On Thursday, Iraq War veteran Camilo Mejia described watching an Iraqi man violently beating an eight-year-old boy. The boy had thrown a rock at American soldiers, and in response, Mejia's lieutenant was going to take him into custody. The man, just a bystander, pleaded with the lieutenant not to take away the boy. The lieutenant told the man the boy could remain if he would do something worse to him than what the soldiers had planned for him - taking him back to the American base, where Mejia said he would face "God knows what."
The man brutally beat the boy as Mejia looked on, too afraid to speak out to his lieutenant.
But last night, Mejia did speak out - about his experiences in Iraq, his decision to refuse redeployment and what he says is America's "criminal and illegal" occupation there. Speaking to an audience of more than 70 students, faculty and community members in List 120, Mejia talked about the current "poverty draft" and both presidential candidates' plans for the war.
"The truth of the matter is the majority of the people we are killing is civilians," Mejia said. "And this is not natural."
Mejia, 33, came to Brown as part of the Resisting Empire Tour, sponsored locally by Brown's anti-war group Operation Iraqi Freedom, to speak about his experiences during his six-month tour in Iraq and his subsequent decision to refuse redeployment. The talk was sponsored by Amnesty International, the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Office of Institutional Diversity, Students for a Democratic Society, Young Democratic Socialists, the International Socialist Organization, Brown American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee and the Rhode Island Mobilization Committee.
Mejia emigrated from Nicaragua with his family in 1991 and joined the National Guard while studying at the University of Miami to prepare for a Ph.D. program in psychology. After his return, he refused redeployment and was later sentenced to one year in jail after a military court convicted him of desertion.
Though he did not want to be called a "coward or a traitor" before his initial deployment, Mejia said he recognized after his return that he "had to make a choice."
"I realized that I had to either do what the military was telling me, which was to keep my mouth shut and keep doing what I was doing, or to say no, I'm not going to do it."
Mejia said his decision was influenced partly by his first mission in Iraq, when he was taken to a "jet bunker," a temporary prisoner of war camp.
"The place was in complete violation of international Red Cross standards," Mejia said. He described the methods used to keep the detainees sleep-deprived, such as surrounding the prisoners with razor-sharp wire, covering their heads with sandbags so they lost their sense of space and time and hitting the wall next to the detainees with sledge hammers in order to simulate the sounds of an explosion.
Mejia also described the humiliation and brutalization he witnessed in Iraq - atrocities that were possible, he said, because the military made no attempt to educate soldiers or Marines about Iraqi culture. For example, he said Iraqis raise their hands to say hello, and do not understand that American soldiers want them to stop advancing when they make a similar motion.
Iraqis would often continue approaching American convoys until soldiers opened fire, which could result in the murder of entire Iraqi families.
He also criticized American occupation, which he said involves raiding hospitals and terrorizing families by entering homes "armed to the teeth" and killing and arresting innocent civilians.
His experience, Mejia said, taught him that the military tried to discourage individuality, forcing soldiers to become "part of a machine." But he said he realized that he could replace his previous fear and desire to survive while in Iraq with his own attempt to answer moral and philosophical questions.
"You can take away my stripes, my rank, my pay, my physical freedom," Mejia said, "but you cannot take away my spiritual freedom because I am free to follow my conscience."
Rick Ahl '09, a member of Operation Iraqi Freedom, said the talk was a clear statement about the dehumanization of war. "The only reason war is allowed to continue is because people are allowed to ignore it," he said.
"It was really more of an account of what he experienced," Keziah Wesley '12 said. "I've never heard anything like that before."
