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 Askia At-Large
Askia Muhammad
Columnist Page
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page 24
Entire Platoon Refuses Order in Iraq
There has been a steady trickle of mutinies and desertions among U.S. forces waging the unjust war and occupation in Iraq. On Oct. 13, that phenomenon became a movement when an entire 18 member platoon from the 343rd Quartermaster Company refused to deliver a shipment of fuel to a base north of Baghdad. The region is among the most hostile in Iraq.
“This is unprecedented in this war, and it is extremely important because, while we’ve seen individual acts of refusal and resistance, folks like Abdullah Webster, Stephen Funk and other folks who have individually stood up against the war, this was an entire platoon, as one unit who refused orders,” Dustin Langley of the International Action Center told this writer.
“That’s just a whole different level of anger, or resentment, or dissatisfaction, or whatever you want to call it. It means that the sentiment among GIs is really turning against the situation there,” said Mr. Langley, who organized a demonstration Oct. 23 in support of the rebellious troops in front of the main Army recruiting office in New York’s Times Square.
Family members of the soldiers involved complained that platoon members—now nicknamed the “Jackson 17” because many of its members are from that city in Mississippi—told them that they had been complaining for months that their trucks were unsafe, in bad repair and lacked a proper armed escort.
In addition, they said that the diesel fuel the platoon was to deliver was contaminated. That same fuel had actually been refused when the soldiers attempted to deliver it just days before according to several different family members.
The platoon’s soldiers had been telling their superiors that the trucks they were assigned were in poor repair. The flatbed truck some of them had been riding on broke down four times during their previous torturous 3 1⁄2 day mission according to the father of one platoon member.
The soldiers even urged their commander to ride on the new mission through hostile territory to see how faulty the trucks were and the officer refused.
Families of military members in Iraq tell a story of frustration. “This is absolutely striking a nerve,” said Nancy Lessin, a leader of Military Families Speak Out. “People are saying, ‘This is the same thing that happened to my son,’ and if the Army tries to spin this as ‘just a few bad apples,’ people need to know that these are common problems and what these soldiers did required a tremendous amount of courage.”
The leaders of the group of dissenting soldiers are decorated veterans with decades of military service and are praised by friends and family as devoted to the military and unabashedly patriotic and unlikely to risk everything by disobeying a direct order during wartime- an offense which could be punishable by death.
“My husband is a God fearing man,” Sgt. Larry McCook’s wife, Patricia, told WLBT-TV in Jackson. “My husband is not a whiner. He’s proud to be a soldier. He just wants to stand up for his rights and what he believes in. He just wants to get back to me as well. That’s all he wants- is to get back home alive.”
Spc. Major Coates is “not a complainer. He never whined about anything,” his father, Johnny Coates, told a reporter. “This is the first time he’s complained.”
Spc. Reeves Williams is also a member of the unit. He eventually helped carry out the delivery with eight other soldiers after initially refusing to do so. “My son has strong convictions,” Spc. Williams’s mother, Genia White, said in a published report. “For him to say no, there is something definitely, definitely wrong.”
The International Action Center agrees, “The U.S. government, the Pentagon, the brass, the officer corps, has really displayed a contempt for human rights, both in the way they treat the Iraqis, but even the way they treat their so-called own soldiers, who again, are drawn from poor and oppressed communities, largely,” Mr. Langley said in an interview. “They see both the Iraqis and their own troops as expendable in the larger scheme of things. And this is the attitude that has to be condemned, and that’s why we stand with these young people.
“The U.S. government has engendered a sense of hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim world, because of its policies, because of its actions,” Mr. Langley said. “Whether we’re talking about the invasion of Iraq itself, the brutal occupation of Palestine, the torture chambers Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan, and in Guantanomo, whether we’re talking about bombing civilians in Fallujah and throughout Iraq, the U.S. government has put these young people at risk.” |
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