Hero of the Month
U.S. Marine Corps reservist and conscientious objector Stephen Funk reads a statement before he turns himself in to military authorities at his reserve unit in San Jose on April 1. Behind him stand his mother and sister.
Lance Cpl. Stephen Funk is the Hero of the Month for refusing to take part in the Bush regime's unprovoked, illegal, immoral and imperialist war against Iraq.
Funk, 20, who joined the Marines in February 2002, went AWOL when his reserve unit was activated last February.
On April 1 he turned himself in to military authorities in San Jose. Funk told the media that he had spent his time away from his reserve unit working on his application for conscientious objector status.
"I cannot in good conscience take part in war," Funk said. "I object to war because I believe that it is impossible to achieve peace through violence."
"Many people think of conscientious objection as a relic from the days of a mandatory draft," explains a Mercury News article. "But the law allows those who voluntarily join the armed forces to seek a discharge if they have developed a deeply held moral or ethical objection to war."
The Mercury News article futher explains that the procedures to become discharged as a conscientious objector "are rigorous: An applicant must submit a detailed letter explaining how his or her feelings have changed since joining the armed forces. Then there are interviews with a military chaplain, a psychiatrist and an investigating officer, with a final decision made by top military commanders."
Funk is working a desk job at the base in San Jose while officials consider his application for discharge.
The military discharged 111 conscientious objectors from the First Bush Gulf War for Oil and discharged 28 conscientious objectors last year.
Funk also told the military that he is gay, but, he said, "Obviously being gay has affected my moral beliefs, in how I was raised and who I am as a person, but the reason I'm getting out of the military is not because I'm gay. I'm trying to get out because I'm morally opposed to war."
The Associated Press quoted Funk's lawyer as saying that if the Marine Corps refuses to give him conscientious objector status, it probably will discharge him for having violated the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the misguided policy created by former President Clinton that allows gay men and lesbians to serve in the military only as long as they keep their mouths shut about their sexual orientation.
Last year the military discharged 906 people for being gay or lesbian.
"Funk, whose father served in Vietnam, said he grew uncomfortable with the military when he was made to shout 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' during a basic training exercise," the AP reported. "Since his training, he said, he has gone to every major anti-war rally in the San Francisco Bay area."
"I don't want people to be making the same mistakes I did,'' the Mercury News quoted Funk as saying. "If everyone was a conscientious objector, there wouldn't be any war.''
It's easy to call Funk a coward, especially if it's not our own ass on the line.
One confused columnist, who admitted that she herself wussed out of military service (which she had considered to be able to pay for college), vilified Funk even while she admitted, "It's possible he was manipulated. The military's recruiters are some of the best pitch men and women I've ever come across. Just check out the military's commercials -- all that adventure and self-esteem."
Yup. I've yet to see a military recruitment ad that featured injury or death. The U.S. military intentionally and shamelessly targets its "Top Gun"-like ads at our youth, the majority of whom believe they are invulnerable.
It's shameful that, unlike so many other First World nations, the United States does not provide its youth with a free college education, so that poorer young Americans have little choice but to join the military in order to get a college degree.
(The New York Times ran an excellent story on this very topic today. An excerpt:
And one young soldier, Devon D. Jones, hoped to teach English in a high school like the one from which he had just graduated. Private Jones knew he would need a college degree for that, which was why he had found himself in Iraq to begin with.
"'I don't have any other way to pay,'" his former girlfriend, Tiffany Taylor, remembered him telling her when he enlisted last year.
"That is the thing about him dying there," Taylor said of Private Jones, one of more than 100 Americans killed so far in the war. "So much lay ahead. He was really trying to do something in his life. He had everything ahead of him."...
[Jones] told Taylor that his work, inside a tank, turned out to be hard. The Army recruiters had not warned him about what it would really be like, she said he told her, and that he would not recommend the Army to others.)
No one should have to risk stepping on a landmine or being shot to death for a college education. You can bet that the stupid white men of the Bush regime who are sending our youth off to slaughter in Iraq never had to put their precious rich white asses at risk to get their Ivy-League college degrees. Our Imperious Leader got into Harvard Business School on his surname, which also enabled him to avoid being sent to Vietnam by getting him into the Texas Air National Guard. (See Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.)
All of this aside, as Funk indicated, the Bush regime could not conduct its unprovoked, illegal, immoral and imperialist wars without the cooperation of our youth. If more of them refused to serve in unjust wars, there would be fewer unjust wars.
Some things are worth dying for; the Bush regime's colonization of the Middle East is not one of them.
4:11:12 PM 
|
