Stan Goff
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Stan Goff (born 1951) is a writer, activist, and blogger in the United States on topics including peak oil, militarism, imperialism, race, gender, and class. He is a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant, and was in the U.S. military from 1970 until 1996, and received the Combat Infantryman Badge. He is an anti-war activist, feminist, and socialist (once describing himself as "red as a baboon's ass and proud of it."[1]).
He is the author of several books, including Hideous Dream, Full-Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century, and Sex & War. He is currently the author of the weblog Feral Scholar and contributor to Huffington Post.
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[edit] Pre-military background
Goff was born in San Diego, California, in 1951. His father, Stewart Goff, was a factory worker at Convair, a defense contractor that built aircraft. After a mass layoff, the family, which incuded his mother, Margaret Jean Goff, and two full-siblings, Celia and Glen Goff, migrated to central Missouri, where they attempted to establish a barbecue restaurant and public swimming pool. His father commuted to St. Louis to work at another aircraft factory -- also on a defense contract -- McDonnell Aircraft.. The small business would fail, and the family moved to St. Charles, Missouri, nearer McDonnell, where his mother would join his father working at the factory.
Goff narrowly graduated high school in 1969, after having been being indefinitely suspended in his junior year for a discplinary infraction, and was arrested for underaged drinking on the night of his graduation. He took a ratty apartment for a time, while working part-time jobs, and spent a great deal of his spare time drinking and taking amphetamines with members of a local motorcycle club, The Charleytown Sinners.
Raised on Cold War propaganda, his father's admiration for the John Birch Society, and his fascination with the novels of Ayn Rand, he became devoutly anti-communist, and was thoroughly convinced of the Domino theory. Finding himself sinking into an aimless alcoholic routine, he enlisted in the Army in January 1970, and volunteered for Airborne training.
[edit] Military Career
Goff was sent to Vietnam in 1970-71, and served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade as an infantryman. After a bout with drug-resistant malaria, he was sent to the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg, NC. In January 1973, he was honorably discharged at the rank of Sergeant.
He moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and took more odd jobs, including street-retailing marijuana with his brother. Using his GI Bill, he attended classes at Garland County Community College and Henderson State College. He discovered a passion for literature and philosophy, especially the post-WWII existentialists. During this period, he spent some time with a high school friend and sometime lover, Christine Platt, who studied physics at Case Western Reserve University, where she had become involved in feminist activism. They apparently had a close relationship that was as much an intellectual affinity as a personal and sexual one, and he credits her with planting the seed of feminism in his consciousness that would eventually lead him back to gender politics.
In late 1974, his brother, Glen Goff, was arrested after selling an ounce of marijuana to a police informant, and was sent to Tucker Prison near England, Arkansas, on a three-year sentence, and was released after 9 months for good behavior. On return, the two brothers began drugging again. In late 1975, Stan was given a joint laced with PCP. He has described the experience as having agitated his post-traumatic stress disorder (at the time not a recognized illness), wherein his having witnessed the calculated murder of a random civilian by fellow troops during his tour was a "transformative experience." Two days after the overdose, he met Elizabeth Mackall, from Hot Springs, and within a week, they had moved in together.
Mackall became pregnant, and they were married in 1976. On September 1, 1976, Elan Mackall Goff was born in Little Rock. The economic responsibilities of helping raise a child eventually drove him to work in a women's garment factory near Wilmar, Arkansas, that paid for piecework. At the time, he also attended the University of Arkansas in Monticello.
The combination of job pressure, his increasing distraction at school, and an increasingly turbulent and hostile marriage, led Goff back to the recruiters. He rejoined the Army in 1977, and was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Fort Carson, Colorado as a Private First Class. He worked primarily as a Cavalry Scout, and re-earned his Sergeant's stripes by 1979. That same year, he volunteered for Ranger School, and contingent upon his successful completion, was assigned to 2nd Ranger Battalion in Fort Lewis, Washington, reverting to his former specialty as light infantry.
In two years, he earned the rank of Staff Sergeant, and under pressure from what he describes as a "psychotic marriage," he reenlisted on condition of reassignment to the Jungle Operations Training Center (JOTC) in Panama, where he worked for a time as a small unit tactics instructor. It was while he was assigned to JOTC that he volunteered for Selection and Assessment for 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta (Delta Force), a "tryout" course held in the mountains of West Virginia. He was successful at Delta "tryouts," and was reassigned to Delta Force, where he worked as both "assaulter" and "sniper" for most of the next four years. During this assignment, he participated in classified operations in Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as the Reagan administration's 1983 invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury). He also participated in the first train-up of the FBI's new "Hostage Rescue Team" and the pre-Olympics training of South Korea' 707th Special Forces. His team leader for much of that assignment was Eric Haney, author of "Inside Delta Force." Haney uses the pseudonym "Stan Johnson" for Goff.
Goff was purged from Delta in December 1986 amid a massive fraud scandal, though the charge leveled at him personally (resulting in the suspension of his security clearance) was that he had sex in El Salvador with a former FMLN guerrilla on Ambassador Edwin Corr's bed at Corr's residence while the ambassador was out of the country. Goff denies this charge to this day, claiming that he had only joked about the alleged tryst as a story to a fellow-Delta member when asked for his whereabouts, and that the other Delta operator took it seriously and passed the story around. Goff has told some people that where he was, in fact, was not with any former guerrillera, but smoking marijuana with a prostitute he had befriended -- not in the Ambassador's residence, but while strolling through Colonia San Benito in San Salvador.
Goff left Delta a Sergeant First Class (E-7). His security clearance suspended, however, Goff had to seek an assignment that did not require one, and he joined the staff and faculty as one of only nine enlisted instructors at the US Military Academy at West Point (this was in an experiment that was eventually abandoned). He taught Military Science there, served as the NCOIC of the Service Orientation Course, ran the Cadet Basic Training Bayonet Assault Course, and developed the Ranger Orientation Program that selected cadets to attend Ranger School during their Junior-Senior summer. In 1987, he allowed his enlistment to expire, and again separated from active duty.
With his wife and daughter, he moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he had secured employment as a Training Captain for the SWAT teams at the US Department of Energy's Y-12 nuclear weapons facility, then run by Martin-Marietta Energy Systems. He was fired a year and a half later, when his security issues with Delta emerged in the DOE clearance investigation and he refused to "confess" his Salvadoran story to his wife, whose father was installed in their home on a Hospice program, dying of prostate cancer.
Only a few months later, again with very few job prospects, Goff re-joined the Army, losing one grade of rank (making him a Staff Sergeant) as a condition of enlistment. He was assigned to 1st Ranger Battalion, in Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia (Savannah), where he was a Platoon Sergeant. He quickly recovered his rank of Sergeant First Class there, and was by now (1988-9) 38 years old -- ancient by Ranger standards.
He applied for Special Forces training (different than Delta Force, which is called a "Special Forces Detachment," but is not a standard Special Forces unit), and passed the grueling Selection and Assessment course in 1989, whereupon he entered the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFOC) to become a Special Operation Medical Sergeant. During the medical phase of this year-plus training, while in Fort Sam Houston (San Antonio), Texas, he and Elizabeth separated in what would eventually become their divorce.
Goff had mastered functional Spanish through self-study and during his Central American missions, and was assigned to 7th Special Forces Group in Fort Bragg, that focuses primarily on Latin America. While with 7th Group, he performed training and operations missions in Panama, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru -- the latter two conducting counter-insurgency training with the brutal and corrupt host nation forces. These missions were presented to the American public as counter-narcotics, in conjunction with the immediate post-Cold War period when the only available official enemy was framed within the so-called War on Drugs.
Goff later wrote that Latin America, beginning with his Delta tenure, was formative of his later political shift to the left, given the dissonance between what his units were actually participating in, and the "official" versions of these operations -- versions which Special Operations troops themselves are required to support as a security matter -- presented to the American public.
In 1992, he met, dated, and married Sherry Ann Long, a civilian medical records clerk working at Fort Bragg, who had three small children: Jessie, Jayme, and Jeremy Hobbs. This was a mixed-race family, and Goff cites the experience of "navigating the contradictions" of that in the South as another critical and formative phase in his own political development.
He sought reassignment to 75th Ranger Regiment, as a Special Operations Medical "Crosswalk", in 1993, and was attached to 3rd Ranger Battalion as part of Task Force Ranger for the catastrophic operation in Mogadishu, Somalia. Goff saw combat there, but was repatriated to Fort Benning before the infamous Bakara firefight, after a dispute with a Ranger Captain that had verged upon violence. Not long after that, he was promoted to Master Sergeant, which effectivley changed his job description from SF Medic to SF Operations Sergeant.
He was then reassigned back to Fort Bragg, to 3rd Special Forces Group, where he was given the task of running a Special Forces team, called an A-Detachment, in this case, Operational Detachment - A (ODA) 354, a military freefall parachute specialty team. The story of his time with this team, up to and including his retirement from the Army in February 1996 (with special emphasis on Operation Restore Democracy in Haiti in 1994) is recounted in detail in his first book, Hideous Dream - A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000).
[edit] Radicalization and activism
Goff became politically active almost immediately, and took up the study of Marxism. He joined the Communist Party USA for a brief period, but left the party in response to what he describes as the demand for "ideological conformity," and his belief that the party was hostile to feminism that did not confine itself to economistic analyses of women's conditions. This is a criticism he levels frequently at the entire left, which he describes as "male-dominated, and tokenizing of women."
In 1996, Goff secured a job as organizing director for Democracy South, a non-profit organization which did research and advocacy on money-and-politics in the South, and stayed there for the next five and a half years.
In 2001, he did a short stint as the military technical advisor for the Arnold Schwarznegger action film (Collateral Damage), which he describes as one of the most miserable jobs in his life, and for which he publicly apologized after the film was altered, in the wake of 9-11, into what Goff called "yet another guns and fire-balls, macho death-cult, fascist film-myth."
Throughout this post-military period, he remained in touch with Haitian political issues, and developed a close working relationship with Katharine Kean, a film maker who has worked in Haiti for decades, and the political cadres of the National Popular Party , a left party in Haiti with a peasant popular base. He has returned to Haiti dozens of times since then, and has written extensively on the political developments there.
After the September 11 attacks and the resulting "war hysteria", Goff was in demand as a public speaker, as his military career and his powerful opposition to the coming war gave him and the movement a degree of immunity from the jingoism and patriot-baiting that was deployed against anti-war forces.
He became involved with Freedom Road Socialist Organization around the same time, drawn primarily by the organization's analysis of Black nationalism, and the organization's stated goal of the "refoundation" of the American left. In the process of writing for a column called "Military Matters" for the organization, he began his second book, Full Spectrum Disorder - The Military in the New American Century, (Soft Skull Press, 2004).
[edit] Activism against the Iraq War
In 2003, after President George W. Bush (whom Goff referred to as a "de facto" president) remarked, "Bring 'em on," during an interview, Goff wrote a response for the on-line journal Counterpunch, called "Bring 'em on?". He received thousands of emails in response to the Counterpunch article, many of them from veterans and military families. He contacted Dennis O'Neil, a colleague in New York, and told him about the supportive reaction from vets and military families. They then contacted Dave Cline, the president of Veterans For Peace, and Nancy Lessin and Charlie Anderson of the nascent group Military Families Speak Out, and within a week a campaign had been inaugurated called "Bring Them Home Now!"(http://www.bringthemhomenow.org) As this is written, the campaign is still Goff's primary preoccupation.
In 2004, after the publication of Full Spectrum Disorder, Goff became interested in the connections between militarism and the social construction of masculinity. He studied feminist writings and theory over the next two years in the process of writing his third book, Sex & War. (Lulu Press, 2006).
Goff now resides in Raleigh, NC. He is still married to Sherry Long. His oldest step-son Jessie is in Iraq for the third time as an active duty member of the Army. Jessie has one son, Goff's only grandchild, Jaydin Amari Hobbs, to whom Full Spectrum Disorder is dedicated.
