Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re bringing readers Elliot Ackerman’s 2021 essay on his time spent fighting the U.S. war on terror—first with the U.S. Marine Corps and later as a CIA paramilitary officer. “If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded,” he writes. “But at what cost?”
On September 20, 2001, barely a week after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war—the so-called war on terror, in which the United States would dedicate itself to the disruption and defeat of global terrorist networks including al Qaeda. In the years that followed, the United States waged ill-fated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and hunted suspected terrorists elsewhere, including in Somalia and Yemen. Over two decades later, with the war on terror ostensibly over after having contributed to an estimated 4.5 million deaths around the world, the country is still coming to terms with the psychological, political, and human costs of its campaign.
“Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like,” Ackerman writes. “I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached ‘the end of history.’”
Twenty years of focus on the war on terror has left the United States exposed to instability at home and military threats from abroad, Ackerman warns. Moreover, Americans are increasingly anesthetized to the human costs of war, and their “appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home.” The country as a whole, he observes, “is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways.”
And Americans are still reckoning with the impact of the war on a personal level. “From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me,” Ackerman writes. “I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me.”
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