1975
Camilo Mejía
in Moral injury
Nicaraguan-Costa-Rican-American antiwar activist and writer. U.S. Army Reserve enlistment 1995, activated to active duty after 9/11, deployed to Iraq April–October 2003 as a Florida National Guard infantry staff sergeant operating around Ar Ramādī and Baghdad. Did not return to his unit after October 2003 home leave, applied for discharge as a conscientious objector, was denied, was tried and convicted of desertion at court-martial in May 2004, served nine months in military prison. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. Chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War in 2007.
Stake§
Mejía writes from inside the U.S. antiwar movement and from the refuser position — he paid the institutional cost of refusing to participate further in a war he had come to believe was deeply wrong. The stake is testimonial and political at once: the argument that the moral wound of war extends to what the institution required and what refusal looks like as a response, and that refusal itself can be a form of moral repair when the institutional structure of the war is what is producing the injury.
Mejía's memoir The Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía (The New Press 2007; Haymarket 2008 paperback) is the principal first-person text on moral injury from the selective-conscientious-objector position. The book traces the moral-conversion narrative from squad leader to prisoner of conscience, and is unusually careful about the gradual texture of moral conversion under the experience of occupation duty.
Mejía also appears as one of the four veterans whose testimony structures Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair, and the inclusion is part of why the Soul Repair project's framing of the construct includes the refuser position alongside the participating-veteran one. The refuser case is structurally distinct from the perpetrator case the dominant moral-injury literature centres, and Mejía is the principal voice for it inside the corpus.