The Oregonian covered the Winter Soldier event in Portland. There were three panels, soldiers and Marines, family members and clinicians and supporters of war resisters. The soldiers gave heart wrenching testimony such as that of Chris Arendt.

Christopher Arendt said he joined the National Guard after hearing war stories from his grandfather, who had proudly counted the number of shells he’d fired during World War II.

In 2004, seven years after his grandfather’s death, he recalled forcibly extracting a Guantanamo Bay detainee from his cell and watching as the man’s head was smashed into a metal fence post. At that moment, he told a crowd of more than 100 at the First Unitarian Church in Portland on Saturday, Arendt couldn’t tell the difference between himself and the images he’d seen of Nazi soldiers. now living in Portland. “What I hate about myself over there was the callousness, the emptiness. I wish I was angrier while I was there.

“But it’s impossible to keep yourself — the sane, the normal, the feeling. You figure, ‘I’ll feel later.’ Three years later I’m still trying to do that.”

The Oregonian provides a link to my testimony here.

The NY Times has an article up about Iraq war deserters. One of the complicating issues about filing for conscientious objector status is brought to light in this article. Many soldiers are not opposed to fighting a war if they believe the cause is just and therefore do not qualify as ‘objectors’ and so have sought asylum in Canada.

The majority of the deserters in Canada have chosen not to make the authorities aware of their presence. Like any other illegal immigrants, they have settled for invisibility. A few dozen, though, followed Hinzman’s lead. Most found their way to Jeffry House. One young Army medic named Justin Colby read an AOL news posting about Hinzman’s case while stationed in Iraq. He telephoned House from Ramadi and showed up in his office a few months later.

House would eventually represent between 30 and 35 American deserters. Most of them, like Colby, say they joined the military in part out of patriotism. “I thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11,” Colby says, “that they were the bad guys that attacked our country.” But unlike Hinzman, most did not apply for conscientious-objector status. They tend to say they aren’t opposed to all wars in principle — just to the one they were ordered to fight. It wasn’t until Colby arrived in Iraq that he started to see the conflict as “a war of aggression, totally unprovoked,” he says. “I was, like, ‘This is what my buddies are dying for?’ ” Midway through his tour, he decided: “I’m never going to do this again.” He went AWOL the day before his unit left to train for a second deployment. House says that more than two-thirds of his clients have been deployed to Iraq at least once. “One is resisting a third deployment.”

These young resistors have many reasons for choosing this path and one of the strongest is that they swore to uphold the constitution and believe they have been put into a situation which conflicts with that pledge. There is an organization which supports war resistors Courage to Resist

From the Washington Post

Former Marine Jon Turner began his presentation by ripping his service medals off his shirt and tossing them into the first row. He then narrated a series of graphic photographs showing bloody victims and destruction, bringing gasps from the audience. In a matter-of-fact voice, he described episodes in which he and fellow Marines shot people out of fear or retribution.

“I’m sorry for the hate and destruction I’ve inflicted upon innocent people,” Turner said. “Until people hear about what is happening in this war, it will continue.”

These are courageous young men and women and I know how it rips their hearts to tell these stories. As I have written before, it was ultimately the warriors themselves, refusing orders, individually and en mass that brought about the end to the Vietnam War.

UPDATE: More video coverage

One of the first conscientious objectors was Camilo Mejia who is now on the board of IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War. He has helped organize this Winter Soldier event because he feels it is his patriotic duty to defend the constitution.

Mejia was court martialed for refusing to redeploy to his unit after two weeks’ leave, and spent nine months in a military jail.

Now the chairman of the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which has organized the four-day gathering, Mejia spoke of a groundswell of resistance within the US military to the war in Iraq, which will enter its sixth year later this month.

“Servicemen and women are refusing en masse to participate in this war. I have seen a rapid and inevitable growth of dissent within our ranks,” he said.

At the “Winter Soldier” event in Washington, some 200 soldiers like Coppa and Mejia will give eye-witness testimonies about what they lived through during their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and afterwards.

There were about twenty local veterans from the Vietnam and Korea era attending this evening as Elliott Adams, president of Veterans for Peace visited with Chapter 141 for the first time. Many issues were discussed from furthering the peace movement, veterans health care. impeachment and the Winter Soldier event this month in DC.

One issue that is especially important to me relates to PTSD and educating the public about what it is, how to recognize it and what to do when you witness it in a veteran. In New York they are working with local police officers on these very points and I have discussed doing the same thing in this area with Dr Staggenborg at the VA clinic. We have many returning veterans now and the last thing I would ever want to see is one of these vets facing a police force that does not fully understand what they are dealing with. These kids have suffered enough without further complications along those lines.

This is just so sad. The article does not say how many tours he had served already but he was desperate not to return again.

A soldier trying to avoid redeployment to Iraq had a friend shoot him in the leg and then claimed he had been wounded in a holdup, authorities said.

The 20-year-old old man from of Apple Valley limped into a minimart about 9:30 p.m. Sunday and reported he had been walking on a golf course when a gunman stole his wallet and military identification and shot him in the right thigh, authorities said.

Some of these kids are on their fourth and fifth tours now. Less than 1% of the nation is actually involved in fighting in Iraq. The demographics of the military indicate that 1% come primarily from rural America.

Fort Hood soldiers are breaking the silence about the mission in Iraq

“The honest truth is that if the American people knew what was going on over there everyday, they would be raising their voices too. They would be saying, ‘Hey, bring those guys home,” Sgt. Selena Coppa said.

Coppa blames lawmakers in Washington for filtering the facts on the war in Iraq. She said there’s no real end in sight.

“There is a cost to this war. This war is being paid in American blood, in my soldier’s blood. And that is not okay,” Coppa said.

“We lost really good friends, really good leaders who died in Iraq. From my perspective, it didn’t make any sense, we didn’t
accomplish anything, and I talked to a lot of other soldiers who feel the same way,” Fort Hood soldier Casey Porter said.

He started the local branch of IVAW at Fort Hood.

Iraq Veterans Against the War is also planning an event in DC Winter Soldier, ’08. It was the warrior who ultimately ended Vietnam and it will be the warrior who ends Iraq.

Porter is spending his numbered days in the U.S. passing out pamphlets before he is redeployed this summer.

He said he feels it’s his obligation to his fallen brothers to take action. Local IVAW members are trying to let other soldiers know it’s okay to do the same.

“This is well within the rights that service members have, but not many soldiers know that they do have,” Fort Hood soldier Ronn Cantu said.