Veterans Call to Conscience Speakers Bureau David Wiggins Short Bio

I am 40 years old, a former Distinguished Graduate of West Point (The United states Military Academy) and Honors Graduate (AOA) New York Medical College. I was raised in Waverly, New York - a small town of 5,000 in upstate New York. I completed my Internship at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC and then stationed at Fort Hood Texas as the Flight Surgeon for an attack helicopter brigade. I witness 'The Wall' come down and believed there would be peace, but saw only war in Grenada, Panama, etc. This experience led me to deep introspection and reevaluation of my reasons for having joined the military and led me to apply to be discharged from the Army as a Conscientious Objector in Feb, 1990. My application was initially approved, but Iraq invaded Kuwait that August and I was retained due to Stop Loss Regulations. I was subsequently ordered to Saudi Arabia and went while demonstrating my opposition with a 27day fast broken by force feeding in an Army hospital in Dahran Saudi Arabia. I subsequently resigned my commission on the day prior to hostilities by holding out my arm and blocking military traffic at an intersection in King Khalisd Military City on the front lines. I was Court Martialed and dismissed from the Army with a $50,000 fine. Since then I have become a practicing Emergency Physician and writer and speaker for nonviolence. I am married and have a wife and two children. Here is a recent interview I did: Dave Wiggins is an emergency room physician in North Carolina these days. A long time ago he was a West Point honors graduate destined for a career in the U.S. Army. He was proud of that, thought it was the best thing he could do with his life. After graduating from medical school, he was assigned to an Apache helicopter combat unit at Fort Hood, Texas. His next stop was the Gulf War. "I was a conscientious objector during Desert Storm. It didn't start out to be that way. I originally joined the army thinking that I was going to defend the country against the `Evil Empire' rather than the `Axis of Evil' we have today. When the [Berlin] wall came down I was quite disillusioned when, as a country and a world, we didn't have a more peaceful environment--we proceeded to invade Grenada and invade Panama. And then after that I applied to be discharged from the army as a conscientious objector. "However, while my application was pending approval by the Department of the Army--after I had already been approved for discharge as a conscientious objector--Iraq invaded Kuwait. My whole situation became entangled in that situation. The army put out an order called `Stop Loss,' which meant nobody could get out of the army, including me. I subsequently was ordered to deploy to Saudi Arabia as part of the combat unit I was assigned to. There is an army regulation which basically describes how an application to be a conscientious objector is supposed to be handled. There was an investigation where I was interviewed along with my family, friends and other military officers I worked with. The result of that investigation was the recommendation that I was `sincere'--which is the only thing they have to determine. And given that I was sincere, the army regulation stipulates that I should be discharged from the army. At that point the paperwork has to go through my chain of command, and that's where I started to run into some resistance. In spite of the recommendation of the investigation, the chain of command pretty uniformly said, `Well yes, we understand this but we don't agree with the concept of conscientious objection in general and therefore we deny the application.' "I told my commanders that as part of this whole investigation and interview process that--in the theoretical event that my application was turned down--I would basically cooperate during the application but that would end at the time I felt there was a problem. I also said that I would never voluntarily fight because of the reasons I laid out during my application. I was subsequently ordered to go to Saudi Arabia, and at that point I started a fast as a way of resistance and protest. I started going public in my opposition to the war on TV and radio. Yet I did not refuse to go Saudi Arabia. I went because the army had attempted to make my case appear to be one of cowardice--which it certainly wasn't. "When I was deployed they treated me as though I was a danger to the unit. A few of the officers came up and in some bizarre sort of way suggested that I was endangering the unit by the position I was taking. They actually had armed guards they called `Black Hats' guard me all the way into Saudi Arabia. "I continued to do my job in a certain sense. I was in a war zone, and I was actually deployed there before any hostilities started. I took medicine with me, and if somebody was hurt or injured I certainly did not refuse to take care of them. However, at other times I refused to show up at my place of assignment. I wrote letters and posters while I was in Saudi Arabia and posted them on the mess hall. I did interviews with media saying that I still opposed the war. And I was still fasting all the time. I volunteered to work for the International Red Cross since the army was trying to make the case that I didn't really care about the people who would be sick or injured. I did that because I felt that taking care of any injured soldier-- whether it be Iraqi or U.S.--would be equally just. However, that was turned down as well. They ended up putting me in a hospital and force feeding me to break the fast. "I was initially sent to the front lines in a place called King Khalid Military City, about five miles from the border with Iraq. We were in a tent city there with the forward units that were going to invade Iraq since I was in a helicopter unit. It was pretty well signaled as to the day that the war was going to start. And at that point I knew that it was basically a matter of acting upon my beliefs. So I decided to resign my commission. "In my mind I had a picture of the gentleman in Tiananmen Square [in Beijing, China] who held his hand up to the tanks. I decided to do something similar. I went to the main intersection in King Khalid Military City where the heavy armor was heading towards the front lines. I stood there and held out my hand and blocked all the traffic heading to the front lines. While I was doing that I took off my uniform and signed a resignation. It was about 15 or 20 minutes before some soldier dragged me off to the side of the road. They tell me that the traffic was backed up for 15 or 20 miles at that point. "Immediately afterwards they threw me in the back of an ambulance. Their initial response was that this person must be insane. So they actually packed me up and took me to the hospital where I stayed overnight, and then when they determined that I wasn't insane they tried to tell me to go back to work, to forget about it and do what I was told." Dave refused to do what he was told. He refused to go to work or to wear his uniform. He again volunteered for the International Red Cross, saying he would care for anyone injured, civilian or soldier, Iraqi or American. The Army rejected this and eventually court-martialed Dave and convicted him of Failure to Repair (not showing up for work) and Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman (for taking off his uniform as a sign of resignation). The judge ordered that he be discharged from the army. Since then Dave has felt a special responsibility to speak out on the dangers of blindly following unjust orders. "I feel sorry for the troops. I think they are being unjustly ordered to do something and being taken advantage of by a government that is supposed to represent them. I feel sorry for their families be- cause they're losing their loved ones for a certain amount of time if not forever if they get killed. On the other hand, I don't agree that they should be going off and killing people just because they are ordered to. The excuse that `I was just following orders' has never carried that much weight whether it applies to Cambodia or the Nazis, and I feel this applies equally well to U.S. soldiers. If you're going to take it upon yourself to take someone else's life, I think a person has a moral responsibility to make sure that they actually believe in it and are not just following orders. "We live in a world that is getting smaller all the time. You can travel anywhere in the world in less than a day. We have weapons that can totally render the human race extinct--nuclear weapons, bio- logical weapons. What one nation does can affect the whole world as well as the citizens of the nation. In our own selfish sense as American citizens and in a more noble sense as world citizens, we need to act in our own best interests, and that may often involve acting against the interests of our government who doesn't always represent the best interests of the citizens." This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online