Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq
Peter Laufer
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006
212 pages • $14
Review by ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD
THE PENTAGON now places the number of deserters since the year 2000 at an astonishing 40,000. In this context comes Peter Laufer’s very moving and inspiring Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq.
Rather than presenting a distilled analysis of the war, Mission Rejected focuses on the individual stories of war resisters and antiwar soldiers, told through a series of interviews with soldiers, their families, the activists helping them to build new lives, and (in one case) the military recruiter who signed them up. The strength of this approach is that it allows these dissident soldiers to emerge as real people, with their own experiences and ideas.
Taken together, the soldiers are a diverse group. They have a range of politics: Some have become anti-imperialists due to their experiences in the military; some have become pacifists; still others continue to support the U.S. military in general while rejecting the war in Iraq. Some were always against the Iraq war; others are former Republicans. While some easily articulate their views, others, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, express their thoughts in jumbled and distorted ways. It is a testament to Laufer’s skill as an interviewer (he is a former NBC News correspondent) that he is able to capture these differences while conveying the essence of each person’s story.
Still, themes emerge. One is the myth of the “volunteer” army, as many soldiers explain their reasons for signing up as poverty, recruiter lies, or both. Many of the soldiers also tell similar stories about turning against the war after experiencing its brutality. The book opens with a stomach-turning description by Joshua Key of watching fellow soldiers play soccer with the head of an Iraqi they had killed and beheaded; near the end it presents a detailed description of the house raids resister Steven Casey took part in.
Strikingly many of the stories involve violence at U.S.-run checkpoints. Some resisters fired on people at checkpoints, ultimately turning against the war through their horror at what they had done. Darrell Anderson was threatened with punishment because he didn’t fire on an unarmed family that stopped too slowly.
Connected to these stories is the military’s racism toward Iraqis. In the words of Dave Bischel, “Pretty soon you start developing this hatred almost—this hatred of Arabs. It’s scary because I’m not that kind of person. I’m not that kind of person at all.”
Several soldiers tell Laufer about their recognition that Iraqis are much like themselves, or their view that the U.S. military—not Iraqi resisters—is responsible for “terror” in Iraq. The soldiers’ openness in discussing their experiences underscores another theme of the book—that, contrary to the common charge of “cowardice,” soldiers display tremendous courage in resisting.
Some of the best parts of the book are the interviews Laufer conducted in Canada, which give an inspiring picture of the movement that resisters and their allies are building bit by bit. A growing group of resisters who have fled the U.S., along with activists supporting them (some of whom came to Canada themselves as resisters of the Vietnam War), are creating a community providing friendship, logistical and legal support, and political education to one another.
A fascinating component of these chapters is the sense they provide of how this movement is affecting the ideas of the soldiers involved. One soldier, Ryan Johnson, says that he went AWOL only to survive, but became a politicized activist afterwards.
Their lawyer, former Vietnam resister Jeffry House, explains:
They talk and they plan and then they all go out drinking and have debates about everything.… And it’s good. If you never thought about anything and you’re now being asked, “What’s the status of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, of the West Bank, as opposed to the American occupation of Iraq.”
This level of detail is invaluable for readers who are also figuring out how to build a movement ourselves.
The book is on weaker ground when it strays from its central theme of war resistance. For example, in his desire to find anti-war dissent in the United States, Laufer sometimes attaches that mantle to those who don’t deserve it (such as Sen. Chuck Hagel and Rep. John Murtha). But this is a small part of an otherwise excellent book.
In the year since the book was published, soldiers’ resistance has only continued to grow—perhaps most visibly with the antiwar “Appeal for Redress,” signed by more than 1,250 active-duty troops at the time of this review’s writing. The soldiers’ voices presented in Mission Rejected have a lot to teach us about what this movement can become.
