Soldiers' Resistance

“General, man is very useful,” wrote the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht. “He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.” People are not machines and this “defect” has made itself apparent throughout the history of warfare. The case of America is no exception. There is evidence of signifcant resistance from rank-and-file soldiers in the virtually every major American war with the exception of World War II and Korea. While there are instances of major, open soldiers’ resistance, as in the Filippino-American or Vietnam Wars, there are far more instances of quiet protest and insubordination. In the current war, a growing American soldiers, both active duty and veterans, are engaged in active resistance against US policies in Iraq. More and more soldiers are going public with their resistance, joining organizaitons like Iraq Veterans Against the War, or signing petitions calling for an end to occupation. While public resistance may be limited at this point, a Zogby poll in early 2005 found that the vast majority, 72 percent, of American troops in Iraq wanted a complete withdrawal by the end of 2006.
The issue of soldiers’ resistance is a story generally left out of conventional history books. Like the victims of a particular war, most of the attention given to the role of soldiers in a conflict is a list of numbers. They are treated like passive objects, not historical actors capable of rational thought. Objects do not raise questions, but people do. Antiwar Iraq veteran Kelly Dougherty observed, “The way that the military are portrayed in the media is that we’re just faceless, patriotic drones who go along and do whatever we’re ordered to do… The fact is that the men and women in the military are real human beings. They have families, they have children, a lot of us are going to school and have careers, and we’re not just blindly patriotic.”
A recent USA Today report found that at least 8,000 soldiers have refused deployment to Iraq. That same report found that 400 have fled to Canada seeking refugee status. While the numbers in the current war do not, by any means, rival that of earlier wars, it must be taken into acount that US forces are, more or less, an all-volunteer military. These numbers must also be viewed in light of the declinng number of new recruits, the relaxation of recruitment standards, and the increasing use of the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR). Last year military recruitment was even suspended for a day for a period of retraining after several public revelations of widespread recruiter misconduct. The actual numbers of war resisters is almost impossible to know because, other than simply discharging them, the military has not done much to persue soldiers resisting deployment in the IRR.
While most of the soldiers resisting the war have done so quietly, an increasing number have gone public with their opposition. Sgt. Camilo Mejia, the first US soldier to publicly resist deployment, had been in the miltary for seven years and spent eight months in Iraq before he made his decision. He was court-martialed and served nine months in prison. Speaking after his release, Mejia argued, “When I turned myself in … I did it not only for myself. I did it for the people of Iraq, even for those who fired upon me – they were just on the other side of a battleground where war itself was the only enemy. I did it for the Iraqi children, who are victims of mines and depleted uranium. I did it for the thousands of unknown civilians killed in war… those who called me a coward, without knowing it, are also right. I was a coward not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. Refusing and resisting this war was my moral duty, a moral duty that called me to take a principled action. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier.”
After Mejia, dozens of other soldiers have followed their conscience and refused to fight. Darrell Anderson, a Purple Heart recipient speaking from exile in Canada, told journalist and author Peter Laufer that he became a war resister after his experiences convinced him to refuse redeployment. After seeing his friend die after an insurgent attack, he said that he became disheartened by the feelings that came over him. Recalling his thoughts, Anderson said, “When I first got there, I was disgusted with my fellow soldiers. But now I'm just the same. I will kill innocent people, because I'm not the person I was when I got there.” Another war resister, Joshua Key told Laufer that he holds the Bush Amdinistration responsible for the war. “I blame them because they made me do it. You can lie to the world; you can't lie to a person who's seen it. They made me have to do things that a man should never have to do, for the purpose of their gain – not the people's – their financial gain.” Steven Casey said that while he was still in the Individual Ready Reserve, he would never return to Iraq. “You'll see me on the news,” he said. “I won't be back.” He said that he was going to use the money that was promised to him for school, but that “there are a lot of things that came with this that are irreparable and I'm going to have the rest of my life.” Looking back on his decision to join, he lamented, “I should have worked at McDonalds and found a way to pay for my tuition.”
As indicated by the Zogby poll mentioned in the beginning of this column, the depths of the antiwar sentiment in the ranks cannot necessarily be measured by the number of those engaged in active resistance. The nature of the soldiers’ revolt is complex to say the least. Kelly Dougherty, discussing the dynamics of the reistance, explained, “I think most of the people in Iraq right now in the U.S. military are there fighting for the people to their left and their right. They’re fighting for their brothers and sisters, who are really like their second family. That’s why they go over there, and that’s why they go back again and again. We have members in Iraq Veterans Against the War who are very opposed to the war, and they’re thinking of reenlisting – because they feel like their friends are going back, and they can’t let them go by themselves.”
As long as people fight in wars, the war machine will always have one “defect.” Throughout the modern age wars have been sold to domestic populations on defensive or humanitarian grounds. Leaders do not simply tell people to send their sons and daughters to fight and die for money or territory or resources. If they did, no one would fight. Even when they do fight, the enemy has to be dehumanized, transformed into subhumans who do not even value their own lives. The “enemy” can’t be a person. As soon as the “enemy” becomes a person with feelings and parents, an act of war becomes an act of murder. The “defect” in the war machine is the very thing that wars seek to destroy: humanity. Speaking at an antiwar rally on Jan 27 in San Franscisco, Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment, said, “To stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it.... If soldiers realized this war is contrary to what the Constitution extols – if they stood up and threw their weapons down – no President could ever initiate a war of choice again.”
-RP