"It is absolutely devastating to me to see what we're doing and what we have become."

u.s. troops, serving on german military bases, want out...

On military bases across Germany, many are now seeking a way out through desertion or early discharge.

When he goes underground, he won't tell his mom. "John," a rangy young soldier with arresting eyebrows, has planned each step carefully. He will spend his leave from an Army base in Germany at home in the northeastern United States, snowboarding, visiting friends, and hanging out with his teenage siblings.

Then he'll disappear. When the military police call his mother and stepfather, the hard-line Bush supporters will be able to say honestly that they don't know where their son is.

[...]

"I knew when I came back that I couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't be the tool to enforce policy that I thought was fundamentally wrong, if not a little evil," says Sgt. Bob Evers, a 14-year Army and Navy veteran now living in the Bavarian hamlet of Schnackenwerth. "It is absolutely devastating to me to see what we're doing and what we have become."

i spent most of my army time in vietnam on a wide-eyed learning curve that hasn't stopped to this day... i was fortunate in many ways, particularly in that i never had to fire a weapon, and came back in one piece... i served the rest of my time stateside before taking an early out to return to college... i had a good friend who served for a time as a medic in hawaii... seeing the human destruction arriving daily from s.e. asia, he took the conscientious objector route, and, after much bureaucracy, it was upheld... i sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had i escaped across the border into canada, to work at a job on vancouver island that my uncle had all lined up for me... very different would be my guess...

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