Review by ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD
ROAD FROM ar Ramadi is the moving memoir of the first U.S. soldier to publicly refuse to fight in Iraq.
In some ways, Camilo Mejía was an unusual soldier even before his resistance. His parents were leaders in the leftist Sandinista movement against the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. When the Sandinistas took power, Mejía became, in his words, “a privileged child of the revolution”; his family was well connected with the new ruling elite.
After the Sandinistas lost power and after a few years facing poverty and discrimination in Costa Rica, Mejía’s mother moved her children to Miami. Here his story becomes all too commonplace. His mother’s supermarket cashier job couldn’t support the family, so Mejía worked long hours at a fast food restaurant while attending night school. Mejía joined the army at age nineteen, eager to escape his dead-end job and attend college. “But more than financial stability and tuition,” he writes, “the military held out the promise of helping me claim my place in the world.” Only toward the end of his enlistment at Fort Hood did Mejía realize that the three-year contract he’d signed obligated him to eight years of military service.
So Mejía served five more years in the Florida National Guard. In May 2003, he was to be discharged from the military and graduate from college. But his new life plans were circumvented in January of that year when he was informed that his service obligation had been extended to 2013 under a congressional “stop-loss” order. Instead of leaving the military that spring, he would be heading to Iraq.
Most of the book recounts Mejía’s five months as a staff sergeant and leader of a nine-person squad in Iraq. This account is invaluable not only because it presents a picture of the reality of the occupation—infused, from the very beginning, with racism, brutality, and incompetence—but also because it helps us understand the process through which soldiers can become resisters.
That the book can serve this function is a credit to Mejía’s honesty. He avoids what could have been a natural temptation to project his present political consciousness onto the past, acknowledging instead the limitations of his understanding at various points. He notes, for example, several instances in which it did not occur to him—not until much later—to wonder what the Iraqis he interacted with were feeling as he stopped their vehicles or raided their homes.
He also acknowledges the shame he feels about the instances when he did not resist. Mejía’s first role in Iraq was as a guard in a prison where Iraqi detainees were being abused by U.S. forces. Sickened by the abuse, he used his position as squad leader to avoid participating directly, but was too afraid to intervene to stop it:
There are standard ways of justifying the sort of thing we were doing and I tried them all. I told myself, “When I signed a contract I agreed to follow orders” and “I’m doing this for the soldiers next to me.” But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice.
Mejía’s horror at what the occupation was doing to Iraqis fused with the increasing recognition that the military brass did not care about his own life or that of his fellow soldiers. From the beginning, several of Mejía’s superiors made clear their desire to have their units see combat—a prerequisite for the awards that would help them earn promotion. He writes: “Rumors that someone at the battalion level forged documents to get our units into combat more quickly were reinforced when we landed in Baghdad and found there was no unit waiting for us, no orders, no place to sleep, not even food or water.”
Once in Iraq, the leadership’s desire for prestige at the cost of other people’s lives continued. Officers used their soldiers as bait, having them follow a precisely scheduled routine so as to draw Iraqi resistance fighters into firefights. This practice led to the only collective resistance Mejía experienced, when an entire platoon refused a particularly suicidal mission, having suffered heavy casualties on an identical mission the night before. The mission was altered.
The connection between his own treatment and the treatment of Iraqis was first drawn for Mejía by an Iraqi named Mohammed, whose shop he used to hang out in. Questioned about the justification for the war, Mejía weakly falls back on the idea that they are bringing freedom to Iraq. Mohammed looks at him in disbelief—and proceeds to question him about his own involuntary deployment. “So how can you bring freedom to us, when you don’t have freedom for yourselves?” Mohammed asked.
Later, Mejía makes the connection between the class divisions within the military and the morality of resistance. When he explains to his squad why he won’t fire on cars at an unmarked checkpoint as ordered, he says, “We’re the ones who are gonna have to live with the shit if we kill innocent people. It won’t be the captain or the colonel squeezing the trigger, men, it will be you, and you, not they, will have to live with that shit.”
Mejía’s book helps us to understand the complexity of the ideas and emotions that soldiers can experience in a war zone. His own experience was contradictory. On the one hand, as he experienced the occupation, his opposition deepened and his resistance became bolder. On the other hand, at the same time as Mejía’s resistance became less timid, the occupation increasingly took a toll on him. More than once, other soldiers or Iraqi policemen intervened to prevent a panicked Mejía from firing on an ambulance or on unarmed, wounded Iraqis.
Their interventions highlight the fact that Mejía was not the only soldier who struggled to retain his humanity, though he was rare in following this process to its logical conclusion. The only way out of the impasse of occupation—between his developing conscience and the ethical toll of his increasing drive for survival at all costs—was literally to get out. This realization led Mejía to find a temporary way back to Miami. He never returned to Iraq.
“The truth is,” Mejía writes, “that there never was a moment of complete clarity at which I made a firm decision to resist the war; I simply didn’t get on the plane when I was supposed to.” But the accumulation of experiences, and taking small steps to resist, eventually led Mejía to act. He did this without any model.
After deciding not to return to Iraq, a terrified Mejía went underground for five months before publicly turning himself in to the military. He served nine months in a military prison and became an international figure of resistance. While underground, Mejía had to grapple with his role in sparking a soldiers’ resistance that did not yet exist.
Am I really courageous? I haven’t done anything yet, I would say to myself. And then other words would come to mind: There has to be a first one, a voice that breaks the silence. There needs to be a first one. And what I needed to do would become clear again.
Mejía was the first. But he wasn’t the last, and there are many more to come. We have much to learn from his story.
