A Letter We Wish Someone Would have Written to Us
español -
Apr 24, 2026 / Rubicon & Griobhtha, and Juan Idalgo / Crossing Rubicons - World War 1, the “War to end all wars” killed 30-40 million people. Version 2.0 of the “War to end all wars” killed double that. Since 1945, the United States has killed approximately 20 million people around the globe through direct slaughter. Korea killed millions, mostly innocent civilians, Vietnam killed millions more, mostly innocent civilians. When you add in proxy wars, sanctions, deliberate starvation of populations and withholding of medicine and care (“to teach them a lesson”), the number conservatively reaches 45-50 million aggressively culled. When you add in the other Western colonial powers, the figures double again.
We’re writing to you because nobody else will — not like this.
Not your recruiter. Not your coach who “served.” Not the teacher who told you the military would “make a man out of you.” Not the influencer with the sponsorship deal and the gun she’s never fired at a living thing. Not the politician who’ll send you to die and then stand at your funeral with a flag and a speech full of words he stole from better men.
We’re writing to you because two of us were you, and three of us have spent a lifetime examining the chaos.
Rubicon was eighteen once. He loved music — Boston, Styx, Kansas, Dire Straits. He wanted nothing more than to work, earn some money, and move to California. But the economy was a sunken shit-hole with double digit unemployment, and every corporation was screwing Americans to manufacture overseas in order to increase profits. No work is no work, and he began to wonder what the hell he was going to do. One night at a polka fest — beer, bratwurst, dancing with pretty girls — he spoke with a just-enlisted young man in the Air Force. After much conversation, he thought he’d try it.
Change the songs and the bands, change the party, it’s still the same. Recall the movies and TV you were indoctrinated with since you were five, or the ROTC/JrROTC every school is paid to promote to you. That’s how it starts. Not with drums and flags. Not with some dramatic oath. It starts with no work and a conversation at a party, and the preinstalled propaganda from youth.
What followed was something the United States government authorized for publication only under the condition that it “appear to be fictional.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reviewed the account, confirmed it, and then put that condition on it — because the truth of what happened to an eighteen-year-old American boy in CIA proxy wars in Central America is so ugly that the government’s own intelligence apparatus would rather you believe it’s made up.
Think about that for a minute. Really think about it.
The government confirmed the story. And then told us to make it look fake.
We didn’t. We published it as what it is: the verified first-person account of a young man who was recruited, conditioned, trained to kill, deployed into classified covert operations, and then, when he refused to continue, was stripped of every award he’d earned and thrown away like a used tool. Because that’s what “GI” means — GI Joe or GI Jane – Government Issue. You are issued. You are property. And when the owner is done with you, you are disposed of.
This letter is the pause that nobody gave Rubicon or Sean. We’re giving it to you.
They’re Hunting You
We need you to understand something, and we need you to understand it clearly: you are being hunted.
Not by a foreign enemy. By your own country.
The United States military has a problem. It needs bodies. Not minds — bodies. It needs young bodies that can run, carry, fight, bleed, and break. It needs them before those bodies are old enough to fully understand what they’re agreeing to. It needs them before their brains are finished developing. And it has built an enormous, sophisticated, well-funded machinery to catch you before you’re ready to say no.
This isn’t conspiracy theory. This is documented, observable, and everywhere you look — once you know how to look.
Let’s show you how to look.
The Trap Has Many Doors
False Flags and Wars Built on Lies
Every American war of the last seventy years has been sold on a lie. “The Domino Theory” of hysterical Russophobia and Sinophobia that launched war all over SE Asia, including Korea and Vietnam — fabricated. The Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that expanded Vietnam — fabricated. The “weapons of mass destruction” that launched the Iraq invasion — fabricated. Osama bin Laden is an Afghan terrorist – fabricated. “Poor” Israel is a victim — fabricated, The pretexts for interventions across Central America, the Middle East, Africa — lies stacked on lies, sold to a public too comfortable or too afraid or too ignorant to question them.
You will be asked, cajoled, demanded to kill and bleed for these lies. Not in the abstract. With your hands. With your body in the dirt. And when the lie is finally admitted — years later, quietly, on page twelve of a newspaper nobody reads, or an online source no one can find — you’ll be the one carrying the dead in your dreams every night for the rest of your life.
Nobody is coming to apologize to you. Nobody is coming to un-kill the people you killed. And nobody is going to un-dream the dreams.
Movies, TV, Video Games — The Glory Machine
You’ve been watching military propaganda since before you could tie your shoes. Top Gun is a recruitment film — the Navy’s own recruitment numbers spiked after it. Call of Duty doesn’t just desensitize you to killing; it teaches you to associate killing with reward, with achievement, with fun – and the Pentagon helps pay for its development and advertising. The Pentagon has a formal entertainment liaison office that reviews Hollywood scripts and provides money, equipment, and access in exchange for the “right” portrayal of the military, and the “right” portrayal of those who they want you to view as “enemies”.
They don’t show you the veteran sleeping in his car. They don’t show you the twenty-two suicides per day (conservative VA figures) – doubled by legitimate researchers to 44 suicides per day when the figures of self-inflicted harm and overdose, not flagged as suicide, are thrown in. They don’t show you the woman whose husband pins her against the wall because his brain can’t stop replaying a firefight from twelve years ago, or the man choking the woman he loves because he feels the “threat response”. They don’t show you the man who sees blood on his hands when the weather gets hot and humid — forty years after the last operation. They don’t show you the guy at the Memorial Day parade who never saw combat pretending to be a hero while actual combat veterans sit at home unable to watch. You DO see the pretenders proudly wearing campaign hats they were never in or never saw combat in. You DO hear the pretenders telling you they were in conflicts and actions they were never in.
They show you the flight suit and the explosion and the girl/boy waiting at home. That’s all they need to show you.
“Comrade, I did not want to kill you... But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
The God Honeypot — Religious Propaganda — Praying For Slaughter
Many of you are religious. But ask yourself deeply what that means in relation to war. In churches across America, the military is blessed from the pulpit. Troops are “prayed over” before deployment. Chaplains serve the institution, not your soul. The God they invoke is not the Jesus of Nazareth who said “those who live by the sword shall die by the sword” — it’s a manufactured deity, a war god dressed in Christian robes, a Neo-Jesus whose entire purpose is to make you feel righteous about killing strangers.
“The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel’d priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher’s sword,
And poureth freely (now as then!)
The sacramental blood of Men!”
...
See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chaunt his praise and worship him --
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian, Jew, Muslim, and Atheist meet!
A wondrous god! most fit for those
Who cheat on ‘Change, then creep to prayer;
Blood on his heavenly alter flows,
Hell’s burning incense fills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
— Robert Buchanan in New Rome
G.A. Borgese documented this mechanism in his study of fascism: “Religion... is a valuable asset of the State and must be protected and fostered as such.” The state doesn’t believe in God. It believes in your belief in God. And it will use that belief to put a rifle in your hands and tell you that God wants you to pull the trigger. But you have the skill and ability to read the text yourself without interpretation. We’ve brought up WW1. At the end of that debacle Upton Sinclair published an impassioned critique of the religion that drew young men into the God Honeypot. “The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are better then the Catholic, but not much better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to do.” – Upton Sinclair, The Profits Of Religion
Your heart actually contains cells equivalent to brain neurons, in other words, your heart has the ability to think as feeling and communicate that. Part of the job of developing your frontal lobe properly is getting those neurons and your upper brain and base brain communicating in concert, a symphony of checks and balances. Growing requires juxtaposing work that you must do to understand religion and faith, and YOU must do this, and not accept the pre-made self-serving interpretations of Holy Rollers.
The Greatest Love is Defense:
“Greater Love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” – John 15:13
“My prayer, my sacrifice, my life and my death are for Allah, Lord of the worlds.” (Quran 6:162)
“And those who strive for Us — We will surely guide them to Our ways. And indeed, Allah is with the doers of good.” (Quran 29:69)
“And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression.” (Quran 5:2)
“And let not those of virtue among you and wealth swear not to give to their relatives and the needy and the emigrants in the cause of Allah; and let them pardon and overlook. Do you not love that Allah should forgive you?” (Quran 24:22)
Hadith — “The best of people are those that bring most benefit to the rest of mankind.”
Hadith — On compassion and protecting others: the Prophet said, “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Sahih al‑Bukhari & Sahih Muslim; phrasing varies)
Life Begets Life, violence begets violence, aggressors suffer, unjust killing is punished:
“Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword” – Matthew 26:52
“Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land — it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one — it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.” (Quran 5:32)
“O you who have believed, retaliate in the way that is equitable. And if you forgive and overlook, then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (Quran 2:178–179 context of qisas and restraint) — frames retaliation as legally bounded and elevates forgiveness.
Hadith — The Prophet condemned unjust aggression and warned of consequences: “Do not commit treachery, nor be treacherous, nor be cowardly, nor be stingy; do not mutilate the dead.” (Sunan Abu Dawud)
Hadith — On reciprocal harm and divine justice: “Whoever harms a believer in this world, Allah will harm him.” (paraphrase of reports found in hadith literature) — expresses that harming others brings harm upon the wrongdoer.
Defense is NOT Aggression:
Christian / New Testament
- “Put away your sword. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” — Matthew 26:52 (ESV).
- “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” — Matthew 5:9 (ESV).
- “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. … If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” — Romans 12:17–18 (ESV).
Qur’an
- “And do not kill the soul which Allah has forbidden” — Quran 6:151.
- “And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression.” — Quran 5:2.
- “And fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors.” — Quran 2:190
- “And if they incline to peace, then incline to it [also] and rely upon Allah.” — Quran 8:61.
Hadith (sayings of Muhammad)
- “None of you should be a treacherous aggressor.”
- “The strong man is not the one who overcomes people by his strength, but the strong one is who controls himself while in anger.”
- “Do not kill a child, nor an aged person, nor a sick one, nor a woman.” — (prophetic instructions given to armies in classical hadith literature; see multiple collections).
Once again… “The sole purpose of the military is to kill and support killing” — X Rubicon, Praying For Slaughter
Bully Propaganda — John Bull, Uncle Sam, and White Feathers
This one is old. During World War One, women in Britain were organized into the Order of the White Feather. Their job was simple: walk up to any young man not in uniform and hand him a white feather — the symbol of cowardice. Shame him. Humiliate him. Make him feel like less than a man, and it worked, and he enlisted and marched to the Somme and died in the mud.
The tactics have changed. The principle hasn’t. If you don’t “support the troops,” you’re un-American. If you question the war, you’re a coward. If you refuse to serve, you’re not a real man. This pressure comes from everywhere — family, school, media, social media — and it’s designed to bypass your thinking brain and hit you right in the gut where your identity lives. Where your pride lives. Where your desperate need to belong lives.
They know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been doing it for centuries.
The Gender Honeypots
This is where it gets personal. This is where they come for you — not as a generation, but as you. As the specific person you are right now, with the specific hungers and fears and loneliness and ambitions you carry.
Female Honeypots — The E-Girls
In the last ten years the number of photos of girlz with gunz — naked, half naked, bikini, tight shirt, no bra, shaking breasts, pointed nipples, long clean hair, and ALWAYS full makeup — holding automatic weapons and rocket launchers has exploded. Using women to goad or shame men into combat goes back even farther than White Feathers in WW1. The Israelis set the stage for a more pornographic form of enticement, and the US military has joined in with both balls. One ball for men to believe women are just waiting to fuck them if they join; and one ball to entice women into believing they are the hot model in the pic.
Let’s be clear about what’s happening here.
Alan MacLeod and Mnar Adley at MintPress News documented this in detail: the US military is actively using “E-girls” — attractive young women with curated social media presences — to recruit Gen Z into service. The titles of his and Mnar’s reports tell you everything: From Simp to Soldier: How the Military is Using E-Girls To Recruit Gen Z Into Service, and Thirst Trap Nation: How E-girls Are Luring Young Boys Into Joining Army. — Mnar Adley , Mint Press News
If you’re a young man reading this: that girl in the bikini holding the AR-15 on Instagram; or the model in combat gear with automatic weapon and bandoleer? She’s not waiting for you. She’s bait. The military is using your loneliness, your horniness, your desire to be seen as strong and attractive, to lure you into a contract that will own your body for years. She is a sales tool. She’ll never know your name and you will never see her in the military. And when you come back missing a leg or unable to sleep without screaming, she’ll still be posting photos for the next batch of boys.
That’s not cynicism. That’s the business model.
Male Honeypots — The Pretend Fathers
This one cuts deeper, and we need you to hear it.
“Trust. Think about it. How many people have you trusted? How many people would you trust... with your life? When you were younger? Your parents? Your friends? When you grew up in a solidly patriotic town? When everyone around you saw the same “enemies”? When people with degrees and important positions assured you that your country is “the greatest country on Earth”? When no work is available? When killing is presented as “opportunity”?” — X Rubicon, Final Rest Camp
“If your “teacher”, whom you “trust”, who presents themself as a “parent figure” to you, who self-presents wisdom to you, offers you the “opportunity” to join the military, who presents themself as an “expert” because they proudly had a father or grandfather in the military, in the “great war”, and they “wish” they could have participated, would you respond like this?
“Mr. Mida I have spent most of my life dodging bullets and dodging drive-by shootings. At least now I can get paid to do it. I’ll be getting shot and killing at no matter if I enlist or not. At least over there I won’t go to jail for it.”
This is an actual response provided to Sean by a teacher in our local school district. It was seen as positive and presented as an argument, a justification, an armchair warrior’s pride, a non-combat pretender’s excuse for patriotism and encouraging immoral attitude and behavior, and casually throwing the life of a young man to the Dogs.
Kinda warms your heart, doesn’t it? To be considered so worthless to the system that you are encouraged to go kill to “make something of yourself.”
That teacher never saw combat. Never held a dying friend. Never woke up with the sheets soaked in sweat from dreaming about a head he cut off a body. He’s what we call a Non-Combat Pretender — a Virgin Talking About Sex. He’s playing the role of the wise elder, the manly parental figure, the man who knows the way. He knows nothing! But he has authority over you. He has the power of trust. And he’s using it to feed you into the machine.
We call them Male Honeypots because that’s what they are. They bait the trap with the thing you’re most hungry for: a father figure, a mentor, someone who says “I see you” and “you matter” and “I’ll show you the way.” The military knows that many of you don’t have that. It knows you’re looking for it. And it sends these pretenders into your schools, your churches, your neighborhoods, to perform the role of the caring elder — so they can hand you off to an institution that will use you, break you, and throw you away.
Financial Honeypots — The Signing Bonus
When no work is available and the economy is designed to keep you desperate, a signing bonus looks like salvation. Free college. A paycheck. Benefits. A way out.
This is not opportunity. This is structural compulsion. When your only road to education, healthcare, or stability runs through an institution whose sole purpose is to kill and support killing, you are not being offered a choice. You are being cornered.
Rubicon’s path was exactly this. “No work is no work,” he wrote. The economy pushed him toward enlistment the way a funnel pushes water toward the drain. And once he was in, the trap closed.
Ask yourself: How much is my sight worth? How much is my arm worth? How much are my legs worth? How much is my life worth? How much is my lifelong sanity worth? How many men, women, and children am I willing to kill or allow to be killed before I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I’ve done?
No signing bonus covers that.
Unemployment — The Oldest Trap
Every empire in history has used unemployment to fill its armies. Rome did it. Britain did it. America does it now. Those they don’t need are kept from considering your plight by bread and circus. A volunteer force for colonial power is unsustainable without lies and unemployment. When the economy works for everyone, recruitment numbers drop. The military needs you poor. It needs you desperate. It needs you to see no other door.
This is not an accident. This is policy.
Legal Sentencing — The Prison-to-Military Pipeline
Judges in America still offer military service as an alternative to incarceration. Think about what that says. The institution that exists to kill is presented as moral education. As rehabilitation. As though learning to shoot a rifle in a foreign country will straighten out a kid who got caught selling weed. This is not justice. This is disposal. And when young men with smaller crimes, who should be offered help and counseling and education, are told they should join the infantry and learn to increase the scale of their crimes with a gun, that’s just obscene!
The Application of Glory — Addiction
And underneath all of it, there’s the rush. The glory. The high. The feeling of being special, of being chosen, of being part of something bigger than yourself. The military sells this feeling the way a dealer sells the first hit. It’s intoxicating. And like any drug, it requires increasing doses. More danger. More violence. More adrenaline. Until you can’t function without it, and you can’t function with it either, and you’re caught in a loop that grinds through the rest of your life.
All of these presuppose an acceptance of country over morality, and of capital over humanity. In all cases the military is presented as an “opportunity.” All of this occurs in a country whose Founders, at least in moral thought, stated that a standing army is an evil and is anathema to democracy.
Boyz With Toyz — And Girlz Too
Now we need to tell you about another lie — one of the most dangerous lies of the current moment.
The lie is that war is a “man’s thing” or that you are a “Warrior”. That this sickness of glorifying violence belongs only to the male sex. That if only women ran things, we’d all be holding hands in a meadow; or, opposingly and ironically, that women are weak and men need to be Warriors; and then further the feminist antagonist is flipped into an agonist.
This is fantasy. And it has been used — deliberately, cynically — to put a progressive face on the machinery of slaughter. Myths are what make the machinery turn, and women are presented with their own myths, for them, but meant to produce the same goading and senselessness.
The Warrior Princess Myth
If you’re a young woman reading this, they’re coming for you too. And they’re using different bait, but the trap is the same.
The feminist and military-entertainment complexes have spent decades building a mythology specifically for you. Wonder Woman. Black Widow. She-Ra. Storm. Rogue. Captain Marvel. The Warrior Princess archetype — beautiful, powerful, righteous, fighting on the side of good with perfect hair and gleaming armor.
Wonder Woman deserves special attention, because she is the completely mythical Amazon — the warrior-woman of Greek legend, a society of female fighters that never existed as described, but whose myth has been weaponized for modern recruitment. She represents an impossible ideal: a woman who fights with devastating violence but remains morally pure, physically unmarked, emotionally whole. A woman who kills without consequence — and never breaks a nail and her makeup never runs.
Nobody kills without consequence. Nobody.
The historian Edward Gibbon debunked this Amazonian myth in the late 1700’s. Borgese, who mapped the anatomy of fascism and the romantic myths that feed it, would have recognized this instantly. The Warrior Princess is the female version of the same romantic lie he diagnosed in Mussolini’s Italy: the lie that violence is heroism, that combat is glory, that the warrior is spiritually superior to the civilian, that “war is the highest human endeavor”. Whether the warrior is a man in armor or a woman in a bustier, the lie is the same. And it feeds the same machine.
Here’s what the Warrior Princess mythology doesn’t tell you:
It doesn’t tell you about Military Sexual Trauma — the epidemic of rape and sexual assault within the armed forces that the DoD’s own reports document year after year. It doesn’t tell you that reporting it can end your career faster than the assault itself. It doesn’t tell you that the institution designed to protect you will often protect your assailant instead, because he/she has rank and you don’t – because the military isn’t a Patriarchy, it’s an absolute aristocracy, and you will suffer at female authoritarian hands equally.
It doesn’t tell you that women veterans have the fastest-growing rate of suicide among any veteran demographic. It doesn’t tell you that PTSD doesn’t care about your gender. The nightmares don’t care. The flashbacks don’t care. The inability to hold your baby without shaking doesn’t care.
And it doesn’t tell you this, which is maybe the hardest truth of all: The warrior ethos being sold to you is the same warrior ethos being used to send young men to die. You’re not being liberated by it. You’re being recruited by it. They’re using your desire for equality, your desire for strength, your desire to prove yourself, and they’re channeling it into the same killing machine. Different ad campaign. Same grinder.
The Women Who Send Others to Die
The Female Honeypot has its adjunct to the male counterpart, the Feminist guide, the Mother figure. We must say it plainly, because history demands it:
Catherine the Great sent countless soldiers to war. Queen Victoria presided over the largest colonial killing machine in human history. Queen Mary (Bloody Mary) burned humans alive to satisfy religious zealotry. Golda Meir was ready, willing, able, and did sacrifice any number of Palestinian men, women, and children via genocide and expulsion. Margaret Thatcher sacrificed men and civilians to reclaim an island. Madeleine Albright — asked whether the death of half a million Iraqi children under US sanctions was “worth it” — replied, without flinching: “We think the price is worth it.” Albright, who never served a day in combat or the military, told an interviewer that 500,000+ casualties in Bosnia “would be acceptable.” Hillary Clinton was the driving force and liaison turning Libya from a modern country into an ancient chattel and sexual slave market for girls and boys.
“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world!” declared Kamala Harris, feminist politician, running for the office that commands your life.
These women are not aberrations. They are the rule. For every privileged King there is a privileged Queen. The road to women’s privilege, as historians have documented, is paved with the corpses of men. The greatest single privilege women enjoy in relation to war is that they are hardly ever expected to shed blood — yet many of them are only too willing to shed yours.
We call them Girlz with purpose. Not to belittle — to cut through the propaganda that says feminism and militarism are somehow incompatible. They are perfectly compatible. The question has never been whether women can be warmongers. The question is whether any of us — man or woman — will refuse.
Your Body Is Not Made of Steel
We need to talk about your body. Your actual, physical, flesh-and-blood body.
Right now, at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, your body feels invincible. It’s anabolic, growing, and heals fast. It recovers. It’s flexible and resilient and strong in ways you take for granted because you’ve never known anything else. You run without thinking about your knees. You carry weight without thinking about your spine. You throw and catch and jump and fall and your body absorbs it all and comes back for more.
Here’s what nobody’s telling you: that’s temporary.
Think about professional athletes. These are people with the best training, the best nutrition (& often the best steroids), the best medical care money can buy. Their entire lives are organized around peak physical performance. And what happens? Running backs are done by thirty. Pitchers’ arms blow out. Linemen can’t walk without pain by forty. Fighters get brain damage that shows up years later. The human body, pushed to its limits, begins to degrade rapidly — far faster than you’d think watching highlights on TV.
Now take the athletic body and add combat. Add carrying eighty to one hundred pounds of gear in 110-degree heat. Add sleeping on rocks and mud. Add dehydration, malnutrition, concussive blasts that rattle your brain inside your skull even when you walk away from the explosion. Add the stress — the constant, grinding, cellular-level stress of knowing that any moment could be the moment you die, or the moment you have to kill someone. That stress doesn’t just live in your mind. It lives in your body. It changes your hormones. It stresses your heart negatively. It changes your DNA. It ages you at a rate that would terrify you if you could see it in real time.
Even if you never see combat — and the military will promise you won’t, right up until it sends you — the physical toll is enormous. Button pushers grow stress too. Support personnel grow stress. The culture itself is a stress machine. Sleep deprivation is not a bug; it’s a feature of training. Physical punishment disguised as “conditioning” breaks your body down in ways that compound over years.
Here’s the biology they don’t teach you at the recruitment office:
Your frontal lobe — the part of your brain responsible for judgment, impulse control, moral reasoning, long-term planning — is not fully developed until you’re around twenty-five. Read that again. The part of your brain that would tell you “this is a bad idea” is literally still under construction. The military knows this. This is not incidental to their recruitment strategy — it IS their recruitment strategy. They want you before your braking system is installed.
Your body will change dramatically in your early twenties. What was once young and supple will begin hardening through hormonal shifts. Impacts and wounds that your eighteen-year-old body shrugged off will leave permanent damage in your twenty-three-year-old body. The cartilage doesn’t come back. The discs don’t uncompress. The concussions accumulate.
Between twenty-eight to thirty-two, you’ll experience your first major hormone drop. You’ll start to expand in weight and width, placing further stress on an already-stressed frame. The injuries you collected at twenty will announce themselves at thirty as chronic pain, limited mobility, early arthritis. And if you’ve been in combat — if your body has been living in sustained fight-or-flight for months or years — the stress hormones will have been eating you from the inside the entire time.
The military will tell you twenty years and a pension. They won’t tell you that you’ll spend those twenty years being ground down, and the forty years after spending the pension on medical bills and therapy.
What They Do to Your Mind
Now we have to tell you the hardest part. And we’re telling you because Rubicon & Sean lived it, and a young man named Jim died from it, and the families who never got the truth deserve to have it said plainly.
Psychological Kill Training
Normal people possess a deep, instinctive aversion to killing another human being. You have it too, right now, whether you know it or not. It’s built into you. It’s part of what makes you human.
The military considers this aversion a defect to be corrected.
Beginning in the early twentieth century, psychologists were brought into military training programs with a specific mission: find ways to bypass conscience. Not to remove it — that’s impossible — but to build a detour around it. To make the act of killing feel automatic, necessary, even merciful. To condition the inner narrative so that when the moment comes, you don’t hesitate.
How do they do it?
First: language. They strip the people you’ll be killing of their humanity and replace them with categories. “Targets.” “Hostiles.” “Packages.” “Assets.” Once a person becomes a category, conscience has less to grab onto. You’re not killing a man who has a mother and a wife and a child who looks like your sister — you’re “neutralizing a hostile.” You’re “eliminating a target.” You’re “cleaning up.”
“Clean up” — that’s a CIA term for killing survivors and witnesses after a primary operation. Think about the language. Cleaning up. As though human beings are dirt on a floor.
Second: moral reframing. You’re taught that certain people are morally contaminated — socialists are evil, communists are godless, these people are threats, our national security is paramount — “everyone’s out to get us!” Harm is not harm if the target deserves it. This is what psychologists call moral disengagement. The trainee is taught that killing isn’t killing when the person being killed has been placed outside the circle of moral concern.
Third — and this is what Rubicon and Jim experienced, and what haunts Rubicon to this day — the guided imagery tapes:
These recordings sound like meditation. Slow cadence. Breath awareness. Progressive visualization. But the content is inverted. Instead of grounding the body for healing, they rehearse the body for violence:
“Feel the knife solidly in your hand.”
“The knife is an extension of your body.”
“Strike with intent to release.”
“You need not fear blood.”
“They will feel no pain.”
There are many more phrases that go deeper, and really, you couldn’t get any closer to psychotic thought patterns than this. In clinical settings, guided imagery is used to treat trauma and reduce anxiety. Here, the same neurological pathways are activated to normalize the idea of harming another person. This is not hypnosis. It is somatic conditioning — a way of teaching the body to accept what the mind would otherwise reject. The tools of inner peace, repurposed for outer violence.
And here’s the part that should make your blood run cold: this conditioning is delivered to you at precisely the moment when your brain is most vulnerable to it. At eighteen, your emotional and motivational systems are fully online, but your frontal lobes — the regions responsible for judgment, empathy integration, and moral reasoning — are still under construction. The conditioning doesn’t have to overpower a fully formed moral self. It only has to fill the space where that self is still forming.
This is developmentally opportunistic. They are planting instructions in soil that hasn’t hardened yet.
But your brain does not stay eighteen. As you move into your twenties, the frontal lobes continue to mature. Moral reasoning deepens. And the conditioning begins to crack. The euphemisms stop working. The faces come back. The person you were trained to call a “target” becomes, in your dreams, a man or woman like you.
“Why did you do this to me?” — the severed head asked Rubicon in a dream, speaking in clear English, more than forty years after the mission. Forty years. Every night.
What Happened to Jim?
We want to tell you about Jim. Jim was born in 1961. He was one of the nicest and sweetest persons you could ever meet. He was from New York City. He was an Air Force Scout, like Rubicon — a commando performing covert destruction and death in CIA proxy wars in Africa, then finally in Central America.
The last time Rubicon saw Jim, in summer of 1981, Jim was living in a rental house off-base. He had mounted his combat knife — a custom-made ten-inch wide blade with brass knuckle guards, the leather handle permanently stained with blood — in a sheath on his front door. Every room had pistols, rifles, and shotguns stashed in readily accessible locations. He had kept detonators instead of turning them in.
Jim was no longer the sweet, kind person Rubicon had first met two years before. He had become sullen, depressed, angry, and paranoid. He said he no longer felt safe, anywhere. His whole persona had changed to be identified with the military. He wore his fatigues everywhere. He stopped going to the beach or trying to have fun.
If you have any heart at all, killing damages you and changes you permanently. Your DNA is damaged, scarred, and changed. Your outlooks are changed. Trust is radically changed. Jim, because of his schedule and travel time, never had the chance to become involved in love or having a lover. Because of this he went further into darkness than Rubicon did. While Rubicon had a lover and fiancée, Jim was absolutely alone.
Jim was dropped into Central America in late 1981 or early 1982. He died on his first mission in the area. When deaths occur on covert missions, there is no officer knocking on the family’s door offering consolation. Families receive a form letter that tells them a lie: that their son died in an unfortunate accident while on a training mission.
Jim was twenty years old. The Commanders who sent him in had no field or combat experience. They were Non-Combat Pretenders — Virgins Talking About Sex — in love with the glory and the power. They didn’t care whether Jim survived. They were interested only in their own objectives.
This is what the recruiter or video doesn’t show you. This is the end of the story they never tell.
The Aftermath — What “The Rest of Your Life” Actually Means
Rubicon & Sean survived. But survival is its own kind of sentence.
For Rubicon over forty years — every single night — the dead visit in “sleep”. The woman whose life, baby, and husband he took away is the most frequent visitor. After telling his wife Julie about these things, Julie started appearing in the dreams, with the dead woman and her companions attempting to kill her.
For years, Julie had to put up with his kicking, running, punching, and stabbing in his sleep. Listening to him calling out attack vectors. He would wake up so exhausted, as though he had been in the field the entire night. The dreams would stick with him throughout the day because they engaged his entire brain in the conflict, and he would feel the original traumas all over again.
He sees blood on his hands when the weather gets hot and humid. This started months after separation from the military. It continues more than four decades later.
More than three suicide attempts. Wrist cutting. Overdose. Seventeen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy for treatment-resistant depression. Rage episodes directed at the woman he loves because his brain couldn’t distinguish between threat and tenderness. Right arm, hand, and wrist pain related to knife kills — forty-plus years after the last mission.
His DD-214 — the military discharge document — was completely redacted. No deployments. No awards. No citations. Rank gone. Time in service reduced. Reason for separation: “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE.”
That’s what the military calls a man who refused to keep killing: defective.
It took Rubicon thirty-eight years to tell Julie what he had done. How do you tell the person you love that you’ve cut off a man’s head, shoved knives into throats, hearts, kidneys, livers, and souls? How do you describe such a thing to those you love?
And this is the man who survived. Jim didn’t make it that far.
Becoming a killer happened in a relatively short time span, but it didn’t happen without help — serious programmed conditioning. The two and a half years involved in dealing out death took at least forty years of his life, and nearly forty years of Julie’s life.
You must understand these things in relation to you, your wants, your needs, your desires for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whether you are directly in combat, coding, cleaning, gathering intelligence, or pushing a button to launch a missile or drone, firing a weapon remotely, clerking a budget, cooking a meal, etc… It is all part of a killing machine.
Twenty years and a retirement. That’s what they promise you. What they deliver is a lifetime sentence.
The Pause
This is the pause. This is the moment — right now, reading this — when you stop and think before you sign.
The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth reviewed our book X Rubicon and spoke about the importance of the pause: that moment when a young person steps back from the pressure, the promises, the propaganda, the excitement of adventure, and the desperation, and considers what they’re actually agreeing to.
You are being asked to sign a contract that gives the government ownership of your body. Not metaphorical ownership. Literal, legal ownership. You will go where they send you. You will do what they tell you. You will kill who they order you to kill. And if you refuse — as Rubicon refused — they will punish you for it. They will strip your record. They will deny what happened. They will call your conscience a defect.
The sole purpose of the military is to kill and support killing.
That sentence is not rhetoric. It is the operational reality that every layer of propaganda exists to obscure. Every recruitment video, every signing bonus, every e-girl, every teacher with a grandfather story, every chaplain’s prayer — all of it exists to prevent you from standing in the clarity of that single sentence.
The sole purpose of the military is to kill and support killing.
If you can stand in that sentence and still want to sign, that’s your right. But stand in it first. Feel it. Own it. Don’t let them rush you past it. Don’t let the bonus or the boredom or the girl in the bikini or the teacher’s praise or the unemployment or the shame or the promise of feminist brass tits pull you through before you’ve read every word.
You are not a tool. You are not “Government Issue.” You are a human being with a soul. and a body made of flesh and blood, not steel and plastic. You have a mind that is still growing toward its full power of judgment. You have a life ahead of you that belongs to you, and your future lover and children — not to Lockheed Martin, not to the Pentagon, not to the CIA, not to the politicians who will use you and discard you and then wrap themselves in the flag at your funeral IF they have the balls to show up.
What will be the price tag for your family & friends? What will the aftermath be, and who will help you to deal with it?
Susan, a mother, a nurse,
…watched her son march off to Iraq in patriotism and fervor – based upon lies that were purposefully and willingly fabricated to force an aggression:
“The lack of psychiatric care, the denial of any real problem by the VA is how a military which refuses to be accountable for its own actions chooses to deal with the collateral damage of war: the mental and physical health of its Soldiers and Marines. But this is the empire we live in. Everything, and I mean virtually everything this government does is to protect the money powers, corporate interests, and by extension, the Federal Reserve. If you still believe America is good and defending freedom everywhere, you are in need of a wakeup call… The price combat vets pay is indescribable, as I know first hand watching my son self destruct over the years like a slow train wreck… After all, if the public sought the truth, action might be required. Like a group of teenagers, Americans hate the idea of accountability more than anything else. Platitudes such as ‘Thank you for your service’ should suffice. But make no mistake: This government is coming for you and your family… Don’t let your kid join up or you may spend a lifetime regretting it.”
Julie, a wife, a mother,
…only found out about Rubicon 38 years after the fact. She knew there was a presence in their life she couldn’t detail, then, Rubicon told her. She became entangled within the chaos that Rubicon had spent 40 years with:
“I am a witness to Rubicon’s journey through devastating suffering. I have witnessed the darkness that has imprisoned him for most of his life. He was stuck in a vortex of extreme pain and felt no freedom to share it with anyone…
“His pain was palpable, visual, I referred to it as the light-less mask of depression; I could taste its bitterness and it felt ever so cruel… There was/is never any doubt that my husband would/will always protect me and care for me. Nevertheless, the torment inside of him often saw me as a threat and I became the target of his rage. He was helpless to protect me from his own pain, fear, and rage. How could it be otherwise? He was helpless to protect himself from his own buried pain, fear, and rage. He was reminded nightly of the atrocities he had caused. I would awaken in the middle of the night to his punching me or kicking me as he was engulfed in a nightmarish flashback. I would block his blows and yell at him to wake up… As I continue to process the suffering my Beloved has caused and the suffering he has endured, it is like walking through a raging inferno. Fire has two capacities. Fire can just burn and destroy leaving only destruction and ashes. Fire can also purify and open a space for new life to thrive. For 40 years Rubicon has been engulfed within an inextinguishable fiery hell. It is only by Grace and fortitude that it did not leave him as a pile of ashes.“
A Country That Told You This Would Never Happen
One final thing. The Founders of this country — the men whose words are carved into the marble in Washington — said that a standing army is an evil and is anathema to democracy. This wasn’t a footnote. It was central to their thinking about what kind of nation they were creating. They had seen what standing armies did to the people of Europe. They had seen how kings used them. They knew. But, power corrupts, and through the years forced drafts were enacted along with false propaganda.
And here we are.
The government is pushing to make draft registration automatic for boys by the end of 2026. Think about what that means. They’re not even going to ask or threaten you to register anymore. They’re going to do it for you. Your name will go into the system without your consent, and when the next war comes — and it will come, because the money interests require your sacrifice — they will know where to find you. And when they want you, they will come after you with force. The Hunger Games weren’t future dystopia stories, it’s the eons old aristocratic foundation story of the rich culling the poor for gain and control.
This is not freedom. This is inventory management.
So, What Do You Do?
Take the pause, Breathe, enjoy the pause. Read. That’s the first thing. Read the people who walked this road and came back to tell you what they saw.
Read Erich Maria Remarque — All Quiet on the Western Front. He was there. He watched his generation fed into the machine of World War One, and he wrote it down with a precision and a heartbreak that has not aged one day in a hundred years. When he wrote, “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear,” he was talking to you.
Read Smedley Butler — War Is a Racket. He was the most decorated Marine in American history at the time of his death. Two Medals of Honor. And he came home and said: “I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” He said that. The most decorated Marine in the country. He expressed remorse for having fed men into the grinder.
Read X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars by Sean Griobhtha. Rubicon’s story, verified by the US intelligence community, authorized for publication with the condition it “appear to be fictional.” The government’s own confession, wrapped in a paradox. He was a highly decorated combat veteran of CIA proxy wars in Iran, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and CIA drug wars in Colombia and Mexico.
Read G.A. Borgese — Goliath: The March of Fascism. He mapped the anatomy of how nations are seduced into violence, how myths are manufactured, how the romantic glorification of war makes ordinary people complicit in supremacy and atrocity.
Read Hannah Arendt. Read Simone Weil. Read Abraham Joshua Heschel. Read the people who understood that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, and that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
And then… breathe deep again and make your choice from a place of knowledge, not ignorance. From a place of strength, not desperation. From a place of clarity, not propaganda.
They want you before you’re ready.
We want you to be ready.
“...morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel
Source: https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/before-you-sign-a-letter-to-the-young
Recommended Reading:
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
- Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket (1935)
- G.A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism (1938)
- Upton Sinclair, The Profits Of Religion (1919)
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
- Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940)
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom (1966)
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (1973)
- Sean Griobhtha, X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars (GP&R, 2022)
- Alan MacLeod, From Simp to Soldier: How the Military is Using E-Girls To Recruit Gen Z Into Service (MintPress News)
- Mnar Adley with Alan MacLeod, Thirst Trap Nation: How E-girls Are Luring Young Boys Into Joining Army (MintPress News)
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Updated on 04/25/2026- GDG
