http://i3.democracynow.org/2008/6/17/us_army_sergeant_matthis_chiroux_refuses
Sergeant Matthis Chiroux served in the Army for five years, with
tours in Afghanistan, Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Last month,
Chiroux announced he would not deploy to Iraq. On Sunday, Father's
Day, the deadline for him to report for active duty expired.
June 17, 2008
Guest:
Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, served in the Army until being honorably
discharged last summer after over four years of service in
Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Philippines. On Sunday, he
publicly announced his intention to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.
He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
--
AMY GOODMAN: A US Army reservist who publicly refused to deploy to
Iraq last month may face prosecution from the military after refusing
to report for active duty with his unit in South Carolina.
Sergeant Matthis Chiroux served in the Army for five years, with
tours in Afghanistan, Japan, Germany and the Philippines. He was
honorably discharged last summer and was placed in the Individual
Ready Reserves, a pool of former soldiers who can be "reactivated"
and ordered to deploy to war.
Last month, Sergeant Chiroux announced he would not deploy to Iraq.
He made the announcement in the Capitol Hill Rotunda after members of
Iraq Veterans Against the War testified before the Congressional
Progressive Caucus during Winter Soldier on the Hill.
On Sunday, Father's Day, the deadline for Chiroux to report for
active duty expired. Chiroux now joins us from Washington, D.C.
Matthis Chiroux, welcome to Democracy Now!
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Good morning, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So tell us what is happening right now. When were you
supposed to deploy or report for active duty?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: OK, I was supposed to report Sunday, Father's
Day. I did not. I was in Washington, D.C. with the Iraq Veterans
Against the War at their chapter house. I gave a short speech on the
porch of our house there, and I stood with my dad, and I kept my
promise to the military, I kept my promise to my country, to refuse
an illegal order to participate in an unlawful occupation.
AMY GOODMAN: So what happens now?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Well, right now it's turned into a bit of a
waiting game, as far as the military goes. You know, I made my
intentions clear, and then I followed through on them, and I'm
waiting to hear from the military.
There's no real way I can know what consequences to face here. You
know, many, many members of the Individual Ready Reserve, about
15,000 of them, have been called up since the beginning of this
occupation of Iraq, and only 7,500 of them have reported. So there's
about half there that's unaccounted for. And many of those
individuals have been ignored by the military, as they should be. It
is an illegal order to call up and deploy to Iraq. Others have been
charged with desertion. So, during a time of war, actually, desertion
can be punishable by death. So, you know, my spectrum of consequence
is in the situation range literally anywhere from nothing to death.
So I will wait faithfully in the United States, as I promised to do,
to see how the military will react.
AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Matthis Chiroux, why did you sign up and when
did you sign up?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: I signed up about a month after I got out of
high school. I was a very, very poor student in Auburn, Alabama. I
graduated high school with nothing more than a 2.1, no real money in
my bank account, no prospects for a good job or education. And, you
know, I joined the military primarily looking for personal progress,
though after enlisting and after spending 4th of July, you know,
three weeks before I reported for basic training here in Washington,
D.C. with my mother, I also felt proud about the fact that I would be
participating in the global war on terror, to bring to justice those
individuals who perpetrated 9/11, or the events of 9/11, anyway, on
this country. So I joined both out of a desire to pave a way forward
to a career and to university and also to spend some time serving the nation.
AMY GOODMAN: And what year was it that you signed up?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: 2002. I was in the military from August 1,
2002I reported to basic training at Fort Knox, Kentuckyto July 31,
2007, when I was honorably discharged from Heidelberg, Germany.
AMY GOODMAN: When did you go to Iraq?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: I've never been to Iraq, ma'am. This would have
been my first tour. Fortunatelywell, by nothing more than good
fortune, my five years in the military, all after September 11th, I
was never asked to deploy to Iraq. And I'm quite thankful for that,
because I think I would have been facing a very similar situation as I am now.
I havethere has never been any lack of disgust for the Iraq
occupation on my behalf. You know, I remember quite clearly watching
the invasion while I was still in Army journalism school in Fort
Meade, Maryland. I remember watching it on my company's big screen
television and feeling entirely shocked and awed to see what was
going on at the other end of those cameras in Baghdad and know that
our actions were not sanctioned by the international community and
were, you know, coming onat the word of a few people who were saying
Saddam Hussein is a threat. So since that time, since the invasion,
I've been against this occupation to various degrees. But
fortunately, I was never unlawfully asked to serve there until now.
AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Afghanistan, I went to in 2005, although only
for a very short stint. I was an Army journalist working for General
B.B. Bell at the time. He was still the commander of US Army Europe.
And we went down to catch up with a unit from Hohenfels, Germany, a
training unit that was in fact only supposed to be assisting other
soldiers who were training in Hohenfels, Germany. They had been
deployed as a non-deployable unit under the direct command of a
Romanian battalion, and I went down to Afghanistan to tell the
stories of those soldiers deployed with that unit.
But, Amy, my combat experience is very limited, and I don't want
anybody to feel like I'm trying to hide that point. I never
discharged a round in a combat zone, and I never took one, either.
But that does not make me any less qualified to determine or to
choose between, as I'm required to, a lawful and an unlawful order
and either following or refusing those orders alike.
AMY GOODMAN: Matthis Chiroux, you were a military reporter?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Yes, Amy, I was.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you do?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Well, I spent a lot of time writing stories and
taking photographs in the interest of the commands that I served.
It's a smaller career field in the Army, but it's a very highly
creative and independent field, where you spend a lot of time
producing, like I said, stories, photographs, coordinating
interviews, coordinating transportation to wind up where you need to
be to conduct your interviews and produce a story, basically just
like anything any civilian journalist would do, except at the end of
the day my duty was not as much to the truth as it was to the truth
that the Army wanted not just its soldiers to see it, but civilians
on the outside.
So, you know, for example, I once did a story about a Romanian
soldier who had been wounded in Afghanistan. He had had his leg blown
off by a mine, and I went to interview him at the hospital to produce
a reallyyou know, to produce a piece for the US Army Europe
quarterly magazine about basically how we, as the American Army, were
so generous by agreeing to treat a coalition soldier in a US Army
hospital. Now, this story came at quite a personal expense for me.
When I went to do it at the hospital, he was one out of about, I
believe, sixty-five men and women who had lost limbs in either
Afghanistan or Iraq, and I went to do the story about the Romanian
guy, ignoring the dozens of other American troops who had also been
suffering greatly in combat, but their stories could not make us
look, I guess, nearly as well as this Romanian guy who we were caring for.
And, you know, I'll never actually forget leaving the ward that day.
And there was a young man, couldn't have been more than nineteen
years old, lying on a gurney, and he was missing both arms and legs,
and he looked over at me, because I had the camera, and I was there
with the story, and he said, "Hey, are you a journalist?" And I said,
"Yeah, I'm from the US Army Europe, and I'm here to cover this story
about this Romanian troop right down the hall. Do you know him?" And
to which he just got really quiet and distant and looked at me and
said, "Sixty-five blue-blooded Americans on this hall, and the
journalist shows up to do the story about the Romanian. That's cold-blooded."
And I remember looking back at this young man and havingfeeling like
my diaphragm was being sucked down my thighs, because what could I
tell this guy? You know, "Yes, I am here to do the happy, rosy story
about the Romanian who's getting taken care of. I'm not here to talk
to you. Andbut that's my job, just as it was your job to do whatever
you were doing when you got your legs blown off." It was my job to
produce stories in the manner which my leadership told me to write
them and told me to produce them.
So, situations like thatI mean, that's a particularly poignant one
for me in my mind, but typically situations like that, where I would
be telling a story, I would be writing a story based in fact, based
in quote, but I would also be limiting the scope of that story to the
topic which would make the military look like it was really taking
care of its people, make it look like it was really taking care of
coalition troops and, you know, make it look like it was really
accomplishing something, either in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any place in
the world that I served. I had the very unique experience of spending
more than four-and-a-half years overseas.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you raise that story, Matthis, with your editor? Did you say
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Absolutely, I did. Yes, I did. I raised it, and
I told him I thought it was terrible and that actually that
experience kind of affected mewell, very much affected me for
awhile. And, you know, it came less than a year before I got out of
the military. And that wasthat one was what put the nail in the
coffin for me. I didn'tI was disgusted that I was being ordered to,
like I said, produce a story about this guy, to go in and have to
interview a man who has had his leg blown off in somebody else's war
not but a week earlier and to not be able to report about the fact
that when I interviewed him, I was in full protective gear, because
this young man had contracted a bacteria from the sands of
Afghanistan that is spreading pretty rampantly, or at least at the
time was, through Army hospitals all over the world, and he was
inside an isolation chamber where, you know, all the oxygen was
flowing in, rather than out, to try and keep his bacteria contained. And
AMY GOODMAN: What was the bacteria?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: I believe it started with an "A." I'm not a
doctor, but it was something like "acetobacteria" or something like that.
AMY GOODMAN: And you didn't describe what he looked like, where he was?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Absolutely not. Well, I took a couple of photos
of him. You know, those are still out around online. But I didn't
AMY GOODMAN: And did the military newspaper run the photos?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: It was posted on a website. It was released on
a military newswire. As well, it was published in US Army Europe's
quarterly magazine, which I helped to, you know, shoot for, write,
edit and produce, EurArmy magazine.
AMY GOODMAN: You just couldn't explain why he was in
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: No, I didn'tI didn't reportI didn't report on
the bacteria.
AMY GOODMAN: You just couldn't explain why he was in that isolation chamber.
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Well, I knew why he was in that isolation
chamber, but the fact is, for us to be broadcasting to the world, you
know, however necessary it may be that we have a Romanian soldier
here that's in isolation, not but a week after, you know, having his
leg blown off, because he's got a bacteria that's spreading
throughout all kinds of Army hospitals, you know, that does not paint
the rosy picture that the military requires most of its journalists to paint.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did your editors say when you asked if you
could cover the US soldiers, like the one who had his arms and legs blown off?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Well, I didn't ask "Could I?" I asked why we
didn't, why we wouldn't. And she said it's not in line with our
strategic goals. We had a strategy map for US Army Europe, a command
information strategy map, which outlined about seven or eight
different points that we wanted to be advertising to the world and to
our soldiers. And I believe while one of them was talk about US Army
Europe healthcare and why it's so good and so top-notch, but one of
the main strategic goals of working for that magazine was to foster
positive relationships between the US military and militaries of
emerging allies in the East, such as Romania or Poland, you know, all
of these former bloc states and just Eastern states that are now
contributing troops to efforts both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Matthis Chiroux, we only have fifty seconds
left on the satellite, and I want to ask you what happens to you now.
On Sunday, you announced you're not going to report for duty. Are you
AWOL? Are you absent without leave?
SGT. MATTHIS CHIROUX: Well, I'm not absent without leave until they
tell me I'm absent without leave. To me, I'm following the US
Constitution. I'm upholding the law, and I'm going to continue
behaving as such. I refuse to be labeled or be shamed by these
actions. I refuse to behave like a criminal. I am going to stay here
in Washington, D.C., until at least Thursday. I've been here for the
past two-and-a-half weeks lobbying members of Congress to come out in
official support of resisters to the Iraq occupation for cause of its
unconstitutional nature, as well as being waged in violation of
international laws and the like. I believe we've made progress, and I
believeThursday, I believe members of Congress will be coming out in
support of war resisters.
AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Matthis Chiroux, we're going to leave it there,
and I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, as of
Sunday, he has publicly announced that he is refusing orders to deploy to Iraq.
.
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