Sgt. Ricky Clousing is going away for awhile. A judge yesterday sentenced him to eleven months in confinement, although he won't serve the whole term. Clousing's crime? He went AWOL--he ran away from a military that he was convinced was doing more harm than good.
Clousing saw his fellow soldiers smash their Humvees into the vehicles of Iraqi civilians just for shits and grins, saw a teenage boy murdered and looked into his eyes as he died. He interrogated prisoners who had committed no crimes, but who, by their very detainment, Clousing believed would actively support any insurgency against U.S. forces. He became convinced that as long as the U.S. was in Iraq, the world was a more dangerous place.
His story is particularly interesting in the wake of a study from Johns Hopkins University estimating the number of Iraqi casualties to be 655,ooo. Right-wingers, of course, immediately disputed this, claiming these numbers were inflated.
Somehow, that just makes it more terrifying. I know war is terrible and all, but leaving aside the lack of justification for this whole mess, the idea of killing so many people in such a short amount of time that, hey, you just can't keep track of 'em all--Well, the people who started this claim to be hard-core Christians, but I can't think of anything more morally repugnant than this.
And me, I just sit here, and you, whoever you are, do as well. We're not taking to the barricades, we're not making any meaningful change. We're allowing our souls and our flesh and everything we are to be co-opted, to say it's okay, because really, what else can we do?
Ricky Clousing tried to make a change. He did what his conscience told him to do, and he's going to prison for it.
