Month: February 2007

By Susan Van Haitsma

CounterPunch / CommonDreams

My favorite photograph of Mark Wilkerson shows him smiling, looking relaxed. He is standing in a grove of trees whose trunks radiate outward from his image as though they are drawing life from him. One side of his face glows with reflected sunshine. He wears a black “Iraq Veterans Against the War” T-shirt with a small star over his heart.

I first met Mark on the grounds of the Texas Capitol during a peace demonstration on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, 2004. Mark was stationed at Ft. Hood, and he and his wife had driven down to attend their first anti-war demonstration in Austin. I didn’t know then the extent of Mark’s experience in Iraq, but he looked stressed, his eyes circled with dark shadows. He exuded nervous energy.

He looked at the materials on our Nonmilitary Options for Youth table and described how he had been recruited through the JROTC program in high school with assurances that he would receive training to become a peacekeeper. At the demonstration, Mark met local members of Veterans for Peace, who understood more profoundly than I the internal and external battles he was facing.

Mark had served one tour of duty in Iraq, during which he had begun to question both the morality and the practicality of the invasion and occupation. Assigned to the military police, he participated in house raids and arrests of Iraqi citizens. He witnessed the effects of the occupation on Iraqi civilians and the change in attitude toward US soldiers. He began suffering serious post-traumatic stress and underwent a crisis of conscience about his participation in the army.

He filed for a discharge as a conscientious objector in March 2004. When his claim was denied 8 months later, he appealed the decision, but soon learned that his unit was about to be deployed to Iraq for a second tour. Stuck between honoring his conscience and obeying orders to deploy, he went AWOL in January 2005.

Mark was AWOL for about 18 months. During that time, he said the nightmares didn’t stop. He also felt at sea, as though he could not move forward with his life. He worked long hours, trying to save for a future that might include prison. Just before he turned himself in at Ft. Hood in August 2006, he held a press conference at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX.

Flanked by other GI resisters and supportive members of Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace, Mark confidently and eloquently expressed his reasons for having left the military and his reasons for returning to the base to accept the consequences.

When I saw Mark Wilkerson last on February 22, 2007, he was embracing his family shortly before being handcuffed and walked to a van outside the Major General Lawrence H. Williams Judicial Center at Fort Hood, Texas following his sentencing by a military judge to seven months of confinement, demotion in rank and a bad conduct discharge for desertion and missing movement.

During the court-martial proceedings, several family members and officers in Mark’s chain of command were called as character witnesses. Mark’s wife described how, several months into his tour, his letters began to include doubts about his mission. During his first 2-week leave, she saw that Mark had changed. He was restless, bothered and “set off by little things. There was an edge to him that hadn’t been there before.” When he returned to Iraq, Mark felt increasing hopelessness about his mission, yet he performed his duties admirably, as his commanding officers testified.

After his tour, Mark had emotional battles, nightmares, and one night, a breakdown. “My body and my mind had never felt that way before,” he said. He explained that when he was home, family and friends “were treating me like some sort of hero,” but he felt nothing like a hero inside. He hesitated to ask for help in the military “because an unsaid rule is that we’re not supposed to rock the boat.” Even after he filed his conscientious objector claim, he was advised to refrain from seeking PTSD counseling while the case was pending.

In Mark’s court-martial, the fact that his conscientious objector claim had been denied prior to a looming second deployment could not be used as a defense to the charges of desertion and missing movement to which he pleaded guilty. However, it is important to note that the conscientious objector approval process in the military is considered by many to be a broken system.

By law, the military must allow soldiers to apply for discharge as conscientious objectors when they have experienced, after enlisting, a “crystallization” of their moral, ethical or religious beliefs about participating in war. However, J.E. McNeil, director of the Center on Conscience & War, says that, according to military figures, only about 50 percent of CO claims are being approved, and anecdotal evidence suggests the percentage may be even lower.

“They throw as many roadblocks in your way as they possibly can,” she says. “The process takes incredibly long, and it really doesn’t have to. They don’t really follow their own regulations. They treat it as an annoyance.”

Unlike the case of First Lt. Ehren Watada, the illegality of the Iraq war was not used as a point of defense in Mark’s court-martial. However, at one point, the military judge asked if there wasn’t an inconsistency inherent in Mark’s guilty plea. Was his intent to “shirk a duty,” or to resist an unjust war? If he was saying he was wrong to desert, was he also saying he was wrong to act on his conscience? Both defense and prosecuting attorneys stated that they saw no inconsistency, and the judge laid aside the concern.

The brief interchange touched on what may be the crux of the dilemma faced by soldiers in all wars. What is a soldier’s duty? The prosecuting attorneys in Mark’s case stressed that he “shirked his important service” when he was “absent by design.” He was told that he “abandoned the Army family that would embrace him.” Soldiers commonly say that when they are on the battlefield, they are not fighting to protect liberty or democracy; they are fighting for the soldiers on their right and left. If they are compelled by conscience to embrace a larger human family that extends to their adversary, it’s no wonder that their expanded sense of duty presents a problem for the military and themselves.

One of the prosecuting attorneys distinguished between being a good soldier and a good public citizen. “This dichotomy must be maintained,” he said.

But, human beings simply cannot divide themselves into two separate beings with two separate moral codes and two separate sets of behaviors. Attempts to do so are injurious, and soldiers who suffer from PTSD know this.

Part of Mark Wilkerson’s defense centered on his achievements in high school as a teenager with a keen interest in peacemaking. Following a serious family violence crisis when he was 12 years old that was described in detail during his court-martial, Mark adopted a strong leadership role in his family, his school and community. He used the tragedy to become more determined to prevent violence. He wanted above all to help people, to be a healer and a reconciler.

Mark wanted to help his country, but his country betrayed him. His country capitalized on his honorable intentions, gave him false promises, fed him misinformation, used him to carry out inhumane missions, caused him psychological injury and then punished him by making him an object lesson for his fellow GI’s.

In fact, Mark is an example of the best kind, for all of us. In the same courtroom where soldiers were sentenced for harming Abu Ghraib prisoners, Mark was sentenced for refusing to harm. In his final testimony, Mark’s plainspoken optimism rose above the contradictions of his surroundings.

“I’m ready to live the life I know I can live,” he said. “I still want to help people, to be useful. I always lived by a certain moral code. I know whatever I do, I’ll do it well. I look forward to being able to do it.”

Mark Wilkerson’s blog is www.markwilkerson.wordpress.com. Susan Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net

By Susan Van Haitsma

DissidentVoice / CommonDreams

The young woman and I talked into the night as we headed south on a Greyhound bus. Each minute of conversation carried us physically farther from but perhaps emotionally closer to the enlisted man she had married just three days prior. The wedding she had arranged and paid for in their home town had to be canceled because his leave was revoked at the last minute, so she had traveled across the country for a visit with him that included a quick civil ceremony at the courthouse nearest his base.

She described in almost comical terms their attempt at a honeymoon, braving subzero temperatures with bodies unused to a northern climate, with his close-shaven head and light sailor hat and her thin jeans, to walk downtown to see the sights. When she couldn’t feel her legs anymore, she told him, “Baby, I’m sure this is a nice place. Send me some pictures. But, for now, get me out of here!”

She said that they ate at the McDonald’s on base, “where their logo has a little anchor hanging on it – it’s kind of cute.” She didn’t expect the food prices to be so high there, nor had she or her husband counted on other expenses of military life when they had decided jointly on his enlistment several months ago. This hadn’t been her first trip to see him, and she hoped that she could go again by train in the coming weeks, bringing along her two children. But, she wondered if she could afford the travel, or even the purchase of winter clothing for her children. There were also the added costs of keeping up two households, as she put it – “his and ours.”

She said that they had decided he should enlist in order to help support their family, but now she realized that the support they really needed was his presence at home.

Although I was a stranger, my seat-mate expressed her concerns with a frankness that had not yet been altered by the ‘culture of silence’ that often engulfs military family members. With surprise rather than self-pity, she noted the ways her husband had already changed since basic training.

She described his new obsession with order, his habit of lining up his shoes and even his toothbrush and toothpaste in precise, parallel fashion. She said that he suggested she do the same. He was more acutely aware of the time, of the number of minutes necessary to accomplish daily tasks. He walked in front of her instead of by her side. In his sleep, he called out as though he was responding to orders. She explained that he used to show his affection for her liberally in public and private ways, but now he was aloof, turning away from her in bed even during their honeymoon weekend.

Another unexpected consequence of being a military spouse was the paper work she had been required to sign in the case of her husband’s death. She described feeling physically sick as she and her husband listened to an official explain the necessary procedures: the personal effects that would be sent to her, the body, the funeral. Because he was in the Navy rather than the Army, she hadn’t foreseen such a discussion taking place in the first hours of their marriage. The death talk compounded her worry because he told her rumors had been circulating that his unit might soon be shipped to the Middle East.

I asked my seat-mate what reasons, beyond the financial security they had hoped for but that so far had proven illusory, had guided their decision about her husband’s enlistment. She said that he “had a problem with authority” and had been fired from a series of jobs, so he felt that the military would help him achieve the discipline he needed.

I confided to my seat-mate that the “I need more discipline” motivation is one of the most perplexing reasons for enlistment that I hear, and I hear it frequently. Self-discipline and coercion are opposites. But, I didn’t really need to explain that paradox to my seatmate, who already had described how the brand of discipline her husband was learning was leading to family separation rather than the family protection they were promised.

My heart aches when I think of the significant challenges this young couple faces, but I also am heartened by the fact that they are asking questions and discussing the discrepancies between what they know and what they are told. My valentine to them reads, “Question authority always.”

That jealous lover, Uncle Sam, pointed his long finger and shot an arrow into the joined hearts of this couple and said, “I want you to be mine.” But, they had pledged their hearts to one another, not to him.