As of October 21, 2009, Tony has been released from imprisonment, after nearly a year in the stockade!
Anthony Michael Anderson
19 year-old Army private Tony Anderson was court martialed Monday and sentenced to 14 months of confinement and given a dishonorable discharge from the military for “desertion with intent to avoid hazardous duty” and “disobeying a lawful order.” The young soldier refused to deploy to Iraq in July of this year on the grounds of conscientious objection to war.
The 14 month sentence is one of the longest given to a U.S. military serviceperson for refusing to fight in Iraq.
Biography
Hailing from the small city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Anderson says that he was never very attracted to military life, but joined the service at the behest of his father, who had always regretted not joining the
military himself. Once in the ranks, Anderson realized that he had made an unfortunate decision. During basic training, he found himself ethically opposed to taking a human life in a military conflict. He was disturbed by seeing soldiers on his base return from Iraq deeply traumatized from their experience in combat.
“I didn’t want to mess myself up for the rest of my life doing something I didn’t want to do to begin with,” he says. Anderson had vague thoughts about filing for conscientious objector (C.O.) status but was discouraged from doing so by his commanding officers, who told him that it would not be possible for him to obtain, and even falsely informed him that he was “not the right religion.”
Anderson was led to believe that filing a C.O. application would be futile. Anderson says that when he was
ordered to deploy to Iraq on July first, he “freaked out.” “What upset me most was the thought having to hurt or kill someone else,” he said at his trial. “I know this may be hard to believe, but I never really thought about the idea of hurting or killing another human being before I joined the military. And then in training, it just didn’t seem real. I knew I could be deployed someday but I just never gave it much thought. But when I got to Ft. Carson and heard that I would be going to Iraq, I realized that this was something I would have to resolve.”
Just hours before boarding his flight, he went AWOL, eventually turning himself in after 22 days in hopes of diminishing the severity of his punishment. On his return, Anderson was again ordered to deploy to Iraq immediately. This time, he simply refused, and he says, “they haven’t tried to deploy me since then because they realize I’m not going to go.”