Almost 10 years ago to the day, I left for basic training in the U.S. Army. My decision to join the military wasn’t easy. I didn’t ever want to fight in a war. But, like many young Americans, I desired a college education and my family didn’t have the resources to provide that for me. I joined the military because I needed money for college, plain and simple. Neither of my parents served in the military, nor did any of my aunts or uncles. Both of my grandfathers had served, but the military was not a part of my family’s heritage—not one that was ever talked about.
During my time in the military I was trained to kill. It isn’t something that I talk about much, but that was the main thrust of my training. The military needs people who are willing and able to kill enemies on the field of battle. In my early twenties, I didn’t think a whole lot about war or about killing for that matter. Like many, I enjoyed modern war movies portraying honorable American military heroes, and fantasized about my abilities to perform under those conditions. But I never really thought critically about the effects of war or killing on a person and on society at large.
Sept. 11, 2001: I was at home and, like many Americans, I watched, horrified at what I was seeing. It wasn’t long before my reserve unit was alerted and on standby. My unit, however, wouldn’t deploy until November of 2003. I’ll never forget the long walk to the plane from the hangar. Parked out on the tarmac, about 200 meters away from the hangar—where several units had gathered—was a DC-9 fueled and ready to take us to war. We walked single-file to the plane. Some soldiers stepped out of line to take pictures of this pilgrimage, others walked somberly.
But each of us walked those 200 meters alone. With my M-16 assault rifle, I walked. My rifle had never felt so real. The cold steel and plastic were finally warm. I am pretty sure I prayed the entire time I was walking, something like: “Help me remember my training, help me aim quick, and don’t let me die.”
Walking up the stairs onto that plane, I experienced a kind of euphoria like I had never felt. For most of my life up to that point, I had decided where I would go and how I would get there. I exercised a large degree of control over my circumstances. But on that cool night, I would go where I did not want to go, and trust my entire livelihood to others. I was giving up control. Maybe it was this losing control that caused a sort of adrenaline rush that would stay with me for much of the next 12 months.
When we landed in Kuwait, the first thing that we did was attend a briefing on the rules of engagement. Finally we ended up, after more than 24 hours of traveling, at a camp in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. This would be my home, my base of operations for the next year of my life.
The soldiers that I served with experienced a variety of traumas. Some were physically injured by bombs, shrapnel, or bullets. Others had psychological trauma from the threat of harm they experienced or the harm that they witnessed others experiencing. One of the most common traumas experienced by soldiers I served with was the trauma of losing a close relationship back home. It is a cruel and awful thing to receive a “Dear John” letter anytime. But when the letter comes while one is removed from loved ones and serving in war, helplessness and hopelessness are mere reductions, shadows perhaps, of the greater pain that presents itself.
I did not receive any such letter, nor was I physically wounded in battle. But the pain I witnessed in both friends and enemies has changed the way I will view conflict for rest of my life.
One of the things I learned about through this experience was the concept of proximity. When you live close to someone and interact with them on a daily basis, their experience becomes a part of your experience. The festivals that I attended in Kuwait were fantastical. National Dayon Feb. 25 and Liberation Day on Feb. 26 are two that stand out the most. There are street fairs, music, and dancing. Roadsides become miles of bazaars lined with local cuisine and strings of lights. Being deployed gave me the unique opportunity to experience another culture. I wanted to use every opportunity I could to get outside of the confines of our camp and experience the life that the locals lived.
I wanted to understand the Kuwaiti and Iraqi people as best as I could, in the hope that I could better communicate what the military was doing in Iraq and how much we were needed. It was clear to me even in early 2004 that many people in America and abroad were growing more and more critical of the war. I wanted to see what we were actually doing for the people of Iraq and Kuwait. Because I was in the military I had to believe that we were doing good and I needed the interaction with the local culture to affirm my beliefs.
The people I met wanted to know about me and, steadily, their dreams became a part of my life, and I became a part of theirs. One man I talked with often worked at an ice cream shop on the route I would take to weekly meetings at the U.S. headquarters in Kuwait. His name was James, and we talked at least weekly when I would stop to get my ice cream fix. James was from Pakistan but had moved to Kuwait to find work during the war.
“When 150,000 U.S. troops come to town, local businesses flourish,” he told me. James was married and had four children back home. He planned to stay in Kuwait and work as long as he was permitted, then send all the money back home. He was saving so that his children could come to the United States for their education. I told James that I was in school and was planning to attend graduate school to study religion and law. He wasn’t sure when the next time he would see his family, but I always ended our conversations by asking him to tell them I said “hello” and that I look forward to seeing them in America some day.
In our culture we spend a lot of time drawing lines in the sand to define who we are. We define ourselves by often pointing to other people and saying; “I am not like that; I am not a liberal, I am not a fundamentalist, I am not a religious fanatic, I am not a Muslim.” In my experience, sometimes the more religious a person is the more sharply defined are the lines between oneself and the person labeled “other.”
Too many times, I think, people hate the other: Muslim, gay, fundamentalist—or however you label them—because of the geographical distance between them.
I grew up in a tradition that teaches that homosexuality is a choice and it is wrong. But after living in a community with homosexual people for the past four years, gays and lesbians are not the other anymore. I share meals with them. My wife and I have double-dated with a homosexual couple. The hatred that stems from this geographic distance is masked in ideological differences.
The critical thinker is able to remove this ideological mask to see the real problem of proximity. It wasn’t until I lived in a Muslim country for a year that I was able to see through a different set of lenses. It took sharing my life with Muslims and them sharing their lives with me. Today I have Muslim friends. When we live in community with those who are different, it slowly becomes more difficult to view them as other. Another lesson gleaned from my experience during Operation Iraqi Freedom is what I call the problem of collateral damage. Collateral damage includes the unavoidable but unintended civilian casualties, damage to public buildings and infrastructure, and the overall cost —both economic and psychological—to the soldiers of the country waging war. I call it a problem because the term collateral damage connotes “unavoidable” when in reality it is completely avoidable. If something is unavoidable, then we cannot feel too bad about its occurrence.
During my deployment I served as a chaplain assistant and would often provide initial counseling for soldiers coming to speak with the chaplain. I was counseling a soldier once who had just finished a 12-month tour in Baghdad, and as his unit arrived at the airport in Kuwait to fly home, they were ordered to go back to Baghdad for three more months.
He was devastated.
His unit hadn’t suffered any loss of life, but there were several that had been wounded. He wept as he told me about a time when he was pulling up to security at a checkpoint. He told me that a car came speeding through the barricades, and he and his team signaled the vehicle to slow down, to stop; they even fired warning shots into the air. Finally the team opened fire on the vehicle to stop it from coming into the checkpoint. He and his team killed a woman driver and two young children who were laying down in the backseat, that afternoon.
“It seemed that the woman was just scared to death and was trying to get the hell out of there,” he told me. Next he said, “I can’t go back 'to Iraq'. I don’t want to kill anymore.” The investigation into the incident found that all the soldiers acted honorably and within the rules of engagement. I think the point has come in history where collateral damage should always be unacceptable. If hundreds of thousands of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States are psychologically scarred, such that they can no longer function fully in society, it is too high a price to pay. With multi-national coalitions and resources to negotiate conflict between nations peacefully, war must never be preemptive.
Over the last seven years I have seen firsthand lives torn apart by war. I have seen schoolchildren studying in bombed-out schools and widows raising children amongst rubble. I have talked with young adults who lost their spouses to roadside bombs and veterans haunted by nightmares of burning children. At home in the United States, I have listened as politicians and religious leaders talk about securing our border to protect us from religious extremists and I’ve watched as we’ve demonized or deported those labeled Muslim behind the guise of national security. In our country and in our world we are creating too much distance between us and them, whomever “they” happen to be on any given day.
As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I am often asked by friends and complete strangers, “What was it really like over there?” After I do my best to satisfy them with my less than adequate response; I often reflect on what it must mean that so many people think they don’t know what “really” is happening or has happened in Iraq. Surely, for the first three or four years, the Iraq war dominated the national news coverage. Embedded reporters from the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and others all did numerous feature stories following American military units in Iraq. Were people not watching this media frenzy?
It actually gets harder and harder to talk about the war the more I process how I’ve changed. I used to be able to talk about convoys, training meetings, and hours in a guard tower with ease. I’d tell stories and have my audience laughing, impressed by my ability to process my experience in a way that allowed me to share it with them—and then they’d thank me for my service. Now all I want to say is: “War is horrible. People die; good and bad.Families fall apart; good, strong, families of all faiths are destroyed by war. People lose their humanity, their dignity. When you stare down the sights of your weapon into the eyes of another human being, you strip them of every shred of dignity they have left and they never sleep soundly ever again. While you tear away at someone else’s humanity, you don’t realize it, but you start to lose yours. It’s true: you have difficulty looking into the eyes of others now, because you’re afraid that they will see into yours, that they will see who you really are. Please just stop supporting wars, please stop.”
“But if we stop…” they say, as they begin the rhetoric we are all so used to hearing. It is so easy for us as a nation to justify war when war is the goal. Let’s make peace the goal, and then when in the face of conflict, let’s justify peace. After the Holocaust, survivors, rescuers, and allied forces all worked together to put in place systems, organizations, and checks to ensure that a mass genocide can never happen again.
Today, after all we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, isn’t it time that we work to build systems and grant multinational organizations greater power or authority to negotiate peaceful resolution to conflict in our world? Because of all the damage that is done to countries, infrastructures, and families on both sides of the conflict, isn’t it now time for us to decide that there must be a better way? I am a pacifist veteran of the Iraq war. I wasn’t a pacifist before I was deployed, but my experience of war has forced me to say “Never again.”
It isn’t as if there is not a precedent for nonviolence. Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both achieved much through the practice of nonviolence. Today in the 21st century, we have too many examples to look to; justifying wars over and over is irresponsible and it disrespects our human history of progress. Throughout our shared human history, we have seen an evolution of thought, actions, and capability. Human beings have such amazing potential for evolution because we are able to imagine a better future. We can conceive of a higher path, a righteous path. Evolution is a belief in progress and belief in a process toward something better. It is therefore the antithesis of evolution to believe that wars are inevitable. As a veteran, I will work tirelessly to promote peace wherever I am, and I will be critical of any individual or government that rushes to war.
During my time in the military I was trained to kill. It isn’t something that I talk about much, but that was the main thrust of my training. The military needs people who are willing and able to kill enemies on the field of battle. In my early twenties, I didn’t think a whole lot about war or about killing for that matter. Like many, I enjoyed modern war movies portraying honorable American military heroes, and fantasized about my abilities to perform under those conditions. But I never really thought critically about the effects of war or killing on a person and on society at large.
Sept. 11, 2001: I was at home and, like many Americans, I watched, horrified at what I was seeing. It wasn’t long before my reserve unit was alerted and on standby. My unit, however, wouldn’t deploy until November of 2003. I’ll never forget the long walk to the plane from the hangar. Parked out on the tarmac, about 200 meters away from the hangar—where several units had gathered—was a DC-9 fueled and ready to take us to war. We walked single-file to the plane. Some soldiers stepped out of line to take pictures of this pilgrimage, others walked somberly.
But each of us walked those 200 meters alone. With my M-16 assault rifle, I walked. My rifle had never felt so real. The cold steel and plastic were finally warm. I am pretty sure I prayed the entire time I was walking, something like: “Help me remember my training, help me aim quick, and don’t let me die.”
Walking up the stairs onto that plane, I experienced a kind of euphoria like I had never felt. For most of my life up to that point, I had decided where I would go and how I would get there. I exercised a large degree of control over my circumstances. But on that cool night, I would go where I did not want to go, and trust my entire livelihood to others. I was giving up control. Maybe it was this losing control that caused a sort of adrenaline rush that would stay with me for much of the next 12 months.
When we landed in Kuwait, the first thing that we did was attend a briefing on the rules of engagement. Finally we ended up, after more than 24 hours of traveling, at a camp in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. This would be my home, my base of operations for the next year of my life.
The soldiers that I served with experienced a variety of traumas. Some were physically injured by bombs, shrapnel, or bullets. Others had psychological trauma from the threat of harm they experienced or the harm that they witnessed others experiencing. One of the most common traumas experienced by soldiers I served with was the trauma of losing a close relationship back home. It is a cruel and awful thing to receive a “Dear John” letter anytime. But when the letter comes while one is removed from loved ones and serving in war, helplessness and hopelessness are mere reductions, shadows perhaps, of the greater pain that presents itself.
I did not receive any such letter, nor was I physically wounded in battle. But the pain I witnessed in both friends and enemies has changed the way I will view conflict for rest of my life.
One of the things I learned about through this experience was the concept of proximity. When you live close to someone and interact with them on a daily basis, their experience becomes a part of your experience. The festivals that I attended in Kuwait were fantastical. National Dayon Feb. 25 and Liberation Day on Feb. 26 are two that stand out the most. There are street fairs, music, and dancing. Roadsides become miles of bazaars lined with local cuisine and strings of lights. Being deployed gave me the unique opportunity to experience another culture. I wanted to use every opportunity I could to get outside of the confines of our camp and experience the life that the locals lived.
I wanted to understand the Kuwaiti and Iraqi people as best as I could, in the hope that I could better communicate what the military was doing in Iraq and how much we were needed. It was clear to me even in early 2004 that many people in America and abroad were growing more and more critical of the war. I wanted to see what we were actually doing for the people of Iraq and Kuwait. Because I was in the military I had to believe that we were doing good and I needed the interaction with the local culture to affirm my beliefs.
The people I met wanted to know about me and, steadily, their dreams became a part of my life, and I became a part of theirs. One man I talked with often worked at an ice cream shop on the route I would take to weekly meetings at the U.S. headquarters in Kuwait. His name was James, and we talked at least weekly when I would stop to get my ice cream fix. James was from Pakistan but had moved to Kuwait to find work during the war.
“When 150,000 U.S. troops come to town, local businesses flourish,” he told me. James was married and had four children back home. He planned to stay in Kuwait and work as long as he was permitted, then send all the money back home. He was saving so that his children could come to the United States for their education. I told James that I was in school and was planning to attend graduate school to study religion and law. He wasn’t sure when the next time he would see his family, but I always ended our conversations by asking him to tell them I said “hello” and that I look forward to seeing them in America some day.
In our culture we spend a lot of time drawing lines in the sand to define who we are. We define ourselves by often pointing to other people and saying; “I am not like that; I am not a liberal, I am not a fundamentalist, I am not a religious fanatic, I am not a Muslim.” In my experience, sometimes the more religious a person is the more sharply defined are the lines between oneself and the person labeled “other.”
Too many times, I think, people hate the other: Muslim, gay, fundamentalist—or however you label them—because of the geographical distance between them.
I grew up in a tradition that teaches that homosexuality is a choice and it is wrong. But after living in a community with homosexual people for the past four years, gays and lesbians are not the other anymore. I share meals with them. My wife and I have double-dated with a homosexual couple. The hatred that stems from this geographic distance is masked in ideological differences.
The critical thinker is able to remove this ideological mask to see the real problem of proximity. It wasn’t until I lived in a Muslim country for a year that I was able to see through a different set of lenses. It took sharing my life with Muslims and them sharing their lives with me. Today I have Muslim friends. When we live in community with those who are different, it slowly becomes more difficult to view them as other. Another lesson gleaned from my experience during Operation Iraqi Freedom is what I call the problem of collateral damage. Collateral damage includes the unavoidable but unintended civilian casualties, damage to public buildings and infrastructure, and the overall cost —both economic and psychological—to the soldiers of the country waging war. I call it a problem because the term collateral damage connotes “unavoidable” when in reality it is completely avoidable. If something is unavoidable, then we cannot feel too bad about its occurrence.
During my deployment I served as a chaplain assistant and would often provide initial counseling for soldiers coming to speak with the chaplain. I was counseling a soldier once who had just finished a 12-month tour in Baghdad, and as his unit arrived at the airport in Kuwait to fly home, they were ordered to go back to Baghdad for three more months.
He was devastated.
His unit hadn’t suffered any loss of life, but there were several that had been wounded. He wept as he told me about a time when he was pulling up to security at a checkpoint. He told me that a car came speeding through the barricades, and he and his team signaled the vehicle to slow down, to stop; they even fired warning shots into the air. Finally the team opened fire on the vehicle to stop it from coming into the checkpoint. He and his team killed a woman driver and two young children who were laying down in the backseat, that afternoon.
“It seemed that the woman was just scared to death and was trying to get the hell out of there,” he told me. Next he said, “I can’t go back 'to Iraq'. I don’t want to kill anymore.” The investigation into the incident found that all the soldiers acted honorably and within the rules of engagement. I think the point has come in history where collateral damage should always be unacceptable. If hundreds of thousands of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States are psychologically scarred, such that they can no longer function fully in society, it is too high a price to pay. With multi-national coalitions and resources to negotiate conflict between nations peacefully, war must never be preemptive.
Over the last seven years I have seen firsthand lives torn apart by war. I have seen schoolchildren studying in bombed-out schools and widows raising children amongst rubble. I have talked with young adults who lost their spouses to roadside bombs and veterans haunted by nightmares of burning children. At home in the United States, I have listened as politicians and religious leaders talk about securing our border to protect us from religious extremists and I’ve watched as we’ve demonized or deported those labeled Muslim behind the guise of national security. In our country and in our world we are creating too much distance between us and them, whomever “they” happen to be on any given day.
As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I am often asked by friends and complete strangers, “What was it really like over there?” After I do my best to satisfy them with my less than adequate response; I often reflect on what it must mean that so many people think they don’t know what “really” is happening or has happened in Iraq. Surely, for the first three or four years, the Iraq war dominated the national news coverage. Embedded reporters from the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and others all did numerous feature stories following American military units in Iraq. Were people not watching this media frenzy?
It actually gets harder and harder to talk about the war the more I process how I’ve changed. I used to be able to talk about convoys, training meetings, and hours in a guard tower with ease. I’d tell stories and have my audience laughing, impressed by my ability to process my experience in a way that allowed me to share it with them—and then they’d thank me for my service. Now all I want to say is: “War is horrible. People die; good and bad.Families fall apart; good, strong, families of all faiths are destroyed by war. People lose their humanity, their dignity. When you stare down the sights of your weapon into the eyes of another human being, you strip them of every shred of dignity they have left and they never sleep soundly ever again. While you tear away at someone else’s humanity, you don’t realize it, but you start to lose yours. It’s true: you have difficulty looking into the eyes of others now, because you’re afraid that they will see into yours, that they will see who you really are. Please just stop supporting wars, please stop.”
“But if we stop…” they say, as they begin the rhetoric we are all so used to hearing. It is so easy for us as a nation to justify war when war is the goal. Let’s make peace the goal, and then when in the face of conflict, let’s justify peace. After the Holocaust, survivors, rescuers, and allied forces all worked together to put in place systems, organizations, and checks to ensure that a mass genocide can never happen again.
Today, after all we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, isn’t it time that we work to build systems and grant multinational organizations greater power or authority to negotiate peaceful resolution to conflict in our world? Because of all the damage that is done to countries, infrastructures, and families on both sides of the conflict, isn’t it now time for us to decide that there must be a better way? I am a pacifist veteran of the Iraq war. I wasn’t a pacifist before I was deployed, but my experience of war has forced me to say “Never again.”
It isn’t as if there is not a precedent for nonviolence. Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both achieved much through the practice of nonviolence. Today in the 21st century, we have too many examples to look to; justifying wars over and over is irresponsible and it disrespects our human history of progress. Throughout our shared human history, we have seen an evolution of thought, actions, and capability. Human beings have such amazing potential for evolution because we are able to imagine a better future. We can conceive of a higher path, a righteous path. Evolution is a belief in progress and belief in a process toward something better. It is therefore the antithesis of evolution to believe that wars are inevitable. As a veteran, I will work tirelessly to promote peace wherever I am, and I will be critical of any individual or government that rushes to war.