Kirk Kasuya can be reached at tkasuya@ucdavis.edu

KEVIN BURK can be reached at xavierholt@gmail.com

Andrew Hufferd was a friend of mine I’ve known since our high school days, so sitting down with the returning GI for an interview was difficult. I’d always called him ‘AJ.‘ While I drafted interview questions, I found myself stricken with what I reflect on now as one of the greatest quandaries of modern warfare. What do you ask a soldier anymore?

Iraq is a new breed of war. Conflict today is communicated to the home front with an unprecedented level of personal intimacy. I had seen the videos – night vision nightmares of gunships reducing human figures to thermal splotches, IEDs rupturing roadsides in spherical blasts of asphalt, and worst of all, the matter-of-fact images of the casualties and their families on both sides. In World War II, soldier’s girlfriends received skulls of slain Japanese from their boys in the Pacific. In Vietnam, stories of ear necklaces trickled back to the States. Today, you can watch soldiers riddling civilians with depleted uranium shells on YouTube. The charnel house drama of the front has evolved.

The public has a much clearer idea of what to expect from war, and this clarity of vision can attract some borderline personalities. AJ had a history of headstrong aggression that often crossed the line – the army certainly would scout for him. It’s evident that the brutality of war didn’t change him as much as reveal what drove him to violence.

In my parent’s back yard in Mountain View, AJ was at ease and extremely talkative. His fiancée Allyson Carlson sat quietly beside us. I asked what questions I had and set my laptop up to record our conversation. Before I share the results, I’ll give you some background so you can know AJ like I know AJ.

Back at Mountain View High, AJ confounded school administrators by getting a strong GPA while picking fights every couple of weeks. These fights would lead to his expulsion in senior year.

“What did you do, AJ?” I asked him during his last day on campus.

“He was hitting on my woman. Warrior’s code,” he said.

AJ’s private set of morals he compared to bushido, ninjitsu, Norse legend or whatever martial code fascinated him most that month.

“You should have seen the finishing move,” he added with cold enthusiasm. “I planted my foot right in the center of his face.” He demonstrated the door-knocker kick in slow motion.

He returned to his home country last fall after serving with the 759th battalion of the 3rd infantry in the Southeast outskirts of Baghdad. Hufferd got to Iraq in an unorthodox way. A heart condition kept him from enlisting in anything but the National Guard, but his exemplary service there allowed him to ship out.

His determination to serve in the armed forces was rooted in his past. AJ came from a military family and lost his serviceman father to suicide at the age of 12. If you could navigate his occasional outbursts, he is a decent and friendly human being.

The area he was in was far from calm, Hufferd said, and went on to say that he and his brothers in arms made a visible change in the safety of the region. In addition to standard patrols, AJ helped train an Iraqi SWAT team that won accolades for their discipline and teamwork.

“I think I definitely had more impact there than anywhere else in Iraq,” he said. The camaraderie he built with them was unforgettable. This was the definitive counterpoint to his violent tendencies.

His nine-month tour in Iraq was a growing experience, he said, but it was a harsh way to learn.

“It has definitely instilled a work ethic. Now I’m a little disappointed with the way civilians work.” Military service in Iraq is a tense environment that straddles the extremes in daily life.

“Ninety percent of the time, you’re bored out of your mind,” Hufferd said. “Ten percent of the time, you’re scared shitless.”

Ideologically, it seems AJ returned from Iraq with only more confidence in his moral convictions, but some cracks in the warrior’s façade began to show.

“The place is a trash dump, and I don’t think it was us that did that. I never did agree with the reason we went in.”

He alternately glorified and criticized the U.S. armed forces.

“I feel like war is always gonna be there. We’ll always need a military. Which is good for me, because or else I’d be out of a job.”

He said it made him sick that support for soldiers had dwindled in his eyes, but he also considered himself conservative when it comes to enlisting. In service, he met volunteer soldiers that were duped into enlisting for college money and was sufficiently outraged at the idea.

“They whined that they were supposed to be ‘undeployable‘ for two years because they did it for college. Oh, they promised me this, they promised me that. Yeah, well, recruiters lie. If you’re not out there to serve your country, you shouldn’t be there.” This line of thinking smacked of his trademark harshness and his reverence for a man in physical conflict.

Overall, AJ still appealed to the Spartan ideal of honorable war.

“I am trained to do a job, and I’m going to do it.“

The ugliness of that job was a reality to him, but he defended his work to the end.

Wartime experience is a mixed bag that’s difficult to dissemble. Even a born killer can have a tough time reflecting. “It’s different. I don’t want to speak for everyone else. I only know what I did.“

His conditioning was extreme, he said, but not malicious. Interestingly, he said that boot camp routine “is like brushing your teeth. There can be a good kind of conditioning, and it’s not all that side of conspiracy theory stuff that everybody talks about.” Likening the potentially fatal discharging of firearms to dental hygiene epitomizes a modern soldier’s conflict.

The fact that conspiracy theories have entered mainstream dialog is another clue that war has changed. Soldiers today spend a lot of time considering ideas that were once on the fringe – war as a construct for population control, secret societies conspiring to profiteer on carnage and most of all speculation on whose hands were dirtied on Sept. 11. AJ seemed to wave it all off now that he was back home.

Ending a life is transformative. “Nothing will ever prepare you for that,” AJ reflected. Services are present to help bind mental scarring, but there is no cure. “They had combat stress programs and a chaplain, but no matter how much they can do, you’re still stuck there.“

Chillingly, he later stated he had no illusions. “I joined to kill.“

Switching from days of physical training and recreation to combat was unpredictable, he said, “You’re always alert. They’re not kidding around. It could happen any time.” The real ‘fronts‘ in Iraq are ill-defined due to the sporadic distribution of violence. “You have no open engagements while you’re over there. It’s kind of a mental thing.”

This atmosphere of total uncertainty in the presence of murder and death deconstructs notions of a ‘good war.‘

In an earlier conversation, he and I concurred that the idea of a monolithic, organized and meticulous al-Qaida force was a complete myth. Soldiers instead fight isolated militia groups consisting of desperate Iraqis that have lost all hope for a better future. He remained as committed as ever, though, in ending the lives of America’s enemies – however localized and banal they may be.

The feelings a soldier has toward the civilians of the nation he occupies are layered. “We primarily got respect, but there are always those people that teach their children to throw rocks at us,” AJ said. He became wary, he said, “I found myself ending up suspicious of people. Anybody who was looking a little suspicious or a little shady … ” he drifted off. He said Iraqis were good people but that they lacked ambition. Their less than total welcoming of U.S. aid said to him “they don’t want to evolve.“

This paranoia he acquired overseas I saw unfortunately extending to American citizens. “The nationalism is gone,” he said, and repeatedly said that not supporting troops. Even more critically, he said that parenting has gone astray and lamented what he saw as a pre-teen generation of insulated brats. A military lifestyle leaves its marks.

When asked if he’d make the same decision knowing this would be the outcome, he replied, “Oh hell yeah. I’d only have done it faster.“

War, it seems, only changed AJ in age and karma. His preconceptions of the nobility and glory of killing have shifted little since the days of watching bad kung-fu films.

Our talk turned to the more domestic. He mentioned that he supported Rudy Guiliani through the primaries and I had to bite my tongue nearly off. AJ’s very skeptical about Obama mostly due to the president’s pro-withdrawal position, but mentioned that he wasn’t qualified to comment on General Petraeus‘ choices or the effectiveness of the surge. “It’s all monotone out there,” he said. “We didn’t feel the changes of policy decisions.” AJ plans to return to service, as he was singled out to become a Ranger for further reconnaissance work.

He’s currently living with Allyson in Colorado and thoroughly enjoying his stay stateside.

The stimulus package laboriously working its way through Congress has huge implications, both politically and economically, for our generation and for students especially.

The plan contains many billions of dollars in targeted aid to state education budgets, and with the furloughs, program cuts and construction stoppages due to lack of funds, that aid is desperately needed. The fate of the stimulus rests largely on the ability of the president not only to compose an effective plan, but to get it passed in a politically expedient matter. Unfortunately, he seems to be failing on both counts.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the stimulus debate thus far is watching network news bend over backwards to fellate the GOP and other inherently conservative business interests (coincidentally, network news is one such inherently conservative business interest). According to ThinkProgress.com, Republican congressmen critical of the stimulus appeared on major television broadcasts at more than twice the frequency of Democratic supporters, 51 to 24, on Jan. 26, 27 and 28.

Media’s also had the habit lately of loudly parroting GOP talking points based on what turned out to be a nonexistent Congressional Budget Office analysis which purportedly called into question the efficacy of the stimulus.

At first this would seem to be a relief; the GOP was finally basing their policy on data. The only problem was that the CBO had issued no such analysis on the stimulus. None. And when the CBO did issue a report, it directly contradicted the assertions made by the GOP, which quickly dismissed the CBO as partisan. The GOP, it seems, would no longer be appealing to actual economists with access to information.

Instead, they’re appealing to all sorts of interesting people, like Joe the Plumber. That’s right, Joe-the-fucking-Plumber just gave a talk on the stimulus to GOP congressmen this Wednesday. This sort of thing has upset a lot of economists, and rightfully so. After all their study, data collection and model construction, and despite a general consensus among economists about what should be done, the public face of the profession is one of complete chaos.

Thanks to Fox News, we see a parade of “senior fellows,” “research specialists,” and “policy analysts“ like Amity Shlaes, William Kristol and Ben Stein (who urged people to buy stock in investment banks back in 2007) appearing on TV as though it was Take-Your-Political-Lapdog-to-Work Day. Across the networks, these economic kindergarteners are inexplicably given equal time with, and regarded as equally credible to, professional economists like Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi.

Mark Zandi is an interesting case, because despite his post as a former McCain economic advisor, he shamelessly produces research that supports a massive stimulus plan driven by government spending, not by tax cuts. So really, there’s not a whole lot of disagreement among intellectually honest economists about the current situation. That conservatives have to dig this deep into the ideological dustbin to find people willing to embarrass themselves so publicly betrays just how desperate they are in the wake of their failed world view.

Yet Obama has been banging his head against the brick wall that is that failed world view, attempting to break through and reach common ground. He’s met repeatedly with GOP leaders, made tax cuts a third of the stimulus and cut infrastructure spending and various green initiatives to make room for Republican appeasement. But all he got was the big “fuck you” from every Republican in the House, and as of this writing, it appears the Republicans are going to filibuster in the Senate.

Despite this, reports are coming out that the administration is keeping the lid on Democratic congressmen who want to go after Republicans for their obstructionism. Why? The White House wants to court moderates, and they’re scared criticism will galvanize the GOP. Problem is, almost all the moderate Republicans got replaced by Democrats in 2006 and 2008 (and one, Judd Gregg, just got nominated for Commerce Secretary, even though he voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in the ’90s. All that’s left now are the hard-core conservatives. And as I always say, you can lead a Republican to reason, but you can’t make him think.

Consider Michael Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee. Shortly after being elected, he explained his strategy for relating to opponents: “We’re going to say … ‘We want you to be a part of us, we want you to with be with us, and for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over.‘”

This coming from the party that filibustered 142 times (more than double the previous record) in the last session of Congress and continues to behave like a spoiled brat at the supermarket; crying violently and refusing to budge because mommy won’t buy him a candy bar. Steele also seems to believe that “not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.“ Which is interesting, because I was under the impression that my parents, both teachers, were employed. Guess not.

This is the same partisan chicanery that’s been going on for decades, and it just keeps getting more ridiculous. Plainly, there is no bipartisan consensus to be reached here; the Republicans have a diametrically opposed economic philosophy. This philosophy has been implemented rigorously for 20 of the past 28 years (if you’re generous enough to regard the Clinton era as any significant deviation), and it has failed.

Yet they continue to push this philosophy, especially in regards to tax cuts, regardless of the situation. When times are good, tax cuts are good because government revenue is up and Americans deserve to keep more of their prosperity. When times are bad, tax cuts are still good because deficits don’t matter and lower taxes are needed to boost consumption. It’s complete rubbish, of course, but it’s slavishly worshipped rubbish. And that makes it dangerous.

Thus, no matter how hard he tries, Obama is not going to get GOP support; there will be no dual accountability, and his half-ass, concession-riddled stimulus will fail to deliver as a result of his bipartisan delusion. As Representative Barney Frank put it, “He overestimates his ability to take people – particularly our colleagues on the right – and sort of charm them into being nice.… When he talks about being post partisan, having seen [the current GOP leadership] and knowing what they would do in that situation, I suffer from post-partisan depression.“

Obama’s softball politics have justified Frank’s quip, and the Republicans are licking their chops. Minority Whip Jon Kyl elucidated the GOP’s strategy for the stimulus, “In six months or so, when the American people say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not better off … ‘ Republicans then are going to be in a position to say, “We didn’t have the input in this and that’s why it didn’t work.‘” Basically, they’re pulling a Limbaugh: they want Obama to fail, want to starve state budgets, want to shut down the social safety net, want people to lose their jobs, their health care and their pensions. They want this because if people blame Obama, 2010 and 2012 won’t get here soon enough.

But Obama may finally be getting the message that compromise is impossible. On Wednesday he said that GOP criticisms “echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place – the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care … and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.”

This is a good thing, because unless he can create a PR nightmare for the GOP by painting them as obstructionist relics, he will fail, per their wishes. As I wrote just after he was elected, “Obama must hammer aggressively that he’s out to undo the damage of the past 40 years of Republican driven neo-liberal economics. If he doesn’t, progressivism will retreat even further than it has since Nixon in the face of the coming conservative onslaught and our own economic amnesia.“

Representative Kyl is betting that Obama’s too scared to pull the trigger, and frankly I’m still willing to bet the same. But this is one bet I hope I lose, for all our sakes.

K.C. CODY sees some light at the end of the tunnel, but fears it’s a freight train comin‘ our way. Ease, or stoke, his fears at kccody@ucdavis.edu.

I’m nearing the end of my time here at UC Davis, and I realized this weekend while playing sloshball in Slide Hill Park that no one ever told me what to expect of this humble township when I first began this four five year adventure. Sure, the General Catalog has the obligatory pictures of artificially diverse groups of students sitting around with Frisbees and guitars pretending to laugh at someone’s shitty joke, but no one ever gave me any rules to live by, any advice to follow. So I took a page out of George W. Bush’s playbook; I talked to God. It was a good conversation, and it went a little something like this:

And the prophet went up to the Mace Drive I-80 overpass, which was embroiled in fire and smoke, lightning and dark clouds, for it was there that the Lord of Tha D was. The Lord of Tha D spoke to the prophet, he said, “Go down and warn the people not to mob me like they did at the inauguration, for that would be an abomination before me, and would totally be idol making.“

The prophet replied, “The people cannot come up the overpass, because they are super-weak bikers who sit in their rooms taking pictures of themselves to put on Facebook.“

“Jesus H. Christ,” said the Lord of Tha D, “that’s pathetic. They have obviously not learned the way of Tha D. Go, prophet, and tell them what it is that they must hear.“ And so the prophet went down to the people and told them:

I. Thou shalt go to the Rec Pool. Drunk. You will bring a water bottle or BigGulp filled with the spirit or brew of your choice. You will forget to put on sunscreen and, being drunk, not notice that you have turned redder than your Asian friends do when they have a beer until it’s too late. The Rec Pool is not called the meat market for nothing. Therefore, you will wear sunglasses so that you can stare at boobs and asses, pecs and abs without appearing sexually deviant. Girls, you will wear those sunglasses that give you the look of vapid, soulless insects; because insects, with their tiny, tiny brains, are worth emulating. Guys, you will wear aviators, because Tom Cruise is not gay.

II. Thou shalt intend to go to sporting events but always find an excuse not to. After the first home football game, you will become lame. If Davis is playing Cal Poly, you will have to study. If Davis has a match against Berkeley, you will have to study. If Davis is racing Stanford, you will have to study. In truth, you will not have to study, but in fact would rather watch “Dancing with the Stars“ or play WoW. You will wish great bodily harm on the Aggie Pack guy for loudly interrupting your peaceful Coho dining experience and set your spam filter to block Aggie Pack e-mails.

III. Thou shalt go to the DC. At first you will “get ready“ to go to the DC, but by April you will look like Amy Winehouse minus crack. You will drop and break plates, bowls, cups and mugs, sending their contents flying across the floor. When this happens to you, you will feel embarrassed and small. When this happens to someone else, you will clap loudly and boisterously, laughing at their misfortune. You will also steal fruit, cereal, pizza, condiments, whole loaves of bread and enough plates, utensils and cups to stock your kitchen for the rest of you life. You will do this mostly during winter, because you will be able to wear sweats and large jackets. You will also go to late night and get fat. It is then that you will require the fourth commandment.

IV. Thou shalt go to the ARC. You will go to the ARC to work it, not to work out. You will color coordinate your clothing, of which you will wear as little as possible. Girls, you will for some reason use a treadmill and later go to a tanning salon. You will ignore the fact that you could have run outside and gotten a tan while simultaneously becoming not fat. Guys, you will wonder how that dude in the wheelchair got so buff. To get as buff as him, you will eat 200 grams of protein a day and eventually resort to steroids. You will at some point punch off the side mirror of your Civic in a fit of ‘roid-rage, then quit using and let your testicles grow back.

V. Thou shalt go to Houseboats. Once. You will bathe in hard liquor and be showered in beer foam. You will defecate and copulate openly with complete strangers. You will wander Slaughterhouse Island aimlessly for hours, wearing a single sandal and your bathing suit, clutching a red cup and busted flashlight, until you are taken in by a random boat for the night. You will wake up with cuts and bruises for which there is no discernable cause, and you will pour Captain Morgan over those cuts to sanitize them.

On your way back to Davis you will go to Denny’s and order a Lumberjack Slam with a Coke; it will be your most wholesome, nutritious meal in five days. You will fail all of your assignments the next week, and feel sick, discombobulated and unable to bike as the world around you rocks to and fro for many days after you last licked tequila off Sigma Chi’s beer pong table. It will be the most foul, most unclean, most regrettable experience of your life; and you will love it. Once.

VI. Thou shalt get into a bike crash. You will do this in a bike circle, on one of the many olive oil slicks that form under olive trees, because a squirrel ran into your spokes or because an Asian girl was biking on the wrong side of the path. You will crash violently and without a helmet, and your only solace will be the fact that the other person got equally fucked up. If they didn’t, you will have no solace, and you will instead set up lawn chairs next to busy intersections during the first week of fall quarter to watch freshmen repeat your folly.

VII. Thou shalt worship Picnic Day. You will eventually graduate and become one of the proud group of Aggie alumni who believe Picnic Day is the best thing to ever happen to Davis. Yet while you are here you will not remember a single one. Instead, you will know only that at some point you lost $50 to your friends betting on the wrong wiener dog. You will also at some point go to Santa Barbara or Chico, and realize that their Thursday nights have at least three orders of magnitude more debauchery than Picnic Day.

VIII. Thou shalt take awesome classes. You will enroll in Human Sexuality (HDE 012), Intro to Beer and Brewing (FST 003), Drugs and Society (PHE 040) and The History of Rock Music (MUS 106). In 40 years, your grandchildren will ask, “What did you study in college?” To which you will reply, “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n‘ roll.“ You will also enroll in any and all freshman seminars which kick ass.

IX. Thou shalt get a parking ticket. You will be in a rush and unable to find parking, and you will think yourself clever for parking on the street and returning to wipe the chalk off of your tire every two hours. You will return to your car and be greatly angered to find not only a parking ticket under your windshield wiper, but a ticket for attempting to evade a parking ticket. You will also be tempted to reuse a daily permit or alter your quarter long TAPS permit. This is folly, for you will be even more greatly angered to discover that the latter carries a fine of over $200 and a referral to SJA. And SJA ain’t nothin‘ to fuck with.

X. Thou shalt not buy textbooks. In fact, you will do very little reading, for professors are egotistical and will only test you on what is important to them. You will learn what is important to them by going to class, office hours and review sessions. To do homework sets, you will find “copies on reserve“ quite useful. If you break this commandment by purchasing a book, you will be unable to sell it back because a new edition will have been published. You will curse loudly at McGraw-Hill, who will have profited mightily by exploiting your unfounded fear of failure.

This is the word of the Lord of Tha D. Honor it and keep it holy. Amen.

K.C. CODY has followed most of these commandments, but this list is in no way complete. Let him know what you think he’s missed at kccody@ucdavis.edu.

Kicker: Letter to the editor

Headline: UC test requirements

This past Tuesday, January 20th the ASUCD Academic Affairs commission reviewed ASUCD Senator Jack Zwald’s resolution to uphold UC admissions Standards.  For those of you who have not heard of the issue facing the UC system today here is some background.  The UC Regents have proposed to lower UC admission standards across the board.  The proposition up for a vote in early February threatens to eliminate the SAT Subject Tests as a requirement and bring down the number of top high school students guaranteed admission to at least one UC from 12 percent to 9 percent.

By lowering standards the UC Regents are opening the UCs to a larger pool of hopefuls. In past years between 45 and 55 percent of UC applicants have been turned away.   By increasing the number of candidates and taking away a tool to assess academic ability it is likely that less capable students will be admitted to the UC system.  Once the Regents have lowered standards for admissions, academic standards must follow, resources must be directed away from standard classes to remediation, or failure rates must increase.  None of those options is beneficial to current students, faculty, the UC system or the state of California.

Further, fewer competent students in the UC system will have adverse effects on the entire community.  As outlined above, the quality of education must degrade, diminishing the value of degrees provided by UC schools.  The Regents and people supporting these changes want us to believe that the lower standards will raise the chances for those at a socio-economic disadvantage to get into college.  We are inclined to agree with this in so far as it is an indictment of the failed K-12 system, but that is a matter for another time.   It is also simply false; the SAT Subject Tests have proven to be fair and do not favor students based on their ethnicity or lifestyle. 

It is up to the UC Regents to maintain the integrity of the UC system.  I urge students to contact members of ASUCD to encourage them to pass the resolution, letting The Regents know that students want a quality education.

Tierney Burke

Sophomore Political Science major