As the US military assault on Fallujah intensifies, we feel sure that American troops will have more and more reasons to feel genuinely conflicted about their participation in this war. Here in Lawton, Oklahoma, we consider the words of Camilo Mejia:

“I admit that in Iraq there was the fear of being killed, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill; there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body…I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me. I say without any pride that I did my job as a soldier. I commanded an infantry squad in combat and we never failed to accomplish our mission.”

During our vigil outside a cemetery, we had the opportunity to leaflet passengers in cars as they came to a stop at a traffic light. Many of the people who accepted our flyers were soldiers from nearby Ft. Sill, where Camilo is a prisoner. Farah remarked on “the almost pained look” on the faces of some of these soldiers when she asked them “Have you been to Iraq?” And we were all struck by their apparent interest in our vigil.

I’ll end with a poem, written today at the vigil

Letter To Camilo

Camilo,
in the armored, seven headed logic
of military justice,
you are pathological
infectious
a foreign cell in the bloodstream
a virulent disease to be isolated, surrounded, smothered.

We seek no chink in that armor.
Rather,
like scientists gone underground
and gathered in makeshift laboratories,
we seek the purest strain
of that virus
and every opportunity
to spread it,
hoping, in time,
to help infect the entire body

Read the Lawton Journal Day Two, and Day Three.