By Claire Schaeffer-Duffy
This article was reprinted from the Fall 2004 issue of The Albany Catholic Worker. Claire Schaeffer-Duffy also writes for The National Catholic Reporter.
After twenty minutes of deliberation, a military jury found staff sergeant Camilo Mejia guilty of deserting his unit. On May 21, 2004, he was sentenced to a year in military prison and received a bad conduct discharge.
Even before his sentence was issued, the 28-year-old Catholic soldier knew prison could be in his future. After six months of combat in the treacherous Sunni Triangle and five months AWOL, he held a press conference on March 15 and declared his refusal to fight, making him the first Iraq war veteran to publicly disobey an order to return to duty.
His no-to-war declaration was immediately followed by his surrender to military authorities and a submission of his application for conscientious objector (CO) status.
The 53-page document is a detailed indictment of military incompetence and war’s brutality. It is also the autobiography of a conscience that paradoxically came to life in a time of much killing.
The soft-spoken young man with Jesuit schooling, Mejia comes from upper middle-class households in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In his CO application, he described his Central American childhood as “relatively stable.” He credited his Catholic education with giving him the ability to discern the call to peace amidst the crisis of war.
“I think God puts His voice into our conscience whenever we see killings and destruction, and it just does not seem right. Many people can not articulate this divine voice because they lack education and training, but I, who have experienced Jesuit training at an early age, can listen to the Spirit calling for peace,” he wrote.
In 1994, Mejia, his mother, and his brother, went to the United States. The move, he wrote, “was not only a cultural shock, it was also a social shock.” He lived from paycheck to paycheck, finishing high school at night while flipping burgers during the day.
At age nineteen, Mejia signed up for a three-year stint in the Army to help pay for his college education. He was a soldier with a developing appreciation for the sanctity of life. He remained a vegetarian while in the military, and changed his once pro-choice views on abortion after the birth of his daughter Samantha in 2000. Later, in Iraq, he had a photo taken of himself for Samantha’s sake. The picture, surreptitiously arranged while he was doing nighttime guard duty, shows Mejia, his face strained, staring into the camera and holding a sign that reads, “Give Peace a Chance.”
“If I were to die in the war,” he wrote, “I would have wanted my daughter to know that her father had been against it.”
But in 1995, Mejia’s ambivalence toward the military was not apparent. Judging from his record, he was an exemplary soldier who gained rank and awards, including the Army’s Good Conduct Medal.
In 1998 he reenlisted in the Florida Army National Guard, hoping to complete his 8-year military obligation as a reservist while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. An energetic and successful student, he earned membership in three honor societies, served as an advisor for transfer students, and volunteered for two nonprofit organizations. And then, in April 2003, during his last semester of college with just seventy days left of his military obligation, he was called up to fight.
Newly promoted as squad leader of seven to nine men in Charlie Company of the 124th Infantry Regiment, Mejia was deployed to the Sunni Triangle in northwestern Iraq where fighting was fierce and treacherous. According to The Chicago Tribune, 28 of 127 men in that Company were casualties during those first six months of combat.
Mejia believed some of these losses were avoidable. Much of his CO application is a stinging condemnation of what he described as the U.S. military’s “disrespect and inhumanity” toward soldiers as well as civilians. He reported that poorly trained and poorly equipped troops were sent out on missions that were needlessly hazardous. He accused his commanding officers of being more interested in seeing combat and “climbing up the military hierarchy than the safety of their troops.”
In May 2003, his platoon of infantrymen, “who were never trained how to deal with detainees, “was assigned to Al Asad Air Base in northwestern Iraq where they were ordered to use sleep deprivation tactics on blindfolded Iraqi’s to “soften” them up for interrogation. According to Mejia, some of these prisoners had already been up for two or three days, so to keep them awake required tough measures, like loading a 9 mm pistol next to their ear. Although he obeyed his orders well enough to merit a commendation from his military superiors, Mejia would later describe his mission at Al Asad as cruel and illegal.
Mejia quickly learned that waging a war justly became irrelevant amidst the intensity of combat. Because of the desire to survive, soldiers killed indiscriminately. “The fear of dying has the power to turn soldiers into real killing machines, and it becomes almost impossible for us to consider things like strictly acting in self-defense or using just enough force to stop an attack.”
Ultimately, his experience of war’s brutality and senseless loss became unbearable. “When I saw with my own eyes what war can do to people, a real change began to take place within me,” he wrote. “I have held a rifle to a man’s face, a man on the ground and in front of his mother, children and wife, not knowing why I did it. I have walked past the headless body of a man right after our machine gun decapitated him. I have seen a soldier broken down because he killed a child.
During this morally chaotic time, his faith deepened. Once indifferent to religion, he began attending Mass whenever possible. He read the Bible and prayed a lot. His prayers, initially self-centered expressions of gratitude for his survival, gradually became more “humanistic,” and he began praying for “everyone who suffered from the war.” Yet, while in Iraq, he didn’t know how to honor the stirring of his conscience. His allegiance to the squad was strong, and the duress of being a soldier under attack prohibited reflection on the morality of his actions. Clarity came after he left the battlefield.
Last October, the military granted Mejia, who is not an American citizen, an early furlough to the United States to renew his application for permanent residency. According to The Chicago Tribune, while in the United States, “he called the Army several times seeking a discharge based on a regulation limiting non-citizen’s service in the United States military to eight years – a period that Mejia reached last May while in Iraq. Those calls were ignored, he says, so on October 16, Mejia went AWOL. (The Pentagon’s stop-loss orders, issued early in the war, have superseded most of the military’s retirement agreements). After an absence of thirty days, Mejia was categorized as a deserter.
Four months later, on March 15, the once conscientious squad leader announced at a press conference, “I went to Iraq and was an instrument of violence. Now I have decided to become an instrument of peace.”
Although incarcerated at Ft. Sills, Oklahoma, Mejia no longer considers himself a man confined. Minutes before his sentencing at Fort Steward, Georgia he told the jury that convicted him, “I will sit behind bars a free man, knowing that I did the right thing. I followed my conscience and provided the leadership I thought I should provide.”
Amnesty International has adopted Mejia as a prisoner of conscience and is appealing for his immediate and unconditional release. He was sentenced despite a pending decision by the Army on his CO application.
