Town Musters Up Outrage, Sympathy for Defiant Unit

Mike and Jim Gordon, who disagree on most matters of national importance, hashed out the rebellion of the 343rd Quartermaster Company over a plate of barbecue Tuesday.

Jim, 49, said the soldiers should get medals for resisting an order they considered foolhardy and dangerous; if more soldiers had questioned orders in Vietnam, he said, “there’d be a lot less people buried at Arlington.”

Mike, 10 years older than his brother, said they should be punished. During the three years he spent in the Army, he learned that independent thinking was not a quality prized in soldiers; besides, he said, “you might as well know if you sign up for the Army, you might get shot at.”

“If everybody in the military decided to do that themselves,” he added, “we’d be in one hell of a mess.”

The same argument was being replayed all over Rock Hill, home base for the 343rd Quartermaster Company, an Army Reserve unit in Iraq. Last week, members of one of the company’s four platoons refused a mission to carry a load of fuel across dangerous territory, saying their vehicles were slow, unreliable and not armored, and that the fuel they were carrying was contaminated.

Since Friday, when a few soldiers’ act of defiance became a public matter, ordinary Americans have gotten a look into the world of military discipline -- and they have drawn different conclusions. Some said the furor would not have happened had the military been more responsive to the needs of its members. Others shook their heads in disgust at the soldiers’ temerity in disobeying orders.

“I think most of us are shocked,” said Johnnie Robinson, 73, commander of Post 2889 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “I haven’t talked to anyone that’s ever heard of anything like this. Usually, it’s just an individual who refuses to disobey an order -- just a coward.”

Like many communities in the Carolinas, Rock Hill has a high concentration of veterans. They make up about 12% of the city’s adult population, and number 17,000 in York County.

Some, like Robinson, were transformed by combat in Korea and Vietnam. It shaped their belief systems.

Then there are those like 19-year-old Abraham Reed, who grew up in peacetime and has watched his friends turn to the military for education or financial stability.

Reed has sided with the soldiers of the 343rd. From his friends in Iraq, he hears a steady stream of stories about commanders sending soldiers out “like stunt dummies, to get shot at.”

“I think it took mad courage,” he said.

There was a similar approving tone at Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q, where Robert White, 21, sat with two friends. White, who installs air conditioning and heating systems, said he liked to see soldiers and their families demand accountability from the military.

“I think [the military] should have families involved, because it’s part of American society. Our politics control it. Our president is the commander in chief,” White said. “If your family’s out there dying, you should be involved.”

Many others are chagrined that Rock Hill is the unit’s peacetime home.

Sgt. 1st Class Mitchell Withrip, who answers phones inside the small brick building that is the 343rd’s headquarters, has listened as several veterans called to complain about the soldiers’ defiance.

“They say: ‘Can I give you my opinion? What were those soldiers thinking about?’ ” said Withrip, who serves as the unit’s retention officer. “Do the mission and complain about it later, that was their philosophy.”

Withrip said he had received little information about the incident except for what he had heard from reporters. He worries that the publicity will hurt morale in the unit, a group of 120 reservists from communities all over the South who, until last week, weren’t unusual in any way.

“Basically, the 343rd is a good unit. They were a good unit, and up until now they were doing their job,” he said. Now their future holds an exhaustive investigation, he said, and the shadow of notoriety.

“They’re going to dig into everything this unit has done since they got over there,” he said. “If they forgot to dot an I or cross a T.”

The men who meet for beers at the American Legion post down the road from Withrip’s office said they were trying to withhold judgment. Many had served during peacetime and said they could imagine justifications for questioning orders.

“They did get another group from the same unit to carry out the mission,” said Cecil Phillips, 62. “It’s not a good situation from a military standpoint, I’ll tell you that.”

But others have judged, and harshly. At a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Laurel, Miss., Chuck Bush watched coverage of the story with a growing sense of outrage.

“It’s cowardice, and I’m reluctant to use the word, but that’s what it is,” he said. “This is a war, for goodness sake. I don’t know of anything safe in a war. You kill people and tear up property -- that’s what war is.

“In my day, if something like that had happened, it would have been handled locally by the commanders,” said Bush, 65. With cellphones and e-mail available to soldiers, “it’s easy for somebody to cry to mama and daddy. I’ll tell you what my daddy would have told me. He would have said, ‘You find yourself another daddy, because buddy, you’re no longer my son.’ ”

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Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report