Podcast (GW-E02): “How did our oil get under their land?” – Stephanie Atkinson

Transcript

Stephanie Atkinson:
People found my actions personally offensive. Somehow my not going to the Gulf War would affect their patriotism.

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 on the 30 years of current US military intervention in the Middle East. The podcast episode today features Stephanie Atkinson. Stephanie was in the Army Reserves when her unit was activated for the upcoming Persian Gulf War. Stephanie went AWOL and refused her orders to deploy, making her one of only a handful of soldiers to do so during that conflict.

Matthew Breems:
Well, good morning to you, Stephanie. I am thrilled that you have agreed to talk today about your experiences in the first Persian Gulf War. One of the few resisters for that conflict. I’m just very excited that you have agreed to share your story with us today.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Thank you.

Matthew Breems:
Why don’t you start off telling us a little bit about how you ended up in the military. I know from reading about you, you were 17 at the time and you volunteered to join. In your young adolescent mind, what was your thought process behind that decision?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Oh god. Not a lot. It just seemed like a great idea at the time. I had gone with my mom and her younger husband to a recruiting center in the area where I grew up in Southern Illinois and he wanted to be a Navy Reservist. And we went there and I think that he had some charge for weed or something that he couldn’t be in, and before we left the recruiters turned to me and they’re like, “Well, how about you?” And I’m like, “How about me what?” And they’re like, “Well, have you ever thought of joining the military?” And I’m like, “Oh, not really.”

Stephanie Atkinson:
Within a really short amount of time, these recruiters got that information from me and I had a parent with me who was eager like, “Gosh, this could be so great for you. You could travel the world and you could do this and this.” And these guys are chiming in and they’re like, “Yeah, we could do this and this.” So within a really short span of time, it was an easy sell. I’m a 17 year old girl and I don’t have a lot of prospects in rural Midwestern America. So, “Yeah. Great. Sure. Why not?” I didn’t have any resistance to that or any really deep thought about it. It was just, “Oh, this is an escape. This is an opportunity.” It just seems so easy for everybody involved.

Matthew Breems:
Well, right, and at 17, what can you really expect from a young person at that age other than to-

Stephanie Atkinson:
I know. I couldn’t vote and I couldn’t have gone down to a furniture store two doors away and purchased a couch on a layaway plan. I couldn’t have gotten credit, you know? But, man, I could sign up for the next years of my life. I remember thinking 1990 seemed really far away in 1984. I was just starting my senior year of high school.

Matthew Breems:
After your senior year in high school, you joined the army?

Stephanie Atkinson:
So I signed up for the delayed enlistment program as a senior in high school in 1984. And I would go to weekend drill with a unit that I would eventually be assigned to, which was an administrative services or an adjutant general, pretty much support service. My job description was 71 Lima, which is just administrative personnel, whatever you would call us, client services, relations, or… Just back of the house kind of stuff. It wasn’t even like I was anywhere close to being in Airborne or anything where it’s combat. It seemed like a great idea at the time. All of a sudden I had this life plan. My family life was kind of disrupted. My mom had been married and divorced a couple of times. And when it came time to return for my senior year of school, I changed high schools. I just dropped out. I only went to high school half a day. I worked a job. And then I was enlisted, so I started showing up at the weekend drills for this unit. So for me, that was a transformative point. It’s like, “No, I’m going to be a grownup now”

Matthew Breems:
Right.

Stephanie Atkinson:
So after my high school graduation in June of ’85, I was home for about a week or so. And then I shipped out to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And when I got to the basic training, it was just like, “Wow. Oh boy.” Yeah, that didn’t take long to realize that I was definitely not suited for the reality of military lifestyle. So I was in basic the summer of 1985. I graduated at basic and then stayed there for another few months to go to occupational school. And after that, I came home in October and just hid out at home. It had changed me as a person. I was scared and reticent and quiet and just my whole manner of how I interacted with people changed.

Matthew Breems:
You’re saying that the basic training changed you as a person?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it changes everybody as a person. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t been transformed by that because you’re taken away from everything that you know. When you eat, where you eat, how you eat, when you sleep, when you go to the bathroom, everything about your life has changed, disrupted, controlled. And you’re cast in with hundreds of other people who are experiencing the same thing. And it’s a real big adjustment. It was just ugly. The crazy thing is the more that I wanted to get out, the more they wanted to retain me. Because as you’re going through this whole cycle where they’re making you this lean mean fighting machine, you just become that. You are transformed. If you’re not, then they recycle you. And I remember one of my drill sergeants saying, “Well, if you just like us so much, we can always recycle you.” Which means going through basic training again. And it’s like, “Oh, fuck this.” You know?

Matthew Breems:
So you come out of basic. You’re a pretty changed person. But you’re continuing in… You were in the Army Reserve, correct?

Stephanie Atkinson:
That’s correct. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matthew Breems:
So this is a six year contract. As time goes on, you have some other training experiences and some of those were overseas. How did some of those experiences start to really change your perspective on the military?

Stephanie Atkinson:
You know, at the same time that I was in the Reserve, I had started college and I went to SIU in Carbondale. And when you start learning things about how the world works through either a formal education or who you’re hanging out with or what you’re reading, that transforms you as well. And so I was at this place where I was really at odds with who I was in all these multiple roles. Through the week I’m a student and I’m learning and I’m writing and I’m reading and finding about things politically that I wasn’t aware of. And then on the weekend, once a month, or sometimes twice a month, I’m putting on this uniform and I’m going to participate in a drill weekend. And then two weeks a year we would go somewhere. And when we went, I was just like, “Oh, I have to go do this thing.” It was just like, :I have to go do this.”

Stephanie Atkinson:
I can remember we went to Operation Team Spirit in South Korea. And then I also went to another training later on in Japan. By the end of my enlistment, I was hip to what was going on in the world. One of our places that we were supposed to go to, my unit went to Honduras. I refused that trip. I made up some excuse to not go because at this time I was a short timer. Part of it is sort of the ugly American, just paying attention to how we interact with people from different cultures. It was really an opportunity to see how people conduct themselves. And I have to say, we didn’t conduct ourselves very well and it wasn’t just me or my unit. It’s just the culture that Americans take with them to other countries to support a military base.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Yeah, what we call, “Good old boy.” Yeah, “Titties, beer, guns. Woo.” Just when you establish a military base in somebody else’s country, you want all of those elements there. But realizing that’s just part of the culture. There was resentment, people thought I was a smart ass because I was a college student and they didn’t like my music and blah, blah, blah. But also I would hang out with people in my unit when I was up there and it was fun. We would always have a good time. Some people I was close to. It was just a hot mess. And I just was not compliant. I was really a pain in the butt.

Matthew Breems:
Let’s fast forward just a little bit. It’s now 1990 and your six year stint with the army is set to expire in September of 1990. Correct?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right.

Matthew Breems:
So what happens in August of 1990 that changes that?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Sometime during that year they were like, “Our unit is going to Honduras and we’re going to be part of making an airstrip, supporting the efforts for an airstrip.” And by this time Iran-Contra has already hit and I’m becoming aware what it means to be involved in Central America, countries that are adjacent to these other ones. And it’s just like, “I don’t know the details of everything that’s going on here, but I do have enough wherewithal to know that I don’t want to be involved in anything in a Central American country.” Prior to that, had been Noriega and the invasion in Panama. And it’s like, “Oh man.” Because I missed that Honduras trip, I got assigned to another unit and they were up in Wisconsin and it was late summer. And I was just like, “God, I’m almost done with this. What am I doing with my life now?”

Stephanie Atkinson:
And on the last day of summer camp, this guy was like… The commander was getting ready to dismiss this unit and he’s like, “I hope you’ve reinforced your skills here because Iraq just invaded Kuwait. And we don’t know what’s going to happen.” And I’m thinking, “I’ll tell you what’s not going to happen. I’m not going to be here. So, bye.” But my reality changed because a month later, it was around late September, October, my unit called me and they were like, “Don’t leave town. Let us know where you are. We’re on standby for activation.” And I’m like, “What? I don’t know who you’re talking about.” It’s like, “Yeah, we’re on standby.” And I found out that I was activated.

Matthew Breems:
And that was because President Bush had signed a stop-loss order in August. So the month before you were supposed to get out, he had signed this stop-loss order, basically preventing anyone from leaving the military until further notice.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right. No attrition, because, “Hey, something’s getting ready to happen here.” So were you going to retire or… And at this point too, they’re also thinking about calling in IRR, which are irregular reserve units. People who had been separated but still an inactive reservist. And so I’m not aware of it and some other people are not aware of it, but they’re getting ready to activate people for an effort. And at that point it’s like, “Wow, well, whatever I want or whatever I think or this feeling of being detached or not wanting to play anymore, it’s totally irrelevant. What am I going to do?” And at first I was like, “I guess I’m going to have to go.” I didn’t know really what else to do. I would talk to people and they’d be like, “Oh, you should say you’re gay.” This was before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And that sounded so immoral to me because I have a lot of friends that were gay and was really in the LGBTQ community of Carbondale, and that didn’t seem honest to me. So that was out.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Someone else had suggested to me that I get pregnant. I thought that was like one of the worst ideas that I’d heard. Nothing anybody was proposing to me was the right answer. And so it’s like, “Well, I’m just going to have to suck it up.” And so I had got a hold of a paper, an alternative newspaper, and then I got this other one and it was talking about war resisters. And I’m like, “What is…” And so that was the first time I heard of Jeff Paterson. And there was that picture of him sitting on the tarmac and that little sort of Buddha lotus pose. And just with the thousand yard stare. And it’s like, “Wow, who’s this guy? What did he do?” When I read about his experience and then also another Marine, Eric Larson, I was just like, “This thing that these guys are, I connect with this.” I didn’t know how to articulate it.

Matthew Breems:
So these were two Marines that were refusing to participate in the Iraq war?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right. It’s like, “I don’t know who these guys are, but I understand this, this thing, this feeling.” Then I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go to my unit. I’m going to take care of all my gear. I’m just going to pack everything up and I’m just going to report to my unit and I’m going to be like this guy. I’m going to be like, ‘Look, I’m not going to wherever we’re activating to. You can just take me to lock up now because I’m not going to do this.'” And I thought, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” But I’m stumbling the whole way here. I don’t know if you see a pattern in this, but from the very moment where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll join the army.” To, “Yeah, I’ll go AWOL.” It’s just this… I don’t want to say it’s uninformed, but it’s just I’m reacting. At no point during this time am I really taking control of my decision-making. This was the point in my life where I really had to make a decision. There wasn’t any more bumbling.

Jeff Paterson:
Okay. I need to jump in here for a second. If you don’t already know me, I’m Jeff Paterson, the director of Courage to Resist, an organization dedicated to supporting the troops who refuse to fight. As a Marine, I publicly refused to fight in the 1991 Gulf War. So this work is personal for me. These podcasts are possible only because of supporters like you. It’s your tax deductible donations that allow us to ensure our collective people’s history of resistance to war and empire is not lost. Please visit couragetoresist.org to make a donation today. There you’ll also find our entire podcast library going all the way back to 2007. Finally, like and follow us on Facebook at Courage to Resist. Thanks for listening. And back to today’s episode.

Stephanie Atkinson:
I got in touch with this group called Citizen Soldier in New York, and it was run by a man named Tod Ensign and his attorney partner, Louis Font. Louis Font was a conscientious objector from Vietnam, and then established his life as an attorney representing people who wanted to get out of the military. He does other law too, but that was a big one. And meeting them, they were like, “No, we suggest that you don’t that because we’ve heard of people getting shipped out anyway.” And they’re like, “We’d like you to come to New York and we’d like to meet you and help you through this process.” So I went AWOL, essentially, and I met with Louis Font in Boston. And I went to New York and I met all of these other war resisters. Suddenly there was this community of people. I met a guy named Patrick Colclough who was a West Point graduate, and just all these other resisters that were from New York and New Jersey and surrounding environments. Just the density of people, you’re going to have more resisters, right?

Matthew Breems:
And were these people that were resisting the Persian Gulf crisis or they were from previous wars, like Vietnam?

Stephanie Atkinson:
No, these are people who are resisting the Persian Gulf crisis. And I had no idea that there were all these other people,

Matthew Breems:
Well, it had to be incredibly empowering to feel like you weren’t alone.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Oh my God. Yeah. It was really empowering. And to talk to people who had thought things out. I mean, there were different reasons, but it was really great that we were all on the same page. It’s a very personal thing that all of us are having, but we’re also having it together. So everybody’s reason about why they want to be a war resister or conscientious objector is different, but there’s also this connection of like, “This is not right.”

Matthew Breems:
What specifically about this conflict, the Persian Gulf conflict, were the resisters most adamant about, was just wrong in their opinion?

Stephanie Atkinson:
It all seemed pretty transparent to all of us that it was a war for oil. It was a war for resources. It was a war for control of, “How did our oil get under their land?”

Matthew Breems:
“How dare they.”

Stephanie Atkinson:
How dare they. This is not realizing that post World War II, the great cutting up and carving out of the Middle East, essentially a tribal area, and making these false boundaries of, “Okay, we’re going to reward this group of people this territory and we’re going to do this to protect Western interests to protect the automobile industry and, and essentially a Western lifestyle for Western Europe and the United States.” I know that now. I can articulate that now. But back then, it was just like, “This is a war for oil.” It wasn’t a stretch.

Matthew Breems:
So you weren’t buying the narrative that we were protecting an ally?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Not at all.

Matthew Breems:
That we were protecting an ally?

Stephanie Atkinson:
No.

Matthew Breems:
Okay.

Stephanie Atkinson:
And even if I did think that I was like, “That’s…” Yeah. And then there was the stretching [inaudible 00:20:49] like, oh, well, if it’s Kuwait, then next, it could be they want to bring in Israel and they’re coming at all these different directions. And when you’re sort of a… I mean, not that I wasn’t educated because I was, I just finished this degree, but not to the depth that I am now, like understanding decades of history of what went on in the world and how we got to this place. Yeah, I just wasn’t buying that narrative.

Matthew Breems:
So you’ve gone AWOL now.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right.

Matthew Breems:
What happened next? What did you decide to do with the advice of these lawyers?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Well, it became very public. There’s something about me being the first female war resister, and there’s this word conscientious objector. To say conscientious objector I feel like isn’t really appropriate to describe me. Being formally recognized as a conscientious objector you have to jump through all of these assorted hoops. And it’s really a lot of hard work. It’s about proving the sincerity and conviction of your beliefs, presenting evidence, having witnesses, interviews with military chaplains, psychiatrists. So I was already AWOL. So had I submitted a conscientious objectors application it would have been denied anyway.

Stephanie Atkinson:
I am interviewing with people. I’m not terribly articulate. I’m not very media savvy. And this is getting written about in my small newspaper back home, and suddenly everybody knows who I am. And I remember freaking out like, “Why does anybody care?” It seemed so personal to me. It’s like, “Why does anybody care whether I do go there or go to jail?” Because at this point, it’s becoming real to me, it’s like, “Oh, guess what? These are your options. Now you’re looking at possibly five years in confinement.” Why does anybody care? People care greatly. It felt like I was attacking their patriotism.

Matthew Breems:
Well right. And it brings up something very uncomfortable. It’s a sacred cow that if you’re finding fault with our actions there, it forces other people to assess for themselves if what we’re doing there is right.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right.

Matthew Breems:
And they don’t want to have to think about it. They just want to be part of the parade and cheer on America and not really think through the steps of what we’re doing, is it right or not.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right. And plus, for me too, being from this very conservative part of the country, that’s a red state, or at least that part of it is, and where things like Christianity and Patriotism, that’s with a capital C and a capital P, those things are really culturally valued. And there’s not a lot of room for a person to be at odds with that. People found my actions personally offensive. Somehow my not going to the Gulf War would affect their patriotism. After really thinking about it, that choice was not a choice at all. And it felt like I knew what I had to do, and that was not to report. So I was eventually picked up. I was arrested at my home by a state trooper, an Illinois state trooper. He took me down to Jackson County jail in Murphysboro, Illinois, where I lived. Was trying to figure out how to charge me because I was wanted on a military warrant.

Stephanie Atkinson:
I remember he told me, he was like, “Young lady, you are more trouble than you are worth.” And I was like, “Ooh.” After a while, because I was more trouble than I was worth, I was picked up by Air Force personnel from Scott Air Force Base, which is near St. Louis, Missouri. And they came and picked me up, so I was in their care for a while. And then I finally got my phone call to my lawyer, Louis Font. Because nobody knew where it was. It had been about 24, 36 hours and nobody really knew where I had been taken to. Then I was moved from Scott Air Force Base over to Fort Knox in Kentucky. And I was held in the personnel confinement facility for two weeks, two and a half weeks, while they decided what to do with me.

Stephanie Atkinson:
What ultimately happened was I was offered, other than honorable in lieu of courts martial, so I was given the lowest administrative separation that you could get without… It was in lieu of a courts martial. It’s like, “If you sign off on this, we’ll let you go, we won’t bother prosecuting you. It’s just not worth it.” I was actually discharged on November 11th, on Veterans Day. I always celebrate on Veterans Day not being enlisted anymore. The town that I lived in was just like… Nobody would hire me. I did have a small job, but when somebody had come in off the street and saw that I was working there, my boss came to me he’s like, “Look, I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal, but I can’t lose my small business because you work here.” And I’m like, “I get it.”

Matthew Breems:
So the repercussions to you were pretty severe then.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Oh yeah. I got a lot of phone calls, got a lot of mail that was just threatening or hostile.

Matthew Breems:
So a lot of negative pushback just from people that you didn’t know.

Stephanie Atkinson:
Right. Right. Sometimes I’d interview with a person who would be like really sympathetic to me and supported me, or sometimes I’d be put on a program with somebody who’s like, “You’re a piece of shit and I hope all bad things happen to you.” And it’s like, “Wow, okay.” I never knew who I was going to be talking to.

Matthew Breems:
I was going to say, you ended up doing quite a few interviews with the larger networks, like CNN and those, correct?

Stephanie Atkinson:
Yeah, yeah. And ABT. Harold Jordan, he works for the ACLU now, but at the time I met him on a program and then he asked me to come to the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia and take on an internship there, which I accepted in January. It was just a good time for me to leave town. I left my place where I’d lived all my life, pretty much, and moved to Philadelphia. That was the first big city I’d ever lived in. And everybody wanted to interview me. When they started bombing, ABC, Ted Koppel’s Nightline was like, “Hey, if we could interview… So your father doesn’t agree with you on this.” My parents had been divorced since I was a toddler. My dad and I kept in loose contact with each other. And they’re like, “Yeah, well, if your dad agrees to go on, will you interview?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m thinking, “There’s never in a million years my dad’s not going to do this.” And he did. And we did. And it was weird. Where it was kind of like, “This is the impact on the American family of the Gulf War.” And it was my dad saying, “Well, I think that we need to support this effort.” And me saying, “I’m not going. I’ve already been discharged. And by the way, I work for Quakers now.” It was a very, very strange incident.

Stephanie Atkinson:
At this point though I am part of a community of people that genuinely care for me. They’re trying to help me work this stuff out. They’re trying to put my efforts to good use, my experience. And I stayed there for a year and I moved on to Fayetteville, North Carolina, right outside of Fort Bragg, where I was a military counselor at the Quaker house for about eight or nine months. At that point, there’s people coming back. They’ve had the big parade. But I’m getting calls from people who are not okay. And it was heavy trying to do that work there alone, being so close to Fort Bragg, being in a military community. And after nine months, I was like, “I can’t do this. I don’t have enough internal capital to do this job by myself.” I left and moved to Atlanta. And that was where I was for a long time.

Matthew Breems:
And with the advantage of some hindsight and maturity, what would you tell 23 year old Stephanie right now?

Stephanie Atkinson:
People say, “Well, if you had to do it all over again, would you do it?” And I would say yes, because otherwise I would not be where I am now. It’s been painful. It’s been transformative, but I would not know the people that I know now who are so important to me. I would not have the education that I do now. I would not have the outlook that I have on the world right now. Something about being an outsider in a small community and then being even more of an outsider and being rejected, you really come to understand what it’s like for other outsiders, what’s it like to move through the world as somebody who is not heterosexual and not white and not Christian. The experiences that I’ve had as a result of that mean so much more to me now.

Stephanie Atkinson:
So being here in the Pacific Northwest, I worked at the UW for a while, the University of Washington, and I worked in a global health department and we had a visiting professor from Iraq, a man named Riyadh Lafta and he had come to do a presentation about the public health impact of the second Gulf War. Or the never ending Gulf War, I call it. I was really quiet and I’m not out to anybody at this workplace about being a resister. And he shows us this really great PowerPoint and the statistics of the public health implications to infrastructure, clean water, people who died of just secondary results, not even like somebody got their arm or leg blown off or a direct hit of war, it’s like secondary things; cholera, the inaccessibility of clean water or hygiene areas, all of these things that are just the very slow death that lingers after the brouhaha is over. So I watched this and it’s a very moving thing. And my colleagues are crying. And I’m just like, “I got to talk to this man. I have to talk to this man.” The audience had thinned out.

Stephanie Atkinson:
And I just went up to him and I’m like, “Hi, my name is Stephanie and I used to be in the army and I was activated to go to the first Gulf War, but I didn’t. And I was incarcerated for a really short time, but not… I mean the fallout of my life and the continued fallout of this war, and I just don’t know what to say to you except I’m really sorry. I never thought I would meet somebody from Iraq and you are a living, breathing person from a country.” And he said, “Can I hug you?” And I was like, “Yes. You are somebody that I can look at and know, ‘Well, this guy didn’t die as a result of something that I was a part of.'” And for him to say, “Can I hug you?” That is all I will ever need from that experience.

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.