Gulf Crisis Spurs Crisis of Morals : Military: A Camp Pendleton Marine has filed to be a conscientious objector and claims he will not follow his unit to the Middle East.

As his brigade prepares to deploy to Saudi Arabia, a 22-year-old Marine Corps corporal based at Camp Pendleton announced Monday that he has applied for an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector, joining a small but growing group of servicemen who claim moral objections to the military buildup.

Kenneth Turner, a Michigan native who enlisted in 1987 for six years of service in the Corps, said a spiritual “reawakening” he experienced during mock war training exercises earlier this year led him to file his application Oct. 30. When the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade is deployed--reportedly on Saturday--he said he will refuse to go.

“My religious beliefs are no longer compatible with the way the Marine Corps wants me to train and operate,” said Turner, a former squad leader who claims he has nightmares about leading men into combat. “Any duty that I do perform in the military is more or less supporting the efforts of a war machine. My God is behind me and giving me the strength to stand up and say this--it’s against the word of God to participate in any kind of killing.”

He added: “Within the near future, we’re supposed to deploy. So I’m looking at within the next couple of days possibly going to the brig.”

Turner’s application--apparently the first to be filed at Camp Pendleton since Operation Desert Shield began in August--puts him in “an extremely small minority,” according to Maj. Doug Hart, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington.

Since early August, Hart said, fewer than 100 of the 2 million active duty troops and 80,000 reservists and National Guardsmen have asked to be relieved of their military obligation. Of those, he said, fewer than 10 have applied for conscientious objector status.

The first was Jeffrey A. Paterson, a Hawaii-based Marine corporal who refused to board a Persian Gulf-bound transport plane in August. He spent three weeks in the brig and has been confined to his base in Hawaii awaiting court-martial.

On Monday in New York, five members of the 25th Marine Regiment at Ft. Schuyler declared their conscientious objector status as other members of the company were on their way to Camp Lejeune, N.C., for deployment to the gulf.

Anti-war advocates say they are receiving hundreds of calls from military servicemen and women requesting information about how to make a conscientious objector claim. Harold Jordan, coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee’s national youth and militarism program, said his Philadelphia-based office is working with at least 30 service members from over the country to prepare conscientious objector statements.

“The meaningful statistics are hard to come by. If you ask military, they’ll say there hasn’t been a substantial increase,” said Jordan, who said he has received letters requesting help with applications from four servicemen already stationed in the gulf.

“It’s not at the level that it was in Vietnam--nobody means to suggest that,” he said. But conscientious objector applications are on the rise, he said, and there is every indication they will not be handled as they were 20 years ago. “During the Vietnam War, it was routine to hold people stateside (while their applications were processed). They are clearly saying the opposite is in effect now.”

That is precisely what Turner is afraid of, according to Mark Lamanna, a military counselor for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objection, who has worked for three months with Turner on his 15-page application.

“The only way to get a proper review is to be on the mainland United States,” said Lamanna, noting that the Marine Corps has kept Turner on combat duty, assigned to a rifle platoon bound for the gulf. “I’m hoping (coming forward publicly) will put the pressure on the command to transfer him to non-combat status.”

Turner, who sent his wife, Joelle, to read a statement at a news conference Monday at a Methodist church in San Diego, said he wanted others to know of his decision despite warnings from his superiors that he could be brought up on charges for talking to the media.

“I want people to know that you can stand up for your religious beliefs, and that it’s OK to oppose war, if that’s what you believe,” Turner, a convert to the Methodist church, said. “Christ was not one to go in and use force.”

When brute force became the focus of Turner’s advanced infantry training earlier this year, he said, he grew increasingly uncomfortable. A squad leader at the time, he led his men into mock battle situations. It dawned on him then, with a force that left him upset and unsettled, that he was being trained to kill.

“Originally, I had enlisted for money for college,” he recalled. “After talking to the recruiter, getting financially set was what motivated me to join.”

Although going into combat was “always a possibility,” he said, he joined the military without being asked to give it serious thought. “Nothing was ever said (about) ‘you will kill somebody.’ ”

This summer, he was leading a patrol through an exercise to learn different types of patrol and ambush techniques. His unit successfully wiped out another, but the victory left him shaken.

“I began thinking about what had taken place . . . and what I was doing. It was after that I began having bad dreams,” he said.

Turner’s nightmares included two scenarios, he says.

“I was leading men into combat and they were dying--being killed--and I was responsible,” he said. “Or I may personally be responsible for taking another human being’s life.”

The dreams left him restless.

“My performance began to decline at that time. I thought maybe I was getting burned out. I lost a lot of enthusiasm,” he recalled. Then, “I realized it was the job I was performing. My God was revealing to me that what I was doing was wrong.”

Turner calls this surge in his religiousness a “reawakening” of spiritual tenets he learned as a child, when a grandmother schooled him to be a Christian Scientist. In recent months, his religious feelings have become so intense that he felt drawn to the Methodist church.

Capt. Rose-Ann Sgrignoli, a spokeswoman for Camp Pendleton, said that, in order to be granted conscientious objector status on religious, moral or ethical grounds, a serviceman must prove that his belief is the primary controlling force in his or her life.

That belief must be “of the same strength and depth as found in traditional religious conviction,” she said. And further, “the applicant must show that expediency, or the avoidance of military service, is not the basis of the claim. The primary factor is the sincerity with which the belief is held.”

In large part, the military’s evaluation of an application is based on three interviews of the applicant--one with a chaplain, one with a psychiatrist and, finally, one with an investigating officer.

Turner said he has “passed” the first two. The chaplain, Turner said, found his claim to be sincere and has recommended that he be discharged. The psychiatrist was not required to make a recommendation, but found Turner to be mentally stable, Turner said.

Sgrignoli said privacy regulations prevented her from confirming whether Turner had applied for conscientious objector status. If he has, she said, he is the first at Camp Pendleton to do so. If Turner’s company is deployed, and he refuses to go, she said, he will be arrested.

“If he’s given a direct order, and he refuses to follow the order and it’s a legal order, that’s direct disobedience of an order,” she said. “You don’t do that in the military.”