[MKE - Indymedia] U.S. soldiers Breaking Ranks

[Brandon Bauer]

Breaking Ranks
More and more U.S. soldiers are speaking out against the war in Iraq -- and 
some are refusing to fight.
By David Goodman
Mother Jones
October 11, 2004

MIKE HOFFMAN would not be the guy his buddies would expect to see leading a 
protest movement. The son of a steelworker and a high school janitor from 
Allentown, Pennsylvania, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999 as an 
artilleryman to “blow things up.” His transformation into an activist came 
the hard way—on the streets of Baghdad.

When Hoffman arrived in Kuwait in February 2003, his unit’s highest-ranking 
enlisted man laid out the mission in stark terms. “You’re not going to make 
Iraq safe for democracy,” the sergeant said. “You are going for one reason 
alone: oil. But you’re still going to go, because you signed a contract. And 
you’re going to go to bring your friends home.” Hoffman, who had his own 
doubts about the war, was relieved—he’d never expected to hear such a candid 
assessment from a superior. But it was only when he had been in Iraq for 
several months that the full meaning of the sergeant’s words began to sink 
in.

“The reasons for war were wrong,” he says. “They were lies. There were no 
WMDs. Al Qaeda was not there. And it was evident we couldn’t force democracy 
on people by force of arms.”

When he returned home and got his honorable discharge in August 2003, 
Hoffman says, he knew what he had to do next. “After being in Iraq and 
seeing what this war is, I realized that the only way to support our troops 
is to demand the withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq.” He cofounded a 
group called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and soon found himself 
emerging as one of the most visible members of a small but growing movement 
of soldiers who openly oppose the war in Iraq.

Dissent on Iraq within the military is not entirely new. Even before the 
invasion, senior officers were questioning the optimistic projections of the 
Pentagon’s civilian leaders, and several retired generals have strongly 
criticized the war. But now, nearly two years after the first troops rolled 
across the desert, rank-and-file soldiers and their families are 
increasingly speaking up. Hoffman’s group was founded in July with 8 members 
and had grown to 40 by September. Another organization, Military Families 
Speak Out, began with 2 families two years ago and now represents more than 
1,700 families. And soldier-advocacy groups are reporting a rising number of 
calls from military personnel who are upset about the war and are thinking 
about refusing to fight; a few soldiers have even fled to Canada rather than 
go to Iraq.

In a 2003 Gallup Poll, nearly one-fifth of the soldiers surveyed said they 
felt the situation in Iraq had not been worth going to war over. In another 
poll, in Pennsylvania last August, 54 percent of households with a member in 
the military said the war was the “wrong thing to do”; in the population as 
a whole, only 48 percent felt that way. Doubts about the war have 
contributed to the decline of troop morale over the past year—and may, some 
experts say, be a factor in the 40 percent increase in Army suicide rates in 
Iraq in the past year. “That’s the most basic tool a soldier needs on the 
battlefield—a reason to be there,” says Paul Rieckhoff, a platoon leader in 
the New York National Guard and former JPMorgan banker who served in Iraq. 
Rieckhoff has founded a group called Operation Truth, which provides a 
freewheeling forum for soldiers’ views on the war. “When you can’t 
articulate that in one sentence, it starts to affect morale. You had an 
initial rationale for war that was a moving target. [But] it was a shell 
game from the beginning, and you can only bullshit people for so long.”

With his baggy pants, red goatee, and moussed hair, Mike Hoffman looks more 
like a guy taking some time off after college than a 25-year-old combat 
veteran. But the urgency in his voice belies his relaxed appearance; he 
speaks rapidly, consumed with the desire to get his point across. As we talk 
at a coffee shop in Vermont after one of his many speaking engagements, he 
concedes, “A lot of what I’m doing is basically survivor’s guilt. It’s hard: 
I’m home. I’m fine. I came back in one piece. But there are a lot of people 
who haven’t.”

More than a year after his return from Iraq, Hoffman is still battling 
depression, panic attacks, and nightmares. “I don’t know what I did,” he 
says, noting that errors and faulty targeting were common in the artillery. 
“I came home and read that six children were killed in an artillery strike 
near where I was. I don’t really know if that was my unit or a British unit. 
But I feel responsible for everything that happened when I was there.”

When he first came home, Hoffman says, he tried to talk to friends and 
family about his experience. It was not a story most wanted to hear. “One of 
the hardest things when I came back was people who were slapping me on the 
back saying ‘Great job,’” he recalls. “Everyone wants this to be a good war 
so they can sleep at night. But guys like me know it’s not a good war. 
There’s no such thing as a good war.”

Hoffman finally found some kindred spirits last fall when he discovered 
Veterans For Peace, the 19-year-old antiwar group. Older veterans encouraged 
him to speak at rallies, and steadily, he began to connect with other 
disillusioned Iraq vets. In July, at the Veterans For Peace annual meeting 
in Boston, Hoffman announced the creation of Iraq Veterans Against the War. 
The audience of silver-haired vets from wars in Vietnam, Korea, and World 
War II exploded into applause. Hoffman smiles wryly. “They tell us we’re the 
rock stars of the antiwar movement.”

Several of Hoffman’s Marine Corps buddies have now joined Iraq Veterans 
Against the War, and the stream of phone calls and emails from other 
soldiers is constant. Not long ago, he says, a soldier home on leave from 
Iraq told him, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, because you’ve got more 
support than you can imagine over there.”

Members of IVAW led the protest march that greeted the Republican convention 
in New York, and their ranks swelled that week. But the protest’s most 
poignant moment came after the march, as veterans from wars past and present 
retreated to Summit Rock in Central Park. Joe Bangert, a founding member of 
Vietnam Veterans of America, addressed the group. “One of the most painful 
things when we returned from Vietnam was that the veterans from past wars 
weren’t there for us,” he said. “They didn’t support us in our questioning 
and our opposition to war. And I just want to say,” he added, peering 
intently at the younger veterans, “we are here for you. We have your back.”

There was no Iraq veterans’ group for Brandon Hughey to turn to in December 
2003. Alone and terrified, sitting in his barracks at Fort Hood, Texas, the 
18-year-old private considered his options. He could remain with his Army 
unit, which was about to ship out to Iraq to fight a war that Hughey was 
convinced was pointless and immoral. Or he could end his dilemma—by taking 
his own life.

Desperate, Hughey trolled the Internet. He emailed a peace activist and 
Vietnam veteran in Indianapolis, Carl Rising-Moore, who made him an offer: 
If he was serious about his opposition to the war, Rising-Moore said, he 
would help him flee to Canada.

The next day, there was a knock on Hughey’s door: His deployment date had 
been moved up, and his unit was leaving within 24 hours. Hughey packed his 
belongings in a military duffel, jumped in his car, and drove north. As he 
and Rising-Moore approached the Rainbow Bridge border post at Niagara Falls, 
Hughey was nervous and somber. “I had the sense that once I crossed that 
border, I might never be able to go back,” he recalls. “It made me sad.”

Months after fleeing Fort Hood, the baby-faced 19-year-old still sports a 
military-style buzz cut. Sitting at the kitchen table of the Quaker family 
that is sheltering him in St. Catharines, Ontario, Hughey tells me about 
growing up in San Angelo, Texas, where he was raised by his father. In high 
school he played trumpet and loved to soup up cars. But when his father lost 
his job as a computer programmer, he was forced to use up his son’s college 
fund. So at 17, Hughey enlisted in the Army, with a $5,000 signing bonus to 
sweeten the deal.

Quiet and unassuming, Hughey grows intense when the conversation turns to 
Iraq. “I would fight in an act of defense, if my home and family were in 
danger,” he says. “But Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They barely 
had an army left, and Kofi Annan actually said [attacking Iraq was] a 
violation of the U.N. charter. It’s nothing more than an act of aggression.” 
As for his duty to his fellow soldiers, he insists, “You can’t go along with 
a criminal activity just because others are doing it.”

So far, only six U.S. soldiers are known to have fled to Canada rather than 
fight in Iraq. But in 2003, the Army listed more than 2,774 soldiers as 
deserters (military personnel are classified as having deserted after not 
reporting for duty for more than a month), and many observers believe the 
actual number may be even higher; the Army has acknowledged that it is not 
aggressively hunting down soldiers who don’t show up. The GI Rights Hotline, 
a counseling operation run by a national network of antiwar groups, reports 
that it now receives between 3,000 and 4,000 calls per month from soldiers 
seeking a way out of the military. Some of the callers simply never thought 
they would see combat, says J.E. McNeil, director of the Center on 
Conscience and War. But others are turning against the war because of what 
they saw while serving in Iraq, and they don’t want to be sent back there. 
“It’s people learning what war really is,” she says. “A lot of people are 
naive—and for a while, the military was portraying itself as being a peace 
mission.”

Unlike Vietnam, when young men facing the draft could convincingly claim 
that they opposed all war, enlistees in a volunteer military have a tough 
time qualifying as conscientious objectors. In the Army, 61 soldiers applied 
for conscientious objector status last year, and 31 of those applications 
were granted. “The Army does understand people can have a change of heart,” 
notes spokeswoman Martha Rudd. “But you can’t ask for a conscientious 
objector discharge based on moral or religious opposition to a particular 
war.”

Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey may be the most unlikely of the soldiers who 
have come out against the war. A Marine since 1992, he has been a recruiter, 
infantry instructor, and combat platoon leader. He went to Iraq primed to 
fight. “9/11 pissed me off,” he says. “I was ready to go kill a raghead.”

Shortly after Massey arrived in Iraq, his unit was ordered to man 
roadblocks. To stop cars, the Marines would raise their hands. If the 
drivers kept going, Massey says, “we would just light ’em up. I didn’t find 
out until later on, after talking to an Iraqi, that when you put your hand 
up in the air, it means ‘Hello.’” He estimates that his men killed 30 
civilians in one 48-hour period.

One day, he recalls, “there was this red Kia Spectra. We told it to stop, 
and it didn’t. There were four occupants. We fatally wounded three of them. 
We started pulling out the bodies, but they were dying pretty fast. The guy 
that was driving was just frickin’ bawling, sitting on the highway. He 
looked at me and asked, ‘Why did you kill my brother? He wasn’t a terrorist. 
He didn’t do anything to you.’”

Massey searched the car. “It was completely clean. Nothing there. Meanwhile 
the driver just ran around saying, ‘Why? Why?’ That’s when I started to 
question.”

The doubts led to nightmares, depression, and a talk with his commanding 
officer. “I feel what we are doing here is wrong. We are committing 
genocide,” Massey told him. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic 
stress disorder and given a medical discharge.

Back in his hometown of Waynesville, North Carolina, Massey got a job as a 
furniture salesman, then lost it after speaking at an antiwar rally. Two or 
three times a week, he puts on his Marine uniform and takes a long walk 
around the nearby town of Asheville carrying a sign that reads: “I killed 
innocent civilians for our government.” The local police now keep an eye out 
for him, he says, because people have tried to run him over.

When asked what he would say to someone who thinks the way he did before the 
war, Massey falls uncharacteristically silent. “How do you wake them up?” he 
finally responds. “It’s a slow process. All you can do is tell people the 
horrible things you’ve seen, and let them make up their own minds. It’s kind 
of the pebble in the water: You throw in a pebble, and it makes ripples 
through the whole pond.”

Jeffry House is reliving his past. An American draft dodger who fled to 
Canada in 1970 (he was number 16 in that year’s draft lottery), he is now 
fighting to persuade the Canadian government to grant refugee status to 
American deserters.

“In some ways, this is coming full circle for me,” says the slightly 
disheveled, 57-year-old lawyer. “The themes that I thought about when I was 
21 years old now are reborn, particularly your obligation to the state when 
the state has participated in a fraud, when they’ve deceived you.” A dormant 
network has been revived, with Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters 
quietly contributing money to support the legal defense of the newest 
American fugitives.

House’s strategy is bold: He is challenging the very legality of the Iraq 
war, based on the Nuremberg principles. Those principles, adopted by a U.N. 
commission after World War II in response to the Nazis’ crimes, hold that 
military personnel have a responsibility to resist unlawful orders. They 
also declare wars of aggression a violation of international law. House 
hopes that in Canada, which did not support the war in Iraq, courts might 
sympathize with the deserters’ claims and grant them legal refugee status; 
the first of his cases was to be heard by the Canadian Immigration and 
Refugee Board this fall.

On an August afternoon, I follow House as he darts through Toronto traffic 
on his way to see a new client—a young American who had been living in a 
homeless shelter for 10 months before revealing that he was on the run from 
the U.S. Navy. He disappears into a run-down brown brick building; moments 
later, a thin, nervous young man in shorts and a T-shirt emerges onto the 
sidewalk and introduces himself as Dave Sanders. Over dinner at a nearby 
Pizza Hut, he tells me his story.

Sanders dropped out of 11th grade in Bullhead City, Arizona, in 2001. He got 
his GED and was hoping to study computers, but couldn’t get financial aid. 
“The only reason I joined the military was to go to college,” he says. That 
was late 2002, and I ask Sanderswhether he then considered he might end up 
in combat. “I was told,” he says, “that everything would be ended by the 
time I got out of boot camp.”

Sanders completed boot camp in March 2003, two days before the United States 
began bombing Iraq. He started training as a cryptologist; in his spare time 
he surfed the web, reading news from the BBC and Al Jazeera. He was growing 
skeptical of the administration’s motives in Iraq. “Stuff wasn’t adding up,” 
he recalls. “Bush was trying to connect the terrorists with Iraq, and there 
was no proof for that. I was starting to think that we kind of put the blame 
on Iraq so we could go over there and make money for companies.” He 
considered what his job might be if he were deployed; as a cryptologist, he 
could have been handling information leading to raids and arrests. “I didn’t 
want to be a part of putting innocent people in prison,” he says. “I felt 
that what we were doing there was wrong.”

In October 2003, Sanders learned that his unit was headed to Iraq. For 
several weeks he agonized over what to do; then he bought a one-way 
Greyhound ticket and headed to Toronto. He picked up odd jobs and kept quiet 
about his predicament, fearing that authorities might send him back to the 
United States. Finally, he read an article about Jeremy Hinzman, another 
deserter who had fled to Canada and was being represented by Jeffry House. 
When I spoke to Sanders, House was helping him file for refugee status.

As we talk, Sanders keeps tapping his feet and twisting his long fingers. 
“Sorry if I seem nervous,” he finally blurts. “I never really talked to the 
media before. I’m a shy person.” I ask if he surprised himself by defying 
his orders. He nods. “I never really thought I could stand up to a whole 
institution.”

Though Sanders has kept away from the spotlight, other deserters have 
attracted headlines around the world—and drawn criticism from the war’s 
supporters. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly called their actions “insulting to America, 
and especially to those American soldiers who have lost their lives fighting 
terrorists.”

But Sanders says he doesn’t actually consider himself a deserter. “I don’t 
think I did anything wrong by turning down an illegal order,” he says. “I 
don’t know what it’s called—I think it’s Nuremberg?—that’s what I followed 
by leaving.” When I ask if he would call himself a pacifist, he says he is 
not sure what the term means and asks me to explain. Then he shakes his 
head. “I believe if you’re being attacked you have a right to defend 
yourself. But right now, we are not the ones being attacked. That’s a reason 
I think this is a very unjust war.”

Sanders is an only child; his father served in the Marines for 13 years. “My 
family is pro-war, pro-Bush, pro-everything that’s happening,” he says. 
“They would really not support what I’m doing.” He has emailed them to tell 
them that he’s alive, but they have not replied. “I miss them,” he says, his 
eyes welling. “I love them. And I hope they can find it in their hearts to 
forgive me.”

Sergeant John Bruhns is sharply critical of soldiers who go AWOL. “I feel 
that if you are against the war, you should be man enough to stay put and 
fight for what you believe in,” he says. But he also doesn’t believe in 
making a secret of his opinions about the war. “I’m very proud of my 
military service,” he tells me from his post with the Army’s 1st Armored 
Division in Fort Riley, Kansas. “But I am disheartened and personally hurt, 
after seeing two people lose their limbs and a 19-year-old girl die and 
three guys lose their vision, to learn that the reason I went to Iraq never 
existed. And I believe that by being over there for a year, I have earned 
the right to have an opinion.”

Bruhns returned in February from a one-year deployment in Iraq. He is due to 
complete his Army service next March, but his unit may be 
“stop-lossed”—their terms extended beyond their discharge dates to meet the 
Pentagon’s desperate need for troops. Critics have called this a backdoor 
draft, a way to force a volunteer military into involuntarily serving long 
stints in an unpopular war. A California National Guard member has filed a 
lawsuit challenging the policy, and Bruhns has considered joining the case.

“I’m really a patriotic soldier,” the 27-year-old infantryman tells me; he 
addresses me as “sir” and stops periodically to answer the squawk of his 
walkie-talkie. He signed up as a full-time soldier in early 2002, after 
serving five years in the Marine Corps Reserve. “I was really upset about 
what happened on 9/11,” he recalls, “and I really wanted to serve. I lost a 
buddy of mine in the World Trade Center. I believe what we did in 
Afghanistan was right.”

But what he saw in Iraq, Bruhns says, left him disappointed. “We were 
fighting all the time. The only peace is what we kept with guns. A lot of 
stuff that we heard on the news—that we were fighting leftover loyalists, 
Ba’ath Party holdovers—wasn’t true. When I arrested people on raids, many of 
them were poor people. They weren’t in with the Ba’ath Party. The people of 
Iraq were attacking us as a reaction to what the majority of them felt—that 
they were being occupied.”

Among his fellow soldiers, Bruhns adds, a majority still support the war. 
But, he notes, “This is a new generation. We have the Internet, discussion 
forums, cable news. Soldiers don’t just march off into battle blindly 
anymore. They have a lot more information.”

Vietnam figures prominently in soldiers’ conversations about Iraq. Nearly 
every one of the Iraq veterans I spoke with has relatives who served in the 
military, and nearly every one told me the same story: When they grew 
cynical about the Iraq war, the Vietnam veterans in their family immediately 
recognized what was happening—that another generation of soldiers was 
grappling with the realization that they were being sent to carry out a 
policy determined by people who cared little for the grunts on the ground.

Resistance in the military “is in its infancy right now,” says Hoffman, 
whose cousins, uncle, and grandfather all did their time in uniform. “It’s 
growing, but it’s going to take a little while.

“There was a progression of thought that happened among soldiers in Vietnam. 
It started with a mission: Contain communism. That mission fell apart, just 
like it fell apart now—there are no weapons of mass destruction. Then you 
are left with just a survival instinct. That, unfortunately, turned to 
racism. That’s happening now, too. Guys are writing me saying, ‘I don’t know 
why I’m here, but I hate the Iraqis.’

“Now, you realize that the people to blame for this aren’t the ones you are 
fighting,” Hoffman continues. “It’s the people who put you in this situation 
in the first place. You realize you wouldn’t be in this situation if you 
hadn’t been lied to. Soldiers are slowly coming to that conclusion. Once 
that becomes widespread, the resentment of the war is going to grow even 
more.”



Learn more about the antiwar movement within the military by visiting Iraq 
Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out.

In the service? Get answers to the questions you can’t ask your commanding 
officers from the GI Rights Hotline at 1-800-394-9544.

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