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Brian Kresge is a retired veteran of the U.S. Army, president of Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor, and a rabbinical student with the Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary.
Moved by the Holocaust and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Professor Stanley Milgram conducted his famous experiments on obedience at Yale University in the 1960s.
His conclusions were astonishing: Most of his experiment subjects would carry out orders, even reluctantly, even if they were opposed to their own avowed morality. The majority will yield to those in authority.
I deliberately retired last year from the Maine Army National Guard in the last months of President Joe Biden’s term. I enlisted in the active-duty Army as a paratrooper in 1994 and moved to the National Guard in 1999. Across that three-decade span, I served overseas and in numerous domestic mobilizations. I feel like I could have served another decade physically and mentally, but with the inevitability of Donald Trump winning a second term, I could not serve in another Trump presidency after the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
Milgram’s obedience tests were always fixed in my mind as a scion of Lithuanian Jews with family members who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The United States military is filled to the brim with very young people with very little life experience trying to navigate the complexities of rules of engagement.
President Trump’s lack of morality, his avarice and his cowardice are the perfect storm for testing the upper limits of our armed forces’ commitment to American values. It’s exacerbated by placing the heavily compromised Pete Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defense.
With the widespread use of the military, particularly the Guard, in blue cities, and legally questionable attacks on Venezuelan vessels, it’s that much more important to remind our forces about the perils of following unlawful orders. This should not be a partisan issue; it should be every veteran in Congress issuing a reminder to service members.
My great-uncle, a Marine who served at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and the invasion of the Japanese home islands, told me stories of the barbarism of his peers in Okinawa. He reported known rapes up the chain of command to no avail. He was so proud of his service, but so acutely aware that there is no such thing as morality in war.
In 1994, in infantry school at Fort Benning, we watched the scene from the movie “Platoon” where a Vietnamese village is razed and its residents raped, assaulted, or murdered by American forces. It was shown as an instructive “orders you shouldn’t follow.” What ensued was drill sergeants and recruits alike snickering at the scene where the disabled boy was murdered.
During Donald Trump’s last term, I listened to a commander of one of our Maine Guard units say on the anniversary of the Kent State shooting: “With all the money we’re spending on small arms training, you all should kill more people when it’s our turn.”
It was not everyone. I always saw more good than bad in my peers. When we mobilized for Hurricane Katrina, there was talk of excitement over killing looters, but that yielded to unreserved humanity and aid rendered to beleaguered residents of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish.
Nevertheless, the profession of arms is centered on the use of violence to solve problems, and that requires responsible leaders who recognize the deadly potential of our armed forces.
I have one criticism of the message from six Democratic lawmakers reminding members of the military and intelligence community that they can refuse illegal orders. Junior enlisted soldiers are the ones most often positioned to carry out potentially unlawful orders.
Twenty years ago, I took what I thought was a principled stand against President George W. Bush’s southern border mission, and it left me isolated, perhaps rightly so.
An unlawful order must plainly contravene the Constitution, United States law or exceed an issuing authority. Shooting unarmed civilians is obviously wrong. Participation in domestic deployments or operations against Venezuela is not so obviously unlawful, even if they potentially open service members up to criminal prosecution later. It’s a difficult needle for the courts to thread, let alone a fresh private who drills one weekend a month and spends the other days working retail.
If you’re going to remind service members of this obligation, you damn well need to be crystal clear about the high legal standard for unlawful orders before you encourage them to invite a court martial. You need to let them know you have their back, otherwise they cannot know this is just demagoguery.
