by Camilo Mejía

I wish I could say that I have a long history of resistance, but my resistance began fairly recently in the United States military. There are very few places where you can resist illegitimate authority more than in the military, because we're engaged in this horrible illegitimate war.

My first opportunity to resist came to me in 2003, when my company commander announced to our unit that we were deploying to the Middle East in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. At that point I had been reading the news and I had a very detached, impersonal opposition to the war because we had not directly tied Iraq to September 11th. Plus people like Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei said that they did not think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they needed more time to investigate. I thought that the Iraqi government was opening all kinds of back door channels to try to not be invaded.

At the time I was really afraid to publicly oppose a war that had not yet begun, with part of me thinking that this might just be a huge show of force to scare Saddam Hussein out of power. I was very naïve back then. With massive resistance to the war throughout the world, I felt that the Unites States government would ultimately not invade Iraq—even when my unit was stationed in Jordan preparing to go to Iraq. I had been in the military close to eight years. I was a sergeant-promotable, I became a staff sergeant in Iraq. And I had a pretty good military career… until I rebelled, of course.

Resisting illegitimate authority in the military means many things. This is a pool of people who are not really aware of the law, who are very young, and who at some point find themselves out of options—wanting to go to college, wanting to get out of poverty, wanting to get health care. They join the military thinking that they will be fighting for God and country and democracy and things like that. They are not usually very politically aware, and many of us don't start with an understanding of what is legal or illegal.

That uncertainty about legality came into play quickly with my unit in Iraq. The first mission of our unit was to keep Iraqi prisoners sleep-deprived by creating fear through loud noises and mock executions. We received direct orders from officers to do this kind of thing, and there were a lot of other people doing it. We did not know if it was illegal, but it just felt wrong. We did not know if it was considered torture, since we were not physically hurting them. Later missions included instigating fire fights and conducting missions by hospitals and by mosques— things that we knew would lead to the killing of civilians.

The question of legitimacy is really hard to deal with when you're in the context of the military, so it becomes a question of conscience. It becomes a question of whether what you are doing—regardless of what the law says about it—is something you feel good in your heart about doing. In my case it didn't, and the majority of the things that we did in Iraq did not feel right.

Our main concern was to survive. We were in a very intense environment, and we were being threatened every step of the way. We were concerned about our physical environment, where the next attack was coming from, and how to get home in one piece. There were times, however, when what we were doing seemed to be wrong in spite of the fear, in spite of the confusion and frustration.

My resistance became a matter of overcoming my own fear. When I finally came home on a two-week furlough, I refused to go back. This was very difficult because of the bonds that I had developed with the people in my unit, which had nothing to do with policies or whether the war is legitimate or illegitimate, but everything to do with the creation of a human bond in a very intense environment. Your life depended on these people, and their lives depended on you and your leadership. I was afraid of being called a coward, of being rejected by my peers, of being called unpatriotic. I was also afraid of being court marshaled; I did not want to go to jail.

Finding the moral courage to resist meant that I had to work on my fear. One good day I did resist, and at the time there were no combat veterans publicly speaking against the war. The case became a big media sensation. I went to jail and got out, and then I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).

I want to talk about resistance in the military and what that looks like today. What I felt to be the calling of my conscience may not be the calling of other people. For instance, we have cases like Joe Darby, who provided the photographs that exposed the scandal at Abu Ghraib Prison. He did not go public right away. He is someone who went to Iraq and did his job at Abu Ghraib, and who felt that his conscience was telling him that he needed to make people aware of what was happening there.

Then there is the case of Suzanne Swift, who was the victim and now survivor of military sexual assault. She initially resisted the war not on political grounds, but on the grounds that she refused to be assaulted.

We have people like Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq on the basis that the war in Iraq was illegitimate and illegal. He did not go AWOL, and he's not a conscientious objector. He's not even opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

We need all these types of resistance, and we need to understand that resisting is not necessarily going to take the shape or form that we want it to take. We have to work with all the ways people resist.

An organization like Iraq Veterans Against War ( IVAW) tries to bring all of these people together as a united front to strengthen resistance to this war. IVAW is concentrated on organizing active duty bases. We have a chapter at Fort Drum, New York, where we started the first GI coffee house opposed to the war, called A Different Drummer Café, located right outside of the base.

Resistance in the military also means launching counter-recruiting and counter-retention campaigns. It means telling people that they should not stay in the military because this war is illegal, and that they have every right to refuse. It means telling them that they not only have the right but the duty to refuse this illegitimate war. Our goal is ultimately to remove military support from the war. We are concentrating our efforts on making sure that the government can no longer rely on the military to wage an illegal, illegitimate and immoral war on other countries. That's our struggle.

Resistance in the military is not going to be effective unless there's resistance in the larger society. When I first decided not to go back to Iraq, the anti-war movement had basically become demoralized after the invasion. IVAW was not formed yet, and my opposition was very isolating at the time because there was little organized response to the war. Fortunately, there were people and organizations that helped me tremendously, like Military Families Speak Out, and, later, groups like Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

Beyond the anti-war movement and the GI side of that resistance, I don't think that people are taking ownership of this war. That’s one reason I would support a draft, and then I would advocate for 100% resistance to it. Kidding aside, I don’t actually support a draft, but conscription would force middle-class America to face the possibility that their children might actually fight in a war that we know for a fact is horrible.

Part of the problem is that people are not really given the opportunity to experience the war, especially as compared with the Vietnam War. Back then, we had pictures and footage—the naked girl running from napalm, soldiers posing with dead Vietnamese. Today we are not even allowed to see the coffins coming back from the war. We're not allowed to see the maimed and wounded. We don't hear enough about post traumatic stress disorder and suicide rates going through the roof. All of these things send the message that “this is not your war.” You hear that 10, maybe 15 soldiers died this week, but people are not really being touched by it. We have .05 percent of the population directly affected by this war, and that's not enough to get people to go into the streets. That's not enough to get people to take ownership, to really identify with the anti-war movement.

We need more than just the soldiers to refuse to fight. It’s going to take the larger public to come together and send a message to the government, to stand against the war, and to protect those who refuse to fight. The anti-war effort needs more than the military to be successful.

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Camilo Mejía is a former Staff Sergeant of the Florida National Guard, an anti-war activist and the author of Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía. He also serves as chair of the board of directors of Iraq Veterans Against the War.