Stan Goff
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Stan Goff (b. 1951 in San Diego, California) is a writer, activist, and US Army veteran having served from 1970 to 1996. He is an Anti-imperialist activist, feminist, and socialist. He is the author of the weblog Feral Scholar.
He is the author of the books Hideous Dream, Full-Spectrum Disorder: The military in the New American Century and Sex & War. He is also a contributor to Huffington Post.
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[edit] Military career
Goff was sent to Vietnam in 1970-71, serving with the 173rd Airborne Brigade as an infantryman. He was then sent to the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg after a bout of malaria. In 1973, he was honorably discharged at the rank of sergeant. He returned to the Army in 1977, and was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) as a Private First Class, and re-earned his Sergeant's stripes by 1979. He volunteered for Ranger School that same year, and was then assigned to 2nd Ranger Battalion in Fort Lewis, Washington.
Goff earned the rank of Staff Sergeant in two years, and reenlisted on condition of reassignment to the Jungle Operations Training Center (JOTC) in Panama, where he worked as a small unit tactics instructor. He volunteered for 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (Delta Force) during that assignment, and was eventually reassigned to Delta Force as both "assaulter" and "sniper" for most of the next four years. Goff participated in operations in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Grenada (see Operation Urgent Fury). He participated in the first train-up of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and the pre-Olympics training of South Korea's 707th Special Forces.
Goff left Delta a sergeant first class in December 1986, and joined the staff and faculty as one of the few enlisted instructors at West Point. He taught Military Science, served as the NCOIC of the Service Orientation Course, ran the Basic Training Bayonet Assault Course, and developed the Ranger Orientation Program that selected cadets to attend Ranger School during their Junior-Senior summer. He allowed his enlistment to expire in 1987, but rejoined shortly thereafter as a Staff Sergeant assigned to 1st Ranger Battalion as a Platoon Sergeant. He applied for Special Forces training, and became a Special Operation Medical Sergeant assigned to 7th Special Forces Group in Fort Bragg. While with 7th Group, he performed training and operations missions in Panama, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. Many of these missions were presented officially to the public as counter-narcotics in the War on Drugs, despite the nature of the missions his units were actually participating in. He wrote that this dissonance was formative in his political shift to the left.
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 effectively 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 free-fall 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 analysis 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 adviser for the Arnold Schwarzenegger 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 many criticisms made against anti-war forces. Goff is also involved in the "9-11 Truth Movement", which question the official account of the 9/11 commission.
He also 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, along with 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!". As of 2007, this campaign is still Goff's primary preoccupation. He has also worked with Iraq Veterans Against the War as an adviser.
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, North Carolina. He is married to Sherry Long. His oldest step-son, Jessie, is in Iraq for his third tour as an active duty member of the Army. Jessie has one son, Jaydin Amari Hobbs, Goff's only grandchild, to whom Full Spectrum Disorder is dedicated.
