PERSPECTIVE ON MILITARY SERVICE : Refusing to Fight for Imperialism : ‘The truth does not set us free, but demands that we act on it as people : of conscience, no matter the cost.’

On Aug. 29, I was ordered to board a military transport plane for deployment to Saudi Arabia. I refused. When my staff sergeants attempted to push me onto the aircraft, I sat down in the hangar. It was from this perspective that I watched friends and co-workers being shipped off to the largest U.S. military operation since Vietnam. It’s yet to be seen how the body counts will compare.

I enlisted in the Marine Corps nearly four years ago, right out of high school in Hollister, Calif.. I joined for the same reasons that most do: training, educational opportunities, and maybe some adventure. Somewhere within was a desire to serve my country.

My outlook changed during deployments to Okinawa, South Korea and the Philippines. Exploitation and prostitution were rampant around our bases and sexism and neocolonial condescension were the approved attitudes toward our hosts. I began reading about U.S. involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua and concluded that we were on the wrong side. When I returned to Hawaii, I joined Central American solidarity movements and worked with the Refuse and Resist! organization against censorship, homophobia, the government’s detention of immigrants and reproductive rights for women. These diverse beliefs are knit together as the struggle for global justice--not “justice” as in America’s right to the consumption of a quarter of the world’s resources for one-tenth of its population.

The military knew nothing about these activities, which I considered private.

I had seven months left to serve when the Saudi deployments began and I decided to refuse to go, seeking instead conscientious-objector status. It wasn’t easy, but it was for me the only rational course of action.

I felt that tens of thousands of lives were being threatened for imperialistic economic interests. President Bush claims that nothing less than the American “way of life” is on the line in the sands of the Kuwaiti desert. But why are 200,000 U.S. troops expendable to secure less than 5% of this nation’s oil supply? What is really at stake here is who will manipulate Earth’s resources to the benefit of whom in the post-Cold War era. Bush seeks to establish Washington as the capital of the new unipolar “world order.”

It would be inconceivable for me to defend Saddam Hussein. It would be just as inconceivable to overlook who made him. Was it not the United States that tacitly endorsed Iraq’s invasion of Iran 10 years ago? Was it not America’s allies, the West Germans, who sold chemical weapons to Hussein? Where was the international condemnation when Hussein used these weapons on Iranians and his own Kurdish population?

After refusing deployment on Aug. 29, I spent three weeks in the brig until a federal court judge ruled against the military’s argument that I was a “national security threat.” I’m now awaiting a general court martial.

Many assert that because I signed a contract and placed myself in the indentured servitude of the military four years ago, I should fulfill my “obligation,” regardless of my belief. I’ve been chipping away at my soul for two years now, fulfilling that contract to the best of my abilities, and I’m going to have to live with being an accomplice to the military-industrial complex.

I have, as an artillery controller, directed cannons on Oahu at Schofield barracks, rained burning white phosphorus and countless tons of high explosives on the Big Island at the Pohakaloa Army Training Area, and blasted away at the island of Kahoolawe. The Hawaiian people equate this assault of the land with the destruction of their culture and their people.

I can bend no farther.

We are told to seek the truth, for it will set us free. That’s not quite right. The truth does not set us free, but demands that we act on it as people of conscience, no matter the cost. History has proved that the price to be paid for doing nothing is far greater.

I will never take up arms in defense of this country in any conceivable confrontation it chooses to enter. That is not to say that I will not fight for the people of this land, or any other land. But my weapons are ideas, commitment and a sense of justice--not bullets, chemical rockets or nuclear warheads. And my battles are against injustice, inequality and the placing of the Earth’s wealth in the hands of the very few.

Only we can deter this blitzkrieg on people of the Middle East. It’s up to us to stop this war. We have no time to waste.