Conscientiously Objecting to War James M

1 Conscientiously Objecting to War James M. Skelly lthough I will talk tonight about my own experience of conscientiously objecting to war, I want to try to put it into a larger context by first talking about the experiences of other sol- Adiers. What I hope I can accomplish by doing this is to demonstrate that we must allow for objection to war regardless of whether it is conscientious or not. The structure of war has changed profoundly in the last century. The tactics of Al Qaeda are just a further mani- festation of that transformation. War is no longer fought between armies where soldiers suffer the overwhelming number of casualties. Although civilians died in pre-20th century wars, soldiers made up 90% of the casualties. Now the ratio is reversed – 90% of the casualties are civilian – a ratio that the war in Iraq continued despite all the talk of so-called “precision” weapons. Some of you may have seen CNN’s recent documentary called “Fit to Kill,” which explored the psychological consequences of the training and experiences of soldiers who had killed in combat. One of the former soldiers interviewed, Charles Sheehan Miles, was a veteran of the first Gulf War in 1991. During operations in Iraq he and his colleagues had engaged two Iraqi trucks that subsequently caught fire. As one of the occupants ran ablaze from the truck, Miles fired his machine gun and immediately killed him. ______________ Presented on November 18, 2003, as part of the Baker Institute World Affairs Lectures 2004 25 His immediate emotional response was a “sense of exhilara- tion, of joy.” These emotions were followed in a split-second by what he characterized as “a tremendous feeling of guilt and remorse.” The image of the man on fire, running, as our young sol- dier killed him, stayed with him “for years and years and years,” he said. Miles’s unit returned to the U.S. amidst great celebration, and he was awarded a medal for valor, yet he felt, in his words, “probably the worst person alive.”2 Subsequently, Miles went to the chaplain and told him that he didn’t think he could engage in killing again. What is interesting is what he says at this point in the interview with CNN. Miles reveals the threat to their humanity that all soldiers face – he says, “It’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I knew I could. Because it was…it was so easy to pull the trigger and kill people. Yes, I was afraid of what would happen. I was afraid of what it would do to me. What kind of person I would become.” A little over a year ago, I met a young Israeli paratroop officer, Guy Grossman, at the conference that Robert Jay Lifton, one of the world’s leading scholars on genocide and the Holocaust, organizes on Cape Cod every autumn. Grossman and some 500 other Israeli soldiers refuse to serve in the territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. The populations in the territories are overwhelm- ingly Palestinian, but the Israeli government has encouraged its cit- izens to settle in the territories in contravention of international law and United Nation’s Security Council resolutions. Grossman and his comrades formed a group known as “Courage to Refuse,” because they feel strongly that the occupation is undermining Israeli security and destroying the humanity of both Palestinians and Israelis. At Lifton’s conference, Grossman spoke of his experiences as an officer leading his men on missions where the locals saw them as beastly occupiers. Guy is an intelligent and sensitive human being, but his experiences led him to the very edge of his fragile humanity. Like most young soldiers he initially believed in the policies of his government and did his best to carry out military orders in circumstances that no one should confront. In the course of his missions in the Occupied Territories, he shot and killed several people. He wounded, and probably crippled, a child of six. However, for me, the most telling story was his description of what 26 Juniata Voices are called “midnight arrests.” Midnight arrests are the Israeli security forces’ efforts to capture their enemies when they are at home reposing with their families in the middle of the night. Grossman and his heavily armed platoon would break into the residence of an extended family of ten to fifteen people. There would be shouting, men roughly handled, women screaming, children crying – chaos! Grossman would order them to be quiet, and when, as one would expect, they would not, he would grab the grandmother and put a pistol to her head. At this point the five-year-old boy in the family would, according to Grossman, “shit in his pants.” These experiences led Grossman to refuse further service in the territories because, like Charles Sheehan Miles, he feared what he could become. We all have that point beyond which we are capa- ble of becoming beasts. What Grossman experienced, I personally would not have been able to bear. My own epiphany with regard to military service and war took rather longer to evolve. It is important to recall the early 60s, the time of my coming of age. It was assumed without question in my family, and by me, that I would do military service. My older brothers had been foot soldiers after they had dropped out of college. I took the NROTC test in the autumn of 1962, when I was 17. That I would be an officer after going through NROTC would clearly be better. Since it was peacetime, military service was one’s personal part of keeping that peace within the simple logic of American history and the Cold War as we understood it. I think I was a rather typical American young person of the time. That my agreement with the Navy would be more like the bargain that Daniel Webster made with the Devil would not become apparent until several years later. At the point I was commissioned in the summer of 1967, I had not given very much thought to the war in Vietnam. My concerns, like many people, were private ones. I merely took military service as a natural and unquestioned expression of life in American soci- ety at the time. Like most Americans, I was primarily an individualist in my sentiments and did not question the war from a political or moral perspective. My concerns were of a private and personal nature and were focused largely on the relationship with the woman I had married immediately after finishing university. The individualist in me wanted to minimize my encounters with the authoritarian aspects of military life for the four years that I Skelly 2004 27 thought I was required to serve, but this was not framed in political or moral terms. For the first two and a half years of my service, I sat on a rusty, converted World War II oil tanker. Mentally, I avoided the political and moral issues of the war, while pursuing what I think is all too common in American life, and what I imagined was “self-realiza- tion” of a psychological nature. In the late summer of 1969 however, the Navy Department made the decision to decommission my ship, and I received orders to Vietnam where I was told I would serve as a military advisor to the South Vietnamese forces. Shortly after I arrived in San Diego, where I was to undergo thirteen weeks of training in preparation for Vietnam, I met Jay King, the leader of an antiwar organization called the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM). King, it turned out, was really a member of the San Diego Police Department. King, despite his secret affiliation, gave good advice and suggested that I explore conscientious objection, which I did. In fact, I had written some letters that did indicate a personal abhorrence to war, but I did not think that they were central to my self-identity because my sense of Self was more fluid. I, of course, went about becoming a conscientious objector with all the entrepreneurial energy that I could muster. I knew rather consciously that I had to construct a Self in which conscientious objection was central. I asked for letters of support from various people of some standing including two Navy chaplains with whom I had worked while serving as Catholic Lay Leader on my ship. The chaplains wrote in their letters indicating that in their discussions with me I had “showed a certain abhorrence toward” war, and that I was trying “for a meaningful way to comprehend a God who is good in a world that is filled with evil.” Their letters also spoke of things like “personal growth” and “strong moral and religious beliefs.” In addition, the required official interview with the Navy base chaplain had gone well, and in his official report of his discussion with me, he had indicated that, “I am convinced of his sincerity and his motivation … .” The final hurdle was the formal hearing with an officer, Lieutenant Commander James Robinson, appointed by the base commander. He had read the “statement of belief” that I was required to submit with the application. In it, I had stated that receipt of the orders had crystallized my beliefs. I now knew who I 28 Juniata Voices was. I wrote that, “All of my prior religious thought suddenly had major application as it manifested itself in new ways due to my orders to Vietnam.” I claimed that I had been “shocked into a very deep state of reality and recognized as I had not previously, that my continued participation in the military was in fact in direct opposi- tion to my religious life,” and that “before this I had not had brought home to me my complicity in the evil actions of warfare.” I thought that the hearing went well for me, but it had not.

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