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"As a counselor on the GI Rights Hotline, I know that, for every GI in the news refusing to fight, there are thousands more GIs quietly saying, "No!" to this war."
By Susan Galleymore, Courage to Resist. Published in Left Curve Journal Spring 2007.
One of the best kept secrets of our time is the ferocious GI resistance to the war in Vietnam. It covered the gamut from individual, passive, and unorganized to overtly active, collective, and organized. It sprouted in military barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs, and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite West Point, spread through Vietnam's battlefields and, according to a Vietnam-era military officer, by 1971 it had infested the entire armed services. Until the recent screening of the documentary, Sir, No Sir!, the American public knew little about the resistance to that war.
Today, there is budding GI resistance to this war, the Global War on Terror (GWOT). So far, resistance has not blossomed into the near-epidemic of that time but the ground is fertile and thanks to Sir, No Sir! GIs are learning their history and emulating their forebears. |
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 Marc Train at the 'March on the Pentagon' 3/17/07. Photo: Jeff Paterson / Courage to Resist
"Just because we volunteered, doesn't mean we volunteered to throw our lives away for nothing. You can only push human beings so far," says Marc Train, a 19-year old soldier from America's heartland. "Soldiers are going to Iraq multiple times. The reasons we're there are obviously lies. We're reaching a breaking point, and I believe you're going see a lot more resistance inside the military."
By Sarah Olson, Truthout. April 19, 2007
Train's a private in the US Army, stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia. But the last time anyone saw him on base was March 16, just before he headed to DC to protest the war he is expected to fight. |
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By Paul von Zielbauer, New York Times. April 9, 2007 Army prosecutions of desertion and other unauthorized absences have risen sharply in the last four years, resulting in thousands more negative discharges and prison time for both junior soldiers and combat-tested veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army records show.
The increased prosecutions are meant to serve as a deterrent to a growing number of soldiers who are ambivalent about heading — or heading back — to Iraq and may be looking for a way out, several Army lawyers said in interviews. Using courts-martial for these violations, which before 2002 were treated mostly as unpunished nuisances, is a sign that active-duty forces are being stretched to their limits, military lawyers and mental health experts said.
“They are scraping to get people to go back, and people are worn out,” said Dr. Thomas Grieger, a senior Navy psychiatrist. Though there are no current studies to show how combat stress affects desertion rates, Dr. Grieger cited several examples of soldiers absconding or refusing to return to Iraq because of psychiatric reasons brought on by wartime deployments. |
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Civilian federal judge sides with Marine objector
By Aaron Glantz, posted on AntiWar.net. April 6, 2007
University of California Santa Cruz student Robert Zabala joined the Marine Corps thinking it would be a "place where he could find security" after the death of his grandmother in 2003.
But when he began boot camp in June 2003, Zabala said he had an ethical awakening that would not allow him to kill other people. He was particularly appalled by the boot camp's attempts to desensitize the recruits to violence. |
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by Sara Corbett, The New York Times Magazine. March 18, 2007. On the morning of Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, a 21-year-old Army specialist named Suzanne Swift went AWOL. Her unit, the 54th Military Police Company, out of Fort Lewis, Wash., was two days away from leaving for Iraq. Swift and her platoon had been home less than a year, having completed one 12-month tour of duty in February 2005, and now the rumor was that they were headed to Baghdad to run a detention center. The footlockers were packed. The company's 130 soldiers had been granted a weekend leave in order to go where they needed to go, to say whatever goodbyes needed saying. When they reassembled at 7 a.m. that Monday, uniformed and standing in immaculate rows, Specialist Swift, who during the first deployment drove a Humvee on combat patrols near Karbala, was not among them. Swift would later say that she had every intention of going back to Iraq. But in the weeks leading up to the departure date, she started to feel increasingly anxious. She was irritable, had trouble sleeping at night, picked fights with friends, drank heavily. "I was having a lot of little freakouts," she told me when I went to visit her in Washington State last summer. "But I was also ready to go. I was like, 'O.K., I can do this."' |
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