While president-elect Donald Trump accuses the U.S. military of being too “woke,” a morale patch showcased on a Defense Department website suggests some troops are as bigoted as ever. While the military has covered up evidence of the patch, removing photographs of it amid press outcry, the Pentagon has not disavowed it.
In late October, the website of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service — the Pentagon’s official photo repository — posted a photograph highlighting the shoulder patch of Lt. Kyle Festa, a pilot assigned to the Navy’s Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 74.
Festa’s patch features crosshairs over likenesses of the Tusken Raiders, the fictional “sand people” who attacked Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The patch reads: “Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024.”
The insignia commemorated his deployment aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea, according to the photo’s caption. Since January, U.S. warships in the Red Sea have repeatedly struck the Houthis, a nationalist movement that controls much of Yemen and has been attacking ships — including U.S. warships — there and in the Gulf of Aden in retaliation for the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza.
“The enemy is given quasi-racialized and subhuman status, which makes it easier to kill them.”
U.S. military personnel wear all manner of patches — official and unofficial — on their uniforms. Some so-called morale patches are rooted in heraldry and history; others reference pop culture or dark humor.
“The patches reduce the Houthis to the status of a not-quite-human, semi-alien Other. So the enemy is given quasi-racialized and subhuman status, which makes it easier to kill them,” observes Janet McIntosh, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University and an expert in the U.S. military’s long history of dehumanizing its enemies. “It also lumps all Houthis into the same category, which will also make non-combatants or civilians easier to kill.”
For years, the United States backed an atrocity-filled air campaign led by Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. Just after entering office, President Joe Biden formally delisted Houthis as terrorist group. But after the Houthis started targeting ships, Biden reclassified them as a terrorists and began launching attacks on Houthi missile and radar sites.
“For over a year, the Iran-backed Houthis, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, have recklessly and unlawfully attacked U.S. and international vessels transiting the Red Sea, the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month, announcing airstrikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen by Air Force B-2 bombers, a rarely used stealth plane capable of carrying the U.S. military’s largest “bunker buster” bombs.
The Intercept asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense whether Austin agrees with the morale patch’s characterization of the Houthis but did not receive a reply prior to publication. “The patch signifies the squadron’s operational achievements and heritage,” according to the caption of the official Navy photograph by Austen McClain.
After several journalists — including former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein — drew attention to the “Houthi Hunting Club” photograph, that image and another of Festa wearing the patch, were removed from the Defense Department website. “After further review, it was determined that the patch was inappropriate in nature and not consistent with uniform regulations,” Cmdr. Dawn M. Stankus, a public affairs officer for Naval Air Force Atlantic, told The Intercept. She and other Navy spokespeople failed to respond to more substantive questions about the decision.
Dehumanization is a conduit to killing. The use of animalistic slurs has been shown to increase people’s willingness to endorse harming a target group. The Nazis, for example, compared Jews to rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches.”
White Americans have been dehumanizing racial and ethnic Others since long before there was a United States. Racist dehumanization was central to the justification of European conquest, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery, making it inextricable from the nation’s origins. No less a document than the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to “merciless Indian savages.” Recent studies have shown, almost 250 years later, racist attitudes by Americans toward minority groups persist.
Research led by Nour Kteily, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, asked participants to rate where they think various groups belong on a 100-point scale of “evolutionary progress,” mapped onto the drawing of the “Ascent of Man” showing ape-like human ancestors on the left and a fully upright humans on the right. They found “Americans rate Americans, Europeans, Japanese. and Australians equivalently high on the scale (i.e., 90 to 93) but rate Mexican immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims 10 to 15 points lower,” according to their 2017 study. A quarter of Americans, in fact, rated Muslims at or below 60 on the scale.
The U.S. military also has a long history of dehumanizing its enemies — especially racial Others — from the Indian Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries onward. During America’s war in the Philippines, at the turn of the 20th century, U.S. troops began calling their Indigenous enemies “goo-goos.” The pejorative term then seems to have transmuted into “gook” and was applied over the decades to enemies during the so-called banana wars in Haiti and Nicaragua prior to World War II, and after that conflict in Korea during the 1950s.
The epithet returned to the lips of U.S. troops in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. While other slurs were freely employed, “gook” was — from the beginning of the conflict to its end — uttered ad infinitum. “The colonels called them gooks, the captain called them gooks, the staff all called them gooks. They were dinks, you know, subhuman,” recalled one veteran in an interview in the 1970s, published in Robert J. Lifton’s “Home From the War.”
The notion that the Vietnamese were something less than human was often spoken of as the “mere-gook rule,” or MGR.
This mentality believed that all Vietnamese, regardless of background or age, were seen as nothing more than animals, subject to being killed or mistreated without consequence. It justified numerous atrocities and encouraged soldiers to act without remorse. Quotes from memoirs recount Marines being told that the deaths of Vietnamese should not bother them, as they were just “dead gooks” and the sooner they all died, the sooner the soldiers could return home. This dehumanizing mindset led to the deaths of an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians, with millions more wounded and displaced during the conflict.
During the war on terror, new derogatory terms like “sand nigger” were used to dehumanize Iraqis and Arabs. Soldiers were taught to view all Iraqis and Arabs in a negative light, even children, and joked about heinous acts like raping women. The military has recognized its tendency to dehumanize the enemy, acknowledging that such behavior can lead to serious crimes and atrocities.
Despite efforts to address offensive behavior within the military, morale patches like the Houthi Hunting Club emblem continue to exist, blurring the lines between humor and violence. These patches often mix symbols of fun with images of violence, serving as a coping mechanism for soldiers but also normalizing acts of military depravity. The use of fictional characters and humor in such patches allows for plausible deniability, making it easier to dismiss their harmful implications.
The contradictions surrounding patches like the Houthi Hunting Club emblem are evident, especially considering the failures of the U.S. military campaign against the Houthis. Despite engaging in hundreds of combat missions, the Houthis have continued to carry out attacks, causing significant disruptions in shipping activity and even targeting U.S. Navy vessels. These ongoing attacks have left sailors unsettled and underscore the complexities and challenges of modern warfare.
“It’s something that doesn’t often cross our minds until it’s right in front of us.”
The Pentagon did not respond to inquiries regarding its military efforts against the Houthis and whether it considers the military campaign a success. Additionally, there was no comment on the decision to remove images of the Houthi Hunting Club patch or on any potential restrictions on its use by military personnel.
