This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

A caution to readers: This story is an unvarnished, unsanitized firsthand account of the Second Battle of Fallujah that includes descriptions and photos that are candidly disturbing. In telling this story, I promised my fellow Marines that I would not sugarcoat our experience. This story is published in collaboration with The War Horse. To hear us in our own words, you can listen to The Fallujah Files, an eight-part audio series including conversations and interviews with Marines I served with from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion.

Narrow metal cages sit empty in a dark, damp corner of the execution room. Bloody handprints mark the windowless mud walls. Human feces are piled in the corner. The air smells of urine and death.

Nearby stands a makeshift altar. Dried blood stains the dirt beside an empty camera tripod. The floor feels tacky with every step. A Quran rests on a lectern. Knives and medical supplies are strewn about the ground. The black flag of Al Qaeda hangs on the wall.

Some of us step outside. Others argue over whether the bloody handprints belong to the victim or the executioner. Some guess how many heads had rolled across the floor, or whether the executioner used the straight-edge or the serrated knife. Did they prefer efficiency or pain? The dark humor dulls our reality and makes the scene more palatable. It’s 2004, roughly 10 days before our families back home will celebrate Thanksgiving. As our squad of Marines resumes our patrol through Fallujah, Iraq, some of us pledge to kill ourselves—and each other—before we will ever be caged by the jihadis. Every conversation circles back to the cages and the killing. A few Marines struggle to eat dinner. Country Captain Chicken looks even less appetizing. The thought of being trapped in a cage keeps me awake.

For the next month, combat strips away our humanity as we patrol street by street. Combat brings out the absolute best and worst in us. Most laugh about the death. The ones who break down are sent back to the base. Others photograph corpses and detainees. A few volunteer to kill the dogs feasting on human remains. With every firefight, we drift further from the values we once held dear and the men we once were. Fathers and sons. Blue-collar workers and college graduates. And even the pompous son of a billionaire.

All changed forever by war.

After five weeks in Fallujah, it seems like many of us have lost our way and are not fazed by the depravity surrounding us. Some of us laugh at a kitten crawling out of the chest cavity of a corpse, and after one of my rockets transforms a human being into a bloody shadow on a wall.

Most of us celebrate the crumpled bodies, mangled by the rockets and bombs. Some photograph the corpses bursting like combat pinatas after bloating under the desert sun. We cheer as a bulldozer buries enemy fighters alive.

The dozer is bulletproof. We aren’t. And we’ve all rationalized that they are going to die anyway.

Then, one night shortly after Thanksgiving, we are awakened by the sound of a Marine from another battalion beating a cat to death against a wall. He releases its lifeless body from the empty green sack, and it falls from our second-story window onto the street below. The animal was making too much noise, he says. He then lays down beside us.

We all go back to sleep.

It’s been 20 years now—half our lifetimes—since we fought in the bloodiest battle of the global war on terrorism. President George W. Bush had just won reelection, despite concerns over the Iraq War and the lies that led us there. It had been 18 months since he had declared “an end of major combat operations” in Iraq.

But the insurgency was growing stronger. Militants boobytrapped roadways with explosives and beheaded Iraqi collaborators in kill rooms—like the one we discovered—executions that were filmed to send a message both to the Iraqi citizens and foreign invaders. But nothing symbolized the disdain for our presence in Iraq more than the March 2004 execution of four US contractors from Blackwater who were beaten, lit aflame, dragged behind vehicles, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. At the time, I was an 18-year-old Marine fresh out of boot camp who didn’t know any of that story. But seven months later, here I was, in November 2004, as one of nearly 13,000 American, British, and Iraqi forces ordered to fight Operation Phantom Fury, a 46-day battle during the US occupation of Iraq and the heaviest urban combat Americans had seen since the 1968 Battle of Huế City during the Vietnam War. The battle demonstrated that what we thought a year ago were pockets of resistance was, in fact, a full-blown insurgency.

More than 4,000 enemy fighters armed with rockets, machine guns, and explosive devices fought from trenches, tunnels, and booby-trapped homes.

By the end of the battle, about 110 members of coalition forces were killed and more than 600 were wounded. Roughly 2,000 enemy fighters died, and 1,500 were captured. An estimated 700 civilians were killed, and by the end of the battle, nearly half of the city lay in ruins. It marked a new phase in a war that was quickly spiraling out of control and would ultimately cost US taxpayers more than $728 billion and lead to the deaths of more than 4,500 coalition troops and more than 32,000 others wounded. In total, at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.

For 20 years, the men and women ordered to fight in Fallujah—and other battles of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—have lived with those traumas, and despite our collective successes as we continued serving or returned to civilian life, many of us still ended up in a box.

The moral injury. The drugs. Alcohol. Suicide. Divorce. Cancers from the poisons we were exposed to. The list goes on and on.

For the last two decades, I have avoided reading the books that were written about our battle. I haven’t watched the documentaries or revisited the news stories. I distanced myself from the reunions and the young men who were once my close friends.

As I write this, I have tears in my eyes. I’m afraid of what this journey will do to me and what the reaction will be. But the further I travel in life beyond the house-to-house fighting, the more I wonder how my body—and my mind—survived it, and whether I still will.

Everyone back home expected us to be killers and diplomats at the same time. We succeeded on the former and failed tragically on the latter. If I were a resident of Fallujah who returned home to the destruction after our battle, I would commit my life to killing Americans.

We didn’t just destroy the enemy, we thrived at it. And many of us grew to enjoy it. Yet we obliterated parts of ourselves along the way.

We defecated in people’s bathtubs to avoid being shot in the street. My rockets broke prayer beads and incinerated Qurans. Grenades blew apart heirlooms. We destroyed wedding photos as we knocked over dressers and flipped mattresses during our searches. Across the city, Marines set homes ablaze. We littered neighborhoods with white phosphorus, unexploded ordnance, and burn pit ash. We blew up childhood bedrooms, schools, and mosques.

The destruction was a tactical necessity. But it was also fun.

Two decades on, I now carry a heavier pack: the guilt that I could have done less. And more. For 20 years, I’ve wished I had fired a rocket into an enemy stronghold instead of letting Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth kick in that door. And for 20 years, I haven’t stopped thinking about the time we were ordered to stand down and not shoot a group of enemy fighters using women and children as human shields. The jihadis scurried down an alleyway.

Our collective wish list of do-overs is neverending. But the list of selfless and heroic acts we witnessed in Fallujah is also endless.

Before Fallujah, I thought I understood war. Bullets and blood. Bodies and bandages.

Some live. Some die. Oohrah.

But what combat teaches you is that your circle shrinks to the handful of people who are there with you. Nobody and nothing else matters. Not the flag. Not our families or fellow Americans back home. Not a fictional hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Not the Iraqi people. And surely not the politicians who sent us to war. We were ordered to fight and did whatever we had to do to survive. This is our story.

 

April 2004:
The “Hopeless Boots” of Camp Matilda

 

For two days leading up to the battle, Marines from Alpha Company watched as bombs and artillery were fired into Fallujah.Photograph courtesy of Robert Day.

Marines are wounded. I rush to pick up the handset of the radio and begin calling in a casualty evacuation. Location. Callsign. Number of patients.

I can’t remember what to do or say next. I’m caving under the pressure.

“You’re a piece of shit, and you’re going to get everyone killed,” screams my squad leader, Sgt. Billy Leo, a 27-year-old from the Bronx.

I’m 6,000 miles from the battlefield, and I’m making a great first impression.

It’s 2004 and I’ve just graduated from the School of Infantry, and this is my first training exercise as one of 3rd Platoon’s newest “boots,” the most junior Marines in the Corps. I’m an infantry assaultman specializing in demolitions and rockets, and I’m assigned to Alpha Company, one of four infantry units within 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

In fewer than 90 days, we will be patrolling the streets of Iraq together for seven months. I quickly learn—and Sgt. Leo reinforces—that I am not ready for combat and that I haven’t earned his trust.

The rest of my week is a blur of standing guard, filling sandbags, exercises in the treeline, and whatever other “fuck fuck games” could be played to teach me—and my fellow “hopeless” boots—a meaningful lesson: Lives depend on proficiency, attention to detail, and an instant willingness to follow orders.

When we wrap up our two weeks in the field, we’re shipped off to an abandoned Air Force housing complex near San Diego known as Camp Matilda—a wasteland of asbestos and lead-based paints, broken glass, and rusted metal.

For weeks, we practice setting up vehicle checkpoints, searching detainees, and rehearsing infantry tactics we’ll soon use in Iraq. At night, I lay on the floor of an abandoned home and stare at exposed insulation in the ceiling as I fall asleep.

After two months with my Marines, I travel back to the Boston area for 30 days of pre-deployment leave back at my childhood home, where my friends from high school tell me I’m crazy if I go to Iraq. They’re supportive of my service, but my enlistment has always confused them, and they can’t fathom trusting strangers with their lives. I tell them that Sgt. Leo is one of the big reasons why I do.

He’s a towering force with a contempt for arrogant leaders and is fiercely loyal to us. I barely know him, but I trust him. He’s bar-battered and constantly goes toe-to-toe with higher-ups to defend us from their flawed strategies and pointless games.

Only he fucks with us.

Deep down, we know Sgt. Leo just wants to bring us all home.

Back in North Carolina, we lay our uniforms on the ground in the quad at the center of our barracks. Marines with canisters of chemicals walk back and forth and mist our clothing.

The chemicals are to protect us from malaria and last the entire deployment, they say.

Wash your uniforms twice, and they are safe to wear, they say.

The next day, and nearly every day until we deploy, we start our mornings on that same grass. Pushups. Situps. Grappling matches. Then we put on our chemical-laced uniforms and lay out our gear over and over.

We clean our rifles and rooms. Then we clean our rifles some more.

After work in the barracks, we drink. A lot. It’s big boy rules. Underage? Doesn’t matter. Want to throw a fridge off the third story? It better be your fridge. Want to see who can smash more beer bottles on their head? Doc better not have to stitch you up.

Marines funnel hard liquor from the third story. Some hire sex workers or seek out happy endings at massage parlors. Others tell tales of past sexual conquests. Arrington brags about the size of his dick, eager to show anyone who doesn’t believe the lore. Drunkards wrestle and fight. Our “give a fuck” is broken, and all of the boots will clean up the mess before our morning formation. We are going to war.

 

October 2004:
“A Whole Can of Whoop Butt”

 

Photograph by Cpl. Trevor Gift.

By the end of our first month in Iraq, the monotony of the beggars, the tan landscape, and our mission to “win hearts and minds” are killing our motivation and making us complacent.

Diplomacy is the Army’s job, not the Marines’.

For our first three months in Iraq, we aimlessly patrol Rawah, Hadithah, Anah, and other small villages. At Iraqi police stations, we barter copies of Playboy and Hustler for fresh meals of chicken and rice. In each city, we are itching for a gunfight, but all we do is kill time. The only thing we are fighting is boredom.

None of us has lost our combat virginity.

In late October, we’re told we’re getting a change of scenery and to pack only the gear we can carry. We are being relocated to Camp Fallujah. We do as we’re told. We’re unaware of the intense fighting elsewhere in the country and that Fallujah is an insurgent hotbed where jihadis film executions.

A few days later, we strap our packs to the sides of 7-ton trucks and ride into the darkness. What seems like an endless string of military vehicles stretches to the horizon in either direction. I chain-smoke Marlboros as I stare at the stars and fall asleep to the hum of knobby tires against the asphalt.

When we get to Camp Fallujah, we all know something big is about to happen. Thousands of Marines from across multiple battalions are crammed onto the base. We repetitiously review maps, practice casualty evacuation drills and clearing rooms, and go to a makeshift rifle range to verify the sight settings on our weapons.

Our leaders know a tough fight is ahead of us, and their plan is shrouded by the fog of war and the uncertainty of violence.

A few days before the battle begins, our battalion is standing in a semicircle when an enemy mortar round slams into the ground beside our formation and doesn’t explode. I think about how lucky we were that the round was a dud. Dozens of us are standing in the kill radius. We erupt with a mix of cheers, laughter, and screams.

Our battalion goes silent as Sgt. Major Carlton Kent, a 47-year-old from Tennessee and the senior enlisted Marine for the upcoming battle, steps in front of us and looks out across a sea of desert camouflage. Some of us sit. Others kneel. Some stand.

“I’m gonna tell you one thing. It is an honor for me to be able to serve with each and every one of you hard chargers,” he says. “I mean, I look out here, and it’s no difference than when we took the damn war over in Korea, we took it during World War II, we raised the flag at Iwo Jima—it’s no difference.”

“Y’all are in the process of making history, and I am very proud of you, and I have no doubt you are gonna go in there and do what you always have done—kick some butt.”

We walk back to our building and await a briefing from our platoon commander, 2nd Lt. Douglas Bahrns, a 23-year-old who studied English at Virginia Military Institute. As Bahrns walks into the room, Sgt. Leo tells us to sit down and shut up.

Bahrns stands in front of us. Grains of sand float through motionless air as beams of light creep through sandbagged windows. Young men sit mesmerized by the words echoing off walls scarred by years of war.

Through the desert confetti, Lt. Bahrns shifts between confidence and trepidation as he explains the details of our mission to clear Fallujah of enemy fighters and what should happen when—not if—we are wounded.

He tells us that inside the city, we will face roadblocks, sniper positions, boobytraps, and more than 300 well-constructed fighting positions that make up a three-ring defensive posture. He explains that civilians have fled the city, and our psychological operations teams have manipulated insurgents into preparing for an attack from the south. Instead, blocking forces will first surround the southern side of the city, and then our platoon will be at the center of a six-battalion, house-to-house battle.

Lt. Bahrns pauses often, gazing into the darkness above our heads.

The reality of our mission is becoming clear. We know that Bahrns, like Leo, wants to bring us all home. We all know that won’t happen.

 

November 7, 2004:
“The Infidels Are Here”

 

The screams of thousands of US Marines roar into the distance as tracer rounds dance across the night sky, through a barrage of air-burst white phosphorus and thousand-pound bombs.

For hours, we watch as munitions explode. Some of us ooh and ahh. Others pace anxiously. As the night passes, we fall asleep to the sounds of warthogs and gunships. I cuddle with Phil Barker and Doc Frasier to stay warm.

Operation Phantom Fury is beginning.

Task Force Wolfpack is the first unit to breach the city’s perimeter, and as they begin taking sporadic fire, a voice in Arabic echoes from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque.

“Citizens of Fallujah, stand up. The infidels are here. Kill them, kill them all.”

For two days, as the first Marines push into the city, I check and recheck my gear, cinching my rockets tighter and tighter against the 20-pound satchels of C-4 inside my pack, and wait to storm Fallujah. I wonder if the combat will be over before we reach the outskirts of the city.

I draw smiley faces on my grenades and write, “One free ticket to Allah” on an explosive. I snap a photograph that captures my misguided hatred. We play grab ass and Spades, and I make dozens of donut and det-linear charges that will soon make doors disappear.

But mostly, with each explosion or machine gun burst we hear, we wonder what it will be like inside the city. Who will be the first to die?

Shortly after 3 a.m. on November 10—the Marine Corps’ birthday—we strap on our gear and load into the tracked vehicles that will be either our chariots into battle or a metal mass grave.

The diesel engines roar to life as the metal ramp closes behind us. The earth crunches beneath us as we begin our drive toward the city.

We are jostled back and forth as we crash through rubble and debris. There are explosions and gunfire in the distance. Black exhaust seeps into the troop compartment.

As the seconds pass, our 20-minute drive feels like hours. I envision scenes from the Normandy landing during World War II, where machine guns ripped through the men crammed inside the Higgins boats as the ramps lowered.

I close my eyes and wait for a rocket to tear through the side of our vehicle, transforming us into a stew of melted fat and charred flesh.

I feel trapped and helpless. I want out.

“One minute,” shouts the vehicle commander. Some of us go silent. Others hype themselves up. “Let’s kill some hajjis,” someone yells. We respond with a series of guttural screams.

Yut. Err. Kill.

But as the ramp lowers, the slow creak of the metal door is all we hear. There is near-complete silence as we run to our assigned sectors of Fallujah’s government complex.

No gunfire. No explosions. No death.

For the next few hours, I sit in a dilapidated office chair, recessed in the shadows of a second-story room of the government complex. As the sun continues to rise, the buildings to our south erupt with gunfire. I notice a man with an AK-47 poke his head around a corner.

I shoulder my rifle as he creeps around a mud wall and slowly begins to close the 200 meters between us. The clear tip of my front sight traces the center of his chest. Fear builds inside me. It is the first time my training will be tested.

I pull the trigger of my M16. The weapon’s recoil nudges my shoulder, and he crumbles to the ground. The aroma of gunpowder fills the room. I fire two more rounds into his motionless body and stare in amazement as he lies lifeless. I peer through another Marine’s rifle scope to get a closer look.

It will take years for my smile to fade.

I watch the sun continue to rise across the city’s skyline as loudspeakers blare the Marines’ Hymn through the streets.

Happy Marine Corps’ birthday, I think.

Moments later, machine gunfire and rockets begin peppering our position, and I’m ordered to the rooftop with my rocket launcher. I sprint across the roof and hunker behind a small mud wall to shield myself from the bullets whizzing by.

As I lift my head, I take in the full Fallujah skyline for the first time. Buildings stretch from horizon to horizon—a sea of tan dotted with minarets and smoldering fires. I watch as Capt. Aaron Cunningham, the maestro of our frontline symphony, stands calmly as bullets skip across the rooftop around him.

We’re surrounded by the enemy.

Then the moment we’ve feared most finally arrives. The first Marine is killed.

Lt. Daniel Thomas Malcom Jr. is dead—shot in the back while calling in artillery. Jordan Holtschulte, a Navy corpsman from a nearby platoon, tried his best to save him.

News about Malcom’s death spreads across our unit within minutes and stops me in my tracks. Before Fallujah, I’d spent four months in convoys as his driver. During our time together, I grew to respect his humility and intellect. We spoke about his sister and his favorite books—I’m ashamed to say I have since forgotten those names. I never got to tell him how much I admired him or ask him about the burden he carried leading our band of enlisted misfits.

I think about how he loved to play chess, which to him was yet another way he could train his mind to defeat an opponent. If life were a brilliancy—a deeply strategic chess combination—he made his with brevity, winning a chess game in 25 moves, his age when he was killed.

His corpse is carried to a nearby vehicle and driven away.

 

November 10, 2004:
Crossing Fran

 

Phase Line Fran was a multilane highway Marines sprinted across on Nov. 10, 2004. Thomas J. Brennan

Javelin missiles shriek through the sky. Machine gunners fire from the rooftops. Artillery thumps in the distance moments before a thunderstorm of steel rain pours around us.

Our squad is crammed into a room at the south side of the government complex, waiting to sprint across Route Fran, the multilane highway that separates us from our 3-mile, house-to-house battle through the city.

Looking back, Route Fran was a final buffer from the real carnage and a life-altering demarcation point for all of us.

Once we crossed over, life would be different.

The change would be forever.

“One minute,” someone yells.

My heart is racing.

I’m scared.

The time passes in an instant.

Yut. Err. Kill.

Sgt. Leo takes off across the road, and we sprint behind him.

I hop over the center median and rush toward the sidewalk. Electrical wires dangle from street poles. Rubble is scattered about. A thick black smoke dances in the air.

We peer through shattered windows and broken doors as we pass by shops and offices damaged by the airstrikes and rockets.

As we rush down the first alley, second-story windows erupt with gunfire. We’re pinned down.

Some Marines break off to clear nearby houses. Cpl. Robert Day, a 24-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, sprints to the roof with his machine gun and a team of snipers in tow. Bullets whiz and ricochet around him, peppering him with chunks of brick and mortar. Day presses his shoulder into his machine gun as a fighter with a backpack full of rockets sprints down a street.

Search. Traverse. Fire. Repeat.

Simultaneously, the rest of our platoon maneuvers down the street, returning fire and bounding from position to position.

“Get those rockets up here!” Sgt. Leo screams, from the front of our patrol. He’s standing beside a compound wall and is unfazed by the firestorm surrounding us.

He’s calm amid the chaos.

I prop my launcher on my thigh as my team leader, Michael Briscoe, inserts a high-explosive rocket. Together, we sprint to the middle of the street. I prop the weapon on my shoulder and press my face against the launch tube to look through the scope.

Bullets are hitting all around us as Briscoe turns around to make sure no Marines are standing behind us.

Dozens of them are. But there’s no time for protocol.

He slaps my shoulder and screams in my ear, “Backblast area all secure! Rocket!”

Ten pounds disappear from my shoulder in an instant, and the second story of the house is destroyed.

The gunfire stops. For a moment.

The enemy takes pot-shots over and around walls as we move from one home to another. We find a network of blown-out walls, allowing fighters to maneuver from house to house. Mattresses are boobytrapped with grenades and cutouts for people to hide inside. We find tripwires and machine gun bunkers reinforced with sandbags.

Sgt. Leo often takes point alongside Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth, clearing almost every home we go into. He lobs grenade after grenade over compound walls and has me blow open door after door with explosive charges. Across the street, Gary Koehler gets shot in his leg, and Matthew “Doo Doo” Brown is shot in the buttocks like Forrest Gump. Then Brian Passolt takes a machine gun burst to the stomach.

Back home, the three of them aren’t yet old enough to buy a six-pack of beer.

They’re stacked into the back of a vehicle like a cord of wood and disappear into the distance.

By nightfall, we’re still clearing our first street inside the city and occupying a house for the night. Some sleep in beds, others on pillows and piles of clothes. I am relegated to the rooftop with the boots and sleep beneath a blanket of stars between hour-long shifts of guard duty.

The next morning, we wake up before sunrise and continue our weeks-long journey south.

Eat. Sleep. Shoot. Shit. Repeat.

For days, the firefights are constant as we clear house after house. Machine gunners fire from the hip as we rush down streets. I fire dozens of rockets and we use so many grenades that we run out. I begin to prime sticks of C4 for us to throw instead. The blasts break prayer beads and tear Qurans.

In the moment, destroying heirlooms and wedding photos during searches and defecating in bathtubs to avoid being exposed to enemy fire outside feel necessary. But they’re some of the things that bother me most 20 years later.

At one point, an officer specializing in chemical weapons identification tells us that we’ve discovered drums of chemical weapons known as “blood agents” and that we should vacate the premises. We do as we’re told. We also discover a torture chamber. Decades later, I still have nightmares where I’m trapped in that small metal cage.

One morning, our patrol stops at the edge of an open field. We’re ordered to run across, and one by one, we sprint hundreds of meters toward a cluster of three-story homes.

One hundred pounds of rockets and explosives press into my flak jacket as I rush across the uneven ground, dodging ankle rollers, barbed wire, and mounds of dirt.

Puffs of dirt jump from the ground as bullets snap and whiz around us as our boots suck into the wet earth.

The charging handle of my rocket launcher digs into my thigh with every step.

My gasps for air drown out the noises around me.

Somehow, we all make it.

We climb the stairs of the building, and the squad man’s defensive positions on every floor. The Marines on the roof take cover behind a short wall and begin to return fire as enemy fighters take pot-shots from nearby windows and scurry through alleyways.

Our lieutenant quickly realizes we’re at a tactical disadvantage. We’ve been holding our position for too long, and the enemy has surrounded us on three sides.

Shell casings pile up at our fighting positions as enemy tracer rounds penetrate the wall and dance across the rooftop until they fizzle out. Talking machine guns play a game of insurgent whack-a-mole. I watch fixed-wing aircraft drop bombs in the distance.

Mike Ergo, a 21-year-old from Walnut Creek, California, who joined the Corps to play the saxophone, is on the roof smoking a cigarette and scanning for enemy fighters when he hears a whoosh as a volley of rockets slams into the front of our building. The blast briefly knocks him unconscious.

As Ergo pulls himself off the ground, he sees the wall beside him is destroyed. He hears gunfire and tastes explosive residue.

“I’m hit,” Sgt. Leo screams from nearby, as the wall explodes around him. He clutches his leg. A deep purple bruise quickly spreads across his hip and thigh. Then Sgt. Nathan Fox, a 21-year-old from Berryville, Virginia, takes shrapnel in the shoulder. Ergo and another Marine rush to drag them from the roof.

I watch as our wounded are carried downstairs. Leo objects the entire time. He’ll walk it off, he jokes. Our lieutenant worries Leo’s femur is broken and forces him to leave, assuring him he’ll return soon.

For the first time, we see fear in Leo’s eyes.

As the firefight continues, our wounded are driven to the hospital. Morale crumbles. There’s an obvious void as we continue to push through the city.

Sgt. Leo was more of a security blanket than we’d realized.

 

November 20, 2004:
Stray Dogs and Instant Mashed Potatoes

 

Munitions explode in the distance as the Marines of 3rd Platoon fight from a high-rise building.Cpl. Trevor Gift

We are on an afternoon patrol when I see a Marine from another battalion diddy bopping with a gnawed femur and pelvis resting over his shoulder as though he were a combat bindle stiff.

“Look at how small his dick is,” he jokes as he tosses the remains on the ground. I wind my disposable camera and snap a photograph of him bent over, smiling beside the bloody genitals. When I look at the photo now, the Marine stares back at me from underneath his kevlar helmet. His face is full of joy. At the time, I was happy, too. Two decades later, I feel contempt toward our indignity.

We’ve been inside Fallujah for weeks and have embraced the kill-or-be-killed reality surrounding us. When we see Marines from mortuary affairs begin collecting enemy remains for intelligence gathering at The Potato Factory—the section of the government center where enemy bodies are being collected—I watch from a distance as limbs deglove and meat sloughs from bones. The aroma of bloated, rotting corpses and firefights has become our norm.

We’re absent of emotion and humanity. Numb.

But now Marines across Fallujah are ordered to go on patrol and kill the animals roaming the streets.

Dogs are sick from eating the decomposing bodies, and we’re told the executions are to prevent the spread of disease.

Killing animals is a line I won’t cross. Hearing their helpless yelps and screeches is unbearable. But watching them run toward us for help once they’re wounded is torturous.

A few days later, we begin taking fire from a second-story building and quickly surround it.

The enemy is trapped inside.

A rocket is fired. Machine gunners sprinkle ammunition through windows and doorways. Others hurl grenades. The jihadis on the other side do the same.

I scream degrading comments about Islam, devoid of the shame that will metastasize.

Our interpreter—an Iraqi citizen from a village outside of Baghdad—yells for the fighters to put down their weapons and come out with their hands up.

They refuse.

We try to convince them with another volley of grenades, gunfire, and slurs about Islam.

Then a Marine runs over to the driver of a nearby D9—a 54-ton bulldozer—and asks them to demolish the house so we won’t have to go inside.

The ground shakes as the driver positions the vehicle a few feet from the building.

Rocks crumble under the tracks as the blade lowers and the vehicle inches forward.

The walls fold in, and the second story buckles as the driver works his way around the structure.

We watch as the home is slowly compressed into a pile of twisted rebar, broken cinder blocks, and tattered belongings.

We cheer.

I notice that our interpreter does not.

The insurgents go silent.

But 20 years later, I still hear them scream.

We continue our patrol back to base.

It’s time for chow. 

 

November 25, 2004:
“Corpsman Up! CORPSMAN!”

 

A squad of Marines patrols the streets of Fallujah in November 2004.Cpl. Trevor Gift

Later that week, the streets are quiet. We move between houses and narrow alleyways, expecting to come under attack for hours. Nothing.

As we are turning back to base, a shot rings out. Then another. Sniper. I’m a few doors down and want to fire a rocket into the building, but Marines are ordered to storm the compound instead.

Two Marines from our platoon, Bradley Faircloth and Michael Meadows, push through the gate and clear the courtyard. They notice the windows are covered with blankets and that the front door is unlocked.

As they step into the living room, there’s a stairway to their left and two rooms in front of them. One door is open. The other closed.

Faircloth leads Meadows down the hallway—he’ll go left. Meadows goes right.

As they walk toward the doors, a machine gun erupts with a 20-round burst. Faircloth moans as he collapses to the floor.

Meadows sprints through the open door and calls for reinforcements. Ryan Stulman and their squad leader, Evan Matthews, rush inside to clear the house, but the enemy fighters escape.

The three Marines grab Faircloth by his limbs and scream for a corpsman as they carry him outside.

Faircloth’s head bobs up and down with every step. His lips are blue. His eyes are open.

Corpsman up! Corpsman! CORPSMAN!

They set his body down in the courtyard, and our corpsman Reinaldo “Doc” Aponte begins his assessment. Airway. Breathing. Circulation.

Doc reaches to check for a pulse, and his fingers slip inside a wound on Faircloth’s wrist.

No pulse.

He tears open Faircloth’s flak jacket and sees gunshot wounds to his flank.

There’s very little blood.

No rise and fall of his chest.

Doc intertwines his fingers and centers his palm on Faircloth’s sternum.

Ribs and cartilage break with each two-inch-deep chest compression.

But Faircloth’s injuries are too extensive.

There’s nothing Doc can do to save his patient.

Doc has to be pulled off of Faircloth’s body.

Tears stream down his face as he is embraced by the Marines around him.

Doc is 21 years old.

Our platoon is scattered, and many of us don’t yet know Faircloth is dead.

The firefight continues.

Sgt. Anthony Martinez is on a nearby rooftop and shoots two fighters scurrying to a nearby building. Lt. Bahrns does the same. Robert Day pulls the trigger of his machine gun and fires at the house.

Then I see two insurgents sprint down an alleyway into a compound.

Squirters.

I shoulder my rocket launcher and fire in their direction. Three walls of the building collapse, and the house folds outward.

I run with three other Marines toward the collapsed structure and find two bodies lying outside, blown clear by the blast.

I stare at the figures. One is mangled and missing both legs. Blood pools beside his torso.

Then I hear someone yell out that a Marine has been killed storming the compound.

My eyes sting from sweat and tears of frustration.

Weeks of heavy combat have put me on edge. Friends have died; others have been wounded, some multiple times.

Now the enemy fighters lay dead on the ground in front of me.

I think to myself that if I had fired my rocket into the building, a Marine might still be alive.

We’re told it’s Lance Cpl. Bradley “The Barbarian” Faircloth, a 20-year-old from Mobile, Alabama. He’s a Sgt. Leo in the making and widely regarded as the best boot in the platoon.

We watch from a distance as the body bag is zipped closed and loaded into the back of a vehicle.

Many of us cry as we continue our patrol back to base.

When we return, there’s silence as we eat our vacuum-sealed meals of preservatives and congealed fats. Meadows wishes he’d thrown a grenade and killed the men who shot Faircloth. Matthews wonders if his squad will ever trust him again. Bahrns believes he let down Brad’s family back home.

Doc is inconsolable and believes he failed us by not saving Faircloth. That he’s lost our trust. And that by losing Faircloth, he’s lost us all.

All of us know there will be a memorial service when we get home and are scared about what it will be like to look Bradley’s mother in her eyes.

As the days go on, we reminisce about Faircloth and the Thanksgiving dinner we shared with him the day before he was killed. Our loss of motivation is palpable. We want to go home. But we still have two months left on our deployment.

Over the next few weeks, Leo nominates roughly half of our squad for valorous awards. The Corps’ bureaucracy mows most of them down.

The next month, our battalion commander Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl begins making his rounds to talk to Marines across the battlespace. We take out the trash and shave our faces. We blouse our boots and put on our cleanest uniforms. It’s our turn for the dog and pony show.

When he arrives, we stand neatly in a formation as he speaks for what seems like an hour—stories of our bravery and sacrifice and how we upheld the Corps’ legacy.

Yut. Err. Kill.

One sentence lingers in our minds. Prepare for your next mission.

 

“On Behalf of a Grateful Nation”

 

Arlington National CemeteryMatt Eich

Widows and other Gold Star family members sit in the front rows of a silent theater.

It’s the spring of 2005, and we’ve been home for a few weeks. Our entire battalion is crammed into the base field house at Camp Lejeune. Dozens of portraits are displayed on the floor, each paired with a rifle, dog tags, and boots.

I stare at the photographs. They stare back.

They’re all dead.

For months, we’ve struggled with our battle, but we’ve remained isolated from the families who received the dreaded knock on the door to mark the start of their holiday season. We weren’t there for their three-volley-gun salute, or when they were handed a folded flag “on behalf of a grateful nation.”

Now, seated in the bleachers, we are too far away to comfort them.

Doc can’t bear to watch Kathleen Faircloth walk across the floor. He sneaks outside and cries in the cab of his truck.

I sit quietly and recall my times at the School of Infantry with Demarkus Brown, who loved to tell stories about his mother.

I think back to my conversations with Lt. Malcom about his sister.

I remember my late-night conversations with Travis Desiato about being proud Massholes.

I think about how much I want to apologize to Kathleen Faircloth, but I can’t face her.

One by one, the families are ushered across the floor, and one by one, they stand by the photographs of their loved ones. Some pray. Others hug. Most of them cry.

Children with no fathers. Parents who lost sons. Families destroyed. Friends we’ll never see again. All torn apart by combat thousands of miles away during a war that America ignored.

As each family walks back to their seats, the steady rhythm of their footsteps is a reminder of how we failed to bring their loved ones home.

The sound of taps fills the building.

I stare straight forward and try not to let anyone see me crying. It’s a feeling I’ll get used to.

Twenty years ago, I thought the Corps gave me exactly what I asked for, and I’m still struggling to understand the meaning of it all.

When I enlisted in 2003, I was a rebellious teenager who lacked discipline and a sense of purpose. Despite my mother’s objections, I wanted to be a Marine infantryman. When I got to recruit training at Parris Island, the Corps handed me my first rifle and taught me that blood makes the grass grow. In Fallujah, we destroyed our enemy through fire and maneuver—exactly what we were trained to do.

The rules of engagement justified the death and destruction. But today, I no longer can.

When we came home, we settled into the monotony of grocery shopping, changing diapers, and paying utility bills, all while we faced a rampant stigma disincentivizing mental health care. Dozens of Marines across our battalion self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. Those who were caught were publicly shamed and booted from the Corps.

I eventually tried to kill myself.

The fog of war may have been in Fallujah, but it still drifts in and out of our lives, often at the most inopportune, unexpected times.

Like the time my daughter and I were playing with dolls on the floor and their cold, lifeless eyes reminded me of a dead body.

Or when the scent of jet fuel at the airport made me imagine running alongside a tank, smiling with my friends.

Or when AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” came over the speakers as my wife and I waited in line to ride a roller coaster. My mind drifted to crossing Route Fran, and memories of Malcom and Faircloth.

I stared straight forward and tried not to let anyone see me crying. The feeling I’m now used to.

And now, after two decades spent trying to forget what we saw and did in Fallujah, I decided it was time to confront it. I reached out to Marines I hadn’t spoken to since the battle, and with them by my side—just like they were 20 years ago—I wrote this story.

In August, I organized a five-day reunion in DC that brought our squad back together. We cried. We laughed. And we remembered. But the most healing part of our time together was that Faircloth’s mother, Kathleen, traveled from Alabama to join us and lead us into the new Fallujah exhibit at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Together, we listened to her read the last letter Bradley wrote home.

And not only were we able to look Kathleen in the eye but she told us something that will never leave me.

We are all her sons.

Like millions of Americans, I volunteered to serve during a time of war and knew I might experience combat. We trusted the Pentagon officials leading us and the promise that we’d be cared for once we returned home. We believed the global war on terror was justified and that by fighting it, our children wouldn’t face the same enemy. We believed Americans cared about the war we fought on their behalf.

We should have known better.

After 20 years, what haunts me most about Fallujah isn’t just the killing or how we did it, whether it was a bullet, a blast, or a bulldozer.

It’s knowing that some of the hope we destroyed in Fallujah was our own.

The hope that time will make the memories fade away.

The hope that I’ll forgive myself.

And the hope that it was all worth it in the end.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

The People Who Made This Project Possible

Author
Thomas J. Brennan

Photography
Matt Eich
Justin Gellerson
Cpl. Trevor Gift
Madison Brennan

Video
TJ Cooney
Sunjae Smith
Shane Yeager
Claude Robinson
John Napolitano
Greg Corombos (AVC)
Dan Taksas (AVC)
Peter Trahan (AVC)
Vallen King (AVC)
Rich McFadden (AVC)
Nick Schifrin (PBS Newshour)
Paul Wood (BBC Embedded Footage)
Robbie Wright (BBC Embedded Footage)

Audio
Elena Boffetta
Jim O’Grady (Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting)

Engagement
Lydia Williams Keller (Soundview Creative)
Hrisanthi Kroi Pickett

Fact-Check
Jess Rohan

Copy Edits
Mitchell Hansen-Dewar

Editors
Mike Frankel
Dan Schulman (Mother Jones)

Music Licensing
Jonathan Leahy, Aperature Music (In-Kind Advisory Support)
Phil Collins via Concord Publishing and Warner Music Group (Gratis)
Lynyrd Skynyrd via UME and UMPG (Gratis)
AC/DC via Sony and Sony Music Publishing (Gratis)

Partners
Mother Jones
PBS NewsHour
The Center for Investigative Reporting
The American Veterans Center

Location Support
Lt. Col. Matthew Hilton, USMC Communications Directorate, New York
Col. John Caldwell, Communications Directorate, Headquarters USMC
The National Museum of the Marine Corps
Office of the Secretary of Defense
The United States Marine Corps

Mental Health          
Dr. Pamela Wall
Jodi Salamino

Legal Review
BakerHostetler
James Chadwick (Mother Jones)
Four Retired Marine Judge Advocates

On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.

Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership. 

With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.

A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”

The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.

Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.) 

Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.

Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefire offers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)

The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)

Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.) 

Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.

Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict. 

Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.

Yesterday, Axios reporter Barak Ravid published a copy of a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israel urging the country to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza—and, in a rare move for the Biden administration, backing that request up by publicly threatening to remove some military aid. 

“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20,” Blinken and Austin wrote, suggesting that the US could withhold money from Israel if the country does not: enable 350 aid trucks to enter daily, reinstitute “humanitarian pauses” in their military operations, allow Palestinians to move inland before winter, and open an additional aid crossing within thirty days.

The State Department confirmed the veracity of the letter. And Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations, today said the effort was to ensure there was not a “policy of starvation” for a region that has received zero food or medical aid since October 1st. 

Israeli press reported that 50 trucks of food aid entered North Gaza today, likely in response. But it still is not clear yet whether the administration will actually back up its words with action before the election and pull military funds if Israel continues blocking aid. 

NSM-20, the policy directive Blinken and Austin reference in their letter, is based on an amendment filed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in December of 2023. The policy requires that the provision of US “security assistance” comply with international law, and that countries receiving US weapons and military funding—of which Israel has received over $17.9 billion in the past year—do not also obstruct the provision of humanitarian aid. This past spring, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid; Blinken rejected the reports, according to ProPublica.

“As the humanitarian situation in Gaza has gone from horrible to catastrophic, the Biden Administration has failed in its ongoing duty to apply the law and terms of NSM-20,” Van Hollen said Tuesday. “Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account in meeting the requirements set forth in the secretaries’ letter.”

Annelle Sheline, a Quincy Institute analyst who resigned from the State Department in April over Biden’s Gaza policy, wrote on X that the letter, which expresses “concern” that Israel is impeding the movement of civilians within Gaza and prohibiting nearly all aid from entering the strip, is also a “clear acknowledgement” that section 620I of the foreign assistance act is being violated. 620I—which prohibits the provision of military aid to foreign governments which restrict humanitarian aid—“has never been systematically implemented,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict. 

 According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts since the war began a year ago. The United Nations said that Israel blocked all food aid from entering north Gaza between October 1st and October 14th. Health officials at North Gaza hospitals say food, medicine, and even water are running out. 

The letter’s 30-day deadline means any threats it contains won’t be enforceable until after the US presidential election. And Austin announced on October 13th, just days before the letter, that the US would send another THAAD missile defense battery—along with about 100 soldiers to operate it—to supplement Israel’s pre-existing air defenses. 

Annelle Sheline, the ex-State-Department official, told the Wall Street Journal she suspects it’s a strategy to gain Arab and Muslim votes in key swing states like Michigan for Harris, rather than a real attempt to shift Israel’s policy long-term. “It’s very convenient that the deadline is after the election,” she said.

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted on X a video he had debuted a few days earlier at a rally: A montage decrying the “woke” military, showing clips of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—a film, famously, about the dark cost to the human soul of creating a war machine—as an example of the halcyon days of a battle-hardened Army to which we must return.

WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY! pic.twitter.com/zpWZhSKcEs

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2024

“WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Trump wrote. His post was accompanied by a 94-second edited video alternating clips of a screaming general from the film Full Metal Jacket with shots of Assistant Secretary for Health for the Department of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine—the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official—and TikTok videos of people changing from military garb into drag queen ensembles.

The clips from Full Metal Jacket are labeled “President Trump,” while those featuring LGBTQ people are labeled “Comrade Kamala.” The video ends with a Trumpian exhortation: “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.”

“Absolutely,” Elon Musk, right-wing owner of X, replied to Trump’s post. “The military’s job is to defend America, not engage in social activism.”

The clip is not just absurd. Beneath it is a real aim. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that created Project 2025 has decried “the rise of wokeness in the military.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote back in 2022, the former president has made clear to his inner circle that going after “woke” generals would be a priority if he’s reelected.

What, exactly, would this look like? I’m not sure if Trump knows. But Project 2025 offers some clues, stating that “those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service” and “physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.” The Heritage Foundation, in its critiques on “wokeness in the military” attacks the familiar suspects: DEI initiatives, critical race theory, LGBTQ people.

With Trump and Harris now tied in a dead heat just three weeks out from the election, according to a new NBC News national poll, it’s also worth remembering Trump has reportedly flirted with a return to mandatory military service.

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted on X a video he had debuted a few days earlier at a rally: A montage decrying the “woke” military, showing clips of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—a film, famously, about the dark cost to the human soul of creating a war machine—as an example of the halcyon days of a battle-hardened Army to which we must return.

WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY! pic.twitter.com/zpWZhSKcEs

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2024

“WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Trump wrote. His post was accompanied by a 94-second edited video alternating clips of a screaming general from the film Full Metal Jacket with shots of Assistant Secretary for Health for the Department of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine—the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official—and TikTok videos of people changing from military garb into drag queen ensembles.

The clips from Full Metal Jacket are labeled “President Trump,” while those featuring LGBTQ people are labeled “Comrade Kamala.” The video ends with a Trumpian exhortation: “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.”

“Absolutely,” Elon Musk, right-wing owner of X, replied to Trump’s post. “The military’s job is to defend America, not engage in social activism.”

The clip is not just absurd. Beneath it is a real aim. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that created Project 2025 has decried “the rise of wokeness in the military.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote back in 2022, the former president has made clear to his inner circle that going after “woke” generals would be a priority if he’s reelected.

What, exactly, would this look like? I’m not sure if Trump knows. But Project 2025 offers some clues, stating that “those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service” and “physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.” The Heritage Foundation, in its critiques on “wokeness in the military” attacks the familiar suspects: DEI initiatives, critical race theory, LGBTQ people.

With Trump and Harris now tied in a dead heat just three weeks out from the election, according to a new NBC News national poll, it’s also worth remembering Trump has reportedly flirted with a return to mandatory military service.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence. 

In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings. 

The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.

Human Cost

To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615. 

Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.

“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.” 

Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”

Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said. 

Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)

Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said. 

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been directly financed by the United States, which supplies 69 percent of Israel’s weapons imports.

Monetary Cost

Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year. 

Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount. 

“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.

In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)

The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote. 

This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.

“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said. 

On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence. 

In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings. 

The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.

Human Cost

To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615. 

Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.

“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.” 

Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”

Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said. 

Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)

Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said. 

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been directly financed by the United States, which supplies 69 percent of Israel’s weapons imports.

Monetary Cost

Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year. 

Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount. 

“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.

In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)

The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote. 

This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.

“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said. 

On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.” 

Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.

In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:

The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).

As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.

After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran. 

Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.

“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”

In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.” 

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.” 

Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”

It seemed US politicians were inching towards a cross-partisan embrace of Israel’s reported “de-escalation through escalation” strategy.

Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv. 

On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.” 

That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.

But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced. 

Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)

Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon. 

Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.

Sullivan, the same man who once called for  “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration. 

“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.” 

On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.” 

Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.

In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:

The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).

As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.

After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran. 

Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.

“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”

In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.” 

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.” 

Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”

It seemed US politicians were inching towards a cross-partisan embrace of Israel’s reported “de-escalation through escalation” strategy.

Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv. 

On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.” 

That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.

But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced. 

Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)

Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon. 

Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.

Sullivan, the same man who once called for  “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration. 

“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.” 

Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.

But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend. 

Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks. 

While it might sound nice to talk of building the “greatest dome of them all,” as Trump recently said, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, says such a plan is ridiculous.

“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”

The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.

The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.

Such a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July. 

America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)

“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?” 

Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.

But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend. 

Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks. 

While it might sound nice to talk of building the “greatest dome of them all,” as Trump recently said, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, says such a plan is ridiculous.

“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”

The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.

The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.

Such a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July. 

America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)

“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?” 

On September 24, ProPublica revealed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly ignored two different reports from within the Biden administration concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking aid into Gaza. Only days after receiving detailed memos explaining exactly how the Israeli military was blocking humanitarian aid, Blinken told Congress that US does not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Now, the Secretary of State is facing calls for his resignation. “[Blinken] lied. People went hungry, and some died. He needs to resign now,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) wrote this morning. Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian-American in the US House, is the first member of Congress to call for Blinken to resign. 

Blinken has not, as of the time of publication, responded to Tlaib’s comment. He justified his response to the reports on CBS this morning, saying his response was “actually pretty typical.”

The US government is legally required to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of humanitarian aid. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration each gave reports to Blinken concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking aid from the starving people of Gaza.

“USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct,” ProPublica reported. “The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.”

As recently as August, the US approved a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, including fighter jets, tank shells, and missiles.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Try as they might, Trump aides cannot seem to quell criticism of their recent photo op at Arlington National Cemetery, which allegedly included a physical altercation.

The latest high-profile condemnation comes from Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was also a Purple Heart recipient who served in the Navy and spent several years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. The younger McCain, who is currently serving in the Army, told CNN that he thought the incident was a “violation” of the cemetery, a resting place for fallen soldiers—including his own grandfather and great-grandfather. (Sen. McCain is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery.)

“It just blows me away,” McCain told CNN of the Trump team’s fight at Arlington, adding, “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” about whether to participate in a campaign event.

As I reported last week, two Trump campaign staffers clashed with a cemetery official where Trump had been attending a wreath-laying ceremony to honor soldiers who died in the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. A statement from the Army later confirmed that the staffer had been “abruptly pushed aside” after they tried to enforce cemetery rules that prohibit filming and photographing in a section where recent US casualties are buried, which is forbidden by federal law. (NPR was the first to report news of the incident.) Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, denied the report of a physical altercation, while Trump himself has called the incident a “made-up story.“

The Trump team ultimately got their content, which included a TikTok video suggesting President Biden was responsible for the deaths of the soldiers who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus various photos posted to X by Trump campaign staffers. McCain, who CNN reports enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 17 and currently serves as an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment, said that in doing so, Trump had disrespected the sacrifices of the people buried there. “I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently—that it’s not about you there,” he told CNN. “It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”

“Many of these men and women, who served their country, chose to do something greater than themselves,” he added. “They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up, and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.”

McCain’s remarks are likely a reference to Trump’s infamous record of avoiding military service. Not only did Trump not serve in the military—he famously claimed he had bone spurs, allowing him to avoid serving in Vietnam—he has also openly denigrated those who have: He infamously attacked the elder McCain, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Since the confrontation last Monday, Trump’s team has refused to acknowledge any sort of mistake at the cemetery last week, even opting instead to attack and denigrate Trump’s critics. As I reported, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), defended Trump’s actions and told Harris to “go to hell” for criticizing the visit…though she never did. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign put out a video of some of the families of the fallen soldiers present at the cemetery last week blasting Harris over the Afghanistan withdrawal and for failing to be present at the cemetery, accusing her of “playing politics.”

But some feel differently: As I wrote last week, the family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano—a Green Beret who reportedly died by suicide in 2020 after serving eight combat tours—told the New York Times they were upset his gravestone had been included in a picture in which Trump posed grinning with a thumbs up at the gravesite of Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, located next to Marckesano’s.

McCain also told CNN that he changed his voter registration from Independent to Democrat a few weeks back and would be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris this November, adding that he “would get involved in any way I could” to help her win. His mother, Cindy McCain, a registered Republican, endorsed Biden in 2020 but does not appear to have made an endorsement ahead of this year’s election. But don’t expect McCain’s sister, the conservative firebrand and former co-host of The View, Meghan McCain, to join her brother. In a post on X last week responding to someone who called on her to publicly endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, McCain said that was a “fever dream,” adding, “I’m a lifelong, generational conservative.”

But Harris—or the threat of Trump—is converting plenty of other Republicans: As I reported last week, more than 200 former GOP officials—including former McCain staffers—endorsed Harris in an open letter, writing, “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

Jimmy McCain appears to agree: “For me to be with [my father] towards the end of his life, hearing things [from Trump] like, ‘he was a loser because he was captured’—I don’t think I could ever overlook that,” he told CNN.

Spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On June 6, the Rahma Worldwide international medical delegation arrived at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. The humanitarian volunteers noticed something immediately: Some of the medical staff welcoming them—with the best food available, an assortment of cucumbers, hummus, and french fries—appeared remarkably young to be doctors.

Before the delegation could ask any questions, an airstrike hit the neighborhood. The walls of Gaza European Hospital—then one of the only functioning medical centers in the region—shook.

“Within the first 15 minutes that we were here,” Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, an emergency specialist from Australia, recalled, “nine people came in an ambulance, already dead.”

This, the doctors learned, was typical of the day-to-day life in Gaza. It was only later the international doctors would come to find out that many of the staff were not fully credentialed doctors, but student volunteers. Dr. Bing Li, another member of the Rahma delegation—a team of a dozen doctors from different countries, there to provide support to Gaza’s depleted health system—estimated that half of the people working in European Hospital’s emergency department in June were students or trainees from Gaza’s two medical schools.

“The health care system’s on the verge of collapsing,” Salman Dasti, an anesthesiologist who worked in Gazan hospitals both before and during this war, said. “It’s being propped up because of students.”

Mustafa found the students’ ability to keep the hospital functioning remarkable. “We were getting patients moving and getting them treated. It was pretty amazing to see,” he recalled, “especially since you can see how broken they are physically, emotionally.”

On the first day, Li recalled meeting one of the volunteers keeping Gaza’s hospitals running. A patient was brought in and losing blood quickly from a blast injury to his leg. Li worked with a volunteer to stabilize the man; the volunteer then pulled Li aside and introduced herself excitedly in English: Her name was Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, and she was 20 years old.

“I had this impression she was this very friendly person, and she asked me if I wanted help with translation and seeing other patients,” Li said. The foreign doctor appreciated the aid. Earlier that day, Li, an emergency specialist from Arizona, had already had a heartbreaking experience. “We evaluated one patient that was maybe three or four years old,” she recalled. “Half his head was basically blown off.” (It ended up being “just one of many similar cases,” Li said; other doctors who have returned from Gaza say the Israeli military regularly targets children.)

As Nermeen showed Li around, another doctor noticed who the American was talking to and pulled her aside. Li was told Nermeen had a friend die earlier that same day in the blast that sent a raft of critically injured patients to the hospital.

“She was keeping this brave face despite learning that she lost somebody,” Li remembers.

Nermeen always wanted to be a doctor. As a young child, she said, she “had doctor’s tools in the form of toys.” As she grew older, she watched medical school graduation videos online, transfixed by the celebrations. She imagined herself as a cardiovascular specialist, or perhaps a pediatrician; she was overjoyed when, in 2021, she was finally able to enroll at her dream school: Al-Azhar University-Gaza. (For this article, I interviewed Nermeen using WhatsApp text messages and voice memos. Her internet and data access in Gaza is not good enough for phone calls of length.)

By October 7, 2023, Nermeen had made it through two and a half years of medical school. (In Gaza, students’ medical training starts immediately after high school, when they begin a six-year program of study.) Her tuition was expensive, and the hourlong bus ride to school from her home in Abasan Al-Kabira, a small city east of Khan Younis, made her carsick. But she was happy to be learning.

Then, the war came. In early November, Israeli warplanes destroyed Nermeen’s campus. By mid-January, Israeli bombardment had reduced every university in Gaza to rubble. Nermeen moved constantly. She evacuated from place to place four times in the first six months of the war. Eighty-four percent of Gaza is now under evacuation order. She watched classmates, professors, and friends die nearly every week. “In this war, I lost many of my colleagues and friends from school,” she told me. “I lost four members of my family.”

In April, Nermeen started volunteering at the hospital. It was the “one positive amid all of this,” she said. A third-year student would not ordinarily be actively treating patients. But her clinical phase began early. “I was learning from the doctors and helping them,” she said.

Many of those working and volunteering at the hospital had shifts lasting 24 hours—and no one I spoke with had received payment from the hospital since October. Anything shorter than a 24-hour shift would mean more trips on treacherous roads, made nearly impassable by millions of pounds of debris and sewage overflows from broken sanitation systems.

On a normal day, Nermeen began her shift early in the morning, connecting to the internet and trying to download lectures and readings from the website of her bombed university, before beginning to see the injured, “standing with doctors, talking to patients.”

As a volunteer, she cleaned wounds, translated for foreign doctors, and made treatment plans. “There were days when…the work was a lot, due to the arrival of large numbers of martyrs, and injured,” she said. “But the thing I loved to do most was stitches in the emergency department.” 

This was made difficult by short supplies. The sutures in Gaza hospitals were labeled “not for use on humans,” Mohammed Mustafa, the ER doctor from Australia, recalled. Still, he helped Nermeen with her suture technique; he noticed that she was particularly careful in caring for patients during the process. Nermeen did her best to stitch in a way that would minimize scarring.  

Conditions were hard. There were no beds, only rigid metal frames. Rooms were cramped and hot. Even the chairs in the hospital were occupied by patients, leaving little room for their caregivers to rest. The complex smelled of rot, and flies landed in patients’ wounds just as Nermeen finished disinfecting them. Even the suture needle was less sharp than it should be. 

“It would take you maybe three, four attempts to pierce the skin with the suture,” Mustafa said. “And you can imagine trying to do that with very limited anesthetic, [on] children as well.” 

Beyond the shortage of goods, there was also a shortage of personnel. Students did their best to fill in. One 22-year-old student who spoke to Mother Jones, Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, was in his third year of dental school before the war. He was initially told he’d be working as a porter, then a translator. He spent four months volunteering at European Hospital, unable to see his family in Deir al-Balah after the Israeli army took over the area between the hospital and his family’s tent.

“I slept in the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the hospital for four months,” he said. ‘There was a broken bed that does not move from its place,” which was not used except for emergencies. When it was unoccupied by patients—and when he wasn’t being called to translate for a surgeon in the middle of the night—he got that bed.

As he spent more time in the hospital, he learned “there was a severe shortage of dentists specializing in maxillofacial surgery,” so he quickly found himself assisting with those surgeries, too. “It is difficult to talk to patients with burns or fractures,” he said, “some of whom lost a loved one with the same injury minutes before.”

Sometimes, the patients the students cared for were people they recognized. On the mid-June day when Nermeen met Bing Li, she wasn’t supposed to be at work. She was at her family’s tent, taking a rest day, when she felt a bomb detonate nearby. “We saw the smoke of the bombing, and a large number of ambulances,” she recalled. Without internet access, Nermeen worried her own relatives might be among the dead.

Nermeen decided to go to the hospital on her day off. “I put on the uniform and walked to the road.” A man with a car offered her a ride when he saw her medical uniform. His family lived in the area that had just been bombed, Nermeen remembered, and he was headed to the hospital, too. Once there, she opened her phone to scroll through the names of the dead. “My friend’s name was among the names of the martyrs of this massacre.” She rushed to the emergency room in hopes that the news was wrong. “But it was true.”

Most of her friend’s family had been killed. She found her friend’s younger sister, Samar, waiting alone, with wounds all over her body. Nermeen monitored her vital signs, stitched up a deep gash in her left foot, and patched up two wounds on her leg.

Samar was later transferred to a different department, where her head wounds were treated. “She remained in care for several days,” Nermeen remembered. Then, Samar was discharged, but “she was still in a state of shock, and would not speak.” At the end of July, Nermeen received word that Samar had been killed, too: “She joined the rest of her family.”

Gaza’s medical system has been painfully constricted for decades. This is partially due to the longstanding Israeli policy of blocking “dual-use items” at the border—medical devices that could, allegedly, be used as weapons. Those items have included crutches, hearing aid batteries, thermometers, and incubators. This means the doctors of Gaza must make do.

Dasti, the anaesthesiologist from San Francisco, visited Gaza multiple times as part of a medical mission group with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund before 2023. “I was fairly impressed with the robustness of the health care system,” he said. “I mean, it still lacked resources, but I was pretty impressed with the training that the physicians there had.”

There were 36 fully functioning hospitals in Gaza prior to the war. By mid-August, according to the World Health Organization, only 16 of those 36 hospitals were even partially operational. These 16 hospitals have treated patients far beyond their capacity. Staff is low: The UN Human Rights Office reported that more than 500 medical workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. And an NBC News investigation recently suggested Israel has targeted doctors for kidnapping and taken them to torture camps. Hanan Balkhy, Eastern Mediterranean regional director for the World Health Organization, said that as of early August, WHO has been able to verify more than 500 attacks on medical personnel in Gaza.

This leaves a staggering hole for those in need of care. The WHO estimates that nearly 93,000 people in Gaza are injured. Among those 16 remaining hospitals, there are fewer than 1,500 hospital beds—about one for every 60 injured people. And those numbers don’t account for those who would ordinarily require hospital beds even in peacetime: diabetic patients requiring dialysis, cancer patients, and pregnant women needing somewhere to give birth.

“The remaining students are now basically frontline doctors, because of just the lack of personnel,” Dasti said. Students spent their days at European Hospital “functioning as essentially an attending physician, while not getting paid and working long arduous hours with little sleep.” 

Balkhy, of WHO, said the students are exhibiting “more resilience than anyone should need to have.” Nermeen and her classmates dream of continuing their education—perhaps leaving and studying elsewhere if the borders reopen—but, as Balkhy said, it is “a race against time and circumstance.”

Conditions in Gaza, meanwhile, are only worsening. WHO confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years on August 22: “Health workers have been digging graves for patients they know they are not able to save because they don’t have the resources needed.”

Forty-five international doctors who spent time in Gaza published a letter on July 25 addressed to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Bing Li and Salman Dasti were among the signatories. They detailed the injuries they’d seen—preteens deliberately shot in the head, healthy babies dying of preventable diseases—and noted their “acute awareness” that Gaza’s medical professionals have been targeted. The doctors begged the president for an arms embargo, and for “unfettered aid delivery” of antibiotics, painkillers, and sutures.

On August 1, 300 days into the destruction of Gaza, Nermeen turned 21 in a white tent, as temperatures soared above 90 degrees. As she sent me WhatsApp voice notes, warplanes buzzed overhead and her siblings chattered in the background.

She had been away from the hospital for a month. It was evacuated on July 1. Patients left, or were carried out by hand, over a chaotic 24 hours. “There’s really no roads because they’ve all been destroyed,” Dasti remembered. Taking a patient a couple of miles to the nearest hospital took at least an hour. Even in the United States, under the best of conditions, it is hard to move a patient from the ICU down the hall to the operating room safely. “I think some of them died on the way,” Dasti said.

Hasan, the dental student, evacuated too. He has spent the past two months sharing an 8-by-20-foot tent with four families in Deir al-Balah refugee camp, not far from the site of the Al-Tabin School bombing, in which the Israel Defense Forces used US-made bombs to hit a school building and kill nearly 100 people. He spends time making videos about his work in the hospital, which the international doctors he met have been sharing at conferences back home.

Hasan has been trying to return to European Hospital to see if he could help if it reopens—and perhaps find a path to continuing his studies. (World Health Organization officials told Mother Jones that they are partnering with the Gaza Ministry of Health to restore emergency services at the hospital, though the timeline has been postponed amid heavy bombing.) On WhatsApp, Hasan showed me a map outlining the route he planned to take, with red danger zones highlighted. When he tried to make the journey, “the people on the road told me to go back [because] the army is on the road.” He turned around and returned to Deir al-Balah.

When we messaged last week, Hasan said he had heard a system of buses organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross might be able to bring him back to Khan Younis. But a day after we spoke, Israeli forces once again ordered the evacuation of large portions of Khan Younis—and bombed portions of Deir al-Balah, where Hasan now lives. But he hasn’t given up. “I will try again,” he said.

Nermeen faces similar obstacles. “I am impatiently waiting for the hospital to reopen, because I miss helping and learning new things,” she said. While she heard that administrative work on reopening the hospital began in mid-August, she doesn’t know when it will reopen fully. And returning to the hospital might be dangerous: “Sudden bombing could occur on the road.” So, instead, she has returned to her studies, when the intermittent-at-best internet allows, and when the “terrifying” noises of artillery shells pause long enough to let her focus. One day, Nermeen announced proudly that she’d managed to turn in her endocrinology exam online, to a virtual classroom run by professors from a university that, physically, no longer exists.

“All of this losing makes my heart broken,” Nermeen said. “I hope I can be strong, because my dreams wait [for] me, and many people…I want to help them.”