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Dec. 30, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

19:42

1543 'Courage to Resist' The Freedomain Radio Interview with Jeff Paterson

Options to explore if you're in the army, and don't want to be.

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	On the phone I have with me, Jeff Patterson from Courage to Resist, a website that is dedicated to helping soldiers who want out of the army to explore their legal and moral options.
	Is that a fair way to describe the site, Jeff?
	Absolutely. We deal with people that are refusing to fight in the United States military for various reasons.
	Some have deployed already to Iraq and are now being asked to turn around and redeploy to Afghanistan.
	Some are refusing for moral reasons, for conscientious objection, for example.
	Others are simply in no condition to return to fight.
	For mental health, physical health issues, they're simply broken, you know, to basically put it simply.
	And in previous years, you know, they would have never been asked to return to fight, but the military is so stretched at this point, after nearly a decade of ongoing occupation war, that these people are still being pressed to return one more time.
	Right, so this is soldiers who have physical ailments that limit them, and I guess even more fundamentally and less testably, so to speak, those who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or other kind of mental health ailments that are not helping their stability when faced with a return to the theater of war, right? Well, that's right.
	Most people in the military who have fought in Iraq are going to have some post-traumatic stress disorder.
	I can't imagine anybody going through that situation, being on those convoys, doing security, doing the checkpoints, and not being affected in some way by post-traumatic stress disorder.
	But we're talking about the 30 to 40 percent that are going to have significant problems, and some of them for the rest of their lives with this issue.
	And these are the people that would have never been asked to redeploy, but now, based on just the desperation of the military to fill these deployment quotas, those are the people being called upon.
	And it's not only about those people, it's about people that have fulfilled their Obligated contracts of four or six years that are being stop-lossed to remain in the military against their will past their active duty time of separation.
	And those are being individual ready reserve recalled, meaning that they've already gone back to their civilian lives, trying to get that all back together, trying to recover mentally and financially and gain a life together.
	And being called up against their will years later to deploy one more time for another year.
	Right. So it's not just people who have their term extended.
	It's people who've been honorably discharged, who've reintegrated as best they can into the civilian life who were getting yanked back.
	And that really is against the contract.
	And I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me against the contract that they originally signed up for.
	Well, it's The contract people sign up for is so open-ended, it's hard to say that the military could do anything that's against the contract.
	You can make an argument that the military could call you up to do strange experimentation on you by chopping off your left arm, and you'd be hard-pressed to say that.
	You're protected against that anywhere.
	So it's really a question of, you know, what are we doing as a nation to these people?
	Do they deserve better?
	How are these occupation wars going to continue?
	The military has had a very good success in the last couple years, last year particularly, in dealing with the economic downturn as a great recruiting opportunity.
	So they're getting desperate, poor young kids to join the military, but they want to keep these non-commissioned officers that have the combat experience to lead these fresh 18-, 19-year-old troops back into these occupational wars.
	And not enough NCOs want to stick around to do that.
	And so that's why they're sort of shanghying these guys to do it one more time.
	Right.
	And of course, they've also lowered the bar, if I remember rightly, in terms of allowing some felons in and lowering some of the IQ requirements or the written test requirements.
	Is that correct?
	Well, the military has done that for decades.
	They'll do whatever they need to do to meet their quarters.
	They'll increase recruitment money by hundreds of millions of dollars if they need to, or they'll lower the bar, as you say.
	It's like putting people in that say that they've smoked illegal medicines or illegal drugs, or lowering standards like you no longer have to actually complete high school or have a GED in hand.
	Or, you know, like you say, felonies are no longer immediate disqualification.
	And you're seeing more like back in the 70s when actually you have judges coming back to say, well, you know, you can go to jail or go to the military.
	And you're seeing those kinds of situations a little bit more.
	So if a soldier is in the situation where, for whatever reason, he wants out when he's in or he doesn't want to go back if he's already out, I wonder if you could just lay out the options that are available to these poor men and women?
	Well, it's really hard to describe briefly what the options are because people really underestimate the maze of military regulations that we're trying to deal with.
	And trying to sum up each individual situation.
	And just to give you an example, you know, what happens to individuals is different, hugely, whether you're in the Coast Guard versus the Marine Corps or the Army versus the Navy or the Air Force.
	And we, you know, we follow this so closely, we know we see particular trends that people at a particular military installation are being treated one way, say a Fort Stewart.
	In Georgia versus Fort Hood in Texas, you know, or versus a naval base by San Diego.
	And, you know, and then we're talking, you know, has that person deployed already?
	You know, is PTSD an issue that we're going to be bringing up in their defense?
	We're trying to document hardship cases.
	Some people, more than, you know, actually quite a number of people have gone AWOL To attend the funeral of a close family member when they were told by the military that that was important enough for them to get leave for, for example.
	And then how many years has the person been in?
	What's their rank? A private or a specialist is going to be treated differently than a staff sergeant or a gunnery sergeant, for example, or a lieutenant.
	So it's just a whole...
	But what people do, some people speak out and remain with their unit and deal with charges such as conduct of incoming, which is a military crime.
	Basically anything they say that you're doing that brings the military into a negative light is against military regulations.
	Some people go AWOL, and that's probably the most commonly understood of what people refusing happens.
	Other people miss a movement, which is sort of when your AWOL and your unit deploys to a combat zone, that's a more serious charge.
	We deal with issues like desertion, where people leave for years and years at a time.
	We have a couple hundred U.S. military Objectors living in Canada, and many of them have been there for over four years now.
	And, you know, as those people choose to return or are occasionally deported from Canada one by one, they face desertion charges.
	They're more serious.
	So it's sort of a two-cent tour of that.
	Thank you for that.
	There are some options, and again, I'm far from an expert in this, but there are some options if you become a conscientious objector or have moral qualms or reservations about your deployment.
	I wonder if you could speak a little bit about that?
	Well, if you are against, you know, according to the U.S. military, conscientious objection is somebody who is against all war in all forms.
	It's important to recognize that conscientious objection, that definition changes from country to country, or even by who you talk to.
	But for the U.S. military, that's the deal.
	It's one of the hardest discharges to get from the United States military, and probably only a few dozen people every year actually are discharged to conscientious objectors.
	So you compare that to medical discharges, hardship discharges, or even don't ask, don't tell discharges.
	A very small number.
	But, you know, those are the cases that we deal with in that this process takes a long time.
	It could take up to eight months or more.
	It takes about eight months on average.
	Usually we have cases that have gone over for up to a year, year and a half.
	So you can be a conscientious objector and say, you're not going to pick up a weapon, but that won't stop you from being deployed to Iraq for a year.
	And we've had a member of Courage to Resist who was in that position where he deployed, went on patrols in Iraq, but still refused to carry a weapon.
	So, you know, that's sort of one extreme of what can happen as a conscientious objector.
	And that's why, you know, most of the people that we deal with go AWOL at some point after they've given up after months of trying to get a discharge as a conscious ejector feel that they're simply not going to be able to deploy.
	And we bring those issues up to military court-martials as they happen.
	And we hope that, you know, as we can document that situation, They won't be discharged as a conscious objector, but maybe they'll do a few extra months or a few less months in the military stockade if we can argue that they intended to be a conscious objector.
	They intend to be a deserter, for example.
	Now if, and I know these are all very generic answers and I appreciate that, but if you are a soldier who's facing something like a stop-loss recall or a recall after re-entering civilian life, are there a number of steps that you would suggest that person take that may be the most useful?
	And again, I know each case is different, but are there any general steps that you would suggest that people would take?
	Well, the issue of stop loss and the individual ready reserve are very closely associated with each other because they're both generally known as the backdoor draft, where you're taking soldiers in the military and holding them longer than their contract.
	But for example, in those two situations, they're very different in what the impact on the soldier can be.
	If you're a stop loss, for example, that means you can't leave your unit.
	You never separated from the military and you have to continue to serve.
	If you refuse, then the complications or the repercussions are exactly the same as if you had refused years earlier, for example.
	But if you were released from the military even for 24 hours and placed into the individual ready reserve program, then the repercussions are actually very minimal.
	The military doesn't tell you that.
	But you can simply not show up and ignore them and live your life without any significant consequences at all, despite repeated threats to the contrary by the military.
	Whereas if you're stop-lossed, you refuse, then it's very possible that you'd be looking at doing a prison sentence of 12 or 6, 12, 18 months.
	Right, because if you're in the Individual Ready Reserves, you can, I think I read on your website, some people do, they change their numbers, they have family members say, this person is not available at this address, and eventually the military will mock them down as unable to contact, and they don't, you know, send out the posse to hunt you down.
	But it's different if you're already in there and you're being retained, right?
	Yeah, I think one of our big successes as Courage to Resist is we're the first organization to actually Make this information public to people in the individual writing reserves and to actually document and to explain what the military can and can't do,
	what they are and are not doing, and to give people all the facts and let them choose to refuse and knowing the consequences or in the situation of the IRR, the lack of consequences.
	And that's something very new and I think that we've contributed to Dozens or hundreds of people that would have believed otherwise but have refused and not shown up for recall, stayed home, and been able to live their life without real issue.
	Right. Now, as far as hardship discharges go, I would imagine, of course, that they're on their way down, although you do hear these terrible stories of women who've given birth and then the child has gone into custody and then child services and then the woman is drafted and so on.
	Are the hardship discharges or ways of getting out, are they very hard to achieve these days?
	Well, they are. They are hard, but they're still a very legitimate avenue to pursue for your average soldier.
	You mentioned the case of a woman giving birth and that issue, and you might be referring to a client of ours, Alexis Hutchinson, who was a single mother, and she had a family plan, which all single parents need to have, is like when The member of the military deploys, who's going to take care of your kid?
	In her case, her family plan had to be changed because her mother, the child's grandmother, realized that she couldn't take care of an 11-month infant and two other sick members of the family.
	In that case, the military actually locked up Alexis, put her in military jail, and sent her 11-month infant To county protective services out there in Georgia, which is a pretty extreme case.
	Hardship issues overall have actually gone up in the military because After years of repeated deployments, people's families have fallen apart.
	Their wife leaves them, their job disappears, family members have died, and yet the military has less and less sympathy for such cases just based on their desperation.
	To not let people leave from Iraq or Afghanistan, so it's a big logistical issue to allow somebody to go to a funeral or to be at the bedside of a dying family member.
	They have to ship them all the way around the world and back, and then take the chance of them going AWOL in the process.
	Right, right. And of the hardship cases that you've seen over the last few years, are there any kinds that are more successful or less successful than others?
	Well, the ones that are successful is when people are able to contact organizations like ours Courage to Resist or the GI Rights Hotline, which is a nationwide free hotline service that deals with just these kinds of issues.
	And if people are able to contact advocates like ourselves, Then we can get people to avoid pitfalls.
	We can make sure that they file their paperwork in a way that can't be, quote-unquote, lost in the garbage can by the military.
	And to let the military know that these people are not on their own in this process.
	If your military commander thinks that you're trying to do this on your own, it's very easy for your request or your form to Right,
	and I was just wondering if you wouldn't mind giving the contact numbers for you and the GI Rights Hotline so that people who are watching this or listening to this would have a chance to get in touch with people who can help them with these incredibly difficult situations.
	That's the deal. You know, whatever your situation is, you know, give us a call.
	We'll talk it over. And if we can't help you, we'll refer you to the best people that can.
	And we have the, you know, we have the resources and the sort of the years working on these different cases to know who and what those organizations are.
	So you can just call it CodeResist, CodeResist.org on the web, or 510.org.
	488-3559.
	And also our friends at the GI Rights Hotline have toll free number 877-447-4487.
	Well, thanks. I know that your time is short today, so I really wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk about this incredibly difficult issue, and I just wanted to thank you, sort of human being to human being, for the work that you're doing to help people in these just tragic and difficult situations.
	I think that the work that you're doing is enormously Thanks for having me on.
	It's great to be able to do this work.
	I'm so angry and so frustrated year after year of endless war from different political parties and different presidents.
	And to be able to actually come to work and feel like I'm making some kind of concrete contribution to ending our opposing wars.
	It's sort of an honor for me.

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