“I was a coward, not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being, and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier. What good is freedom if we are not able to live with our own actions? I am confined to a prison, but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity. Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.”
Camilo Mejía was born in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1975. His family moved to Costa Rica and then to the United States where he finished high school in New York City. Mejía never applied for nor received U.S. citizenship. Nevertheless, he went to college at the University of Miami on a military-funded scholarship, intending to major in psychology and Spanish. But, in the spring of 2003, before he had finished college, the military sent Mejía to Iraq, where he spent five months in active combat, and then to Jordan where he spent two more months.
In late 2003, he came home to the U.S. on furlough and realized he could not go back: “Going home gave me the opportunity to put my thoughts in order and to listen to what my conscience had to say. . . . I thought of the suffering of a people whose country was in ruins and who were further humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army. And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true. . . . There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We weren’t helping the Iraqi people and the Iraqi people didn’t want us there. We weren’t preventing terrorism or making Americans safer . . . I realized that I was part of a war that I believed was immoral and criminal, a war of aggression, a war of imperial domination. I realized that acting upon my principles became incompatible with my role in the military, and I decided that I could not return to Iraq.” He filed for conscientious objector status and told the military he refused to return to the battlefield.
In May of 2004, Mejía was convicted of desertion by the U.S. military–a charge that can be punishable by death–and he was sentenced to a year in jail. He served his time at Fort Sill military prison in Oklahoma. During his incarceration, Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience, and the activist organization Refuse and Resist gave him their Courageous Resister Award.
Since his release in February of 2005, Mejía devoted his time to speaking out against the war in Iraq and encouraging others to understand that being a part of an immoral war was more cowardly than breaking the law: “I was a coward not for leaving the war but for being a part of it in the first place,” he said. His book, The Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía (2007), details his personal journey. Mejía served on the board for the non-profit organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (now About Face: Veterans Against the War). For his work, he received Global Exchange’s Young Leader Award and the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award.
Mejía says that being a hero does not take anything special, just the belief that one person can make a difference: “Many have called me a coward, others have called me a hero. I believe I can be found somewhere in the middle. To those who have called me a hero, I say that I don’t believe in heroes, but I believe that ordinary people can do extraordinary things”
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