The Unlikely Activists (Page 2 of 4)
September 20, 2006By:
According to the sign-in sheets, over 300 people attended the screening in Knoxville. The night before, Dougherty had attended a screening at a film festival in Washington D.C. “There were more people here than at the [festival] last night,” she said. “It’s encouraging [to see].”
Gill said that while the film was hard for some to watch, it’s necessary for people to see. “My sense is there’s a lot of discomfort [within the community] … people don’t want to be seen as not supporting the troops, and there’s discomfort with where the war is headed. We felt like a lot of people, you read about casualties each day and despair a little but don’t know how to respond,” he said.
Dougherty, a founding member and chairperson of IVAW, was part of a panel discussion following the film screening and shared her experiences with the audience.
She said she signed up for the Army National Guard as a medic in 1996. Her father, who was drafted during Vietnam, never spoke about his experiences in the military, but her stepfather urged her to join. Her stepbrother was also in the guard.
“And what the recruiter said sounds appealing … my father didn’t want me to join,” Dougherty said. “He was like ‘Don’t do it, they’ll turn you into a robot!’ ” Dougherty signed up and served with the National Guard for the next eight years.
She was deployed to the Balkans in 1999-2000 as a military policewoman and served as an MP again when deployed to Kuwait and later Iraq in 2003.
After doing convoy escorts and patrols in Southern Iraq for 10 months, Dougherty came back to the states and helped establish IVAW. “Every day I made lists of thing I’d do and changes I’d make when I got home,” she said.
Dougherty said she is dedicated to veteran activism. “For better or worse people need to listen to what veterans have to say.”
“We as civilians wave goodbye and welcome [troops] back and think it’ll be alright … we are responsible for sending them into warfare and taking care of them when they get home and help them on the road to healing,” Dougherty said.
A former Staff Sgt. of the 1st Battalion of Florida’s National Guard’s 124th infantry, he served roughly eight years between the Army and National Guard and was deployed to Iraq in March 2003.
In a telephone interview Mejia, who lives near Miami Beach, Fla., said he’s active in his daughter’s life and with activism. He hopes to go back to college and get a degree in psychology and Spanish. When he was deployed, he was only one semester away from completing a psychology degree.
Having moved between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the United States several times in his younger years, Mejia joined the military looking for a sense of belonging.
“I moved back [to the U.S.] in 1994 and haven’t moved since. I guess I didn’t really have what I wanted out of life, not just in terms of material things, but not really having a place to call home,” he said. “I just needed a sense of belonging and a group of friends and a place to call home. The Army seemed to offer the camaraderie, the stability, and a number of benefits I was looking for.”
Mejia said he was assigned many things he didn’t agree with during his five-month deployment in Iraq. “We were not there to bring freedom to the Iraqis, but to go after the natural resources, and I felt we shouldn’t do that,” he said. “We should fight for freedom but not go halfway across the world to basically destroy this country to take their oil.”
He continued, “Most important [is] the humanistic aspect, the torture and the civilian killing, and the humiliation that makes an occupation: the raids and curfews. We’d gone out of our way to start firefights to earn glory…I was thinking how it was totally unnecessary.”
When Mejia returned to the U.S. for a two-week leave, he decided going back would be against his morals and what he believed.
“When I came home I didn’t go back,” he said. “I stayed with friends and relatives, mostly in the Northeast.”
