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US soldiers have a rich history of questioning the wars they’re told to wage abroad.
As President Donald Trump increasingly uses the U.S. military to carry out his agenda through brute force, organizations that provide counseling services for U.S. servicemembers are reporting growing numbers of calls. These calls have further spiked in response to Trump’s war on Iran, one of the most unpopular in U.S. history.
The United States has carried out the war through intense attacks on densely populated civilian areas, the impact of which was clearly shown in the bombing of a girls’ school, killing well over 100 children. Not even concerned with selling the war to the public, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has leaned into treating the intervention as a “holy war” for Christianity.
Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran and executive director at the Center on Conscience & War (CCW), told Truthout that troops are telling his organization that they don’t want to be involved in the killing.
“That’s pretty much all of the cases that we have,” Prysner said. “It’s all people who don’t want to take part in killing in a war that they don’t believe in, and this war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”
The CCW, formerly the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, was founded in 1940 to assist religious communities whose beliefs prohibited them from participating in war. Over time, and as a result of broadening criteria for who can qualify as a conscientious objector (CO), the organization evolved to assist troops of all backgrounds whose values prevent them from being able to participate in war.
Prysner told Truthout that in recent weeks CCW has already been able to help several servicemembers become COs to avoid being deployed.
To reach more servicemembers experiencing crises of conscience, CCW and other organizations including the Quaker House founded the GI Rights Hotline in 1994. Steve Woolford, a resource counselor at the Quaker House, has taken calls for the hotline since 2001 and agreed that the war on Iran, and Trump’s broader use of the military, has caused a spike in calls.
“The biggest increase has come from people who are feeling a lot of opposition to the ways the military’s currently being used,” Woolford said. “That includes people who feel like they don’t want to be sent into cities and point a weapon at U.S. citizens, they don’t want to be part of what to many of them look like war crimes, shooting down speedboats in Venezuela that wouldn’t be able to make it to the United States, and I would say with the invasion, or whatever you want to call it, ‘Operation Epic Fury’ in Iran, there’s been significant opposition to that.”
Woolford clarified that not all troops who call the hotline are able to leave the military by filing as COs. While every member of the military has that right, the process requires applicants to prove that they have deeply held antiwar beliefs. This means that even if someone is opposed to certain orders or operations, they don’t qualify as CO if they aren’t opposed to participation in all wars.
Prysner said that the social pressure in the military can also make it difficult for troops to declare themselves COs.
“Especially for people who have deployments happening, you’re telling all of your brothers and sisters in uniform that you don’t believe in what you’re doing and you’re not gonna be able to do it with them,” Prysner said. “The thing is, the people that we’re dealing with, they simply don’t have any other choice … They cannot live with themselves participating.”
Echoes of Antiwar History
This is not the first time that members of the military have questioned their role in U.S. wars. In fact, there is a rich history of GI dissent throughout U.S. history.
The role of antiwar veterans was especially important in bringing about the end of the Vietnam War. During the height of the antiwar movement there was a proliferation of underground newspapers which criticized the war and highlighted the fact that soldiers being sent to die were disproportionately from working-class communities, many of which still faced racial discrimination within the United States. It was common for soldiers to circulate these newspapers among themselves at bases and at antiwar organizing spaces known as GI coffeehouses. By the end of the war, opposition within the military’s own ranks was so widespread that deployed soldiers had developed codes to communicate with Vietnamese fighters to avoid shooting at one another, and the military was recording hundreds of cases of troops throwing grenades at their officers, a practice known as fragging.
This widespread GI resistance contributed to the United States ending the draft in 1973. The switch to an all-volunteer military has made it less likely that troops will resist war en masse.
However, the so-called “war on terror” produced its own share of antiwar veterans.
Millions of people opposed the Iraq War from the start. As the war continued with no clear end, some U.S. troops began to question the war as well, especially as it became known that the United States was carrying out atrocities against the Iraqi people like the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. Some troops formed the group Iraq Veterans Against the War to demonstrate to the public that as veterans, they were opposed to the wars they had participated in. This organization, now under the name About Face Veterans, continues to organize against U.S. militarism at home and abroad.
As the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s domestic use of the National Guard to wage war on immigrants have led many people to question U.S. militarism, veterans organized in groups like About Face and Veterans For Peace have been at the forefront of opposing these expressions of state violence and connecting them to a larger culture of militarism.
It remains to be seen how in the longer term the war on Iran, recently marked by Trump’s genocidal threat to end an entire civilization, might further change how people in the U.S. military feel about their role in the institution carrying out such violence. Both Prysner and Woolford suggested that the increase in troops reaching out to their organizations could be a sign of a deeper transformation taking place.
“I think you can start to get a picture of the fact that there is quite a bit of opposition from within the ranks,” Prysner said. “That has not yet manifested into a movement or radical actions or people speaking out publicly or refusing to go on deployment publicly, but there’s real potentialities when you have that many people who are this opposed to the war.”
Woolford, comparing the current moment to the early 2000s, thought it was important that antiwar sentiment is already more common.
The war on terror “was very much a boots on the ground, where people were feeling shot at, they were feeling like they were being asked to do terrible things, whereas now, we don’t even have boots on the ground and people are already upset,” Woolford said. When it comes to the troops, “the opposition is way earlier this round.”
Sam Carliner is a freelance journalist with a focus on U.S. foreign policy, geopolitics and international struggle. His writing has appeared in Teen Vogue, Responsible Statecraft, Salon, Shadowproof, Waging Nonviolence, and other publications. He previously managed social media at the feminist antiwar organization CODEPINK. Currently he writes and edits for the socialist publication Left Voice, with a focus on international coverage. Follow him on Twitter: @saminthecan.
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