People who serve in combat missions on the ground, there's a valor to that. What we're learning is that intelligence analysts and officers who are involved and sitting in what are called 'remote combat operations' are actually seeing graphic violence, homes destroyed, villages bombed, bodies burned, more than even special forces on the ground. And it's at this point, as he's sort of going through all of this, that he's realizing he's starting to question what he's doing. And he was this incredibly strikingly vigorous person. He starts to develop skin welts and feel sick and just feel weak. Chris starts to have a physical breakdown.

What he remembered and what he described was the sort of exhilaration and a sense of, 'We got a high target, high-five!' There's just the sense that we're getting the bad guys.Īnd then. In the beginning, he doesn't feel very conflicted about what he's doing. He said, 'I want to go serve my country.' He ends up very early on helping out and working on the drone program. 11, felt a streak of idealism kind of derived from his grandfather who had served in World War II. On drone operators engaged in remote combatĬhris Aaron, who's one of the former drone operators I write about at length, he was someone who, after Sept. If you look at the occupational health literature on prison guards, you have alarming rates of hypertension, of divorce, depression, substance abuse, suicide. On the psychic and physical toll of working in a prison So what replaced them? Jails and prisons. Many of the prisons and jails in the United States have been built in more low-income rural areas where the good jobs that used to exist - the mills and factories - shut down. And I should say that the geography of prisons and jails in this country sort of helps reinforce that. It's a job they end up doing after a kind of period of occupational drift or because they have few other better choices. And that's the only reason,' or 'I'm doing this job because I don't want to do a job that is temporary and I can't support my family.'īut certainly the studies suggest this is, again, not a career that people aspire to have. I'm doing this job because I get benefits. In my interviews and in the literature on corrections officers, what you find in many places is that they feel, 'Boy, I wish I could have been a cop or a firefighter. On people taking correctional jobs because they don't have better options

A dirty job book