Different War, Same Struggle
News: Veterans from both Vietnam and Iraq are organizing and speaking out against the war in increasing numbers.
March 8, 2006
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NEW YORK — When 23-year-old Joseph Wood came back from Iraq after serving in Fallujah with the 82nd Airborne Division in June 2004, he just wanted to forget about the war.
"I came out of the Army not wanting to have anything more to do with it," Wood said. He enrolled in design school, hoping for a "regular life."
"It wasn't until recently that I began feeling really out of place. It seems no one has any idea what's going on over there in Iraq. Everybody is so tuned into their own lives. "
So a couple weeks ago, Wood, who appears in the documentary Occupation Dreamland, joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). He said he did so after attending a reading by conscientious objector Camilo Mejia, who served prison time for refusing to go to Iraq.
"I remember being over there, and it's really nice to know someone's over here trying to bring you home," Wood said.
He's also one of the vets planning to walk from Baton Rouge to New Orleans between March 7 and 14 to mark the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
"We're going down there basically to connect the two biggest problems we think the United States is facing right now," says Staff Sgt. Jose Vasquez, a member of the military since 1992. Vasquez, now a member of the New York National Guard, was set to be deployed to Iraq before applying for conscientious objector status in January 2005.
"I had been researching—kind of seriously looking into it since August of 2004. I had just returned from Army leadership training school. One of the lessons was on the ethics of warfare. They had us read a website about the My Lai massacre. And after that we were supposed to discuss how to maintain ethics in warfare. I kind of just raised my hand and I said, 'The real problem is war itself.' I got a bunch of blank stares from 39 other sergeants. I realized then that I wasn't thinking about things the same way as everyone else," Vasquez says.
"My father was a Vietnam vet and he was really messed up when he came back. I really cared about what he thought about it. I called him up after the [2004 presidential] election and told him I'm basically fed up, and he said 'I fought in a war we shouldn't have fought, and I don't want you to go through the same thing.'"
