Flux 2008

the well

The science of suspension
Psychic numbing
Reinventing Ed's Coed
Bass driven
One year, one pair, zero washes
Running from crocodiles
The big idea
Faith in recovery
I am Duck
Learning to lose

multimedia

Unfinished battles

Unfinished battles

story Libby Whittemore | photo Conner Jay

Bob Watada has waited two years to find out what will happen to his twenty-eight-year-old son, Lieutenant Ehren Watada. But according to his son’s attorneys, he’ll likely have to wait two more. Lieutenant Watada isn’t in Iraq. He isn’t missing in action. The patriotic Oahu, Hawaii native who once couldn’t wait to fight terrorists in Iraq is working a desk job in Fort Lewis, Washington. Like his father, he too is waiting. 

In June 2006, Lieutenant Watada joined twenty thousand deserters who have fled the United States military since the beginning of the war when he refused to board the plane deploying his unit to Iraq. His opposition to the war developed after he returned home in August 2005 from deployment in Korea and began to question the administration’s motives for war. He soon concluded the war was an illegal one and discussed his options with his family.

Lieutenant Watada’s legal counsel has advised him against attracting media attention, but he has made official appearances at events such as the 2006 Veterans For Peace National Convention in Seattle, Washington. “Though the American soldier wants to do right,” he stated, “the illegitimacy of the occupation itself, the policies of this administration, and the rules of engagement of desperate field commanders will ultimately force them to be party to war crimes. No one knows the devastation and suffering of war more than the veterans, which is why we should always be the first to prevent it.”

Because Lieutenant Watada refused to deploy with his unit, the military charged him with “missing a movement” and “conduct unbecoming of an officer,” two counts that collectively carry a maximum sentence of four years in prison. His trial, which began in February 2007, has become a tangled mess: the prosecution called a mistrial, the defense yelled double jeopardy, and the proceedings are currently tied up in the court system. Now all that Lieutenant Watada can do is wait. “They’re just holding him,” Bob Watada sighs. “It’s like Guantanamo Bay.”

 
The Watadas aren’t alone in their waiting: carbon copies of Lieutenant Watada’s case have popped up elsewhere in the state. Eugene resident Sara Rich waited in legal limbo for six months after her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Suzanne Swift, also refused to deploy to Iraq. Swift deployed for a year in 2004, during which she filed formal reports that commanding officers had sexually harassed and raped her on multiple occasions. Swift knew if she deployed a second time she faced another round of the same treatment. She missed the movement and the military sent her to prison for thirty days and stripped her of her rank. There would be no more jail time, they said, if she would sign a statement saying she was never raped.

The army eventually released Swift from prison in January 2007, but since then she has received countless death threats. Rich will not disclose her daughter’s current location, only saying she is working at a U.S. military fort. For a short time, Swift was assigned to Fort Lewis with Lieutenant Watada, who has supported her and whom she regards as an older brother. “The army is pretty much above the law to do whatever they want. They’re doing it deliberately to punish [Lieutenant Watada] and make an example of him,” says Rich of her daughter’s and Lieutenant Watada’s court martialings. “I think if they were going to let him go, they would have by now.”

Bob Watada hopes a new administration in 2008 will pressure the military to examine his son’s case more justly. “There is no fairness in the military system. I’m pretty convinced that the orders for trying Ehren have come all the way from Cheney’s office,” he says.

Though he feels powerless to help his son on a daily basis, Bob Watada hasn’t sat at home for two years waiting by the phone. For five months in 2006, he and his wife, Rosa Sakanishi, traveled across the country as far east as Maine and Florida on a speaking tour to raise awareness for Lieutenant Watada. On their busiest day they spoke at six different engagements. Recognizing the support they have received from their neighbors and fellow Oregonians, the Watadas have taken every opportunity to raise local awareness as well. At a March 2008 rally at Eugene’s federal courthouse, Watada spoke publicly on stage with fifty-three-year-old Cheshire, Oregon resident Eric Burmeister, whose son also faces court martialing and jail time.

Three hundred U.S. soldiers, including twenty-three-year-old Junction City High School graduate James Burmeister, have fled to Canada since the start of the Iraq war. Burmeister, who has auditory nerve damage in his right ear from an IED explosion, returned to Oregon from Iraq for a week in February 2007 with shrapnel in his face, the residual effects of a concussion, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We, his family, worked to try to keep him from being re-deployed because of his injuries but the army said, ‘No, you’re going back.’ James decided he couldn’t do it,” Eric Burmeister recalls. “He’s killed people, he’s had to shoot people, he has seen civilians be killed. The kid’s in bad shape mentally.”

 
When the army ordered Burmeister to return, he ran. After an eleven-month stay in Ottawa, he turned himself in to the army in March 2008 because his PTSD had gotten worse and Canada, which has tightened its immigrant restrictions, would likely have rejected his application for refugee status. For three weeks, Burmeister sat in a holding facility doing virtually nothing. He’s since been released and is stationed in Fort Knox, Kentucky, waiting for the army to court martial him.

“We’re playing a game of cat and mouse with the army,” Eric Burmeister says. “We’ve been waiting since March. But the waiting game now is for him to get out so he can heal.”

Local support for Burmeister, Swift, and Lieutenant Watada has not waned. “I told Ehren he will always have a dinner plate at our table,” says seventy-nine-year-old National Guard veteran Larry Davis, a neighbor of the Watadas in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. “I back the kid one hundred percent.”

Local support, political pressure, and media attention, Eric Burmeister believes, can help soldiers like Lieutenant Watada, Suzanne Swift, and his son James recover their lives. “These guys, what they’ve seen and what they’ve had to do — they’ll never forget. They’ll be haunted by these ghosts for the rest of their lives,” he says. “The military families are really suffering. I just want my kid home.”

 
To complicate matters further, Ehren Watada could face additional charges for missing a second
movement if his unit deploys to Iraq again. “I’m just going to have to be patient, sit it out and wait, and see what happens,” Bob Watada says.