No More 'Shoot to Kill'
Documentary examines the motives—and, in some cases, the faith angle—of four vets of the war in Iraq, all conscientious objectors. It airs Thursday on PBS.
by Martin Stillion | posted 10/13/2008
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Soldiers in today's U.S. military undergo "reflexive fire training"—a drill process that teaches them to fire their weapons instinctively, before they have time for second thoughts.
Recent statistics suggest that more than 90 percent of soldiers now shoot to kill during combat—compared to less than 25 percent during World War II.
Having shot first, however, some Iraq war veterans are now beginning to ask questions. And those veterans are the subject of a documentary film, Soldiers of Conscience, which will have its national broadcast premiere on Thursday as part of the P.O.V. series on PBS.
Produced and directed by the award-winning husband-and-wife team of Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan, Soldiers of Conscience profiles four Iraq veterans who chose to leave military service and become conscientious objectors—and examines the events and motives that led to their decisions.
Faith plays a role
Each soldier's story is different, but all four claim to have witnessed mistreatment of Iraqi civilians and/or prisoners. Two served at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, one as a guard and another as an interrogator. The guard, Aidan Delgado, has become a Buddhist and derives his commitment to nonviolence from that religion's principles.
The interrogator, Joshua Casteel, is from an evangelical Christian background, and experienced a crisis of faith during an encounter with a jihadist prisoner. Now a Roman Catholic, Casteel says his military service was at odds with Jesus' teaching on loving one's enemies.
Whereas Delgado and Casteel applied for and received conscientious objector status from the Army; the other two veterans profiled in the film, Camilo Mejia and Kevin Benderman, were court-martialed and served time in military brigs for refusing to redeploy to Iraq after coming home on leave.
Soldiers of Conscience treats these four conscientious objectors favorably, devoting the majority of its 87 minutes to their stories. Yet if it's an antiwar film, it's doubtless one of the most balanced ones ever made. In addition to the conscientious objectors, the filmmakers interview a West Point ethics professor, Maj. Pete Kilner (now a Lieutenant Colonel), three active-duty drill sergeants, and Army spokespersons who offer what can be considered an official military point of view, given that the Army approved the footage. (In fact, the National Veterans Affairs Chaplain Center is using Soldiers of Conscience as a training resource for military chaplains, and the film will be screened in January for the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces.)
To its credit, the film doesn't try to refute, dismiss, or play "gotcha" with the arguments offered by Kilner and others in favor of military service. Weimberg and Ryan have created one of the rare breed of documentaries that have a point of view, but don't try to manipulate viewers into sharing it.
"We wanted to make a film about a very controversial issue," says Weimberg, "but find the common ground where people agree—and only then look at the places where they disagree. We wanted to make a film that builds community by having respect for every single person who appears in the film or even watches it at home. With respect, we can actually find solutions to problems."
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