// essays //
Spring 2006
From The Euphrates to the Hudson: Iraq War Veterans at Columbia
David Plotz
In case you haven't noticed, America is currently at war in Iraq.
The population of Iraq War veterans at Columbia is limited to a handful in the School of General Studies, small enough that most of us don't realize it's there. Even within the Ivy League, Columbia is infamous for its general hostility toward the armed services. From the ongoing fight over whether Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) should be allowed to resume recruitment on campus to the recent controversy reported in The Columbia Spectator between US Marine and GS student Matthew Sanchez and certain members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Columbia's relationship with the military is fraught with tension. Most students and faculty are firmly opposed to the Iraq war, to the administration that engineered it, and to the entire culture associated with military life.
Columbia's estrangement from the military goes beyond politics. At its root, it is a question of culture, or, to use an appropriately Marxian analysis, of class. It seems safe to assume that a significant proportion of the student body, perhaps a majority, has no personal connection to the military. Many of us don't know a single person serving in Iraq, either among our friends or relatives. Some of us have never even been to the parts of this country where military service is considered a part of life. Most of us probably never even considered military service as an alternative to college, let alone as our only viable way to attend college.
As I told the three veterans I interviewed, I didn't conceive of this article as a way to make a point about the war (which I do not support), about President Bush (whom I despise), about whether ROTC should be allowed to recruit on campus (I think they should be), or about what was said to Matt Sanchez [1] (I wasn't there). Rather, I simply wanted to give students who have served in Iraq a chance to tell their fellow students that they exist, to describe their experiences at war and in college, and to prove that they are not monolithic in their politics, in the nature of their service, or in anything else. Iraq veterans unquestionably add diversity to Columbia, and what better way to represent that diversity than to give them an opportunity to speak for themselves?
Garth Stewart, GS '09, is tall, muscular, bespectacled, and just slightly unkempt. He runs, plays chess, studies history and Russian, and reads Noam Chomsky. On the door of his apartment there's a sign that reads: "Do your work. There'll be plenty of time to rest when you're dead." On request, he'll lift up his right pant leg to reveal a 4 x 6 inch scar with a skin graft. He'll also happily prove that his right leg has fared somewhat better than his left leg, which is prosthetic from seven inches below the knee.
"That's awful," I gasped the first time I saw it.
"Why?" he replied, smiling, "That's what happens when you step on a landmine."
The landmine that briefly incapacitated Garth was planted on a highway near Baghdad. In April 2003, the twenty-one-year-old Minnesotan Army Specialist, after two weeks of continuous combat against Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, found himself flung on his back by a small explosion, and then evacuated (still conscious) by helicopter to Kuwait. Two months and several amputations later, he was begging to return to duty in a combat position, an exceedingly rare request for anyone who has lost a limb. But Garth's prosthetic is so well-engineered that he can do anything he could do before the war, and he missed the camaraderie of the Army. The brass were willing to offer him a desk job, but after a year of training new recruits, Garth figured he might as well take advantage of his benefits as a wounded veteran and go to college.
Already a minor celebrity, with his story appearing in The Washington Post and on CNN, Garth also managed to snag recommendations from three Republican congressman whom he befriended during his first visit to Washington. He also shook hands with President Bush, got a personal visit from Sheryl Crow, and struck up a still-ongoing e-mail correspondence with former Deputy Defense Secretary and current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. He discovered Columbia when The New York Times put him in touch with Jeff Danziger, a political cartoonist whom he admired, and who invited him to come to New York for a guided college tour. When Garth was told that Columbia is one of the most competitive schools in the country and one of the least friendly to the military, he took it as a challenge. "I told Admissions I could guarantee funding, and I told Funding I could guarantee admission, and both turned out to be true," he grins. The upshot is that the military is giving Garth a four-year full ride in GS, along with a monthly pension of $2,000 for as long as he's in school.
Garth, now twenty-three, is not one to complain about frivolities like losing a limb. Arguably, Garth's prosthetic leg is a less awkward fit than Garth himself is at Columbia. He never imagined or particularly desired that he would attend college at all, and until about a year ago he had never heard the phrase "Ivy League." Garth grew up in a poor suburb of the Twin Cities, where nearly every family was on welfare, his own included. Both of his parents had served in the Marines, and the young Garth always had a romantic fascination with military service. That said, he was not simply continuing a family tradition when he enlisted. "When I said I wanted to join the Army, I might as well have said I wanted to be a hairdresser," he chuckles, recalling his parents' disappointment. But Garth longed for combat, which he thought he was much likelier to see in the Army than in the Marines. "Maybe half a percent of the people in this whole country actually want to join the Army for a sense of adventure," he speculates. "The rest of the people who join, mostly for college money, are there to support us. Everyone knows what they're getting into, except for a few idiots."
Garth paints a picture of military life far removed from the image of racist exploitation propagated by the ISO and other student activist groups. In his experience, the armed forces are probably seventy percent white, much like the United States, and it is disproportionately whites who volunteer for infantry positions. Despite the ISO's claims that the army uses minorities as "cannon fodder," Garth recalls that it was mostly white men like himself who were actually on the front lines of combat. "There is no institutional racism in the military," he claims. I've heard this before, so he elaborates. "Every unit has a good 'ole boy from the south who hates niggers. The officers see that and they beat it out of him." How? "Sometimes they'll literally tie him and a racist black guy together and force them to do everything together until they get over it." It occurs to me that this might not be such a terrible idea at Columbia.
Despite the military's reputation for institutional homophobia, Garth, who once dressed in drag and drove with a friend from Fort Benning, GA to Atlanta to hang out in a gay bar (I've seen the pictures), is clearly no homophobe. He doesn't easily conform to other stereotypes about the Army either. He was raised as a liberal Democrat and an atheist and grew up reading Chomsky's devastating critiques of the U.S. military-industrial complex, which he completely accepted. He never supported George W. Bush and considers his views on domestic issues like stem-cell research retrograde. "I was never a nationalist, or a zealot. But I was always patriotic. I didn't like the government, but I loved the real America, the country itself, the people." And he loved the idea of serving in the Army. "I liked the concept of honor, although really, what does a high school kid know about honor? Batman and Spider-Man were my heroes. I didn't know what honor really meant."
The war has clearly changed Garth's politics. Although he did vote for John Kerry and can barely contain his contempt for President Bush, and although he denounces most of the Columbia College Republicans as "frail, pale shadows of men talking about tax breaks," [2] the fact remains that he joined anyway. So what makes Garth a Republican now? Above all, he became convinced that the Republicans are more grounded in reality than Democrats when it comes to both foreign and economic policy. Regarding the former, Garth, who enjoyed "Fahrenheit 9/11" and calls Michael Moore "a patriotic American," nevertheless came to support the American mission in Iraq while he was on the ground. He was struck by how brutalized Iraq appeared in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's reign, and by the gratitude with which most Iraqi civilians seemed to welcome their American occupiers. "I realize now that we had to get rid of Saddam," he says between mouthfuls of chicken pot pie, which he eats with an engraved silver spoon that once belonged to the Butcher of Baghdad himself.
This revelation has encouraged Garth to become interested in a future career in public service (As in the presidency? "Why not?"). It has also prompted a member of the ISO to personally denounce him as "a white-man's-burden racist". But aside from the ISO and its even more marginalized arch-rival, the Spartacus Youth League, no one has given Garth a hard time at Columbia. In fact, he has been pleasantly surprised by the friendly and apolitical curiosity with which most Columbia students regard him. "Honestly, it completely destroyed the impression of an anti-American Columbia," of which he was warned by most of his commanding officers and friends when he first considered applying here. If only every veteran could be so optimistic…
Peter Kim, GS '09, always wanted to attend an Ivy League university. But when the Long Island native was deferred from his top choice, he decided to put off college and move straight into the workforce. After stints in investment banking, marketing, and law, Peter decided he needed some discipline—not to mention some extra money for college. Had he been accepted early, he would have had a financial aid offer worth accepting. As things stood, Peter didn't want to burden his parents or his twelve-year-old brother, and he liked the idea of military service. Joining the Marine Corps seemed like a good way to gain valuable skills and earn money as a weekend warrior. It was 1999 and Bill Clinton was still president, Iraq was still ruled by Saddam, and most people were more scared of the Y2K virus than of terrorists hijacking airplanes and flying them into skyscrapers. No one had ever heard of Shock and Awe, the Green Zone, or Abu Ghraib.
Especially not Abu Ghraib. When Peter was offered a position as a legal specialist and a congressional liaison to the Marines, he had no idea it would lead him on a tour of military detention facilities in Iraq following the public outcry over the revelation that U.S. soldiers were torturing Iraqi P.O.W.s in Saddam's infamous prison. Unsurprisingly, Peter saw a lot of things that he is not authorized to comment on. What he can say is that he believes that in the Marine-run camps, the Marines live in worse conditions than the prisoners. "Marines are indoctrinated in the Geneva Convention. America is unique in the world in that our forces actually abide by the law during war."
Peter acknowledges that the situation in Iraq is far from simple, and he freely admits that he has always had reservations about the U.S. presence there. He does a lot of reading on Islam, as he is currently enrolled in a course on the subject, and he remains a skeptic that American values can be transferred to Iraq by force. "We want results now, but we can't transfer our ideals to Iraq. We struggled for two hundred years to create democracy, and we give them two or three years. It's never going to happen." Suggesting that Americans need to be more aware of the cultural gulf separating them from Iraq, Peter is tempted to agree with many opponents of the war that the occupation should be scaled back in the near future, with an emphasis placed on training local security forces rather than on futile efforts at building democracy.
On the other hand, Peter genuinely believes that there is a strong humanitarian element to the U.S. presence in Iraq. "I've got a picture of a little boy on my laptop that embodies what I fight for," he says. The boy in question is smiling innocently and sweetly before a background of extreme poverty, which Peter says is typical of the towns he visited during his tour in Iraq. As a legal expert, Peter had what he calls "the privilege" of working with Iraqi contractors in small towns to process claims for the reconstruction effort. He tells a story of how the boy followed him around everywhere while he passed out hard candy (chocolate bars tend to melt in the Iraqi climate), but never asked for anything. Eventually, Peter gave him a pen as a gift, then watched in horror as the boy's father tried to take the pen and ended up slapping his son around to get it. "That's how impoverished Iraq is," Peter sighs.
With his tour of duty completed, Peter's thoughts returned to applying to college. He prayed to get into Columbia so that he could be close to his family, and especially so that he could serve as a role model to his brother. He knew this was a liberal campus, but he always considered himself "very moderate," a vaguely oxymoronic position that led him to believe he would not be bothered by the political climate anywhere. Since enrolling in January, Peter says he has been disappointed and upset by the way students relate to the military. It isn't the fact that students tend to oppose the war that troubles him; he isn't exactly a staunch supporter himself. Rather, he finds himself a bit underwhelmed with the level of political discourse, especially regarding veterans. "Too many people talk, and not enough people listen," he complains, pointing especially to the altercation between Matt Sanchez and the ISO, which was Peter's first glimpse of the anti-military animus on campus.
Peter doesn't advertise his military service, and he wants to challenge the stereotype of the arrogant marine. He would love to talk to antiwar activists, but in his experience they don't usually want to listen to what he has to say. When he does volunteer work, his typically left-leaning fellow volunteers often harass him about his service. He isn't entirely surprised by this kind of behavior. "Most students here come from a sheltered upper-middle-class background," he notes. "I did too, and I was truly humbled when I joined the marines." Peter served alongside everyone from impoverished high school dropouts to Harvard grads, and he credits Marine Corps training with serving as a social leveler, ensuring group cohesion through a willful sacrifice of individuality. Still, he insists, "There is a lot of humanity behind everything we do, and we can't let politics obscure that."
Luke Stalcup, GS '08, is a 25-year-old from Oakland, CA. Gertrude Stein once famously said of Oakland, "There's no there there," but of course there is. Oakland is just across the bay from San Francisco, and lies immediately adjacent to the nation's most legendary bastion of liberal activism: Berkeley. Luke, whose sister is currently enrolled at UC Berkeley and who is himself a graduate of Berkeley High, has plenty of experience with people who despise the military. Some people might find it stressful, but then, those people probably haven't ever had to defuse roadside bombs and minefields for a living. As an Explosive Ordinance Disposal team leader for the U.S. Army in Iraq, Luke was charged with dealing with what has turned out to be the Iraqi insurgency's most potent weapon: the array of explosives used to paralyze ordinary life and keep the military on its toes throughout the Sunni Triangle. This was hardly the most dangerous kind of explosive Luke expected to find when he first arrived in Iraq in 2003.
"All I can say is that I didn't personally find any weapons of mass destruction," Luke says wistfully. "That doesn't mean they're absolutely not there." If he sounds a tad defensive, it is only because he is tired of having to argue with the various conspiracy theories surrounding the origins of the war. While he admits he can't speak for the Bush Administration (which he voted against in 2004; in 2000, he didn't get to vote because he spent election day in Florida helping the Secret Service protect Al Gore), Luke is quite certain that even if there never were WMDs in Iraq, everyone in the military genuinely believed that there were—and he would know better than most. "There was no conspiracy. That's nonsense. People were definitely wearing their gas masks. I wouldn't have walked around for weeks in my chemical gear—it was really hot."
Even without any WMDs, Luke was kept plenty busy during his tour in Iraq. He removed submunitions from civilian residential areas ("That's not classified as humanitarian work," he notes, "but it should be."), surveyed supply points, and helped disarm what might have been the first roadside bomb in Iraq in June 2003, before most people realized that a major insurgency against the occupation was already forming. "Our mission was not accomplished at that point," he recalls thinking in response to Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" stunt flight. "I don't think Bush is the devil. I just don't think he's a very skilled administrator." If that sounds like an understatement, consider that it comes from someone who cites the importance of public service as his chief reason for joining the military. Luke's feelings about the Iraq War are mixed and almost ambivalent, but he is capable of summoning genuine outrage toward some other aspects of the Greater War on Terror. Unprompted, he brings up torture, a subject which many in the military are naturally loathe to discuss. For Luke, the simple fact of torture is more embarrassing than discussion of it. "Torture is clearly illegal," he says with a look of utter moral seriousness. "It's never justified. Why would you even have a legalistic argument about that?" Clearly this has been on his mind a lot, and it may have something to do with his admiration for John McCain, the one senator in Washington to take a firm stance against torture (or, Luke adds, anything else in the past few years).
On the other hand, Luke insists on what should be, but often is not, an obvious point: most people in the military do not go around wantonly torturing people. Luke doesn't sound defensive at all when he speaks of wanting to protect the reputation of the military on campus. "I have a pretty thick skin thanks to Berkeley," he says, "My experience has been better than most. But I read the editorials [in The Columbia Spectator]… it's not even that I always disagree, it's that they're really hateful and mean-spirited." Luke is especially outraged by the treatment of Matt Sanchez, which clearly has become emblematic of a much larger frustration.
Although he is happy to be here, Luke did not originally want to come to a big city school. Even now, he thinks that General Studies is the best part of Columbia. "You meet the most interesting people there, including all of the veterans." For someone like Luke, it can be a difficult transition between performing dangerous missions abroad and being treated at best with indifference, and at worst with open hatred by fellow students stateside. "People are really condescending. They try to fit you into one of two categories: either you're a flag-waving, gung ho, jingoistic Bush supporter, or you're a repentant antiwar vet. It really is a presupposition of a fairly intimate knowledge." In other words, he contends, veterans on campus are not treated as people. Instead, other students tend to use veterans to confirm what they already feel about the war, whatever that might be. "I've been asked whether I support the war a thousand times here. I don't have a yes-no answer. It's infuriating." And more than that, it can be invasive. "During the course of my day, I don't necessarily want to visit Iraq twenty times. If I wanted to be in Iraq, I'd be in Iraq."
That frustration is the reason why Luke joined MilVets, the campus veteran organization in which he now serves on the executive board. "MilVets creates a forum where people are welcome to ask questions. We are here to talk about anything. Just not when I'm having lunch!" As much as anything else, Luke was attracted to the organization's apolitical nature. Not that Luke is apolitical; he just thinks it is more important that veterans have a place on campus where they can socialize with each other and, if possible, with other interested students. "We're not a pro-war group or an anti-war group," he insists. "Veterans have broad and diverse opinions. I would have a hard time getting along with my family if I hated antiwar activists."
Indeed, Luke goes out of his way to sympathize with even his harshest critics. "If people oppose the war, they should protest," he argues. He views dissent as a public service, just like military service—and the latter, he freely admits, is not for everyone. But like Garth and Peter, Luke would like to see a more civil tone develop on campus. "It's not productive for people to demand yes/no positions on the war." Or, for that matter, on anything else. I suggest to Luke that maybe the extreme positions veterans are forced into are simply a variant on the annoying left/right dichotomies everyone has to accept as part of America's current political polarization. Maybe so, he replies, but it is sad that simply volunteering to serve one's country is now seen as a partisan political statement.
The population of Iraq War veterans at Columbia is limited to a handful in the School of General Studies, small enough that most of us don't realize it's there. Even within the Ivy League, Columbia is infamous for its general hostility toward the armed services. From the ongoing fight over whether Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) should be allowed to resume recruitment on campus to the recent controversy reported in The Columbia Spectator between US Marine and GS student Matthew Sanchez and certain members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Columbia's relationship with the military is fraught with tension. Most students and faculty are firmly opposed to the Iraq war, to the administration that engineered it, and to the entire culture associated with military life.
Columbia's estrangement from the military goes beyond politics. At its root, it is a question of culture, or, to use an appropriately Marxian analysis, of class. It seems safe to assume that a significant proportion of the student body, perhaps a majority, has no personal connection to the military. Many of us don't know a single person serving in Iraq, either among our friends or relatives. Some of us have never even been to the parts of this country where military service is considered a part of life. Most of us probably never even considered military service as an alternative to college, let alone as our only viable way to attend college.
As I told the three veterans I interviewed, I didn't conceive of this article as a way to make a point about the war (which I do not support), about President Bush (whom I despise), about whether ROTC should be allowed to recruit on campus (I think they should be), or about what was said to Matt Sanchez [1] (I wasn't there). Rather, I simply wanted to give students who have served in Iraq a chance to tell their fellow students that they exist, to describe their experiences at war and in college, and to prove that they are not monolithic in their politics, in the nature of their service, or in anything else. Iraq veterans unquestionably add diversity to Columbia, and what better way to represent that diversity than to give them an opportunity to speak for themselves?
Garth Stewart, GS '09, is tall, muscular, bespectacled, and just slightly unkempt. He runs, plays chess, studies history and Russian, and reads Noam Chomsky. On the door of his apartment there's a sign that reads: "Do your work. There'll be plenty of time to rest when you're dead." On request, he'll lift up his right pant leg to reveal a 4 x 6 inch scar with a skin graft. He'll also happily prove that his right leg has fared somewhat better than his left leg, which is prosthetic from seven inches below the knee.
"That's awful," I gasped the first time I saw it.
"Why?" he replied, smiling, "That's what happens when you step on a landmine."
The landmine that briefly incapacitated Garth was planted on a highway near Baghdad. In April 2003, the twenty-one-year-old Minnesotan Army Specialist, after two weeks of continuous combat against Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, found himself flung on his back by a small explosion, and then evacuated (still conscious) by helicopter to Kuwait. Two months and several amputations later, he was begging to return to duty in a combat position, an exceedingly rare request for anyone who has lost a limb. But Garth's prosthetic is so well-engineered that he can do anything he could do before the war, and he missed the camaraderie of the Army. The brass were willing to offer him a desk job, but after a year of training new recruits, Garth figured he might as well take advantage of his benefits as a wounded veteran and go to college.
Already a minor celebrity, with his story appearing in The Washington Post and on CNN, Garth also managed to snag recommendations from three Republican congressman whom he befriended during his first visit to Washington. He also shook hands with President Bush, got a personal visit from Sheryl Crow, and struck up a still-ongoing e-mail correspondence with former Deputy Defense Secretary and current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. He discovered Columbia when The New York Times put him in touch with Jeff Danziger, a political cartoonist whom he admired, and who invited him to come to New York for a guided college tour. When Garth was told that Columbia is one of the most competitive schools in the country and one of the least friendly to the military, he took it as a challenge. "I told Admissions I could guarantee funding, and I told Funding I could guarantee admission, and both turned out to be true," he grins. The upshot is that the military is giving Garth a four-year full ride in GS, along with a monthly pension of $2,000 for as long as he's in school.
Garth, now twenty-three, is not one to complain about frivolities like losing a limb. Arguably, Garth's prosthetic leg is a less awkward fit than Garth himself is at Columbia. He never imagined or particularly desired that he would attend college at all, and until about a year ago he had never heard the phrase "Ivy League." Garth grew up in a poor suburb of the Twin Cities, where nearly every family was on welfare, his own included. Both of his parents had served in the Marines, and the young Garth always had a romantic fascination with military service. That said, he was not simply continuing a family tradition when he enlisted. "When I said I wanted to join the Army, I might as well have said I wanted to be a hairdresser," he chuckles, recalling his parents' disappointment. But Garth longed for combat, which he thought he was much likelier to see in the Army than in the Marines. "Maybe half a percent of the people in this whole country actually want to join the Army for a sense of adventure," he speculates. "The rest of the people who join, mostly for college money, are there to support us. Everyone knows what they're getting into, except for a few idiots."
Garth paints a picture of military life far removed from the image of racist exploitation propagated by the ISO and other student activist groups. In his experience, the armed forces are probably seventy percent white, much like the United States, and it is disproportionately whites who volunteer for infantry positions. Despite the ISO's claims that the army uses minorities as "cannon fodder," Garth recalls that it was mostly white men like himself who were actually on the front lines of combat. "There is no institutional racism in the military," he claims. I've heard this before, so he elaborates. "Every unit has a good 'ole boy from the south who hates niggers. The officers see that and they beat it out of him." How? "Sometimes they'll literally tie him and a racist black guy together and force them to do everything together until they get over it." It occurs to me that this might not be such a terrible idea at Columbia.
Despite the military's reputation for institutional homophobia, Garth, who once dressed in drag and drove with a friend from Fort Benning, GA to Atlanta to hang out in a gay bar (I've seen the pictures), is clearly no homophobe. He doesn't easily conform to other stereotypes about the Army either. He was raised as a liberal Democrat and an atheist and grew up reading Chomsky's devastating critiques of the U.S. military-industrial complex, which he completely accepted. He never supported George W. Bush and considers his views on domestic issues like stem-cell research retrograde. "I was never a nationalist, or a zealot. But I was always patriotic. I didn't like the government, but I loved the real America, the country itself, the people." And he loved the idea of serving in the Army. "I liked the concept of honor, although really, what does a high school kid know about honor? Batman and Spider-Man were my heroes. I didn't know what honor really meant."
The war has clearly changed Garth's politics. Although he did vote for John Kerry and can barely contain his contempt for President Bush, and although he denounces most of the Columbia College Republicans as "frail, pale shadows of men talking about tax breaks," [2] the fact remains that he joined anyway. So what makes Garth a Republican now? Above all, he became convinced that the Republicans are more grounded in reality than Democrats when it comes to both foreign and economic policy. Regarding the former, Garth, who enjoyed "Fahrenheit 9/11" and calls Michael Moore "a patriotic American," nevertheless came to support the American mission in Iraq while he was on the ground. He was struck by how brutalized Iraq appeared in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's reign, and by the gratitude with which most Iraqi civilians seemed to welcome their American occupiers. "I realize now that we had to get rid of Saddam," he says between mouthfuls of chicken pot pie, which he eats with an engraved silver spoon that once belonged to the Butcher of Baghdad himself.
This revelation has encouraged Garth to become interested in a future career in public service (As in the presidency? "Why not?"). It has also prompted a member of the ISO to personally denounce him as "a white-man's-burden racist". But aside from the ISO and its even more marginalized arch-rival, the Spartacus Youth League, no one has given Garth a hard time at Columbia. In fact, he has been pleasantly surprised by the friendly and apolitical curiosity with which most Columbia students regard him. "Honestly, it completely destroyed the impression of an anti-American Columbia," of which he was warned by most of his commanding officers and friends when he first considered applying here. If only every veteran could be so optimistic…
Peter Kim, GS '09, always wanted to attend an Ivy League university. But when the Long Island native was deferred from his top choice, he decided to put off college and move straight into the workforce. After stints in investment banking, marketing, and law, Peter decided he needed some discipline—not to mention some extra money for college. Had he been accepted early, he would have had a financial aid offer worth accepting. As things stood, Peter didn't want to burden his parents or his twelve-year-old brother, and he liked the idea of military service. Joining the Marine Corps seemed like a good way to gain valuable skills and earn money as a weekend warrior. It was 1999 and Bill Clinton was still president, Iraq was still ruled by Saddam, and most people were more scared of the Y2K virus than of terrorists hijacking airplanes and flying them into skyscrapers. No one had ever heard of Shock and Awe, the Green Zone, or Abu Ghraib.
Especially not Abu Ghraib. When Peter was offered a position as a legal specialist and a congressional liaison to the Marines, he had no idea it would lead him on a tour of military detention facilities in Iraq following the public outcry over the revelation that U.S. soldiers were torturing Iraqi P.O.W.s in Saddam's infamous prison. Unsurprisingly, Peter saw a lot of things that he is not authorized to comment on. What he can say is that he believes that in the Marine-run camps, the Marines live in worse conditions than the prisoners. "Marines are indoctrinated in the Geneva Convention. America is unique in the world in that our forces actually abide by the law during war."
Peter acknowledges that the situation in Iraq is far from simple, and he freely admits that he has always had reservations about the U.S. presence there. He does a lot of reading on Islam, as he is currently enrolled in a course on the subject, and he remains a skeptic that American values can be transferred to Iraq by force. "We want results now, but we can't transfer our ideals to Iraq. We struggled for two hundred years to create democracy, and we give them two or three years. It's never going to happen." Suggesting that Americans need to be more aware of the cultural gulf separating them from Iraq, Peter is tempted to agree with many opponents of the war that the occupation should be scaled back in the near future, with an emphasis placed on training local security forces rather than on futile efforts at building democracy.
On the other hand, Peter genuinely believes that there is a strong humanitarian element to the U.S. presence in Iraq. "I've got a picture of a little boy on my laptop that embodies what I fight for," he says. The boy in question is smiling innocently and sweetly before a background of extreme poverty, which Peter says is typical of the towns he visited during his tour in Iraq. As a legal expert, Peter had what he calls "the privilege" of working with Iraqi contractors in small towns to process claims for the reconstruction effort. He tells a story of how the boy followed him around everywhere while he passed out hard candy (chocolate bars tend to melt in the Iraqi climate), but never asked for anything. Eventually, Peter gave him a pen as a gift, then watched in horror as the boy's father tried to take the pen and ended up slapping his son around to get it. "That's how impoverished Iraq is," Peter sighs.
With his tour of duty completed, Peter's thoughts returned to applying to college. He prayed to get into Columbia so that he could be close to his family, and especially so that he could serve as a role model to his brother. He knew this was a liberal campus, but he always considered himself "very moderate," a vaguely oxymoronic position that led him to believe he would not be bothered by the political climate anywhere. Since enrolling in January, Peter says he has been disappointed and upset by the way students relate to the military. It isn't the fact that students tend to oppose the war that troubles him; he isn't exactly a staunch supporter himself. Rather, he finds himself a bit underwhelmed with the level of political discourse, especially regarding veterans. "Too many people talk, and not enough people listen," he complains, pointing especially to the altercation between Matt Sanchez and the ISO, which was Peter's first glimpse of the anti-military animus on campus.
Peter doesn't advertise his military service, and he wants to challenge the stereotype of the arrogant marine. He would love to talk to antiwar activists, but in his experience they don't usually want to listen to what he has to say. When he does volunteer work, his typically left-leaning fellow volunteers often harass him about his service. He isn't entirely surprised by this kind of behavior. "Most students here come from a sheltered upper-middle-class background," he notes. "I did too, and I was truly humbled when I joined the marines." Peter served alongside everyone from impoverished high school dropouts to Harvard grads, and he credits Marine Corps training with serving as a social leveler, ensuring group cohesion through a willful sacrifice of individuality. Still, he insists, "There is a lot of humanity behind everything we do, and we can't let politics obscure that."
Luke Stalcup, GS '08, is a 25-year-old from Oakland, CA. Gertrude Stein once famously said of Oakland, "There's no there there," but of course there is. Oakland is just across the bay from San Francisco, and lies immediately adjacent to the nation's most legendary bastion of liberal activism: Berkeley. Luke, whose sister is currently enrolled at UC Berkeley and who is himself a graduate of Berkeley High, has plenty of experience with people who despise the military. Some people might find it stressful, but then, those people probably haven't ever had to defuse roadside bombs and minefields for a living. As an Explosive Ordinance Disposal team leader for the U.S. Army in Iraq, Luke was charged with dealing with what has turned out to be the Iraqi insurgency's most potent weapon: the array of explosives used to paralyze ordinary life and keep the military on its toes throughout the Sunni Triangle. This was hardly the most dangerous kind of explosive Luke expected to find when he first arrived in Iraq in 2003.
"All I can say is that I didn't personally find any weapons of mass destruction," Luke says wistfully. "That doesn't mean they're absolutely not there." If he sounds a tad defensive, it is only because he is tired of having to argue with the various conspiracy theories surrounding the origins of the war. While he admits he can't speak for the Bush Administration (which he voted against in 2004; in 2000, he didn't get to vote because he spent election day in Florida helping the Secret Service protect Al Gore), Luke is quite certain that even if there never were WMDs in Iraq, everyone in the military genuinely believed that there were—and he would know better than most. "There was no conspiracy. That's nonsense. People were definitely wearing their gas masks. I wouldn't have walked around for weeks in my chemical gear—it was really hot."
Even without any WMDs, Luke was kept plenty busy during his tour in Iraq. He removed submunitions from civilian residential areas ("That's not classified as humanitarian work," he notes, "but it should be."), surveyed supply points, and helped disarm what might have been the first roadside bomb in Iraq in June 2003, before most people realized that a major insurgency against the occupation was already forming. "Our mission was not accomplished at that point," he recalls thinking in response to Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" stunt flight. "I don't think Bush is the devil. I just don't think he's a very skilled administrator." If that sounds like an understatement, consider that it comes from someone who cites the importance of public service as his chief reason for joining the military. Luke's feelings about the Iraq War are mixed and almost ambivalent, but he is capable of summoning genuine outrage toward some other aspects of the Greater War on Terror. Unprompted, he brings up torture, a subject which many in the military are naturally loathe to discuss. For Luke, the simple fact of torture is more embarrassing than discussion of it. "Torture is clearly illegal," he says with a look of utter moral seriousness. "It's never justified. Why would you even have a legalistic argument about that?" Clearly this has been on his mind a lot, and it may have something to do with his admiration for John McCain, the one senator in Washington to take a firm stance against torture (or, Luke adds, anything else in the past few years).
On the other hand, Luke insists on what should be, but often is not, an obvious point: most people in the military do not go around wantonly torturing people. Luke doesn't sound defensive at all when he speaks of wanting to protect the reputation of the military on campus. "I have a pretty thick skin thanks to Berkeley," he says, "My experience has been better than most. But I read the editorials [in The Columbia Spectator]… it's not even that I always disagree, it's that they're really hateful and mean-spirited." Luke is especially outraged by the treatment of Matt Sanchez, which clearly has become emblematic of a much larger frustration.
Although he is happy to be here, Luke did not originally want to come to a big city school. Even now, he thinks that General Studies is the best part of Columbia. "You meet the most interesting people there, including all of the veterans." For someone like Luke, it can be a difficult transition between performing dangerous missions abroad and being treated at best with indifference, and at worst with open hatred by fellow students stateside. "People are really condescending. They try to fit you into one of two categories: either you're a flag-waving, gung ho, jingoistic Bush supporter, or you're a repentant antiwar vet. It really is a presupposition of a fairly intimate knowledge." In other words, he contends, veterans on campus are not treated as people. Instead, other students tend to use veterans to confirm what they already feel about the war, whatever that might be. "I've been asked whether I support the war a thousand times here. I don't have a yes-no answer. It's infuriating." And more than that, it can be invasive. "During the course of my day, I don't necessarily want to visit Iraq twenty times. If I wanted to be in Iraq, I'd be in Iraq."
That frustration is the reason why Luke joined MilVets, the campus veteran organization in which he now serves on the executive board. "MilVets creates a forum where people are welcome to ask questions. We are here to talk about anything. Just not when I'm having lunch!" As much as anything else, Luke was attracted to the organization's apolitical nature. Not that Luke is apolitical; he just thinks it is more important that veterans have a place on campus where they can socialize with each other and, if possible, with other interested students. "We're not a pro-war group or an anti-war group," he insists. "Veterans have broad and diverse opinions. I would have a hard time getting along with my family if I hated antiwar activists."
Indeed, Luke goes out of his way to sympathize with even his harshest critics. "If people oppose the war, they should protest," he argues. He views dissent as a public service, just like military service—and the latter, he freely admits, is not for everyone. But like Garth and Peter, Luke would like to see a more civil tone develop on campus. "It's not productive for people to demand yes/no positions on the war." Or, for that matter, on anything else. I suggest to Luke that maybe the extreme positions veterans are forced into are simply a variant on the annoying left/right dichotomies everyone has to accept as part of America's current political polarization. Maybe so, he replies, but it is sad that simply volunteering to serve one's country is now seen as a partisan political statement.
// DAVID PLOTZ (CC '06) is an editor for The Current, The Birch, and AdHoc. He is also a senior writer for The Blue and White and a former Spectator Columnist. He is majoring in Eastern European History.