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It's over at the best movie site on the 'Net, CHUD (www.chud.com). It's a fairly long interview, so I'll just provide an excerpt. Besides, y'all should check out CHUD anyway, on account of it's super-terrific-awesomeness.
Q: Speaking of the times, you’re doing an interesting thing in that while you’re not personally down with the war, you’re going out with the USO. How important is it to you that there’s a difference in people’s minds between the war and the troops?
Rollins: Seeing the separation between the war and the troops is seeing the differentiation between the cop and the law. If you have a beef with the way the law’s written, you don’t argue with the cop about it. If you have beef with American foreign policy and this war in Iraq, you don’t go to the Army grunt. He’s not the guy to talk to. You want to talk to Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld or Dr. Rice or whoever.
So since the armed forces do not dictate policy besides a village they’re running into, I don’t have a beef with them. In a perfect world we don’t need a military, we just need the Ramones. But in the world we live in we need a military because it allows us to be Marilyn Manson and jump up and down and watch Desperate Housewives. Because there are a lot of people in the world who would want this all to end. So when the USO called me, I said I would be honored. I didn’t hesitate.
I got a few angry letters from students in England – ‘You’re sleeping with the enemy!’ – I’m like, you’re young and in a few years you’ll laugh at the letter you just wrote me because it’s incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted. I completely disagree, and I think I’m doing a good thing, and the troops are good. Some of the finest people I’ve met in years have been these young people I’m meeting on these USO tours.
Q: Recently I had the chance to interview a Marine who came home from Iraq about a year ago. The thing I ended being concerned about is that he was not able to articulate what he felt we were doing over there.
Rollins: A lot of guys come back and they write me – I get letter all the time from all walks of the military life, from the wives, from the brothers, or the guys who come home saying, ‘Hey man, I met you in Kyrgyzstan, I’m back, I wanna see your show some time!’ We put soldiers on the guest list almost every night of my tour. When I meet them they go, ‘I seen you twice in Chicago,’ and I say, ‘Pal, when you get home, you see my flyer up, you write my road manager, here’s his email address, and you’re guest-listed.’ And they do, and we put them on the guest list.
But in any case, that’s one of the things I have read over and over again – ‘I spent a year in Iraq and I don’t know why I was there. I don’t know what we accomplished, I don’t know what we were up to. All I did was shoot at buildings, get shot at, drive by garbage that later ended up being IEDs. Nearly died 8 times. Lost three friends.’ Maybe that’s just the kind of person who’s writing from that sentiment.
One woman wrote me the other day and she said, ‘I know that you said in interviews that you get a lot of angry letters from soldiers who feel they were betrayed, and I told my friend who was a Marine. He said those must have been Army because a Marine would never do that. We would go in there and just kick ass.’ That’s what the Marines do, they break the door down and let the Army clean it up. So you’re not going to hear a Marine go, “My finger hurts!” They’re superhuman, these guys. So it is interesting when you see on the news a Marine coming out against the President, coming out against the Iraq war. Whoa. That’s pretty bold for a Marine.
Q: It’s also interesting talking to a Marine who has come home and is having a hard time adjusting. This guy in particular now has an alcohol problem. I know of someone else who came home and couldn’t go out for a couple of months because their reactions were always inappropriate – they’d be in a crowd and a kid would bump into them and their reaction would be a combat reaction.
Rollins: They’re picking the guy off the ground after he’s broken his trachea. A cop stops him for making an illegal left turn and he’s got the cop against the hood, and he goes to jail. Yeah. Vanity Fair, a magazine the girls get on the other side of the office but that I don’t read most of the time, they do have good feature articles once in a while, and there was an article talking about the alarming rise in vehicular deaths of returning Iraqi vets. They come home, buy one of those fast motorcycles and ride it into a tree. They can’t get the adrenaline any other way, and they’re just screwing up in their cars or driving drunk. But there’s this alarming rise in highway fatalities, and they keep pulling dead young Iraqi vets out of these wrecks.
I think in any war, in any traumatic experience, there’s potential for post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been shot at. I remember the first year after that it was very hard for me to be around people and not be very scary. I was a pretty hardcore person for a year. A photographer would go, ‘Henry, you’re looking through my lens… and through my head. Would you please be here?’ I realized, oh I must have that thousand yard stare thing going on. I would say some pretty crazy stuff to people, like ‘Watch me kill you.’ And I meant it. And a year later I was like, ‘Whoa… whoa! Who was that guy?’
That was one little experience I had. If you lived for a year with a heightened experience of that, seeing it, smelling it, administering it, and you come back to a strip mall? You come back to Joplin, Missouri and a Wal-Mart? To three kids and a wife? I sat in, in Kyrgyzstan, a seminar given to young men and women about to go home from their first rotation. It’s an hour long, and it’s basically guys who know sit a bunch of young men and women down and say, ‘OK, you’re about to go home. You’ve been fantasizing about your wife or girlfriend for a year now. It’s been a long time since you’ve had a beer. It’s been a while since you did this, this, this or this. You’re not going to do it all in one night when you come home, so don’t tell your wife, “Boy we’re gonna pull over in the bushes on the car ride home.” She doesn’t want that from you. She wants to reconnect with her husband, her boyfriend. Your wife has been being mom and dad while you were gone, so you don’t come home and start issuing directives. Your home is not the Army. You don’t give your wife orders. You don’t give orders to the kids. It’s going to take a while for you to readjust, and you do it on your wife’s terms, not on yours. Because she’s been running that house and wiping those butts for a year, not you.’
It was fascinating to sit there and listen to this guy because all of this stuff obviously came from case studies. They’ve gone out into the field and asked the questions. This is what they have to address, and it was fascinating. I’m so glad they let me sit in on that because it gave me a real insight into – it’s a glimpse into what these guys are going through when they get home.
So yeah, I think with the volume of young people going to Iraq and coming back, we’re going to have almost a generation – Generation Z Prime or whatever it is now – a generation of young people who are going to have some visible – well, this society is going to have to adjust to the needs and peculiarities of these young people.
Q: Do you think pop culture is addressing this stuff?
Rollins: To a certain degree. From the Bochco TV show Over There to bands writing songs – to Green Day, putting out American Idiot, obviously about Bush. To your movies, your George Clooneys and your Syrianas. So yeah, I think pop culture addresses anything in culture. In the Vietnam War you had protest songs, protests movements, rock and roll and protest seemed to come together in that era. So I think to a certain extent, yeah.
But I think the Iraq war is an MTV TV war, where it’s more like a video game to a lot of people. If you look at the advertising for the Army it went from pre-war, “Be all that you can be,” to ‘Hey man!’ this cool, drop D, Korn-sounding music – GUNG! GUNGGUNGGUNG! – ‘This could be you!’ Or the guy who comes back to the civilian world and is asked if he ever worked on an airplane before and he flashes back to Apaches and Chinooks, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been around it.’ MAN WITH BACKSTORY!
They have a shortfall with American recruitment, and now that we’re about to start our own little jihad on Iran, we’re going to need a lot more people in the Army.
Q: You really think we’re going to go into Iran?
Rollins: I think we really [need] the geography. This is just me talking out of my ass, but I think we need northern Iran so we can move gas and oil out of Turkmenistan. It’s why Clinton turned his view over here when the Taliban was destroying Afghanistan, because he needed southern Afghanistan to source oil and gas out of Turkmenistan. I think it’s all about that Unocal pipeline, or some version of it. Iraq and everything is about the Caspian oil reserves; no matter what country you want to get it out of, it’s the Caspian Sea. Basically it’s what Syriana the film addressed. It’s what the Rashid books are about, what he calls “the second phase of the great game.” It’s some great reading, and it makes you do some great thinking.
The other day when Condoleeza Rice was at Georgetown University speaking, someone asked the question of when are we going back into negotiations with Iran, and she said, ‘Talking with Iran is over with.’ I may be overreaching and underinformed, and I probably am, but to me that said, ‘I want a fight with Iran. I don’t want to sit down at the table, I would rather fight them and take Tehran so I can demonize them and get the UAEA and everyone else to go, “They’re bad, we’re good and we need to bring democracy to this place. And by the way, we’ll need a Halliburton pipeline and some software on those oil wells so no one but Halliburton can access them like they have in Iraq.”’
Another thing, and I don’t think at this point I’m speaking out of class, when I was in Afghanistan for the first time we met someone at the Baghram air base, and we said to this person, ‘Why are we here? Why are we in Afghanistan.’ The guy said, ‘Well, if you think it’s about democracy or whatever, it’s not true.’ And this is an Army guy. He said, ‘When you get home, learn everything you can about the Unocal pipeline, because that’s why we’re everywhere.’ My road manager and I said, duly noted, came back home, went back to the world, Googled Unocal, I started reading everything I could about it. He also said, ‘Look for us in the next two years-‘ and this is two years ago – ‘look for us to start moving into Pakistan and Iran.’ So when stuff happens now in the news I call my road manager and go, ‘Oooh! Oooh!’
The more you read and listen to guys like Thomas L Friedman, who a lot of people hate, and read these books by guys like Ahmed Rashid and Steve Coll, who wrote Ghost Wars, a Washington Post guy, and you see America’s relationship with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela – you see this whole thing is about that gas. And more and more if you follow the money you get to the heart of the Republicans, of the conservatives. Always. And to a certain extent Clinton. But really that’s their pulse, money and oil. So when you look at it through those goggles, Iraq nakedly shows itself out as a power grab, and basically getting good military positioning in that region to basically have Iran, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia.
I say it becomes a kill box for our guys. If we get into it with Iran (this is just me talking out my ass again. I’m such the Monday morning quarterback, on my bed in the sea of Dorito crumbs. I ripped that off from Dennis Miller. Anybody from Fox News could reduce me to sashimi in one minute, I would leave with my tail betwixt my legs) – but I think that when you put American forces pushing into Iran – and I am not into Iran having nuclear capability – you put our guys in a Shia sandwich. You’ve got unfriendly Shia behind you in Iraq and you’ve got unfriendly Shia in front of you in Iran, and I think we’re already in a bad kill box. We’re surrounded by unfriendly people.
Q: Who just keep coming in.
Rollins: Sieve-like. Here comes the rain, but it’s insurgents. When I was in Baghdad, they showed me a confiscated cache of weapons. All new RPGs, unused AK-47s, all packed in grease. I was like, wow this is real gear. Not bootleg knock-off, this is the real ****. They said, ‘Yeah, this is the good stuff.’ I said, ‘Where did you get this?’ They said, ‘This is a Syrian cache.’
I just visited a man who had part of his legs blown off – I do a lot of hospital visits with the USO. A few Sundays ago I was at Bethesda Medical – and he said, and this is a guy newly back and he’s a Marine, I think he knows what he’s talking about, he said, ‘Sir, we’re fighting Syrians now.’ I’ll believe him quicker than I’ll believe the President anytime, because he’s got his boots on the ground and he knows what he’s talking about. And it gibes with what I saw and what the reports are saying. And it sucks.
And it sucks that Bashar al-Assad – and at least he’s honest in that great interview he did with Amanpour that he did a few months ago. She will hold someone to a point. She said, ‘Don’t you think you should be policing your borders,’ and he said, ‘Why? It was better before America was here. The stability of my country really hinges on a stable Iraq, so I want them to leave. It was stable before they came.’ She said, ‘President Bush wants you to stabilize your border,’ and he said, ‘It’s not my job to police that border, and what am I going to do, build a fence to keep people who disagree with your presence in Iraq out? I disagree with your presence in Iraq.’ Now, I’m not into Bashar al-Assad, but at least the guy made a point.
Rollins: Seeing the separation between the war and the troops is seeing the differentiation between the cop and the law. If you have a beef with the way the law’s written, you don’t argue with the cop about it. If you have beef with American foreign policy and this war in Iraq, you don’t go to the Army grunt. He’s not the guy to talk to. You want to talk to Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld or Dr. Rice or whoever.
So since the armed forces do not dictate policy besides a village they’re running into, I don’t have a beef with them. In a perfect world we don’t need a military, we just need the Ramones. But in the world we live in we need a military because it allows us to be Marilyn Manson and jump up and down and watch Desperate Housewives. Because there are a lot of people in the world who would want this all to end. So when the USO called me, I said I would be honored. I didn’t hesitate.
I got a few angry letters from students in England – ‘You’re sleeping with the enemy!’ – I’m like, you’re young and in a few years you’ll laugh at the letter you just wrote me because it’s incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted. I completely disagree, and I think I’m doing a good thing, and the troops are good. Some of the finest people I’ve met in years have been these young people I’m meeting on these USO tours.
Q: Recently I had the chance to interview a Marine who came home from Iraq about a year ago. The thing I ended being concerned about is that he was not able to articulate what he felt we were doing over there.
Rollins: A lot of guys come back and they write me – I get letter all the time from all walks of the military life, from the wives, from the brothers, or the guys who come home saying, ‘Hey man, I met you in Kyrgyzstan, I’m back, I wanna see your show some time!’ We put soldiers on the guest list almost every night of my tour. When I meet them they go, ‘I seen you twice in Chicago,’ and I say, ‘Pal, when you get home, you see my flyer up, you write my road manager, here’s his email address, and you’re guest-listed.’ And they do, and we put them on the guest list.
But in any case, that’s one of the things I have read over and over again – ‘I spent a year in Iraq and I don’t know why I was there. I don’t know what we accomplished, I don’t know what we were up to. All I did was shoot at buildings, get shot at, drive by garbage that later ended up being IEDs. Nearly died 8 times. Lost three friends.’ Maybe that’s just the kind of person who’s writing from that sentiment.
One woman wrote me the other day and she said, ‘I know that you said in interviews that you get a lot of angry letters from soldiers who feel they were betrayed, and I told my friend who was a Marine. He said those must have been Army because a Marine would never do that. We would go in there and just kick ass.’ That’s what the Marines do, they break the door down and let the Army clean it up. So you’re not going to hear a Marine go, “My finger hurts!” They’re superhuman, these guys. So it is interesting when you see on the news a Marine coming out against the President, coming out against the Iraq war. Whoa. That’s pretty bold for a Marine.
Q: It’s also interesting talking to a Marine who has come home and is having a hard time adjusting. This guy in particular now has an alcohol problem. I know of someone else who came home and couldn’t go out for a couple of months because their reactions were always inappropriate – they’d be in a crowd and a kid would bump into them and their reaction would be a combat reaction.
Rollins: They’re picking the guy off the ground after he’s broken his trachea. A cop stops him for making an illegal left turn and he’s got the cop against the hood, and he goes to jail. Yeah. Vanity Fair, a magazine the girls get on the other side of the office but that I don’t read most of the time, they do have good feature articles once in a while, and there was an article talking about the alarming rise in vehicular deaths of returning Iraqi vets. They come home, buy one of those fast motorcycles and ride it into a tree. They can’t get the adrenaline any other way, and they’re just screwing up in their cars or driving drunk. But there’s this alarming rise in highway fatalities, and they keep pulling dead young Iraqi vets out of these wrecks.
I think in any war, in any traumatic experience, there’s potential for post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been shot at. I remember the first year after that it was very hard for me to be around people and not be very scary. I was a pretty hardcore person for a year. A photographer would go, ‘Henry, you’re looking through my lens… and through my head. Would you please be here?’ I realized, oh I must have that thousand yard stare thing going on. I would say some pretty crazy stuff to people, like ‘Watch me kill you.’ And I meant it. And a year later I was like, ‘Whoa… whoa! Who was that guy?’
That was one little experience I had. If you lived for a year with a heightened experience of that, seeing it, smelling it, administering it, and you come back to a strip mall? You come back to Joplin, Missouri and a Wal-Mart? To three kids and a wife? I sat in, in Kyrgyzstan, a seminar given to young men and women about to go home from their first rotation. It’s an hour long, and it’s basically guys who know sit a bunch of young men and women down and say, ‘OK, you’re about to go home. You’ve been fantasizing about your wife or girlfriend for a year now. It’s been a long time since you’ve had a beer. It’s been a while since you did this, this, this or this. You’re not going to do it all in one night when you come home, so don’t tell your wife, “Boy we’re gonna pull over in the bushes on the car ride home.” She doesn’t want that from you. She wants to reconnect with her husband, her boyfriend. Your wife has been being mom and dad while you were gone, so you don’t come home and start issuing directives. Your home is not the Army. You don’t give your wife orders. You don’t give orders to the kids. It’s going to take a while for you to readjust, and you do it on your wife’s terms, not on yours. Because she’s been running that house and wiping those butts for a year, not you.’
It was fascinating to sit there and listen to this guy because all of this stuff obviously came from case studies. They’ve gone out into the field and asked the questions. This is what they have to address, and it was fascinating. I’m so glad they let me sit in on that because it gave me a real insight into – it’s a glimpse into what these guys are going through when they get home.
So yeah, I think with the volume of young people going to Iraq and coming back, we’re going to have almost a generation – Generation Z Prime or whatever it is now – a generation of young people who are going to have some visible – well, this society is going to have to adjust to the needs and peculiarities of these young people.
Q: Do you think pop culture is addressing this stuff?
Rollins: To a certain degree. From the Bochco TV show Over There to bands writing songs – to Green Day, putting out American Idiot, obviously about Bush. To your movies, your George Clooneys and your Syrianas. So yeah, I think pop culture addresses anything in culture. In the Vietnam War you had protest songs, protests movements, rock and roll and protest seemed to come together in that era. So I think to a certain extent, yeah.
But I think the Iraq war is an MTV TV war, where it’s more like a video game to a lot of people. If you look at the advertising for the Army it went from pre-war, “Be all that you can be,” to ‘Hey man!’ this cool, drop D, Korn-sounding music – GUNG! GUNGGUNGGUNG! – ‘This could be you!’ Or the guy who comes back to the civilian world and is asked if he ever worked on an airplane before and he flashes back to Apaches and Chinooks, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been around it.’ MAN WITH BACKSTORY!
They have a shortfall with American recruitment, and now that we’re about to start our own little jihad on Iran, we’re going to need a lot more people in the Army.
Q: You really think we’re going to go into Iran?
Rollins: I think we really [need] the geography. This is just me talking out of my ass, but I think we need northern Iran so we can move gas and oil out of Turkmenistan. It’s why Clinton turned his view over here when the Taliban was destroying Afghanistan, because he needed southern Afghanistan to source oil and gas out of Turkmenistan. I think it’s all about that Unocal pipeline, or some version of it. Iraq and everything is about the Caspian oil reserves; no matter what country you want to get it out of, it’s the Caspian Sea. Basically it’s what Syriana the film addressed. It’s what the Rashid books are about, what he calls “the second phase of the great game.” It’s some great reading, and it makes you do some great thinking.
The other day when Condoleeza Rice was at Georgetown University speaking, someone asked the question of when are we going back into negotiations with Iran, and she said, ‘Talking with Iran is over with.’ I may be overreaching and underinformed, and I probably am, but to me that said, ‘I want a fight with Iran. I don’t want to sit down at the table, I would rather fight them and take Tehran so I can demonize them and get the UAEA and everyone else to go, “They’re bad, we’re good and we need to bring democracy to this place. And by the way, we’ll need a Halliburton pipeline and some software on those oil wells so no one but Halliburton can access them like they have in Iraq.”’
Another thing, and I don’t think at this point I’m speaking out of class, when I was in Afghanistan for the first time we met someone at the Baghram air base, and we said to this person, ‘Why are we here? Why are we in Afghanistan.’ The guy said, ‘Well, if you think it’s about democracy or whatever, it’s not true.’ And this is an Army guy. He said, ‘When you get home, learn everything you can about the Unocal pipeline, because that’s why we’re everywhere.’ My road manager and I said, duly noted, came back home, went back to the world, Googled Unocal, I started reading everything I could about it. He also said, ‘Look for us in the next two years-‘ and this is two years ago – ‘look for us to start moving into Pakistan and Iran.’ So when stuff happens now in the news I call my road manager and go, ‘Oooh! Oooh!’
The more you read and listen to guys like Thomas L Friedman, who a lot of people hate, and read these books by guys like Ahmed Rashid and Steve Coll, who wrote Ghost Wars, a Washington Post guy, and you see America’s relationship with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela – you see this whole thing is about that gas. And more and more if you follow the money you get to the heart of the Republicans, of the conservatives. Always. And to a certain extent Clinton. But really that’s their pulse, money and oil. So when you look at it through those goggles, Iraq nakedly shows itself out as a power grab, and basically getting good military positioning in that region to basically have Iran, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia.
I say it becomes a kill box for our guys. If we get into it with Iran (this is just me talking out my ass again. I’m such the Monday morning quarterback, on my bed in the sea of Dorito crumbs. I ripped that off from Dennis Miller. Anybody from Fox News could reduce me to sashimi in one minute, I would leave with my tail betwixt my legs) – but I think that when you put American forces pushing into Iran – and I am not into Iran having nuclear capability – you put our guys in a Shia sandwich. You’ve got unfriendly Shia behind you in Iraq and you’ve got unfriendly Shia in front of you in Iran, and I think we’re already in a bad kill box. We’re surrounded by unfriendly people.
Q: Who just keep coming in.
Rollins: Sieve-like. Here comes the rain, but it’s insurgents. When I was in Baghdad, they showed me a confiscated cache of weapons. All new RPGs, unused AK-47s, all packed in grease. I was like, wow this is real gear. Not bootleg knock-off, this is the real ****. They said, ‘Yeah, this is the good stuff.’ I said, ‘Where did you get this?’ They said, ‘This is a Syrian cache.’
I just visited a man who had part of his legs blown off – I do a lot of hospital visits with the USO. A few Sundays ago I was at Bethesda Medical – and he said, and this is a guy newly back and he’s a Marine, I think he knows what he’s talking about, he said, ‘Sir, we’re fighting Syrians now.’ I’ll believe him quicker than I’ll believe the President anytime, because he’s got his boots on the ground and he knows what he’s talking about. And it gibes with what I saw and what the reports are saying. And it sucks.
And it sucks that Bashar al-Assad – and at least he’s honest in that great interview he did with Amanpour that he did a few months ago. She will hold someone to a point. She said, ‘Don’t you think you should be policing your borders,’ and he said, ‘Why? It was better before America was here. The stability of my country really hinges on a stable Iraq, so I want them to leave. It was stable before they came.’ She said, ‘President Bush wants you to stabilize your border,’ and he said, ‘It’s not my job to police that border, and what am I going to do, build a fence to keep people who disagree with your presence in Iraq out? I disagree with your presence in Iraq.’ Now, I’m not into Bashar al-Assad, but at least the guy made a point.
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