The Daily Beast Podcast - Why No One Cared About the War in Afghanistan Until We Lost

Episode Date: November 5, 2023

Marine combat photographer Miles Lagoze tells The New Abnormal why Americans were more concerned about the optics of exiting Afghanistan than the mission itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with former Marine Combat photographer and documentary filmmaker Miles a Ghosts. And he's here to tell us all about his new book, Whistles from the Graveyard, My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan. But first, let's have some first. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips?

Clips. Come on, Daniel. You love it. Clip. I think you two did a really great job of this podcast this week, so I'm going to go easy on you at first. So this week we saw the fall of Vivek the Fake Realm Swami and his poll numbers, and I realized we had missed this clip from a few weeks ago. And I got to say, I hope this is what helped him fall because this is truly one of the most amazing things I've seen in a town hall. You've expressed some illogical and dangerous positions, just a lot of.

about everything under the sun, but I will only bring up a few points today. Okay. Just be respectful of everyone, but we'll pick your favorite ones. Thank you. Just a few years ago, we all saw firsthand the disastrous results when a ruthless capitalist, a scam artist, a showman, and a liar with no public service experience, became the President of the United States. And yet we are here again. My fellow New Hampshire residents are being manipulated by showmen and Trump wannabes to win

our votes. Mr. Ramzwamy, you may be a millionaire and you may know how to avoid paying taxes by incorporating companies in Bermuda but let's talk about your lack of job qualifications. You're not qualified to become the principal of my children's school of only 1,000 students. You're not qualified to be the select board of my town with a population of 16,000 people and you're definitely not qualified to run for the highest office of our nation

to govern 330 million Americans. Spewing nonsensical, fast-talking, empty words, interspersed with name-dropping Thomas Jefferson and George Washington should not be misconstrued as knowledgeable. We Americans should stop thinking that rich men who fund their campaigns and manipulate us into thinking that they're smart or savvy are qualified for the presidency to receive the codes to launch nuclear weapons and to become the commander-in-chief of our military forces. I don't know who that woman is, but she has my vote. She can run for whatever the fuck she wants to run for, and I will cast a ballot for her.

Bravo. I've never seen such a prepared audience member of a town hall ever. Well done. I agree with all of that, except that this really did have the feeling of a, I don't know if any of you have ever, like, gotten to see a movie or something like that, where there was a panel discussion afterwards and they take questions from the audience. And someone from the audience says, well, this is more of a comment than a question. Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely. It was like, is there a question in here somewhere?

But look, everything she said was fantastic. So I kid, I kid, but that was great. Danielle, I do have to take some umbrage with what you said here. Ken bone erasure is all I'm going to say. Ken bone. My God. He's on a cameo. Oh, really?

Yep. And Danielle has a birthday coming. Oh, this is true. No, dear. I have to say, though, I would prefer that Vivek's falling numbers and the fact that his disapproval rocked it up so I was really just that people listened to him talk. And it wasn't her, but I really do applaud her for that because that was amazing. Yeah. Okay.

Well, now we get to the bad stuff. So a thing I always think of is Bill O'Reilly is why we have Jesse Waters. And we're going to watch Jesse honor his mentor with his best imitation. here. For those who don't remember, O'Reilly would love to yell and bluster whenever a liberal proved him wrong. So here we have Jesse versus the five's Jessica Tarloff. Is that your smoking gun? Is that your smoking gun, Jessica? Because you said that was a smoking gun. If money went from overseas directly into Joe Biden's bank account, if a check comes out at some point from that avenue, is that a smoking gun? Is that a smoke?

smoking gun. Okay. So two things. Yes or no? Yes or no? It's not. It's not. Well, Jessica, for a year, you said, oh, well, then money never hit his bank account. What if I have a check that hits his bank account that comes from overseas? Okay. Is that not a smoking gun? Okay. Is he in elected office and did he do something about it? So that check, that 2018 check, when he was not doing anything except hanging around and there was an explanation for it. So if you get a check and then you can connect that to an action that he took. Oh, no, now it's an action that he took. That is always...

Now it's just an action that he took because before you said, none of the money from overseas went into his checking account. So now it's an action. You are yelling and there is no reason for it. There's reason. I was promised a smoking gun and if I deliver a smoking gun,

you have to admit that gun is smoking. Excuse me, can I just say something to all the guns out there? Don't smoke. Oh. Oh my God. People yell when they don't ever have anything to say. And also, I have a smoking gun.

Bear with me. Two billion dollars being given to Jared Kushner's business from Mohammed bin Salam. Two months after he exits the Trump administration, foreign money in a bank account, in a very close proximity of time from when he was a special advisor with security clearance that he shouldn't have fucking received to receiving $2 billion from the Saudis. I'm just saying smoke and gun, there you have it. Look, Jessica Tarloff is good people and I for the life of me don't know how she continues to work there and just get yelled at all day. She's okay with that. so that's fine.

No judgment. I just, I don't get it. Jesse Waters is, I believe I've mentioned this before, the dumbest person on cable news. He's also an asshole. I don't know if I say that enough.

And look, I know people are going to say, people who know him off air or whatever, and say, no, he's a really nice guy off air. I don't give a fuck. Like, if that's your on-air persona, you're an asshole.

And it doesn't matter that it's just a persona. Because if you think that persona is in any way a good thing or something that you should be doing, then you're an asshole. So he is the dumbest person on cable news and also an asshole. And the underscored part of that is how bad Greg Gutfeld's joke was at the end of that segment, which truly one of the worst I've heard.

Yeah, I'll give Greg a pass on that because he was just trying to diffuse a situation, which I think actually is a good thing. The quality of the ad lib aside, they're not all. I don't know why I'm defending him at this point. But that doesn't bother me that much because at least he was trying to do the right thing. I don't know. Good point. All right. Now we get to a man or a psychopath.

I'll let you two take your pick. No. Who represents the not-so-great state of Florida, one congressman, Brian Mast. He's here addressing the four in Congress, and it's going to get Florida. As a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians during World War. or two. Jesus Christ. I mean, let me get this out. I do not care what your view is on what is happening in Israel slash Palestine slash Gaza right now when it comes to this. There is no excuse for what he

said. What he said was utterly fucking reprehensible. And he has no business being in Congress and saying shit like that. And the fact that nothing is going to happen to him for saying that he's not going to be censured or anything like that is an absolute stain on the institution of Congress. It's pretty good bike drop. Danielle, do you have anything? You're welcome. I don't even know what to say about what he stated. The fact is that that is going into the congressional record, which is incredibly problematic,

that he, like Andy just said, there will be no repercussions. He is a member of Congress. He represents constituents. And this is the hot shit that came out of his mouth. Thousands of children have been killed. That is not something to take lightly. Again, I don't care what side you fall on. You should fall on humanity.

And those statements are anything but. You want to talk about a piece of trash? You want to talk about a trash fucking human? Welcome. Can we like marbleize him in the Hall of Fame of fuck that? I know we're not in the fuck that guy segment. But that guy, this motherfucker, fuck that guy. We could put him as a statue in that's stupid.

a performative thing he did wearing an IDF uniform around Congress all week. Yeah, and as long as the statue is actually a pile of shit with his name on it, because that will be accurate. So let that be what it is. All right. I'm going to let you guys down easy from this last one. I think that this clip really, like when we hear Trump calling Biden's Sleepy Joe, this is the sleepiest cable news hit I have ever seen in my life.

Here we have one Ben Carson, who you may remember. remember him for having gifted hands, not the most gifted brain, and running a failed presidential campaign. Here he is doing a thing that we see here on this segment often, which is trying to come up with a justification for crazy shit Trump said on a whim. But I also just want to raise to you, you know, former President Trump has openly mused on his social media platform about terminating the Constitution. How does that factor into defending American democracy? Well, I think you have to look at the context of what things were said, how they were said,

you know, and which parts of the Constitution are you talking about? Are there any parts of the Constitution that should be terminated? There are no parts of it that should be terminated, but they need to be well-interpreted. They need to be looked at in the right way. For instance, you have people who are trying to take away people's rights to bear arms. You know, and they said that part should be terminated. That's not true. But, you know, you can make strong arguments.

But the key thing that we have to do as a nation at this point, we have some very major differences. We have one group of individuals who feels that our country should be people-centric, and we have another group that feels that it should be government-centric. They need to be able to sit down at the table, put the facts in the middle of the table, and resolve their differences by discussing the facts and how they can both use those things in an appropriate way. Anyone? Sorry, I was napping. I fell asleep.

It was weird. I was waiting for an alarm. And that didn't happen. I don't know how one could have been so gifted and celebrated at one time and then land here. What a wild journey life is. That's what I'll say about Ben Carson. What a wild journey is life. It just points out that people have skills in one area and they don't necessarily translate.

Like, I could never be a brain surgeon and Ben Carson, by all accounts, was an amazing brain surgeon. Ben Carson, I don't think could ever be a podcast host. I just don't think he has the skills that I have. He could absolutely put you to sleep. And if that is the kind of podcast that you are looking for at the end of a long day, I think he's... It's ironically, people use white noise to fall asleep, but in this case... Oh, thanks everybody.

Good night. That's the end of this episode. Jesus. Oh. Miles Lagozi was a marine combat photographer or combat camera, as they're known, whose 2018 documentary Combat Obscuro was a critically acclaimed film composed of footage he and others shot in Afghanistan. And now he's written about what it was like serving in the Corps in his new book,

Whistles from the Graveyard by Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in America. He joins us now to talk about it. Miles, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having it. So before we get to the book, for people who do, don't know. The Marine Corps was not a big fan of combat obscure, was it? No, they tried to sue me. Yeah. So I bring this up only because in some ways the book serves as a making of for the film. So you go into the story in the book of how the Corps tried to sue you, but I wanted to let people

know that they took a sort of adversarial stance to the work you were doing. But let's talk about the book. I know the Army and the Marines are different beasts and I was Army, but I have to admit that I was shocked at your descriptions of Marine boot camp with suicide attempts, drill instructors that went beyond the label of tough and into one more like sadistic. Not that Army basic training was fun, but this truly sounded like hell. I think the Marine Corps has a very different boot camp. And it's basically designed, I guess the most common thing was to try to make us a vomit as much as we could.

They'd make a eat a lot and at IT, which IT means intensive training. which just means hazing. It was a totally brutal experience for an 18-0. The Great Corps is all 18-year-olds, fresh out of high school. It's not like, you know, Army boot camp or Air Force. It's much more hazing. Yeah, it really sounded god-awful. And, like, I was just in shock that they were still in the day and age when you went through.

I was shocked that they were allowed to still do a lot of the shit that you described. So you had the Vietnam guys, right? The Vietnam guys who were getting trained to go to Vietnam were getting trained by Korean vets, Green of War vets. And then the Gulf War kids were not getting trained by anyone who had seen combat. But then once Afghanistan kicked off, Iraq kicked off, and by the time I joined in 2008,

the drill instructors that we had, some of these guys had like two purple hearts. You know, they'd been shot multiple times. You know, they were going through their own shit. They unleashed that on us. That's a really good point because I was in from 2000 to 2003. So I was a Gulf War kid. And you're absolutely right.

None of my drill sergeants, as they're called in the Army, I don't think any of them had seen combat at all. So it was just a completely different beast. And that's a really good point. You get out of boot and you get out of your combat camera training. Yeah. You get to Afghanistan. And then on an early deployment, you somehow end up, you go some video

that you shot goes viral on YouTube, those video of a Marine sniper, I think, right? Yes, these snipers, you know, the biggest problem I had with snipers was that the main mantra was it's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6th, which means it's better to kill somebody and save the life of a fellow Marine than it is to be judged in a court for killing that person. Stapro's just had that kind of built-in mindset to shoot first, ask questions later. Filming them was kind of a very interesting experience because I didn't know how much the camera was influencing their decision. Because when you win the Marines, the Marines, when they're on camera, they want to kill. Marines are meant to kill.

That's our main thing, right, is to kill. When you have a camera on there, it changes everything. It changes the whole aspect. And so a lot of snipers, you know, I saw a lot of civilians killed by snipers who would say, you know, he was acting suspicious or these people were unarmed. They had no radio. If you had a radio, at least you could be spotting. Spotting basically means you're watching our movement. So the shooters, the Taliban shooters, can know where we're at.

But they would shoot a lot of people that had no radios, that had no weapons, they were just acting suspicious. And it was all under the umbrella of war is hell, you know, and it's better to save the life of a Marine by taking the shot than it is to kill a civilian. At the time, that was a very understandable thing. But as time goes on, you start to realize, wait a minute, we were in somebody else's country where we didn't understand how the people behaved, what they were doing half the time. If somebody looks, I mean, what does that mean? Somebody looks like they're acting in a military manner. What's a military manner? Yeah.

And I've talked about this with the snipers. And a lot of them are still convinced that they killed the right people. Even when I had video evidence of a guy who has no weapon, no radio. The locals say he's mentally handicapped. And the snipers say he was using kids as a shield. And they said, no, he was playing with the kids. He's mentally disabled. He was playing with the kids.

And so they kill this guy. These things happen all the time. They're not reported. The death toll in Afghanistan has been way, way underreport in terms of civilian deaths from drone strikes, from night raids, special forces especially. They get this intel that they're going to go raid this house and they end up shooting up a whole town. And that shit is way underreported.

Yeah, it's truly frightening. And reading the book like yours really laid bare. just how far from the truth the official word is, the official numbers, the official mission statements, everything. The main question is, the sentiment really give a shit. Right. When they pulled out, there's no graceful way to lose a war. After 20 years, there's no graceful way to lose a war.

But I feel like the thing that most Americans were upset about was the optics and how it looked. Yep. Because no one gave a shit about the war for 20 years. It's the longest war in American history. Nobody cared about it until we pulled out. Yeah, I don't think there's any way to disagree with that. I want to get back to something that you said in telling the story about the sniper just now and you talked about how much you filming them, shooting them, affected what happened. Because it's a theme sort of throughout your book. And you write, at one point, you write, if it's a movie, it's easier. And that seemed to apply both to the Marines you were filming and also to you while you were over there. Absolutely. We were all reared on the most anti-war movies that were made. I mean, full little jacket, right? I mean, that was the main recruiting movie for us. You know, as I've gotten older, it's probably the most anti-war movie you could imagine. Right. You know, it's almost a satire of war. Yeah. But this movie recruited so many kids. When you get behind the camera and you're filming them, they want to see themselves, right? They want, it's almost like a super. They want to see themselves in action.

So when I would arrive, because I was bouncing around a lot, I was going to different cartoons and area, we call them aos, it just means area of operations. When I would arrive, they would go looking to get into some shit because the camera was there. There's a complicity with the camera that is always present, especially in the YouTube selfie state generation. Right. Yeah, and you write about how proud you were, you know, you shot some video that, and you would show it to people and they would say, oh, it's like Black Hawk down. And you made it clear in the

book that at that time, you were like, hell yeah, I'm really proud of that. You know, because when you grow up on war movies and then you film the war and it looks like a war movie, and also you want to meet people's expectations. Right. When you get back home, you know, you go through this shit. It's nothing like the movie. It's absolutely nothing like to move. Right. In the movies, there's always some ground amorphous enemy that you can see, they gun them down and they get shot in a very kind of silly action movie kind of way. In the real war, you don't see them. All you have are the rounds popping overhead, whizzes and cracks and pops, and then mortars. You don't see them. You never see the enemy. The only person I knew on my deployment who saw the enemy

was a kid who got shot. So if you see the enemy, you're not doing good. We have, you It had all been reared on kind of fake adaptations, fake expectations of what war was like. And when you come back, you want to meet those people's expectations, you know, so you tell them stories. And even when they watch the footage, they think, you know, even my dad said, it's like, you guys would smoke weed, you know, all that shit. There's sort of a feedback. Right.

I think that's perfect. One thing I thought was interesting, though, is that you did also in the book, you do sort of compare the reality of what you saw in Afghanistan to a movie, but it's not a war movie. It was the Larry Clark movie, Kids. And one of the things you wrote was, you say, what people didn't understand about our wars was that they weren't run by the politicians or generals or even the defense contractors or corporations. They were run by 18 to 23 year old kids without college degrees and little on their minds besides getting some trigger time. And I thought, like, that was an unbelievable comparison to compare it to the movie kids. It just, it nailed it so completely, it feels like that.

like. Kids is a similar film to a war movie in a lot of ways. I mean, it's like, um, it is like full metal jacket in the sense that there's a initiation, a kind of adolescent recklessness. And a lot of kids who join the Marines, they say patriotism serving the country, but the real underlying thing is that they want to get shot at. They want to go to war. They want to experience it and they want to know what it feels like because an American when you're growing up in America as a young man is trying to challenge themselves and that's kind of the ultimate ticket. Yeah. And you write about a guy in the book who actually not once but twice ended up, he gave himself, well, there's no other way to give yourself a self-inflicted wound. I mean, he self-inflicted wounds

on himself twice. Yeah. Because he wanted to feel that. I think he wanted to go up home and tell you know, I think he wanted to tell his family that he had seen some shit. He'd got hit. Yeah, that he was in the shit as an expression we all know from a full metal jacket. There was so much in the book that I'm not going to have time to get to. I want to sort of jump to there's a couple of points you make that in sort of comparing or talking about how the wars over there sort of feed back to overhear. In one instance, you talk about the same drones we use in Afghanistan would be utilized without people's knowledge. a few years later during the Freddie Gray protest in Baltimore.

And you talk about sitting in the middle of the projects in Harlem and you'd see an MRAP, a mind-resistant ambush protected vehicle and all this stuff still in desert camouflage because they didn't even bother to change the paint. Every war is an experiment in some sense. You're testing new equipment. World War II was the Adam bomb. Vietnam was napalm. Afghanistan and Iraq was constant.

drone surveillance, constant drone strikes, every war is an experiment. This shit, all the shit that we use out there, the fucking surveillance blimps. We have these stupid blimps. It literally had these blimps in the sky, right? Watching the people 24-set, even at a, like, I think they could see through their mud walls.

And we still had no fucking clue who the fucking enemy was. But still, because the defense contracting and all that shit, all that shit gets recycled back to American soil. It's coming back in so many different ways. There's a huge fetishization of military, especially like special forces, kind of attire, right? You see a lot of these guys on Joe Rogan talking about, oh, yeah, how many guys they killed out there. I'll tell you one thing. Special forces were bullshit. They would come in, so we would be staying in a fucking AO for eight months.

Eight months we would be stuck in this area where we'd be getting shot at, blown up, etc. These special forces guys, these Navy SEALs, Green Berets, who didn't have to shave, they could have that beer, they didn't have to wear uniforms. So they just kind of look like lumberjacks, I guess. They would come in and they would just get fucked up. They would get shot to hell. they would stir the pot and we would have to clean up their mess. Yeah. And we lost so many guys because these special forces assholes

who would come in on their fucking birds and stay for literally a week. They would stay for a week. They'd get shot to hell. They, you know, maybe dropped like 100 bombs and then they go back to the main base. And we were stuck to clean up that mess. That's a side thing.

But the whole militarization, the whole aspect of being at war for 20 years, has made such an impact on American society, American culture, what we wear, the guns, the fucking flag jackets, the fucking helmets. You look at January 6th, these guys were totally attacked up. I knew guys who were at January 6th in my unit. You talk about your friend Dave. Yeah.

You have a quote from him, I'm running out of time, but this is an important point, I think. You quote your friend Dave, who was a fellow Marine, and he says, you want to know why there's an insurgency in America? Because we've been fighting one for the past 20. years. Yeah. And you sort of, you bring that up at the beginning of the book. And then at the end, it's clear that what he's talking about is January 6th and about how many veterans were there and how much, even the guys who weren't veterans, like you said, all cop the look and the quote unquote style of soldiers and Marines. That's their culture. It's become a total fetishization of the military

entire and all that shit. Miles, I'm unfortunately out of time. I got to say this book was tremendous. It's a harrowing read, and there's so much stuff I didn't get to touch on. So I really encourage all our listeners to go out and pick it up and check out Combat Obscura, which is available on To Be right now. Miles, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus. Calder.

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