Begin with the man, because the law would rather you began with anything else.
español -
May 31, 2026 / Sean Griobhtha / Crossing Rubicons - (Excerpt from X Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA ProxyX Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy) He is older now. The wound has not faded with age; it has deepened. His right arm and hand and wrist — the arm that drove knives into other human beings, the hand that twisted a wide-blade knife in their bodies to make their dying quick — ache now in ways directly traceable to what was asked of him, what he did, more than forty years ago. When the weather turns hot and humid, he looks down at his hands and they appear to be covered in blood, and he can smell it. He has known for decades there is no blood. It appears anyway. The dead still visit him in his sleep; the woman most often, the one who whispered “baby” before she died with his knife in her heart, the one who turned out to be carrying a child she would never bear. His government has a name for what was done to her, and to her husband, and to the roughly fourteen hundred human beings he killed and helped kill in the span of thirty days while Americans were snug in their beds with visions of “power, glory, and sugarplums in their heads”. The name his government has for it is classified until 2085.
That is the first thing to understand about this man. The second thing is that, on paper, he does not exist.
When he refused to keep killing — when, following the last mission, he could no longer justify supporting right-wing death squads on the strength of a CIA officer’s word that the slaughter was righteous — the machine did not simply discharge him. It unmade him. He was stripped of the Air Force Cross, of two Silver Stars, of four Bronze Stars, of the Defense Superior Service Medal — every decoration he had been awarded for the killing, save a single Marksman ribbon his commander left him “to remind him of who he really is.” His DD-214, the discharge document that is a veteran’s only legal proof that his life in uniform happened at all, was, in his commander’s own words, redacted in toto. No deployments. No awards. No citations. Rank gone. Time-in-service reduced. And then, to set the headstone, the reason listed for his separation: “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE.”
He has told us, plainly, what that felt like: “I had been redacted from service.”
Sit with the verb. Not discharged. Not separated. Redacted — the word a censor uses for the lines he blacks out so that what remains can pretend the rest was never written. A man was treated as a sentence in a document the government did not want read.
And the erasure did not stop at the paperwork of 1981. Forty years later, when this man finally won — through a quarter-century of records requests and an unorthodox back channel — a written acknowledgment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that the record was real, that the medals were real, that the killing was real, that letter confirmed the erasure even as it confirmed the man. He could write his account, it said, on four conditions: he may not use his own name or anyone else’s; he may not name the operations; he may not name the locations; and “the account should appear to be fictional.” His likeness is classified. When a retired general, moved by conscience, later tried to obtain a single photograph of him as a young man receiving a medal — a picture for his children — a CIA officer refused, because, in the general’s report of it, “your face is classified.” Yet that general pushed for a compromise — see below.
A man told by his own government that he may not have a face in public associated with… himself. That he may write the true story of his own body only if he agrees to make it look like a lie. That his medals, his rank, his deployments, his name, and his face are all, in the cold administrative sense of the word, unavailable.
This is the charge, and we will not soften it: this was erasure, accomplished with law, on purpose, and it was cruel.
The cruelty is twofold, and the second part is what this essay is about. The first cruelty is obvious — that the same legal architecture which authorized the killing also claimed the right to own and delete the killer. But the second is the one that should keep a citizen awake. The erasure of this one man was not improvised malice. It was not a vindictive major exceeding his authority on a bad day, though there was a vindictive major. It was the small, intimate, personal terminus of a machine that was designed — built law by law across the length of the Cold War — for exactly this purpose: to make men disposable and deniable, and to make the work they do disappear. The same machinery that can redact a man from his own service record is the machinery that redacted the Constitution’s allocation of the war power out from under the American people. The same lawlessness that disappears a Constitution disappears a person. The man is simply where you can see it with your own eyes, because the man is still here, and still bleeding from a wound the paperwork could not reach.
A word about what this essay is not. It is not a roadmap for fixing the record. Rubicon is not litigating, and he does not want the medals back — they are a stain to him, decorations awarded for killing, and he is long past caring whether a corrected DD-214 ever issues. The ODNI’s own letter conceded that no amount of pressure would move the military to change the document, that even its own request to restore the awards and strike the “Apathy” and “Defective Attitude” slurs would simply be ignored. What angers him — what should anger you — is not that the record is wrong and unfixed. It is the erasing itself: that a government took a living man and resolved, by paper, that he would be made not to have been — and you, dear Citizen, are requested not to know, even when they use your name for justification.
Source: https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/the-legal-erasure-of-a-man
Counter‑Recruitment Framing: The Erasure of a Man as a Warning to Youth
When we talk to young people about military recruitment, we often focus on the promises: job training, honor, belonging, a path out of poverty. But the story of the man known only as Rubicon shows the other side — the side recruiters never mention, the side hidden behind classification stamps and patriotic slogans. His life is a case study in what happens when a system built for secrecy decides a human being is expendable.
As a teenager, Rubicon was pulled into a world of covert operations where the United States was fighting undeclared wars in Central America. He was trained to kill quietly, efficiently, and without acknowledgment. The missions were classified until 2085 — long after every participant will be dead. When he could no longer justify the killing, the government didn’t simply discharge him. It erased him. His DD‑214 — the document that proves a veteran’s service — was stripped of medals, deployments, rank, and years. The official reason for separation was “APATHY — DEFECTIVE ATTITUDE,” a bureaucratic insult designed to destroy his credibility and block him from healthcare, employment, and benefits.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a legal system built across the Cold War to make certain people — especially young, working‑class men sent into covert violence — disposable. Laws passed in 1947 and 1949 gave the CIA the power to run secret wars and hide the identities of the people who fought them. Later “reforms” like the Hughes–Ryan Amendment were sold as oversight but actually strengthened deniability by making operators even more severable from the chain of command. The seam between Title 10 (military) and Title 50 (intelligence) created a legal void where a service member could be decorated in secret and erased in public. And Supreme Court decisions like Snepp v. United States ensured that even a veteran’s own story could be seized and censored.
Rubicon’s erasure is not just personal harm — it is a window into how the state treats the people it recruits. The same machinery that deleted his service record also deleted the Constitution’s requirement that Congress declare war. Covert “Findings” allow a president to wage war in secret, without public debate, while the people doing the killing are told they can never speak of it. When a president’s lawyer can stand before the Supreme Court and refuse to rule out the assassination of a political rival as an “official act,” that is the same logic at work: the executive is above the rules, and the people beneath him are tools.
For youth, the lesson is simple and devastating: the military can promise you honor, but the system it serves is built to protect itself, not you. It can use you in secret, discard you in silence, and classify your face, your name, and your injuries out of existence. Rubicon’s story is not an outlier — it is the logical endpoint of a structure that treats young people as raw material for geopolitical projects they will never be allowed to understand.
Counter‑recruitment is not about disrespecting service. It is about telling the truth that recruiters cannot tell. It is about giving young people the informed consent they deserve before signing a contract that can follow them into classified spaces where even their own life story no longer belongs to them. Rubicon’s erasure is a warning: when a system is built to hide its wars, it is also built to hide the people who fight them. - NNOMY Staff
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Updated on 6/01/2026 - GDG
