Author Camilo Mejia was featured in P.O.V.'s 2008 film "Soldiers of Conscience."

---

Product Description

Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía became the new face of the antiwar movement when he applied for discharge from the army as a conscientious objector.

After serving in the army for nearly nine years, he was the first known Iraq veteran to refuse to fight, citing moral concerns about the war and the US occupation. His principled stand helped rally the growing opposition and embolden other soldiers.

Mejía was eventually convicted of desertion by a military court and sentenced to a year in prison, prompting Amnesty International to declare him a prisoner of conscience. Here Mejía tells his own story, from his upbringing in Central America to his service in Iraq-where he witnessed prisoner abuse-to his struggle today to end the occupation there.

In this stirring book, he argues passionately for the end to an unjust war. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "The issues [Mejía] has raised deserve a close reading by the nation as a whole. . . . He has made a contribution to the truth about Iraq."

Includes a new afterword by the author.

Camilo Mejía grew up in Nicaragua and Costa Rica before moving to the United States in 1994. He joined the military at age nineteen, serving as an infantryman in the active-duty army for three years before transferring to the Florida National Guard. He fought in Iraq for five months. He lives in Miami.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #618205 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Mejía, a veteran of the Iraq conflict, became an antiwar hero when he refused to return to his unit and was court-martialed in 2004 for desertion. His memoir is a blend of compelling war narrative and dubious soapboxing. Mejía's claim to conscientious objector status, after eight years in the U.S. military, months of combat and a long campaign for a discharge, rings rather hollow. The son of prominent Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he takes a view of the insurgents' "fight for self-determination" that seems naïve ("[t]here seemed to be a unity that spread through the differences among Iraqis") and his prose is laced with clunky rhetoric about "the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profit." Most powerful are his firsthand experiences of prisoner abuse, senseless patrols that invite insurgent attacks, discord among his demoralized comrades and their careerist officers, and the constant brutalization of Iraqis by paranoid, trigger-happy GIs. (In one incident, an irate soldier arrests an eight-year-old rock thrower, who is then beaten by a local man desperate to appease the vengeful Americans.) Those stories add up to an indelible portrait of the dirty war in the Sunni triangle and Mejía's painful confrontation with his immoral complicity in it. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Mejia gained prominence in 2004 when he applied for a discharge from the National Guard as a conscientious objector after having served eight months in a combat zone in Iraq. Eventually, he was court-martialed for desertion and served nine months in a military jail. Mejia apparently felt compelled to describe his odyssey from immigrant to soldier to resister as an act of self-justification. He grew up in Nicaragua and Costa Rica; both parents were active supporters of the Sandinista resistance to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Mejia's own political views seem imbued with anti-imperialist sentiments. Nevertheless, he joined the U.S. Army at the age of 19, apparently because he found the benefits package attractive. Mejia describes himself as a rebel; others might see a griper and malcontent. However, his descriptions of the trivia, petty jealousies, and boredom in camp life are enlightening, and his eventual determination to take a principled stand against the war in Iraq seems sincere. This is an interesting if highly biased account of a young man's evolution. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Sgt. Mejía and his 600 co-deserters could well be the harbingers of a new GI movement. -- The Guardian, Clancy Sigal

The issues [Mejía] has raised deserve a close reading by the nation as a whole. -- The New York Times, Bob Herbert