Free the Fort Bragg 50

The resistance of conscientious objector Dustin “Che” Stevens has sparked a national petition campaign to free Stevens and the 50-plus other GIs currently held in the 82nd Holdover Unit at Fort Bragg, N.C., awaiting absent without leave and desertion charges. The petition says these GIs “live in a legal limbo of poor living conditions, verbal abuse and arbitrary punishments while waiting for up to a year to be actually charged and brought before a court martial. The result is that these soldiers are subjected to many months of unjust and illegal punishment prior to their day in court.”

The petition requests that the Army “improve living conditions, reassign sadistic supervisors, end all informal punishments, and expedite resolution for these soldiers so that they can return home to begin rebuilding their lives as soon as possible.” It also requests that the time they spend in the Holdover Unit count as part of any sentence they might receive.

Signers include Mike Ferner, national president of Veterans for Peace; retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright; Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild; historian Howard Zinn; leaders of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Courage To Resist; organizers at GI coffee houses at Fort Hood and Fort Lewis; and many more. The petition is directed to the Fort Bragg Commanding General and the Commanding Officer of the 82nd Holdover Unit, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C. (To sign and contribute to this campaign, go to Couragetoresist.org.)

Conditions at Fort Bragg were exposed recently in articles by Courage To Resist project coordinator Sarah Lazare and Dahr Jamail, author of “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Their report, “Echo Platoon—Warehousing Soldiers in the Homeland,” appeared in “Tom Dispatch” on Aug. 10. (It is online at Couragetoresist.org.)

According to the Echo Platoon report, soldiers who have gone AWOL and then voluntarily turned themselves in or were forcibly returned, “remain suspended in a legal limbo of forced uncertainty that can extend from several months to a year or more, while the military takes its time deciding their fate. Some of them, however, are offered a free pass out of this military half-life—but only if they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.”

“Echo is like jail with some privileges,” says Spc. Kevin McCormick, 21. He was held there for more than seven months on AWOL and desertion charges, then offered release if he would accept deployment to Iraq—despite being suicidal.

“You’re less than human to the commanders,” Spc. McCormick said, adding that they act as if “you don’t deserve to be alive. A sergeant told us he wanted to take us out and shoot us in the back of the head. We get threatened all the time there.”

A Fort Bragg spokesperson, Capt. Ronald Thaxton, said, “I can’t confirm or deny verbal abuse. It depends on if a person is angry.”

Spc. Dustin “Che” Stevens, whose decision to publicize his own resistance led to the exposure of conditions at Fort Bragg, said: “I’ve been here almost seven months, and only a few people have gotten out during that time. There was a Purple Heart veteran who was here and is now serving a 15-month jail sentence. ... Unfortunately, our sentence does not take into account the time served here. Some of us get paid, albeit the E1 or entry level wages, but I’d gladly give them the money back if I could go home.”

Sgt. Travis Bishop sentenced at Ft. Hood for resisting

Fort Hood, Texas, is another base where there has been a recent surge in resistance. Sgt. Travis Bishop became the second GI in two weeks court martialed there for resistance, and was sentenced on Aug. 13 to 12 months in military prison. A strong support delegation was present at the court martial from Under The Hood, a GI coffee house in nearby Killeen, Texas, as well as Students for a Democratic Society representatives and other supporters who came from Austin, Texas.

Travis based his defense on the failure of the Army to notify soldiers of their right to apply for conscientious objector status. Neither the judge nor the jury of “peers”—all many ranks higher than Sgt. Bishop—paid attention to this argument. But Bishop’s attorney, James Branum, who is co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force, said he plans to take the appeal through all military courts and “if necessary, the Supreme Court.”