US Army Struggles With Soldier who Won't Pull the Trigger (Part Two)

See the first installment of this two-part series here.

The US Army sergeants waited on the couch, studying the floor. Family dogs skirted the sofa, growling. From time to time, one of the soldiers extended a conciliatory hand to them.

On the floor, sixth-grader Rebecca Aguayo played a video game; her twin rollerbladed outside. Just one voice fed the tension in the living room: Their mother, Helga, sat in an armchair, bawling. "It was the ugly crying, with the snot and everything," Mrs. Aguayo recalls, "I wanted them to see how much they were hurting us."

Her husband, Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo, hurried around their military base apartment in central Germany that afternoon, under orders to assemble his battle gear. Two-and-a-half years earlier, in February 2004, the medic had applied to leave the Army as a conscientious objector (CO), someone whose beliefs forbid him to participate in war. While his claim was being evaluated, Aguayo served a year in Iraq with an unloaded weapon; when the claim was rejected, he sued for another review.

That legal process was under way on Sept. 1, 2006, the afternoon Aguayo's unit assembled to begin its second Iraq tour. Unwilling to deploy, Aguayo took an officer's advice and stayed home so as not to "make people very upset on a very stressful day." That evening, his commander, Capt. R.J. Torres, called Helga, saying Aguayo would be punished unless he appeared.

Aguayo did not show up before his comrades left that night. The next morning he turned himself in to the military police, prepared to serve prison time for "missing movement." Instead, Captain Torres ordered him taken to Iraq by force. The two sergeants drove him home to get his gear.

"I needed to show that I was ready to do anything except hurt people" rather than return to war, Aguayo says. So, as the men sat in his living room, he stuffed jeans and a T-shirt into a plastic shopping bag, opened a first-floor bedroom window, took out the screen, and jumped.

Aguayo, a military court would later decide, deserted. It's something nearly 37,000 active duty US troops did between October 2001 and October 2006. But the medic's situation was more complex than that. In his mind - and in the minds of superiors who attested that he was "absolutely sincere" - he was a conscientious objector, a hardworking soldier who'd grown opposed to all wars and should have been honorably discharged.

Since boot camp in 2003, Aguayo had felt at odds with his military mission. Now his mission was just to keep moving. A civilian friend gave him a ride to the train station. Aguayo traveled to Munich, where he stayed with an antiwar activist. German and American peace activists passed the hat and bought plane tickets. The Mexican Consulate issued the naturalized US citizen a passport in less than an hour. Aguayo flew to Mexico, met his father-in-law at the US border, and rode home with him to Palmdale, Calif. On Sept. 26, 2006, he turned himself in at Fort Irwin, Calif.

That night, sitting in a cell, he wondered if this was how God punished the faithless. Raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, he and Helga had met as children, married as teens, and baptized their daughters in Kingdom Hall. When they started community college, though, Aguayo had a philosophy professor whose "way of questioning was so intriguing," he says, that it "would get you doing it even after class."

With time, the Aguayos made a painful break from their church. One of its central tenets is political neutrality: Members don't usually salute flags or perform military service. At first, Aguayo saw his religious estrangement as spiritual license to serve his country. By the time he realized that, church or no church, he couldn't take a human life, he was already a US infantryman.