US Soldier Refuses Iraq Tour

Soldier Refuses Tour, Citing "Stomach-Churning Horrors"
By Aaron Glantz
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42401

WASHINGTON, May 16 (IPS) - A U.S. Army soldier who served as a
military journalist in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Philippines
announced Thursday his intent to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.

"As an Army journalist whose job it was to collect and filter service
members' stories, I heard many stomach-churning testimonies of the
horrors of the crimes taking place in Iraq," said Sergeant Matthis
Chiroux, 24, in an announcement under the rotunda of the House of
Representative's Cannon Office Building.

"For fear of retaliation from the military, I failed to report these
crimes, but never again will I allow fear to silence me. Never again
will I fail to stand," he said.

Chirioux said he's aware he will likely face prosecution for refusing
the deployment, but said, "I choose to remain in the United States to
defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they are willing to
pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq."

Chirioux is a victim of stop-loss, a controversial wartime power that
the George W. Bush administration has used to keep soldiers from
leaving the military when their term of service expires. Critics call
the policy a "back-door draft". More than 50,000 troops have been
stop-lossed since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In an interview shortly before his announcement, Chiroux told IPS the
stop-loss order sent him into a downward spiral of depression.

"I became borderline suicidal," he said. "I just went into my room and
shut the door and barely emerged for close to a month. I just sat in
my room reading news about Iraq and feeling completely hopeless, like
I would be forced to go and no one would ever know how I felt. I was
getting looped into participating in a crime against humanity and all
with the realisation that I never wanted to be there in the first place."

The turning point, Chiroux said, came when one of his professors at
Brooklyn College in New York suggested he listen to the Winter Soldier
hearings. The hearings, which were organised by Iraq Veterans Against
the War, took place in March in Washington, DC.

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of
U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of
an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not isolated
incidents perpetrated by "a few bad apples", but part of a pattern,
the group says, of "an increasingly bloody occupation".

For four days, dozens of Iraq war veterans testified about the horrors
they'd seen and the actions they carried out while deployed. As
Chirioux listened to their testimony, he realised he was not alone.

"Here's an organisation of soldiers and veterans who feel like me," he
said. "All this alienation and depression that I feel started to ease.
I found them and I've been speaking out with them ever since."

Chirioux timed his announcement to coincide with a Congressional forum
meant to highlight testimony offered at Winter Soldier within the
halls of Congress.

Nine veterans spoke at the hearing, which was organised by the
Congressional Progressive Caucus. They talked about extremely lax
rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they
said virtually guaranteed atrocities would be committed -- which in
turn would create a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a
continued cycle of violence.

"On several occasions our convoys came upon bodies that been lying on
the road, sometimes for weeks," said Marine Corps veteran Vincent
Emmanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005.

"When encountering these bodies standard procedure was to run over the
corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also
standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq," he told the
Progressive Caucus.

"On one specific occasion, after I had shot a man trying to flee while
planting a roadside bomb, we dragged his body out of the ditch he was
laying in and we subsequently left this man to rot in a field where we
saw this man up to a week later," Emmanuele said.

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hope Thursday's Progressive
Caucus hearing will spark an investigation by a full Congressional
committee and speed the end of the wars. But with the House of
Representatives moving toward approving another 186 billion dollars in
war funding, these former soldiers and Marines will have to satisfy
themselves with the sentiments of liberal Congresspeople like Maxine
Waters, who praised the veterans for speaking out.

"I want to thank you for having more courage than many members of
Congress have for coming here in defiance of what you have been
instructed and taught to do," she said. "They attempted to tell you
that you should be satisfied by everything that you saw and everything
that you did and everything you witnessed, but you're not. I praise
and honour you for that."

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