People with war trauma in a shitty economy—it’s practically set up to make terrorists

~ James Birmingham ~

On January 1, 2025 two acts of violence (albeit one largely self-inflicted) occurred within hours of each other, one in Las Vegas and the other in New Orleans. The perpetrators had very little in common ideologically. Matthew Livelsberger (37), who blew himself up in a Tesla at the doorway of the Vegas Trump Tower, was a politically conservative Trump supporter who wrote a manifesto about ousting Democrats in government, war crimes in Afghanistan, and “gravitic propulsion systems”. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar (42), who murdered 14 and injured 35 in a suicide attack in New Orleans, was a Muslim for most of his life and appears to have rapidly radicalised in 2024.

What they do share in common is having served in the US military. Livelsberger is said to have wanted to be a special forces soldier since he was a child, according to an anonymous relative. He was in the Army for 19 years and was deployed to places such as Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Republic of the Congo, Tajikistan, and Georgia.  He was a Green Beret on approved leave before he killed himself and blew up the Cybertruck outside the Trump resort in Las Vegas. Jabbar served in the US Army for ten years as a human resources specialist and information technology specialist.  He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2009, left active duty in 2015 and served in the Army Reserve until 2020.   

The US makes soldiers largely by taking impoverished, directionless and confused young men and stripping away part of their identities to make ‘good soldiers’. With the impoverished, it’s working class alienation; where the military is seen as a route to material resources and opportunities. With directionless ones, it’s suburban alienation; where the regimentation and structure of the military is seen as a path to meaning and purpose. The confused part can apply to either group, and could involve fantasies of seeing the world, or romanticising war.

Then, they go through the trauma of war—which, in addition to the fear and the violence one is exposed to, also de-sensitises one to inflicting violence on others. Now at middle age they get plopped back into society, in a shitty economy with minimal help re-acclimatising to ‘normal life’ when many of these people never lived normal lives during early adulthood either—they went straight from school to the military and then got dropped into unstructured existence with a small military pension and PTSD. 

Livelsberger suffered a traumatic brain injury while deployed overseas. Alicia Arritt—a nurse who dated Livelsberger and works with combat veterans—says that he told her about symptoms such as memory loss, paralysing guilt and confusion that are consistent with traumatic brain injuries. She reports that he wanted to get more help for his condition but felt shame and stigma around it as an active duty soldier.

I have not been able to find any reports on Jabbar’s medical or mental health records.  We should not construct a narrative where PTSD turns people into killers—but it would be foolish not to discuss the impact of military service on veterans, and in turn the impact on society at large. In 2013, a study of Lone-Actor Terrorists in the US and Europe found that a quarter of them had military experience. In a 2022 study of mass shootings in the US, 28.5% of shooters were found to have had a military background.

It is hard to find concrete numbers regarding violence and military service that isn’t labelled as terrorism, a mass shooting, or is a spectacle (as Livelsberger understood in order for his suicide to make worldwide news).   If we follow Carl von Clausewitz’s idea that war is a continuation of politics by other means, what kind of politics do we expect those trained for war to express and how should we expect them to express those politics?

It is not a coincidence that the Vegas Cybertruck suicide bomber and the NOLA car battering ram driver were both US military. Like a friend said the other day, “it’s practically set up to make terrorists”.

Abolish war. Abolish the military.