Cindy and Iraq War Vets Refusing to Return. They are My Heroes!

[leftchick]

Darrell Anderson, 24, speaks to the media during a rally in Fort Erie, Ontario, Saturday, June 17, 2006. Anderson of Lexington, Ky., who arrived in Canada by way of Niagara Falls in January 2005, spent seven months in Iraq with the Army's 1st Armored Division and received a purple heart following a roadside bomb attack before deciding during a leave he would not go back. Sheehan was making her second visit to Canada in support of sanctuary for those fleeing the U.S. military. The Canadian government has so far denied political asylum to U.S. soldiers who have sought it. Appeals are pending. (AP Photo/Don Heupel)

http://www.wstm.com/Global/story.asp?S=5044428&nav=2aKD

<snip>

"They're trying to deport me," said Darrell Anderson of Lexington, Ky., who arrived in Canada by way of Niagara Falls in January 2005. He spent seven months in Iraq with the Army's 1st Armored Division and received a purple heart following a roadside bomb attack before deciding during a leave he would not go back.

"When I was in Iraq we were killing innocent people for oil. It was obvious they didn't want us there," said Anderson, 24, who is petitioning to remain in Canada.

The gathering at a Fort Erie park was organized by peace groups on both sides of the border. About 20 former U.S. soldiers, referred to as war resisters, have applied for refugee status in Canada. Organizers estimated there may be as many as 200 soldiers in the country who have not yet sought formal protection.

"They say we're traitors, we're deserters," said Marine Lance Cpl. Chris Magaoay, 20, of the Hawaiian island of Maui. "No, I'm a Marine and I stand up for what I believe in, and I believe the Constitution of the United States of America is being pushed aside as a scrap piece of paper."

[wtmusic]

1. Bless these people

"There are no weapons of mass destruction. Innocent people are being killed every day. It's a war about money -- to keep money in rich people's pockets. There is no way I can believe in that. I still believe in my country, but I can no longer be a part of the Army or that war," Anderson said.

http://oldamericancentury.org/darrell.htm

[BrklynLiberal]

2. After reading this article, I cannot understand how anyone would allow

a loved one to go to Iraq. :(
I don't care what it would take to keep them away from there. I would do it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1450831

[leftchick]

3. That article is just horrifying!

:cry:

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Yes. It is heartbreaking

[leftchick]

6. Thank God the Father had an epiphany....

<snip>

He decided to use his son's death benefit from the U.S. government to try to develop a robotic device to help soldiers push IEDs off the road safely. He and his brother, a former Marine, set up a workshop in borrowed space in an industrial park. Their prototypes won them meetings with military procurement officials in Washington, but no contracts. Brian began investing his savings into improving their robots, betting that his activism wouldn't hurt his chances of eventually selling them to the Pentagon. "You have to believe that people will do the right thing in the end," he says. "If you don't . . . Well, that's not a world I want to live in."

Working furiously, Brian felt out of step with a seemingly complacent American public. He reread Martin Luther King's Letters from a Birmingham Jail and identified with the civil rights leader's frustration at "the silence of good people."

Brian started making antiwar speeches. "Is it treason to state the obvious: that occupiers stay and liberators leave?" he said June 5, 2005, at a forum at First Parish Unitarian. "In America we seem afraid to ask the president where Osama bin Laden is, why intelligence analysts can lie with impunity, why we were sent to Iraq on half-truths . . . and how will we ever get out? . . . We must hold our leaders and ourselves accountable."

It would be two months before another grieving parent, Cindy Sheehan, would go to Crawford, Tex., to try to confront the president. Brian's speech was unusual enough at the time that it received coverage in the Boston Globe. His activism alienated relatives in Texas who remain staunch Bush Republicans, he says.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. He certainly used his grief in a posotive way. He is saving lives.

[Philosoraptor]

4. RIGHT ON!