Soldiers' blind faith in top brass

Catholic New Times, June 6, 2004 by Joseph E. Mulligan

I wrote this article in the Muscogee County Jail in early February while serving my 90-day sentence for "crossing the line" at Ft. Benning last November.

The mentality of slavish obedience described in the article is the same mentality which we see today as having led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

During the last week of January in Columbus, Ga., 27 people were sentenced to jail for "crossing the line" onto Ft. Benning property in a November 23 protest against the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

The protesters, only a small fraction of the ten thousand on hand for a two-day demonstration outside the base, denounced the school's record of using torture manuals (as admitted by the Pentagon in 1996) and training many Latin American soldiers who have returned to their countries to become torturers, assassins, and even dictators.

We also criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the participation of troops from Latin American countries in the occupation, calling for a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy.

Here in jail, we are allowed to subscribe to the local Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, which contains a considerable amount of national and international news. In "No Time To Waste" (January 31, 2004) a reporter describes the training of the Ft. Benning-based 3rd Brigade in the California desert.

"There were seventy 'civilians' in Eastlake Village (a mock town) before the Air Force dropped a mock 2000-pound laser-guided bomb on an enemy tank in the heart of town. It took out the tank, but killed the mayor and 19 other civilians, as well as 15 enemy combatants. A later infantry attack, with house-to-house fighting and booby traps, took out the rest of the enemy and the rest of the civilian population."

Is there a misprint in the last sentence? It's appalling enough that the 2000-pound bomb killed the mayor and 19 other civilians, but it is outrageous that the infantry "took out" the rest of the civilian population, even in a mock attack. According to the traditional just-war doctrine of Christianity and of other ethical systems, a war becomes unjustifiable when it begins to take an inordinate number of civilian lives. And yet, the Knight-Ridder article reports nonchalantly that the soldiers took out all the civilians. I don't presume that the writer is presenting the mock wipe-out as ethically acceptable. But what do the military officers, including chaplains, say about it?

In my trial in federal court in Columbus, Ga. on January 28th, I served as my own lawyer, defending myself against the charge of trespassing at Ft. Benning in the November, 2003 protest. After some solders, both old and young, testified as to the facts of our case ,which I did not contest, I asked them whether a soldier is obliged to obey any order from a commanding officer. To my shock, they answered in the affirmative--one after a short pause.

Thus, it seems that the U.S. Army is training troops to carry out any order--presumably, in view of the training of Ft. Benning's 3rd Brigade, even to kill civilians.

"No soldier is obliged ..."

One day before he was assassinated on March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, in a Sunday sermon broadcast throughout El Salvador, ordered the Salvadoran army to "stop the repression." And to the soldiers he solemnly stated: "No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God."

Any soldier who does not understand and follow this moral principle may find himself committing war crimes and crimes against humanity like a "good Nazi", described graphically by Thomas Merton in 1967.

"Given the right situation and another Hitler," the Trappist monk wrote, "places like Auschwitz can be set up, put into action, kept running smoothly, with thousands of people systematically starved, beaten, gassed, and whole crematories going full blast. Such camps can be set up tomorrow anywhere and made to work with the greatest efficiency, because there is no dearth of people who would be glad to do the job, provided it is sanctioned by authority" ("Auschwitz, A Family Camp," Catholic Worker, November, 1967).

If some or perhaps most soldiers at Ft. Benning have this attitude of idolatrous obedience to orders, does it rub off on the Latin American trainees at WHINSEC? If these trainees read the article in The Ledger about the 3rd Brigade taking out all the civilians, would this message negate the human rights lessons which WHINSEC claims to teach?

This raises a larger issue: do the many "bad examples" given by the U.S. military, starting with the wars against the Indians, render it incapable of inculcating in foreign soldiers a respect for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights? Shortly after the six Jesuits and the two women were assassinated at the Central American University in San Salvador on Nov. 16, 1989, I went to Washington, D.C. to begin denouncing this atrocity.

After Phil Berrigan and I threw some of the Jesuits' blood, mixed in some soil of the garden where they were slain, on the gateposts of the White House, I spent a night in jail and was released by the judge the next day on time served.