MichaelMoore.com

Soldier explains why he disappeared

By Angie Leventis / News Tribune

TACOMA, WA -- Sgt. Ricky Clousing went to Iraq to fight for freedom.

He said what he found was an occupation.

He described seeing U.S. troops shoot livestock and smash cars for fun. He said he saw the people he was supposed to help detained for weeks without cause. And he won’t forget watching a fellow soldier shoot and kill a young Iraqi civillian without repercussions.

It was not so much the individual episodes that disturbed the 24-year-old from Sumner. It was the realization that they were the rule rather than the exception, he said.

“Wearing a uniform demands subordination to your superiors and the orders passed down,” he said. “But what if orders given violate morality, ethics and even legality?”

Clousing, who served as an Army interrogator in Iraq, spoke against the war Friday at a Veterans for Peace convention at the University of Washington.

His speech was the highlight of the national gathering, as a thick crowd of fellow veterans cheered him on. One Korean War veteran offered to take Clousing to Costa Rica if he “needed a little vacation.”

Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an Iraq war veteran from Miami Beach, offered some words of comfort.

“He will be a free man even if he goes to jail,” said Mejia, who had been jailed for deserting. “Freedom is not a physical state but a state of the mind.”

Clousing turned himself in Friday evening to military police at Fort Lewis, a little more than a year after leaving Fort Bragg and the 82nd Airborne Division.

Clousing and his attorneys say he tried to contact officials at Fort Bragg and other military posts during that period.

Fort Lewis spokesman Joseph Piek said Clousing was assigned Friday to the 525th Replacement Company until arrangements could be made to transfer him to Fort Bragg.

Piek said Clousing’s punishment would be up to the sergeant’s commanding officer.

“It’s not a terribly unusual thing for soldiers to go (absent without official leave) and turn themselves in,” he said. “As long as countries have had armies, soldiers have gone AWOL.”

Peace movement rallies around soldiers

Another local case is more unusual because it involves an officer. Army Lt. Ehren Watada recently refused to deploy to Iraq and faces charges of missing movement, contempt toward officials and conduct unbecoming of an officer.

Watada is scheduled to appear at Fort Lewis next week for a pretrial hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding. The Stryker brigade soldier faces the possibility of court-martial, dishonorable discharge and up to seven years in prison.

Like Watada, Clousing has become a rallying point for the Northwest peace movement.

Also like Watada, he said he would accept whatever punishment he is given.

“I’m at peace,” he said.

Clousing enlisted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He traveled abroad in Thailand and Europe, and saw life without many of the liberties Americans take for granted. He wanted to help preserve them and extend them to people abroad.

It came as a shock to his mother, Sharon Pankalla of Sumner. He called from Europe to tell her he was enlisting and would leave for basic training a few weeks later. The next time she saw her son, he was a soldier.

Before graduating from Sumner High School, Clousing was student body vice president and was active at Sumner Presbyterian Church. He completed basic training in September 2002, went on to Airborne and Interrogation schools and studied French at the Army’s primary language center in Monterey, Calif.

Troubled days in Iraq

In late 2004, he deployed to Iraq to support the first stage of elections. While he was trained with appropriate interrogation tactics, he said, he watched U.S. troops detain four brothers – the youngest just 12 years old – for four weeks without cause or telling their family.

He described how American soldiers would drive their Humvees into civillian cars and laugh.

The worst was the day he was guarding a convoy in Mosul. Clousing recalled how a civilian drove onto the street, seemed frightened by U.S. troops, and tried to turn around and leave. Before the young man could get away, a U.S. soldier shot and killed him, Clousing said.

When he told superiors about the incident, he was called an inexperienced soldier, Clousing said.

Pankalla said her son sought guidance from counselors, chaplains and fellow soldiers. He was told to suck it up and store the pain and confusion in a little box in the back of his mind, she said.

But he couldn’t shake the guilt and anger, and he grew depressed. A few months after returning stateside, he packed his clothes and left Fort Bragg in the middle of the night, leaving a note on the door to his barracks with a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Part of it read, “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.”

He could have waited it out until summer 2007, when his service would be up. He could have tried filing for conscientious objector status.

But he said either choice would have been a lie.

Pankalla doesn’t want her son to go to jail. But she’s glad his internal struggle is over.

Even if imprisoned for his choice, “he can still go to sleep at night and look in the mirror every morning,” she said.