America’s Shadow War in Yemen Has Its Own Racist Military Swag

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.

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 held that all Vietnamese — northern and southern, adults and children, armed enemy and innocent civilian — were little more than animals, who could be killed or abused at will. The MGR mentality excused all manner of atrocities and encouraged troops to kill without compunction. “Shouldn’t bother you at all, just some more dead gooks. The sooner they all die, the sooner we go back to the World,” a Marine recounted, in a memoir published by Naval Institute Press, being told at the time. The slur and the mindset encouraged callous killing during a conflict in which an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians were slain, around 5.3 million were wounded (using a conservative estimate), and 11 million were displaced by the war.

During the war on terror, a passel of new slurs came into use, with “sand nigger” among the most vile. “The infantry taught us to use language like ‘haji’ and ‘raghead’ and ‘target’ and ‘towelhead’ to dehumanize not just enemy combatants, but every Iraqi or Arab person we encountered,” recalled one post-9/11 Marine Corps veteran. “Our senior Marines joked about raping Iraqi women, so we did too. They called Iraqi children terrorists in training, and meant it. So we did too.”

The U.S. military is not unaware of its propensities. In a 2013 article in Military Review, three Army lieutenant colonels (two on active duty and one retired) wrote:

For the soldier at war, objectifying oneself as superior and the ‘other’ as inferior can rapidly transform even minor abuses into very serious crimes. … Leaders often condone this self-deception because they believe they are helping themselves and their troops to do what “must be done.” Unfortunately, while attempts at dehumanizing the enemy may make killing easier for some (at least in the short term), these attempts can be the first steps on the road toward atrocities — acts that cannot occur without such dehumanization.

For years, the military has been excoriated by right-wing pundits for being too “woke.” The foreword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page blueprint for a second Trump term, laments that “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’” The Houthi Hunting Club patch suggests that such sessions may have had limited effect.

“The military’s tacit endorsement of the patches is part of a broader pattern of conflicted messaging in military training and military culture,” said McIntosh, who addresses this tension in her forthcoming book, “Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics.” “On the one hand, one is instructed about rules and laws designed to carefully control violence, but on the other, you can find messaging that indirectly encourages the idea that military identity is partly about transgressing morality and sometimes even the military’s own rules.”

In many cases, morale patches are not officially sanctioned but are tolerated within the military to foster esprit de corps. In 2021, the Air Force ordered a review of official and unofficial unit emblems, morale patches, mottos, nicknames, and challenge coins to weed out those that were racist, sexist or otherwise offensive. “Our core values demand we hold ourselves to high standards and maintain a culture of respect and trust in our chain of command,” read the memorandum announcing the review. That same year, the 51st Civil Engineer Squadron “Mongrels” in Osan, South Korea, replaced its pit bull morale patch because it too closely resembled an image of a pit bull that the Anti-Defamation League had labeled a white supremacist symbol.

While the photographs of Festa and his Houthi Hunting Club patch were removed, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service website continues to display photos of other patches such as a 2022 women’s leadership patch with the “imagery of a woman standing proudly against the force of an atomic explosion.” Another patch features the likeness of Nusret Gökçe — a celebrity chef better known as Salt Bae for his ridiculous way of sprinkling salt on steaks — dropping Joint Direct Attack Munitions in a similar manner.

The Houthi Hunting Club patch is available through a commercial website that stresses that while it is not affiliated with the U.S military, it is nonetheless “where most [U.S. Marine Corps] and Navy squadrons direct purchase their squadron patches,” adding that they “are licensed by the USMC and US Navy Trademark Offices.” (It is not clear if Festa’s patch was purchased from the website.)

McIntosh noted that unlike the use of slurs as a means of dehumanization during the Vietnam War, the Houthi Hunting Club patch uses images of fictional movie characters, offering plausible deniability — a means to cast the patch as a joke. She calls this an example of “frame perversion,” the commingling of upbeat and menacing symbolism within military culture. “The Houthi Hunting patches both invoke the sport of hunting — where people kill for fun — and entertainment by picturing the sand people, who have pop cultural resonance. This general kind of layering of the semiotics of fun onto military killing is really common,” she says, noting that it is both a gallows-humor coping mechanism and a license for violence and military depravity.

The contradictions surrounding the patch are legion, not the least of which being the failures of the U.S. military effort against the Houthis. The USS Eisenhower Strike Group alone conducted more than “750 engagements,” utilizing “792 munitions in combat,” according to a July Navy press release. Just a month earlier, however, a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged that Houthi attacks had led to a 90 percent decline in shipping activity through the Red Sea.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have carried out almost 100 attacks on ships, sinking two vessels and seizing another. They have even targeted U.S. Navy ships, leaving sailors unaccustomed to enemy attack distressed. “It was incredibly different,” said Cmdr. Benjamin Orloff, a Navy pilot. “And I’ll be honest, it was a little traumatizing for the group. It’s something that we don’t think about a lot until you’re presented with it.”

The Pentagon failed to respond to questions about its military efforts against the Houthis and whether it views the military campaign as a success. It also failed to comment on the decision to remove photographs of the Houthi Hunting Club patch, nor whether any action would be taken to restrict its wear by military personnel.