US Army reports rising desertion rates

US Army reports rising desertion rates

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/army-n27.shtml

By Naomi Spencer
27 November 2007

After a decline in desertion rates following an initial exodus before
the preemptive strikes on Afghanistan and Iraq, the military is
recording a rise in the number of soldiers who abandon their posts.
The Associated Press reported November 16 that desertions this year
stand 80 percent higher than in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq.

According to the US Army, 4,698 soldiers­about 9 in every
1,000­deserted in the fiscal year ending September 2007. Over the
same period, the Department of Defense reported 1,163 total US deaths
and 8,190 wounded. Overall, desertion is the largest cause of
personnel attrition­over fatalities and injuries­serious enough to
result in military discharge.

A deserter is an active duty service member away from his or her unit
without permission for more than 30 days. The Army reports that more
than three quarters of its deserters are soldiers in their first term
of enlistment.

Roy Wallace, director of plans and resources with the Army, told the
Associated Press that soldiers generally exit the military in one of
four ways: They are determined unable to meet fitness requirements;
they are found to be "unable to adapt to the military"; they violate
the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy prohibiting someone who
is gay from revealing their orientation; or they simply go absent
without leave and do not report for duty.

For the Army, the desertion rate for 2007 is 42 percent higher than
that of the previous year, when 3,301 deserted. In 2005, 2,011 Army
soldiers deserted, representing the lowest annual rate of the war
period. In 2001 and 2002, the number of desertions was similar to the
most recent figures for the Army (4,597 and 4,483, respectively)
before they began to decline.

Historically, the military has not actively pursued deserters. Troops
who leave their posts are denied veterans benefits and their names
are permanently added to a national database of fugitives. If they
are picked up by civilian law enforcement, they are handed over to
military police for court martial.

However, Army prosecutions of desertions and other unauthorized
absences have greatly increased over the past four years in an
attempt to deter other would-be deserters, according to Army lawyers
in interviews with the New York Times earlier this year. In a report
published April 9, the Times noted that from 2002 through 2006, the
average annual rate of Army prosecutions for desertion was triple the
preceding five-year period, and prosecutions of similar absences have
doubled. This increase in disciplinary action is an unmistakable
acknowledgment by the chain of command that the rise in desertions
represents not a fluke but a sign of things to come.

Pointing to the far higher Vietnam-era desertion rates, which rose as
high as 5 percent, the military has insisted the current rise in
desertion rates has nothing to do either with the so-called war on
terror or with mass antiwar sentiments.

According to the Army, lower rates in 2003-2005 were the result of
successful efforts to identify soldiers likely to desert during basic
training, before they were assigned to their posts.

The current higher desertion rates, the Army insists, are too small
an increase to attribute to any factors other than personal or
familial stress. As Army planning director Wallace put it for the
Associated Press, "We're asking a lot of soldiers these days. They're
humans. They have all sorts of issues back home and other places like
that. So, I'm sure it has to do with the stress of being a soldier."

What the military will not acknowledge is the obvious connection
between "issues back home" and military culture and the war itself.
Above all, the open-ended and brutal nature of colonial-style
occupation has taken a psychological toll on the soldiers charged
with carrying it out on the ground, as well as on their families and
friends in the United States. Consequently, morale among active duty
troops is low and stress is very high.

The military has encouraged a dehumanizing attitude in its ranks
toward the Iraqi population, which is understandably hostile to the
occupying force. A survey conducted a year ago by the Pentagon of
soldiers stationed in Iraq found that more than a third thought
torture of captured Iraqis was acceptable. The survey also found that
destruction of civilian property, assault and abuse of civilians by
troops were utterly routine.

The same survey, conducted by the military's Mental Health Advisory
Team, found that 40 percent of Iraq-deployed soldiers were concerned
about uncertain redeployment dates and extended tours. Lengthened
tours of duty exacerbate exhaustion and stress, as well as domestic
difficulties. Last year, a quarter of soldiers reported marital
problems, and 20 percent were in the process of divorce.

When soldiers return home, there is no guarantee they will not be
redeployed even when diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or other
psychiatric disorders. Nearly 40 percent of Army and half of National
Guard personnel who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have
been diagnosed with some form of mental illness.

Senior brass readily admit that the military is stretched to the
breaking point, even as preparations are drawn up for an expansion of
the war into Iran. Yet how to resolve the numbers crisis poses a
major policy problem for the current administration and the
Democrats, who recognize that a re-institution of the draft would
have a devastating effect on public acquiescence of the war.

The great majority of deserters during the Vietnam-era had been
conscripted; by comparison, the "all-volunteer" composition of the
current military­drawn almost entirely from the poorest layers of the
working class and secured with enticements of signing bonuses and
college tuition­has undoubtedly acted as a suppressant upon desertion rates.

Since 2003, the Army has greatly relaxed recruitment and enlistment
standards in order to wage the two wars and increase numbers for
future occupations. Over the past few years, the proportion of Army
recruits without high school diplomas has risen from fewer than 10
percent to 24 percent. About 20 percent of current recruits would not
have been accepted before the Iraq invasion, including a higher
percentage of recruits issued "moral waivers" for criminal records.
The Army has also increased monetary inducements for officers,
including bonuses of up to $35,000 to retain sergeants and other
mid-level commanders.

Coinciding with the troop surge early this year, the Bush
administration called for an additional 65,000 Army troops and 27,000
Marines over the next five years, putting pressure on the military to
find volunteers. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office in
April suggested the addition would cost $65 billion, not including
the expense of extra training facilities and likely hospital care.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's senior
military assistant, Peter Chiarelli, asserted that the military must
be better structured for open-ended occupation. According to a piece
by Art Pine in the National Journal November 12, Chiarelli wrote,
"Like it or not, until further notice the US government has decided
that the military largely owns the job of nation-building.... We need
to accept this reality instead of resisting it."

The National Journal cited Andrew Bacevich, a military analyst at
Boston University, who advocated the institution of a "small-scale
draft, supplementing the current all-volunteer force with a small
cadre of conscripts. One possibility," the Journal specified, "making
military service an option in a broader program in which young people
would be required to do a stint in some kind of 'national service.' "

This proposal has been high on the Democratic Party platform since
the 2006 congressional elections. Bacevich told the Journal, "A draft
would involve a broader spectrum of Americans with the military and
would serve as a constraint for policy makers.... But there's a need
to begin debating the issue because the heavy lifting for future
Iraqs is going to be done by the Army."

.

Let war resisters stay

[3 items]

The right not to follow orders

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/278299

Nov 21, 2007

U.S. soldiers had a choice
Letters, Nov. 19

Those who oppose letting U.S. war resisters stay in Canada often
argue that these soldiers chose to enlist, unlike their comrades who
were drafted during the Vietnam era. The picture is much more complex
than that.

Between 1965 and 1973, more than 50,000 draft-age Americans came to
Canada, in opposition to the Vietnam War. Many were soldiers who
enlisted voluntarily, before they had the chance to be drafted, but
quickly became opposed to the war after hearing from returning
soldiers about what was really happening in Vietnam.

Today, U.S. soldiers are once again coming to Canada, in opposition
to another U.S.-led war. Many of them are Iraq war veterans – men and
women who served, were sometimes injured, saw their comrades killed
and faced multiple deployments.

Upon their return to the U.S., a growing number have decided not to
fight. Some go AWOL in the U.S.; others seek refuge in Canada.

Almost five years after the invasion, the whole world can see that
the Iraq war is a disaster and now knows it was based on lies. U.S.
soldiers who decide to no longer participate are indeed making a
choice – the right one.

Anyone who refuses to fight in an illegal and immoral war, whether in
Vietnam or Iraq, should be welcomed to Canada as heroes, rather than
jailed in the U.S. as criminals. It's time we let the resisters stay.
- James Clark, Toronto
--

Joanne Fisher writes that because U.S. war resisters Jeremy Hinzman
and Brandon Hughey voluntarily joined the military, it is
"unacceptable" that they refused to follow orders and should be
expected to pay the consequences. There can be no refuge in Canada
for shirkers.

Hopefully, Fisher would agree that in everyday life, being under
contract to an employer doesn't obligate an employee to commit a
crime if asked to do so. There are laws that bind what can be
reasonably, legally required in such agreements. If I murdered the
boss of a rival company, it would hardly be a defence that my
employer ordered me to do it.

Yet when Fisher argues that whether the Iraq war is just or unjust
has no bearing on whether Hinzman and Hughey were justified in
refusing their orders, she is really saying that an employment
contract supercedes every other legal and moral responsibility.

A soldier's right to refuse any order they believe would result in
the commission of a war crime has been enshrined in the Geneva
Conventions, as well as in the Nuremberg Principles. It is also set
out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (Article 92), which
governs all U.S. military personnel.

To argue the contrary, that a soldier must blindly follow all orders
regardless of the consequences, takes us right back to the gates of
Auschwitz. - Michael Gaspar, Barrie, Ont.
--

The idea that soldiers should follow the orders of their superiors
without question, or complete "one's obligations," as letter writer
Joanne Fisher suggests, is repugnant. As she is familiar with the
Vietnam War, she may remember the massacre at My Lai in 1968. A
soldier who acts without thought is capable of acts against humanity.

Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey should be welcomed by Canada as
deserters of an unjust war, launched on lies, by a self-serving
administration. - Matthew Swan, Toronto

--------

Parliament Must Make Provision to Let US War Resisters Stay in Canada

http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1121-04.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOVEMBER 21, 2007

CONTACT: Canadian Arab Federation
Khaled Mouammar CAF National President 416-879-6766 benwalid@rogers.com
Mohamed Boudjenane CAF Executive Director 416-493-8635 x 23 ed@caf.ca

TORONTO - November 21 - The Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) has added
its voice to the growing demand that US war resisters be allowed to
stay in Canada . On November 15, the Supreme Court of Canada decided
that it would not hear the appeal of former US soldiers Jeremy
Hinzman and Brandon Hughey. That decision increases the urgency for
an immediate political solution that would allow all resisters to
stay in Canada .

"These men and women made the same brave decision that the Canadian
government did in 2003," says Khaled Mouammar, president of CAF.
"Canadians were right to oppose the war on Iraq , and so are the US
war resisters. We should let them stay."

US soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq face lengthy prison sentences
in the US . "If US soldiers refuse to fight in an illegal and immoral
war, they shouldn't spend half an hour in a prison cell, let alone
five years," adds Mohamed Boudjenane, Executive Director of CAF.
"Canada must not deport these young men and women to a prison sentence."

CAF is calling on its members and supporters to contact their Members
of Parliament, asking them to support the demand to let US war
resisters stay in Canada .

--------

Let war resisters stay

http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=7518

Scott Harris / scott@vueweekly.com

The unfortunate, but somewhat predictable, refusal by the Supreme
Court of Canada to hear the appeal of two US war resisters trying to
remain in Canada has thrown the issue to the political realm, where
members of the House of Commons, through action or inaction, will
decide their fate.

Both Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey came to Canada in 2004 to
avoid deployment to Iraq and applied for refugee status based on
their moral opposition to the war. In 2005, the Immigration and
Refugee Board separately rejected the claims of both, stating that
they had failed to demonstrate that they qualified as refugees. The
Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal also subsequently
rejected their claims.

While it is likely true that they don't meet the standard definition
of a refugee, it is also certainly the case that the men, and the
dozens of other war resisters believed to be in Canada, are deserving
of the protection of any country that respects international law,
basic human rights and any notion of morality.

While their lives may not be at risk if they are returned to the US,
going to jail for up to five years for a courageous stand in
opposition to an illegal war would seem to qualify as both "cruel"
and "unusual." Or at least it ought to.

Some have argued that as volunteers, rather than conscripts, the men
cannot appeal as conscientious objectors to the war. This argument of
course ignores the relatively basic fact that one can oppose a war
because of its nature or illegality without necessarily opposing all wars.

Hughey put the argument poignantly in an interview with the San
Angelo Standard-Times, saying, "I feel that if a soldier is given an
order that he knows to not only be illegal, but immoral as well, then
it his responsibility to refuse that order. It is also my belief that
if a soldier is refusing an order he knows to be wrong, it is not
right for him to face persecution for it."

On everything from war crimes to genocide, governments are adept at
retroactive displays of morality, bandying about well-worn phrases
such as "never again" long after any opportunity to take action that
would actually have any meaningful impact has long since passed.

During the American war in Vietnam, Canada bucked this tendency and
made the moral choice to allow tens of thousands of war resisters to
stay in the country. It should make the same decision now by making
it possible for brave men and women whose consciences will not allow
them to participate in their government's illegal endeavour in Iraq
to remain in Canada.

.

Uh, Oh Canada! [by Cindy Sheehan]

Uh, Oh Canada!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_cindy_sh_071126_uh_2c_oh_canada_21.htm

November 26, 2007
by Cindy Sheehan

Recently the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear appeals on the
denial of refugee status for two US military Iraq war resisters that
were among the firs to flee to Canada: Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon
Hughey. I have had the opportunity to meet both of these brave and
honorable young men on my many trips to Canada imploring the
government and the people to accept our war resisters as our Northern
Neighbors have done in the past. With 64.6% of Canadians supporting
allowing our Iraq war resisters to stay, this situation is another
example of how governments simply refuse to listen to their citizens.

When I met with leaders of the separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois,
they were very sympathetic but outlined their reasons for not
supporting resolutions to grant our resisters amnesty, refugee status
or asylum. The Bloc has since changed their policy and do support
giving our war resisters amnesty, but their past reasoning can help
us understand what is happening up North.

The women from the Bloc told me that our soldiers don't meet the UN
requirements for refugee status because first of all, there is no
forced draft in the USA; and secondly, our prisons are not so bad and
Canada has to make room for other more needy refugees. I used my own
story and experiences to try to refute their arguments.

First, and foremost, I told the leaders something that they already
knew, because Canada refused to participate in the "Coalition of the
Willing." The invasion and occupation of Iraq, was and is, illegal
and immoral. Our soldiers, especially ones like Casey who signed up
before the horror-show known as the Bush Regime was in power, should
not have to choose between prison (whether they are not so bad, or
not, which is another debatable issue) or killing the innocent
citizens of Iraq to benefit the war profiteers. Although I begged him
to head for Canada the last time I saw him alive, Casey was
"rewarded" for selecting one of the abhorrent choices with a Bronze
Star and Purple Heart posthumously that were pinned to his lifeless
chest and buried for eternity with him. If our children are
"volunteers" in an "all voluntary" military, when the mission changes
or when they are forced to participate in a corrupt mission, our
children should be able to "un-volunteer" without having to flee the
country or go to prison.

Even if our soldiers did sign up after BushCo declared their war of
terror, recruiters are infamous for lying to potential recruits. I
would equate Military Recruiters to used car salespersons, but
Recruiters know that they are sending our young people off to die,
kill, or become infected with depleted uranium or other physical and
mental illnesses that accompany all war whether it is just or not. My
son's recruiter lied to him and put five of those lies in writing. It
is a little known fact, and most recruiters will not inform their
recruits, that the enlistment contract is a unilateral contract and
only binding on the recruit, not the US military. The one promise
that Casey's recruiter: Sgt. Big Fat Liar told my trusting and
trustworthy son that he broke was that even if there was a war (Casey
signed up in May, 2000), Casey would not "see any combat." I recently
met a young man fresh from boot camp that was on his way to Canada.
His recruiter promised him that he would not have to be deployed to
Iraq, but as soon as he graduated from boot camp he received his
orders to head to Iraq.

Not only are our often-gullible young people faced with dishonest and
unconscionable recruiting practices, if our soldiers are lucky enough
to not be killed in Iraq, they return to a VA system that is broken
and many cannot find help or hope for their physical and/or emotional
wounds. The incidences of suicide among our veterans are appalling
(but at least they get a parade once a year) and now if our kids are
wounded and unable to return to the front lines before their
enlistment periods are up our soulless government is asking them to
repay their enlistment bonuses! I am surprised we didn't get a bill
for Casey's re-enlistment bonus since he was killed 3 years before
his enlistment was over.
We as a peace movement need to support the Iraq war resisters (I
would also add Afghanistan, but that's a little more controversial in
the movement).

If we are pro-peace and anti-war, if our children slip through the
cracks and are successfully preyed upon by recruiters, then we must
support their decisions to not be used as cannon fodder for maniacal
BushCo. Not all of our young people who enlist are stone-cold
killers, but most see little choice in today's economy that is bereft
of opportunity and where university is prohibitively high.

Action items:

Write to Canadian officials to request that they accept our war
resisters as refugees.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/

Send money to organizations that support war resisters.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/

Support actual war resisters in Canada by sending them expense money.
From my friend Ryan (I gave him and his wife money to get to Canada
over two years ago):

In light of the recent Supreme Court denial in Canada, I (Ryan
Johnson), My wife (Jen Johnson) and Brandon Hughey need help raising
funds to travel to Ottawa to attend hearings before the Standing
Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, where War Resisters will be
giving Testimony to the committee. At these hearings the committee
will be deciding on whether or not to make a provision to allow war
resisters to stay in Canada. This is one of our last chances to be
able to continue living in Canada. We will be leaving December 7th
because the hearings are December 11th, 2007 so we need to act fast.
They may try to send guys back soon and we need to have a strong War
Resister Presence. We appreciate all of the support and Want to thank
all of you who can help.

Checks/money orders can be sent for Ryan, Jen and Brandon to:

312 Tower Rd
Nelson, BC V1L3K6
---

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan, who was KIA
in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star
Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother's
Child and Dear President Bush.

.

War Resisters Last Battle

War Resisters Last Battle

http://torontosun.com/News/World/2007/11/25/4683531-sun.html

Groups Ready To Fight Deportation

November 25, 2007
By BRETT CLARKSON

For Corey Glass, the last straw was a video of Iraqi children talking
about how they wanted to grow up to be suicide bombers so they could
kill Americans.

It's the moment when Glass, who was born and raised in small-town
Indiana, decided to quit the Iraq war.

The problem was, he wasn't allowed to just up and leave. Having
signed up for the National Guard when he was 20, Glass, 25, was
committed to service.

So there he was, several months into his Iraq tour, a sergeant
working as an intelligence officer at Camp Anaconda, a U.S. base in
the Sunni Triangle 110 km north of Baghdad, when he realized he
couldn't live with himself for being part of the U.S. war effort.

"That was the last straw," he says of the video of the Iraqi
children. "So I tried to quit the next day."

Glass was told by his superiors he couldn't do that, but that he'd be
sent back home on leave for two weeks.

Glass told them bluntly -- if you send me home, I'm not coming back.
You'll be back, they told him curtly. Plus, they threatened, if you
desert the armed forces during wartime, it's punishable by death.

Technically, according to U.S. law, Glass' bosses were right, though
no deserter has been executed since World War II.

But Glass fled anyway.

After spending two weeks in January 2006 with his parents in Indiana,
he went into hiding in the U.S., hanging out with friends in Indiana,
Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, and elsewhere. After eight
months, he decided to cross the border into Canada because he'd heard
other deserters had gone north.

For him, he says it was the right decision. Glass, in fact, doesn't
see his decision to desert as breaking his word. Instead, he says the
U.S. government broke its word by mounting a war based on a now
widely discredited claim Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"It's a war of aggression," Glass says. "Wars of aggression are
illegal. Pre-emptive strikes are illegal, unless there's a credible
threat, or a danger, and there was no credible threat. Saddam had no
way of launching an attack on America. That's totally absurd to think
he could launch an attack."

Glass accuses the National Guard recruiters of lying to him, and says
he was told by recruiters he would only face combat if foreign
soldiers landed on American soil.

He says he signed up because he wanted to help fill sandbags in
natural disaster situations, like Hurricane Katrina.

"I thought it was the right thing to do, I thought it was a good
thing to do," Glass says. "War has never really appealed to me."

In August 2006, shortly after arriving in Toronto, Glass filed a
refugee claim. It was denied.

Since arriving, however, he's established a life in Toronto, with a
decent job at an online firm, an apartment near the Danforth, and a
girlfriend.

But two weeks ago, Glass and the rest of the small community of Iraq
war deserters in Canada were dealt a blow when the Supreme Court of
Canada denied an appeal bid by two other war resisters who'd also
been rejected as refugees, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey.

The top court's decision effectively ended the pair's legal quest to
stay in Canada and set the precedent for the other deserters seeking asylum.

Now, barring some sort of near-miraculous political involvement,
Glass is almost certainly going to be deported back to the United
States, where he faces the remote possibility of death, and the very
real possibility of jail time.

"Hopefully it comes down to politics, and the politicians do
something about it," Glass says.

In Canada there are currently about 50 known Iraq war deserters
scattered across the country, with most of them in Toronto,
Vancouver, and Nelson, B.C., says Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters
Support Campaign, which offers assistance to deserters who've fled to Canada.

With the courts having ruled against the deserters' bids to remain in
Canada, Zaslofsky is also hoping enough politicians will come on
board to get a motion passed in Parliament that would allow the
former soldiers to stay here.

FACING FIVE YEARS IN JAIL

If they don't, a deserter like Glass is looking at five years in
jail, Zaslofsky estimates, while also admitting that the U.S.
military has been inconsistent in meting out punishments.

(Some deserters who haven't been jailed have been given Other Than
Honourable Discharges, while some have been told to report for duty.)

Olivia Chow is trying to get Parliament to let the deserters stay.
Last Tuesday, the Trinity-Spadina MP introduced a motion to the
Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration that would allow
the deserters to stay here.

But Chow couldn't get a majority of committee members to vote with
her, so instead she asked for hearings that would put some of the
resisters in front of a microphone at a committee meeting. This way,
the MPs could hear the individual resisters' stories.

Those hearings are slated for Dec. 6 on Parliament Hill.

"Hopefully after we hear from the war resisters, the Liberals will
say yes," Chow says, adding she needs to convince four remaining
Liberals to get a majority. These Liberals include Maurizio
Bevilacqua, Jim Karygiannis, Colleen Beaumier, and Andrew Telegdi,
who has already indicated his support, Chow says.

Then, if a majority of the committee votes in favour, Chow will be
able to introduce a motion to the full Parliament. "If the Liberals,
NDP and the Bloc combine their votes in favour of it, then we're in
good shape," Chow says.

But the Harper government is not expected to be onside. A spokesman
for the federal immigration minister says as much after Hinzman and
Hughey lost their Supreme Court bid on Nov. 15.

"Canadians want a refugee system that helps true refugees," says Mike
Fraser, spokesman for minister Diane Finley. "All refugee claimants
in Canada have the right to due process, and when they've exhausted
all legal avenues we expect them to respect our laws and leave the country."

Zaslofsky, himself a war resister who deserted the U.S. Army in 1970
rather than fight in Vietnam, says the Canadian people wouldn't mind
the deserters being granted amnesty, because the Iraq war is
immensely unpopular in Canada anyway.

"They make a good impression not because they're all spiffy and nice
little choir boys, but because they're very ordinary," Zaslofsky
says. "They're very typical Americans, and people notice that. And
they see that these are not wild-eyed radical weirdos coming up here.
These are typical Americans. They like NASCAR, they like football."

.

Iraq War Veterans to Launch "Winter Soldier" Investigation

Iraq War Veterans to Launch "Winter Soldier" Investigation

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_aaron_gl_071120_iraq_war_veterans_to.htm

by Aaron Glantz
November 20, 2007

Iraq Veterans Against the War is launching a"Winter Soldier"
investigation into atrocities in Iraq modeled on a similar effort by
Vietnam vets 36 years ago.
In March 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will gather in our
nation's capital "to break the silence and hold our leaders
accountable for these wars." The gathering will feature first-hand
stories of atrocities committed by soldiers in Iraq, with the idea of
bringing the truth of war to the surface.

Four members of IVAW are featured on the War Comes Home website:
Lance Corporal Jeff Key, Army Medic Augustin Aguayo, Specialist
Patrick Resta, and Specialist Joshua Casteel.

From the IVAW website:

In 1971, over one hundred members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
(VVAW) gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America.
Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to
the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes
were isolated exceptions. The members of VVAW knew differently.

Over three days in January, these soldiers testified on the
systematic brutality they had seen visited upon the people of
Vietnam. They called it the Winter Soldier investigation, after
Thomas Paine's famous admonishing of the "summer soldier" who shirks
his duty during difficult times. In a time of war and lies, the
veterans who gathered in Detroit knew it was their duty to tell the truth.

Over thirty years later, we find ourselves faced with a new war. But
the lies are the same. Once again, American troops are sinking into
increasingly bloody occupations. Once again, war crimes in places
like Haditha, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib have turned the public against
the war. Once again, politicians and generals are blaming "a few bad
apples" instead of examining the military policies that have
destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan.

Did you know?
A team of researchers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center found 95%
of soldiers deployed to Iraq reported seeing dead bodies and remains,
95% had been shot at, and 89% had been ambushed or attacked. 69% had
seen an injured woman or child and felt they could not provide assistance.

How well do you know your facts about U.S. veterans returning from
Iraq or Afghanistan? Take the War Comes Home "Did You Know?" Quiz and
find out!

http://warcomeshome.org/quiz
---

Pacifica radio network reporter Aaron Glantz is author of the new
book "How America Lost Iraq" (Tarcher/Penguin). More information at

www.warcomeshome.org

.

As more GIs resist: Supporters wrestle with courts in U.S., Canada

As more GIs resist
Supporters wrestle with courts in U.S., Canada

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/gi-1129/

By Dee Knight
Published Nov 21, 2007

Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse
deployment to the Iraq war, won a big victory on Nov. 10 when a
federal judge issued an injunction blocking the U.S. Army from
conducting a second court-martial against him. The judge said a
second trial would violate Watada's constitutional rights by trying
him twice for the same charges.

In February, Watada's first court-martial ended in a mistrial just
before he was to take the stand in his own defense. Immediately
before the mistrial was declared, Watada told the court that to him,
leading soldiers into battle in Iraq "means to participate in a war
that I believe to be illegal."

"This is an enormous victory, but it is not yet over," said Kenneth
Kagan, one of Watada's attorneys. The charges against 29-year-old
Watada remain in effect, and Army officials said they would file
briefs in U.S. District Court to try to prevent the injunction
blocking a new trial from becoming permanent.

Canadian ruling against resisters

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada dealt U.S. war resisters there
a setback on Nov. 15, announcing it will not hear appeals for refugee
status by Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey. These two Iraq war
resisters have been in Canada since going AWOL from the U.S. Army in 2004.

The ruling was met by demonstrations the same day in cities across
Canada, including Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Nelson and Vancouver,
organized by the War Resisters Support Campaign. The campaign has the
support of the Canadian Labor Congress, the United Church of Canada,
peace organizations and thousands of individuals and families. Nearly
two-thirds of Canadians say resisters should be allowed to stay in
Canada, according to a June 2007 poll.

The fate of hundreds of U.S. war resisters living in Canada now rests
with the Canadian Parliament. "Following today's decision we call on
Parliament to take a stand by enacting a provision that would allow
U.S. war resisters and their families to stay in Canada," said actor
and activist Shirley Douglas.

Lee Zaslovsky, a Vietnam-era military deserter and coordinator of the
War Resisters Support Campaign, said the proposed provision has the
support of two parties in Parliament­the New Democrats and the Bloc
Québecois. Pressure is now focused on the largest opposition party,
the Liberals. If the three parties unite to support the provision,
they could override the refusal of the minority Conservative
government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Bush clone.

Zaslovsky said the campaign has generated massive Canadian media
coverage and a "heavy wave" of e-mails and phone calls to Parliament
from across the country.

The attorney for Hinzman and Hughey, Jeffrey House­himself a
Vietnam-era war resister­said, "We're not giving up on any of the
legal cases" of other U.S. war resisters in Canada. He said the
current case means "we can't use international law [as our legal
basis], but we have other things." Zaslovsky said there are another
25 to 30 refugee status appeals pending.

In the U.S., the organization Courage to Resist has organized a
letter-writing campaign to Canadian government officials. The letter
asks them "to make a provision

for sanctuary" for U.S. war resisters, and cites Vietnam-era Canadian
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's statement that "Canada should be a
refuge from militarism." (To sign, go to CourageToResist.org.)

AWOL GI with PTSD arrested

As if to illustrate the claim that war resisters face persecution in
the United States, on Nov. 13 Sgt. Brad Gaskins was arrested by Army
officials and local police as he was preparing to turn himself in at
Ft. Drum, near Watertown, N.Y.

Sgt. Gaskins had traveled almost 300 miles with his mother from his
home in East Orange, N.J., to the Different Drummer Internet Café
near Ft. Drum. He was waiting there while his attorney Todd Ensign
telephoned the base to arrange for his return. When the MPs and local
police grabbed him, his mother screamed at them, "Why are you
grabbing him?" "Because he's a deserter," they yelled.

Ensign said that Gaskins is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress
disorder and severe depression after two tours in Iraq. He has been
hospitalized for psychiatric problems and should be discharged from
the Army for medical reasons, Ensign said. Following legal pressure
and media attention, Gaskins was taken to a veterans' hospital in
Syracuse after his arrest. On Nov. 16, he was transferred to Walter
Reed Medical Center in Washington.

PTSD is reaching epidemic proportions among active-duty GIs and
veterans of the U.S. imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
An Army report released Nov. 15 estimates that one in five
active-duty soldiers, and as many as 40 percent of reservists, are in
need of treatment for PTSD. It adds that soldiers suffer even more
mental distress in the transition to life at home than they show on
leaving Iraq.

According to the Army, more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers have deserted
since the Iraq invasion started. Every year, the number has gone up.
Official statistics say 3,196 went AWOL last year, compared to 2,543
the year before. But Iraq Veterans Against the War says the calls it
receives suggest the real numbers are 10 times the official figures.

A large network of military counselors and lawyers across the United
States is ready to help active-duty and AWOL GIs who need help. They
can call the GI Rights Hotline at 877-447-4487. Also, a growing
network of churches and community organizations offers sanctuary for
soldiers who refuse to fight in the illegal U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

.

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet.
Posted November 26, 2007.

The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due
to "personal problems," not experience in combat.

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks
seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all
50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going
back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains
of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those
Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is
that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states --
there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year
and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home,
and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other
women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and
suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful
to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also
heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and
tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers
to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken
seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that
melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of
alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what
has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public
awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier
suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official
casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths"
to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department
of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation,
continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are
killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but
because they have "personal problems."

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the
well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that
the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades.
Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their
own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones
retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths,
like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown
newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA
doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the
Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a
lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large
part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been
called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about
it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have
fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a
crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom
of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral
issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has
acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic
of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions
have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst
sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left
suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our
systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has
been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no
punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live
in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the
secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert.
Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with
high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those
subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as
lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value
life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And
sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill
innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are
followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our
citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W,
glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic
fundamentalism and human bombs.

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are
motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics
on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case.
Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to
upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically,
despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in
the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists
who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues.
Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization
that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your
ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work
schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if
your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the
appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for
which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their
families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working
people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to
qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans
need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what
needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic
brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable
challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans
make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26
percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair,
neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth
quibbling about.

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between
suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans.
With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths,
Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill
civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing
themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse
for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral
selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about
suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an
unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own
lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of
suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So
who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and
martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and
poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing
out that we are doing a far better job?

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is
often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual
bodies have been blown to pieces.
---

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life
after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006.

.

Iraq war is a betrayal of American democracy

Iraq war is a betrayal of American democracy

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/FEATURES15/71109001/1030/FEATURES15

November 11, 2007
By MATT HOWARD

Editor's note: Matt Howard gave this statement at a recent protest at
the Statehouse.

In 2003 I illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq with 1st
Tank battalion 1st Marine Division. My commander in chief unleashed
the world's fiercest fighting force upon the country and people of
Iraq, and now those of us used and betrayed by him are demanding justice.

Four and a half years after our opening "shock and awe" Bush's lies
are known throughout the world, and yet he continues to act with
impunity. Four and a half years later the Bush regime has unleashed a
hell upon the country of Iraq that only those who have been there can
truly understand.

As a two-tour combat veteran of this brutal war, I have a
responsibility to speak honestly and openly about what has been done
and what continues to be done in our name. We veterans know that this
war is not the one being sanitized on the nightly news. It has
nothing to do with the liberation of the people of Iraq; instead it
has everything to do with the subjugation and domination of these
people in the name of U.S. imperial economic and strategic interests.

We did not go to war with the country of Iraq, we went to war with
the people of Iraq. During the initial invasion we killed women. We
killed children. We senselessly killed farm animals. We were the
United States Marine Corps, not the Peace Corps, and we left a swath
of death and destruction in our wake all the way to Baghdad.

Let me say again so that there is no misunderstanding. I stand here
today as a former U.S. Marine saying we are killing women and
children in Iraq. This is the true nature of war. War lends itself to
atrocities. Don't think you can use an organization designed to kill
other human beings for anything humanitarian. That has never been our
mission. That was crystal clear from the moment I was forced to bury
the crate of humanitarian food given to me in Kuwait.

Four and a half years later we as soldiers, sailors, airmen and
marines are done. We are done being told under threat of court
martial to run over children that get in the way of our speeding convoys.

We are done raiding and destroying the homes of innocent Iraqis on a
nightly basis.

We are done abusing and torturing prisoners.

We are done being hired thugs for the 160,000 contractors and U.S.
corporate interests in Iraq.

We are done being poisoned by depleted uranium, the unspoken Agent
Orange of this war.

We are done coming home broken, from two, three, four tours of duty ­
only to find our commander in chief has actually tried to CUT funding
to the Department of Veterans Affairs. To find our doctors being told
to diagnose us with pre-existing personality disorders instead of
post traumatic stress syndrome.

We are done killing for lies.

So Iraq Veterans Against the War is taking back our history ­ the
history that has been robbed from us. We are dispelling the myth that
the Vietnam war ended when the Democrats started voting against it.
Instead we are spreading the truth about how the American War in Vietnam ended.

The Vietnam War ended when soldiers put down their weapons and
refused to fight; when pilots dropped their bombs in the ocean.

We are re-educating the public to let them know that the power
ultimately lies with the people. Just take a look at the thousands of
pages of internal documents from the Department of Defense explicitly
detailing how at the end of the Vietnam war the military had
collapsed. It was literally in a state of mutiny. And that movement
is slowly starting again. Because ultimately in every war waged
throughout human history, those forced to fight quickly realize they
have much more in common with those they are being told to kill than
with those telling them to do the killing.

And we are re-educating the public about the true nature of sectarian
violence. No, the middle east is NOT inherently violent. In fact, in
the 1,400-year schism between Sunnis and Shias ­ there has NEVER been
a civil war fought. They have always lived in the same neighborhoods
and even intermarried. The United States has caused this civil war
using the classic colonial techniques of divide and conquer.

George Bush is a war criminal who has violated international law, the
Geneva convention and the Nuremburg standards and needs to tried
accordingly for crimes against humanity.

I ask every red-blooded American today: What would you do if your
homeland was savagely invaded and occupied by another country? The
Iraqis will continue to resist and fight until the last American has
left their homeland. Period. End the violence in Iraq? End the occupation.

We veterans are speaking out to stop the violence being perpetrated
in our name. When we voted in the Democrats on an anti-war mandate,
the Bush regime expanded the war. As we are marching against further
occupation, the Bush regime is making threats against Iran.

And we will not continue to be silenced by the mainstream media. Top
generals and bottom privates are all speaking in unison now. We know
the truth about the slaughter of upwards of one million Iraqis. Why
is no one listening? We will not stand by as this regime tricks the
country into thinking that if you oppose the war you do not support
the troops. We ARE the troops and we have never felt support from
this administration. Stop mindlessly supporting the troops. Start
demanding that we come home ­ and maybe think about apologizing to us
when we get back.
---

Matt Howard attained the rank of corporal in the United States Marine
Corps. He is head of the Vermont chapter for Iraq Veterans Against the War.

.

Courage of my Convictions

[See URL for numerous embedded links.]

Courage of my Convictions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sgt-john-bruhns/courage-of-my-convictions_b_73691.html

by John Bruhns
Posted November 21, 2007

This past Monday the Philadelphia Daily News ran an op-ed that I
wrote expressing my frustrations with big money anti-war lobbying
organizations. Particularly the groups that I worked side by side
with. However, the piece that I wrote needs to be elaborated on further.

I have been contacted on and off the record by many expressing
support and criticism regarding my "outing" of how these groups
operate. The contacts came from some highly influential people, close
friends, anonymous tipsters, and many others. Some want me to go
further, name names, and put the final nail in the coffin. Others
think what I did is detrimental to the "anti-war" movement as a whole
and simply want me to cease fire.

Writing the op-ed was not easy for me. In doing so I had to confess
to my own equal involvement in all that I cited as disingenuous --
and rightfully so. After all, I knowingly played the game and
willingly allowed myself to become a major player. Therefore, I am an
equal culprit.

I don't want this blog to be misconstrued as self righteous,
martyrdom, or falling on the sword. This is me taking responsibility
for my faults, learning from my mistakes, making the corrections, and
pursuing a more effective route in ending the war in Iraq.

Some have asked me what my future plans are now that I detached
myself from their perception of the anti-war movement. My answer to
them is to continue on in the fight to end the war. I have the
courage, conviction, and credentials to do so effectively.

Here is my ultimate motivation

The voice of the Iraq veteran is so very crucial to ending the war.
Iraq veterans are the absolute authorities of all testimonials to the
harsh reality we are facing over there. That is why it is so
necessary for me, as an Iraq veteran, to drop the excess baggage and
continue speaking out in a manner that is pure and without any
influence from "special interest" groups. Once the voice of the
veteran is controlled by those who have not walked in his/her shoes
the message is no longer authentic or genuine.

We veterans have an obligation to each other not be fronts or frauds
for outsiders who want to use our experiences from the battlefields
to promote their agenda. The blood, sweat, and tears that we gave for
this country are beyond the comprehension of those who have never
served in uniform. Furthermore, our experiences are not for sale - we
can't and must not be bought.

The moment we veterans step on foreign soil and look death in the eye
we eternally separate ourselves from the average person. We become
exceptional and extraordinary people who know the actual truth of
what the spectators claim to know and pontificate on in such a
cavalier manner. That is why we must educate America to what they
only hear from pundits on television--in most cases, pure fallacies.
Sadly, we have an obligation to fight a war of two fronts--at home
and abroad. After all, we are the true experts. If they don't hear it
from us - they will never really know.

We veterans must play an influential role in determining the outcome
of our nation's future. The only way to do that is to stand in
solidarity with each other and end the divisiveness. We must finally
shut down those who criticize the patriotism of veterans through
disgraceful politically partisan tactics and send them packing on
their merry way.

We as veterans can respectfully disagree with each other. It is only
natural that we will have differences of opinion. But we should never
allow ourselves to be pitted vet-against-vet by those of an outside
influence who have never shared our sacrifice and we must never
question each other's dedication to this country. If we do so we will
lose all that we covet as veterans ... what America proclaims as our
"best, bravest, and brightest."

Where to go from here

I said my piece and all that I have to say in the op-ed --and it
spoke volumes. All I can ask for is that it was enough to redeem
myself for not abiding by what I just described as "my ultimate motivation."

When I joined the military I did so to preserve the freedom of ALL
Americans regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sexual
orientation, and political party affiliation. Under the tragic
presidency of George W. Bush those very same freedoms have all been
tampered with - the war in Iraq, Katrina, the outing of CIA
operatives, domestic spying, the fanatical religious right-wing, the
persecution of gay people by Bush and his loyalist in Congress, and
all dissenters of Bush's view of the world labeled as traitors,
cowards, and cut and run terrorist sympathizers.

This is not the America I volunteered my life for. So now I feel
compelled to do everything in my capacity to reclaim it and restore
our democracy. I realize that I am only one man and I can only do so
much. But if every single American shared this view we would be an
overwhelming Army of people who have the power to take our country back.

Patriotism is not only displayed through military service, waving the
flag, or cheering on your nation's President. And it is certainly not
standing idle while your President wages an unnecessary war that is
killing our troops and running our nation into a debt that will last
for decades. It is as simple as the willingness of an individual to
fight for the betterment of their country in all stretches of the imagination.

True patriots would never want or prefer to see their country at war.
They would much rather have peace, prosperity, and secure livelihoods
for all of their fellow citizens. That is what I will fight for ...
for the rest of my days.

So for those who think I am out to hurt the anti-war movement --
sorry to disappoint you.

John Bruhns
Iraq Veteran

.

Soldiers’ uncertain future

Soldiers' uncertain future

http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-11-22/news_story.php

By MATT MERNAGH
NOW | NOVEMBER 22 - 28, 2007

The Supreme Court of Canada's decision on November 15 not to hear the
refugee appeal of war resisters Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey
prompted anguished cries from the anti-war community.

But is it really all over for the refusenik soldiers who've sought
refuge here after ducking what they deem an immoral war in Iraq?

Depends on how you see federal politics unfolding in the near future.

In the wake of the court ruling, NDP MP Olivia Chow, supported by the
Bloc, attempted to pass a motion in the Standing Committee on
Immigration and Citizenship on Tuesday, November 20, granting special
immigration status to Iraq war resisters.

But led by MP Jim Karygiannis, committee Liberals were obviously
unable to find their inner Trudeau. They moved deferral of Chow's
motion and replaced it with a successful motion to hold hearings on
the matter before the year is out. (Liberal committee members and a
spokesperson for Stéphane Dion did not respond to calls.)

The good news is that war resisters and supporters will be given an
opportunity to testify, something resister and Toronto resident Phil
McDowell, who attended the committee meeting, is looking forward to.

"We'll give them an understanding of what we're doing here. I think
we can make a great case," says McDowell, who served in Iraq for a
year but made his way to Canada when he was deployed again.

It's not clear, though, whether this will make any difference for
Hinzman and Hughey. Resister lawyer Jeffry House says it'll be six
months or so before the two are "put in chains and forcibly removed."
Their last legal formality will be a risk assessment to determine if
they'll be tortured or put to death if returned to U.S. military custody.

The final removal order has to be signed by the minister of
immigration and citizenship, but some hold out hope that in the
months ahead that might not be the current minister, Diane Finley.

"There could be a whole new government," says an optimistic Chow.

What will befall the two if they are returned? "They will be deported
into the hands of people who are going to be extremely hostile to
them," says anti-war movement veteran and former California state
senator Tom Hayden, who's been drumming up support for Hinzman and
Hughey stateside since the Supreme Court announcement.

It's not really clear how the military will deal with their cases. At
the U.S. Consulate, spokesperson Nick Giacobbe says, "No one will
serve time for desertion.''

But House is doubtful. "Someone will do a study in four or five years
from now and find out most got jail sentences."

Each soldier has unique circumstances. In 2006, Darrell Anderson,
wounded in Iraq and living in Toronto, turned himself in at Fort Knox
and scored a mere dishonourable discharge. At least one former
temporary Canadian who returned to the U.S., Ivan Brobeck, was
sentenced to an eight-month term in a military prison (he only served two).

Without a political solution, those active in support work say,
resisters will slip into Canada and remain silent. Some might stay
five years and apply for landed resident status. Ironically, Hinzman
might have been eligible if he'd stayed out of the political fray for
another year, says House. "If resisters don't feel Canadian
institutions can offer protection, Americans will stay illegally."

But if it comes to deportation, Hinzman and Hughey definitely won't
hide, he says.

"I don't think anyone is going to comply willingly. But they're not
going to slink back to America. They're going to let the Canadian
people see them go," House promises.

.

When AWOL Is the Only Escape -- A Patriot's Story

When AWOL Is the Only Escape -- A Patriot's Story

http://alternet.org/waroniraq/68192/

By Sarah Olson, AlterNet
November 20, 2007.

What makes a soldier go AWOL -- and later turn himself in?

James Circello sat on the edge of his bed staring at the floral
pattern on a generic hotel comforter, contemplating what life would
be like in prison. It was early August, and his parents had given him
a one-way bus ticket to Lawton, Okla., and told him he was welcome
home once he got his life together. U.S. Army Sergeant Circello had
been AWOL since April, and with just a few dollars left in his wallet
and a dying cell phone battery, he saw two options: turn himself in
to military authorities at Ft. Sill, or get the next bus out of town
and join hundreds of anti-war veterans convening in St. Louis, Mo.

James was a patriot, and after Sept. 11, joined the Army to defend
his country. By 2002 James was in Italy, assigned to the 173rd
Airborne Infantry Brigade. The 173rd deployed to Iraq between March
2003 and 2004. Facing redeployment last April, this time to
Afghanistan, James asked himself if he could tolerate replicating the
disaster he'd been part of in Iraq. When he answered no, a friend
drove him to the airport, he flew to the United States and has been
AWOL ever since.

Contemplating life in his Oklahoma hotel room, James realized he
didn't go AWOL to avoid a second tour of duty. He wanted to help stop
the war, and how better to do that than join with the hundreds of
other veterans now opposing the Iraq war? So James grabbed his
Army-issued green duffle bag and headed for the Greyhound station. He
boarded a bus to take him south to the banks of the Mississippi River
and joined an international community of veterans working to put an end to war.

James joins a growing number of disillusioned and newly politicized
Iraq War veterans. According to an Associated Press report released
last week, the number of AWOL Army soldiers has increased 80 percent
since March of 2003. The Army says 4,698 soldiers deserted their
posts in fiscal year 2007 -- an increase of over 2,000 soldiers from
the year before. GI rights advocates say the number is far higher.
Soldiers go AWOL for many reasons, and the majority of them don't
denounce the Iraq war. However, an increasing number publicly oppose
the war, even though this could mean harsh punishments or jail time.

What turns a patriot like James Circello, who volunteered for
military service, into someone critical of the United States
occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan? What experiences turn someone
willing to fight and die for his country into someone who, in a
recent interview, said quietly: "It's disturbing when you see humanity fail."

Fighting the war on terror

"I remember the day kids started throwing rocks," James said.
Initially, Iraqis did welcome them, served them tea and called them
liberators. But gradually, James says they grew hostile. "Not without
reason, in my opinion," he says.

James can still hear the helicopters beating the air above the city
and see U.S. troops on every street corner in Kirkuk. The city was
locked down, the traffic going nowhere and soldiers were herding
families into corrals like sheep. That was the day smiles dancing on
the faces of Iraqi boys hardened. Boys used to run through the
streets of Kirkuk, chasing Jeeps loaded with American soldiers. They
would run barefoot through garbage and didn't seem to care when the
streets became muddy with sewage. "They were smiling," James said.
"That was the weird part. As they'd chase after our Jeeps, they were
smiling." Sgt. Circello lost his belief in American liberation at the
same time these boys lost theirs.

Even humanitarian aid was distributed with brutality and chauvinism,
James says. When the chain of command learned there was a shortage of
petroleum -- and without oil to cook, people were starving -- the
Army set up distribution centers where women were cordoned into lines
made from razor wires. The wait was endless, and there was never
enough cooking oil.

"It was hectic and maddening," James said. "U.S. soldiers would put
their hands on the women in line, forcing them to move, trying to get
them to be quiet and stand still. They'd stick guns in their faces
trying to threaten or humiliate them. I did it myself ... once."

In those early days, James didn't live on an Army base. His unit
lived in a house in Kirkuk. They didn't need hum-vees, because when
something happened in the city, they looked out the window. Soldiers
roamed the streets on motorcycles, and at first, security wasn't such
a problem.

But things started going badly pretty quickly. When soldiers set up
roadblocks, if the driver couldn't prove ownership of his vehicle, it
was impounded. Unfortunately, the soldiers relied on a very American
way to prove ownership: They checked for papers. But the ubiquitous
orange and white taxis often existed in families for generations, and
no one had papers anymore. When they were stopped, American teenagers
would wrest the sole source of income for several generations of a
family from the hands of the family patriarch.

Coming home

When James went home to Lima, Ohio, his family didn't ask him about
Iraq or about being AWOL. They did offer to listen, but there was a
schism between James and his parents, who still believed in the
mission of the Iraq war. They didn't want to hear that their son had
deserted and was now living illegally in his childhood bedroom.

James is frustrated by how little many Americans appear to have
thought about the war, or even know that it continues. Even today,
with the war massively unpopular, James thinks politics is still
defining the terms of the debate, and people still seem uncomfortable
challenging the Bush administration about the war. "People say we
have to stay because 4,000 soldiers will have died in vain if we
leave," James says. "But what gives their death meaning if we stay?"

Even though he has struggled with how to turn himself in for the
better part of the summer, James says he's not afraid to go to
prison. His goal is to raise awareness in the United States about the
war about the thousands of soldiers who oppose it and somehow to make
amends to the Iraqi people. He's terrified he'll go to prison before
he can do that.

Struggling to communicate this message, James traveled from New York
to Ohio, Oklahoma to Missouri, Louisiana to Pennsylvania and many
places in between. He did this without renting a car or boarding an
airplane, because using his credit card would give away his location.
James got a job building houses in New Orleans, where he was paid
under the table, but most AWOL soldiers can't find work because
they're wanted by the U.S. government. James doesn't appear to mind
sleeping on the couches of people he just met, which is good because
with the United States on the brink of a recession, his precarious
legal status also makes it difficult to find housing.

As the Iraq War nears its fifth anniversary, more and more soldiers
oppose the war, and many more are AWOL. Soldiers opposing their own
government and the wars they've been ordered to fight have never been
popular. Dating back to the Revolutionary War, U.S. soldiers have
questioned the morality of war, and when they've acted on these
questions, they have been maligned by the civilian population and
punished by their government. Technically, the penalty for deserting
during wartime is death. Today, many, mostly younger veterans, are
calling for support of war resisters and trying to eliminate the
stigma of cowardice associated with deserters.

Supporting the troops

"Right now we're in the middle of two foreign occupations, and a lot
of people don't understand the sacrifice people in the military are
making or the reasons we've been asked to make it," says Kelly
Dougherty, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Dougherty says it's difficult to return from military service, only
to realize many Americans don't seem to know there's a war going on at all.

That frustration is compounded when veterans have trouble obtaining
everything from mental and physical health care to disability
compensation, according to Paul Sullivan, executive director at
Veterans For Common Sense. He says the Veterans Administration (VA)
is struggling to provide for the quarter million Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans it already treats, and this is already having disastrous
consequences for returning GIs.

Recent Army studies found nearly one in five Iraq veterans have
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD,) and almost half demonstrate
combat-related trauma of some sort. According to a CBS News
investigation, more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have committed
suicide than have been killed in combat. What's more, Sullivan says
the average wait for the VA to consider disability claims from
injured veterans is about six months, and this helps explain the
15,000 recent veterans who are homeless today.

That veteran services have fallen into such disrepair indicates how
poorly planned the Iraq war has been, according to Camilo Mejia,
chairperson of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who, himself, spent
nearly a year in prison rather than return to Iraq. He says failing
services are just the latest example of how the government elects to
wrap itself in yellow ribbons and hollow rhetoric rather than
meaningfully care for veterans.

"How do we honor veterans and then send them to fight in an illegal
war?" Mejia asked this week as the country celebrated Veterans Day.
"How do we honor the veterans and then not speak out about their
service? We don't want to hear their analysis or their questions, and
we don't want to hear how their "service" in Iraq has changed them.
How can we go on waving the flag and talking about supporting the
troops, when we ignore the thousands of veterans opposing this war?"

Finding peace

As the country celebrated Veterans Day last week, James was again
contemplating life behind bars. He spent this week traveling from
Baton Rouge, La., to Washington, D.C., and then west to Kentucky,
where he says he will turn himself in at Ft. Knox. He says he's
grateful to the community of veterans -- from every state in the
country -- who have supported him and soldiers like him.

Just like everybody else in the country, it's clear James desperately
wants his service in the Army to be meaningful. The difference is
that, for him, serving meaningfully means changing the nature of the
U.S. debate about the war and somehow making amends to the Iraqi people.

On the phone from somewhere in the middle of the country, James says
he's ready to resolve his conflict with the U.S. military so he can
more effectively accomplish his goals. You get the sense that maybe
he wishes going to prison could resolve the rest of the conflicts he
experiences as well. Last week, James turned himself in to the
military at Ft. Knox, in Tennessee. Rather than going to prison as he
had feared, James was simply discharged with an other than honorable
discharge, which prevents him from accessing healthcare or the GI
Bill, but at least for now, James seems OK with that. Now he says
he's ready to start the rest of his life, much of which is likely to
be shaped by his time in Iraq and his experiences as an AWOL soldier
opposing the war.
---

Sarah Olson is an independent journalist and radio producer.

.

Thank You, Ehren Watada

"So Serious, a Patriot"

http://counterpunch.com/terrall11152007.html

Thank You, Ehren Watada

November 15, 2007
By BEN TERRALL

DOn November 9 in San Francisco's Chinatown, supporters of Iraq war
resister Lt. Ehren Watada made a presentation to community press and
local activists that included good news for their cause. On November
8, Judge Benjamin Settle of the U.S. District Court for the Western
District of Washington issued a grant of a preliminary injunction in
favor of Lt. Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly
refuse deployment to the Iraq War.

As people gathered in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown, Watada Support
Group member Ying Lee told me, "At the time that we called the news
conference we did not know that the judge was going to give his
decision yesterday." Lee went on, "The decision was due by today, so
he was early ... we are very appreciative of a United States Federal
judge respecting the constitution and saying the trial cannot proceed."

Lee described Watada as "a young man who out of a patriotic sense of
duty after 9/11 enlisted. ... And he was such a good officer that
when he was stationed in Korea, his commanding officer told him to
prepare to be sent to Iraq, because that was going to be his next station."

Watada studied the background of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lee
continued, and "he said this war is based upon lies, it's illegal,
it's unconstiutional, it's a violation of the human rights charter,
it's a violation of the Nuremberg Principles which we've adopted, and
my oath of alliegance is to the country and the constitution, and not
to one man. So he tried to resign three times, they wouldn't accept
his resignation, the President wouldn't accept his resignation. He
asked to be sent to Afghanistan, he's not a conscienscious objector,
and they refused that, so he felt he had no choice because he
couldn't tell his men to go into a war that he thought was so wrong
that he then took the step of saying I will not fight in Iraq. He's
the first U.S. army officer to do so. And since then the military has
charged him, through a series of court martials, with refusing to be
sent to Iraq and behavior unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.
And when the court martial occurred, he was not allowed any
witnesses. ... But the army, as the prosecution, had six or seven
witnesses. Each one of them spoke to what a wonderful young man he
was, responsible, perfect officer, and very promotable. ... The judge
decided the trial was not going the way he had wanted it to, and so,
he called a mistrial. In other words, he aborted the trial, and that
was in February of 2007. Since then, the military has been trying to
prosecute him again."

Opening the press conference, Chinatown community activist Reverend
Norman Fong set an appropriately upbeat tone in his remarks about the
injunction. Fong enthused, "we're here to keep hope alive, it's going
very good!"

The Reverend's comments were translated into Cantonese by a young
woman who also translated other speakers, including three poets.
Local activist Peter Yamamoto, read a poem describing Watada as

"So serious.
A patriot.
Young, Asian, and articulate--
Athletic, good-looking, with short military-cut hair-"

Local Attorney David Chiu followed Yamamoto. Chiu said, "As a former
prosecutor, [I would] remind the current prosecutors of their ethical
obligations. Contrary to what you might see on television crime
television shows, the ethical obligation of a prosecutor is not
simply to prosecute, it's not to put people in jail."

Chiu continued, "The ethical obligation is very simple. A prosecutor
is supposed to do justice. And justice in this case is not about
putting this man in jail. ... Justice in this case is about letting a
man who's already gone through a first trial, who's about to be
pushed through a second trial that's unconstitutional, to let Watada go free."

Several rowdy old men playing cards nearby quieted down as San
Francisco poet laureate and radical gadfly Jack Hirschman came to the
microphone. Flanked by activists holding signs which read "Refuse
Illegal War/ Thank You Lt Ehren Watada," Hirschman read a poem he had
written for Watada. That poem, and another read by the city's former
poet laureate Janice Mirikitani, can be heard at indybay.org.

Rev. Fong closed the presentation by noting that Watada's mother
Carolyn "came to Chinatown a year ago and asked for help and we've
been doing it ever since." Rev. Fong concluded, "today we can
celebrate a little bit of sunlight breaking through the fog of war.
And all of you know this was is crazy, it's illegal. And so a little
bit of joy, a little bit of love, and let's give it up for our
captain of hope, Lt. Watada. Thank you everybody, you're all
beautiful , we've got to keep doing this."

As many present noted, the struggle for an honorable discharge for
Lt. Watada is not over. The U.S. Army has announced it intends to
file briefs in U.S. District Court to try to prevent Judge Settle's
injunction on behalf of Watada from becoming permanent.

The U.S. military estimates 10,000 soldiers have deserted since the
beginning of the current Iraq war. But dissidents think the number is
far higher. According to the group Courage to Resist , "In the past
few years, tens of thousands of service members have resisted illegal
war and occupation in a number of different ways-by going AWOL,
seeking conscientious objector status and/or a discharge, asserting
the right to speak out against injustice from within the military,
and for a relative few, publicly refusing to fight."
---

Ben Terrall is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He can be
reached at bterrall@igc.org

.

Back from Iraq, veterans raise their voices against the war

[2 articles]

Back from Iraq, veterans raise their voices against the war

http://www.startribune.com/357/story/1541483.html

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune
Last update: November 10, 2007

Wes Davey, drafted during the Vietnam War, thought America learned a
lesson in Vietnam. He never thought he'd spend his 54th birthday in
Baghdad, or that a son would serve there, too.

Brandon Day carries the names of 11 dead comrades tattooed on his
right arm. But you don't need to see the tattoos to see his pain.
It's in his eyes.

And Raymond Camper is one of the Minnesota National Guard members who
served a longer stretch in Iraq than any other U.S. troops deployed there.

Camper, Davey and Day share more than their time in uniform. They
share the anger and disenchantment of many veterans who have returned
from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also share a
determination to speak out.

The three are among the founding members of the Minnesota chapter of
Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group established here in September.

(For more information, visit the website at www.ivaw.org.)

Today is Veterans Day (government offices will be closed Monday), and
Iraq Veterans Against the War will join Veterans For Peace near the
State Capitol this morning for a reading of the names of Minnesotans
who have died in Iraq. Afterward, the antiwar vets hope new members
will join them to help get word to other veterans that there is
strength in numbers, and in telling the truth.

Drafted as a teenager during the Vietnam era, Davey was a National
Guard and Army Reserve soldier who retired with the rank of master
sergeant after serving in Iraq at the start of the war.

Now, at 58, he is president of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans
Against the War.

Speaking last week at Augsburg College, Davey said the war was based
on lies from the Bush administration and that, while servicemen and
women and their families have borne the war's sacrifice, the affluent
in the political and corporate worlds are sacrificing nothing and are
profiting from the war.

Davey said veterans returning from Iraq -- many suffering from
undiagnosed or untreated physical and mental problems -- are angered
by the attitude they encounter when they get back: "You volunteered.
Shut up and die."

Nearly 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (this year
has been the bloodiest to date, in both countries). Meanwhile, the
wounded and maimed return to a country where 70 percent of the public
opposes the war but few do anything about it, including the
"opposition" in Congress. No wonder there is rising anger among veterans.

Day, 29, enlisted after 9/11 and served two tours in Iraq, the second
ending in September 2006. After 9/11, he had an eagle and a flag
tattooed on his right shoulder, a sign of his desire to defend
America. Now, on that same arm, tattooed dog tags bear the names of
10 soldiers in his company who died in Iraq, as well as the name of a
friend who committed suicide after coming home.

The darkness doesn't go away

"Being in Iraq fills you with a darkness that doesn't go away," Day
told a gathering at the Cathedral of St. Paul in September,
recounting how he pulled another friend's body from the wreckage of a
Humvee. Now studying engineering at the University of Minnesota, Day
finds that his outrage at the waste of lives in Iraq fuels his
passion to speak against the war.

After four soldiers in his unit were killed in an explosion, he says,
an Army psychiatrist counseled the grieving troops. But after two
hours, the shrink looked at his watch and said, "Well, I guess we
should get out of here."

After that, Day says, the soldiers decided they couldn't talk about
their feelings. Instead, their attitude became, "The Army broke me,
and they can't fix me."

Today's reading of the names of the dead will follow a 10:30
bell-ringing ceremony at the First Shot Memorial on the west side of
the Veterans Services Building near the Capitol. Afterward, at noon,
the group will meet at Macalester Plymouth United Church, 1658
Lincoln Av., St. Paul. All Iraq-era veterans are welcome. They may
also e-mail Minnesota@ivaw.org.

"For the second time in my life, a president has plunged our country
into a quagmire where there is no way to win a victory which can be
defined," Davey says.

"I thought we learned a lesson in Vietnam. I was wrong."
---

Nick Coleman • ncoleman@startribune.com

--------

Iraq vets conduct 3-day war protest

http://www.gazette.com/articles/iraq_29818___article.html/people_war.html

Small group is demonstrating in Acacia Park

By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD
THE GAZETTE
November 17, 2007

For former Army Spc. Mark Wilkerson, it was the raids ­ barging into
the homes of regular Iraqis in search of weapons and insurgents ­
that turned him against the war.

"Our mission was to win the hearts and minds of the people, and you
don't do that when you're treating every single one like they're an
insurgent, like they're a terrorist," said Wilkerson, 23.

After a year in Iraq with a Fort Hood-based military police unit, the
2002 Widefield High School graduate felt strongly enough that he
sought conscientious objector status and, when that was denied, went
AWOL. He served five months in a military prison this year.

He is among a small group of Iraq veterans holding a three-day
demonstration in Acacia Park in Colorado Springs that began Friday.

With a mock guard tower ­ to symbolize a guard tower in Iraq because
"we all at one point in Iraq pulled tower guard," Wilkerson said ­
they hope to draw attention to the fact that not everyone who served
there supports the war.

"When I got there they waved flags, then they were giving us angry
looks, and then they were throwing rocks and planting IEDs," said
Wilkerson, who got out of a military prison in Oklahoma in July. "I
got the impression the Iraqi people don't want us there."

The members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a national group, have
held demonstrations elsewhere in Colorado, but this weekend's is
their first in Colorado Springs, Wilkerson said.

"In this very all-American, all-military town, there are people who
are against the war but support the troops and support the veterans,"
said former Marine Capt. Rick Duncan of Colorado Springs.

He served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and went back last year. He now
runs a veterans advocacy group, the Colorado Veterans Alliance.

Duncan said he came to oppose the war because of how it affected his
fellow troops.

"I continuously saw people being sent back into a meat grinder again
and again and again," said Duncan, 30. "I saw people dying and
leaving families and distraught loved ones.

"Seeing the degradation of the military, the degradation of the
troops. There's only so much you can take before you have to begin
speaking up."

Friday's demonstration was politely received by passersby, with some
earnest discussion but no shouts aimed at the veterans, Wilkerson
said. The group planned to be back at the southwest corner of the
park from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. today and Sunday.

They acknowledge theirs is a viewpoint rarely heard, at least
publicly, from soldiers.

"I don't think we're a minority voice, but I think we're a minority
willing to speak up about it," Duncan said.

Former Army Spc. Garrett Reppenhagen, sitting atop the tower, said he
supported the war when he went to Iraq in February 2004.

"I thought I was going over there to look for weapons of mass
destruction and try to get revenge on the people who attacked us on
9/11," said Reppenhagen, 32, now a Pikes Peak Community College student.

"I really got disenchanted. I was sent to another country to kill a
bunch of people who did nothing against Americans and never tried to
attack us," Reppenhagen said.

The Iraq Veterans Against the War advocates an immediate pullout from
Iraq. Its members argue that violence occurs because people resent
the U.S. troop presence, and say the country will stabilize on its own.

"The people will take some pride in their country when there is no
one to hold their hand," Wilkerson said. "We can say there will be a
civil war (if the Americans leave), but there already is one."

.

AWOL Soldier Seeking Treatment Arrested

[3 articles]

Army Arrests Sergeant Who Went AWOL

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/nyregion/15awol.html

By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: November 15, 2007

A soldier who left his post at Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., without
leave more than a year ago to seek treatment for post-traumatic
stress disorder was arrested yesterday at a cafe eight miles from the
base as he was preparing to surrender, his lawyer said.

The soldier, Brad Gaskins, an Army sergeant who had served two tours
in Iraq, was speaking with a television reporter at the cafe when two
officers from the fort entered with two local police officers, who
took him away, his lawyer, Tod Ensign, said.

The officers returned Sergeant Gaskins to his unit, the Second
Brigade Combat Team. Whether he will face military prosecution will
be up to the unit's commanders, said Benjamin Abel, a spokesman at Fort Drum.

Sergeant Gaskins, 25, was transferred to Fort Drum after he returned
from his second tour of duty in Iraq in February 2006. Six months
later, he went home to East Orange, N.J., on leave and did not
return. Mr. Ensign, who is the director of Citizen Soldier, a
veterans' advocacy group in Manhattan, said the sergeant felt the
Army was not giving him adequate treatment.

"They just don't have the resources to handle it, but that's not my
fault," Sergeant Gaskins said at a news conference in Syracuse, just
hours before his arrest, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Abel said that soldiers who are absent without leave ­ or AWOL ­
for 30 days are classified as deserters and a federal warrant is
issued for their arrest.

Mr. Ensign said he had been negotiating Sergeant Gaskins's surrender
with a military prosecutor over the phone when the police officers
arrived. Mr. Abel said, however, that the Army does not negotiate the
surrender of a soldier who is AWOL. "It's the soldier's
responsibility to report to his place of duty," Mr. Abel said.

Sergeant Gaskins faces several options, Mr. Abel said. He could be
referred for medical treatment, discharged from the Army or
court-martialed. Sergeant Gaskins enlisted in the Army in 1999 and
took part in a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo before being deployed
to Iraq in 2003. He returned for a second tour in 2005, and part of
his job was to find roadside improvised explosive devices.

Mr. Ensign said that the sergeant's unit was ambushed many times and
that he witnessed the aftermath of several suicide bombings, which
compounded the emotional difficulties that had already started to flare up.

He has suffered from night terrors, flashbacks and insomnia, and he
has had suicidal thoughts, Mr. Ensign said. Once, after his wife came
home late and startled him awake, Sergeant Gaskins grabbed a knife
and chased her around the house, unaware of his actions, he said at
the news conference.

After the incident, the couple separated and his wife obtained a
temporary order of protection against him, Mr. Ensign said. During
his time at home, Sergeant Gaskins was allowed only supervised visits
with his 3-year-old son and his 9-year-old stepdaughter.

--------

AWOL Soldier Seeking Treatment Arrested

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i60QkM1qjeBw8KxpYe5O2svjHrYQD8STO8OG1

By WILLIAM KATES – 6 days ago

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) ­ A soldier who served two combat tours in Iraq
was arrested Wednesday for leaving the Army without permission more
than a year ago to seek treatment for post traumatic stress disorder.

At a news conference hours before his arrest, Sgt. Brad Gaskins said
he left the base in August 2006 because the Army wasn't providing
effective treatment after he was diagnosed with PTSD and severe depression.

"They just don't have the resources to handle it, but that's not my
fault," Gaskins said.

Tod Ensign, an attorney with Citizen Soldier, a GI rights group that
is representing Gaskins, said the case is part of a "coming tsunami"
of mental health problems involving Iraq and Afghanistan vets.

Last month, the Veterans Administration said more than 100,000
soldiers were being treated for mental health problems, and half of
those specifically for PTSD.

Gaskins, 25, of East Orange, N.J., was taken into custody at a
Watertown cafe by civilian police officers from Fort Drum and two
local police officers, Ensign said. The lawyer said he had been on
the phone with military prosecutors working out the details of
Gaskins' surrender when the soldier was arrested.

Fort Drum spokesman Ben Abel said after a soldier is AWOL for more
than 30 days he becomes classified as a deserter and a federal arrest
warrant is issued. He said he was unaware of the specifics of
Gaskins' case and declined to comment on it.

An eight-year Army veteran, Gaskins served two tours in Iraq and a
peacekeeping tour in Kosovo. He said his mental health began
deteriorating during his second tour in Iraq, which began in June
2005, when his job was to conduct road searches and locate improvised
explosive devices.

He said after returning to Fort Drum in February 2006, he began
suffering flashbacks and nightmares, headaches, sleeplessness, weight
loss and mood swings that took him from depression to irrational
rages. Military doctors sent him to the Samaritan Medical Center in
Watertown, where he spent two weeks and was diagnosed with PTSD. When
he later asked his commanders about returning to Samaritan, they told
him it would delay any chance he had at obtaining a medical release,
Gaskins said.

At the time, the Fort Drum mental health facility had a staff of a
dozen caring for approximately 17,000 troops, Ensign said.

Gaskins said that because he had been unable to get proper help, he
requested a two-week leave and went home to New Jersey, where he has
been living since.

The base has expanded its mental health facility staff to 31 in the
past year, with plans to add another 17 staffers, Abel said. "Is
there a need for more ­ yes," he said.

Gaskins said he hasn't been able to get a job because of his PTSD,
and that he and his wife have separated. He said he has only
supervised visitation rights with his two children.

Citizen Soldier previously represented Spc. Eugene Cherry, another
Fort Drum soldier who had faced a court-martial and a bad conduct
discharge after going AWOL to get treatment. The Army softened its
stance and gave Cherry a general discharge in July.

--------

AP Interview: Soldier charged with AWOL arrested at VA hospital

http://www.kentucky.com/471/story/235519.html

By JEFFREY McMURRAY
Associated Press Writer
Nov. 19, 2007

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- A Kentucky soldier facing his second tour of duty
in Iraq said in a jailhouse interview Monday that he was seeking
mental help at a veterans hospital when police showed up in the
middle of the night to arrest him.

Spc. Justin Faulkner, 22, of Stanton, Ky., is accused of being absent
without leave, even though he insists his superior officers at Fort
Campbell knew about his mental problems but refused to provide
adequate treatment.

Instead, he checked into a VA hospital Thursday in Lexington, and
doctors there told him they wanted to keep him until Monday for
observation. He wouldn't make it that long as police showed up at the
hospital shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday to take him to jail.

"It's humiliating, degrading," Faulkner said in an interview with The
Associated Press Monday afternoon, just minutes before his release
from the Fayette County Detention Center. "It's made me lose respect
for the military. To come and arrest me at the VA, it wasn't like I
was trying to hide, trying to run. I was getting help. I am being
punished for getting help."

Faulkner, who concluded a one-year tour of duty in Iraq in February
2006, was due to head back there Monday to join the rest of his unit.
He was released from jail on the condition he report back to Fort
Campbell Tuesday.

He said he would but insisted the Army would be "foolish" to send him
back considering the post-traumatic symptoms he has been experiencing
since realizing a few weeks ago that a return trip to Iraq was likely.

"I kept getting these flashbacks, these recurring scenes from when I
was over there the first time," Faulkner said. "I get these anxiety
attacks at night, and sometimes during the day, I daze off. I can't
get it out of my head. It wasn't until I was told I had to go back to
Iraq, something just clicked in my head - it was like reliving your
worst nightmare."

Faulkner's superior officer at Fort Campbell, Sgt. Donnie Burnett,
said he wasn't authorized to comment on Faulkner's case.

Fort Campbell spokeswoman Cathy Gramling said she couldn't comment on
specifics either because of privacy issues, but said, "there are
systems in place on the installation and through the chain of command
to ensure soldiers receive the treatment they require."

Faulkner said those systems just didn't work for him, though. He said
he went to a psychiatrist at Fort Campbell for several weeks, most
recently last Tuesday, but the drugs he was being prescribed didn't
help. That's when he checked into the VA hospital.

Faulkner's wife, Brandy, who is due with the couple's second son in
March, said his symptoms were real. She says in the past few weeks,
he has been constantly walking and talking in his sleep. She found
out about her husband's arrest when she got a call early Saturday
from somebody at the VA hospital.

"I was just outraged that somebody who fought for our country could
be treated like this," she said.

Faulkner acknowledges parts of his story may raise some doubts. For
example, he was in the National Guard during his first tour of duty
but voluntarily signed up for active duty, even though he had
questions about the lingering role of American forces in Iraq.

He explained civilian life - including work as a prison guard -
wasn't working for him, and the Army offered him a $20,000 bonus to
re-enlist. Not until his redeployment date got near did the symptoms
become unbearable, he said.

As for the war itself, Faulkner says he supports the soldiers but
believes it's time for the troops to come home.

"To me, we're fighting Bush's war that his dad couldn't finish," he said.

The arrest comes days after the Army announced soldiers are deserting
their posts at the highest rate since 1980. About nine in every 1,000
soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared
with seven in every 1,000 the previous year. Overall, 4,698 soldiers
deserted this year, compared with 3,301 last year.

Faulkner said he isn't surprised.

"When you're over there, you're keeping peace between two religious
communities," he said. "They see it as pointless going back risking
their lives to a war that's not going to make any effect on them. If
they need help, people need to help them."

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