The fine print has to do with the IRR (Individual Readiness Reserves). When one contracts to serve it is for a four-year stint of active duty, followed by a commitment to the IRR. Normally, the people who transition to IRR have fulfilled active duty and go into this unpaid status with designs on college or starting up a family. It’s a civilian gig, where one is expected to show up for periodic musters. Except we’re still fighting Rumsfeld’s Wars; thus in addition to stop-loss, soldiers can also be called up to involuntary active service from IRR, years after being discharged from active duty.
Sarah Lazare, Project Coordinator of “Courage to Resist,” reports in Truthout how one such involuntary recall came to a 26-year old veteran more than 4 years after he had served a tour of duty in Afghanistan and been discharged from active duty.
“I felt like I was being robbed of everything,” Matthew Dobbs said over the phone from his home in Houston, Texas. “I had visions of military police banging down my door and dragging me back to war.”
Dobbs, a 26-year-old former soldier who served a tour in Afghanistan from 2003-2004, was recounting a story that has become familiar in the ongoing Global War on Terror. It is the story of a soldier who, after serving a tour overseas and being discharged from active duty, received involuntary orders to redeploy to Iraq or Afghanistan years later.
“I can say, in my own personal experience, my military recruiter never went through the effort to explain what the IRR is,” said Jeff Paterson, former Marine and current project director for Courage to Resist, an organization that supports troops who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Military recruiters are expert at avoiding inconvenient details of the military agreement. In my case, there was no indication that recall during the inactive term would be a realistic event.”
Dobbs had his mom tear up his activation orders. The military did not pursue him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and eventually discharged him from the IRR.
The good news so far is that the military isn’t acting as if they have the jurisdiction to do anything other than discharge people like Dobbs from the IRR. Lazare reports that these discharges, while they might be less than honorable, do not affect the military benefits accrued during the honorable fulfillment of active service.
The bad news is that there are a number of former soldiers who seem to be unaware of the option to resist involuntary conscription to active duty through IRR.
And the bottom line continues to be the unjust character of these wars we continue to fight, revealed in so many aspects of their conduct, revealed and yet still mostly ignored. There is the dawning, yet still vague awareness that these wars are somehow wrong–wrongly fought, wrongly prepared, wrongly strategized. But the almost willful, blind ignorance of their truly reprehensible character does not mitigate this gaping national wound that refuses to go away, even if we choose not to look at it. Like the child who falls out of the tree house and hears a snap, feels something warm and wet running down his arm along with a growing and throbbing and deep sort of pain, we too would rather not look at the injury. Like the little boy, all we want is for Mommy and Daddy to come out to the yard and make things right again–”Kiss it and make it well!” “Have a parade and wave the flag!” Like the little boy, we may not know what is in store for us, the great ordeal of healing that is required to make us well again. Unlike that little boy, however, you and I are responsible for getting ourselves to whatever sort of hospital is required to get us well, to begin healing from this abominable wound to our national body, mind and spirit. We have got to get better, and soon. Matthew Dobbs is a fortunate son, one whose character and whose friends helped steer him away from another life-threatening experience of unjust carnage. There are many others who are not so fortunate, who are being chewed up and spit out. Too many of our troops are committing suicide, either in the field or when they return home. Then there are the tens of thousands of roadside bomb mutilations, the killings by enemy and “friend” alike, the continued killings of civilian non-combatants; the continued profiteering from the twin charnel houses of Afghanistan and Iraq.
We would rather not look, hoping that somehow it is “their wound.” Nope. It’s ours. And it’s not going away. If we don’t so something soon, this wound will permanently disfigure us, if not poison us with a gangrene that will be too extensive to cut away.
Memorial Day has come and gone, but it’s still appropriate to lift up the courage of people like Matthew Dobbs, courage shown in the military theater and again at home in his resistance to unjust conscription. That’s the sort of courage we need to get up off the ground and start heading to the hospital. That’s the courage we need if we’re ever truly going to get well and heal from this abominable wound of these continuing wars.
