Deserting the Military: Teaching the Lessons the Government Won’t Learn

U.S. soldiers are deserting the military in ever-increasing numbers. Many who have actually fought in Iraq are illegally leaving the military and speaking out against the war. Lance Corporal Ivan Brobeck, who deserted after a tour of duty, witnessed the abuse of Iraqi detainees and the killing of Iraqi civilians. Sgt. Ricky Clousing, also a veteran of the war, deserted when he realized U.S. soldiers were not helping the Iraqis. His allegations of systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees are now being investigated by the military.

The list of brave men and women who served in Iraq, saw the war for what it actually is and subsequently deserted, is growing. Having proved their courage on the battlefield they are now demonstrating it again by opposing the most powerful – and possibly most dangerous – government in the world. They join a list of courageous soldiers that dates back to the American Revolution.

Desertion throughout the nation’s history has had many common causes. Men and women enlist for a variety of reasons, many of them not at all related to feelings of patriotism. In the country’s earliest wars financial rewards, called bounties, were offered to men for enlisting. Farming was a main occupation, and for many men struggling to sustain their families these bounties looked very attractive. The potential recruit could enlist and send the money home to help his family. However, once they enlisted too many men learned that the bounty would not be paid. This left their families back home in an even worse situation: there was no money forthcoming, and the person mainly responsible for farming duties was off at war. Many men finding themselves in this situation simply returned home.           

Today, recruiters make a wide variety of promises to potential recruits, none of which they are legally bound to fulfill. The guarantees of stateside or time-limited deployment are simply not true: anyone enlisting today can be sent anywhere the government chooses, and once the enlistment period is over, the military can arbitrarily extend it. These promises made in 2006 are as meaningless as those made in 1776.

That soldiers enlist because they believe American interests are threatened in some way, then learn on the battlefield that the cause they were sold was nothing but lies and choose the only realistic option out of the U.S. military – desertion – is not new.  Also not new is the government’s desire to skew their reasons and try to show them as cowards. This lie becomes less credible every day.

The War of 1812 was fought, ostensibly, because the British violated some trade agreements with the U.S. However, the expansionist aims of the American government soon became clear.  At least partly as a result of this realization, state militias often refused to cross the border into Canada, and frequently would not leave their own home state. Today many men and women went to Iraq hoping to protect America from weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people from cruel dictatorship. Learning that there was no threat to America, and that the Iraqi people are worse off due to American occupation than they were under Saddam Hussein is causing many soldiers to desert.

More recently, during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, soldiers recognized that U.S. security was not threatened by a civil war on the opposite side of the planet, or by conflicts between two nations over oil rights. Then, as now, they desert rather than risk their lives, and the lives of other innocent people, and conform to the dictates of war-mongering world leaders, intent on forcing an unwanted way of life on another nation’s people.

Cruelty perpetrated upon the victims of U.S. aggression is also a continuing theme in desertions from America’s early wars to the present.

During the Mexican-American War, begun in 1846, American soldiers witnessed and perpetrated horrific cruelty towards the Mexicans. The senseless killing of Mexican civilians and the looting and destruction of their property enraged many Americans and caused them to desert, and many of them actually joined the Mexicans. Many American soldiers, some of whom eventually comprised the Mexican brigade known as the San Patricios, considered the invasion and occupation nothing more than a cruel and greedy land grab. 

The parallels between these earlier wars and the war against the people of Iraq are striking. The blatant discrimination so evident against the Mexicans one hundred and sixty years ago is now aimed at the Iraqis. As families in Iraq drive up to protected checkpoints, American and other coalition soldiers yell at them in English to stop. Is it any wonder that terrified families, seeing heavily armed foreign soldiers shouting unintelligible words, try to flee? The result, of course, is another dead Iraqi family. The U.S. has few Arabic translators, and has discharged several since the start of the war for no other ‘infraction’ than being gay.

The horrors perpetrated in Fallujah and other locations within Iraq mirror the massacre at Samar in the Philippines during the American war against that country. At the start of the Samar campaign, Brigadier General Jacob Smith gave his troops these instructions: “Kill and burn, kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the more you please me.” 1  His instructions included sparing no one over the age of 10. Another soldier who served in the Philippines, in relating his experience in Maypaja, said that after the battle, in this town of over five thousand people “not one stone remains on top of another.”2 In Fallujah, prior to the war, the population was estimated at approximately 300,000. Today the city is in ruins, with a population of less than half that number.

The current, tragic Iraqi misadventure is often compared to the Vietnam war: no clear reason for US involvement, escalating casualties and no viable exit strategy.  But the situation in Iraq invites comparisons from nearly all of America’s previous wars, and leads one to ponder again why America’s leaders cannot learn from the past.

The 2006 mid-term elections were seen, by all accounts, as a referendum on the war. Despite this, President Bush has rejected the major recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq study panel, and even the newly-empowered Democrats do not seem to have grasped the will of the American people. Perhaps as Iraqi war veterans continue to desert and expose to the world the reality of the war, a real change will occur. It took Vietnam veterans like Sen. John Kerry to bring this reality home during the 1970s. Hopefully American leaders will get the message before the death toll of that war – over 50,000 Americans and between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Vietnamese – is reached in Iraq.

1 Schirmer, Daniel B. and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom. The Philippine Reader: A history of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance. Page 63.