War has been part of my life virtually for as long as I can remember.
CAMILLO C. “MAC” BICA, philosopher of war, former U.S. Marine Captain, and Vietnam veteran
People in military service are our neighbors; they are the beloved sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and cousins of ordinary people. Their reasons for being in the military are as unique and diverse as the various people they leave behind in civilian life. But serving in the armed forces changes them.
Military service for most of American history was widely regarded as a sign of strength of character and an expression of patriotism. With the GI Bill of 1944–1956, two-and-a-half-million war veterans bought homes, and the education benefit created a vast number of college-educated men, including over a dozen Nobel laureates, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, and three U.S. presidents. The education benefit had a negative impact on civilian women’s access to higher education and was not as useful to black men in the south, but it was a major builder of the middle class that grew after World War II. Without that postwar middle class, the social progress for women, students, and minorities that marked the 1960s to the 1980s would have been much more difficult. Change came with the Vietnam War. The public’s objections to the war and vehement opposition to the draft changed attitudes toward military service. It became suspect in most liberal circles, but it continued to enhance many American men’s careers.1
A commission to a military academy still delivers a first-rate education, and, even among the enlisted ranks, a desire for a college education is a major reason for joining the military. Many who enlisted immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, wanted to defend their country. Others had joined before the attacks and were prepared to fight, though they may not have expected to. Many soldiers with moral misgivings about the Iraq War fought anyway because of their loyalty to their unit, because of the close friends they did not want to abandon, and because military service required it. Others deployed because a career in the military is greatly enhanced by combat experience.
The end of the draft in 1974 created a perception that military service is totally voluntary, but the term “voluntary” needs interrogation. It oversimplifies why people join the military. A study in 2007 found that troops who died in Iraq were disproportionately poorer than the rest of Americans, what some people have chosen to call a “poverty draft.” The numbers are significant: almost three-fourths of U.S. troops in Iraq were from towns where per capita income fell below the national average and over half were from communities where poverty levels were above the national average. Military recruiters, driven by quotas, work in offices found in poorer areas of cities, and new Army recruits come primarily from lower- to middle-class communities, southern states, and black, Hispanic, and Asian communities, according to official U.S. Army data. These numbers reflect Army special projects, such as “Hispanic H2 Tour” or the “Takin’ It to the Streets Tour” to encourage the enlistment of Hispanic and African American youth. In neighborhoods with high crime levels or in unstable or abusive families, military service may offer greater safety and what one man termed, “ ‘three hots and a cot,’ food and shelter where they can’t turn you away.” Recruiters, often through access to public schools, have been known to target children under age seventeen, sometimes as young as eleven, for military recruitment; this practice, according to a 2008 ACLU report, violates the United Nations Optional Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict.2
Joshua Casteel signed up in 1997 for the Delayed Enlistment Program during his junior year of high school and attended basic training the following summer. An evangelical son of ministers, a Republican, and a member of a military family with a long history of service in war, he attended West Point for a few months, but found its military rigidity constricting. Basic training had made him uncomfortable because his Christian upbringing did not prepare him for the chants: “Kill! Kill! Kill, without mercy, Sergeant!” and “Blood! Blood! Bright red blood, Sergeant!” He concluded he was better suited to a liberal arts college, where he studied the history of Christian just war and pacifism. He also didn’t care for the college ROTC regimen any more than the rigidity of West Point, so his commitment to the military was beginning to fade until the attacks of 9/11. When he deployed to Iraq in 2004, he felt a need to fulfill his duty as a soldier because he had sworn to do so.
Military service defined love of country in Kevin Benderman’s family. He was born in Alabama and raised there and in Tennessee, where his father had deep roots in the Southern Baptist tradition. In the Murray County Courthouse in Tennessee, an ancestor named Benderman is listed as fighting in the American Revolution. His grandfathers fought in World War I, his father in World War II, and his uncle in Korea. His older brother would have fought in Vietnam, but Kevin’s father, who had earned a Purple Heart in France, kept him out because he did not want his sons to fight in war. Kevin suspects that war was a shock to him as a young religious man from rural Tennessee, and he wanted to spare his son, but until Kevin was in the Army, his father never spoke of his war experiences.
Despite his father’s warnings, Kevin felt there was no higher honor than to serve his country and defend the values that established it. He was eager to take his turn at serving in war. At age twenty-two, he joined the military and, during his time at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1988, he witnessed the training of Iraqi officers in Saddam Hussein’s army and the sale of weapons, conventional and chemical, to Iraq. He served for four years until 1991, and though he was called up to deploy during the Persian Gulf War, it ended before he was sent. He thought at the time about what he had seen earlier in Fort Leavenworth: “I remember thinking to myself how odd this was—to be training the officers of the Iraqi Army and then to be fighting them not two years later.” He objected to how some of his fellow soldiers were treated, so he left the Army in 1991. In 2000, he reenlisted, starting over as a private, and in 2002, after training in the Army’s Primary Leadership Development Course, he graduated at the top of a class of four hundred soldiers and became a sergeant. He was deployed to Iraq at the end of March 2003.3
When he turned sixteen, Tyler Boudreau went into a recruiting station to become a Marine. He was told to return when he was seventeen. Tyler, who was working at a tire store in a dangerous part of Boston, was required by his high school to watch the movie Gallipoli, which he suspects was supposed to challenge any student’s idealization of war. But instead, Tyler loved the movie. He went back to see it dozens of times and eventually bought a copy of it. From a poor and abusive family, Tyler was looking for a way to prove himself and escape a dead-end job. He returned exactly a year to the day of his first attempt to enlist. Still suspicious of all authority figures, he read all the fine print in the contract carefully and tried to ask questions about the many points that did not make sense to him. “Just sign the fucking thing!” the recruiter roared.4
Each of the veterans who shares his or her story below reveals the complex reasons people enter the military. All, however, were changed forever by war. While the VA research on moral injury is new, the experience of moral injury in war is ancient. It haunts the lives of former soldiers.
Camillo “Mac” Bica, a Marine veteran and a philosopher who focuses on social/political theory and ethics, particularly as they relate to war, has struggled with moral injury since he fought in Vietnam. He is still active in the veteran community and meets regularly with fellow vets.
We first encountered Mac from articles he had written discussing the Iraq War at online sites such as Truthout and AlterNet. His perspective was passionate and poignant, and his analysis was razor sharp. Always, we heard a deep humanity in his voice. Mac is a veteran who volunteered for service in war and is not an absolute pacifist; he is rather a cogent proponent of just war. Because of his experience and his clear moral voice, we were convinced that he should testify at the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, and he accepted our invitation.
When we met him in March 2010 at the Riverside Church public hearing, we discovered that he is a powerful, compelling speaker. In addition, he is a poet of war who speaks with the heart of a warrior. His high forehead is ringed by a receding shock of gray hair, matched in color by his close-cropped beard. He has the serious, intelligent countenance of a philosopher, but a grave, sad look haunts his deepset hazel eyes.
As a child, Mac grew up in Brooklyn on a diet of John Wayne movies, Roman Catholic education, and patriotism. He was deeply fascinated, even exhilarated, by the idea of war. He believed it was his duty to follow President Kennedy’s admonition, “ask what you can do for your country.” His parents were immigrants from Sicily who were grateful to live in the United States. His mother worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop. His father had served in World War II, believing that if he fought, his son would never have to.
As a child, Mac sometimes hid behind his family’s green couch and eavesdropped on his father and other family members as they spoke about their experiences in combat while playing cards in a thick fog of Di Nobili cigar smoke and drinking caffè corretto, espresso “corrected” with grappa liquor. The men, Sicilian immigrants drafted into the U.S. military, were veterans of World War II and Korea. Mac’s father was sent back to fight in Sicily, the land of his birth, where he served as a U.S. Army interpreter. Hidden behind that couch, Mac heard his father recount the devastation that the American forces had inflicted on the villages he had known as a child. Mac also heard about the guilt and shame his father felt for the deaths of so many innocent people who had been his neighbors. Mac also listened to many dramatic stories of adrenaline-charged close encounters with snipers and kamikaze attacks. But a story that made a profound impression on him was hearing his normally austere uncle Joe describe, with tears in his eyes, how he gently held a fellow Marine in his arms as he gasped his last breath at the frozen Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Mac was deeply moved to see such tenderness in this tough man.
Mac could not make sense of how war could be so fascinating and yet so devastating. He wanted to ask questions, but he instinctively realized that his father and his fellow veterans could only speak their truths about war to those who had shared similar experiences. Their smoky, grappa-anointed circle was their sanctuary.
While attending college, Mac enlisted in the Marine Corps Platoon Leader Candidate Program when he was seventeen. His goal was to become an educator, a position that would entitle him to a deferment from military service. His parents believed he should accept the deferment and could do so with dignity because his teaching was service to his society. After passing the licensing exams to teach in a public school, he was offered a position in the inner-city school where he had been a student teacher.
One of Mac’s close childhood friends, Ralphie, had been killed in Vietnam just after turning nineteen. His parents had received a few fragments of bone and sinew and a letter from the President expressing regret for their loss and gratitude for Ralphie’s sacrifice for freedom and democracy. It made Mac wonder how he could live with himself or face Ralphie’s parents, should he accept the deferment.
Staying home, while so many of his generation were dying in Vietnam, felt cowardly. And so in 1968, after graduating from college, Mac accepted a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
Another veteran of Vietnam, Herman Keizer Jr., spent forty years in military service before retiring. He grew up in Chicago in a family of Dutch ancestry that belonged to the Christian Reformed Church in North America, a denomination he still serves.
When we were first planning the Truth Commission, we knew that having the right leadership at the public hearing would be important. We struggled to find the appropriate person to serve as the honorary host, someone who would understand what we wanted to achieve and who could speak at the occasion with credibility and gravitas. Several people, including a retired superintendent of West Point, mentioned a retired Army colonel and chaplain, Herm Keizer, who had worked for a long time to expand the regulations governing conscientious objection. Herm wanted them expanded beyond the narrow limits that required objection to all wars. He thought they should include the objections to a particular war because so many soldiers belong to religious traditions that follow ideas of just war, not pacifism. Herm accepted our invitation to serve as honorary host. He delivered a powerful opening speech and hosted the commission exactly as we imagined the ideal host would do.
Given what we had heard about Herm and his distinguished credentials and military medals, we expected someone who would convey a grave authority and have an air of sanctity, someone we would feel compelled to call “Chaplain Keizer.” Instead, we met a man who was affable and laughed heartily; it was easy to call him Herm. Short and stocky with a ring of close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and dark bushy eyebrows punctuated by warm brown eyes, his good cheer and ease attracts friends. But his hearty sense of humor masks a passionate seriousness when he talks about war and its moral consequences. He has radar for the trauma lying beneath the surface of stray comments from veterans, and an attentive, caring capacity to elicit their stories. Sometimes, when he speaks of his years as a military chaplain and the men and women he served, a somber look flashes behind his gaze like a distant thunderstorm.
Herm’s family taught him strong values of family, faith, and service to God and country. He had three uncles who served in the Army in World War II. The third, his father’s youngest brother, saw a lot of action in Europe. Herm remembers:
After high school, Herm enrolled at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When his third year ended, he lacked the funds to finish, so he had to take time off. He lost his deferment and was drafted in 1962.
Pamela Lightsey followed her oldest brother into U.S. military service, married a fellow soldier, and is the mother of a veteran of the Iraq War. While she wrote a doctoral thesis on African and African American understandings of just war, she prayed for her son in Iraq and his safe return, knowing that they both believed it to be an unjust and immoral war. During this period, when she was a doctoral student, she and Rita met through a United Methodist scholarship program that supported women of color earning doctorates in a field that qualified them for seminary teaching. When the Truth Commission needed diverse clergy to testify to just war traditions, Rita immediately thought of Pamela, who delivered a compelling, thoughtful testimony at Riverside Church.
Pamela grew up in the Palm Beach area of Florida, one of seven children of Lillie Mae and Eddie Lee Lightsey. She inhabits the pulpit with a commanding presence, speaks with the passion and literary power of her Pentecostal roots in the black church, and has the inviting presence of someone at home in her own skin. Now the Associate Dean for Community Life and Lifelong Learning and Clinical Assistant Professor of Contextual Theology and Practice at Boston University School of Theology, she traveled a long journey to get there.
Pamela remembers her father, who grew up under the Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation, reminding his children when they drove by a particular tree near the police station that it was “a hanging tree,” which meant the tree had been used to lynch black people. Eddie Lee Lightsey worked as a day laborer and truck driver; he often left home in the early mornings to stand on the street corner in hopes of someone needing work done that day. By juggling several jobs, he was able to bring groceries home and pay rent on his family’s tiny twobedroom apartment. He also had alcoholic binges in which he would beat his wife when her insults to his manhood pushed him beyond his limits.
Lillie Mae Lightsey was a maid for much of her life and a tough survivor. She used subversive means, such as contaminating food, to resist racist treatment from some of the white women who employed her. As Pamela reports:
Pamela spent her young adult years as a zealous member of the Pentecostal Church of God denomination, vigorously condemning her older brother for being gay. He had come out as a gay man in his teens, before, as Pamela says, “being out was cool.” Within a few years, she found the church’s answers to her questions about the Bible and how to live a faithful life as a woman were inadequate or illogical. She grew to regret her homophobic behavior.
Pamela’s brother was an unlikely soldier. She is sure that many of his military comrades knew he was gay, but he had such musical talents for the military band—he served as an arranger, conductor, bassoon-flute-oboe-piccolo player, and all-around musician—that he successfully completed his term of enlistment. He didn’t make the military a career, moving on to other work after he left, but he appreciated his time in the military.
Pamela’s motivation for joining the military was largely money. The recruiter told her that the military would pay for her college education. Impatient to get that education, she joined, but what the recruiter did not tell her was that she would have to wait for the military to decide when she went to school. She felt the misleading information she received was a breach of trust, a kind of lie that turned her off to the idea of a military career. She left military service within a few years, even though her husband stayed in.
Pamela worked in civil service during her husband’s military career, moving with him to various postings in the United States and abroad. Her work in data processing required her to have a security clearance, as did some of her logistics work in the areas of transportation and supply. In her last position, Pamela helped procure javelin training equipment, night war-training equipment, and supplies to construct a lab where soldiers trained for various urban warfare situations. She completed college while she worked at Fort Benning, Georgia, and raised their daughter and son. Her marriage ended in divorce after almost sixteen years, and she went to seminary.
Pamela’s son, Dweylon, had been an honor-roll student much of his childhood. He was more sophisticated and culturally literate than his peers because of his military upbringing, the education he had received at military base schools, and the crosscultural experiences he’d had at his father’s overseas postings. When Pamela decided to move from Columbus, Georgia, near Ft. Benning, to do graduate work at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Dweylon asked if he might be allowed to live with his father in a nearby suburb. Wanting her son to have the benefit of more time with his father, Pamela agreed to let Dweylon stay with his father on weekdays and with her on weekends. This arrangement worked well until Dweylon’s father remarried.
As Dweylon went through puberty, he, like many teenagers, became rebellious. The son Pamela sent to live with his father was soon in deep trouble. Within a year of living mostly with his dad, Dweylon had been expelled from high school. Given the impact of his father’s remarriage on her son and his challenges with puberty, Pamela made a rapid decision to bring her son back to live with her full-time as she completed her masters of divinity degree. She enrolled him in a GED program to ensure that he continued in school and earned the equivalent of a high school diploma. Consistent with his earlier academic achievements, Dweylon did not stay long in the program because he easily passed all the required tests. Though he had been expelled in his junior year, Dweylon received his GED a year earlier than he would have received his diploma had he stayed in high school.
At the time Dweylon graduated, Pamela was working for the United Methodist Church, but she realized that she wanted a greater intellectual challenge and felt called to teach seminarians. She applied to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary’s doctor of philosophy program in theology and ethics and received scholarship support from the distinguished United Methodist Women of Color Scholars Program.
Pamela prepared to move to Chicago to begin as pastor of a thriving church in South Chicago and as a doctoral student at Garrett in Evanston, north of Chicago, which meant another move for Dweylon. As Dweylon reports, having already lost focus, he soon began to hang around with the wrong people. He stopped preparing for college and was earning no income. Rather than move with Pamela to Chicago, he asked her permission to join the military. She thought his request was simply another act of rebellion. Reluctantly, she agreed to it, believing that military life would help him refocus and teach him the discipline needed to go to college. Just shy of turning eighteen years old, and a few months before Pamela’s departure for Chicago, Dweylon joined the Army.
The military had been his family’s world during much of Dweylon’s childhood and early adolescence, so it may also have been a return to a world he knew, rather than a move to a strange new city. When Pamela went to his graduation from basic training, Dweylon had excelled as a squad leader, even calling cadence during the ceremony. She realized that he was doing well in the military and was proud of him.
We first encountered Camilo Ernesto Mejía in the documentary Soldiers of Conscience. His interviews in the film affected us deeply. In his understated, searching way, Camilo exhibited moral courage, honesty, and depth of thought. A short man with a strong presence, he has an open, intelligent face, a clear-eyed gaze, and a moral gravity that made his account of shooting a young man without having a memory of firing his gun profoundly moving. His interviews on screen motivated us to contact Camilo at the very beginning of our planning for the Truth Commission.
When we finally met him face to face in March 2010, we also discovered his gracious smile, his sense of humor, and warm, calming presence. His daughter Samantha, aged ten, accompanied him. We were touched by the deep love between them. She wore a pink dress printed with flowers and flashed a huge beautiful smile when we met her. She was remarkably poised and comfortable in a room full of adults, though she clearly had a restless curiosity and impish spirit. She liked to play tricks on her sitter, and she kept busy during the hearing by reading the books she brought, playing with stickers, and strolling around outside. She gave Gabriella one of the stickers—a star—to put on her robe.
Camilo was born in Nicaragua in 1975. He tells the story of his parents and early upbringing briefly in his war memoir, Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía. The story of his parents would make for a powerful novel, one we hope to read someday. Camilo’s father had studied in a Roman Catholic seminary to become a priest, but when he met the passionate and beautiful seventeen-year-old from Costa Rica who would become Camilo’s mother, he had already become a well-known musician and radio personality. His father’s education in liberation theology grounded his lifelong commitment to justice making, despite his abandonment of the road to priesthood. These ideas also shaped Camilo’s life. Camilo’s parents were prominent members of the Sandinista revolutionary movement that helped to bring down the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Camilo was named for Camilo Torres, a radical priest who died fighting for justice in Colombia. His second name, Ernesto, honors Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Camilo was raised a privileged son of revolutionaries. Camilo’s mother reported directly to the top leaders in the Sandinista movement, such as Humberto Ortega. Though his parents separated shortly after his birth, his father continued to be a strong presence in his life. In Managua, Camilo attended a private Jesuit school and lived with his mother and older brother Carlos, traveling at times to visit family in New York City and Costa Rica. His father, who lived a couple of blocks away in the same neighborhood of elegant homes, had a chauffeur, whom he called “the comrade who drives for me.”
When the Sandinista government lost the 1990 elections, the new government was friendly to the United States and its capitalist agenda and included former Sandinista leaders who had become multimillionaires. But because Camilo’s parents had not chosen to amass wealth, his mother decided to move back to her native Costa Rica with her sons. There, Camilo was confronted with deep xenophobia toward Nicaraguan immigrants. He was taunted, shunned, and called names by his classmates. No longer one of the golden children of the revolution but an unwelcome guest, he became a lonely teenager who took consolation in reading novels and poetry and attending theaters and concerts alone.
In 1994, Camilo’s grandmother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, obtained a green card for her daughter and her children. At eighteen, Camilo found himself in Miami, Florida. Even with the support money his father still sent, his mother’s job as a supermarket cashier, and rental income from her Managua apartment, the family lacked enough to survive. So Camilo went to work cleaning a fast-food restaurant. His day started with work at 5:30 a.m. and ended after night school at 10 p.m. Graduation was lonely, as he had no friends to celebrate with. After receiving his diploma from the principal’s office, Camilo sat on a bench outside a supermarket staring at it, puzzled about his future.
Camilo enrolled in a community college, but kept the menial fast-food job, where he had become a cook. After two years, he lost his federal student financial aid because he was supposedly making enough at his job. Disappointed, demoralized, and anxious about his future, Camilo met a U.S. Army recruiter.
The recruiter helped Camilo see the possibility of belonging to something important and of finding meaning in a land where he felt foreign, lonely, and unfulfilled. It was like a sudden revelation. Finally, he thought, he would fit in, find friends, and contribute to a larger good:
Camilo joined at nineteen in 1995. His surprised parents challenged his decision on political grounds. Politics aside, they also simply did not see Camilo as a soldier type who would fit in the Army. Camilo’s mother warned him he would wind up in a war. She cried when he left for Fort Benning, Georgia.
PEOPLE WHO UNDERTAKE military service share the same life aspirations of many of us: they want to be part of something larger than their individual lives, to be of service to others, to do the right thing, and to have a better life. Regardless of their original reasons for entering military service, Joshua, Kevin, Tyler, Mac, Herm, Pamela, and Camilo were profoundly changed by war in their lives, for the rest of their lives. No amount of commitment, patriotic fervor, or physical and mental training can prepare a moral human being for the actual experience of war or for loving someone who returns from war. Which is what makes war, the subject of chapter 2, so devastating.