Ben Zweibelson was the kid in high school who was always drawing. Then his father died, the money ran out, and a National Guard recruiter at a Connecticut county fair offered him a way to pay for college. He took it and stayed twenty-two years, with four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, four Bronze Stars, and the Ranger tab. Along the way the Army gave him three master's degrees, and the GI Bill paid for a doctorate in philosophy.
Our conversation kept coming back to a cigar box and to his father. Irving Zweibelson was a twenty-two-year-old Ashkenazi Jew from New York, blind in one eye, turned away by the Marines and the Navy before the Army took him. He served in Panama and West Africa, came home, locked the war away, and never spoke of it again.
Ben told me about sitting at the dinner table at ten, full of The A-Team and Platoon, and asking his father whether he had ever killed anyone. His father's hand, shaking from Parkinson's, trembled so hard that his wristwatch knocked against the underside of the table. "I had poked the bear, and I didn't understand." His father died when Ben was seventeen. "If you lose somebody that young," he said, "you spend the rest of your life searching for a ghost you'll never catch."
His new book, Bad War Stories, is his answer to that silence. He calls it an anti-memoir. It is written in the third person, refuses the heroics Hollywood needs, and treats everyone in the frame as human, including adversaries and civilians. Every event in it is real, and only the names are changed.
He told us stories that never made the official record. There was the live-agent chamber at Fort McClellan and the atropine pen he jammed into a training dummy backwards, which he said he had never told anyone before. There was the white van he parked on a Special Forces unit's drop zone at Fort Polk, three kilometers from anywhere, which ended their pre-deployment validation. He talked about the four men the book is dedicated to, a high school wrestling coach, two friends' fathers, and a Special Forces colonel who protected him decades later, who together filled the hole his father left.
We also got into what the institution does to curious people, why he thinks we may be training for a war that never comes, and what he wants his three sons to have when he is gone. The last question on our list stopped him. He admitted he had been dreading it since he saw it.
We planned on thirty minutes and went an hour, and we will have him back in October. Ben is now Director of the Strategic Innovation Group at U.S. Space Command and spoke with us as a private citizen. If you or someone you know is struggling, the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/bad-war-stories-ben-zweibelson-on