Stick Your Neck Out, America! (Ray McGovern)

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

By Ray McGovern

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/37381/

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No publicity seeker, Watada earlier this year quietly submitted a request to resign from the Army. The request was denied. He then refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit this summer and is prepared to face prison rather than violate his conscience. Meanwhile, he fully expects the kind of ostracism encountered by those few Army enlisted men who objected to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In what might well be the understatement of the month, Watada says he may be "the most unpopular person at Fort Lewis."

… and a gift for Dan Berrigan

Watada may not realize this, but he has presented a pearl of great price to longtime war resister, Jesuit priest and poet Dan Berrigan, who celebrates his 85th birthday this weekend in New York. Facing ridicule and ostracism for acting on their principled opposition to the war in Vietnam, Dan and his late brother Phil were no strangers to prison -- or to profound disappointment at the dearth of those willing to witness in the way of Watada.

In "No Bars to Manhood," Dan wrote:

"Of course, let us have peace," we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties …" There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war -- at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake...