by Gerry Condon and Helen Jaccard
Z Mag
September 2012
They
are known as “war resisters,” “GI resisters,” and “conscientious
objectors.” That is what their friends and supporters call them. They
are called many other names too, like “cowards and traitors.” But who
are they really? Why did they join the military in the first place? What
changed their minds about going to war?
About Face is a
collection of moving personal stories told by the resisters. They were
compiled by members of Courage To Resist, the Oakland, California-based
collective that has taken the lead in publicizing and supporting the
legal and political struggles of today’s military resisters. Sarah
Lazare’s introduction and her interview with Noam Chomsky addresses some
misconceptions about resistance within the military. “The truth is that
GI resistance is happening not despite a so-called all-volunteer force,
but because of it. In order to understand this, two false assumptions
must be dispelled: the assumption that recruits are not coerced into
today’s military and that those who sign up voluntarily cannot change
their minds and decide to take a stand against the war.” While each
story is unique, there are common threads:
• economic pressures that led them to enlist
• lies of military recruiters
• the brutality of military training
• discovering the truth about war and occupation
• making the decision to resist
• the difficult struggle to survive the consequences of that decision
Samantha
Schutz had been “In an inpatient program in my local hospital for deep
depression…my recruiter had told me not to put that stuff on the
application…. Just the first week, I was experiencing a lot of the same
depression I dealt with for about five years solid before I got into the
military.” Samantha tried repeatedly to be discharged but ended up in
Iraq and subsequently going AWOL, multiple times. She is now discharged
but denied all veterans benefits.
Kimberly Rivera experienced
extremely aggressive recruiting at her high school. “When they get your
rosters from school, they start calling your home; they start setting up
their tables again in the lunchroom, continuing to do their spiel on
you over and over and over.” After testing, “They gave me three choices
of what I could do. So I chose a job, but not knowing that when I chose
my job I was actually signing a military contract.” Soon Rivera found
herself in Iraq, apart from her husband and two children, and wondering
what she was doing there.
Ryan Johnson “wanted to serve my
country, but I didn’t want to be taking people’s lives in the process…. I
requested a job that would be mostly clerical…. They told me I’d be in a
warehouse in the United States ordering parts.” Although they said he
would be a supply clerk, he found out he was to be sent to Iraq to man a
machine gun on a Humvee. So Johnson went AWOL.
Tim Richard
signed up with the National Guard, thinking he would be doing disaster
relief. “They had actually promised a lot more money to me when I
joined.”
Johnson would not go to Iraq. Kimberly Rivera would not
return to Iraq after returning home on leave. Both eventually fled to
Canada, where they have applied for political refugee status, a long
uphill struggle with no encouragement from Canada’s Conservative
government.
Tim Richard’s father was Canadian, so he had an easy
time claiming Canadian citizenship for himself. All three soldiers have
received support from the War Resisters Support Campaign in Canada, and
are working to help some of the estimated 300 U.S. war resisters in
Canada.
Robin Long also went AWOL to Canada but he was less
fortunate. The Canadian government deported him back to the U.S., where
he was court-martialed and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
Starting to See Things Differently
André
Shepherd graduated from Kent State University with a degree in computer
science. “The problem was, I graduated when the dot-com bubble
burst…so I couldn’t get a job…. Mentally, I felt like I not only had
let myself down, but I’d let my family down, too, because I had a set
goal in life—to complete college, have a house, have a family, and to
actually do something that would make the world at least a little bit
better place and show my parents that I can live life on my own. And
since it didn’t work out that way, it was pretty distressing.”
Shepherd
ended up living in his car before running into an Army recruiter. “All I
had to do was sign up for a few years and I would have all of these
benefits.” Shepherd joined the Army and was trained to maintain Apache
helicopters before being sent to Iraq in September 2004.
“When I
was in Iraq, the first thing that I noticed was when the local
population would come into our post. When you liberate a people, they
are usually overjoyed to see you. They’re happy that you want to help
them and they welcome you with open arms. When I would see the Iraqi
population in the morning on my way to work, they didn’t look like they
were in any way happy to see us. They looked like they were either
afraid of me—like I was going to hurt them—or if I turned my back
without my weapon they would probably want to kill me. So that started
me thinking, ‘Okay, what’s going on here because I thought that we were
supposed to be the good guys and everybody’s looking at me like I’m
crazy.
“So I started to do research…and I started to see
little inconsistencies in what I was reading, you know, between what the
Bush administration was telling everybody and what was actually
happening…. Once I pretty much figured out the truth, that this was
basically nothing but a fraud, not only on the American people, but on
the entire world, I resolved that I would not go on another deployment
to Iraq.”
André Shepherd went AWOL in Germany where he has
become a cause celebré as the first U.S. soldier of this era to seek
political asylum in Europe. He is now married to a German woman and is
back in school studying to be a computer network administrator.
David
Cortelyou, from Washington state, was getting nowhere in his search for
jobs, so he joined the Army when he was 18 and soon found himself in
Iraq. His unit was supposed to protect the Cavalry, but his battalion
commander decided that his platoon was too valuable to lose on such a
mission. “The cav scouts got mutilated…. I can’t remember how many
memorial services I went to where I talked to the guys afterward and
they told me about what was going on. Their commander was sending them
down ‘black routes,’ which are roads where there is 100 percent chance
that you’re going to get hit. Halfway to the objective, they’d have to
turn around and come back because they were loaded down with casualties,
dead or otherwise.”
Courtelyou continued: “About two months
after returning from Iraq I started having nightmares and getting real
tense and nervous and anxious about everything…. My platoon was, you
know, the John Wayne handbook—tough skinned, gutsy, big burly guys,
don’t cry, don’t talk about problems, and all that macho bullshit. So
instead of talking to anybody about it, I started burning myself to feel
human, because a lot of that shit that happened downrange wasn’t
human.” A sergeant who saw the burns on his hands and wrists told
Cortelyou, “Hey, man, did you know you can get in trouble for damaging
government property?”
“I was pissed. I was furious. For one, I’m
already having problems because I got this feeling like I’ve turned
into a machine—a machine that can kill without second thoughts, a
machine that can look at a dead person and laugh about it. So I’m
already having a little bit of identity issues and now I’m told that I’m
government property and I’m damaging it? If this is how you’re going to
react to a soldier having a problem, I’m done. So I went AWOL . . .
.for 29 days and turned myself in.”
Both the mental health
specialist and the chaplain were very poor at listening and wanted him
to go to the psychiatrist to get pills. “Pills for your insomnia, pills
for your anger, your aggressiveness, your anxiousness, whatever . . . .I
didn’t feel comfortable with pills because after I came back from Iraq .
. . .I had attempted suicide hundreds of times by taking countless
amounts of pills . . . and drowning them with bottles of vodka. If I
wanted to get addicted to something to drown my sorrows, I could do it
without the Army’s consent . . . But I can’t be in the military. It’s
not that I don’t want to be, I can’t. I can’t stand being around people
in uniform, I can’t stand being in uniform because every day it is a
constant, 25-hour, 7-days-a-week reminder of not only what I did, but
what I witnessed and kept my mouth shut too.”
He went AWOL
again, this time for longer, turned himself in, and was finally
discharged in April 2008. David Cortelyou plans to go to college without
using the GI bill. He wants nothing to do with the military.
Desertion, Conscience Objection, Resistance
Skyler
James joined the Army in 2006 at the strong urging of her family,
despite being opposed to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan
and despite being an out lesbian. “In basic training, I was being
ridiculed for being an out lesbian. I was vaguely familiar with the
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. When I joined I thought that it wouldn’t
be that big of a deal and that I wouldn’t get found out. There was one
incident that still stings in my mind. I was in AIT (Advanced Infantry
Training) and I was coming back from the bowling alley and somebody ran
up behind me and screamed out ‘dyke.’ The next thing I know I got
punched in the back of the head…. Later, I was receiving hate letters
on my door, threatening to injure me and to come into my room at night
and kill me. So I had a talk with another soldier who was in the same
battalion and we both decided it would be best for us to leave.”
Skyler
James contacted the War Resisters Support Campaign. “They were very
helpful. If we had not contacted them, we probably would not be where we
are right now. I’m allowed to work in this country. I have a job. I
have a nice little apartment and so does my friend, and we’re both
happy. . . . My sexuality has not been an issue at all in Canada. They
have welcomed me with open arms.”
The issue of persecution due
to her sexual orientation is being considered by Canada’s Immigration
and Refugee Board to which Skyler James has applied for refugee status.
“In my opinion, my case could go either way. It’s like a pendulum. Like
on one side of it, I’m relaxed and I’m enjoying a very comfortable
lifestyle. And then on the other side, I could be deported at anytime,
and I’m freaked out.”
Bradley Manning and Whistle-blowing
The final few sections of About Face
offer some bonus gems, including one about Operation Recovery, a
campaign launched by Iraq Veterans Against the War to save soldiers who
are already physically or psychologically injured by war from being
re-deployed. Another gem is editor Buff Whitman-Bradley’s compelling
interview with Vietnam-era whistle-blower Daniel Ellsburg of Pentagon
Papers fame, about the alleged Wikileaks whistle-blower, Army PFC
Bradley Manning.
Josh Steiber and Ethan McCord, two soldiers who
were part of the Collateral Murder operation, published an “Open Letter
of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People.” The
soldiers’ moving letters, re-published at the end of About Face,
conclude: “Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our
dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to
speak out against wars and military policies responsible for what
happened to you and your loved ones.”
We highly recommend this
book. It is must reading for young people who are being targeted by
military recruiters and for all who wish to better understand what led
these young men and women to enlist and then to resist.
Gerry Condon & Helen Jaccard, members of Veterans For Peace, support U.S. war resisters who are seeking sanctuary.
Back to Buff Whitman-Bradley’s Author Page | Back to Sarah Lazare’s Author Page | Back to Cynthia Whitman-Bradley’s Author Pasge
