Anita Cole joined the Army in 1998. She differed from other recruits in two respects: she was a college graduate and she sought out the recruiters herself. "When I was growing up I always thought of the military as a meaningful shared public effort, and believed in voluntary service. After college, I still had a sense that it was important that I do this at some point in my life."
Anita's recruitment process was drawn out. After taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test (ASVAB), she met with career counselors several times to find a job that suited her. She eventually signed her contract for training in Chinese, and a future position as an interrogator, or Human Intelligence Collector.
However, when she arrived at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA, she found she had orders for Korean. She was told she could take Chinese, but the wait would be five months, and she would be on casual duty until then, cleaning bathrooms, pulling weeds, and doing other menial tasks. She pressed for them to honor her contract's original start date, and got it. "If people don't step up, they'll get pushed around. First off, make sure what you want is in the contract. Then you're halfway there, but don't count on it."
Although she'd had her difficulties adjusting to military life, by all accounts, Anita was a model soldier. One of her reviews was the first from her unit to get attention on a national level, bringing accolades to the unit as a whole.
Beginning in 2000, she was stationed in Tokyo as an interrogator. She described collecting intelligence as a debriefing process, common protocol among military personnel who travel to other nations. This line of work involved no weaponry, so when she went to a firing range to re-qualify, it was the first time since basic training that she'd fired a weapon. The firing ranges she'd been on were outdoors but this one was inside, and she was without earplugs. As the re-qualifying drill began, Anita fell to the ground, her hands covering her ears.
"The sound of fifteen M-1682s being fired simultaneously, indoors, was traumatic." When the firing stopped, Anita was able to regain her composure, locate protection for her ears, and try again. Almost immediately, she was hit in the face with a spent hot brass casing from another soldier's gun. "One of my sergeants walked by and said, 'Come on, Cole, you're a killer!' That's military encouragement. And I just stopped. I thought, of the many words I would think to assign myself, that would never be one. That's not something I respect, or aspire to be. So I thought, wow, that's not what I think I am, but maybe I'm wrong. Because I'm lying here, trying to see through my watering eyes and just stay still enough so that I can fire at center mass, so that if I saw somebody I needed to shoot, I could effectively fire between their groin and their shoulder to hit a vital organ. I was trying to brainwash myself into thinking I wasn't firing on human silhouettes in the distance so I wouldn't fall apart. I didn't think of myself as a killer, but what the hell was I out there doing if that's not what I was?"
She didn't qualify that day and learned she could be discharged from the military for failing. That night, while looking up disqualification for weapons training, she stumbled across a website for Conscientious Objectors (C.O.). "I thought, that's me. But I wasn't going to apply for C.O. because I had a strong sense of wanting to finish up my contract."
In April of 2000, her family visited Anita in Japan, and they went to Hiroshima. "I saw the other side of history. Seeing Hiroshima, and seeing that it wasn't even a military target ... I saw that I was part of the most destructive force on earth and it shattered me, finally. It wasn't a choice anymore. It was a moral imperative that I apply for C.O. status."
That decision started a long, arduous process. "I went through all the hell of C.O. status. It takes about six months. The interrogations—I went through an interview with a psychiatrist, an interview with a chaplain, a hearing that's a lot like a court martial, an investigation. I was followed, I was confined, I was harassed. According to my rank, I should never have had a roommate. While I was on C.O. status I suddenly got a roommate. And then the roommate got called to my hearing and asked what I discussed on the phone with my family. So I didn't get a roommate. I got a spy."
The most overt form of harassment came on Veteran's Day 2001. For the past four months she had been managing budgets and expense accounts. She was called in by the Chief Officer, and asked about an item on an expense account from three years before. She had no way of knowing about the transaction, and could not get the information immediately, as the records were in storage and she would have to petition to access the paperwork. When she explained that, she was written up for insubordinate conduct to a commissioned officer, which is considered a felony in the military.
She was threatened with an Article 15 punishment and had twenty-four hours to decide if she would accept it, essentially admitting guilt, or press for a court martial and make them prove their case to a military jury. When she brought the matter to JAG, they assured her that her command would never get a conviction on her, that her record was perfect. But according to the GI Rights hotline and the Center for Conscience and War, court martial has a 97% rate of federal conviction.
"I'm not a gambling person. Regardless of what my record said, it's not the real world…anything can happen, and you're not in control. I didn't want a federal conviction, so I accepted the Article 15. They also said since you're a C.O. applicant, if your C.O. position comes up and they've requested a court martial, you won't get out. You'll have to go through the trial. I accepted the non-judicial punishment; I was confined for 14 days.
During my confinement, my first sergeant showed up with another supervisor, threw a piece of paper in my face, and said 'Get her out of here.' So that, to me, was 'You've been approved'."
When Anita arrived at her first out-processing appointment, she was chaperoned by a supervisor, who was also a friend, and she asked for a copy of her approval letter from the Department of Army at the Pentagon. In addition to making a copy of the letter, he made copies of her commander's letter of recommendation, which she had never seen. "The letter contained all these malicious and completely false statements ... I couldn't believe the lengths they went to. More importantly, I saw the fax of the approval letter for C.O. status, with the date it was sent. They had received the approval letter on the same day they had threatened me with the Article 15. It was pure retribution. They had gotten it faxed to them, and they were pissed, and they slammed me, and put me in confinement. They probably never thought I would accept the punishment, because that's an admission of wrongdoing. They were hoping to get lucky and put me on trial."
After Anita got out she staffed the GI Rights hotline, and was also on the board of directors for the Center on Conscience and War, the same group that helped her get out of the military with an honorable discharge.
A SOLDIER'S STORY: CHRIS
"The military didn't contribute a damn thing to my life, except I can do this counter-recruitment work now."
A SOLDIER'S STORY: EMILY
"That's when it got to the point that I thought 'I have to get out of here, because I'm being destroyed.'"