When a US soldier in Iraq won't soldier
What does the Army do with a private who can't be persuaded to load his gun?
from the August 13, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
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Aguayo is a small, soft-spoken man, tentative but quick to smile. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, he immigrated legally to Los Angeles with his parents when he was 4. At 19, he became a citizen and married a girl he'd met at church, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants. He worked a dead-end bank job; for his twin daughters' sake, he wanted more. So he got second and third jobs and enrolled in community college. At Home Depot, where he worked in the fall of 2002, the radio blared through his shift with Army Reserve ads promising he could stay with his family and get a four-year degree.
On the way to renew his driver's license, Aguayo saw a recruiting station and stopped in. "No, you don't want the Army Reserve," he recalls the recruiter saying, "have a seat." Two weeks later, Aguayo joined the active-duty Army. His wife didn't want him to – the Afghan war had subsided and the Iraq invasion was imminent. "But he was so excited and so sure that the future would hold great things," Helga Aguayo says, that she supported his decision. She recalls asking him what he'd do if he had to go to war. "He kind of laughed and said, 'They train you for that. I'll be a different person.' "
But in basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., Aguayo couldn't adjust like other recruits did. It pained him to march to "Left, right, kill!" and to chant "We are not men. We are beasts." He stumbled out of gas-mask training crying, and wrote to Helga that the sting of the gas made him think of Nazi gas chambers. "The point is for you to learn how to use the mask," he says, "but [the gas] hurts, and I'd never want to hurt anyone like that." He hoped his qualms were normal, that he'd master them.
In August 2003, five months after the US invaded Iraq, Aguayo's unit was sent to a base in Schweinfurt, Germany. There they received orders to deploy to Iraq in the new year. His roommate assured Aguayo that the war was over and they would be peacekeepers. Aguayo, who rarely followed the news, felt better.
Then their training changed. "It wasn't targets anymore. It wasn't about me getting a badge. It wasn't about me getting a pat on the back," he says, "It was about me getting ready to take someone down."
In February 2004, on the eve of his Iraq deployment, Aguayo confided to Helga, who had joined him in Germany with their 8-year-old daughters, that he wasn't willing to kill, even in self-defense. She was alarmed. She searched for help online, and found a story about a marine who had refused to serve in Iraq. They read it together; some of the words were new to them.
"I had never heard the term 'conscientious objector,' which is embarrassing," she says. They Googled it, and called the hot-line number that came up. Volunteers explained the application process, and Aguayo, deploying in two days, hurried one together.
In Iraq a week later, he woke to the sound of shouting. Near his Tikrit aid station, a US military truck with five passengers had hit a roadside bomb. Aguayo zipped two officers up in body bags. His horrified expression caught the attention of a physician's assistant who took him aside. "You have to understand, there is a bigger picture," Aguayo remembers him saying, "God has a bigger plan."
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