The Burden of Conscience

J.E. McNeil recalls the Special Operations soldier who couldn't kill anymore after an Afghan child darted in front of his riflescope, or the Marine who vowed he'd never return to Iraq, unable to justify the devastation he witnessed. McNeil hears such stories every day, as part of her role as executive director of the Center on Conscience and War -- a Washington group that works with conscientious objectors.

Invariably, when the term 'conscientious objector' is mentioned, our minds drift to Vietnam. During that war, nearly 172,000 young men were relieved of military duty after officially registering as pacifists. Scenes of protestors burning draft cards were forever seared into America's collective psyche.

But when Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who'd gone AWOL after returning from Iraq, publicly announced on March 15 that he was applying for a conscientious objector discharge, the idea of refusing to fight in the name of universal peace was hurled into the maelstrom of debate over the current war.

By definition, a member of the Armed Forces must prove, through an application and the subsequent investigation, that he or she is opposed to all war in general, not just one particular conflict. Mejia, currently assigned to duty with his Florida National Guard unit at Fort Stewart, Georgia, is waiting to see if Army brass will sign off on his application or if he will be prosecuted for going AWOL.

Predictably, the Pentagon has downplayed his story, as well as one involving two Army medics who requested conscientious objector discharges the following day, just before being shipped to Iraq. As reported in The New York Times on March 16, Army spokeswoman Martha Rudd said 31 of 60 applications for conscientious objector discharges were given the nod last year and two of five have been approved so far in 2004 -- hardly a noteworthy percentage of the more than 130,000 troops currently serving in Iraq.

The Army's numbers, however, are not only misleading; they're bound to change.

According to the GI Rights Hotline, a coalition of advocacy groups that offer confidential counseling and legal advice to American troops, thousands of soldiers have called its offices inquiring about conscientious objector status since the war began. In fact, say two leaders of the GI Rights Hotline, the situation is virtually out of control.

Teresa Panepinto, GI Rights program coordinator for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) -- part of the GI Rights Hotline -- says her Oakland office fielded 29,000 calls from soldiers in 2003, both from those awaiting deployment and from those currently in Iraq. The majority of the calls were from soldiers trying to navigate a way out of the military, with 22 percent of them inquiring about the consequences of going AWOL and 13 percent asking about conscientious objector discharges. Judging from phone call intake this year, Panepinto says, it's already clear that the numbers are getting higher.

J.E. McNeil, whose Center on Conscience and War is also part of the GI Rights Hotline, says that after Sept. 11, her office was initially getting one or two phone calls a week from soldiers specifically wanting to know about the conscientious objector application process. But since January, 2003, the call volume has jumped to one or two phone calls a day.

"The military doesn't have accurate numbers" states McNeil, a longtime attorney for conscientious objectors, noting her organization is currently working on the cases of 30 soldiers who have either already requested conscientious objector discharges or are in the process of applying.

The sketchy statistics, she says, are due to overall underreporting by the Pentagon; applications derailed during the process being discounted; and soldiers going AWOL or Unauthorized Absence (UA) before waiting the three months to a year it might take before the Army makes up its mind.