I served as a cavalry scout in the 1st Infantry Division and I went on to go to the Target Interdiction Course in Stetten, Germany, and became a sniper. I served as a sniper for a year in Iraq between February ’04 and February ’05 around Baquba in the Sunni Triangle.
During our deployment, we started one of the first antiwar MilBlogs, Fight to Survive, and we were involved in a variety of GI resistance but it didn’t entail breaking army regulations. That allowed us to receive an honorable discharge. There are ways to resist this war within army regulations.
One of the most important things about our U.S. military is you’re a citizen soldier. You retain your rights as a citizen. You’re able to use those rights and you should since you’re the one sacrificing to protect them. It’ll be a shame if the use of the First Amendment becomes unpatriotic.
I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) when they first started out. Myself and the other soldiers I deployed with were resisting before we knew there was an IVAW, before Sir! No Sir! or GI Revolt came out. When IVAW formed in the summer of 2004, I was contacted by Kelly Dougherty, Camilo Mejía, and some of the other founding members, and as a result, I became the first active-duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Today we’re talking about the future of GI resistance, and you can’t help but try to predict the future by looking at the past. I think this Winter Soldier is so incredible. We’re doing this far earlier than the Vietnam vets. Thanks to their mentorship, we put this together five years after our invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Vietnam veterans conducted a Winter Soldier in 1971 and the Vietnam War started in 1959; that’s more than ten years after the engagement started, and three years after the 1968 Tet Offensive. We had over four hundred thousand American troops deployed in Vietnam at the time. Over fourteen thousand soldiers had been killed in action. I feel that we’re ahead of the game. We might be less in numbers and we might have less of a political voice, and America is very different now, but if we can start this resistance early, we can end this war before there is a Tet Offensive in Iraq.
So let’s compare Iraq and Vietnam. The military is very different now. When we look at GI resistance, we also need to look at what our military’s doing. There’s no draft today, so college students are not facing activation. A majority of this war’s veterans are still in the military, so the number of veterans isn’t as large as it was during Vietnam. These men and women are still stuck in the military through stop-loss orders and the Individual Ready Reserve.
There’s a different type of soldier today. They’re career soldiers. They’re professional soldiers. The men and women that I served with—for many of them that was their career, that was their job, and they took honor in that. They didn’t want to give that up. They might not have wanted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan over and over again, but they did take pride in the fact that they were soldiers and they didn’t want to lose that. Many of them have wives or husbands and kids that they’re trying to support. They thought that the military would be a good way to do that. They didn’t ask to be sent to Iraq, to an illegal occupation of another country, and to oppress people who don’t want them there. They believed they would be used in a just way, after all peaceful solutions had been exhausted. That’s when they thought they’d be sent into harm’s way.
Rotations are also different now. Soldiers don’t deploy to Iraq one at a time. We’re moving entire divisions in and entire divisions out. The men that I served with are the same men I served with when I was in Kosovo. They are the same men I trained with in Germany. We are loyal to one another. Many of these men and women feel that the military is their family, and they don’t understand civilian life. They’re comfortable in the military and they don’t want to abandon their friends and family, but that doesn’t mean that they want to serve, repeatedly, in Iraq.
There are many benefits available to these men and women. They’re offered GI bills for college. They’re given health insurance. They’re given a nice safe base to live on where their spouses can shop at the PX or the commissary. Their kids are going to school in a safe, healthy environment, and that’s hard to give up as well.
So when you ask why don’t soldiers resist, these are all these reasons why they don’t. Many of them are scared as hell to be in the outside world when all they’ve ever been is a machine gunner.
The three reasons soldiers continue are the benefits, the options, and the loyalty to and pride of service. But there are solutions to each. We can start funds to help war resisters replace military benefits. We could hire veterans. We could give them jobs and someplace to land once they decide to turn their back on this war.
They can also join this movement. There’s a lot of pride and loyalty in joining our army and our Corps and in fighting for a cause we believe in, fighting for a cause that will change America and stop these occupations.
So we’re asking. We’re not going to come out and recruit soldiers or veterans. We’re not going try to trick you into joining us and to joining our cause. But we will ask you to. Because there is a fight coming, and it’s a fight to improve America and to improve this military and we’re asking you to join us.
So if you’re out there and you’re dedicated to what we’re talking about here at Winter Soldier and you want to improve your military and your country, this is a good way to do it. Go to http://www.ivaw.org and there’s membership applications online.
We’ll give you information on how you can resist if you want to stay in the military and you don’t want to break army regulations. If you don’t want to get in trouble, there are still ways you can use your First Amendment rights. You can put your application in and join us to end this occupation.