‘The Hell Months’ : Conscientious Objector Recalls Marine Reaction

The dream that would change Marine Cpl. Ken Turner’s life came on a night in July, 1990.

It began with a feeling. The enemy was close. It was time to move, and Turner--an ambitious squad leader at Camp Pendleton--led the way, leaving the safety of an armored personnel carrier and calling his men to follow.

The first of Turner’s men was shot dead as he stepped into the open air. Turner didn’t hesitate--he shouted out another name. A bullet found that Marine, too, and the next. One by one, Turner called his men to battle. And one by one, they were felled by enemy fire.

When most of his squad lay bleeding on the ground, Turner--dressed all in white, and miraculously unharmed--led four survivors up a hill and into the path of the enemy. And then, the 22-year-old expert rifleman says, his sleeping mind served up an image that would alter the course of his life.

“The people who were shooting at us were the people in my squad--the people we’d left for dead,” Turner said of the dream that he believes first revealed to him his moral objections to war. “My mind was saying, ‘I’m going to show you what you’re doing.’ . . . And it bothered me.”

From that day on, Turner says, nothing was the same. Last fall, he applied for conscientious objector status--the first Camp Pendleton Marine to do so during Operation Desert Shield.

Last month, after four years in the Marine Corps, he ended his military career. At a special court-martial, he received a bad-conduct discharge--part of a pretrial agreement under which Turner, who was accused of desertion, pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for a suspended prison sentence. Although he awaits discharge, his conscientious objector, or CO, claim is still pending.

In a recent series of interviews, Turner reflected on his last tumultuous year in the Marine Corps, a period he now calls “The Hell Months.”

He had once loved the challenge of soldiering. But, in his recurring nightmares, Turner says, he faced--and then grew to abhor--its purpose. At odds with the job he had sworn to perform, he says he was exiled from the military community to which he had belonged for nearly a fifth of his life.

There were threats and taunts--one commanding officer told Turner he would never get a job in the civilian world; another said his children, if he ever had any, would grow up ashamed. Capt. James C. Mallon, the prosecutor in Turner’s case, said Turner had “let down his fellow Marines and let down his country.”

But Turner says it was the Marine Corps that let him down.

What follows is Turner’s personal account--the genesis and evolution of a self-proclaimed CO. Much of it cannot be corroborated--under Marine Corps privacy rules, the Corps will not comment on individual cases. And there are parts of the story that only Turner knows, revelations that unfolded inside his own head.

Turner first heard the term conscientious objector in 1987, as he sat in a Marine recruiting office in his hometown of Jackson, Mich. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew from the recruiter’s tone that it was not something he wanted to be.

“It came right after, ‘Are you a homosexual?’ and ‘Are you a communist?’ ” Turner remembers. “He said, ‘You’re not one of those, I know that’--making it real derogatory.”

In fact, the recruiter was right, Turner says--he wasn’t a CO then. Three months past his 18th birthday, he was sure of only one thing: He had to escape the minimum-wage future that awaited him in the town, 70 miles west of Detroit, where he’d spent his whole life.

The son of a telephone operator and a power plant supervisor, Turner had grown up in a strict Christian Science home with plenty of rules and not a lot of money. He was a hard-working high school student, a trumpet player who shunned football to play in the band. He wanted to study filmmaking, but college was too expensive.

When a friend who had joined the Army came home with a full wallet and a new wardrobe, Turner was intrigued. He went to the recruiting office to inquire about the Army. When the recruiter kept him waiting, Turner stepped into a hallway and was approached by a Marine.

“What do you want to get out of your life?” the Marine recruiter asked him, displaying a set of flash cards. Turner picked the cards labeled Travel, Money and Education, forgoing one that said Sense of Belonging to an Elite Group.

At the time, Turner’s grandmother questioned his newfound interest in the military. From early childhood, when his parents divorced, she had been a strong force in his life--a devout Christian Scientist who had a knack, he says, for teaching him moral lessons without preaching. Because of her, Turner says, he has never thrown a punch in rage.

But, after the recruiter promised Turner filmmaking training in the Corps’ audio-visual program, Turner signed on for six years in the Quality Enlistment Program. He completed boot camp in San Diego and was assigned to the School of Infantry. The training, he said, was geared toward learning military rules and technical skills.

He was good at it. In March, 1990, when he returned to Camp Pendleton after serving two years on guard duty in Alameda, his sergeant chose him to be the company’s noncommissioned officer of the quarter. And soon, Turner said, his commanding officer said that, if he kept up his good work, he could be a sergeant himself.

Responsible for a dozen men, Turner led night patrols around the wild country of Camp Pendleton. He felt in control. Even when his men skirmished with other patrols during ambush exercises, he said, it seemed like make-believe.

“It was just like you were playing cowboys and Indians when you were little,” he said. “It was like a big game.”

Then came the final test: a three-day mock war held in early May, 1990. As in other exercises, Turner and his men were equipped with laser guns, body harnesses and helmets that beeped when fired upon. But, for the first time, the squad was competing against other companies--men they did not know.

The first two days went off without a hitch. But, on the third, Turner led six Marines into the dark, moonless night and stumbled upon an entire platoon. Through night-vision glasses, Turner saw 40 men walking straight toward him, completely unaware of his presence. He could feel the adrenaline.

“I moved my people around so we were standing in the dark out in the open, just facing directly at them,” he recalled. “I could hear them walking. They were that close. So we opened fire.”

Instead of gunfire, the night air filled with the sound of beeps as Turner’s men emptied their laser guns into the “enemy.” When they retreated, giddy in their victory, Turner looked back and saw only four of their opponents left standing.

Soon, men began dying in Turner’s dreams. He found himself haunted by the uneasy feeling that he was responsible for unacceptable violence. That feeling would convince him he could no longer be a Marine.

“I started questioning what I was doing, and to me that was confusing, because I felt like I was going to let all these people down. And I was going to let myself down, because I really wanted to be a sergeant,” Turner recalled. But, for the first time, he said, “I didn’t believe in what was happening. I didn’t think it was what I was raised to do.”

According to written policy, the Marine Corps will grant CO status to any individual who is sincerely opposed to participation in war in any form, whether on moral, religious or ethical grounds. The applicant must prove that his belief is the primary controlling force in his life and that it is of the same strength and depth as in traditional religious conviction.

He must also prove that he developed his anti-war beliefs while in the military, not before enlistment. And he must show that expediency, or the avoidance of active military service, is not the basis of his claim.

Turner says Operation Desert Shield was not the source of his opposition to killing. Even before the military buildup began in August, he said, his nightmares had sent him into a tailspin that alarmed his superiors.

But, when President Bush began deploying Marine units to Saudi Arabia, the growing likelihood that he would be asked to kill served to crystallize his beliefs, he said.

“My feelings became fixed,” Turner wrote in his CO application. “No longer was it just a possibility that I may have to kill another human being. Upon the President’s order, this nightmare had become a reality.”

Soon, his commanding officers took formal note of his flagging enthusiasm.

“Cpl. Turner needs to work on attitude and supervision--I feel he is losing some of the tiger he had,” his platoon commander wrote in his diary Aug. 13. Despite Turner’s tactical proficiency and teaching skills, the commander noted three days later, he was “in jeopardy of losing squad--reason: attitude. Not supervising.”

On Aug. 25, Turner married his fiancee, Joelle. His home life was happy, but his dreams continued, sometimes jolting him awake at night, his heart racing.

Joelle Turner saw that her husband was miserable, she says, and she resolved to get him some help. She called Greenpeace--inspired by the “peace” in the environmental group’s name. When she told them about Turner’s dreams, they referred her to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a national group that counsels war resisters. The CCCO referred Turner to military counselor Mark Lamanna.

In written evaluations of Turner’s CO application, more than one Marine Corps investigator has raised suspicions about Lamanna’s role in Turner’s development. The consensus among them seems to be that Lamanna, a former Navy petty officer who won CO status in 1987 and received an honorable discharge, somehow talked Turner into his beliefs.

“Cpl. Turner was experiencing nothing more than the same feelings, concerns and apprehension that most young men of his age and intellect experience at one time or another in similar circumstances,” wrote R. S. Robichaud, one of six officers who have reviewed Turner’s CO application thus far. “Turner did not conduct a thorough, wide-ranging, rigorous search for the origin and meaning of those feelings. Instead, he chose to select the first, plausible explanation that was offered.”

Lamanna has heard the criticism, and he dismisses it. He won’t work with people who just want a way out of the military, he said--the CO route to discharge is difficult enough for sincere applicants.

“Unlike a lot of people, in his family, religion meant something,” said Lamanna, who said Turner came to him “deeply disturbed” and racked with guilt that his heart was no longer in his job. “He was a conscientious person, a good soldier, and his ability to function had fallen apart.”

Lamanna and Turner met several times in September. Turner talked about the past--about the family dinners with his grandmother, who used the Gospel to analyze current events. He looked back on his military training--the hand-to-hand combat, the pugil sticks, the ambushes and the “seek and murder” patrols--and realized he had never fully grasped that he was learning to kill.

As they talked, Turner grew to regard his dreams and his restlessness as signs from God.

“The master plan of my God was to take me from an environment where I was apathetic about violence and to place me in an environment that is so rife with violence that I would realize . . . my purpose in life,” he wrote in his CO application. “ . . . (T)he curtain of vagueness has been lifted. . . . I was a good Marine because I depended upon my conscience for insight into what the proper military action would be. Now my Lord and Savior is talking to me through my conscience.”

In late September, Turner told his commanding officers he was a conscientious objector. He expected ridicule. What he got from his commanding officers, he says, was a hazing.

“They wouldn’t verbally say, ‘You’re a loser.’ They played these mind games,” he said, recalling how other squad leaders started holding meetings without him. “I wasn’t told. Then I would show up and get chewed out.”

Next, Turner said, the Marine Corps demoted him from squad leader to fire team leader. Then he was threatened with a reduction in rank--a threat that was dropped, he said, when he made clear he wouldn’t back down.

Turner held firm. But his wife soon noticed a pattern in his moods.

“Monday, Tuesday, he was OK,” she said of that period. “But by Friday, he was in tears. Every Friday. He’d say, ‘I feel so worthless. I feel like a loser.’ They totally disgraced him and made him feel like he was nothing.”

The most common taunt, as the military buildup continued in the Persian Gulf, was that Turner was feigning spirituality in an attempt to save his skin. The comment stung Turner, especially when it came from officers who had so recently sung his praises.

If he had just wanted a discharge, Turner says, there were simpler ways to get one.

“If I wanted to get out--just plain get out--I could have just left (Camp Pendleton) for two weeks, come back, taken the punishment and just keep leaving and leaving. Because they’ll just kick you out,” Turner said, remembering that one platoon commander urged him to do just that. “He said, ‘If I were you, I’d just go UA (unauthorized absence).”

But he wanted something more.

“I consider myself a CO, whether they say I’m one or not. I am one,” he said, speaking with bitterness. “You can be religious in the military, but it has to be ‘our’ religion. You can be whatever faith you want, as long as it conforms to the way ‘we’ believe. They say you can be religious, but you have to kill. I say no.”

In November, just before Turner submitted his CO claim, a Navy chaplain who interviewed him judged Turner’s religious convictions to be sincere.

“He has enjoyed his time in the Marine Corps and served well both Corps and country,” Chaplain R. L. Keane wrote in a letter included in the application. “However, his own spiritual journey has led him to a strong sensitivity regarding the taking of human life for whatever reason. I do not have reason to think that he is seeking to escape a deployment or any duty previously accepted in good faith.”

Before Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington rules on Turner’s claim, it must be evaluated by several officers up the chain of command.

Cpl. Kevin Conlin, a co-worker of Turner’s, testified that he, too, believed Turner’s CO claim was submitted in earnest.

“You know how most Marines get out to the field and all they want to do is go kill those guys?” he said. “Ever since I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him express motivation to kill. . . . The driving factor for him was to do a good job.”

In the meantime, his company, part of the 5th Expeditionary Brigade, was about to be deployed. Turner asked to be transferred to a unit that was not going to war--at least until his CO application was resolved. But his superiors said no.

So Turner went public. At a press conference just days before the deployment, Joelle Turner read a statement in which her husband declared that, if the Marine Corps insisted on sending him to war against his will, he would refuse to go.

Early the next morning, as his entire company watched from a waiting bus, Turner refused a direct order to deploy. The bus pulled out, taking his company to board ships in San Diego. Turner was marched around the base for hours. Over and over, he was told that, if he didn’t deploy, he was going to prison for seven years.

When he refused to give in, he says the Marine Corps called his distant father, frightened him with descriptions of his son’s impending prison sentence and asked him to intervene. Then they put Turner on the telephone. (The military says Turner called his father himself.)

The call left Turner shaken. When the Marine Corps promised to expedite his CO claim, he agreed to board a Gulf-bound ship.

He sailed with strangers--his commanding officers said that, for his own protection, he was not assigned to his company’s ship. Instead of making the voyage easier and more anonymous, however, the separation made it lonely and alienating, he said.

A few days into the journey, Turner received the first of what would eventually be many written evaluations of his CO claim. It said, among other things, that his sincerity was suspect and that he had come to his beliefs over too short a time.

Turner sank into despair. Seeking relief, he attended a Bible study held by a Navy chaplain. There, he was handed a pamphlet titled “How Can I Be a Christian If I Kill?” On the front was a drawing of a lamb in wolf’s clothing. Turner took no solace from the message inside: God will forgive you.

When one of his fellow Marines told him he was out to get him, Turner couldn’t take it anymore.

“I was paranoid,” he recalled. “I (had been) on an aircraft carrier for two years--I’d seen guys get pushed down ladder wells and everybody said, ‘Oh, he tripped.’ And here I had a whole (hostile) company. It would have been easy for them to push me over.”

So Turner jumped ship. When his ship docked at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 10--just one month before the ground war began--he fled, buying a one-way plane ticket back to Southern California.

It was that act that got Turner a bad-conduct discharge. When the paperwork is completed, his CO application will become moot.

“I was religiously persecuted,” said Turner, who believes the Marine Corps made an example of him because of the Gulf War and never gave his carefully written essays a fair reading. “I didn’t go against the system, the system went against me,” he said.

Turner’s dreams continued after he returned from Hawaii. In one, he obeyed an order to take an enemy stronghold, only to find himself being fired upon by his fellow squad leaders. In another, his commanding officers were chasing him around a ship, trying to get him to fire a weapon and to put on a uniform.

Now Turner dresses as he likes--usually in jeans and T-shirts. He has stopped his weekly visits to the barber, so his dark hair has begun to grow out.

Last week, Turner began packing up the small San Diego apartment he and Joelle share. They are moving to Denver, where he will attend art school and study music video production--”What I should have done in the first place,” he says.

He also plans to work with high school kids, sharing his military experiences and encouraging them to think carefully about their futures.

“You don’t know yourself when you’re that young,” he said. “Some people, the military is right for. If that’s what they want, they should do it. But they should know what they’re getting into--every side of it.”

He has little hope that his CO application will be approved between now and the time he is formally discharged--probably within a year.

“They’ve gotten what they want. They wanted a conviction. They wanted a bad-conduct discharge,” he said. “By next year, they will have forgotten about me. But I’ll still be telling people what they’re about. So, in a way, I have beaten them.”

On Thursday night, after he fell asleep in a bedroom crowded with cardboard boxes, Turner had another dream. The United States was involved in another war, and Turner was up at Camp Pendleton, with Lamanna at his side. They were both wearing blue jeans.

“There were five or six people standing around us saying, ‘We don’t believe in what’s going on.’ And me and Mark were telling them, ‘Hey, you don’t have to go,’ ” Turner said.

Instead of tossing about in a cold sweat, he woke the next morning with a peaceful feeling, he said.

“It was like a big transition was at an end. I’ve rectified the problem now and my mind is saying, ‘Everything is the way it should be,’ ” he said. “I’ve changed.”

Criteria for Granting Conscientious Objector Status

The applicant must be sincerely opposed to participation of war in any form, whether on moral, religious or ethical grounds.

The applicant must prove that his belief is the primary controlling force in his life and that it is of the same strength and depth as in traditional religious conviction.

The applicant must show he developed his anti-war beliefs while in the military, not before enlistment. And he must show that expediency, or the avoidance of active military service, is not the basis of his claim.

Church membership or adherence to particular theological tenets is not required.

An applicant may not be denied CO status simply because the conscientious objection influences the views concerning the nation’s domestic or foreign policies. But the application should be denied when it can be determined that the sole basis for the claim rests upon political rather than religious, moral or ethical beliefs.

Source: Marine Corps Order 1306.16E on Conscientious Objectors