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In This Issue
Eye on Iraq 2005
Contents
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"GOING BACK IS NOT AN OPTION"
By Dawn Blanken
I worked for many years in the printing industry. Being a woman in an overwhelmingly male trade required finesse and attention to detail. Yet, I worked for over union scale with quite a lot of overtime, and so I was able to accumulate enough resources to stop working. My intention had always been to get to such a point! As a result, I was able to volunteer on the GI Rights Hotline for about 20 hours a week, from Fall, 2003 through Fall, 2004.
Questioning Being a Soldier
Many of the calls from new recruits who realized, too late, that military life was very different from what they had thought, and from what the recruiter had led them to believe. There was a lot of confusion about what was “normal”. Were they failing? Or had they just made a very wrong choice? Many joined without ever realizing that the number one job of any soldier is to train to kill. Many made statements that they came to realize that no killing was ever justified, and they could not accept the role of a soldier, and their government should not force them to train and act counter to their beliefs. None of these callers had heard of conscientious objection, and did not realize that there was a long history of objection to war.
Some callers had these doubts but for a variety of reasons continued to train. There was the fear of being stigmatized as a CO (both in and out of the military), of being labeled a failure, or of disappointing family and friends. I called back a few of these soldiers months later after they had returned from deployment. None of them were willing to return: all were prepared to do whatever it took to avoid being redeployed. They also viewed what they saw and did during their deployment as their own personal failure.
Resisting Orders to Mobilize
Orders to mobilize and report to readiness training motivated many who already had doubts to explore their beliefs further. Some found the courage to pursue their CO claims, in spite of their fears. One very young man joined the National Guard from a rural area, anxious to take full advantage of the promised educational benefits. As the son of Russian immigrants, he was eager to get involved and to be an asset to his community as a Guardsman. His religious parents, wanted to see their son stay out of trouble, get an education and find his way in this country; both they and he believed that the Guard and the Government would look out for him. As soon as he reported to drill and began to train, he became uncomfortable with the realities of the military: the talk of being an efficient killer, of “taking-out”, “eliminating”, and “neutralizing” the “enemy”. The intense pressure to follow orders no matter what, to act without question or hesitation, to react to your orders and training and not your feelings, kept him from sleeping. As he considered not reporting for drills but feared disappointing his parents, he approached the clergy and discussed his feelings with people he saw as very religious. They helped him weigh his feelings of duty and obligation against his feelings of reluctance to commit to killing. He decided to approach is command with his belief that he was a conscientious objector.
At this point, he heard what many other Guardsman and Reservists have heard upon approaching their command: that the command had never handled a CO case before, was not sure what to do, and would look into it. No action was ever taken by his command and they stalled his efforts to move his claim forward. During this time, he continued to investigate his feelings; his parents, after hearing his thoughts and his newly realized beliefs, decided to support him. This occurred partly as a result of their son's experience in military training, and partly as a result of seeing their son's uncle, a veteran of the war in Chechnya, committed to a psychiatric hospital in Russia after complaining he was deeply disturbed by his actions in that war.
A CO claim was filed as he reported to an Army base for weapons training, where he informed his new command of his pending application. He was ordered to the training range and he refused, citing Army regulations. Two Article 15’s (non-judicial punishment) quickly followed for refusing orders. A JAG intervened and the articles were withdrawn, but the Guardsman eventually reported to training to avoid any additional meetings with his command, after being assured by regulation language that the weapons training would not hurt his claim. The decision to deploy him or leave him stateside has yet to be made. Having made his claim lets him avoid the dilemma later of violating either his orders or his conscience.
After Deployment – Unexpected Objectors
Worried parents, many of them veterans themselves, were frustrated and disgusted at what they saw as gross mismanagement at both the personnel level, and the foreign policy level.
“I was in Korea and they wouldn’t have dared order us to do what my grandson has done”
“They took a perfectly good kid and screwed him up. How do we keep him from going back? He’s ready to go to prison, if necessary”.
“I didn’t do two tours in Viet Nam to watch them do this to my kid. Going back is not going to happen”.
There were the "citizen soldiers". So many had joined for the benefits - to get an education, to have a job. Many had joined the National Guard so that they could train and prepare to help their communities, and had never thought of being deployed to a foreign country. According to dozens of callers I spoke with, they were asked to not only do the job of a “professional soldier”, arguably without the traditional training, but also asked to follow orders that were vague, incomplete, or counter to what they understood to be “allowed”. They may not have had doubts previous to their deployments, but these callers seemed resolute in their decision not to return.
I was surprised to hear from senior NCO's (Non-commissioned officers) – First Sergeants and Master Sergeants, as well as field-grade officers – Lieutenant Colonels and newly retired Majors. Why were they all calling to get help? These people decided that the jobs they were being ordered to do were at odds with their view of a professional soldier. Statements like “ this does not marry well with my twelve years of service”, were not infrequent. Some of these soldiers called the Hotline for information because they were afraid to even suggest to their peers that they were pursuing discharges or non-deployment situations. A couple NCO's were so angry that they “stood-down” orders to prepare to re-deploy. They called their Congressman and they talked to the press. They told the facts about what was really happening.
The Enlisted Ranks
The revolt in the military during the Vietnam War era was largely in the lower enlisted ranks. Here during this Iraq war, disillusion and disaffection abounded in the ranks. Among these callers, I heard a lot of recurring statements:
" I didn’t sign up for this”
“I never thought I would be deployed”
“I thought I would be helping people"
“I thought they wanted us here”
“It didn’t seem right…what we did”
“I can’t go back and do that again”
"Going back isn't on my short list”
"Going back isn't an option”
Yet, I also found a lot of lower enlisted personnel afraid to talk too much about the details of being overseas. They had been debriefed, “informed”, and intimidated. Their families called knowing something was desperately wrong. Concerns about prescription medications were often the first question. “ What are these drugs?” “Why are there so many different kinds”. “They gave them to my kid after Sadr City”, or Mosul, or Abu Ghraib, or Fallujah. “He won’t take them anymore, he won’t talk, and he won’t go back”.
The majority of my callers who had returned from deployment were Marines. Three stand as typical examples: all were 19 years old and deployed at about the same time, from different bases. The first was anxious to go. He had no doubts about his job, or what may come, but he did have a long history of psychiatric illness. The second Marine had reservations about this particular war, but was clear in his desire to be a good marine in spite of recently being diagnosed with two psychiatric disorders. The third had no reservations about the war, or his place in it, having graduated from a respected military academy, popular and respected among his peers, and the fourth generation in his family to serve in the military. They all returned from their deployments to the Middle East to say they could not go back. Returning was not an option. They would do anything to avoid redeployment. All three eventually went AWOL with very different outcomes.
The first went AWOL and stayed AWOL, his mental health deteriorated, and his fear of being caught kept him from seeking professional help. His command refused to cooperate in getting him returned to any other base than his assigned one. When the Army was contacted and agreed to accept him at an Army Hospital for treatment, and arranged to have him temporarily assigned there to insure and facilitate treatment, the Marine’s commander again refused. His health continues to deteriorate.
The second went AWOL then returned voluntarily, only to be refused psychiatric treatment by his command for his now serious psychiatric condition. Desperate, he went AWOL a second time while the first charges were pending; while gone the second time, his condition deteriorated and he became violent. He came to the attention of the police after assaulting his wife with a gun and was returned to his assigned base. The commander waived all Article 15’s pending against him, reassigned him to a deploying unit with his sergeant (who had threatened his life), handed him a gun and 72 hours later he was in the Middle East. He immediately disappeared, although he was never declared UA or AWOL. His last statement to his wife was that either the Marines would kill him, he would kill one of them, or he would kill himself, but that he would never go in country and do the job he did before.
The third Marine was advised to turn himself in at his assigned base where he promptly received numerous Article 15’s and was confined pending a decision to pursue court martial. His commander argued that because of his background and his standing within his unit, his actions had been extremely damaging to the unit’s morale. While charges were pending he decided to pursue a discharge, in spite of family pressure not to, stating that he was sure he could not return to the service as an “effective Marine”.
Counselors around the country have heard stories of bankruptcy, divorce, family violence, suicide, and drug or alcohol abuse. Yet these were not the most common reasons I heard for soldiers wanting out. Their orders and actions, while deployed, were the reasons they gave for being done with the military. Even the Pentagon, military analysts, and retired Generals have voiced concern over the impact of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the military as a whole.
What we know is that the Iraq War, compared to the first Gulf War, will return many more soldiers home from longer deployments and with very different experiences. To communities around the country will come not only the “professional soldiers” from the regular military, but the “citizen soldiers” of the National Guard, Selected Reserves and the Individual Ready Reserve. The burden these people bring home with them is immense. Yet the opportunity to learn from the experiences of these citizens could wake us up to the trauma that war participation creates, and the shocking and brutal consequences of the war that our country has unleashed.
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Dawn Blanken has been a GI Rights counselor with HCCO, the Humboldt [County, CA] Committee for Conscientious Objectors which works very closely with CCCO, and is a member of the GI Rights Hotine Network. She recently moved to southern Colorado.
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