The War of Lieutenant Watada

On June 22, 2006, Lieutenant Ehren Watada became the first U.S. Army officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Then he faced a court-martial and up to eight years in prison.

By Kathryn Robinson

THE SUN HAD NOT YET RISEN over the dense woods and brick barracks of Fort Lewis when the soldiers of the Third Stryker Brigade of the U.S. Army’s Second Infantry Division assembled for roll call. It was June 22, 2006. They were heading for Iraq. One by one the sergeant called their names off the troop manifest. One by one the responses came, 
from young soldiers whose duffel bags and Army-issue weapons signaled the stark conditions of the desert world they were about to occupy.

“Lieutenant Ehren Watada!” barked the sergeant. No answer. At 6:45am 210 soldiers boarded buses for the first leg of their journey to Iraq. The 211th stayed behind.

No one was surprised. Not Watada’s parents, who had already walked a long road with their determined son, staying up with him the night before he would refuse deployment. Not his military superiors who had spent many hours—up until moments before the plane took off—trying to convince Watada to change his mind, alternately flattering him as a model officer and spinning scenarios of the dishonorable discharge and seven-year incarceration that likely awaited him. Not his comrades-in-arms, who had in the weeks since he publicly announced his plan to refuse orders pelted him with e-mails ranging from covert support to ferocious derision.

Least of all Watada himself, the quiet officer in the eye of this storm, who had cultivated a profound and impassioned opposition to the Iraq war. His was no pacifist conscientious objection: Watada had voluntarily enlisted for a career in the military and sought other military assignments to fulfill his enlistment obligation, including taking up arms in Afghanistan, once he determined that he could not fight in Iraq. Twice he attempted to resign his commission; twice he was rejected.

“Simply put,” read Watada’s resignation letter to his battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Stephen J. Townsend in January 2006, “I am wholeheartedly opposed to the continued war in Iraq, the deception used to wage this war, and the lawlessness that has pervaded every aspect of our civilian leadership.”

Six months later, two weeks before his unit would deploy, Watada secured his destiny. “Although I have tried to resign out of protest, I am forced to participate in a war that is manifestly illegal,” he said in a statement to the press. “As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order.”

And so he did, from battalion headquarters with his attorney by his side, as the sun came up over Fort Lewis. Since then, with the rest of his Stryker Brigade fighting and dying in Iraq, Watada has remained on duty at Fort Lewis. He will almost certainly face court-martial for six charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice: one for missing movement, two for contempt toward officials, three for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

For many in the military and beyond, the court-martial can’t come too soon. “Were all soldiers like you,” read one atypically civil flame he received, “the United States would not have a functional military.”

“All soldiers serve at the will of the American people,” explains Paul Rieckhoff, a veteran of the Iraq war and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in New York. “And the American people decide when and where they’re going to fight. You may not agree. But there are plenty of things in the military you personally won’t agree with. For the benefit of a viable and efficient fighting force, [the Army] can’t have this and it won’t. He’ll pay for it.”

That’s a likelihood of which Watada is keenly aware, and one inviting a larger question. Ehren Watada is the first commissioned officer in the nation to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq; one of the first in history to take on the legality of a war in a military court. But if he is convicted in a court-martial, will history remember him as a traitor? Or a martyr?

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