Who Pays the Price for War? An Interview with Camilo Mejia Castillo

Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia Castillo, a National Guardsman, spent six months fighting in Iraq. When Camilo was sent home on leave, he requested conscientious objector status so that he wouldn’t have to return to fight in a war that he didn’t support. His application was rejected. When orders came for him to return to Iraq, Camilo refused to go. He surrendered to military authorities on March 15, 2004. While awaiting court-martial, he was confined to the base at Ft. Stewart, GA. Camilo Mejia Castillo was court-martialed and convicted of desertion on May 19. He is serving a sentence of one year in prison.

Dynamic was able to speak to Camilo on May 13, just a few days before his conviction. We asked Camilo what convinced him to apply for conscientious objector status and then refuse to return to Iraq:

There are so many things!

Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia Castillo, a National Guardsman, spent six months fighting in Iraq. When Camilo was sent home on leave, he requested conscientious objector status so that he wouldn’t have to return to fight in a war that he didn’t support. His application was rejected. When orders came for him to return to Iraq, Camilo refused to go. He surrendered to military authorities on March 15, 2004. While awaiting court-martial, he was confined to the base at Ft. Stewart, GA. Camilo Mejia Castillo was court-martialed and convicted of desertion on May 19. He is serving a sentence of one year in prison.

Dynamic was able to speak to Camilo on May 13, just a few days before his conviction. We asked Camilo what convinced him to apply for conscientious objector status and then refuse to return to Iraq:

There are so many things!

The first is my experience in the war. You can read all you want—in books, in the newspaper—about combat and about the situation on the ground in Iraq. But it’s not the same as actually experiencing it. There’s no specific firefight, or ambush, or RPG attack that convinced me: it was a combination of things.

People like to talk about one time, when I shot a young Iraqi who was throwing a grenade. Because I wrote about that experience, people think it was a key thing— but it’s not. Or, another time, we were ambushed in our Humvee: bullets were flying, explosions everywhere—of course that was very traumatic. But that’s not it either. It’s the whole experience, over time.

When I arrived in April, before the end of ‘combat operations,’ Iraqis responded well to us. People came out waving, saying ‘Hello, Mister!’ or whatever bit of English they knew. It was a good welcome; I liked it.

But after a while there were the water shortages, electricity shortages, no employment, no money, curfews and raids all the time—all the things that make up an occupation. People get tired of that.

Imagine you are in your home, about to go to sleep, and soldiers break down your door with machine guns, yelling at you in a language you don’t understand. You wouldn’t like that! Nobody would. But that’s what an occupation is all about.

So the attacks increased, and we increased our response. People were dying all the time: our soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The general mood of the population changed.

As a soldier, you don’t want to kill innocent people. And I think the Iraqis that were attacking us didn’t want to kill innocent people either. But the reality of war is people caught in the middle, people who are paying the price.

To me it shows that there is no just war: if even one innocent pays with his life, it’s not just. If you drop a 500 lb bomb to kill one person, and kill five, or six, or ten—you can’t say it’s justified. This is the nature of war: what they call ‘collateral damage.’

I don’t think war leads to anything good. I think violence can only lead to more violence.

So the most powerful reason I made these decisions—and this is the first time I’m saying this—is the actual experience of war.

This war is bogus. It’s based on lies, on unfounded evidence. And people don’t even talk about it anymore! When’s the last time you heard the words ‘weapons of mass destruction’? And what about this link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Or Saddam buying uranium in Niger? Those were the reasons we went to war, supposedly.

Now you hear about democracy, liberation, how we went there to help the Iraqi people. But in reality, we oppress them. And not just with the torture and abuse that you’re hearing about now. It’s that civilians are getting killed everyday for these imperialist purposes, for money and for oil, and for privatization. Well, I’d like to say privatization; actually it’s piratization! They’re not even trying to hide it!

People act surprised at these pictures of abuse in the prison. I don’t want to downplay those crimes at all. But how about the six hundred people killed in Fallujah when the Marines were fighting there? People don’t seem shocked by that at all, for some reason.

When you’re actually there, and you see who’s paying the price for this war, it has an impact on you. Then you come home and people ask about it: ‘Did you shoot anyone, did anyone shoot at you, were you afraid?’ And it forces you to think about it. You don’t think so much when you’re there, because you’re just trying to stay alive.

When you’re home, and you’re driving down the road and you don’t have to worry that something in the road is a mine, or when you’re in Starbucks and you don’t have to worry about an RPG attack, you have a little bit of peace of mind. Then you start to try to find justifications for what happened. I asked myself, ‘Why did I shoot at this man? Why that firefight—and why this war?’ And the only answers I see are oil, and geopolitical power.

Then you apply for CO status and they tell you ‘You’re too political’—because I looked at the reasons the government gave for going to war. Sure it’s political in a way, but when you’re there on the ground it’s not political. It’s personal, and it’s moral.

So that’s another reason—the lies.

Another reason is the mistreatment of soldiers by the leadership.

You go there thinking you’re there to rebuild, to bring democracy, to help. And then the commanders tell you to do things that actually instigate violence. They tell you it’s to ‘send the right message’, to ‘draw out the enemy’, to ‘show them who’s boss’ or to ‘punish them.’ The end result is soldiers and civilians being killed.

Why do they do that? We had a Lieutenant Colonel who told us he had to get combat experience to be promoted. They have to get those combat medals. So you find yourself doing things you’re taught not to do in training: staying in one place a long time, being very visible. These are things that give the enemy (if you can call them the enemy) a way to plan attacks. And the commanders know that, they know the soldiers will be hit—but they want combat experience!

Suppose, for one minute, this was a justified war. Say Saddam had coordinated the attack on the Twin Towers. Even so—the end result is that in a war, innocent civilians will pay. And some knucklehead commander is going to put soldiers in harm’s way.

And there’s other reasons: my family, for instance. I have a little girl, she’s turning four in June. I would hate for my daughter to look back at the reasons for this war and know that that’s why I died. History is going to condemn this war. There is no doubt in my mind. History will say, this is when the infamous George W. Bush started this infamous war for oil. And for my daughter to lose her father in this corporate war…

There’s fear of death, of course, everyone has that. You might be afraid right now that you’ll get killed walking down the street. And when you’re in a war, you’re afraid all the time. But that’s not the point. The point is why would you be dying, for who and for what? For a nation to be exploited and occupied by another? Do I want my daughter to know I died for that?

There are so many reasons for refusing to serve in this war. I could go on and on! I could drink this whole bottle of wine, and I still wouldn’t be done.

A lot of things keep soldiers from coming forward to say, ‘I don’t want to be in this war; I didn’t sign up to be a mercenary.’

But I’m like the black sheep! (laughing) Things that I say, people don’t talk about in the military. It’s like a taboo. You don’t hear a lot of dissent in the military. But it’s there.

I might end up going to jail for a year. I would have taken five or ten, really. The military makes you think you’ll lose everything if you dissent—but that’s not true. You keep your humanity and you keep your dignity.