Dilemmas of a War Resister

...While he was in Iraq, she had been expressing her opposition to the war, urging him to face what he was doing...

...A few years ago, Anthony Swofford caused a stir when, in Jarhead, he described American troops in the first Gulf War watching Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, commonly considered anti-war...

...Mejia is not a writer, and his plain project is to describe how he became the first active-duty soldier to refuse to return to the war in Iraq, declaring himself a conscientious objector...

...He finished community college and transferred to the University of Miami, which is when he learned the Guard would not pay for a private college...

...Resistance is the same in reverse, an ordinary act that only appears extraordinary by reflexes conditioned to obedience...

...That presents an artistic problem for the writer, one solved since Catch-22 by casting the war story as an antiwar story, the warrior protagonist as anti-hero, the cause as cynical or criminally vacuous...

...People can no more make love alone than they can make war, but there's a clearer, more ordinary path to the latter in the absence of a mass movement opening doors to an alternative reality...

...Protocol: The soldiers whom Mejia's unit relieved had been ordered to keep the Iraqis awake...

...When he awoke, if every other aspect of his future was a scary blur he could be confident that at least he would not confront it unaccompanied...

...As he slept, his mother didn't roust him out of bed or take any of the ordinary steps that would have made his leaving inevitable...

...But I don't know if I can take it mentally, what if that was me in their shoes...

...As is, it is important for its minor chords...

...Sabrina Harman, one of those ultimately convicted in the scandal, wrote a letter to her girlfriend describing what it was like on the job when "it was time to wake the MI [Military Intelligence] Prisoners": "I can't get it out of my head...

...Years later, when the low-level soldiers implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal were on trial, the government would portray them as oddities, "deviants...

...By October of 2003, the arrests made by soldiers like Mejia and his men kicking in doors across Iraq, helping themselves to the people's goods, brought thousands of inmates to Abu Ghraib...

...Mejia does not argue for an adjustment of definitions to allow for objection to some wars but not others...

...is not what they think...

...The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures to prove that the U.S...

...Were it not for the scandals of Abu Ghraib, Guant?namo, and elsewhere, Mejia's story of the way soldiers "broke down" detainees by keeping them scared and awake until they could be interrogated might be sensational...

...his mother, an organizer for the armed insurgency in poor neighborhoods of Managua and later from her native Costa Rica, where she'd taken her children...

...Ubiquity: This was not the only detention camp, nor was it a secret mission...

...By today's standard, the violence in Iraq was restrained then, and as he tells it Mejia seemed as bothered by his command's reckless desire for combat honors as by the fundamental wrong-ness of occupation...

...The benefits appeared attractive in 1995, but mostly, he writes, "I just wanted to be with a group of people with whom I shared something, to acquire a sense of belonging...

...As he slept he returned to her, no longer the Army's vassal but her son...

...The CO can be a clarifying presence here, and Mejia's book can have another perhaps unintended consequence, for the CO does not oppose war because he dislikes a warring faction's tactics or ideology or because he thinks another approach would be politically more efficacious...

...Mejia had similar thoughts, but figured out how to free himself...

...We're all on trial...

...Again I thought, OK that's funny then it hit me: That's a form of molestation...

...Morally frozen, he "took advantage of my rank and simply watched as others abused the detainees...

...It is not easily answered in any case...

...What of Mejia's parents...

...As almost any soldier will attest, though, war isn't hell, at least in the sense that art has imagined the fiery pit...

...He went to bed the night before his plane was to leave, and slept through its departure...

...For this act of resistance, which he recounts in the last eighty pages of the book, Mejia was sentenced to a year in prison, given a bad conduct discharge, and became a hero of antiwar forces in 2004...

...War, we understand, is hell...

...The right of resistance does not depend on the resisters' organization style or likeability...

...Certainly the beginnings of Camilo Mejia's life were not ordinary...

...except in one instance (and then perfunctorily), it would not try them for doing their jobs, using their imaginations to keep prisoners awake for interrogation, as Mejia and the men before, during, and after his stay at al Asad had done...

...He looked like Jesus Christ...

...At nineteen, he joined the U.S...

...He has not dignified war with the lurid grandeur of Satan's realm...

...Unlike Harman, who came home on leave and dutifully, silently, returned to Abu Ghraib, he came home and never went back, then he started speaking out...

...no one jacks off to tedium...

...For the individual, it is...

...Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges might have taken up the matter in his afterword, but instead represents a simple-minded anti-warism, declaring that "in war the old always sacrifice the young, the cynics send idealists to die...

...it was a contradiction he couldn't resolve...

...Mejia deserves better...

...After Somoza was toppled, they returned and lived among the Sandinista elite...

...One of the guys took my asp and started 'poking' at his dick...

...it would argue as if they had pioneered torture, and insist that the insurgency was fueled by their actions more than anything...

...Mejia for acting on his...

...At first I had to laugh so I went and grabbed the camera and took a picture...

...He was on leave and spent most of it trying to find a legal way out of the war...

...He opposes the war before it begins, and feels treasonous posing for a photograph with a sign saying, "Give Peace a Chance...

...His parents opposed his enlistment, but if young Camilo Ernesto ever had more than a passing thought about militarism, the history of U.S...

...He asserts himself as a pacifist, and recounts his journey to that point as a moral struggle...

...He said that for soldiers anticipating action, "The pleasure of the violent films is like the pleasure of cocaine or a good rough fuck...

...Camilo was a teenager when his mother lit out again with him and his brother and settled finally in Miami, where she worked as a supermarket cashier...

...I thought I could handle anything...

...When Harman wrote that, on October 20, 2003, before any of the infamous photographs were snapped, Mejia had already gone AWOL...

...There are standard ways of justifying the sort of things we were doing and I tried them all...

...His renunciation was undramatic...

...to use their combat training and forced by circumstance to suppress it...

...I am one of you, and this is my family too...

...It would prosecute them for the cruel form of fun they devised as relief from those jobs...

...Mejia does not plumb that question, partly out of a desire not to judge his fellow soldiers...

...Fundamentally Swofford's subject was boredom, more alluringly shaped as frustration, sexual rage, violence, the T-fueled frenzies of men with an itch JoAnn Wypijewski covered the Abu Ghraib trials at Fort Hood for Harper's Magazine...

...Both were ultimately prosecuted: Harman for failing to act on her conscience...

...Asking the questions like that does not imply equivalences...

...The competing principle is the right of a people to resist occupation, invasion, tyranny, by arms if necessary...

...He was born in revolutionary Nicaragua, to revolutionary parents: his father, a famous musician, radio personality and activist...

...He had had no epiphany moment, just a steady accretion of disgust...

...Then came 9/11, and then came "stop loss" (Mejia's contract expiration arbitrarily extended from 2003 to 2031) and the invasion of Iraq...

...The government would be consistent, though...

...Revolution receded into the background of routine: the father's infidelities, the mother's dissatisfactions and renewed migrations...

...History may not have been his compass, but it was hers...

...By eighteen, he was living an American cliche: mopping floors and flipping burgers, finishing high school at night, tired, lonely, and too broke for community college...

...Mejia defies that too...

...Mejia seems to have found his voice, in life and in the book, in the course of saying no...

...As we're seeing from soldier websites, soldier listserves, as we know from the thousands of troops who have gone AWOL (more than 1,700 between October 2006 and April 2007 alone), there is resistance among the troops, and there is support...

...The unsoldiered aren't used to thinking of war this way...

...You can't do that...

...That he found another kind of belonging among anti-war veterans and peace activists once he turned himself in and was made a symbol of rebellion mirrors more than negates that earlier affinity...

...At the end of his court-martial—his description of which captures the sinking experience of witnessing justice reduce to procedure—he tells the panel of jurors: "Yes, you have the power to convict me, to sentence me, to discharge me with a bad conduct discharge...

...But hell is thrilling or tragic or, for the more serious-minded, surreal—Hieronymus Bosch on crack— which is why literature loves Satan and the war story...

...I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp to find 'the taxicab driver' handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face...

...Before getting there, in May of 2003, Mejia observes the petty bickering, one-upmanship, arbitrary punishments, and humiliations among the men mustered in Jordan...

...Pulling hard on a cigarette, he said he sometimes wondered how he could face his little daughters knowing the truth of what he'd done...

...In his handling, war is the extraordinary made ordinary—murder or its prospect reduced to patrols, logistics, and the setting up of perimeters...

...Yet, to succeed critically and commercially, even the most anti-war war story must be sensational, a journey into the outer strange, a kind of necro-porn...

...it is a sequence of numbingly dull stretches of time punctuated by unspeakable horror...

...After five years, he was attached to the Florida National Guard...

...In the end, it may be an accident of birth that distinguished Mejia from Harman and from all those who can't bring themselves to say no...

...At Fort Hood in Texas, where she was tried and where Mejia had begun his career in the Army, I met a returned soldier who looked out into the black night, shifted from foot to foot and, spitting almost compulsively, told me, "As long as I live, I can never do enough good to make up for all the bad I've done...

...But no one in command worried about niceties of law...

...Anyone could do what I did, he seems to say: acquiesce to torture, help a stranger, kill a man, face jail rather than do it again...

...It is not clear that was the intent...

...Was the ANC wrong to create an armed wing to complement the mass nonviolent resistance...

...Swofford is a writer, so he transformed tedium into something vivid...

...they used their imaginations and demonstrated their techniques for Mejia's unit, which would pass them on when it was relieved...

...Are the Iraqis wrong to fight back today...

...He had a daughter by his girlfriend, but afterward they broke up...

...He told himself he'd catch a plane the next day, but he kept on sleeping...

...Then he skips on breathlessly to note that "Mejia is the son of Nicaraguan revolutionaries," as if there were no contradiction or even dilemma wedged between the two statements...

...By JoAnn Wypijewski It is an odd accomplishment that Camilo Mejia has written a war story that is mostly a bore...

...In a political culture fastened on gods and monsters, Mejia's book compels us to appreciate the motive force of the mundane...

...He takes the hard line, on principle...

...And yet one final question nags about that freedom...

...He clashes with his command and, by now a squad leader, is told by his platoon sergeant "to put a little more testosterone into your leadership style...

...What makes one person the hero and another the goat...

...At the end of the book he writes, "Even if all those lies [used to justify war on Iraq] had turned out to be true, there is no doubt in my heart that, today, I still would hate and oppose all war...

...While looking for a way out of the war, Mejia contacted a soldier support group that encouraged him to apply for conscientious objector status...

...He became an infantryman and collected good ratings from his superiors...

...Mejia does not expand on that, but clearly he has pondered it, and the book invites its consideration...

...Their first mission in Iraq is at a makeshift prison camp called al Asad, where detainees were being tortured...

...Army...

...neither should peace be romanticized back to the playroom...

...Not many people know this shit goes on...

...they did a job, or they watched...

...His legal residency status was about to expire, and Army regulations clearly stated that noncitizen soldiers may not be kept beyond their contracts...

...The enemy was getting an advantage on his men, and the enemy was the Iraqi people...

...I was wrong...

...The photographs taken with Harman's camera furnished the government with its best prosecution evidence, but she didn't turn them in...

...Timing: The war had barely begun, and Iraqis were being rounded up and tortured...

...The ar Ramadi of the book's title is a city in the Sunni triangle that would be the main assignment for Mejia's Guard unit...

...I took more pictures now to 'Record' what is going on...

...He was twenty-eight, and besides kicking in doors and terrorizing families, he mostly called in artillery to flatten their neighborhoods...

...Were the Sandinistas wrong to overthrow Somoza, to fight the contras...

...For those of us who have not been forced to wrestle with the issue ourselves, the inspiration taken from the conscientious objector can be too easy, though, like a sixties poster: "War is not healthy for children and other living things...

...He had joined the Army for a sense of belonging, and until the war, despite the usual disagreements, he did find it there...

...depredations upon his native land, the meaning of his own name— inspired by the revolutionary Colombian priest Camilo Torres and by Ernesto Che Guevara—he does not let on...

...I have been a bad soldier according to you, and you have that much power, but [remember] I am part of the military...

...The weight of what a soldier knows makes empty talk of heroics...

...The publisher's promotional material calls his experience "extraordinary...

...Now I feel free...

...But that support is not part of a ubiquitous counterculture, so resistance can feel like an individual affair just when individualism is most threatening...

...Not just me, sitting here, but everybody here in uniform, everybody in this country...

...Accommodation: Most of the soldiers were not sadists...

...On the other, I was afraid of speaking up for them and appearing soft and weak as a squad leader, perhaps even being charged with insubordination and court-martialed...

...Maintenance: In ar Ramadi, Mejia's unit's mission consisted of repetitive patrols, constant fear, near-constant sleeplessness, the rare fire-fight, habitual house searches, and arrests of suspected Iraqi insurgents, who would go on to detention camps like al Asad and, ultimately, Abu Ghraib...

...Mejia feels bad about this: "On one hand I was completely against the way the prisoners in the camp were being treated...

...Of course it isn't, but what if your children are being killed, starved, denied a future...