Winter Soldier

by Iraq Veterans Against the War

  Age at Winter Soldier: 30 years old

  For the record, nothing I say should be construed to be the opinion of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

  I left the military shortly after 9/11. It was the end of my four-year contract. I felt like I left the country when it needed me most, and so when I watched America build a case for the Iraq war, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I was in school when the war broke out, and I tried desperately to finish my semester, but in late March 2003 I was in that recruiter’s office again saying, “You gotta make me a part of this, you have to get me over there.” And it was just timing, but the quickest they could get me out was August 2003. In May 2003, mission was “accomplished,” and I was like, “Great.” There was my story for my grandkids: I missed my chance for some honor.

  But soldiers were still dying. And so when I got to my duty station in Germany in September 2003, I found out I would deploy to Kuwait in February 2004. But in December 2003, Saddam Hussein was caught, so for the second time I thought, “Great, now the war is really over.” But we still went, and by that time I was extremely skeptical. Over the course of that year, I felt the same frustration that everybody did. I didn’t realize that the war was over and that the occupation had begun.

  And so the only thing we were fighting for was living one more day. The frustration is that no matter what you do, you’re not going to get home any sooner. Then I felt the frustration of coming home and having to constantly remind myself that America’s a country at war because you wouldn’t know when you look around.

  In between tours I had time to think about the things that I had done. How we went to Iraq under false pretenses. How I went there to help the Iraqi people and that’s not what we were doing. It wasn’t malice; we were just trying to survive. I started to blame the Iraqi people for our presence, and I did want to see Iraq annihilated. I just wanted to go home. It was what all of us wanted back then, and it was every bit as true in 2007.

  I thought I would tell a story of how the First Amendment really came to bat for me. I joined IVAW right before my second deployment. I started writing posts that got published on the site, and it started getting attention because here was this active-duty soldier getting ready to go on his second deployment. I was contacted by a reporter while I was in Baghdad. He said he was with Democracy Now! I had never heard of it before, but I agreed to an interview on so-and-so date. It just so happened that on that date I was going to be investigated for something entirely different.

  I had a website, www.soldiersvoices.net, that I didn’t register with Central Command. It’s policy to register all blogs and websites and I had failed to register this one—and they had found it.

  I didn’t know I was going to be investigated until that day, and I remember I was in my commander’s office answering questions when my phone started ringing. I was like, “Oh, man.” She wanted to know who that was, and I said, “It’s a reporter.”

  She gave me a direct order not to talk to the media. Now, this reporter was calling me one hour before the show was supposed to broadcast live. The phone rang constantly. I didn’t answer it and then it stopped. And I was like, “Great, they just got the hint.” And after I was done, my phone rang again and I answered it, and he’s like, “Do you still want to do this? We go on in ten minutes.” And I said, “I don’t think I should. I’ve just been given a direct order not to speak to the media.” And he’s like, “How ’bout if I just give you thirty seconds to say what you have to say to the American people.” And I said, “I can work with that.” So I had five minutes to come up with thirty seconds to say, and he called and he’s like, “I’m gonna put you on right now.” I can hear somebody talking and she wasn’t talking to me. I thought to myself, “Oh, God, is this live?”

  So she’s like, “Ronn are you there? Would you….” She started asking me questions and I blew her off. I just blew through my thirty-second blurb in about five seconds.

  After a few questions, I hung up the phone. I’m like, “Oh, that’s done.” And ten minutes later somebody found me and said, “The commander wants to see you in her office right now.” I was sad because I was I thought I was going to jail and I was upset because, having gone to school in America, I thought, “That’s not what this country was supposed to be about. All I did was say things I felt had to be said.” I knew IVAW existed and I had just joined, but I hadn’t met anybody yet, and I was wary of anything labeled antiwar at the time because I’ve got so many years of military experience.

  So I said, “I’m not going take this laying down.” I went in there fully prepared for a confrontation. I shed a tear or two, and I went in there and she said, “I’m rescinding my order for you not to talk to the media. It is, in fact, your right.”

  It was sink or swim time. At best I treaded water and I came out ahead. It is our right, and I want the servicemembers and my active-duty brothers and sisters to know that is our right. We do have the right to dissent within the ranks and also serve honorably. My career has not suffered a bit because of anything that I’ve done in the year and a half that I’ve been a vocal member of IVAW. And I just want to say that I know that you guys are out there. There’s IVAW in every unit, on every post in the military. Even if you’re not IVAW members, I know that you’re Iraq veterans and you are against this war.

  To everybody else, I want to say please don’t let us be the first generation of veterans to be forgotten while our war is going on. When you have to look hard for news on Iraq , it really sends a powerful message to us still on active duty.

  Finally, I just want to give myself a little shout-out. Today is my thirtieth birthday. The reason I wanted to say that is I’m doing this for the soldiers over there right now so they could one day see thirty as well.

  Concluding Remarks from Camilo MejÍa

  Chair of the Board, Iraq Veterans Against the War

  Camilo Mejia served in Iraq from April through October 2003. He was the first soldier to be incarcerated for publicly refusing to return to Iraq. He currently serves as the chair of the board at IVAW and is the author of Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejia: An Iraq War Memior.

  George Orwell once wrote, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes an act of rebellion.” We live today in times of universal deceit, but here at Winter Soldier, we have witnessed firsthand accounts that challenge that universal deceit.

  Iraq Veterans Against the War has become a source of stress to the military brass and to the government. We have members who have been interrogated by the FBI, who have been incarcerated for being conscientious objectors and for saying no to command rape and sexual discrimination. We have members in Iraq Veterans Against the War who have been prosecuted for criticizing our government’s failed war policies.

  We have become a dangerous group of people not because of our military training, but because we have dared to challenge the official story. We are dangerous because we have dared to share our experiences, to think for ourselves, to analyze and be critical, to follow our conscience, and because we have dared to go beyond patriotism to embrace humanity.

  The servicemembers and veterans who have shared our experiences with you and with the entire world are committing an act of resistance by being here. We resist the notion of free speech and democracy when the voices of those who have been the most affected by the occupations of Iraq and Afghan­istan are being silenced by the government and by the corporate media.

  We refuse the notion of nation building in Iraq when at home our levees are breaking and our people are drowning, and when our own bridges are falling down. We resist and reject the official government rhetoric of “Support Our Troops” when we have a whole new military generation returning home to no care for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, to homelessness, to disturbingly high levels of suicide, homicide, and domestic violence. We have heard heartbreaking testimony. We who have been there have seen the horror i
n the eyes of children whose doors we kicked down at 3:00 in the morning.

  We cannot win the hearts and minds of any country until we win the hearts and minds of our own people, until we eradicate homophobia within our ranks and we treat our own people as equals regardless of their gender or the color of their skin.

  You have heard our three points of unity: immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces, full benefits to all military personnel, and reparations to the people of Iraq so they can rebuild their country on their own terms. We at IVAW are not going to rest until we achieve these three goals.

  I first became an activist, home on a two-week leave from Iraq, in October of 2003. At first I simply contradicted reporters when they claimed that morale was high among the troops. Then I started talking about how we were going out there on combat missions without basic equipment, such as bulletproof vests and radios. For lack of armored plates on our vehicles we had to line their walls with old flak vests, their floors with sandbags. I told reporters that in some cases we had to ask other platoons to give us some of their munitions before going out on patrols. And sometimes patrols would get cancelled because we didn’t have but two bottles of water per soldier at a time when the temperature was reaching 140 degrees.

  My speaking out then became more radical after I decided I would not return to my unit in ar Ramadi at the end of my R&R leave. I began to speak about the torture of prisoners and the killing of civilians. By the time I surrendered, five months after the end of my leave, I was calling the occupation illegal and immoral and saying servicemen and women did not have a duty to fight in it. The army convicted me of desertion and put me away for nine months.

  I started working on GI resistance shortly after I was released from prison in February 2005. I officially joined IVAW the following month and I have been a full-time activist ever since. Over the past several years, I’ve been asked over and over how come the antiwar movement is not as strong as it should be. The answer to that question is complicated and can only be found in an analysis of the political and historical context surrounding the Vietnam War. Such an analysis would note that back then there was a draft that touched the sons of the U.S. middle class, which unleashed the outrage of the more affluent ranks of society, culminating in draft resistance, mass desertions and conscientious objector applications, a militant antiwar student movement on hundreds of college campuses, and massive street demonstrations. Another aspect from that era missing in today’s movement is the fresh legacy of the civil rights movement. Young recruits and members of today’s military don’t have that point of reference, or even that of resistance to the Vietnam War. That history has been removed from the official records in order to disempower new generations of activists.

  Yet another disadvantage of today’s movement is the lack of personal engagement of the American public, which is explained not only by the fact that fewer than half a percent of the population is directly involved in the fighting, but also by the fact that those fighting belong to the less affluent sectors of society: working Americans, people of color, immigrants, the uninsured and uneducated; in short, people with lots of needs but very little socioeconomic power.

  Today’s society is not experiencing the horror that our military intervention of Iraq is causing to both Iraqis and to servicemembers and their families. Hiding the gruesome reality of the occupation of Iraq is not meant to respect the dignity of the fallen, as our government would have us believe. It is meant to minimize the emotional impact of the occupation so that the United States, as a nation, does not take ownership of the crimes the government commits in its name, with its money, and with the blood of its sons and daughters.

  Part of the work of GI organizers is to ensure that the American people, through the voices of veterans and active members of our military, do experience the war. We want regular civilians to know about the suffering of Iraqis, and how our military operations are carried out in the countries we occupy. We want the public to know that occupation translates into the oppression of people, into the killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians, into the humiliation of an entire nation, into the destruction of the environment, and into the destruction of the moral fabric of the members of our military.

  In order to achieve this goal, to help the American people take ownership of the actions of our government and of our military, we have to empower our brothers and sisters, both veterans and active-duty and reserve personnel, to speak out. We want people at home to hear not from the government pundits, officials, generals, or from the politicians, but from those of us who have intimate knowledge of our military and of war and occupation.

  During the Vietnam era the work of those organizing GIs to speak out was aided by news reports, which were actually depicting the horror of war. Even as someone who was not born in that era, I have imprinted in me some of the horrific images that came from that war: the little Vietnamese girl running toward a television camera, naked, as the village behind her is being bombed with napalm. There were pictures of American soldiers posing with dead Vietnamese as if they were war trophies. There were the images of our own wounded, of our dead, and of those who were alive in body but who were also dead in spirit. The demoralization of our military was able to penetrate into the consciousness of the American public. People in the United States were able to take a peek into the hell of war, a hell that we were unleashing on the people and on the land of Vietnam and that was being carried back home in the hearts of our veterans.

  The hell that’s being brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan is being kept from the American public this time around. This means that today’s GI resistance movement has to do double the work in order to help regular people realize the huge burden of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that this is their burden too. The American people have to take ownership of these occupations; that’s the only way they’re going to get out there and protest, not as a favor, but because it affects them personally and because they have a moral responsibility to put an end to the atrocities. Ending the occupations is not a battle that antiwar GIs should have to wage by ourselves. It is not a burden we should bear alone.

  The need to empower our brothers and sisters in the military to speak out serves several purposes. On one hand it sends the message to other service personnel that they’re not alone in their opposition to the occupations and that they can and should take a stand. On the other hand it brings the horror of war into the consciousness of regular Americans at a time when the mainstream news outlets are going out of their way to hide that horror.

  We in the GI resistance movement want to put a human face to the suffering of Iraqis and Americans alike. What does it mean to the newspaper reader when on the lower inside corner of page A18 he or she reads that three American personnel were killed in an IED attack? How much of the pain felt by the families of those three military personnel can be conveyed by that little box? And what about the Iraqi casualties, the children, the wives and mothers, the fathers, and the destroyed homes—who speaks for them in America? And what about the survivors, who return home with the images of so much suffering forever branded in their hearts?

  Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan, chronicled in this present volume, is the biggest, most important event ever put together by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Modeled after the Winter Soldier hearings held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in a Detroit, Michigan hotel in 1971, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan did not start a new tradition; rather it added a new chapter in the rich history of military resistance that dates back to the Revolutionary War and that carried through to this very day, finding its highest and most successful expression in the military resistance to the Vietnam War.

  Without the experience, support, and mentorship of VVAW and Veterans For Peace (VFP), Iraq Veterans Against the War would be walking down very dark roads as we move forward. We know from the experience of our mentors that the government, bent on continuing its criminal wars of aggression at all cost, will p
ersist in trying to isolate the critical voices within the ranks. The history has been rewritten to portray the antiwar movement of the ’60s and ’70s as anti-military. But we know from our mentors at VVAW that the military, like today, was at the forefront of the resistance: distributing hundreds of GI newspapers, opening GI coffeehouses right outside of military bases, organizing veterans and active-duty GIs, and staging huge antiwar rallies, marches, and speakouts.

  In Vietnam entire units were refusing to go on missions that were not worth their lives. They began telling their officers how missions would be carried out in order to minimize unnecessary danger. They practiced search-and-avoid missions and went as far as negotiating unofficial truces with their so-called enemies, which they accomplished by wearing white armbands around their sleeves, among other signs.

  Today’s military resistance is not as advanced as that of our Vietnam predecessors, but the signs of an ever-escalating disaffection among the ranks, both on the battlefields and at home, become more palpable each passing day.

  Sharing our experiences as veterans and as human beings during the Winter Soldier hearings has not only given voice to those of us who will no longer stand quiet in the face of these criminal occupations, it has also brought us together and returned to us the sense of family we were looking for when we joined the military. If our military experience at war has taken from us our humanity, having been able to testify at Winter Soldier renewed in many of us the hope of finding a new life in resistance.

  The Iraq War was launched under false pretenses and in direct violation of American and international law. As servicemembers we have a duty to resist participation in illegal wars and to disobey unlawful commands. Torture, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and conducting combat missions in certain civilian areas are all illegal orders that should be refused. But the government would have people believe that these are the actions of a few bad apples and not the result of policy crafted at the highest spheres of power.