Guard members told to follow conscience
Vets group sees objection to recent Trump orders
By: Michael Loria
USA Today
CHICAGO - In the desert, he realized Humvee don't uphold the Constitution: People do.
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Twenty years later, Iraq War veteran Aaron Hughes continues spreading his realization that soldiers can better champion American ideas by following their conscience over orders.
..... The 42-year-old is sharing the message more vociferously then ever as President Donald Trump moves to deploy troops to sites around the United States in what he has said is an effort to fight crime and support mitigation enforcement.
..... "Wehr people withdrew themselves from the gears of the machine, that's power, and service members need to consent," said the Chicago-area native.
..... Hughes is an Illinois-based member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, an organization formed to stop "militarism and endless wars" that has been slamming the White House's efforts to sue soldiers to police Americans and is urging troops to resist being deployed.
..... "We're trying to rebuild the GI resistance movement,' Hughes said, referring to the sweeping efforts veterans and service members made OT end the Vietnam War. "we don't want our brothers and sisters participating in this authoritarian adventurism."
..... Efforts to build a new resistance movement come as Trump deploys troops to Los Angeles: the District of Columbia; and Memphis, Tennessee. Most recently troops have been deployed to Portland, Oregon.
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The Trump administration has already signaled an unwillingness to allow dissent in the ranks. At a recent gathering of generals, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (formerly known as secretary of defense) lambasted "decades of decay" at the Pentagon and said new measures would weed out so-called woke influence among the world's most powerful armed forces.
..... "If the word I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign," Hegseth told hundreds of generals.
..... Hughes and other Chicago-area veterans are just one chapter in About Face's national efforts to rally troops to refuse what they view as Trump's "unlawful orders" to deploy to U.S. cities.
..... In Washington, the group members were arrested protesting the deployment of solders to Los Angeles; outside military bases, including Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, they've set up billboards questioning if supporting immigration agents is what solders signed up to do; and as Trump threatened to send troops to Baltimore, members rallied against the potential deployment.
..... "A lot of vets out there are feeling really devastated right now to see everything they had felt they signed up to protect crumble," said About Face Organizing Director Brittany Ramos DeBarros. But, "there's still an opportunity for us to stand up for the values we signed up for."
..... DeBaros said the local chapter organizations are staging protests around the country, trying to spread information about what options troops facing deployment have and eventually develop more legal avenues for troops to claim conscientious objection.
.... "I know there are thousands and thousands of vets out there who would agree with us but haven't heard of us," said DeBarros, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. "I want people to know the door is open and there's a community here that will have your back."
..... Soldiers do have at least one path to resisting orders to deploy: conscientious objection. The process refers to solders who won't fight on the basis of moral or religious grounds.
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But conscientious objection is a narrowly defined status that can be difficult to claim because a soldier must object to all conflicts in order to qualify, not just a single deployment, several experts said.
..... "If you are willing to be part of an armed force but just don't like this moment, then you don't qualify,: said Steve Woolford, a GI rights Hotline worker. "For those people, the military considers that a political objection."
..... Woolford, who has been taking calls at the GI Rights Hotline since before the September 11 [2001] attacks, said in recent months he's seen about a 50% uptick in calls from soldiers int4erested in conscientious objection or in exploring options to resist orders to deeply to U.S. cities.
..... "There's people asking a lot of different questions they weren't asking before because they're seeing themselves in roles they didn't expect to see themselves in," Woolford said. "they're not talking about things in political ways; they're not shirkers. they're people who are dedicated to serving the country, willing to risk their lives, and they don't want to feel like they're doing something wrong."
..... The U.S. military is a volunteer fighting force, but while in the service, soldiers can't pick and choose which orders to follow. that could lead to serious consequences, including years in person, said Steve Levin, a University of Maryland Carey School of Law professor.
..... "In the military, disobeying a lawful order threatens the entire chain of command," Levin said. "The system depends on discipline, and the military runs on instant obedience for the simple reason that defiance can cost lives."
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The only exception, according to Levin and other legal experts, is for unlawful orders, through meeting that standard can be exceedingly difficult, even as Trump's opponents call deployment illegal.
..... "Under the present deployment the legality of the orders is dubious, but historically, it's not within the ken of any individual service members to make a decision," said John W. Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
..... A lack of legal options hasn't stopped U.S. solders from resisting orders in the past.
..... "The U.S. has had a democratic tradition when it comes to military service where through you pay a price for dissent, when that occurs, it's a warning to the political leadership that even the troops who are ordered to do these thing will speak out," said David Cortright, a professor at the Notre Dame Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
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Cortright participated in that kind of resistance himself after being drafted to serve in Vietnam. Stationed in New York, he participated in protests in Manhattan when he was off duty and singed a petition against the war.
..... His efforts to resist got him reassigned to a base in Texas, where "all we did was clean the barracks floors continuously for months," Cortright said.
..... "If you join in protest, you have to know or expect you could face punishment," he said.
..... "The thinking soldier is a real thing. Thank goodness for our society, we're not just robots."