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Carolina Civic Voice Winter 2005-06 Vol. 5, No 4 |
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True Patriots Americans Fighting for Liberty in Iraq and at Home —CCV Exclusive Interview with Iraq War Veterans
When career opportunity makes its alluring call, First Twins and daughters of senators alike click their high heels and snap the salute. "Daughters of President Bush and Senator Kerry reporting for duty!" How keenly they serve the call to comfortable vocations, and not without privilege. With golden parachutes and shiny new BMWs availing as preferred options, America's favored darlings live sensibly above the fray of plywood-armored Humvees and imploding Kevlar helmets. They decline service in Iraq; yet their patriotism is never summoned or questioned. But when America—still the acknowledged leader of the free world—calls, true patriots act. And they typically act in good faith and with no small amount of courage. They go where well-heeled cowards and chicken hawks dare not tread. "Dougherty, Mejia, and Ryabov reporting for duty, Sir!" Like privates Downey and Dawson in Hollywood nail biter A Few Good Men, the three Iraq veterans who were interviewed for this feature story profoundly believe what they have been taught: that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It's not for the timid of heart or the phony spin-meisters reclining upon leather chairs in an air conditioned imitation-paradise. Unlike those who talk the double-speak of the Vietnam War era, authentic patriots walk the walk: when they enlist, they put their derriere on the line...not somebody else's. And when they tell their stories from the conflict in Iraq, they prefer to speak their mind rather than recite the latest official line. During the 1990s and into the early years of the new century many young sons and daughters of America responded to the glitzy promotions hailing Be all that you can be! broadcast day and night by the national media. Reaching deep into the hearts and minds of impressionable young people, the armed forces and National Guard lured many of America's youth—some very patriotic, some seeking help with college, some desperate for a future—with both challenges and promises. The challenge of Are you tough enough? was sweetened with promises of transferable high-tech skills, earned degrees, and the glamorous appeal of See the world! During that all-but-forgotten era, a booming and rapidly globalizing economy, moving toward one world market, seemed an unlikely place to spawn the "permanent war on terror" mantra that would later come to characterize White House sermons. So, who can blame National Guard enlistees for naively assuming they would be rescuing earthquake victims from rubble, not turning Fallujah into rubble? Nevertheless when Kelly Dougherty, Camilo Mejia, and Alex Ryabov decided to don the uniform—and they were blunt enough to admit it was for personal reasons—they did so in good faith. Unlike policy analysts and armchair warriors who call the shots from within their cozy stateside cocoons, smugly professing love for God and country, these patriots were prepared to fight, kill, and die if called overseas for legitimate national defense. They would never have believed, however, what was about to happen to their lives once they were ordered to Iraq. A trial of conscience was about to unfold; disillusionment with national purpose was about to ensue. Flash back to January 2003. Most of us are engrossed with the government-orchestrated media run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Terrified by unconfirmed reports by the New York Times' Judith Miller, the public is convinced they and their children are about to be annihilated by a salvo of WMDs mysteriously planted somewhere within the borders of Iraq. Safely isolated from the dread of battle, White House war planners brazenly threaten a "pre-emptive" assault. Meanwhile, somewhere in the deserts of Kuwait, twenty-five year old Sergeant Kelly Dougherty stands poised with her unit—with none of the amenities of the scions of the elite in sight. "I remember that first night when I reported to my unit," Dougherty recalls. "I got there late, and the company was already in formation. There was a higher-ranking officer addressing the unit. She was talking about how we had been attacked on September 11th and we had to defend our country by invading Iraq; she was talking in those kinds of terms. That really freaked me out, and I remember going 'Oh my God, they all believe it.'" With a touch of sarcasm in her voice the witty Dougherty, now twenty-seven, says "I can't really remember ever being told anything like 'We're going over there to find Weapons of Mass Destruction.'" Before leaving for the Middle East, the assertive but soft-spoken and eye-catching young sergeant said they had not really been told what their mission would be once they got there. Like the others interviewed, she does not recall ever seeing a written mission statement. Even more troubling, "A lot of the people, especially the higher-ups in the chain of command, really wanted to go to Iraq so that they could say 'We went to Iraq,'" she chides. Even after arriving in Nazaria in southern Iraq in April 2003, "The perception was," Dougherty explains, "that we didn't have a clear mission, so we would often just be sent out on patrol." Dougherty, a biology major who had joined the National Guard in 1996 as a medic to help complete her degree, wanted to go into the health field and hoped to obtain some transferable skills. She was only seventeen at the time. Though she never did believe the WMD scare or Iraq-911 connection, Dougherty, of Colorado Springs, kept her agreements with the country and served honorably—even after her primary job had been switched from medic to military police (MP). When asked if she had been adequately trained for MP duty, the affable Dougherty, who had done fine in basic training, tersely answered "No." In general, she does not feel her training ever had much of a connection to what they ended up doing in Iraq. The irony and comedy of her training, she recounts humorously, was that they were "driving around in Colorado in two feet of snow training to go to the desert." Once in Iraq, her unit was mostly kept busy escorting Brown and Root convoys from Kuwait. They would also carry out patrols on city streets, perform traffic stops, and make a few house raids. Their primary mission, it seemed to Sergeant Dougherty, was to survive in a country where they were clearly not very welcome. A veteran of the Balkans military intervention, Dougherty ended up totally dissatisfied with US involvement in Iraq. After being honorably discharged she co-founded Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW, www.ivaw.net). Today, the former combat professional doesn't talk much about Iraq with her parents "because it was such a weird experience and....so crazy." Did Dougherty believe the Iraqi people were better off when she left in February 2004 than when she had first arrived? "When I left, things for the Iraqi people seemed to have gotten worse, not better. The people were still going without reliable electricity, clean water, fuel, and employment. On top of that, the Iraqis were suffering from the US occupation and from criminality caused by the chaos that followed our invasion. We don't often hear in the United States of how the Iraqis are suffering at the hands of the US military, how many innocent people are arrested, harassed, shot at or killed by US forces. The Iraqi people are living every day with instability and violence, knowing that at any moment their houses could be raided or their cars could be pulled over and searched for any reason or no reason at all. The way I saw the Iraqi people treated, and the conditions they were living in, solidified my view that the war is wrong, and that violence leads to more violence. We are doing much more harm than good in Iraq and the only way to begin to correct the damage is to bring US soldiers home." It's February 2003 and Corporal Alex Ryabov, only twenty years old, is staged with his tough Marine artillery unit in Kuwait. The troops are about to roll across Iraq and a few of them are jittery, Ryabov remembers, his graphic descriptions bringing the scene to life. Though he had formerly considered himself an unlikely candidate for the Marines, the Ukraine-born man from Brooklyn was now game for Operation Iraqi Freedom. As for their mission in Iraq, Ryabov's unit had been frankly informed: “’Don’t think you’re going over there to topple Saddam. You’re going over there for one reason alone: oil.’...And this came from our first sergeant, a veteran of Desert Storm," explains Ryabov, now twenty-two and on individual ready- reserve. "So that definitely took a few of us aback. So we were frustrated, but we had our orders....Looking back, it felt we weren’t going over there for the right reasons. Even the man telling us seemed angry." The young corporal, who depicted some brief, though spectacular firefights encountered on their swift advance toward Tikrit, was confident the Marines would ultimately prevail in the invasion. On the other hand he ardently pointed out, "No troops are trained for occupation." Having taken the capital in a mere three weeks, Ryabov was not prepared for what was to follow as the occupation wore on. He comments: “Really, what is happening is the destruction of a country. I take what the government says with a truckload of salt. Fast forward to elections last fall. Falluja has been destroyed, people don’t understand this should never have taken place: we clear and destroy towns. They say we build schools, but I have to ask, are these schools still standing? It’s all futile, because you rebuild and in the end it gets blown up. How does our government have the audacity to think that another country would just lay down for them?" “The people who are fighting and the people who are dying are the poor and innocent: it’s the working class just like us. The people who are making out on this are the rich," said Ryabov of the military contractors who stand to gain the most by a prolonged occupation. And the American men and women who pull the triggers? "We are expendable, we are like prostitutes: they use us and throw us away." Dateline: 2003, Iraq. Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia gets a call. A huge firefight has broken out at some nearby palace. Mejia's squad jumps into their doorless Humvees and they race over to the scene only a mile or two away. As they pull up bullets are flying everywhere. The men have to lay low in their Hummers, ducking for cover. After a fierce battle, the troops prevail at last. Finally, at three in the morning, they decide to head back to base. But the night, unfortunately, is not yet over. The squad gets ambushed in the city. An IED goes off in front of one of the Hummers and another firefight lights up the darkened sky as bullets rain down from the rooftops. Incredibly, the troops shoot their way out and make it back to base without any casualties. Mejia has survived his first combat experience. Did Mejia, who had been sent to the Middle East as part of a National Guard unit, feel adequately trained for the kind of urban warfare that would confront him in Iraq? "Not at all. But let me tell you this, though," he pauses momentarily. "Having been in active duty as an infantry man for close to nine years, I can tell you that no one in the military, save perhaps Special Operations, was ready for fighting an insurgency in urban terrain. No one. We were all trained for desert warfare...and here we are in the city!" As with the other vets interviewed, Mejia, who was born in Nicaragua, insisted his unit had no real military mission. "I'm not joking," he titters. "There was no mission for us. I know this sounds crazy: these guys were basically desperate for combat experience. This is true for a lot of National Guard units. Because a lot of our commanders, you know, had been in the military twenty, twenty-five years and had no combat experience. So we are dropped into Iraq and we have absolutely no mission, nothing." And urban terrain combat experience, what was that like? "You are a machine, your body gets behind the trigger and you just do it. For the most part we did a lot of bad stuff out there. But I was 'a good soldier' so I kept my mouth shut....I should have said ‘This is wrong' many times, but I didn’t." Later he added, "In a firefight we often kill civilians, not the insurgents—the wrong people get killed. And those taken prisoner are often abused.” Eventually, Mejia would come to change his whole view of war in general and apply for conscientious objector status. Though some in the military imagine that Mejia is simply a coward who sought to avoid hazardous duty, his own testimony argues differently. If his story is essentially accurate—and members of his unit did confirm that Mejia showed courage in Iraq and was a good leader—the brave are those who have dodged bullets on the streets of Baghdad and Ar Ramadi while their commanding officers play computerized war games back at the base. Mejia fought as ordered—up to a point. Once it became clear that although there might be some political agenda in Iraq there was no credible military mission, Mejia placed a new target in his sights. Staff Sergeant Mejia, age twenty-eight, began to battle the commercial, political and military forces of delusion that doggedly try to excuse the unjust and useless occupation of a foreign country. Camilo Mejia is still fighting for what he believes in. Those who would accuse him of cowardice know not the backbone it takes to stand up to the US military. The official Pentagon view of veterans who oppose the occupation seems to be that their criticism of war policy is due to some personal disappointment: for example, they had to perform duties they did not like. The implication is that their observations and views on the war are not to be trusted. But this begs the question: If a career veteran returns from Iraq and touts US accomplishments there, are we to assume they are only saying what their superiors want to hear? Or should we rather evaluate both supporters and dissidents on the basis of the authenticity of their first-hand observations? After a full week of interviewing Iraq veterans and seeing Iraq through their eyes, one is led to the unsettling conclusion that Iraq is tragically a Vietnam deja vu in need of a long overdue shift in the American political zeitgeist. Upon coming home each of the veterans interviewed began speaking out on the leading edge of that shift. And no matter how you slice it, White House denials to the contrary, these are bona fide American war heroes. Mejia, Ryabov, and Dougherty are the real deal. In good faith they fought the Iraq War....Yet now in good faith they're fighting the war at home. Because in the land of the free and the home of the brave, true patriots act.
Robert Argento is a writer from California now living in the Wilmington area. He is working on his first nonfiction book. |
