Today's story from News8Austin has a good a capsule description as any:
Thousands of soldiers are being sent back to war when they should be finished with their military duty.
It's a story that is repeated around the country every month, as so-called Stop Loss orders force troops who are short, almost ready to leave the service, and send them back for another deployment in The Sandbox. Thousands of others who have served and fulfilled their active duty obligation but who are in what's called the Individual Ready Reserves are also being called back to patch the holes in an overtaxed military.
This diary is going to focus on one soldier who's been hit with what is referred to as the Back Door Draft:
"I honored my commitment, why is it not being honored on the other end?" Casey Porter said.
Specialist Porter had just three weeks left of his enlistment when he was expecting to receive discharge papers. Instead, he received new deployment papers with a date three months away to return to war.
The teevee news article these quotes are from didn't mention one important thing about Casey. He has been one of the most active members of a brand spanking new chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, formed by active duty troops at Fort Hood in Killeen, TX. And he had been documenting their progress in a series of short videos you can find on YouTube here.
Check Casey's work out, and get to know him and the other members of the Fort Hood IVAW chapter a little bit. My friend Jeri blipped me an hour ago to let me know about Casey's deployment. He's on the way back into Bush's meatgrinder right now, but I very much doubt he's going to stop organizing there.
And for sure Casey Porter's sisters and brothers in IVAW, active duty and veterans alike, aren't going to stop organizing back home. They are going to be in Washington, DC starting one week from today, for the Winter Soldier hearings into violations of law and decency committed in Iraq by US troops occupying that brutalized country. It will be the largest gathering of anti-war veterans and active duty troops since the war began, five years ago.
These young men and women risk much in standing up to stop a great crime, a crime which too many in positions of power prefer to pretend is not there or is an unchangeable fact of life.
They deserve our attention.
They deserve our support.
And they deserve our emulation. As the Iraq Moratorium says:
It's got to stop! We've got to stop it.