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Veterans Call to Conscience Speakers Bureau Jeff Paterson Short Bio |
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Marine Cpl. Jeff Paterson broke ranks and refused to board a military transport last night at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station for deployment to Saudi Arabia. After refusing "repeated verbal orders" to board the plane, he was taken into custody... "At some point, I'll sit down," he said. And that's what he did. For a fuller biography on Jeff go to: www.jeff.paterson.net Here is a recent interview done by the Revolutionary Worker with Jeff: Jeff Paterson grew up in the Central Valley of California. It's a place that plays a big part in feeding the rest of the country but can be like a prison for an 18-year-old looking for a future. Jeff joined the Marines at 18 because, in his words, he wanted to be a "bad-ass fighting machine." Over the next four years as an artillery controller and traveling the world with the Marines, Jeff began to see the people of the world in a different light. By the time he was ordered to the Gulf War, Jeff was a changed man. He became the first active duty soldier to refuse orders to go to war in the Persian Gulf. "I served my four years, and I was a few weeks short of my end of active duty service, looking forward to going back to school, when the Iraq war kicked off. And based on what I'd learned, how we were interacting with those peoples where I was at, and the things I'd heard from my buddies coming back from Central America--talking about helping out Contras down there--and stuff going down in Beirut, I came to the conclusion, with some help of friends, that it would be in the best interests of the people of the world for me to not participate in the first Gulf War. "I basically came to the conclusion that whatever the military could do to me for refusing to fight that war, it would be pretty insignificant compared to what we were going to do to the people of Iraq. I sort of knew that first hand because I was trained as a nuclear warhead technician for our artillery unit. And we were promised that we'd get to `nuke the ragheads' if anything went wrong. My commanding officer, to make us more relaxed about going over there and make us not worry so much, promised me particularly that if anything went wrong, I would be able to assemble the nuclear warhead and `nuke the ragheads until they all glow.' That was his way of reassuring us that we'd be taken care of. "So I held a press conference to get the word out, because I figured the military wasn't going to look kindly on my ideas and that they'd probably want to `disappear' me to the Middle East as quick as possible unless I got the word out. I threw together this press conference at the last minute, and basically I just tried to articulate how I felt and that I wasn't going to be a pawn in America's power plays for profit and oil in the Middle East. That's the way I looked at it, having tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of basically pawns going out there, being shot up with anthrax vaccines, and given toxic amounts of BP pills and botox pills and all these other things that are supposed to keep you safe, that obviously have contributed to the illness of 100,000 troops from the first Gulf War and 10,000 dying from Gulf War Syndrome. "I went back and forth with the military about applying for a discharge as a conscientious objector, and that takes forever sometimes. In my case the military decided that I wasn't actually `sincere' enough to be a conscientious objector, denied my claim to be discharged, and ordered me on to the next outbound plane to Saudi Arabia. "At that point, I actually just sat down on the runway and refused to get on the plane. Because of the publicity I had, they didn't just shackle me and throw me on the plane like they did to people later on as the war progressed and other people refused to get on the plane much like I did. "I went to Pearl Harbor brig. I did a couple of months there. I was in the middle of a court martial because I was a `threat' to the national security of the United States. Probably today I'd end up in Guantánamo or something, but back then they kept me in Pearl Harbor. It was basically only because people protested outside the base--this was before the war actually kicked off--that the military decided that actually it wasn't in their best interest to pursue my prosecution. Instead of getting the expected five years in Leavenworth, they gave me an other-than-honorable discharge. "One thing people ask me is how was it that I became the first person to publicly declare that that war was wrong from within the military. It was basically because one person challenged me to do the right thing. It wasn't `Go' or `Don't go.' It was actually, `Do the right thing.' For four years I'd spent my life not doing the right thing, but doing what I was told. "As far as I'm concerned, I've never regretted for a moment what I've done. Any nightmares I have are about what if I actually just followed orders, if I just did what I was told, if I had to be part of the carnage that's led to the last 12 years of sanctions and 1.5 million Iraqi dead. That's the nightmare I have. "I think people saw what it meant to `support the troops' during the last Gulf War. There is no way to put that as your primary political orientation. If you are starting from `support the troops,' `bring them home,' `we want peace,' then still when the troops are over there fighting the war, you are left with primarily supporting the troops. And that means supporting what they are doing. "I am completely sympathetic and understanding of where people are coming from, but if you are actually going to be part of a worldwide movement to stop this war and other wars, we got to call out what's really going on. We have to support the troops who refuse to fight. That's not to say we dis the other troops or whatever, but it's more of a challenge to us to do the outreach, to let those troops know what the war is all about. They don't know, they've been indoctrinated to not think about those sort of things. "And once we do that, then it's our responsibility to speak out in whatever way to help them along to do the right thing. We need to lay the foundation for people to step out in a bold way and say `Hell no, we're not gonna go. This war is wrong,' and call out other people to take the right stand against all this." |
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