Photograph by Garin Pirnia
During a frigid afternoon on January 3, U.S. Navy veteran Mike James stood in front of more than 100 protesters gathered at Cincinnati City Hall in response to the U.S. military’s bombing Venezuela to support capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro. “[Joining the military] is one of my great regrets in life,” he told the crowd.
From 2008 to 2014, James worked as a mass communications specialist for Navy public affairs and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. After returning from the back-to-back deployments, he worked in Defense Media Activity at the central hub for all military public affairs at Fort Meade, Maryland.“I experienced Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were awful,” said James in an interview. “We were there to terrorize normal people. I found out quickly that I sympathized with the Iraqi and the Afghan civilians, whom I worked with all the time. The people could see we were just nothing but a burden on them and weren’t making anything any better.” He says his stints exposed him to burn pits, poverty, bombs, environmental catastrophes, and a lot of jingoistic and misleading government messaging.
James was based at Fort Meade when the Chelsea Manning trial occurred. Like Manning, he worked in intelligence in secret compartments and sympathized with her. Despite his illustrious military career, James felt disillusioned and moved back to Cincinnati, his hometown. “I went from working out of the Pentagon and the American Primary Public Affairs office to living in my mom’s basement, and that was really humiliating,” he says.
In response to the Iraq War in 2004, military personnel founded About Face (originally named Iraq Veterans Against the War), a nationwide and regional group of post-9/11 veterans and active-duty members. James got involved in 2015, and last year he launched About Face Cincinnati, the city’s only anti-war veterans organization.
“About Face is really important because it provides an ideological safe house and a physical safe house where you can talk to other veterans who experience the same thing—the alienation, the dispossession,” says James. “About Face and other anti-war veteran-led organizations like Veterans For Peace are incredibly important as a means for saving the lives of veterans so they can alleviate themselves of the brainwashing of American exceptionalism and white supremacy and to try to heal their psychological wounds.”
About Face promotes the Save Our VA program, created by Veterans For Peace. “The VA is a critically important national hospital system,” says James. “Not only does it provide specialized healthcare for American troops who sacrificed everything in the interest of serving their nation, but the VA also serves as the backup hospital system in the case of regional or national catastrophe. With America threatening apocalyptic war in western Asia and against every continent, even against NATO, it seems increasingly likely that all Americans will desperately need the VA in the near future.”
To gain more visibility with veterans and the community at large, James and fellow Cincinnati Navy veteran Kean “Babs” Babcock have been speaking at protests and recruiting left-leaning veterans. Military veterans make up 6 percent of the American population, with active duty service members around 1 percent of the population.
Babcock joined the Navy when he was 18 and for three years worked as a hospital corpsman search and rescue medical technician, or Navy flight medic, in Guam. Like a lot of people, he joined because he couldn’t afford college. Seven years later, in 2022, he says he felt “misled” and left the military. He is set to graduate from UC this spring with a neuroscience degree.
Photograph by Garin Pirnia
“I realized I was really just contributing to America’s imperialist war machine,” says Babcock. “After I became educated on the true agenda of American imperialism and how it relates to capitalism, I joined a bunch of left-wing organizations here in Cincinnati and found my true place of belonging was with veterans.”
In May 2025, James and Babcock met at Fountain Square during a pro-Palestine rally. The two immediately bonded over their shared military experiences. “We understand that military members’ oath is to the Constitution, not to any president, not to any one man,” Babcock says. “It is to the people. We want them to know that veterans are not a conservative monolith. About Face is platforming our voices, but it’s also creating a community for us.”
That community also entails offering mental health support. According to James, “all veterans” have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “It’s not because they got blown up or they lost a limb or they received brain trauma in a particular kind of way. But the way the American military trains soldiers is a highly traumatic process. It’s a demeaning, humiliating process where you’re broken down. They take the fight out of you. They use sleep deprivation tactics. It’s a modus operandi of abuse, harassment, and trauma that creates a person who simply isn’t you. Having such an intense experience in the military was incredibly traumatizing. It basically ruined my life and caused PTSD.”
By speaking at protests, mobilizing new members, and pushing back against ICE, James says About Face hopes to make a positive difference in veterans’ lives. “The anti-war veteran movement has helped me with my trauma because it provides a venue where I don’t have to pretend to be somebody I’m not,” he says. “I don’t have to lie about my experiences. It helps me to move forward and become a real person and not be a cog in a death machine.”
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