The Road from Ar Ramadi — The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía

Camilo Mejía is a Nicaraguan-Costa-Rican- American who joined the U.S. Army Reserve in 1995, was activated to active duty after 9/11, and served as a Florida National Guard infantry staff sergeant in Iraq from April to October 2003 with deployments around Ar Ramādī and Baghdad. After two weeks' home leave in October 2003 he did not return to his unit, applied for discharge as a conscientious objector, was denied, was tried and convicted of desertion at court-martial in May 2004, and served nine months in military prison. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience. The Road from Ar Ramadi — published in hardback by The New Press in 2007 with a foreword by Chris Hedges, and re-issued in paperback by Haymarket Books in 2008 — is his memoir of the road that took him from soldier to prisoner.

The New Press is a non-profit, mission-driven publisher founded by André Schiffrin after his departure from Pantheon; its list leans toward serious progressive non-fiction and the editorial filter is between trade and academic. Haymarket Books is the publishing arm of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change and is openly socialist in editorial orientation. The book's reception was concentrated in the antiwar and veteran- movement press; it was reviewed in The Nation, In These Times, and several international outlets, and excerpts appeared in The Guardian and Le Monde. The mainstream U.S. press was more circumspect, partly because of the book's politics and partly because the refuser position remains contested in U.S. veterans-affairs discourse.

The book is structurally a moral-conversion narrative. The early chapters describe Mejía's enlistment, training, and deployment from the position of someone who took the standard volunteer- military framing of Iraq seriously; the middle chapters describe the operations around Ar Ramadi and Baghdad in 2003 — including participation in detention operations he later characterised as torture — that produced the moral disquiet; the later chapters describe his decision not to return after leave, the conscientious-objection application and its denial, the court-martial, the nine months in the brig, and the post-prison work as an antiwar advocate. The account is unusually careful about the gradual texture of moral conversion — Mejía resists the narrative form in which a single event triggers a single realisation, and shows the slower process by which his participation in particular operations accumulated into the conviction that he could not continue.

The relation to the moral-injury literature is structurally distinctive. Most of the dominant moral-injury literature is written about and from the position of the participating veteran — the soldier who returned, completed the deployment, and is now contending with what they did. The refuser position is under-represented because, by definition, refusers do not return to participate in the rest of the deployment, do not accumulate the same depth of participation, and frequently are positioned in the institutional discourse as either not really veterans or as politically disqualified from speaking for the veteran experience. Mejía appears as one of the four veterans in Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair, which is the place most non-activist readers first meet him, and that inclusion is part of why the Soul Repair project's framing of the construct has the breadth it does — Brock and Lettini chose to include the refuser position as part of the moral-injury picture rather than treating it as a separate phenomenon.

The stake is testimonial and political. Mejía writes as a refuser who paid the institutional cost of refusing and the book is openly part of his ongoing antiwar work; he served as chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War in 2007. The position the book stakes out is that the moral wound of war is not exhausted by what soldiers did but extends to what the institution required of them and what refusal looked like as a response to the requirement; the implicit argument is that refusal is itself a form of moral repair when the institutional structure of the war is what is producing the injury.

For the moral-injury corpus The Road from Ar Ramadi is the principal first-person text from the refuser position and the necessary corrective to the participating-veteran-paradigm of the dominant literature. Read it alongside Boudreau (the participating-veteran case) and the Mejía chapter in Soul Repair (the theological framing), so that the three positions are visible together.