Veterans Say They Organized Against the War While on the Front Lines in Iraq

Three veterans who came back from Iraq in 2005 say they conducted anti-war organizing while fighting on the front lines and are now continuing their activism by offering help to soldiers who oppose the war and decide to go AWOL, or “absent without leave,” from their military duties. They are doing it all with seeming impunity.The former Army specialists, Jeffrey Englehart and Joseph Hatcher, both 26, and Garett Reppenhagen, 31, spoke on a panel at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City on Friday. About 100 people attended the event, which was sponsored by an anti-war organization called the Military Project.At the talk and in earlier telephone interviews with The New York Sun, the veterans discussed how, as part of their activism on the battlefield, they:· Created an anti-war Web log, FightToSurvive, on which they gave details about their daily lives in Iraq and wrote of their disapproval of the president, the military, and American foreign policy;· Secretly passed out anti-war literature at military dining facilities and camp libraries, penning some of the literature themselves under aliases such as Soldier X, Soldier Y, and Soldier Z;· Wrote “F— Bush” in Arabic on military vehicles in what they said was an effort to improve relations with local Iraqis;· Launched a “tagging campaign” in which they wrote anti-war graffiti in bathrooms and posted stickers that read “Bush Lies, Who Dies?” in public places in Iraq;· Organized discussions with other soldiers around the ideas of leftist writers such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn,· And proselytized against the war in one-on-one conversations with their military comrades and in private screenings of anti-war films.After a few months, the soldiers said, their online journal drew the attention of military commanders in Iraq. At that time, two of the soldiers, Messrs. Englehart and Reppenhagen, said they were confronted about it and asked to stop posting. The Army never knew of Mr. Hatcher’s participation on the Web site, they said, perhaps because Mr. Hatcher was stationed near Tikrit and the other two were based in Diyala province.“There was one captain who said he hoped I was shot for treason,” Mr. Reppenhagen told the Sun.However, no charges were filed against him or the others, and whatever disciplinary action any of the three might have undergone is not clear.“Except for courts-martial, disciplinary action is administrative in nature and not releasable to outside parties,” the Combined Press Information Center director for Multi-National Force in Iraq, Lieutenant Commander Chris Garver, told the Sun in an e-mail.Asked what kind of reprimand a soldier could receive for passing out anti-war or anti-Bush materials on the front lines, Commander Garvey said, “I cannot comment on this without seeing the materials. Such a decision would be left up to the local commander on the ground and would be based on a myriad of factors. … Commanders would have to weigh the materials being distributed against the definitions in the UCMJ,” the United Code of Military Justice.The military now requires all Web sites created by active-duty soldiers in Iraq be registered with the unit chain of command.According to U.S. Air Force Major Patrick Ryder of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, personal blogs by soldiers “may not contain information on military activities that is not available to the general public” and “cannot be done during normal duty hours or with use of Department of Defense facilities or property except as authorized.”“Information not available to the general public would include comments on daily military activities and operations, unit morale, results of operations, status of equipment, etc.,” Major Ryder said.However, in a November 19, 2004, post on the blog, Mr. Englehart, writing under an alias, describes in detail his experience as a witness to a battle in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, including the activities of American military units and the types of weapons used.The message reads:“I was in Falluja during the last two days of the final assault. My mission was much different from that of the brave and weary infantry and Marines involved in the major fighting. I was on an escort mission. … Artillery was pounding away … At times, the jets would scream menacingly low over the city and open fire with smaller missiles meant for extreme accuracy. … Seconds later, the colossal explosion would rip the sky open and hammer devastatingly into the ground, sending flames and debris pummeling into the air. And as always, the artillery — some rounds were high explosive, some were illumination rounds, some were reported as being white phosphorus (the modern day napalm). Occasionally, on the outskirts of the isolated impact area, you could hear tanks firing machine guns and blazing their cannons. It was amazing that anything could survive this deadly onslaught. Suddenly a transmission came over the radio approving the request for ‘bunker-busters.’ Apparently, there were a handful of insurgent compounds that were impenetrable by artillery.”At the time, the military’s use of white phosphorus was not publicly acknowledged. The chemical is considered an incendiary weapon similar to napalm, but it is not banned by any treaty to which America is a signatory.After Mr. Englehart’s appearance in a documentary broadcast on Italian television earlier this year in which he described the use of white phosphorus as a weapon, the U.S. military at first denied his assertion but later backtracked, confirming its use soon thereafter.“Anything that is not available to the public should not have gone on the Web site,” a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, Mackenzie Eaglen, told the Sun. “If the Department of Defense wanted it on the Web site, it would be on the Web site. … At best, it’s troubling. At worst, it’s illegal.”But the rules governing the political activities of active-duty military personnel can be complex and difficult to understand, Ms. Eaglen said. For example, it is unlawful for a soldier to use “contemptuous” words against civilian leaders such as the president.However, the legal definition of “contemptuous” remains murky, and even if the soldier’s actions are found to be a violation, it is often up to the soldier’s commanding officer to decide what form of punishment the G.I. receives.“This whole topic warrants attention at the highest levels of the military,” Ms. Eaglen said.Meanwhile, at Friday’s event, Mr. Englehart told the audience: “We had to fight a war on two different fronts. One was against the Iraqi insurgency. The other was against the Army.”Mr. Englehart then gave more details about some of his anti-war activism on the front lines, describing how he and the others would go on “sticker campaigns” to post decals with anti-Bush statements on them in public-but-obscure places. “It was our means of expressing ourselves without getting caught,” Mr. Englehart told the audience.A former Army sergeant who served in Afghanistan until May 2005, Verby Wright, spoke during the Friday event’s question-and-answer session. In a room containing several scores of people, he was the only person to speak out against what the soldiers said they had done, telling the panel, “I probably would have tried to bring you up on UCMJ for treason.”During the panel, Mr. Wright told the Sun that he thinks the soldier’s commanding officers should have done something more to punish them and questions why they chose not to file for status as conscientious objectors to war.“They shouldn’t have even went to be deployed,” he said.When the Sun asked the anti-war veterans themselves why they agreed to go to Iraq if they so strongly opposed the war, all three former G.I.s said it was only after they arrived that their political views solidified.“While I was on the ground performing missions,” Mr. Reppenhagen told the Sun by telephone, “that was when I truly switched sides. … It was an evolution.”After that evolution, Mr. Reppenhagen said he began to hide anti-war pamphlets, such as “G.I. Special” Newsletter produced by an activist named Thomas Barton, inside of other books at the camp libraries. Sometimes, other soldiers would report finding the activist literature to the chain of command, he said, sometimes they would throw it away, and sometimes they would read it and pass it on to their friends.After the soldiers’ blogging activities were discovered, Mr. Reppenhagen said he was ordered to report to his commanding officer, who “told me to stop writing, which I didn’t. I continued to write, and I had to report again.” It was then that Mr. Reppenhagen said his commander told him, “You’re a good soldier. You’re just a bad person.”One September 15, 2004, post from the anti-war blog reads:“How could we ever allow a child-president to take siege of the White House, slip a war right under our noses, and move the department of Offense to a secluded location in Texas? … No longer are we allowed to think for ourselves, question authority, or challenge the ignorance of a crooked president. In an exaggerated sense, what makes this country any different than the Third World countries we invade?”A post from two days later complains of the military’s stop-loss program to call up active-duty soldiers to serve in combat for a longer period than their original commitment. It reads: “The stop-loss is the easy solution to the lack of troops on the ground in Iraq, and for Bush, it makes for a perfect backdoor draft. Well, f— you, Uncle Sam!”A third message from October of that year quotes the writer Hunter S. Thompson calling the president a “stupid little rich kid.”Mr. Reppenhagen points to the blog as the trio’s most effective anti-war tactic, saying: “I think we had the most success through our blogging because it helped validate the civilian anti-war network” by providing people with information from anti-war soldiers in Iraq.Now that the three former soldiers — who all served in one of the most violent regions of Iraq, in the Sunni triangle — are back in America, the soldiers’ anti-war activism has taken a new form, through speaking engagements and through helping active-duty soldiers who are against the war by giving them information and help in going AWOL if they choose to do so.“I encourage conscientious objection. I encourage desertion,” Mr. Hatcher, 26, told the Sun over the telephone. “Soldiers have a right to defend themselves from a chain of command that has no concern for their well-being.”Mr. Hatcher, who says he is “homeless” because he travels and speaks full-time against the war, said he has suggested to “many, many people” that they go AWOL but that most will not listen.Mr. Englehart said he would try “to provide resources” to any person who chooses to go absent without leave from the service. “I personally think it’s a great move if the decision is based on morals and ethics.”Mr. Englehart said he has corresponded by e-mail with a couple of active-duty soldiers who were considering doing so. “I don’t think it’s wrong,” he said he told one of the G.I.s. “If you need help, let me know.”Mr. Englehart said he does not know what choice the soldier made, as he has since fallen out of contact with the person. And asked whether he fears what he did might be against the law, Mr. Englehart said, “I don’t know if what I did was illegal.”

Veterans Say They Organized Against the War While on the Front Lines in Iraq

Veterans Say They Organized Against the War While on the Front Lines in Iraq

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