Soldier Trades M16 for Peace

I’m not one of those people that oohs and aaahs over tattoos. Although I will ask about them if it seems like they were put there for symbolic purposes, rather than just “Duuuuuude, look what I did when I was out drinking with my buddies! Isn’t it awesome?”

No, a clown smoking a cigar, waving the Confederate flag and riding a big wheel with a playboy bunny sitting on the handlebars is not awesome. Sorry. You couldn’t just buy a drawing of that and hang it on your bedroom wall? You had to get it permanently painted on your neck?

Being an Air Force brat, I have a bias toward soldier tats. Jason, one of the gardeners at an organic farm I visit in upstate New York, has cool tattoos. A Gulf War veteran, who fought in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Jason is frequently ill from the many vaccines he received before he was sent to Kuwait, not to mention whatever mystery chemicals he was exposed to that were swirling around in the air.

Each tattoo says End War in the language of every land in which Jason fired an M-16 when he was in the Marines.

In “treasury font” fired M16 on Paris Island, SC; in Hawaiian, on Oahu and Big Island…

In Arabic, fired M16 in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq; in Japanese, in Okinawa and Mt. Fuji…

At 15, most of Jason’s friends had dropped out of school. At 17, Jason was thinking about dropping out too. He found himself sitting in school suspension in October of his senior year of high school for skipping too many days of school. He plotted his escape by telling the teacher he wanted to check out the colleges who were recruiting students in the gymnasium that day. Jason wasn’t interested in college. This was just a way to get out of suspension. The first booth he came to was a Marine recruiter who Jason recognized as an alumni. He talked to him for a while about joining the Marines, something he had never thought about doing before.

He never made it beyond the recruitment table. That night the recruiter came to his house, talked to his parents, and told him they had an opening for him. They invited him to come down to the office and take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to determine what he would be suited for in the military. The recruiter showed Jason his test results, handed him three pages and said, “Hypothetically speaking, if you could pick any of these jobs, what would you pick?”

It was hypothetical, right? So Jason chose infantry. The next day Jason took advantage of an excused absence from school to meet with the Marine recruiter for a “pre-physical”. Again, it sounded like a preliminary step to see hypothetically if he was fit. Afterward, a woman in uniform walked in to the room with all the recruits. She said, “All you ‘depers’ come with me!” Jason didn’t know what a “deper” was but he went. She left the room, returned in ten minutes and said, “Everyone get a chance to sign your forms?”

“No.”

“You have to sign wherever it says sign here,” she said. Without question, Jason signed.

“I didn’t even know why I was in the room,” Jason said. “I could have signed a contract for a car for all I knew. I wasn’t shocked. I just went along with it. I came to reason with it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Of course once you join, you realize you don’t want to be in the military.

She asked, ‘Everybody here wants to be in the military, right? Okay! Stand up and raise your right hand.’ We stood up, took our oath and she said ‘Okay, you’re all in the military.’”

Jason found out that “deper” stood for Delayed Entry Program. “I signed up in October of ‘88 at the age of 17. I graduated June of ‘89. My send off date was in late August.”

Jason took the six-year contract. In the beginning he launched off the back of ships and assaulted beaches. “I was a radio operator and I communicated with ships and airplanes. If you would see a story on the news that said troops were overrun and needed helicopters and artillery, that’s what I did. I used encrypted gear and called in for backup or med-evacs.”

I asked Jason the question I wonder about every soldier: “Did you have to kill anyone?”

“That was my job. My actions as a Marine and things that I did led to the killing of people. But I never saw someone at the end of my scope and pulled the trigger on them.”

Jason considers himself fortunate. “I’m no where near the degree of post traumatic stress soldiers who come back now have, trying to figure out if that was a wedding party or an insurgency. They just followed orders but the next day in the news they find out they killed innocent civilians. That’s tough to live with.”

Today, Jason dedicates his life to peace. He is an active member of Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, a very active peace activist organization that fills the library meeting rooms to capacity, with people holding homemade signs that say “I am already against the next war.” Even the license plate on his Jetta says End War.  He wears, walks and drives the talk.

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