The following is the text of a speech I gave this past weekend to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Poughkeepsie, NY. For those of you unfamiliar with my story, I was an officer in the Army Reserve. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, I declared my refusal to participate in any such operation to my chain of command, and applied for classification as a conscientious objector. I was discharged from the service this past September for turning down promotion to Captain, at which time my claim remained unresolved. Now, I am an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and the newly-formed CO support group, Peace-Out (
http://www.peace-out.com).
NOTE TO MODS: Since this writing is by ME, there are no copyrights on it, so I'm posting it in its entirety...
The Conscience of a Soldier: Questions of Morality in a Time of War
By Christopher HarrisonGreetings! And thank you for the gracious invitation to come here and speak today. I know that when Pat Lamanna first contacted Iraq Veterans Against the War about finding someone to speak about the war on Iraq to your congregation, the idea was to get someone who had experienced the war firsthand. I sincerely hope I do not disappoint too many of you when I say that I never had the “good fortune” of being sent to Iraq. That is because when I was faced with the choice of whether or not to participate in a military campaign that I believed to be wholly unjust, I decided to state my refusal and apply for classification as a conscientious objector. Because of this somewhat unpopular decision to refuse to go to war while still wearing the uniform of a commissioned officer in the United States Army, I feel I can offer a unique perspective, and I hope that perspective can provide hope and counsel to others, both inside our military and out, who also believe this war to be an affront to the most basic concepts of justice, common decency, and humanity.
I would like to take a moment now and read a passage from a speech given by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church a year to the day before he was so tragically struck down by an assassin’s bullet. For those of you unfamiliar with this specific talk, it was the first instance in which Dr. King took the controversial stance of openly opposing US involvement in the war in Vietnam. Although the excerpt deals with another war from another time, I believe that it is still eerily pertinent to the situation we find ourselves in today.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial objections and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.When I read these prophetic words spoken by this great man, I realized that he is reaching beyond the grave and through time to speak to us today. Dr. King is telling us not only that we must speak against the war on Iraq if we find it to be dishonorable and unjust. He is telling us that we must go beyond the war in Iraq, and to look at the deeper fundamental reasons why we are once again sacrificing our young men and women, why we are creating countless orphans and widows, while embroiled in another dishonorable and unjust war halfway around the globe. Only by facing these unpleasant but fundamental truths will we be able to avoid committing the same mistake another 35 years in the future.
You see, it was this introspection that led me to refuse to serve in the war on Iraq. I had come to the realization that this war was not an anomaly, something to be opposed in and of itself – rather, I realized that this war was only a symptom of that “far deeper malady” of which Dr. King spoke, and that I would not be able to look myself in the mirror should I either actively or passively go along with such a grave injustice.
I would imagine that many of you out there are asking right now, “Well, if you didn’t believe in war, then why did you join the military in the first place?” That is a very valid question and, admittedly, not the easiest one to answer. I could tell you that my beliefs evolved over a decade after I had signed my cadet contract at age 19. I could tell you that I held fear in my heart, both for what might happen to me over there, and even more for what I might be forced to do to others to survive. I would not be lying to tell you these things, but it would not be a complete answer either.
Some people will undoubtedly say that I don’t love my country – that if I did, I would have just gone and “done my duty”. Some will even say that I am a coward for refusing to participate in the war on Iraq. Some of you, out there, may be thinking along those lines right now. To my detractors, I say that they are fully entitled to their opinion – but it does not dissuade me from my convictions one bit.
Let us return to the question just posed, why did I join the military in the first place? Actually, the reasons I joined the military and the reasons I refused to participate in the war on Iraq are strangely similar. In both cases, it was all for an ideal – an ideal of justice, an ideal of freedom for people everywhere, an ideal that values the life of every living being on this fragile blue marble in space that we all occupy and share together.
When I was a young man, I believed that my country stood unflinchingly for such a noble ideal. I also viewed war as a noble crusade, a contest between absolute good, defined, of course, by the United States, and absolute evil, defined by whoever was on the other side. My view of war was a rather sanitized one, based on movies I saw growing up and the rhetoric of the Reagan years that glorified the military. I viewed war as the utmost opportunity for a person to prove their mettle, offering opportunities for acts of great heroism – without having any true appreciation for the absolute butchery and slaughter that war really is.
I viewed military service as a way of furthering that idealized vision, along with displaying my independence to my parents by paying for my own college education. As time wore on, however, and I began to learn more and more about my country, the world, and its history, I began to grow disenchanted. I found that my country, or rather, my country’s government, wasn’t always as virtuous as I had been led to believe. I also began to discover – first through my own research, later through the veterans I came to know in Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace – the way that war affects those who have been subjected to its barbarity, the never-healing scars it leaves young soldiers with for the rest of their lives. While these realizations initially made me angry, that anger eventually subsided to sadness.
I was sad because I still believed in those basic ideals of justice. I read our country’s founding documents over and over again, and saw those ideals expressed in the loftiest and most inspiring of terms. And I came to understand that those ideals were what made America beautiful, in spite of all its scars and warts. America wasn’t a piece of colored cloth flitting in the breeze. America wasn’t a couple of simple words like “freedom” or “liberty” repeated ad nauseum. America was the never-ending quest to achieve those ideals, while acknowledging our past wrongs and making amends for them.
When I saw those ideals being ignored – or worse, subverted – in order to pursue a path that was completely opposite to them, I realized I had a difficult choice bearing down on me. During my time in the service, like all others who choose a path in the military, I felt a deep loyalty to those with whom I served. I felt that, if called upon to go to war, that I owed it to them to watch over them and do what I could to ensure their safe return. But at the same time, if the mission for which we were called upon to serve was dishonorable and unjust, I owed it not only to my conscience, but to the ideals in which I believed, to oppose it.
With a great deal of introspection, meditation and prayer, I was finally able to do what I felt must be done – I was able to step forward and refuse. I made this decision because I wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror at the end of each day and know that I was living as true to myself as I could. I made this decision because, when I eventually have children, I want to be able to look them in the eye when I tell them how important it is to stand up for what they believe. I made this decision because I would rather make the more difficult choice of taking an unpopular stand on the side of justice, than to stand with injustice as an easier way out.
Are there times that I still feel heartache over this choice? Absolutely! I still have friends serving in Iraq and the Middle East as we speak. When I attend events for Iraq Veterans Against the War, I always feel a bit inferior to other members because they were there and I was not, in spite of our complete unity in purpose. I know that there will be those who will reject my view out of hand because of my refusal to serve in this war. But I also must say that in spite of the anguish I still feel, I never regret the choice that I made, and that I would make the same choice again if given the opportunity to do so.
Although we Unitarians sometimes don’t like to admit it, our historical foundation is in Protestant Christianity. As a member of a Unitarian congregation who still identifies himself as a Protestant Christian, there is a passage in the scripture that I believe applies here. In the book of Matthew, in an attempt to trick Jesus, a Pharisee asked him, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Bearing this in mind, if strive to love my neighbor as myself, how could I justify invading and conquering his homeland, and unleashing incredible misery upon him and his family? How could I do this and still profess to have love in my heart for him? Doing so would be little more than the mouthing of falsehoods and empty platitudes. This would only serve to corrupt my heart, while fostering hatred in the heart of my brother. Taking this reasoning a step further, how could I profess and maintain a similar love for my fellow countrymen while simultaneously being a willing tool of the creeping evil of militarism that has come to poison our national dialogue and hijack our foreign policy?
This, in essence, is the call to conscience that led me to my decision to refuse. It was also what compelled Dr. King to make the statement he issued on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan. He was compelled to speak out on the Vietnam War not simply because he opposed the war, but because he viewed it as intertwined with all of the other injustices of his time. He saw that the racism that he fought his entire life at home was a significant part of the struggle in Vietnam. He knew that the economic exploitation that existed within the United States was also a significant reason for our presence in Vietnam. He knew that the militarism that was driving our foreign policy in Vietnam was a cancer upon the ideals of the America he hoped to help us realize. And when he came to this conclusion, he saw it as his duty as a human being to speak against it.
We must ask similar questions with regards to our current involvement in Iraq. How is it that we live in the richest country in the world, a country that can spend over half a trillion dollars on its military, but we have one-in-five children growing up in poverty? Why do we spend billions on a hopeless missile defense system while more and more people are sleeping on the streets and under the bridges of our cities? Why do our elected officials speak about spreading freedom in Iraq and abroad while simultaneously seeking to curtail similar liberties at home? Why do our leaders proclaim that they seek peaceful resolution to international problems while simultaneously waging aggressive war? Why do we tell our children that they need to share, when as a nation we consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources? Why do we teach our children that fighting and killing are wrong, and then nod our heads in agreement while our leaders pursue a foreign policy based on militarism and with the primary goal of maintaining global hegemony by whatever means necessary? We must force ourselves to confront such uncomfortable questions, regardless of whatever uncomfortable truths they may lead us toward. Then we must encourage our neighbors, friends and relatives to do the same.
Friends, if we as individuals believe that the war on Iraq is wrong, then it is our solemn duty as human beings to speak out against it. But, as Dr. King said, we must go further. We must work to identify and unflinchingly point out our nation’s faults with as much vigor as we celebrate its triumphs. We must abandon the myth that we are somehow better and wiser than the rest of the world, and realize that we are just as prone to error as anyone else. We must move beyond being a society of consumers and instead reinvigorate civic awareness and involvement. We must hold our elected officials up to the standards they profess to apply to others, and to refuse to let them off the hook when we find them wallowing in hypocrisy.
But perhaps most of all, we must repeal this spirit of militarism that has so entranced us and is now in the process of poisoning the minds of another generation. We must roll it back, and set out to use our power and influence not to secure resources and markets to further our consumptive patterns, but to spread goodwill and share our wealth with the less fortunate. We must not allow our national leaders to keep us in a spirit of fear from an endless parade of imaginary hobgoblins, enabling them to act on their most capricious whims, toward their most nefarious purposes, in our names. We must stop infecting the minds of our youth with the idea that war is something clean, noble and glorious. We must show them the ultimate horror and most barbaric butchery that is the reality of war, so that they will never see it as anything short of an absolute last resort. We must instill in our future generations faith in the fact that organized violence is not an acceptable solution to our problems and conflicts, and teach them the ways of peaceful resolution.
I have heard it said that peace is not defined by the absence of violence, but by the presence of justice. Considering it in those terms alone should tell us how powerful a force justice really is, and why it is avoided so completely by those who seek to further their aims of militarism and exploitation. It is that quest for justice to which I decided to dedicate myself when I declared myself a conscientious objector. It is that quest for justice that led me here, to speak to you today. And it is that spirit of justice that spelled the words with which Dr. King concluded his speech at Riverside.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.Let us, today, endeavor to carry on Dr. King’s vision. Let us make this choice and work together for justice, in the name of our children. Perhaps at some time, when we are all long gone, our future generations will look back on this time of seeming despair, and instead see it as a time when seeds of great hope were sown – seeds from which emerged a better, more just world in which brotherhood is not just a word, but a way of life.
Thank you for allowing me to come and speak to you today, and as we conclude I only ask of you to carry the spirit of justice and love out into the world with you, and spread it like a wildfire everywhere you go.
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