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Soldiers in Our Midst

By Douglas Nelson

I gave this speech to a hundred people in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day. Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans Against the War were well-represented.

In 1968, the year I was in Vietnam, the majority was wrong. History has proven them wrong. The minority became the majority, but not before 58,000 of us were dead and many more maimed.

I am here today to talk with you about soldiers, about what motivates them to be where they are, and how I think we in the peace movement should relate to them. I enlisted in the army in 1967, after doing badly in college and being threatened with the draft. My father, a World War II combat veteran, sat me down at the kitchen table and said that returning veterans of the Vietnam War had nothing positive to say about our reasons for being there, and that I should not waste my life by enlisting in the army. I did not listen to him. I spent a year in Vietnam and two years in Japan. I joined the veterans' peace movement in March 2003, because I am opposed to our war in Iraq. My father's words returned to me: "This doesn't feel right; I have serious misgivings about this." How ironic that one of the first people to welcome me into the veterans' peace movement was a World War II veteran.

I used to like Sergeant Rock comic books. The soldiers in them fought with visions of flags and the people at home they were protecting. I learned later that patriotism is in the dreams of psychotic old men who chose not to go to war themselves. Soldiers fight to live another day—another day without a bullet out of nowhere, without their Hummer being blown up by a roadside bomb, without a random mortar round dropping on them. They fight for something else: they fight for each other. Whether a soldier goes on combat patrols, prepares meals for hundreds, or repairs trucks, he does what he does so that his buddy may live. Not to do one's job is unthinkable. Much of what soldiers do, in battle and otherwise, can be explained by this motivation. Like it or not, this is the situation in which our country places young men and women.

They have the right to expect us to honor the sacred trust between a soldier and his nation. This implicit trust states that you will be asked to lay down your life only when war is a last resort, when all other means of settlement have been tried and have failed. When war is necessary, it should be in the defense of our country, and should be fought with the probability and expectation of accomplishing specific objectives. "War on terror" is not a coherent, credible foreign policy objective. "Terror" and "evil" are not specific enemies.

We veterans speak out, write and march because we believe that our country has placed them in an impossible situation. This is a war against a country that did not attack us, did not have weapons of mass destruction, and did not participate in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. This war, like the one some of us fought in Vietnam, is unwinnable without doing the unthinkable. We are killing and maiming far too many innocent people. Those who survive our excesses have joined those who fight us. We are not winning converts to democracy by torture, bombing, and home invasions. The other side's atrocities do not give us the right to do likewise. Nothing we are doing in Iraq will have any influence on whether or not we suffer further attacks, or on whether or not other countries buy, steal or develop nuclear weapons.

We know that the vast majority of soldiers behave according to the morals and values they were taught at home and in church. The military is no better than the rest of American society, and it is probably no worse. That is precisely what scares us. How can we expect children raised in at atmosphere of violence, whether actually witnessed or seen daily in a barrage of acted violence in movies and video games, not to act out that violence? How can we expect people to act, raised in a culture that is obsessed with punishment and prison? Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are merely an extension of our own prison system. It makes no difference whether the brutality is inflicted by guards or by other inmates; it is still sanctioned, government-administered brutality.

It is interesting to note that now no one takes responsibility for having ordered the torture at Abu Ghraib. Like the My Lai incident in Vietnam, one good soldier called us on our behavior. Some of the worst of soldiers and bureaucrats have tried to cover for the criminal behavior. Martha Stewart will have served more time in prison than will any of the military and intelligence officers who gave the orders to "soften them up."

We know that they are sometimes given orders to do what they know is not right. Marine sergeant Jimmy Massey has chosen to go to Canada to speak out against being ordered to kill Iraqi civilians who did not understand what was expected of them at a traffic checkpoint.

Convoys travel at high speeds through Iraq, to try to minimize the blast effects from improvised explosive devices. A soldier stopped his truck to attend to the body of a tiny child who had been hit. He moved the little crushed body to a doorway and saw a little American flag in the tiny hand. He told this story when he got home, but there were apparently many more. He cannot be with you today. He killed himself.

When the reason for going to war is flawed, the corruption flows downward. Our nation has created a moral climate in which we dehumanize Middle Eastern people to rationalize mistreating them and acting with indifference to their lives. Our soldiers and Marines are caught in the middle, between a population that does not want us in their country and an administration that took us to war for unsound reasons.

Depleted-uranium munitions are the Agent Orange of the present war. Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans alike are likely to suffer ill-health effects from breathing radioactive dust, and from contact with the munitions. Expect the same rounds of denials of health effects that veterans faced in the struggle to receive care and compensation for Agent Orange exposure.

Be very suspicious of an administration that tells us how much they value and respect our military. We saw how much value was placed on advice from general officers who expressed grave misgivings about this war. No one was ever ordered to serve more than one tour of duty in Vietnam. Many soldiers and Marines, professionals, reservists, and National Guardsmen have been to Iraq twice already. This administration throws a forty-million-dollar party while the soldiers they sent to war have ragtag, improvised armor on their trucks, and have had the budget cut for the care and treatment they are going to need for their wounds and psychological trauma. They are an expendable commodity, to serve the cause of cheaper oil and fat government contracts for friends of the administration.

To the extent that my generation has been silent, uncaring, unwilling to read and to understand the issues, and unwilling to talk to our elected representatives, we are truly sorry. Inasmuch as we failed to run a candidate in the last presidential election to stand against this ill-conceived war, we are sorry. When we see soldiers as somebody else's kids, not our own, we are sorry.

I can tell you, many of these soldiers and Marines are angry and confused. They may misunderstand our message, even when we try to present it civilly and with reason. They will think that our message dishonors their service and their buddies' sacrifice. To them, we offer a smile and a peace sign.

You may choose to turn your backs today, with good reason. Please don't turn your backs on our military people. This country has turned its back on them too often, in too many ways, already. Treat them as brothers and sisters, and later, you will see some of them in our ranks, when they are free to do so.

You people of college age are the conscience of your generation. I love you for that. I am still looking for the conscience of my own generation. Please know that you are the lucky; these soldiers are the unlucky, the cast off, the used up, the thrown aside. Many of them were lured into the military with the promise of jobs and education. They come from places that offer little of either.

The draft is coming; it is inevitable. I cannot in good conscience ask you to do what I did not have the courage to do: to resist the draft, not to enlist. Some of you may do as I did and choose the path of least resistance, to go and hope you live through it. If for no other reason, treat soldiers as if it could be you, your brother, your friend out there.

We can only tell them what we wish the peace movement had told us thirty-five years ago: "This war you are caught up in is not of your making. Our issue is with those who have brought this war on the world, not with you. You are our own. We love you. We want you home."