How a Draft Dodger Builds the Next Generation of Enemies
On a tenant farm in Illinois you learn early that the man with the deed makes the decisions and the people who work the ground pay the price. My father never had to explain that. He just went quiet — when the landlord drove past, when the harvest ran short, when the bank sent letters. I filed those silences without knowing I was filing them. Found them later in my own hands.
Cruelty doesn’t announce itself as cruelty. It announces itself as business. Necessity. Strength.
I’ve lived in these East Tennessee mountains long enough to know they hold things. Cherokee land. Coal country. Company towns. Generation after generation sending sons to wars decided by men who’d never held a rifle and never would. You don’t read that history here. You breathe it. You find it in the water table, in the way old men go quiet at certain names, in the shape of the graves up on the ridge.
Which is why I keep thinking about the water.
Not as metaphor. As water. The thing people die without in three days.
Monday morning, before we finished our coffee, a man with five bone spur deferments posted his ultimatum. Blow their water dry. Pull the power stations down. Added a parenthetical about the desalinization plants — like a landlord listing damages, like a banker cashing grants. Ninety million people.
Parenthetical.
Then he slept.
The Pentagon’s own manual says obeying the laws of war is the right thing to do. What he described is a war crime. Wanton destruction with foreseeable catastrophic effects on the civilian population.
Pete Hegseth calls those rules stupid.
Tuesday a staffer scored real airstrike footage to cartoon music and posted it on official channels. Six thousand miles from the wire. The highlight reel running while the schoolhouses emptied.
One hand on the post button. One hand on nothing.
Two hundred seventeen children dead since February 28th. A schoolhouse full of empty seats. Three million at checkpoints, everything left behind — and this same administration asking them to rise up and take their streets back.
The distance between those two sentences is where the next forty years of war gets made.
My father worked land he’d never own his whole life. He understood something the deed-holders never did — that you can drain a place to bedrock and walk away thinking you’ve won. But the people who worked that ground remember every bucket you took. They don’t announce it. They don’t explain it to their children. They just go quiet in certain ways, at certain moments, and the children file it without knowing they’re filing it.
The grandson finds it in his hands one day. Already loaded.
That eight-year-old in the dark since the water stopped isn’t working the land.
He is the land.
He’s what gets extracted from it.
In thirty years East Tennessee boys will go fight him. Same as they’ve always gone — boys from Erwin and Gray and Mountain City, boys who never heard of the Strait of Hormuz until the recruiter sat down at their mama’s kitchen table. They’ll go because someone six thousand miles from the wire decided the ground needed draining and called it winning.
These mountains don’t just remember. They repeat. Removal becomes black lung becomes body bags becomes this.
My father knew the deed-holder’s face.
So will that boy.
And so will his son.
I wrote a song this week from the same place this essay came from. Same argument, different language. It’s called “How to Make an Enemy.” Here are the words.
How to Make an Enemy
How to Make an Enemy
Every pipe you crack’s a reason / For somebody’s daughter or son
[Verse 1] He posted it on Monday, said we’d blow their water dry Pull the power stations down, cut every generator line Added a parenthetical — the desalinization plants — Like a landlord listing damages, like a banker cashing grants
[Chorus] That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make one Every pipe you crack’s a reason For somebody’s daughter or son You hand it down, you don’t outrun You don’t outrun what you’ve done That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make one
[Verse 2] The videos went up on Tuesday, somebody scored it like a movie Some staffer hit the post button six thousand miles from the wire Two hundred seventeen children, a schoolhouse full of empty seats Three million at a checkpoint, asking them to take the streets
[Chorus] That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make one Every pipe you crack’s a reason For somebody’s daughter or son You hand it down, you don’t outrun You don’t outrun what you’ve done That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make one
[Bridge] Somewhere a kid lies in the dark Since the water stopped Eight years old He’ll be forty when he’s done
[Final Chorus] That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make one You give a child a grievance And it outlives everyone You don’t outrun what you’ve done You don’t outrun what you’ve done That’s how you make an enemy That’s how you make a war
[Outro] (instrumental)
