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ISR Issue 58, March–April 2008
REVIEWS
How soldiers turn against the war
A Survey of recent antiwar memoirs
Joshua Key and Lawrence Hill
The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq
Grove Press, 2007
256 pages, $14.00
Camilo Mejia
Road from Ar-Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejia
Haymarket Books, 2008
320 pages, $16
Sgt. Kevin Benderman and Monica Benderman
Letters from Fort Lewis Brig: A Matter of Conscience
The Lyons Press
232 Pages, $24.95
Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian
Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq
New American Library
272 pages, $15.00
Aidan Delgado
The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector
Beacon Press, 2007
228 pages, $24.95
James Yee and Aimee Molloy
(For God And Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire)
Public Affairs, 2005
240 pages, $24.00
Review by ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD
five antiwar Iraq veterans published memoirs last year. Although their politics vary, each was initially willing to participate in the occupation and strove to contribute to the mission. Yet, ultimately, each found that their conscience demanded opposition. Joshua Key went into exile and seeks asylum in Canada. Aidan Delgado successfully applied for conscientious objector status. Camilo Mejía and Kevin Benderman sought conscientious objector status but were given military prison sentences for their refusal to fight. And Tony Lagouranis’s increasingly vocal dissent after his unit returned to the U.S. led the Army to grant him a medical discharge.
For all five, opposition to the war grew out of disgust at the racist, dehumanizing treatment of Iraqis, and shock at the realization that soldiers’ lives, too, were seen as highly expendable by their command.
Army hypocrisy
Some of these soldiers, particularly Mejía and Key, experienced such shock very directly as they were ordered on suicide missions for the sake of an officer’s glory. This bred anger because both men feared for their own lives, but also struck at the heart of one of the military’s most effective ideological weapons for winning soldiers’ participation—loyalty to their fellow soldiers. This was particularly true for Mejía and Benderman, both staff sergeants who retained a feeling of loyalty and responsibility to the men in their units, even as they began to recognize that the Army did not share this sentiment.
Benderman, for example, explains that his biggest fear in deciding to resist was that he would be letting down his army buddies. Yet seeing the Army’s disregard for those same buddies strengthened his resolve. In Iraq, he saw members of his unit become seriously injured because they lacked adequate armor and because they were given unsafe orders, and he began writing letters to Congress in protest.
Feeling that the Army had betrayed his trust heightened Benderman’s growing rejection of the wider aims of the war. His unit was stunned when a commander instructed them to fire on children who were throwing pebbles at the soldiers. Not one of them obeyed the order. These experiences led Benderman to write his remarkable 2005 letter to George W. Bush that said, “I want to fulfill my contract that says I joined the army to protect my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and as far as I am concerned you are a domestic enemy of the United States.”
In his memoir, Mejía recounts an act of resistance while he was still in Iraq. When the battalion commander—who was out to score combat points for his own career—insisted on violating protocol with a suicidal strategy that had already produced casualties, Mejía refused to participate. Yet the reason wasn’t the fear for his own life, which he acknowledges experiencing, but rather frustration with the commander’s seeming incompetence: “I would go out and do my job if they would let me,” he tells a superior—a sentiment repeated in several of these memoirs.
Ultimately, as Mejía’s resistance developed, he decided that there was no “right way” to carry out this mission. But the contradiction between what the military had told him he should do, and what they directed him to do in Iraq, helped him to reach this conclusion.
Benderman’s book, co-written with his wife Monica Benderman, focuses far less than the other memoirs on the details of his experiences in Iraq. Much of it recounts his court-martial trial—like Mejía’s, a kangaroo court convened to punish soldiers for their opposition and send a message that resistance would not be tolerated.
Unfortunately, the book caricatures the antiwar movement, aiming as much of its ire at the movement as it does at the government that sent Benderman to war and jailed him. Much of the latter half of the book is devoted to criticizing this movement, and misrepresents most of its efforts. When Monica states, for example, that much of the peace movement cares only about those soldiers who have already resisted, it’s not at all clear who in the movement she means.
The alienation from civilian society reflected in the Bendermans’ frustration seems to have been a common experience among the soldiers. Delgado’s engaging memoir—which amusingly captures many of the absurdities of war while it recounts his growing identification with Buddhism—gives a striking illustration. By the time of his two-week leave from Iraq, Delgado had already rejected the occupation completely, filing for conscientious objector status while still in Iraq. But being back in the “normal” world with the girlfriend he loved was so strange and terrifying that, to his horror, “Being here with Amy I am filled with a terrible shame: I want to go home, to Iraq.”
Lagouranis’s feelings of isolation during his own two-week leave, meanwhile, were heightened by the lack of a visible antiwar movement. His leave occurred during the 2004 election season, and he describes his frustration at the disconnect between his own experience of the war’s brutality and the political discourse he found back home—a pro-war Democratic candidate, a sea of yellow ribbons, but little apparent dissent. For a soldier who neither supported the war, nor felt supported by the Army or the government, “support the troops” was galling rhetoric.
The lives of Iraqis
One important lesson of these memoirs is that moving from rejection of the way the war is carried out to a political rejection of the war itself requires identifying with the people being occupied. Describing the aftermath of an attack—one in which a sergeant’s reaction to losing his leg was to remark, “Now I get to see my daughter”—Key puts it succinctly, “Some of the men in my company wanted to take revenge, to go out and kill as many Iraqis as they could. My own anger, however, was reserved for the president of the United States and the military commanders who had put us in this war in the first place.”
Key’s own evolution was remarkable. Before he left Iraq, his wife told him, “You get ‘em, Josh, before they get you. Even if it’s a kid. They’re terrorists too.” He agreed. Yet when he conducted house raids in Iraq, seeing Iraqi children in actuality made him imagine his own kids being woken by soldiers in the middle of the night. When he returned from Iraq he said he could never go back. His wife understood, and they and their children went underground, making their way to Canada.
Assigning blame to the occupiers, rather than the occupied, requires overcoming the military’s racist training programs. Lagouranis, an interrogator, describes his reactions to being briefed on the “Arab mind”:
Arabs, apparently, can’t create a timeline. They don’t think linearly or rationally. They have a different relationship with truth than we do…. Okay, so the people who invented algebra can’t think logically? That was news to me. [Emphasis in original.]
Lagouranis saw through this racism from the beginning, in part by drawing on his experiences living in Tunisia. Similarly, Delgado’s high school years spent living in Egypt with his diplomat father predisposed him against the anti-Arab bigotry around him. He describes his disillusionment at seeing soldiers, who he genuinely liked, brutalize and dismiss Iraqis with casual racism.
For Delgado, like Mejía, rejecting anti-Arab racism fused with feeling his own powerlessness in the military’s hierarchy:
When I stood across the wire from prisoners in Tallil and prisoners in Abu Ghraib, I didn’t hate them. I saw the men of my own company reflected back at me: young, poor, without options in life, forced to fight me as I was forced to fight them. Some of them were full of hatred for us, just as some of us were for them. They weren’t abstract, they weren’t black-cloaked terrorists, they were men who were struggling to make it through life with the options they’d been given from birth…. That mirroring, that sense of recognition, preserved a part of my soul.
Abu Ghraib
Much of Delgado’s book takes place at Abu Ghraib, during the time the infamous pictures were taken (months before they became public). His description of it as “a reality so bleak and joyless it could drive men to the edge of madness, and did,” complements Lagouranis’s experience as a military interrogator in the prison.
Both give the lie to last year’s memoir by Abu Ghraib’s former commanding general, Janis Karpinski. Karpinski has been embraced by some antiwar writers because she is critical of much of the occupation strategy, as well as of the military’s widespread sexism. Her book argues, plausibly enough, that the torture came not from her individual mistakes, but from policies at the very top. Yet her apparent lack of regard for the Iraqi people, who merit barely a mention in her book—leaving aside a passage where she justifies knowingly imprisoning innocent civilians—makes this critique more self-serving than insightful.
Contrast that to Lagouranis’s account. When he arrived at Abu Ghraib, the military leadership was working to keep the photographs under wraps and, fearing a scandal, had tried to clean up its interrogations. Yet by the time Lagouranis’s tour was over, he and his fellow soldiers had recreated torture at Abu Ghraib and at al-Asad.
His book is a close-up account of the conditions producing torture. Even as his opposition to the war deepened, the abusive interrogation tactics escalated bit by bit. They went from inducing fear among a select group of prisoners to creating ever-worse terror in all of them. In part, Lagouranis explains, this is because to the extent that it is effective, torture relies on a threat of constant escalation:
If a person is in pain, he is enduring that pain. It may be excruciating and he may wish for death, but he is still enduring it, and he knows that he is enduring it. He has no reason to give the torturer what he wants unless there is the threat of more pain and worse pain.
This combined with a command that increasingly put emphasis on gaining confessions rather than finding intelligence, and dehumanization that prevented many soldiers from identifying with the prisoners they tortured. The result was that torture took on a logic all its own.
Torture cannot be contained. It is not something you can do once and then go back to your regular routine, hoping you won’t have to do it again, but keeping it in reserve just in case. As a method, as a human interaction, and as a moral choice, it is simply too large and too powerful to confine.
In part because the specific torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib migrated from Bagram, Afghanistan, and before that, from Guantánamo Bay, these memoirs are well paired with James Yee’s 2005 account of his experience as Guantánamo’s last Muslim chaplain. Far from a being radical, Yee, and other Muslim soldiers serving in Cuba, were arrested on no basis other than anti-Muslim bigotry. For these soldiers, the connection between the military’s racism and its dismissal of their own lives was direct and immediate.
The best part of Yee’s book is the way the humanity of individual prisoners emerges from his stories. In particular, he captures the way prisoners in the harshest of conditions strove to organize themselves. One prisoner, nicknamed Shaker, emerged as a leader. He paid close attention to what the guards did so he could learn the prison rules, and often represented the whole cellblock’s grievances to the chaplain. Despite their bleak circumstances, the prisoners were able to organize collective protests.
It is that humanity that has helped soldiers generalize their own exploitation into a more comprehensive critique of the war. And that moreover, the recognition of the humanity of the occupied should be at the heart of the domestic antiwar movement that can give real content to strengthen the idea of support for soldiers as they turn against the war.
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