Also in Politics & Social Justice

Mission Rejected

U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq

by Peter Laufer

Interview

Why We Won’t Fight

Fairfax author’s book spotlights Iraq soldiers who refuse to return to ‘a terrible mistake’.

Pacific Sun
BY Jill Kramer
July 28, 2006

Peter Laufer wants to stop the war in Iraq. He believes that some of the most persuasive arguments for ending it come from the men and women whose service in the war zone has convinced them that this mission is a terrible mistake. He gives voice to their thoughts in his latest book, Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq.

Laufer has been an antiwar activist ever since the ’60s, when, as a teenager, he filed for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. His application was denied, but he’d established himself as enough of a troublemaker that his draft board decided against inducting him anyway. He grew up in Sausalito with a couple of “old lefties” as parents. His father was a graphic designer and his mother ran the office. Laufer began working in radio while he was in high school and never stopped. These days he co-anchors Washington Monthly on the Radio and anchors National Geographic World Talk. He also consults on programming for Mother Jones Radio and The Business Shrink (on Sirius Satellite).

Mission Rejected is the 13th book Laufer’s written in the last 15 years. His first was Iron Curtain Rising: A Personal Journey through the Changing Landscape of Eastern Europe. He collaborated on two with his wife, poet and short-story writer Sheila Swan Laufer. They have two grown sons.

Laufer and I talked in the spare-looking front room of his Fairfax home. He and his wife just had the place painted and hadn’t yet re-hung their wall decorations. But I had the sense that the house always has an austere feel to it. These are people who live in their heads. The few objects of furniture are simple and utilitarian. An old chest serves as a coffee table. I sprawl on the sofa while Laufer sits upright in a chair, dunking a teabag in a mug. He’s tall and lanky with a full gray-white beard and darker gray hair. He wears glasses, a striped T-shirt, jeans and slip-ons with no socks. He speaks slowly and carefully, his voice betraying none of the passion that is clearly evident in his words.

• • • •

How widespread is opposition to the war in Iraq among the military?

We can’t quantify how many soldiers are opposed to the war. We can find some, and some of them are spotlighting themselves and saying, “I am against the war.” But they’re telling me that they had all kinds of buddies in the service who were against the war, but who decided to just mark their time and try to get out in one piece. But unless you could survey all the members of the armed forces, there’s no way to know how many are against the war. One of the motivations I had in writing this book was to bring these stories together and show that there is a critical mass, even if we don’t know how many there are. If you remember from Vietnam, this was slow-building. And the soldiers opposed to the war were a critical aspect of the antiwar movement. And this thing has not been going on nearly as long as Vietnam and, unfortunately, it seems it’s going to be going on for a while.

It struck me as I was reading your book that the issues raised by the conscientious objectors are not just the immorality of wars in general or of killing in general, but specifically the illegality of this war that’s been based on lies.

There certainly are soldiers who are opposed to the Iraq war who are not opposed to military action per se or are not opposed to war. A really good example is Lt. [Ehren] Watada, who is the first officer to be spotlighted [in the book] as refusing to deploy to Iraq. This case just came up recently. He has said he would have no problem deploying to Afghanistan, but he believes the Iraq war is immoral and illegal.

How many conscientious-objector applications have been approved and how many denied?

It seems about half of the applicants are receiving CO status, but these are numbers from the Pentagon and I believe it really is important when numbers from this particular administration are looked at to be skeptical. This is an administration that not only has shown that it lies, it’s an administration that has announced that it will lie in order to further its policies. So when we see numbers that come from the government such as the number of soldiers who are AWOL, the numbers of deserters or the numbers of CO applications that are granted, I don’t think we should look at those figures as necessarily accurate.

When have they announced that they will lie?

They announced that they will lie when they created a department within the Defense Department that was designed as a propaganda office for the purpose of perpetrating false information. And when it was spotlighted as an element of the Pentagon, they then said, OK, we’ll close this down. Now, realistically, if the design of that office is to perpetrate lies, should we believe them when they say they’re going to close it down? And certainly we know they have lied about the reasons they have gone to Iraq. And that’s just Iraq. We have all the other problems with this administration that are blatant lies. It’s a criminal, immoral bunch of gangsters who have hijacked our country.

Aside from applying for CO status, what are the other ways that soldiers opt out of the war?

Soldiers go AWOL. Some go AWOL quietly and disappear. Some go AWOL publicly because they want to make a statement. Their AWOL status transitions into desertion at about 30 days, depending on service branch and other details. And when they become deserters there’s a federal warrant put out for their arrest in the national crime database, which means that if they jaywalk in Fairfax and the Fairfax police run a check on them, that will likely come up. Some soldiers go to Canada. Soldiers get out of the military with honorable discharges and are then opposed to the war. Soldiers get out of the military with “other than honorable” discharges, as one of the fellows profiled in the book did, by failing a drug test.

And what are the consequences of each of these paths? What are the ramifications for job prospects, for example?

For this particular fellow who failed the drug test, it follows him in life because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and the Veterans Administration will not provide him with care—even though he was wounded, even though he received multiple medals for his valor on the battlefield after two tours of duty in Iraq—because he was given an “other than honorable” discharge. If you are a deserter or if you’ve gone AWOL, or if you are a conscientious objector, how this will affect your future certainly depends on what you do in your life. It depends on your career choice, it depends on how carefully an employer will do a background check. If you desert to Canada and you then want to come back here, you’re likely going to face those charges. And a lot of the people profiled in the book who have spotlighted their cases, when they’re adjudicated they get hard prison time. And that’s another record. There certainly are employers who would embrace someone like that—especially in our community—but elsewhere in the country, who knows?

Well, most of these guys are doing manual labor jobs.

Yes, there are an awful lot of people who are undereducated and hold low-level, minimally skilled jobs.

It seems like those are the kinds of jobs where you fill out an application form and have to check if you’ve done prison time and if you’ve served in the military.

Sure, and I can only imagine that it’s going to cause them problems. Even some of these terms are loaded. “Deserter.” The first time I contacted one of the fellows profiled in the book, he announced himself in that way—I imagine to empower himself. He said, “I am a deserter!” But that’s a harsh word. It connotes a lot of negativity, especially when it isn’t in the context of a war such as this mess in Iraq. That’s one of the reasons I consider these soldiers who are rejecting the war so courageous and brave. They are, at a very young age, accepting an awful lot of baggage that, as you point out, will be lifelong. They really are in the front line of a new fight—a fight for our nation’s morality and for our nation’s soul. These are heroes. And they open up an opportunity for us to engage in dialogue with those who are still on the fence about this war or are even proponents of the war. Because when someone like me talks about the war, that’s one thing, but when somebody who chose to join the army and then from inside the army decides to go up against the monolith of the U.S. government and the peer pressure of the army and says, this is wrong, they have great credibility with those who are on the fence or who are proponents of the war. So I hope this book is an important tool working against the war, in addition to being a news report.

I was very moved by the bravery of these soldiers. And it’s ironic because they’re being accused by war supporters of cowardice. I remember one of the men in the book who, despite his disgust with the war, chose to sign up as a sniper because he felt he’d be better able than somebody else to make moral decisions about whom to shoot.

Yeah, I think about him and that statement a lot. And it’s beyond bizarre that anybody could call somebody like him a coward. It’s ludicrous.

Yes! He went!

So many of these guys served time in Iraq. [Think of] the courage of just being there! And then to come back and announce their opposition and refuse to go back—that, to me, is an extraordinarily courageous step and they cannot be indicted as cowards because they were there! They did it! They are not going back because they believe it’s wrong. And it’s also important to remember that, one after another, the politicians who created this disaster didn’t go. They really are chicken hawks, by definition.

Would you pick one of the soldiers you interviewed and describe him and his story for our readers?

I think of Clifton Hicks. I met with him in Heidelberg. He had come back from Iraq and he was filing for CO status. As with so many of these guys, what was incredible to observe was their relative youth, combined with premature aging. And the piercing blue eyes of Clifton Hicks as he told the stories of the horrors he had experienced in Iraq, mixed with a harsh and sometimes crude military lexicon and an extraordinary sophistication in terms of describing the changes that took place inside him and his understanding of what was wrong politically and historically with the war. It was a fascinating dichotomy—this rough gunner who had always dreamed of being in the army and driving a tank, and this increasingly sophisticated character who was analyzing what he had done and how he had changed and how this was going to affect his life. Amazing fellow. A lot of these guys and girls are so young, and they’re often undereducated. And there is some optimism that comes out of these horrific stories. One is that these guys could be in the forefront of helping to stop this war. Another is, they are never going to be the same. Not only regarding the negative things that happened to them, but the positive things. They have an education now, from the streets of Iraq, that is unparalleled in terms of understanding what the government can do wrong, and what the history of the Middle East is, and developing an appreciation for another culture—their learning curve is just extraordinary.

This is a very personal issue for you because you filed for CO status yourself in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

It’s personal for me, but I think it’s personal for all of us. It’s personal for anybody who’s got a kid. You can’t look at these guys and not think about your own kid and how bloody lucky you are that they’re not in the military, if they’re not. But yes, I applied for CO status and didn’t get it. I was going to Tamalpais High School at the time.

You grew up in Marin.

I grew up in Sausalito. I lived there until I could no longer afford to buy a cup of coffee there and moved to Fairfax. So I was going to Tam when the draft notice came and I replied with a CO application and it was denied.

What was your thinking?

Well, it was clear and obvious that the war was wrong and I don’t believe in war as a political solution. That’s how I grew up. I grew up in the Unitarian Church. My parents were old lefties. Anyway, I wasn’t immediately called up and then the Pentagon Papers case came up. At that time I was working at radio station KSAN as a news reporter and I was an activist against the war. And I called a news conference at the draft board in San Rafael and demanded my file back, based on the spurious claim that, if the government thinks that the Pentagon Papers are theirs and The New York Times shouldn’t have them, then I think my draft records are mine and the government shouldn’t have them. Of course they refused to give them to me. Eventually I went to the Oakland induction center and they chose not to draft me after a Selective Service psychiatrist advised against it. He called me—I’m going to have to quote from the book here—[opens the book, finds a passage and reads]: “a markedly eccentric young man, completely incapable of fitting into or complying with any authority structure.” That was a perceptive psychiatrist. To me, it was a badge of honor.

Tell me how you got into the field of news reporting.

My first job was at what was then called KEWB, which became KNEW, arguably the first 24-hour call-in talk radio station in America. That was in high school. I started out running errands and working in the mail room and then got into news writing, then interviewing and producing shows. I went from there over to KSFO, which at the time was the most popular and important radio station in the Bay Area. KSFO owned the city in terms of radio. So I learned a lot there. Then I went to work at KSAN. Do you remember KSAN?

Oh, yes! That was a great station.

It was a spectacular period. And we did very important work in the news department there. Those were consequential days.

What first sparked your interest in working as a reporter?

To be in a position to interact firsthand with history as it’s being made, and to participate in that history and advocate and have the bully pulpit of a book or a radio station to interpret events and try to influence my friends and neighbors and whoever I can get to listen or read or pay attention to me—I think that’s an incredible honor and responsibility and I can’t imagine anything that could trump that.

You must have been a serious kid if you were thinking about that back then.

I don’t know if I was analyzing it that much back then. It was a good way to get girls. And I love radio. Radio is a magical medium. The immediacy, the portability of radio, combined with the fact that it can be done with virtually no expense—the manner in which radio stimulates the imagination and allows one to create a perceived reality and foist it on a mass audience—the potency of radio makes it my first love in the world of media. And radio is constantly re-inventing itself. We’re seeing that right now with satellite radio. It’s never going to go away. For people who have three-hour commutes, radio is an integral part of their lives.

What do you think of Air America?

I think it’s important that Air America is out there. It’s tragic for radio that something as compelling as talk radio has been largely co-opted by the selfish, opportunistic hate-mongers of the right wing. So anything that provides some balance to that is extraordinarily important to support—not just for political reasons, but for the art of radio. I wrote a book about this 10 years ago called Inside Talk Radio and it’s unfortunately still quite relevant. There are business reasons why the foaming-at-the-mouth type of talk radio is so prevalent. It’s easier for the holding companies that maintain the licenses for radio stations to accommodate the kind of programming that comes out of these shows than it is to accommodate shows that are not trying to paint complex issues simplistically. But there is some acknowledgment in the business community that there might be some money to be made with other types of shows, and that’s why we’re seeing Air America and other alternatives on more and more stations.

You worked for NBC News for a long time.

I was primarily assigned to their news division in radio. I was a documentarian and what we referred to as a “fireman”—I was the first guy out when there was a disaster or a breaking story of some kind. I was assigned to their Washington bureau. When they closed it down I took a mid-career fellowship and went to Germany and studied German and East-West relations. That was just prior to the Wall coming down. So I was there for the reunification of Germany, which was pretty serendipitous. That’s when I started writing. My first book was about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions across Eastern Europe.

Boy, talk about being in the right place at the right time!

Yeah, that was really great.

I understand your book Wetback Nation is soon coming out in paperback. Tell me about it.

It addresses the current immigration problem with the solution that if travel were unrestricted between Mexico and the United States, you would have a secure border because you could keep out the people you don’t want. Any Mexican with a valid ID could come up here to work, to vacation or to go to school and all the manpower and technical know-how of the Border Patrol could be used to keep out the people you don’t want here, like drug smugglers, murderers and terrorists.

What about the argument that they’d take jobs away from U.S. workers?

Well, you can’t stop economic-driven immigration, historically. One study after another shows that that is not occurring. Of course you can find isolated cases where somebody’s job is undercut, but that’s not what’s going on. We have an economy that’s in need of the workers, we have a country that historically has been fueled culturally, economically and otherwise by immigration, we have a birth rate that mandates more workers, and if these people come up here legitimately, then they have the power to demand appropriate wages and organize as workers and they won’t be undercutting wages by living in an underground society. It’s a bogus argument.

How is it for you being on the other side of the interview?

I feel awkward talking about myself. You know, all I want to do is ask you questions. You may have noticed that I answer questions cautiously and slowly and I guess that’s partly because I’m usually on your side of the room, asking them. My advice is always, “Never talk to a reporter, unless you really have to.” But I think it’s important to make these appearances because I find the matter of these soldiers being opposed to the war to be of critical importance and so I go out of my way to talk on the radio, to speak in bookstores, to speak with you; but, given my druthers, I would have kept the door locked when you knocked—no reflection on you personally. But I seek the right-wing radio shows. I want to talk to those guys, not just to talk to the friendly audiences.

Have you encountered much hostility from callers on those shows?

Yeah, I’ve been called treasonous by callers, and that’s OK. I think I can defend my position pretty well—I can quote Thomas Jefferson to defend my position. That comes with the territory. And looking at these soldiers and what they’ve been through and the courage they’ve shown, certainly the least we can do is stand up on a soapbox and jump up and down a little bit.