Chapter+7




 * Deserter of Wrong**

“I was a warrior, you know? I always have been. I’ve always felt that way… that if there are people who can’t defend themselves, it’s my responsibility to do that. It was my responsibility to ship out with the Marines to Kuwait in Jan. 2003 to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. Instead, I slipped out of Camp Pendleton and deployed myself to Canada.”

“I didn’t want, you know, ‘Died deluded in Iraq’ over my gravestone,” I said. “If I’d gone, personally, because of the things that I believed, it would have felt wrong. Because I saw it as wrong, if I died there or killed somebody there, that would have been more wrong.”

I told Wellington it wasn’t fighting that bothered me. In fact, I told him that I started basic training just weeks after Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, and I was prepared to get even for September 11 in Afghanistan. But I didn’t see a connection between the attack on America and Saddam Hussein.

“What it basically comes down to, is it my right to choose between what I think is right and what I think is wrong?” I asked. “And nobody should make me sign away my ability to choose between right and wrong.”

But I signed a contract to be with the U.S. Marine Corps. “It’s a devil’s contract if you look at it that way,” I said. “It makes me struggle with doubt, you know, about my decision, while I’m here in Ottawa and other Marines are dying in Fallujah, Najaf, and in Ramadi. I honor the dead, those who left America, their families, and died in Iraq. Maybe their families think that my presence dishonors their dead. But they made a choice the same as I made a choice," I told Wellington. "My big problem is that, if they made that choice for anything other than they believed in it, then that's wrong... right? And the government has to be held responsible for those deaths, because they didn't give them an option."

__By:Irobles__

Works Cited:"Deserters:We Won't Go To Iraq", CBS News, 60 Minutes II http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/06/60II/main659336.shtml