Podcast (GW-E03): “Still remember it like it was an hour ago” – Charles Sheehan-Miles

Transcript

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Even though I’d been in combat over the day and a half or so prior to that event, that was the only time that I know for sure that I shot and killed somebody. Again, it’s 30 years ago this month, and I can still remember it like it was an hour ago.

Matthew Breems:
This is the Courage to Resist podcast. Since 2005, Courage to Resist has worked to support military resistance to illegal and unjust wars, counter recruitment, draft resistance, and the policies of empire. This episode features a guest with 30 years of current us military intervention in the Middle East.

Today I have on the Courage to Resist podcast, Gulf War veteran Charles Miles. Charles served in the army during Desert Storm, including heavy fighting in Iraq. His traumatic experiences during that conflict led him to become a conscientious objector. Charles then started his own nonprofit organization focused on helping veterans receive medical benefits that were currently being denied to them. He is also an established author. More about Charles and his work can be found at sheehanmiles.com.

Well, Charles, excited to be speaking with you today as a Gulf War veteran, to hear your story of activism and of being a conscientious objector. With all of our guests, we like to just get a little bit of background information about you and your formative years. Can you just give us a nutshell version of how you came to find yourself in the military?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Sure. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. And my family has a long history of military service. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in Japan, World War II. And my dad served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. So to some extent, as I was growing up, there was… It wasn’t like an expectation or a requirement, but there was an assumption that military service was a possibility. And about a year after graduating high school, I did enlist in the army.

Matthew Breems:
Okay. So you, you enlisted in the army. What were your early experiences in the army?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
I actually liked being in the army. It was fun. I got to the tank range and fire the cannon. And I was originally expecting to go to the second armored division in Germany. My graduation from basic training was scheduled for August 10th of 1990. And as you may know, August 2nd of 1990 was when Iraq invaded Kuwait. And so, the sequence of events was we were, during the last week, getting ready to graduate. Everything’s exciting. And then August 2nd comes, there’s the invasion. On August 8th, they canceled my orders for Germany. On the ninth, they gave me new orders for the 24th infantry division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. And on the 10th, I graduated. Then they bused us across the base and we got on a plane and flew straight to Fort Stewart. And then a week later, we deployed to Saudi Arabia.

Matthew Breems:
So that was a pretty fast turnaround for you as far as what you were probably expecting your army career was going to look like. And then all of a sudden you’re in combat.

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Yeah, it definitely was unexpected. I probably was better prepared, maybe, than some people, if only because when I was going through the decision-making process of whether or not to enlist, my father did sit me down and he said, “Look we may be at peace now, but if you enlist in the military, you’re going to have to assume that you’re going to get sent to war.”

I want to say in January of 1991, which was just as we started bombing Iraq and before the ground invasion, when I actually read in Stars and Stripes and article about a Air Force officer who had applied for conscientious objector status. And it just put the bug in my head because I was curious about it. Didn’t know exactly what it meant. I thought it was interesting. And then subsequently, had these terrible traumatic experiences in ground combat. And not long after returning back to the United States, that article came to mind again. And that’s what I started researching.

Matthew Breems:
So your personal experiences in ground combat is what really triggered you to become a conscientious objector? Is that correct?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Yes, absolutely.

Matthew Breems:
And what did that path look like for you to apply to become a conscientious objector? Were you still technically in the military at that time?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Yes, I was. I was still a tank crew man. I was stationed at Fort Stewart after the war. I started talking about it with, actually, our battalion chaplain in the months immediately after the war. I think over that summer. And then in the fall I had talked with my company commander about it and he was surprisingly supportive. And so in January I actually filed the paperwork.

So the process took a long time, from originally thinking about it, then all of those discussions, then filing the paperwork, then to actually get in the discharge was a little bit more than a year. And it was a year of fairly extreme stress because my battalion commander at the time was calling me into his office on a near daily basis to talk about it. I didn’t feel like I was being harassed or anything, but it was still… You know, when a PFC is being called in to talk to a Lieutenant Colonel on a regular basis, that is a stressful experience. And it just… Inherently.

Matthew Breems:
What was his motivation for calling you in on a near daily basis? Was it to counsel and advise you through this process? Or was he trying to talk you out of it?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
A little bit of both. The battalion commander had not had the same experiences that we had during the war. And I think that was part of what led to that sympathetic reaction from my immediate chain of command. And also, in retrospect now, I’m a little bit flattered, because here was this guy who was like really trying to engage me. Handing me books to read on like military ethics and stuff like that. It wasn’t a harassment campaign. He was like genuinely trying to get me to look at it from all different angles. And I learned a lot from that process, even though I was very solid in my beliefs and I was ready to make that case.

Matthew Breems:
Well, that is definitely a unique experience. We’ve heard so many stories from conscientious objectors on the podcast, and their superiors are never supportive of their-

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
I know.

Matthew Breems:
… action to become an objector. So yes, consider yourself very fortunate in that regard.

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
I absolutely do. And I think it had to do with two different things. One was, I was applying for it not in a time of war or conflict. The war was over when I filed for it. So that was the one piece of it. The other piece of it was that my company was involved in some incidents that were very, very disturbing in Iraq, including one in which we shot and killed some people who may have been civilians. And everybody knew about it, and everybody was shaken and traumatized by these events. And I think that had a lot to do with it.

My company commander, platoon leader, testified in my discharge hearing, and both of them were very supportive and described all of the events. And so when it came time, when it went up to the conscientious objector review board in Washington, it very smooth from there.

Matthew Breems:
A lot of conscientious objectors that were veterans have a lot of different reasons for becoming CO’s. If you could pare it down, specifically, what were your reasons for wanting to become a CO?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
First, I’m going to relate a specific experience that happened. On February 26 of 91, so coming up on 30 years ago this month, my unit was up in the Euphrates River Valley in Iraq and it was in the middle of the night. We had been in engaged in combat for about 18 hours up to that point and so we were exhausted. Sitting in our tanks, hardly… There was, like, one person in each tank who was awake and looking around and nobody else. And then out of nowhere, these trucks pulled up right in front of our position. And one of the trucks was fired on by a tank and it exploded. And it was a fuel truck and splashed burning fuel all over the area around it, including the other truck that was with it. That was a truck full of people. And they came running out and they were on fire.

The humanitarian thing to do, the human thing to do, when you see someone on fire is to put the fire out. Right?

Matthew Breems:
Right.

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
It’s to help them. But the appropriate response, the only response, we could take at a time, because of this unknown people, and explosions, and we didn’t know if they were armed, we didn’t know who they were. And we machine gunned them all and killed them. Even though I’d been in combat before that, over the day and a half or so prior to that event, that was the only time that I know for sure that I shot and killed somebody. And again, it’s 30 years ago this month and I can still remember it like it was an hour ago. The short version of why I filed for conscientious objector status was that I never wanted to be in a position to have to do something like that again.

Matthew Breems:
Okay. So you’ve got your CO status. It’s this year long, nearly a year long, process and it’s given to you. Did you start becoming an activist at this point, or was there sort of a timeout period for you?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
It was a timeout period. I drifted for a while. I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. The moment that became, where I became an activist, was when I was sitting in the VA hospital in Atlanta in a quasi group therapy session with some other Gulf War vets. And one of them had gotten a hold of a copy of a report from the Senate Banking Committee, of all people, on exposure to chemical weapons in the Gulf War.

And I was curious, so I read the report, and I get to this page where they’re talking about the testimony of this under secretary of defense, who claimed that Iraq never deployed any chemical weapons in the war zone, that they just worked there. And I knew for a fact that they were, because our unit had come across some and cataloged them, taken pictures, and they were in the logs and all of that.

And so here is this case where I knew people who were very sick and nobody could figure out why. And they were getting turned away from the VA and not getting the medical care they needed. And then I found out that the Pentagon had sent officials up to Washington, to the Capitol, to lie in official hearings about why those people were sick. And I ended up moving to Washington, DC, and founded an organization that worked on Gulf War veterans health issues, out of my frustration and anger about the way these people were being treated. And so, that kind of set my activist career. And I was the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center for several years. And then I served on their board of directors.

Matthew Breems:
And what were some of the activities… Or, were some of the focuses of that organization? And how did they attempt to make change?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
We were primarily focused… Well, I should say exclusively focused on healthcare issues around returning Gulf War veterans. So the different angles were getting the VA to recognize that the illnesses existed, to service, connect them, and treat them. So that was one piece. And then the second piece was to get research funded, to identify what the cause was, and what would be effective treatments.

And we had a surprising amount of success at both of those things. And it was mostly through developing relationships on Capitol Hill with staffers and congressmen, like Wayne Evans, who was a Congressman on the Veterans Affairs Committee. Or Senator Robert Byrd slipped an amendment into an appropriations bill in, I want to say 1994, that ended up authorizing what has turned out to be tens of billions of dollars in benefits to sick veterans, that just didn’t exist up until that point.

And so that was primarily it. And until September 11th came, and that was when the veterans community that I was part of split in half, because half of them were cheering on kind of this nationalist, “Go America” and “Let’s smash the Iraqis” type of perspective. And the other half, which included me, thought that was a crazy idea and tried to stop it.

It was primarily a group of Gulf War veterans who initially organized an organization called Veterans for Common Sense. And we wanted to come at it from what would be seen as a very pragmatic perspective because… I’ve been a member of Veterans for Peace off and on, and I love that organization. But it’s not a particular surprise to the news media if Veterans for Peace is against a war. Right? That just stands to reason. And so we thought if we could come at it from a very centrist national security perspective and make the argument, not that invading Iraq was immoral and would kill innocent people for no reason. That was all true. But making the argument from the perspective that this is strategically stupid, and it will get a lot of Americans killed and cost us a lot of money, and there’s no good reason for it.

We thought that that angle would have more practical effect with both the press and on Capitol Hill. And that did turn out to be effective. We did a lot of media. We got veterans to sign on to group letters that we sent to the White House and to the Capitol. And it was all for nothing in the end. Obviously, we did invade Iraq and a lot of people were killed, and everything we predicted came true, and it was a tremendous tragedy.

And so now that same organization exists and we primarily do lobbying around the impact on veterans who served there. I’ve dialed back my kind of national activism and gotten very involved locally. And so two years ago, I ran for the school board here in my town, got elected. And so, I’m focused on things like making sure that we are not disciplining students of color at greater rates than white students, which used to be the case here. Focused on things like that. Trying to, at a very, very local level, do what I can to make things a little bit better.

Matthew Breems:
Charles, did you feel that there was any significant cost to become a conscientious objector on a personal level? Did it affect any relationships with family or friends or anything of that sort?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
I was lucky in that respect because I had the support of my parents, many of the soldiers I started with, not all of them. I didn’t feel that I had to pay any terrible cost or have any deep sacrifices to file for it. I have friends who were conscientious objectors who went through much more difficult times. And so I was lucky in that way, that, again, because I had local support from my chain of command and from the other soldiers I served with, it was fairly painless for me.

Matthew Breems:
How would you encourage veterans to be activists in this time that we’re living in right now in 2021?

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
I would say the biggest threat that we all face right now is the misinformation, that the information silos, where we only hear the things we want to hear. And then we hear more of the same and more of the same, and it gets more and more extreme. I was really alarmed to see that a way out of proportion number of those arrested and charged in the capital insurrection we’re veterans.

Matthew Breems:
Right. Right.

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
We know from work Vietnam Veterans of America has done, for example, that they had a huge research project looking into how Russian intelligence, for example, was actively trying to recruit and targeting American veterans with all kinds of misinformation and stuff. And those weird silos of information and misinformation and confusion and false news, and all of that has… Puts us whole in levels of danger.

And so what I would encourage people to do as activists is to just stay engaged in reality. And, what is reality? And to employ critical thinking when you look at some website with a provocative headline. All you have to do is look at the anti mask protests to know that we’ve got some very confused people out there. Right? We are actively radicalizing ourselves. And for me, that… I feel like this is probably one of the most essential things we all face right now, is to, if we know people who are caught up in that stuff, to ask them the critical questions, try to draw them out, and try to get them to look outside of their bubble because it’s frightening.

Matthew Breems:
Well Charles, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your story of activism with the listeners on the podcast today. Thank you so much.

Charles Sheehan-Miles:
Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Matthew Breems:
This podcast is a Courage to Resist production recorded and edited by Matthew Breems, with special thanks to executive producer Jeff Paterson. Visit couragetoresist.org for more information, and to offer your support.