An Iraq veteran speaks out

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Friday March 18, 2005 16:38 by William Hederman

Interview with Kelly Dougherty

Kelly Dougherty is a 26-year-old Irish American who spent a year as a US military police sergeant in Iraq, having been given one day's notice to report for duty. She is now a full-time anti-war activist and a founding member of Iraq Veterans Against War. She was in Dublin recently to support the Catholic Worker five, who were on trial at the Four Courts. Here she talks about patriotism, Ploughshares, her experience in Iraq, what made her change sides, how the military entices teenagers to join and about Ireland's role in the conflict

Q: Why did you join the military?

A: I joined as a way to get money for college. I joined the Colorado National Guard, a part-time military force that traditionally is used to help the state in times of local emergencies. I joined as a medic, but spent time in Iraq as a Military Police sergeant.

Q: You were a soldier and now you're a anti-war activist: when you look back to your childhood or teenage years, which of those paths, if either, were you likely to pursue?

A: I always thought it was ironic that I joined the military because I always had a liberal standpoint. During my senior year at high school, which is when I joined the military, I was into the whole punk scene; I was very anti-government, anti-establishment. I was looking to go to university, but I didn't know how I was going to pay for it; I was looking at scholarships, but it didn't seem it would cover it, so I was looking for a way to pay for school.

My stepfather's son is in the National Guard and he said, you should go talk to a recruiter: the National Guard will pay for your school and all you have to do is drink coffee once a month and sit around. Of course it didn't quite turn out that way! [laughs] I thought, this sounds like a pretty good deal, and I actually convinced my best friend to join with me and she served with me in Iraq as well.

I'd say for a huge number of people in the military, at least one of the reasons they joined is because of the money to go to college. College is very expensive the United States and it's very hard to pay for it unless you have parents with money or get a scholarship or join the military, especially among the middle and working classes. It's also misleading, because they advertise: "Join the army and get up to 65,000 dollars for school." Most people never see that much money.

I didn't get as much as I thought I would. I had to take out student loans; I still have debts. So when Iraq Veterans Against War (IVAW) speak at high schools, we focus on telling the students that even if a recruiter promises you something, it's not necessarily true. They're salesmen and they're selling you something: they're selling you the military. They make things up, they embellish things, they don't tell you the full truth.

Q: Were you patriotic as a teenager and have you become any less patriotic?

I would say I was patriotic. You know, when I said I was anti-government as a teenager, I wasn't anti-American. I love the United States, I'd say it was the best country in the world. I know Americans who say they're from Canada when they're travelling abroad, or they put a Canadian flag on their backpack. I would hate to do that. I hate to think that this administration has really wrecked the image of the US to the point that Americans have to be afraid to say they're American. You should be proud of where you're from. There's been a lot of damage to the idealism that the US is supposed to be all about: freedom and optimism and democracy. That image is really being ruined by the Bush administration.

Q: When did you hear you'd be going to Iraq?

Early in January 2003. I had just begun my final semester at university (studying Biology) and I received a call one afternoon saying you've been transferred, you're military police now, report tomorrow, you're getting sent somewhere, so I reported the next day, spent a month training and found myself in Kuwait in late February.

Q: Did they teach you about Iraq before you went?

In my unit we had a one-hour briefing about Iraq: a man got up and said, well I've never been to the middle East, but eh, don't shake hands with your left hand and don't be freaked out if the guys hold hands with each other. That was it! There's a whole misunderstanding about the Arab culture and about Iraq as a country and I never knew anything about Iraq. Those misunderstandings lead to violence.

Q: What did you do in Iraq?

In Iraq the two main things we did were escort convoys of different kinds of cargo, mostly tankers of fuel that we escorted north from Kuwait into Iraq and also we patrolled on the roads and in the cities.

Q: How did you feel about going?

Well, I was opposed to the Bush administration from the beginning and I was against the war in Iraq, so it was a surprise to me when I found out I was going because, as I was saying, I was a medic, in a medical unit and the day before I was due to report, I was told I was being transferred into a military police unit. So it was a surprise to me and I was unsure of what I should do, because I was opposed to the war and I thought it was wrong, but when I reported for duty and saw the other people in the unit and how much they had to sacrifice in order to be deployed overseas, I felt obligated to them.

Q: Did you talk to your colleagues about the fact that you were against the war?

I vocally expressed my doubts with the reasons we were told we had to go to war with Iraq and explained to people if they asked, why I was opposed to the war. Once I got to Iraq I didn't speak about it much, mostly just to the people who shared my point of view, because it's stressful enough being in Iraq, you don't need the added stress of arguing politics.

Q: Is it possible to talk about such things in the army?

It is, and it depends on the unit. Some units have put more pressure on people not to voice a dissenting viewpoint. In my unit it was like: you knew who you could talk to about it and you knew who you couldn't. I definitely felt free to a certain extent to share my viewpoint.

Q: Did you every get into a discussion with your superior officers about it?

When I first reported to the Military Police company I spoke with the first sergeant and expressed to him my concern and told him my objections to the war and he basically said it doesn't matter, because we need people, so it doesn't matter who you are or what your training is or whatever, we need military police, so you can either go to prison or you can come with us. I also spoke to my platoon leader, a captain, about my misgivings and he said he himself wasn't quite sure about the war and wasn't completely thinking that we were being told the complete truth, but then in front of our whole platoon he said: "People might disagree with this war, but if they say something to you, just tell them to remember September 11th, remember when those two planes came down." That really made me mad, not only because September 11th had nothing to do with Iraq, but also because he was lying to us.

Q: Don't Military Police have a lot of responsibility compared to most soldiers?

I would say it's one of the more dangerous jobs in the military, because we do many things that an infantry unit would do, such as foot patrols and in vehicles, house searches and road blocks and searches of individuals, so all those things put you out with the population every day and that exposes you to a greater risk.

Q: Did you think you could do good?

While I was against the war, I hoped against my better judgment that it might turn out well for the Iraqi people, maybe they would welcome us as liberators. I didn't think they would, but I thought with the power and money the US has maybe we could make a positive impact, not remain long-term occupiers.

Originally the administration told us, we're going to get in there, they're going to be so overjoyed that you're there, and then we're going to set up a democracy and get out in a few months. And people who said it would take years and 150,000 troops, they respectfully asked them to resign. But look now, we're in the second year of it, we have 150,000 US troops, plus 20,000 foreign troops I think and there's no end in sight and it continues to worsen. What I saw from my own experience was that the Iraqi people, when we arrived, were living in desperate poverty; by the time my unit left Iraq, their situation had not improved at all, and in certain areas it had gotten worse.

Q: How much do you think morale has changed among US troops since the invasion?

In my unit, before the war and during the initial part, a lot of people felt it was right to go in and invade and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was somehow responsible for September 11th and was linked to terrorism and Al Qaeda. When all this proved not to be true, people still said, at least we freed the Iraqi people, at least we can do something good for the Iraqi people. I think it was hard for people to keep believing we were doing something good for the Iraqis when the Iraqis obviously did not want us there and were attacking our forces. That bred a lot of hostility towards the Iraqi people among Americans and also of course the Iraqis had alot of resentment towards us. That affected morale.

The thing that affected morale most in my unit was the length of deployment. National Guard units normally do not get deployed overseas and most National Guard units haven't been deployed in war zones since World War Two. Traditionally you do your part-time training, but then you have a family, a career, you're pursuing an education, so you have many other things that are more of a priority, more central to your life than the military. Then to be overseas for extended periods of time is really stressful for the families and for the soldiers. In my unit, first we thought we might be there until June, then July, then October, then we were told we'd definitely be home by Christmas. So there are these dates you're really looking forward to, but then it gets close to those dates and you get told, No, you're staying another two months, and another two months and we ended up staying a total of a year and right after my unit got home, they began keeping people for a year and a half or two years. And now they're talking about enacting a new law where you can go over for two years, come back and then be sent over for another two years and it doesn't seem like there's any limit to how they're using our forces right now.

Q: What do you think is the real reason America went to war against Iraq?

I believe many people in the Bush administration had been planning and wanting to have a presence in the Middle East and to go to war with Iraq for years, but they never had the opportunity and once September 11th happened, they seized on this opportunity to distort public opinion to get support for an overthrow of Iraq.

I think it's about oil markets, it's about empire-building and corporate interests and about power. It's not about democracy and it's not about a sense of freedom. If we can remember two years ago, which isn't very far back to remember, we weren't being told it's all about democracy; we were being told it's about keeping America safe because Saddam Hussein is going to nuke us; that's the reason we were told we had to go to war. Now all of a sudden we don't talk about that in the United States. President Bush doesn't talk about weapons of mass destruction, he doesn't talk about links to Al-Qaeda. Now it's all about bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. I don't trust them. I don't believe that. You cannot have democracy when you're living under a foreign occupation.

Q: What made you finally take the big step, to leave the military?

I was enlisted for eight years. Before I found out that I was going to Iraq, I was thinking that I wasn't going to stay in the military, because I was having different priorities, I wanted to travel and go to school. After my experience in Iraq, that really sealed the deal; I was very fed up with our foreign policy and with the reckless administration, which really does not care about the soldiers, or about life in general, it's just bent on pursuing its own agenda, whatever the cost. When I was in Iraq I really wanted to become more involved in the anti-war movement and get more informed about politics because if anything can make you realise that foreign policy decided by the government affects you personally, it's getting sent to fight their war.

It took me a few months after I got back before I really got involved, but in June of 2004 I went to Boston for the Veterans for Peace Conference and that's where I met five other veterans who had served in Iraq. That's when the six of us announced the formation of the group. That was a little less than a year ago and now we have over 150 members and we're really growing and really doing a lot to get our message out.

Q: Were you on leave when you said, I'm leaving the army?

No actually, my contract was up, so I was allowed to leave. But for a lot of people they're under the stop-loss** programme, which in the United States we call the back-door draft, because we supposedly have an all-volunteer army, and you volunteer for a certain amount of time, whether it's four years, six years, eight years and after that time you have the option of leaving. But what they're doing now is keeping soldiers for longer than they enlisted for: six months, 12 months, 18 months, however much longer they need. When I was in Iraq, there were people who were supposed to be out of the military a year before and they were still in the military and I wasn't affected because I was still under a contract and when I got home they lifted the stop-loss on my unit. It's on a unit-by-unit basis.


Q: Are there people who would face prison if they said, I'm leaving the military tomorrow?

Yes, there have been several who have served time in prison because they refused to go to Iraq or they refused to return to Iraq. There's one man name Camilo Mejia, who served in Iraq, came home on leave and refused to go back. He said that by putting down his weapon he was reasserting himself as a human being and he would not go and kill people any more. He was just recently released after spending a year in prison and there's another soldier in the navy who refused to go aboard his navy ship because it was taking marines to Iraq. He's facing legal action. Then there have been other soldiers who have gone to Canada and applied for refugee status, to avoid facing jail in the United States.

Q: Is there a rough number of military objectors that your group cites?

There have been 5,000 AWOLS or desertions, but that's not really reflective of the anti-war view or the conscientious objector view, because many people desert for personal reasons. It's hard to say, but there have been a number who have refused to go to Iraq on grounds that they are opposed to the war, and the fact that there a number who have been this vocal this early in the war I think is very significant.

Q: Can you tell us something about soldiers rebuilding schools and how that works?

I have heard some soldiers saying, We did something good, we rebuilt a school or helped at an orphanage. I think a lot of soldiers have good intentions and they want to make a difference and want to do something good, but when you have the occupation as the overall problem, it's hard on an individual basis to make a positive impact and whatever small things units or individuals do, it's so overshadowed by all the negative that it doesn't make an overall change.

Once my unit went to an orphanage to give out aid material, but the stuff we gave them had been sent to us by our families back home: snack food, candy, toiletries, and we couldn't use it all so this wasn't coming from the US government, it was charity that was meant for the US soldiers. Also, I wondered how many of those children were in the orphanage because our bombs may have killed their families or their parents may have gotten shot at one of our checkpoints because they didn't know what was happening. So, yeah, it's great that I gave candy to an orphan but why is that child an orphan?

Q: What kind of people get arrested by the US military?

It's very difficult for soldiers to know the situation, because in my case we didn't have translators until the last month that we were in Iraq, yet we were in charge of going out and policing the Iraqi people and trying to control situations, but we didn't have a way to communicate with the people, so what happens is that if a US soldier suspects that an Iraqi may have done something they just find it easier to err on the side of caution because they're in so much danger and in such a stressful environment, so they just arrest them and say, 'Well someone else will sort it out later'. But as we're seeing now, with the thousands and thousands of Iraqis in jails, is that no one is sorting it. You have people who are finally being released after spending a year in a detention facility and saying they were never questioned.

Q: Have you had any hate mail, intimidation or other criticism, from former colleagues or others?

Personally I haven't had any hostitility directed towards me, but we do get our share of hate mail on the Iraq Veterans Against War website. And we do have people saying we're unpatriotic, when I think the opposite is the case, I think it's a great disservice to the United States and its citizens to blindly support a war without thinking about the human costs for US citizens and the people of Iraq. While we do have detractors, we do get much more support.

Q: Have your family been supportive?

My father was drafted during Vietnam and served four years in the navy, but he was the first one to discourage me from joining the military. My family has never been very politically involved, but once I found out I was getting deployed, my father became very active in the anti-war movement, trying to stop the war. My father went to Baghdad in December 2003 with a delegation of military families and veterans. I wasn't able to see him when he was there, but he got to experience more from the Iraqi viewpoint what the occupation was like.

Q: You're here in Dublin for the trial of five people accused of disarming a warplane at Shannon Airport. Tell us first about your family's Irish background.

I have great-grandparents I think, including Powers from Waterford and Dougherty's from... I'm not sure where.

Q: What are your family's feelings towards Ireland's participation in the Iraq war; do people in your movement think the Irish government's role in the war is important and what do they think Irish people could do about it?

I support the effort of peace activists trying to get the Irish government to stop using Shannon airport as a refueling point for US warplanes and civilian planes bringing people to fight and die in Iraq. I support those on trial right now for engaging in civil disobedience to try to stop what I feel is a great crime against humankind. It would be an important step if the Irish government were to say to the US: 'you can't use Shannon anymore because that conflicts with our neutrality.'

Ireland is so closely tied with the US, the huge numbers of Irish in the United States; there's definitely a shared heritage, so I think it would send a message. If you want to talk about spreading democracy, when you have the majority of the Irish population who doesn't support the war, if the Irish government supported the majority, then George Bush should allow that as a step for democracy.

Q: Many in Ireland argue that Ireland has important ties with America and that the investment by US companies here is so important that if Ireland withdrew Shannon from US military use, then US companies would stop investing here and and it would adversely affect our strong ties with the most important country in the world.

Well, that's all speculation. My view is that if Ireland told the US it could no longer use Shannon for military operations, it's not going to make corporations withdraw from Ireland, because they're making a profit here and corporations stay where they're making money. Does China have a good human rights record? No, but we import their goods in a huge way. It's not about politics, it's about money and Ireland is a really good place for corporations to invest because there's a large, young workforce who speaks English, so I don't think that would happen.

Countries must take a stand against something that is illegal and wrong.

Q: What would the average American think about a bunch of Irish people disarming a warplane at Shannon? Would they think they were anti-American?

Some would. Some people say that what we're doing is anti-American, but we think what we're doing is really pro-American and pro-humanity, because we're trying to stop death, including the death of our own citizens. But it's also important to know that in the United States there's a lot of dissent against the Bush administration and in particular with the war in Iraq. Anti-war, anti-occupation feeling is growing.

The media in the US is so biased and never shows the view of those speaking against Bush's policies and that goes to the rest of the world and people in other countries think that everyone in the US supports Bush and the war. But really there's more and more vocal opposition, including among members of the Senate and Congress, who are calling for a complete withdrawal. Twenty-four Congress members signed a bill last month (February) calling for the immediate withdrawal of all forces from Iraq. This is significant and it's building.

I think that every time there's a vocal action against the war, it encourages more people and lets them know that it's a movement that's building.

Q: How would the people in your neighbourhood, the people you went to school with, feel about Bush's foreign policy and the war in Iraq?

The city I live in, Colorado Springs, is known in the US for being one of the most conservative cities. What surprised me, before the election, when I was involved in the Kerry campaign, was just how many people we were able to get out campaigning. The current foreign policy is really bringing more people who were never active before, to speak out and to try to do something.

Q: How should Saddam Hussein have been tackled if not by invasion?

By 2003 Saddam was weaker than he had been. He was only a threat to his own people. Why didn't we support the democratic movement in Iraq in some other way? There had been a build-up to a possible rebellion, Saddam was weakening.

Q: Will the US invade Iran or Syria?

Although our government keeps assuring us they won't invade Iran, I am worried. When you look at Iraq, we're so screwed. If we invade Iran, we won't have enough troops, we're already stretched to the limits in Iraq. I could definitely see a draft happening. The last one was during the Vietnam war.

Q: Were you daunted by becoming a speechmaker?

It's definitely nerve-wracking. I came into it really suddenly. I'm more comfortable now: I just know that my story is one that needs to be heard and that there are a lot of veterans who can't speak out.

Q: Do you know of any surveillance?

No, but we know it's something we have to be aware of. We watch out for people who might infiltrate our group.

Q: You're here in Dublin for the trial of the five Pitstop Ploughshares activists, accused of damaging a US warplane at Shannon. People might say that such actions have little impact, other than putting a plane out of action for a few days and possibly landing the perpetrators in jail.

A: I know it can seem like a Ploughshares action doesn't have much of an impact, but it's all the actions going on that add up to something greater. If you look back over all the movements in history that have really made a big change, and many of the people who were involved their whole lives in the movement, they never actually saw the change come about. It may be easy to dismiss Ploughshares actions, but I think their bravery is inspiring to others. Even if you save just one life, it's worth it.

FURTHER INFORMATION:
Iraq Veterans Against War
www.ivaw.org

[**The stop-loss program, which made its first appearance in the Gulf War of the early 1990s, prevents soldiers scheduled for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan from leaving when their term of service ends.]