130s (aircraft I flew) and C-17s were used to deport migrants to places like Guatemala, Peru, even Guantanamo Bay. Those flights weren't paused because we found our moral center. They were paused because they were too expensive. The message wasn't this is wrong. It was this isn't profitable. And if I had been ordered to fly that mission, I probably would have said yes.
That's the part we never talk about. How obedience becomes survival. How silence gets framed as strength. How the fear of disobeying, of being labeled insubordinate, of losing everything you've earned, becomes more powerful than your own moral compass.
That journal entry wasn't just a teenager's doubt. It was prophecy.
Pink Hair, White Silence, and the Day I Left the Military
When I left active duty in 2019, I showed up with pink hair to pick up my DD-214. Not for shock value. Just to mark, for myself, that I wasn't leaving the institution the same way I entered it.
Outside, Trump's Air Force One touched down like a god descending into theater. Most of the senior officers I served under had taken an earlier flight that morning. An "exercise," they said, though no one said aloud what we all knew: few wanted to stand on that tarmac and salute a man who threatened nuclear war from his phone.
I began my military journey in 2006, under Don't Ask, Don't Tell and I never told a soul that my first crush was a woman. By the time I commissioned and married another service member in 2010, it had been repealed. I entered active duty believing I was part of something shifting. I had to do pull-up challenges as part of physical fitness studies, knocking out 20 just to prove women could effectively serve in billets that had been closed to us before. I believed (naively) that performance would insulate me from bias.
By my final years in uniform, I felt the fracture. Some white men around me understood the terrain we were navigating: women, survivors, people of color moving through an institution not built with us in mind. And then there were others: men who questioned survivor testimony, minimized assault, laughed off racism as "just jokes" in the form of callsigns and locker-room code. The jokes were never just jokes. They were signals. Codes. Warnings.
As a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator, I fought to do right by the people who trusted me. I wrote about what it felt like to sit under the photo of a man credibly accused of sexual assault, trying to convince victims that justice was possible. I didn't always have the tools. I didn't always succeed. I watched victims get punished for speaking while perpetrators got promoted. And when one survivor I was supporting died by suicide, and the system didn't flinch, I stopped pretending the structure wanted to be saved and I left in 2019 and dyed my hair pink.
By 2025, just 100 days into Trump's second term, the transformation was no longer theoretical. It was enforced. The appointment of Pete Hegseth (a Fox News pundit who dismissed white nationalism and mocked sexual assault in the ranks) as Secretary of Defense marked a line in the sand: fall in, or fall out.
Military leadership was reshaped through fear and fidelity. Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Navy's first female Chief of Naval Operations, was fired without explanation, leaving not a single woman in a four-star role. The Pentagon's inspector general halted an internal review into extremism in the ranks, claiming it no longer aligned with executive orders. The review would've exposed radical groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers infiltrating military culture, but instead, it was buried.
This wasn't about reform. It was a coordinated purge. DEI programs were dismantled across commands, reframed as threats to readiness instead of tools of trust and retention. Leaders like Gen. CQ Brown Jr. weren't removed for failure. They were removed for refusing to swear allegiance to a single man.
It wasn't spontaneous. It was orchestrated. Project 2025 didn't just provide the plan; it reshaped the pipeline. Recruitment shifted away from diverse communities and toward a militant white Christian nationalism.
And the symbolic flourish? During Pride Month, the Navy began the process of stripping Harvey Milk's name (a Navy veteran and one of the first openly gay elected officials) from a U.S. Navy ship. Not because of scandal, but because identity itself had become the enemy.
I didn't leave the military. The military I knew left itself.
As I walked out that day with my DD-214 and rebellious pink hair, I watched Trump climb into a vehicle, surrounded by retirees who would've sidelined me if they'd still been in charge. They clapped like he was the second coming. I looked around, didn't say a word, and raised my middle finger. Quietly. Just once. I've never admitted that before. Maybe back then, I was afraid of what would happen if someone found out.
But now? I'm afraid of what happens if no one ever knows the truth.
Los Angeles Is Not a War Zone. Unless They Make It One.
I was born in California. Raised between the redwoods of the north and the sprawl of the south. And if there's one thing I know, it's that you can't understand Los Angeles by watching it burn from afar. You have to walk its boulevards. You have to feel its contradictions: Hollywood and homelessness, ICE raids and taco trucks, generational roots and constant displacement. You have to know it to grieve what's happening now.
Immigration sweeps across Los Angeles became flashpoints of public outrage. Agents arrested people at work, in parking lots, directly after court hearings. In one instance, a 9-year-old boy was detained during a scheduled immigration check-in alongside his father. When labor leader David Huerta was tackled and hospitalized while observing a raid, then charged with a felony, the temperature shifted. The protests escalated into something else.
By Saturday, tens of thousands marched peacefully through downtown, chanting "ICE out of LA."
One video shows a man struck by a federal SUV, his head cracking against pavement as the vehicle drives on. Another shows a woman shot in the head with a rubber bullet, bleeding on the sidewalk while officers refuse her care and blame protesters for blocking ambulances. An Australian journalist was also shot while reporting, and other members of the press were blocked by armed agents from covering peaceful demonstrations.
Claiming falsely that the situation was out of control and without California's consent, President Trump deployed 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles. They arrived without food, water, or sleeping quarters. Packed onto basement floors like gear in a duffel bag. Then came 700 active-duty Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment. Infantry Marines trained to kill enemy combatants. Officially, they were tasked with protecting federal buildings. Unofficially, it felt like a siege.
"We're begging for catastrophe," said @benfeibleman, watching his former unit be pointed at U.S. civilians. These weren't riot police. These were kids. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. Whose only training was how to kill.
On Truth Social, Trump called protesters "paid insurrectionists" and threatened to have California Governor Gavin Newsom arrested for obstruction. He praised ICE raids as "just the beginning." Newsom sued the administration for a brazen abuse of power and warned: "Democracy is under assault. The moment we feared has arrived."
Right-wing outlets like Fox News ran endless loops of burning cars, shattered windows, and Molotov cocktails, casting the entire uprising as senseless chaos. Again and again, they aired footage of Waymo’s driverless vehicles set ablaze, carefully omitting the deeper context: the vehicles were targeted in outrage over Google’s quiet decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico. These images, stripped of meaning, became political ammunition.
"This is Newsom's California," raged Sean Hannity. "Trump is restoring order." But on the ground, the picture fractured. Protesters marched peacefully during the day, waving both American and Mexican flags, chanting for due process and immigrant dignity.
Trump seized on them to justify his rapid escalation of force, painting peaceful protestors as domestic threats. But the truth was far more complex. The violence, while real, was not widespread, and it was condemned by activist leaders, community organizers, and public officials who continued to urge nonviolence. Social media was flooded with reminders to stay peaceful, even as the government responded with brutality.
By Tuesday, Los Angeles was under curfew for the first time since the George Floyd uprising. The mayor marched through downtown flanked by faith leaders, her boots crunching over shattered glass, to announce what felt like a final surrender. What began as protest had become pre-criminalized. Over 400 arrests. 300 immigration detentions. Raids still ongoing. Troops still deployed.
And under the surface, something darker moved. A quiet economy of repression. Because this was never just about enforcement. It was about who profits when freedom gets locked in a cage.
Persecution Pays: The Business of Rounding Us Up
The soldiers were the story, until we looked past the rifles and rubber bullets and saw the ledger.
Behind every arrest, there was a quota. Behind every quota, a contract. Behind every contract, a dividend. And at the center of it all was The GEO Group, the for-profit prison giant whose bottom line depends on locking human beings in cages. In 2024, GEO secured over $747 million in ICE contracts alone.
Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s second-term immigration crackdown, has ordered ICE to cast the widest possible net, demanding 3,000 arrests a day, targeting not just criminals but day laborers outside 7-Elevens and families at court check-ins.
To meet this manufactured surge, the administration has earmarked $45 billion for a massive expansion of ICE detention infrastructure, tapping private prison firms and disaster contractors to erect tent cities across the country.
Inside the detention centers, detainees aren’t just held… they’re put to work. Under the so-called “Voluntary Work Program,” thousands of immigrants, many of whom haven’t been charged with any crime, clean blood and feces, cook thousands of meals a day, and perform clerical work, for $1 or less. Refuse, and they’re sent to solitary. One facility employed a single janitor; the rest of the sanitation was handled by detainees under threat. Lawsuits filed under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act have begun to call this what it is: forced labor.
You can’t manufacture a future on American soil at Chinese prices without a labor force that can’t say no. The border becomes the factory gate. And ICE becomes the HR department of a new American supply chain.
Meanwhile, the military deployments cost $134 million for 60 days. That’s $2.2 million per day to turn American soldiers against American citizens for theater to make the portfolios grow.
Vanguard owns over 16.9 million shares in GEO Group. BlackRock owns 4.9 million. Fidelity, State Street, and Prudential hold millions more. Even public employee retirement systems in 18 states are invested.
During the 2024 election, GEO executives funneled over $1 million into Trump-aligned PACs. The reward? Pam Bondi, former GEO lobbyist, as Attorney General… now overseeing the agency that feeds their profits. (Definitely no conflict of interest…)
Each ICE raid fuels more detentions. Each detention fills more beds. Each bed feeds more portfolios. GEO isn’t just profiting from policy. It’s designing it, scaling it, and tracking every body it touches.
Much of GEO’s projected $2.53 billion in 2025 revenue won’t even come from prisons, but from ankle monitors sold by its surveillance subsidiary, B.I. Incorporated. That segment alone is expected to quadruple to $1.3 billion by 2026. We are no longer just being detained.
This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s the commodification of human lives through fear.
The violence in Los Angeles wasn’t spontaneous. It was an orchestrated crackdown staged to justify the expansion of a detention economy. These weren’t just raids. They were harvests.
And then Trump stepped onto a stage at Fort Bragg. Another veteran sent me the clip with a message I couldn’t shake:
“We in trouble fam.”
I Was Their Comrade. Now I'm Their Enemy.
Trump entered the stage, flanked by American flags, to the swell of "Hail to the Chief," followed by the pounding chorus of "Proud to Be an American." Soldiers in cammies filled the crowd. It looked like a change-of-command ceremony, but it felt like a coup rally.
What followed wasn't a presidential address. It was a 9,000-word tirade against immigrants, against Democrats, against the media, against anyone he cast as "the enemy." Before active-duty troops, he called California a war zone and claimed, "If we didn't act, there wouldn't be a Los Angeles. What you're seeing is full-blown assault: rioters bearing foreign flags, third world lawlessness. I will never let that happen to our country."
My blood went cold.
Not because it was a lie. But because it landed.
The crowd cheered.
They cheered one-year prison sentences to anyone who burns an American flag. And then they booed President Biden. They booed Governor Newsom. They booed the press. On cue. They weren't defending the Constitution. They were auditioning for allegiance. And in that moment, I saw the irreparable damage clearly: this wasn't a commander rallying his troops. This was a man declaring war on his own people, and they were ready.
Hegseth told them exactly who the enemy was: women like me. Veterans who challenged the mission. Californians who'd marched in the streets. He called us "woke garbage." That's what we are now. Not patriots. Not peers.
Threats. Enemies of the state.
Not in Iraq. Not in Kabul. But in Los Angeles. In my home state. On American soil.
San Jose is where I enlisted. San Diego is where I built my career. I've flown combat hours, saluted generals between readiness briefs, and been taught the Uniform Code of Military Justice and rules of engagement. But watching his speech, I was terrified for the future of the institution that built me.
Veterans are speaking out. People I served with popping up in my newsfeed alongside people I've never met. Their voices urgent, fractured, afraid. One video shook me.
Marine veteran Louis Plummer recalled being deployed to Japan during Trump’s first term. When Trump taunted North Korea, his unit was told to prepare for escalation. Plummer refused to follow orders he believed would ignite an illegal war. For that, he was threatened with 25 years in prison. “I signed up to take out the bad guys,” he said. “Not to be the bad guy.”
I felt that in my bones.
Because Fort Bragg wasn’t just a speech. It was a blueprint. A loyalty test wrapped in military pageantry to see how far the ranks could be pushed. Trump took the military’s sacred oath to the Constitution and warped it into a personal pledge of allegiance, a public line drawn to reveal who would obey, and who might resist.
Retired Army General Russel Honoré called it “a disgrace.” Activist veteran Paul Rieckhoff didn’t mince words: “This is the most egregious politicization of our troops we’ve ever seen.” Civil-military boundaries weren’t just blurred. They were bulldozed. And no one stood in the way.
But this wasn’t the crescendo.
It was the drumroll.
June 14: The Parade, the Protest, and the Precedent
June 14 used to mean something else.
The birth of the U.S. Army. The first B-29 air raid on Japan. But this year, it marks something different entirely: Donald Trump's 79th birthday. And he's throwing himself a party the size of an empire. A $40 million made-for-TV military parade storming through Washington while Americans in every state and on six continents rise up in protest against the very regime staging it.
The optics aren't accidental.
More than 7,000 troops. 28 tanks. 150 armored vehicles. Helicopters overhead. Streets sealed off. "HANG FAUCI & BILL GATES" spray-painted across DOD train cars hauling equipment through Pennsylvania. The Army posted the footage. Then quietly deleted it. No investigation followed. Just a statement that the message didn't "align with Army values."
This isn't patriotism. It's propaganda. Narrative domination dressed in military drag. Trump isn't defending democracy. He's redefining it as the threat. Protest becomes treason. Dissent becomes enemy action. And patriotism? It looks like tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue to the tune of "Proud to Be an American," while the memory of January 6 is erased in plain sight.
But across the country, and the globe, a different kind of march is forming.
Organized by Indivisible and the 50501 Movement, more than 1,700 "No Kings National Day of Defiance" protests are set to flood city centers, rural towns, and embassy fronts around the world. Their message is searing in its simplicity: America does not belong to a king.
Trump says these people hate their country. But contrary. Showing up to protest isn't hatred. It's allegiance to the First Amendment. It's faith that a country can be better than its leaders. I love my country. That's why I show up. That's why I speak out, and some unexpected voices are too.
Walmart heiress Christy Walton took out a full-page ad in The New York Times urging Americans to mobilize. Volunteers are holding teach-ins, marching in silence, carrying signs that say: Democracy lives here. In Los Angeles, families are marching with photos of loved ones detained in recent ICE raids. In Texas, clergy are linking arms at the border.
And while Trump threatens protestors will be met with force, the parade plans roll forward, another page in history is being written. Because June 14 isn't just a birthday. It's a litmus test. And what happens this weekend could set the precedent for every protest, and every parade, to come.
So what happens next?
In the military, we're taught to anticipate three outcomes:
The most likely path is a slow, splintering fracture with truth distorted beyond recognition by propaganda, fear repackaged as patriotism, and authoritarian power cloaked in the language of national pride.
The best-case scenario demands mass refusal: soldiers who drop their shields rather than raise them against their own, workers who disrupt the machinery by walking out, journalists who reject the role of stenographer, and judges who remember their oath is to the Constitution, not a man. It requires a collective remembering, that democracy was never meant to be quiet compliance, but relentless resistance.
The most dangerous future is the one where June 14 becomes a date etched into our national memory alongside the gravest betrayals of American ideals. Where protests are criminalized and met with sweeping arrests, where dissent is rebranded as sedition, where prison stocks surge while human beings fill the beds. It is a future where martial law arrives not with tanks and alarms, but draped in red, white, and blue… and followed by silence.
I still think about that 17-year-old girl, the one who feared what she might become if asked to drop bombs on strangers.
She was right to be scared. But she was asking the wrong questions.
It was never just about war abroad. It was about obedience at home.
And now, we are all being asked: Will you comply, or will you remember who you are?
Trump will blow out his candles. The jets will scream overhead. And when the smoke clears, when the steel parade ends and the cameras shut off, some of us will still be standing, asking the only question that matters: How the fuck did we get here?
But I know the answer. I've always known. We got here because we were told to obey. And we did. And that should scare the hell out of us.
About the Author
I’m Alisa Sieber; a writer, veteran, and relentless question-asker, exposing the patterns of power, control, and resistance that shape our world. My work blends personal reckoning with systemic critique, challenging the narratives we’ve been told and demanding we ask harder questions.
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References
Trump Admin Pauses Using Military Planes for Deportations Amid Cost Concerns
No More Female 4-Stars: Franchetti Firing Leaves Top Ranks Filled by Men
Pentagon Watchdog Halts Review of Military Efforts to Root Out Extremism
Warfighters, Mothers, Liabilities: The Military’s Silent War Against Women
How the Fuck Did We Let Our Military Become a Cult of Personal Loyalty?
San Diego leaders speak out on the ordered renaming of USNS Harvey Milk
Torrance boy, 9, detained by ICE for planned deportation to Honduras. Community is outraged
How the immigration protests in Los Angeles started - ABC News
Trump supports Tom Homan arresting Newsom over California protests
Australian reporter hit by nonlethal round during live report from LA immigration protests | AP News
SEIU California President David Huerta detained during L.A. ICE raids - Los Angeles Times
Trump calls for Newsom's arrest, calls him 'grossly incompetent'
Troops deployed to LA have nowhere to sleep and lack supplies: Newsom
The Marines being sent to LA are my old unit. This is throwing gas on a fire. @benfeibleman
Media and Democrats downplay violence in the anti-ICE protests in LA | Fox News
Peaceful protesters in Los Angeles confront National Guard | News | djournal.com
A tamer night in downtown Los Angeles as LAPD makes more arrests, enforces curfew
BlackRock, Vanguard are the biggest investors in private prisons | Money news | channel3000.com
'The Generals Stay Silent': Experts Alarmed as Trump Politicizes Army at Fort Bragg Rally
CNN.com - Transcript of Trump’s White House Comments June 10, 2025
Trump Warns He’ll Use ‘Very Big Force’ Against Protesters At Army Anniversary Parade
Trump issues a word of caution for anyone who protests his military parade | Fox News
Army scrubs vid of parade tank with 'Hang Fauci & Bill Gates' graffiti
Trump's deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to L.A. costs a lot
ICE’s tactics draw criticism as it triples daily arrest targets | Reuters
Slave Labor Widespread at ICE Detention Centers, Lawyers Say
Beyond Bars: Examining Forced Labor in Immigration Detention – The Justice Journal
The staged rally on a military base, complete with selling MAGA merchandise, is wrong to the core, and should be a major alarm. But I'm grateful for the clarity it gives -- as does as the unilateral federalization of National Guard troops in LA -- to where things are headed. I've been trying to warn friends and family for the longest time, but nearly all dismiss me as overly pessimistic and overreacting. I'm rarely getting that response nowadays.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I’ve been trying to put to words the betrayal I’ve felt every day since January 20th. My oath is to the constitution, it was never to an office, individual, or party. I feel so betrayed by the blatant disregard for the constitution and rule of law.
I took off my uniform for the last time in December and I’ll be out tomorrow to protest because dissent is patriotic.