Military Jailing Vietnam War Resisters
40 Years After They Refused to Serve

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: Tod Ensign, you are Buck McQueen's attorney? How uncommon is this?

TOD ENSIGN: Well, there appears to be a unit within the Pentagon called the AWOL Apprehension Unit, and they have been going out and actively searching for people like Buck and Jerry and others, and when they find them or locate information, they send local police after them. So they're very aggressive in finding people and prosecuting them. Jerry was actually under court-martial charges down at Camp Lejeune. So it appears to us that what they're trying to do is say, look, these guys have been gone a long time. They're obviously of no use to us as soldiers, but we want to let young people in Iraq know that if they leave now, we will pursue them and criminalize them for the next -- for the rest of their lives. That's the message I believe they're trying to send.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it happening more now than a year ago, than five years ago, than before the invasion?

TOD ENSIGN: Well, the Pentagon says that the desertion rates are lower than they were before we invaded in 2003. I don't have other figures. I would really question the accuracy of those figures. They claim it's lower, but it's definitely growing now, as the U.S.A. Today story said. There are more people deciding, “I just can't go back.” There was a story just yesterday that some people are facing their fourth tour over there. That's an incredible amount of combat burden on people.

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Even though this tactic, harassing old soldiers with consciences in order to intimidate young soldiers with consciences, seems to be simply that, harassment, it's pretty low-down and dirty. This obviously has nothing to do with these individual Vietnam era soldiers, and everything to do with how much it sucks to be caught up in the unwinnable quagmire of the immoral and illegal war in Iraq: before the rate of Iraq war resisters picked up to what appear to be alarming levels, the Pentagon could have cared less about the guys who ducked out of our last quagmire. In short, these poor guys are now disposable pawns in the neo-cons' global strategic game; they're being screwed over, having their lives majorly disrupted, for no good reason at all. Pretty unjust. Sounds like the military is getting desperate.

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