Podcast: “What? Yes. That term..I’m a conscientious objector!” – Rosa del Duca

Courage to Resist

Rosa del Duca

by Courage to Resist

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Podcast: “What? Yes. That term..I’m a conscientious objector!” – Rosa del Duca

As a teenager considering her future, Rosa del Duca was an ideal candidate for recruitment into the Army National Guard. Smart, athletic, and without the resources to consider a college education, she enlisted at 17. Soon, she discovered the mismatch of her perceptions and the reality of military life. Wrestling with her conscience, Rosa’s experience was transformative to one of a CO, feminist, and author.

“When I was really depressed, my boyfriend convinced me to go into therapy…You can’t be in therapy in the military…I admitted that I was so upset about my role in uniform that I was seeing a counselor and in the past I’d hurt myself…[the investigating officer] wanted to take disciplinary action against me because my ‘crime’ of being depressed by war.”

“I can’t start a conscientious objector application now. I’m going to look like a total idiot and traitor. It’s time to grow up. Own your responsibilities, do what you said you would do, suck it up.”

This Courage to Resist podcast was recorded and edited by Matthew Breems. Production assistance, Stephanie Atkinson. Executive Producer, Jeff Paterson.

“Having signed a six-year contract, I thought there was absolutely nothing I could do. I just needed to hunker down and fulfill my contract and then get out.”

Breaking Cadence: One Woman’s War Against the War, 2nd Edition available from Amazon

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Transcript

Rosa del Duca:
It was really the run up to the Iraq War that really disturbed me. Because I was paying attention and I didn’t understand this fever pitch rush to war over there and how it was connected. I saw pretty clearly what was going on is this rigorous campaign of misinformation and misleading the public and repeating false facts.

Matthew Breems:
This is the Courage to Resist podcast. Since 2005, Courage to Resist has worked to support military resistance to illegal and unjust wars, counter recruitment, draft resistance, and the policies of empire. This episode features a guest and the 30 years of current US military intervention in the Middle East.

Today on the podcast, Rosa del Duca. In her award-winning memoir, Breaking Cadence: One Woman’s War Against the War, Rosa recounts her experience in the Army National Guard during the second Iraq conflict. Coming to believe that the US presence in the conflict was illegal and unjust, Rosa filed to become a conscientious objector when she was placed on active duty for deployment. Del Duca also hosts a podcast focused on conscientious objection called Breaking Cadence: Insights From a Modern Day Conscientious Objector.

Matthew Breems:
Rosa, welcome to the podcast. We are very excited to hear your story of resistance and of being an anti-war supporter. All of our guests, we like to get to know more about you as a person, so why don’t you start off by just giving us a little bit of background on yourself and what transpired that made you find yourself joining the military?

Rosa del Duca:
Sure, and thanks so much for having me. It’s very cool that you guys exist. A little bit about me, I was born in Arizona. We lived in Pennsylvania when I was really young for a few years, but grew up mostly in Montana, first Missoula, and then my mom remarried a guy who got a job working in the platinum mine in Eastern Montana so we moved out there for high school. It was in high school…was I a junior or was I a senior? No, I was a senior, when all the recruiters made their way through our American government class. I tuned out all of them until the National Guard guy came and billed the National Guard as a very part-time job, two weeks in the summer, but other than that, it’s just one weekend a month. You go to drill, and they were offering at that point 75% of your college tuition paid for. I really leapt at that opportunity.

My mom’s second marriage went south. He declared bankruptcy in the middle of it because he had racked up a credit card debt and so my mom had had to declare bankruptcy because she didn’t have the money, she’s just a teacher. She had warned me, she was checking in, like, “Hey, do you want to go to college? Because if you do, just know I can’t help you pay for anything, not even books.” That was a huge worry of mine. “How the heck am I going to pay for college?” I had all these warped ideas of money and debt. We grew up pretty poor and my mom was on and off welfare. I thought, “Wow, I’m not super into the military,” and don’t have anyone in my family who is military, except for I think my grandpa was a civil engineer and helped build bridges during World War II. But it wasn’t something I was exposed to growing up really at all.

Matthew Breems:
There wasn’t this deep family tradition or anything like that, of military service.

Rosa del Duca:
No, yeah.

Matthew Breems:
It was just purely a financial pull for you.

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah, and there are other attractions too. I grew up really sporty. I played sports all year round, volleyball, basketball, track. I was a tomboy and my best friends were boys and I loved keeping up with them. I had always this desire to prove myself as tough and one of the guys and stuff. So yeah, the idea of bootcamp and all these physical challenges of cool obstacle courses and all this stuff was attractive too, as was the idea of, “Well, if you get called up, you’re going to be helping fight a forest fire!” which sounded awesome.

Matthew Breems:
Right.

Rosa del Duca:
Who wouldn’t want to do that?

Matthew Breems:
Yeah.

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah. My mom made me think about it long and hard for two weeks. I was 17 years old, so I needed a co-signer. I thought about it for two weeks and signed that six-year contract. I mean, now I know that all contracts are eight years, but at the time I thought I was signing a six-year contract at the National Guard. That was one year before 9/11, so yeah, things changed.

I wanted to be in some kind of public affairs job in the military. I knew they existed and my recruiter said, “Oh yeah, you can transfer into one of those at any time. You just need to join as a fueler first, because this is what we have a slot for right now.” I drilled with my unit. I graduated high school, I got into the University of Montana in Missoula, was excited to go. A couple weeks into my freshman year, 9/11 happened. At that point, I was just so naive. I thought, “Oh my God, the New York National Guard has a huge mess to clean up.” That’s how absolutely naive I was, even though I was studying journalism. That’s the beginning of the story.

Matthew Breems:
What were some of the first signs to you that the events transpiring around 9/11 were going to start affecting you personally as the National Guard way out in Montana?

Rosa del Duca:
Well, I guess just as things escalated. Being a journalism major, I was paying a little more attention to what was happening than other students and maybe even other military members. Yeah, I knew that now we were engaged in a military operation in Afghanistan and that made sense to me. I’m watching the Afghanistan War start to unfold as I’m doing my freshman year in college. Then that summer I did bootcamp, but then I had a whole other year of school before I was trained as a fueler.

It was really the run up to the Iraq War that really disturbed me, because I was paying attention and I didn’t understand this fever pitch rush to war over there and how it was connected. I saw pretty clearly what was going on, is this rigorous campaign of misinformation and misleading the public and repeating false facts enough that the public perception was that they were facts. The way that the Bush administration was linking Iraq and Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist and the weapons inspectors couldn’t find them, and then they were kicked out before they could investigate further, and trying to tie the 9/11 attacks to them, saying that they were partially funded by Saddam Hussein, which also was based on false intelligence and just a lie. Having signed a six-year contract with the military, I thought there was absolutely nothing I could do. I just needed to hunker down and fulfill my contract and then get out.

Matthew Breems:
But at this point, you don’t necessarily have any inkling that you’re going to be involved, as far as going over to Iraq, or was that starting to become a little bit clear to you that that was a possibility?

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah. National Guard units were starting to get called up. I was listening, I was asking, “Are we at war? Are we going to get called up? What are we going to do? Do I need to tell my teachers or my family?” They didn’t go get called up when I was there. Then I got trained as a fueler and then things started to get more real for me, because I was now fully trained and I could be sent over as part of a unit. I convinced my boyfriend at the time to move to Morro Bay, California, and I transferred to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Then I did my AIT training, and then I was like, “Okay, now I’m fully trained.” At that point, National Guard units all across the state were getting called up a lot. I think that was part of the surge.

It was dicey for everyone, but I was in this brand new little construction unit out at Camp Roberts and the unit only had maybe 10 members. It seemed like the pressure was off me because they said we can’t get called up until our unit is full, and it was really hard at that time to add new people because everyone was getting called up. Then I got called up. My sergeant called me and said that I had been put on a mobilization list and I was supposed to deploy with a unit out of Louisiana to Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was an 18-month deployment.

Yeah, so what happened is so many National Guard units were called up that units across the country were cherry picking whatever MOSs they still needed to get to full capacity to deploy. That’s why, yeah, I was battle rostered with this unit out of Louisiana, total strangers clearly, because I don’t live in Louisiana.

Matthew Breems:
I was going to just ask, what are you thinking at this point? You’ve received orders for mobilization, has this crystallized in your mind, in your conscience, like, “I can’t do this, this is wrong,” or are you still in process at this point?

Rosa del Duca:
At this point, I was just completely devastated. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I didn’t belong in uniform, I never belonged in uniform and now I really, really didn’t, involved in these wars, one of them that I saw as clearly illegal. I had lost respect for the Bush administration and a lot of military leaders and a lot of people in the military that they’re just going to go along with this. Everyone’s just like, “Oh, okay, I’ll deploy.”

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, they offered campus stations I think a year for free. I was exposed to journalism from this larger picture of what was going on. The more I heard, the more I was just horrified by it and I didn’t want anything to do with it. But then again, there’s this contract that I had signed. What the heck was I going to do, go AWOL? I could go AWOL and run away to Canada, but then what, I’m just going to live in Canada for the rest of my life as a turncoat traitor person?

Maybe a week after I’d gotten called up and the next week I was due to go to this mobilization processing or whatever, and I get a call from the ROTC recruiter at Cal Poly. He had somehow heard that I got called up and he was calling me because he wanted to recruit me into ROTC. At first, I was confused. I was like, “Well, I can’t join ROTC, I’m called up.” He’s like, “No, no, they’re going to want you. We’re really hurting for officers right now. If you join ROTC, you can delay this deployment because you’ll have to be trained as an officer first. Then if you do get called up down the road in a couple years, you’ll have your degree, you’ll be an officer. You just have to sign a three-year contract extension.”

Matthew Breems:
So now you’re going from a six year to a nine year if you’re to sign this? Okay.

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah, caught between two hard choices, a rock and a hard place. The idea of fighting in a war I saw as completely illegal or being in uniform much longer, I joined ROTC. The next week, when I went to that processing, the paperwork didn’t move fast enough so I still had to go through the motions to deploy, which included this processing. What do they call it? I forget the acronym. There’s a packet of paperwork, and on one of the pages, there was a box that you could check and it said, “Are you a conscientious objector?” It was like a lightning bolt hit me. I was like, “What?! Yes! That term, that’s exactly what I am. I’m a conscientious objector!” But I just thought, “Oh, that’s a Vietnam War-era term, that’s something for people who went out in the streets and burned their draft cards.” But it was on that piece of paper and there was a box that you could check. I was just like, “What? Yes, yes, I’m that, I’m exactly that. I am a conscientious objector.”

But I didn’t know how the army was defining it. I knew that if I checked that I would get in trouble, there’s probably some proof I had to give. I don’t know. I had no idea.

Matthew Breems:
Did you end up checking that box at that time, or did you pass over it?

Rosa del Duca:
I didn’t. I left it blank, but I went home and I started researching right away. I found the GI Rights Hotline and I called it. I felt so stupid that all of this information was a Google search away, but I called the number and they explained to me what exactly a conscientious objector in today’s military is. It seemed like a really tall order. You had to prove that you were against any and all wars and that your beliefs were developed over rigorous moral training and this and that. It just started stacking up and stacking up.

I had just signed this contract with ROTC that I saw as a gift horse. I was like, “I’ve been given this gift. I don’t have to ship out in a month to fight in this war. I just made this really serious commitment to ROTC. I can’t start a conscientious objector application now. I’m going to look like a total idiot and traitor. It’s time to grow up. Own your responsibilities, do what you said you would do, suck it up.”

Matthew Breems:
So what do you do now at this point? You have just signed this ROTC contract, but at the same time you’re now aware of becoming a CO as a possibility, what do you do from here? What transpires now?

Rosa del Duca:
Well, I really did try to suck it up. The more that I did that, the more depressed and angsty I got and just deeply unhappy. Now I’m going to be in charge of people and giving them orders? I just got worn down by the situation so much that I was just like, “You know what? I can’t do this and I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me. I can’t, I’m not going to be in uniform.” I called the GI Rights hotline again and explained where I was at and like, “Okay, I’m ready.”

But yeah, he sent me this huge long packet to go through it and start thinking about my answers to all these really important questions. You have to prove that your beliefs changed after you signed your contract up until now. I thought about who I was going to ask to write letters of support and all of this stuff. When I was assigned an investigating officer, his witch hunt was focused on that. When I was really depressed, my boyfriend convinced me to go into therapy because you could do a quarter of it for free. I had had a mild history of being a cutter, cutting my arms when I was depressed, so I started seeing a therapist. You can’t be in therapy in the military.

Matthew Breems:
Like you actually can’t, or it’s just such a cultural taboo that you can’t?

Rosa del Duca:
I think that you can’t. I think if you admit to it and if it’s regular, they’ll probably take action and to discharge you because you’re supposed to be totally healthy and that includes mental health. Anyway, I admitted that I was so upset about my role in uniform that I was seeing a counselor and in the past I’d hurt myself. He took issue with that the most and was like, “Well, you’d been doing this since you were a teenager in high school, therefore you joined fraudulently. This is misconduct.” Basically, he wanted to take disciplinary action against me because my ‘crime’ of being depressed by war, that took precedence over my CO application. His recommendation when my application was all complete was that I be disciplined for joining fraudulently and I should compensate the military for any money that they had ever given me for tuition assistance or drill pay or anything. Ugh, yeah. At that point, I was in deep trouble and I had to hire a lawyer.

Matthew Breems:
So you ended up hiring a lawyer. Is this to help you with your CO application, or is this because this investigator is now wanting to bring disciplinary action against you?

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah, the investigating officer was going after me hardcore. I was surprised that the investigating officer went after me so hard because, like I said, the psychologist and the chaplain and even the investigating officer, even though he was a dick during the interrogation, seemed to believe that I truly felt this way and that I was being genuine and truthful and shouldn’t be in uniform. I thought that I would get out as a conscientious objector, but yeah, I had to hire him to help me write a rebuttal. Then the investigating officer wrote his rebuttal. Then I think that’s all you can do. We didn’t get a second rebuttal. Then it was just sent all the way up the chain of command to the Pentagon, where they decide these things. In my case, oh my gosh, it took over a year, I want to say a year and a half.

I moved to the Bay Area. When I moved, I asked where I should drill now that I had moved and would be in a different unit and no one answered me, so kind of I was AWOL. I wasn’t going to beat down doors asking them where I should drill when I didn’t want to be in uniform at all. I half expected the military police to come knocking on my door at some point. One day I went to the post office and there was a slip in my box that said there was something too big, so I went to the window and they gave me this big packet. It was from Army and I nearly had a heart attack, because I was like, “Oh, this is it. This is where I’m going to be activated or gone after, or who knows what.”

But I opened the packet and it was just all of my records, all these medical records and copies of my paperwork, and on one of the pages said something that I had been discharged into the inactive ready reserve. It had on there type of discharge, “Honorable”, and it had my ETS date as six years to the day after I joined up. I still don’t know what the heck happened. I don’t know what happened to my three-year contract extension, I don’t know why they discharged me when they did. I’m like a military ghost. I don’t have a DD214, which is the paper that everyone gets when they get discharged.

Matthew Breems:
So this is the only communication that you get saying you’re no longer in the military?

Rosa del Duca:
Yeah. Oh, well, I guess I skipped an important part of the story. When it did go up to the Pentagon and they denied me, they said I had to go back to the Cal Poly ROTC department to get it in person. They didn’t even let me read the decision myself. I walked in the office and all the officers had seen me coming and gathered in there, and they’re like, “They denied you, you didn’t get CO status.” They handed me this paper and said basically my options were I could re-enroll in ROTC and commission as an officer, or I could volunteer for active duty as an enlisted soldier, full-time, because my application had been denied. I had no intention of doing either of those things and I asked, “Do I have to make a decision right now?” They said, “No”, so I walked out.

I went back to the Bay Area, and the GI Rights Hotline, they connected me with a lawyer in the area, Steven Collier, who actually represented the first CO of the Iraq War, Stephen Funk. He took my case pro bono. He said, “Well, there’s one big mistake they made when they denied you. They didn’t say why, and that is illegal. We’re going to file a writ of habeas corpus proceeding in federal court if they come after you, because it’s a very old writ and it’s against the unlawful detainment of anyone.” That was my last card to play. I was like, “Well, if they come after me, I’ve got Steven Collier ready to sue the federal government on my behalf. This is just wild!” But they didn’t come after me and then I got that packet in the mail and I was not going to go chasing after them asking questions, like, “Yeah, but why did you let me out? Don’t you remember that I signed a contract extension?” I tried to move on.

Matthew Breems:
Well, very interesting. On the podcast we’ve heard lots of stories, but that is a first. Usually, it’s a dog fight to the end and very officially they cut off or discharge. A very unique story. You’re released from the army in such a nebulous sort of way. Did you just move on with life or was this a sea change event in you personally, where you felt like you needed to become an activist or more vocal about military interventions in other countries?

Rosa del Duca:
No, no. I tried to forget about it as much as I could. I would have dreams that I was still stuck in ROTC or that I had to deploy right away or that military police were coming after me and that I was just still stuck in the army, but I didn’t talk about it. I had no contact with any other veterans, I just assumed that everybody hated me. On the civilian side, even a lot of people that I would think would be open-minded and progressive, everyone suddenly has an opinion about you when you’re a conscientious objector. So yeah, I treated it like a secret for the most part and only admitted it to people sometimes, or when I was feeling a little uppity or curious, to test people out, like, “Hmm, what are you going to think about this?”

I didn’t even want to write about it for a while, but I got into an MFA program for creative writing. My second year in there, there was a “Craft of Nonfiction” class and so I started writing some Army stuff. My professor was like, “You need to work on this every day. This is good.” It turned out that that was something really cathartic and good for me, and in the process of writing the book and rewriting it and workshopping it and revising it and sending it out to potential publishers, I finally was able to work through things in a more healthy way and process it and move past it. It was all, I guess, part of the healing part of it. Now I’m not ashamed to promote what I did and the book. I’m trying to go into schools with my little “Truth in Recruitment” group and just inform teens of some of the realities that recruiters aren’t going to tell you when you join the military.

Matthew Breems:
You’re referring to your memoir, your book that you wrote, Breaking Cadence: One Woman’s War Against the War. Where would someone find that book if they wanted to read your story?

Rosa del Duca:
Oh, just Google it. I made an audiobook. Really anywhere you get books.

Matthew Breems:
Rosa, you also do your own podcast. Do you want to put in a little plug for that as well here?

Rosa del Duca:
Oh, sure. It is very sporadic, but it’s called Breaking Cadence: Insights From a Modern Day Conscientious Objector.

Matthew Breems:
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. It was just fantastic to hear your story of becoming a conscientious objector and standing up to the military machine. Thank you so much for sharing.

Rosa del Duca:
Oh, thanks so much for having me on.

Matthew Breems:
This podcast is a Courage to Resist production, recorded and edited by Matthew Breems, with special thanks to executive producer, Jeff Paterson. Visit couragetoresist.org for more information and to offer your support.

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