Page 2 of 3 Marching out of step in the US military
By Dahr Jamail
Staff Sergeant Ronn Cantu, an infantryman who was deployed to Iraq from March
2004 to February 2005, and again from December 2006 to January 2008, said of
some of the patrols he observed while there: "[They] wouldn't go up and down
the streets like they were supposed to. They would just go to a friendly
compound with the Iraqi police or the Kurdish Peshmerga [militia] and stay at
their compound and drink tea until it was time to go back to the base."
As a Stryker armored combat vehicle commander in Iraq from September 2004 to
September 2005, Sergeant Seth Manzel had figured out a way to fabricate on
screen the movement of their
patrol and so could run computerized versions of a search-and-avoid mission. As
he explained:
Sometimes if they called us up to go and do something, we
would swiftly send computer reports that we were headed in that direction. On
the map we would manually place our icon to the target location and then move
it back and forth to make it appear as though we were actually on the ground
and patrolling. This was not an isolated case. Everyone did it. Everyone would
go and hide somewhere from time to time.
Former Sergeant Josh
Simpson, who served as a counter-intelligence agent in Iraq from October 2004
to October 2005, said he witnessed instances of faked movement. "I knew
soldiers who learned to simulate vehicular movement on the computer screen, to
create the impression of being on patrol," said Simpson. "There's no doubt that
people did it."
Saying 'no' one at a time
"There was nothing to be done," Corporal Casler says of his time in Iraq, "no
progress to be made there. Dissent starts as simple as saying this is bullshit.
Why am I risking my life?"
Sometimes such feelings have permeated entire units and soldiers in them have
refused to follow orders en masse. One of the more dramatic of these incidents
occurred in July 2007. The 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th
Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad had lost many men in its 11 months of deployment.
After a roadside bomb killed five more, its members held a meeting and agreed
that it was no longer possible for them to function professionally. Concerned
that their anger might actually touch off a massacre of Iraqi civilians, they
staged a quiet revolt against their commanders instead.
Kelly Kennedy, a reporter with the Military Times embedded with Charlie Company
prior to the revolt, described the shape the platoon members were in by that
time: "[T]hey went right to mental health and they got sleeping medications,
and they basically couldn't sleep and reacted poorly. And then, they were
supposed to go out on patrol again that day. And they, as a platoon, the whole
platoon - it was about 40 people - said, 'We're not going to do it. We can't.
We're not mentally there right now'."
In response, the military broke up the platoon. Each individual involved was
also "flagged" so he would not get a promotion or receive any award due.
To this day, troops in Iraq continue to be plagued by equipment and manpower
shortages, and work long hours in an extreme climate. In addition, their stress
levels are regularly raised by news from home of veterans returning to
separations and divorces, and of a Veteran's Administration often ill-equipped
and unwilling to provide appropriate physical and psychological care to
veterans.
While no broad poll of troops has been conducted recently, a Zogby poll in
February 2006 found that 72% of soldiers in Iraq felt the occupation should be
ended within a year. My interviews with those recently back from Iraq indicate
that levels of despair and disappointment are once again on the rise among
troops who are beginning to realize, months after the Obama administration was
ushered in, that hopes of an early withdrawal have evaporated.
With the Afghan war heating up and the Iraq war still far from over, even if
fighting there is at far lower levels than at its sectarian heights in 2006 and
2007, with stress and strain on the military still on the rise, dissent and
resistance are unlikely to abate. In addition to small numbers of outright
public refusals to deploy or redeploy, troops are going absent without official
leave (AWOL) between deployments, and actual desertions may once again be on
the rise.
Certainly, there's one strong indication that despair is indeed growing: the
unprecedented numbers of soldiers who are committing suicide; the army's
official suicide count rose to 133 in 2008, up from 115 in 2007, itself a
record since the Pentagon began keeping suicide statistics in 1980. At least 82
confirmed or suspected suicides have been reported thus far in 2009, a pace
that indicates another grim record will be set; and suicide, though seldom
thought of in that context, is also a form of refusal, an extreme, individual
way of saying no, or simply no more.
According to Sergeant Simpson, here's how a feeling of discontent and
opposition creeps up on you while you're on duty: The part of the war you're
involved in, interrogating Iraqis in his case, "doesn't make any sense. You
realize that the whole system is flawed and if that is flawed, then obviously
the whole war is flawed. If the basic premise of the war is flawed, definitely
the intelligence system that is supposed to lead us to victory is flawed. What
that implies is that victory is not even a possibility."
After finishing his tour in Iraq, Simpson joined the Reserves because he
believed it would grant him a two-year deferment from being called up, but he
was called up anyway. In his own case, he says, "I thought to myself, I can't
do this anymore. First of all, it's bad for me mentally because I'm doing
something I loathe. Second, I'm participating in an organization that I wish to
resist in every way I can.
"So," he says, "I just stopped showing up for drill, didn't call my unit,
didn't give them any reason for it. I changed my telephone number and they did
not have my address." Eventually, he reached the end date of his contract and
managed to graduate from Evergreen State University in Washington. "I don't
know if technically I'm still in the reserves," he told me. "I don't know what
my situation is, but I don't really care either. If I go to jail, I go to jail.
I'd rather go to jail than go to Iraq."
Unready and unwilling Reserves
Sergeant Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 57th
Expeditionary Signal Battalion - the same battalion as Agosto, who served north
of the Iraqi capital - recently went AWOL from his station at Fort Hood, Texas,
when his unit deployed to Afghanistan. He insists that it would be unethical
for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on moral grounds.
On his blog, he puts his position this way:
I love my country, but I
believe that this particular war is unjust, unconstitutional and a total abuse
of our nation's power and influence. And so, in the next few days, I will be
speaking with my lawyer, and taking actions that will more than likely result
in my discharge from the military, and possible jail time ... and I am prepared
to live with that ... My father said, "Do only what you can live with, because
every morning you have to look at your face in the mirror when you shave. Ten
years from now, you'll still be shaving the same face." If I had deployed to
Afghanistan, I don't think I would have been able to look into another mirror
again.
I spoke with him briefly after he turned himself in at
his base in early June. He said he'd chosen to follow Specialist Agosto's
example of refusal, which had inspired him, and wanted to be present at his
post to accept the consequences of his actions. He, too, hoped others might
follow his lead. (He and Agosto, now in similar situations, have become
friends.)
Agosto, whose hope has been to set an example of resistance for other soldiers,
sees Bishop's refusal to deploy to Afghanistan as a personal success and says,
"I already feel vindicated for what I'm doing by his actions. It's nice to see
some immediate results."
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