Also in Politics & Social Justice

Mission Rejected

U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq

by Peter Laufer

Foreword by Norman Solomon

Excerpt 2

This book allows us to hear from men and women who speak with a different kind of authority than the sort that ordered them into Iraq. The voices of these young Americans—former soldiers who have opted out of war—draw their power from wrenching honesty about firsthand experiences. In the process, they help to fill a routine void in political discourse and media coverage that does not admit basic human realities of the Iraq War.

American news outlets haven’t reported much about the moral dilemmas of occupation forces in Iraq. The pages of Mission Rejected go far beyond the usual media storylines, so we can hear—directly and deeply—from soldiers who turned away from the mission declared by the commander in chief.

A former U.S. Marine, Abdul Henderson, says, “Having to see the things I did and having to do the things I did in the name of defending our country puts a deep pain in my heart.” Another ex-Marine, Charlie Anderson, also looks back with anguish at his role in the invasion of Iraq and the warfare that followed: “I sacrificed part of my humanity. People around me sacrificed significantly more than I did. For what? For what? I can’t point to a single thing. We’re going to liberate the Iraqi people by killing them?”

The selective emphasis of America’s dominant political rhetoric and war news coverage encourages us to forget that war is about killing. What’s obvious to troops is apt to be downplayed for the public back home, rendered in euphemisms, abstractions, and bloodless casualty numbers scattered through news reports. Yet the essence of war—horrific fear, suffering, and death—can’t be anything but incontrovertible to those dispatched by the Pentagon. Sent to war zones, American soldiers obey orders given in our names.

But a simple and difficult principle—sometimes called the golden rule—can become an unyielding obstacle for recruits when they find themselves functioning as part of the war effort. Joshua Key vividly recalls Iraqi people he saw up close: “I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I do it upon them?” And he relives out loud what he will never forget: “I’m fighting a war for months and months. All I’m seeing is death, destruction, and chaos.”

For the most part, the Americans at war in Iraq are young. Many are barely out of high school. Scant worldly experience, thin financial resources, and bleak career prospects made them ideal targets for U.S. military recruiters.

After being in Iraq for fifteen months, soldier Steven Casey was about to return to civilian life when he spoke with Peter Laufer. Through the end of the decade, Casey will be vulnerable to reactivation orders, but he vows to refuse any order to go back to the Army: “I’m not giving up my school to go do this again—an unjustified war for these evil people. I’ll go to jail. . . . I’m not going back to work for these people. I’ve been to war. I was an eighteen-year-old kid who went to war. I’m done.”

In the absence of a draft, it may reassure us to think of recruits like Steven Casey as volunteers. In reality, a form of economic conscription is at work, drawing non-affluent young people into military uniforms. “When I joined,” says Ryan Johnson, who went AWOL from the Army in early 2005 and settled in Canada, “I joined because I was poor.” Now, he calls himself “a guy that made a wrong decision who wants a forklift job.” The attorney for a dozen U.S. deserters in Canada told the author that not a single one of his clients has a college degree.

Yet many of the Pentagon’s young recruits have seen joining the military as a way to make college possible later on. “I needed health care, money to go to college, and I needed to take care of my daughter,” Darrell Anderson explained. “The military was the only way I could do it.”

What kind of society requires that low-income young people become warriors as the price of education, health care, and a modicum of economic security? The question recalls a statement by Martin Luther King Jr. while another far-off war was ravaging social programs at home: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

A compelling blend of oral history and tenacious journalism, Mission Rejected went to the printer in the fourth year of a war already long notorious for the presidential deceptions that launched it. But the powerful truths in this book transcend the politics of the Iraq War. What’s in front of you is a human document that will remain profoundly important.

This is a book about what people do as soldiers and what war does to them. Most of all, Mission Rejected is about conscience.

Out of all the differences between people and other animals, Darwin observed, “the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important.” That moral sense is what propels the emphatic voices in this book. And those voices, in turn, can awaken a deeper moral sense in readers if we listen carefully, opening our minds and hearts.

Norman Solomon is a media critic, the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His syndicated column of political and media analysis, "Media Beat," has appeared in newspapers nationwide since 1992. Solomon's latest book is War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.