“Every day in combat training you had to yell out ‘Kill! Kill!’ and we would get into trouble if you didn’t shout it out, so often I would just mouth it so I didn’t get into trouble.” The recruits were also encouraged to hurt each other during hand-to- hand combat training. “I couldn’t do that so they would pair me up with someone who was very violent or aggressive.”
Mr Funk said many recruits were envious of those who were being sent to the Gulf. “They would say things like, ‘Kill a raghead for me – I’m so jealous.’
Stephen Eagle Funk, 20, a marine reserve who was due to be sent for combat duty, is currently on “unauthorised absence” from his unit. He faces a possible court martial and time in military prison for his action. , so begins the Guardians’s report on America’s first conscientious objector of this war.
Funk told the reporter:
“I would rather take my punishment now than live with what I would have to do [in Iraq] for the rest of my life. I woul be going in knowing that it was wrong and that would be hypocritical…. War is about destruction and violence and death. It is young men fighting old men’s wars. It is not the answer, it just ravages the land of the battleground. I know it’s wrong but other people in the military have been programmed to think it is OK.”
Telling the truth is courageous. Putting oneself in harm’s way for one’s beliefs is courageous. Putting the lives of others before one’s own is courageous. Standing alone against a tide of evil is courageous.
It is men like soon-to-be ex-marine Stephen Eagle Funk who are the true moral warriors — the real “good guys,” the heroes of this war who bravely take a stand against the evil that seems to be taking over the hearts of too many of my countrymen.

I don’t want to give aid and comfort to the enemy – I just want to be able to tell the truth.
Read the rest of his statement as published by his new employer.
Thanks to the ex-lion tamer for the link.

In between blogging bursts, I

I

While there’s lots of shots on CNN of military families supporting the war, I haven’t noticed any mention of the kinds of responses profiled in this Salon.com article. Or any mention of the organziation they’ve formed, www.mfso.org.
The article begins:
Military families who oppose the war in Iraq say there’s a special horror in watching this campaign unfold. Like everyone else who has a relative serving in the Gulf, they’re beset by a sickening anxiety that builds as the troops move toward Baghdad — and that paralyzes them every time another casualty is reported. For those who believe the war is unjust, though, there’s no pride in a
righteous cause to ease the terror, no patriotic sense of shared sacrifice to make sense of their families’ disruptions. There is just the helpless feeling that their loved ones might lose their lives for nothing.
Some telling, intelligent, and eloquent quotes from the story:
“It hurts a lot, sacrificing our children for a war that Bush took us into,” says Peter Hansen, a Navy dad in Palm Springs, Calif. “I picture my son going off to World War II and I really think I would feel differently. I’m not a pacifist, but I really feel something stinks about this, and every day I get more confirmation. I have an intuitive sense that Bush is not a good man.”
“I support my son and the troops 150 percent, but I also have tremendous feelings of empathy and compassion for the Iraqi people,” says Dreysus. “There’s a tremendous amount of conflict and confusion. It’s like a paradox that you’re holding inside your heart.”
“The other night on television, they said, ‘Here there was an antiwar demonstration, while here is what some people are doing to support our troops,'” Nancy Lessin recalls indignantly. “That formulation is absolutely wrong, and we’re trying to correct it everywhere we go.”
“The hardest thing by far would be to lose Joe in a war that was unjust and unnecessary,” Lessin says. “In that case, we think we would never, ever recover from our grief and never let go of our anger. That anger would be directed at this administration and the Congress that abdicated its responsibility and allowed this to happen.”
And this from a personal statement on the mfso website:
… I am concerned about the defective mission upon which President Bush is sending him. His dedication to country is being abused by a President hell-bent on an unjustified, unnecessary and