February 2, 2007: City College of San Francisco
You have choices
Thank you for being here to learn more about military resisters and the anti-war movement. I’m happy to be here today with Helga Aguayo after having been working with Agustin’s situation since last August.
I work both with Courage to Resist and the GI Rights Hotline and come into contact with an large number of GIs and their families who are resisting war. As students, there are a few things you need to know.
First, you do have choices. It is tough to pay for school and hold down a job and, really, in a wealthy country like the U.S., you shouldn’t have to struggle like you do to get an education that, finally, directly benefits your country.
Military recruiters prowling around your campus will tell you that the military offers you the ability to pay for school, that you can even go to school while you train, that you’ll have a great military future, a great career and so on. Don’t believe them. Too many young people are learning the hard way that military recruiters say anything that they think will get you to sign up. After that, they intimidate you into staying in. Once in boot camp, you’ll be chanting rhymes that acknowledge the deviousness of recruiters and directly acknowledge that they lie to young people… this is made light of in boot camp but recruits actually have to participate in their own victimization as they chant about how they’re been lied to. You’ll also be trained to kill people. Make no mistake about it, that is the first mission of the military… to break down your aversion to killing so that you kill on command … and use the most fearsome weaponry to do it.
What happens to recruits who sign up then change their minds? Despite what recruiters will tell you, you do not have to go into boot camp if you change your mind. Recruiters will tell you that you’ll be punished, that you’ll go to jail, that you’ll spend the rest of your life paying off legal fees. They’ll tell your parents and grandparents the same thing. But this is not true. You are allowed to change your mind… and recruiters are not allowed to harass you into believing you cannot change your mind.
If you end up in boot camp, remember that the best time to get out of the military is within the first 6 months. You will be almost completely locked down for the first 3 months and also very stressed out by the training, the harassing, the constant voices telling saying you are weak, not a man, etc etc. Suddenly, once you’re a captive audience, you’ll hear that you are useless unless you do what you are told, that you’ll only get jobs flipping burgers if you leave, and that, in fact, you are now Government property.
Well, troops do leave. This year the military is copping to over 20 – 25,000 troops going Absent without Leave or taking Unexcused Absences. Last year, their official number was about 10 – 12,000…so almost twice as many people left the service in the last year. Actually, based on my work as a GI Rights counselor I can almost guarantee that the true number of AWOLs is about twice as high; I’d say about 40,000 have gone AWOL.
Now this is significant. But many of these AWOLs and UAs stay under the radar and do not go public. The group I work with, Courage to Resist, supports the troops who refuse to fight and who are willing to go public. You just heard from Helga about how it is for her husband, Agustin. Not easy, but he will eventually get out of the military and be able to hold his head up for refusing to fight and kill in an illegal war.
But, what can you do? First tell your friends who are thinking about joining to get money for college not to join. If they’ve already signed up and want to change their minds, they can do so. The GI Rights Hotline can help with that. Then you too can help to shift how Americans think about war by telling them what you heard here today. You can also actively resist the militarism that is taking over our country by learning about how American foreign policy works. Generally, when you hear the propaganda about “spreading freedom and democracy around the world” ask yourself, why, if we have over 737 American military bases in well over 130 countries on every continent, why is there so little freedom and democracy in the world today?
Ask yourself why, on the small Japanese island of Okinawa -- an island smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans -- why are there 37 American military bases and a high rate of violence and rape? The answers include the US needing a “geostrategic footprint in the Pacific. The violence is a result of a lack of respect for Okinawan culture and a practice of the pervasive American-centric attitude that we are superior to all other life forms.
I’ve personally been to a huge base in Iraq, one outside the town of Balad in what used to be called the Sunni Triangle. It is one of the biggest in that country and is, in fact, a small American city in Iraq in which Iraqi people work and learn about Americans but from which no a single American can leave to learn about Iraqi culture. The only time and way an American troop can leave that base if is he or she is on a patrol – in other words as a combat soldier ready to kill any suspicious Iraqi. I think you’ll agree that this is not the sort of mission to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people… or to model freedom and democracy.
Another thing you can do is learn about how our foreign aid works. For example, do you know that Israel is the world top recipient of U.S. military assistance receiving over $3 billion per year? Do you know that most of that aid can only be spent on U.S.-made weapons? This means that it is to be benefit of Israel to use up those weapons each year in keep up the flow of aid … it also means that the oppression that the Palestinian people live under is not going to stop and that we, you and I, are complicit in the awful conditions under which they live. I was there last year and I emphasize that they live under terrible hardship… very similar to the conditions experience during the Apartheid years in my own homeland, South Africa.
So, you can be part of the resistance that is alive and well these days.
- You can support the troops that refuse to fight.
- You can Stand up against the social and cultural displacement of civilians around the world forced to endure American military bases in their towns.
- You can Demand that we funnel the billions of dollars currently spent toward the education, health, and well being of our fellow Americans.
- You can Demand that we fully fund the healing of our wounded soldiers, our toxic chemical contaminated soldiers, and our psychologically traumatized soldiers.
- You can Demand that we fully fund the housing of our homeless soldiers and the generative futures of the widows and orphans of our dead soldiers.
- You can Demand an excess profit tax on corporations and individuals reaping huge profits from war and occupation. Let's spend these millions on reparations to Afghans and Iraqis for the destruction we've wreaked on their homelands.