David Wilson, former Army sergeant & resister of sorts....
by Nan Levinson
Regardless of the official response, nearly all applicants for Conscientious Objection describe being ostracized by their peers and their chain of command and isolated at a particularly stressful time of their lives. David Wilson, an Army sergeant stationed in Kuwait before the invasion, emailed me after he turned in his CO packet that “people in my unit won’t look at me or they give me the evil eye.”
Wilson’s story is his alone, but it follows a familiar trajectory for soldiers who applied for conscientious objection early in the war, from his solo navigation of the process without the knowledgeable guidance of counselors who might have made it easier, to the Army’s maze of obstacles, to the disdain he came to have for the military mission in Iraq and the politicians who created it.
He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where his father taught at the Citadel, his mother was a vocational high school principal, and his family worshiped at the Baptist church. (His faith is now in mountain biking.) Looking for money to pay off debt and to return to school, he enlisted in the Army in 2000 at the relatively late age of thirty. He was self-reliant, fit, and sure of himself, so he had no problem holding his own with the other, much younger enlistees. By the time he was sent to Kuwait in February 2003, he had risen to sergeant and was assigned to the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command as an electronic warfare technician.
Wilson and I were introduced by another soldier in his unit, who had gotten out as a CO before the invasion. We exchanged emails in March and April of 2003 and resumed emailing, his preferred mode of communication, six years later. We didn’t know each other and, as with all these exchanges, he had nothing to gain by answering my questions, but answer he did, diligently, promptly and fully, even when his personal time was limited on the Army's computers in Kuwait.
Six weeks after he arrived there and one week before the invasion of Iraq, he wrote: “My position on going to war with Iraq is difficult to describe. I have no problem fighting off an oppressive govt. I have no problem blowing someone’s head off if they are trying to rob my house or harm my family. I do have a problem with a govt that uses its army to achieve those goals. I have a problem with a govt. that does not pay attention to actions it is taking that harm the Constitution that I was sworn to defend.”
A month later, still in Kuwait, it was a different story, as he wrote on drunkcyclist, a friend’s blog. “I hear missiles flying overhead and I get interviewed by CNN as they do a documentary. I feel relief when the A10s hit the persistent launcher in Basra with a missile. Then I get real angry. I wish bad things on those who do what they think is right for America.”
He was angry at his chaplain “who tries to be a cheerleader for this war by quoting old testament scripture”; he was angry at his fellow soldiers who lumped all Iraqis together as the enemy and called antiwar protesters unpatriotic; he was angry at a general he heard of who didn’t care how many soldiers he lost in battle, angry at the contractors who talked nonstop about job security, and angry at an AP reporter, “this poor girl [who] was obviously quite excited to be around so many men.” Most of all, he was angry at himself. “Why did I let it go this far?” he asked plaintively. Concluding that he was “a non-violent dude,” he decided he was also a conscientious objector.
He informed his immediate chain of command of his intention to apply for CO. “A couple were pissed, but they understood.” He told his first sergeant and battery commander – the latter would determine the fate of his application – and they were furious. He didn’t draw on any of the GI rights counseling groups because he thought -- inaccurately -- that he didn't qualify for their help since his objection wasn’t on religious grounds. Instead, he found the regulation regarding CO online, downloaded it, and worked feverishly on his packet. He wrote “from the heart,” he said, basing his claim on his conclusion that he could fulfill the military’s values only by objecting to its actions. Like many other resisters, his thinking was subversive of military doctrine, but not revolutionary. He named specific commanders and cited intelligence he was privy to as evidence that information was falsified and then promoted as truth. “It was my way of defying orders without being seen as a dissenter,” he explained several years later.
A talk with his chaplain strengthened his resolve. A colonel who read his packet cried, another asked how he would feel when he told his nieces and nephews that he was a CO. A psychiatrist recommended that he get counseling to deal with the “tragedies” – his quotation marks -- that he had seen. “I decided I don't want to help prepare for another war. My unit's job here is done. But there will be more actions before my time is up,” he emailed me in the thick of this ordeal. “I don't want to be a part of anymore violence. This is all too big for me. I don't belong in this mess.”
His commanders urged him to ride it out, since his unit would be going home soon, but a week later, he reported that he had been “coerced” into turning in his CO packet. His security clearance was revoked and he “went from being the go-to guy in my unit for electronics and comms, to being the head count at the chow hall.” That was okay with him. Like other COs, he insisted that his resistance could not be dismissed as combat stress or bad faith. He wanted to get out of the army because he believed that what the army was doing in Iraq was wrong.
Things improved when he got back to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where he was assigned to Operation Santa Claus, an on-post charity. There he rebuilt bicycles for kids. He was living at home with his wife, Jennifer, and trying to distance himself from the war by unplugging his television. He hadn’t been in combat, but he was disappointed to have been part of the war machine, since it seemed so obvious to him that the invasion could have been avoided. His CO worked its way through the system for about a year, then it was denied, a result, he thinks, of pressure within the chain of command. To this day, he is unsure who made the decision. He could have appealed, but with less than six months left on his contract, he stayed at the charity, doing his best to rattle the brass with wisecracks about their war bravado and to sow doubt among younger soldiers with tales of military stupidity and false intelligence reports.
His views on the war didn’t change much, except for a sour amusement that the situation had turned so bad so fast. On his blog, he called the Army “the greatest terrorist network in the world,” but his anger seemed to have subsided, probably because he had never considered himself much of a soldier to begin with. “I was just a guy looking for an adventure and a way to continue my education,” he emailed me when we got back in touch in the spring of 2009. He added IVAW to his MySpace page, thought about bicycling across Texas to join the protest of gold star mother Cindy Sheehan outside George W. Bush’s ranch, but didn’t, and that was the extent of his activism. Glad to be back in civilian life, he began studying for his master’s degree in exercise physiology on the GI bill and resumed the intensive mountain biking regimen that he loved.
Then on April Fool’s Day 2006, he was notified that he was being recalled for Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) duty. Typically, soldiers sign a contract for four years active duty and four inactive; when they are honorably discharged from active duty, they go on the IRR rolls for the remaining years, but receive no pay and are essentially done with the Army. However, in 2004, when the Army started having trouble filling its ranks, it began ordering those in the IRR to report for duty.
“I freaked out,” Wilson emailed me a few years after a fat packet of orders had arrived in his mailbox. He was fairly confident that a bad knee would save him from redeployment, but the orders required him to go to Fort Jackson in South Carolina and put his life on hold while he waited to find out. At Fort Jackson, he got lucky: the doctor who interviewed him had also been called back on IRR and wasn’t happy about it. Wilson convinced the doctor that releasing him was in the best interest of the Army and he was sent home. But the recall had forced him to pull out of his graduate program and he never finished his thesis. Instead, he returned to his original plan and got certified to teach science in high school.
So in the end, he got out of the army the way most soldiers do: by completing his contract. He’s not sorry he enlisted, he reports, but not sorry he applied for CO either. “I wanted to serve my country,” he concludes in one email, then adds in another, “Americans were sold a bill of goods in regards to Iraq/Afghanistan. I think the military was betrayed even more than the people of America.... I just wanted to do what was right. I wanted to maintain my integrity and the only way I saw to do that (other than requesting that they throw me in jail) was to file as a CO.”
(c) Nan Levinson 2009
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