Col. Ann Wright: Blood Diamonds and Blood Oil (Truthout)

[marmar]

Blood Diamonds and Blood Oil
By Retired US Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 06 March 2007

Child and teen soldiers in Sierra Leone and the US.
We have a myth that we can transform children and kids in their teens into men and women by sending them to war. If they fight young, we give them adulthood. Children and kids who fight eventually do grow into adults - adults with lifetimes ahead of them filled with emotional pain and anger. Is that what we want for our children and for our country?

Last week at Fort Hood, Texas, I attended the court-martial of US Army Specialist Mark Wilkerson. The night before his second deployment to Iraq, he went AWOL for 18 months. You learn a lot about a person's life during court proceedings. I learned that Mark joined Junior ROTC (high school Reserve Officer Training Corps) when he was 15, a sophomore in high school. He said that in grade school he was not inclined toward the military, but his grandmother showed him photo albums of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather in uniform. Joining the military was his family tradition. As a junior in high school, Mark signed up for delayed entry into the military. One month after graduating from high school in May 2002 at age 17, Mark was in basic training in the US Army. In December 2002 he got married and in February 2003 he deployed to Kuwait and on into Iraq. Mark served in Iraq for one year and returned to Fort Hood in March 2004.

Upon his return to the United States, he began having nightmares. He had a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the sights, sounds and actions in Iraq. After his one year in Iraq, Mark decided he could not kill others; he submitted an application for Conscientious Objector (CO) status in March 2004. In July 2004 he was told his unit would return to Iraq in January 2005. His CO application was denied in November 2004.

In January 2005, the night before Mark's unit was to depart for Iraq, he and his wife closed their apartment, canceled their cell phone accounts and left Fort Hood. Eighteen months later, in August 2006, after a press conference at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, Mark voluntarily returned himself to military control at Fort Hood . During the press conference and before turning himself in, Mark said: "I made the difficult decision to go absent without leave (AWOL) for political, spiritual and personal reasons. I am not willing to kill, or be killed, or do anything I consider morally wrong, for reasons I don't believe in." Mark was tried by a US military general court-martial on February 22, 2007, and was convicted of missing military movement and being absent without leave. He was sentenced to seven months' imprisonment and a bad conduct discharge. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030607R.shtml

[Maat]

1. Thanks for the post.

Col. Ann is a friend of a friend, and I think that she's the greatest; I've heard her speak many times. I once asked her why she thought DimSon illegally invaded Iraq. She told me that she felt that DimSon's motivations were different than Cheney's. Darth is the coldblooded, totally remorseless businessman (my phrasing); DimSon went to avenge his father, or show up his father, or something along those lines, she believed (again, my particular phrasing). I agree with that assessment.