A Marine Sergeant Speaks Out

From a Marine sergeant who reads LRC and who is getting out of the military after eight years.

When I first joined the military I was a good, George Bush conservative who wanted to serve my country. But after three deployments to the Middle East as an infantryman I came to several realizations.

First, how can I petition or demonstrate against the U.S. government for violating my freedoms here while I take those same freedoms from the people of Iraq and Afghanistan? I cannot without being a hypocrite. Regretfully, I have confiscated firearms from non-hostile Iraqis, detained Iraqis and Afghans because of baseless, unfounded suspicion, and quartered in civilian towns and, in some cases, the homes of Iraqis and Afghans. These are all human rights violations that the Founders would have resisted by force and, although neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has accepted the U.S. Constitution, we still have no business committing acts in foreign countries that are contrary to the spirit and intent of our Bill of Rights.

Second, if the Founders would have resisted these egregious acts by force then how can I blame Iraqi and Afghan insurgent forces for their resistance? That leads to the question of why we are still fighting over there. Bin Laden is dead. We are literally traveling thousands of miles now to assume a defensive posture against people who are upset (and rightfully so) that their children, wives, and mothers cannot go to the market without being frisked. They are understandably angry that we are willing to accept their families as “collateral damage” when we target them or some other alleged America-hating aggressor. The Afghan people are tired of the world trying to shove democracy—a foreign concept of freedom that they consider to be illegitimate—down their throats.

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