On Monday, Nov. 21, Sergeant Andrew Sapp, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), spoke at the Zilkha Gallery about his experiences in the military and in Iraq. While serving in Iraq, he became disaffected with the conduct and justness of the war and felt compelled to speak out.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in holding this country up to the ideals we believe it was founded on,” said Sapp.
Six months ago, Sapp joined IVAW to get others involved in the anti-war movement and recount his experiences in Iraq, which he believes are substantively different from the portrayal of Iraq in the media. Sapp emphasized that as a current member of the military, he could not be disrespectful of the chain of command or the president, but that his views would be evident in his critique of the war.
“I became kind of discouraged because Al-Jazeera presented the most interesting news, more so than CNN and even BBC,” Sapp said. “I got more from local intelligence than from the news. There were things going on around me that I knew were significant that never got their way back to American news services.”
Sapp explained that, among the things not accurately reported by the news media, Iran has been heavily involved with the Iraqi insurgency. According to Sapp, Iran has many agents working with Shiite militias, and advanced weaponry such as night-vision goggles and laser-guided weapons have been smuggled into Iraq through Syria. Sapp also said that Halliburton has been greatly overcharging the military for commonplace services.
To Sapp, however, it is the sheer number of civilians who are injured or killed on a daily basis that is least well reported.
After serving in the Navy as a younger man, Sapp went to college with support from the G.I. Bill and became a teacher in 1990. Married with children, he had financial difficulties supporting his family and felt nostalgia for the military. So, for “economic and personal reasons,” he reenlisted in the Army Reserves, trained as a chemical and biological warfare specialist, and then switched over to the National Guard.
“Without the economic impetus, I wouldn’t have signed up with the military,” he said.
In March 2004, he was given notice of mobilization and began five months of training in June. He was deployed to Kuwait in October, and sent into Iraq in January 2005.
“The weekend of the Iraqi elections, we drove into Iraq and past Baghdad to our base,” Sapp said.
He explained that his base, 45 miles north of Tikrit, was only eight kilometers north of one of the biggest oil refineries in Iraq. Although the oil refineries had their own security force, and he was never tasked to guard them, Sapp said he believes that the oil refineries were part of the reason for the base’s location. Primarily, he said, his base existed to provide some protection for the many convoys that would come by on the Baghdad-Mosul route.
“Even though mortars were fired at us and there were shots at towers, I never saw the combat like you see on [television],” he said.
Still, insurgent attacks were a regular occurrence because of the many convoys that passed close to the base. According to Sapp, there were near daily attacks in the form of IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, in which an occasional truck would be destroyed or a driver killed.
During his duty, none of the soldiers from his company were killed. Sapp suspects that his company was put on base security instead of the more dangerous convoy security assignment because twenty percent of his company was female and the Army did not want to put women in combat.
Sapp explained that while in Iraq, he began to feel that the American presence was not contributing to long-term stability or political progress. He recounted a night spent on shift in a guard tower on base with a career soldier, who told him that if he were an Iraqi, he would be fighting the Americans as well.
“The insurgency seems to have some justification,” Sapp said. “But there’s no way you can justify what they do, even if you want to be a little thoughtful and sensitive. It’s just brutal. There are a lot of murderers over there.”
Sapp was not optimistic about the relationship between the Iraqi people and the U.S. military, explaining that Iraq is a country that has been “occupied by someone for hundreds of years.” Therefore, he feels, Iraqi civilians have gotten used to hiding their true feelings and putting on a false demeanor for those they view as occupiers.
Likewise, Sapp said that while the Iraqi army has been improving, it remains amateurish and unprofessional. Similarly, he said that the Iraqi police have been completely unreliable and have been infiltrated by the insurgency.
“It’s a mixed bag,” he said. “My general feeling is that most of the Iraqis just want us out of the country. A sizeable amount wouldn’t mind seeing us leave in coffins.”
Sapp also spoke about the morale of American troops, saying that he feels most soldiers are experiencing similar emotions as troops in Vietnam had felt. He said that the younger soldiers he has lived with were decent but frightened people who had developed “this mentality that ‘I’m coming home no matter what.’” This has led, in Sapp’s opinion, to inappropriate shootings of civilians in cars out of fear they were suicide bombers. His prognosis for the future was grim.
“When we leave, whether it’s next year or ten years from now, the fractures [between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds] will be exposed and the civil war we started will intensify,” Sapp said.
Students who attended the lecture commented on Sapp’s blunt sincerity.
“There was so much reality and so little ideology,” said Nathaniel Lichten ’09, a member of Students Against the War in Iraq. “After hearing this, I would find it even harder to support the war.”
Becca Blumenshine ’06 appreciated the chance to hear from someone with a firsthand experience in Iraq.
“It forced me to face up to the tragedy that my government is involved in, in a way I don’t have to on a regular basis,” she said.
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