AWOL Sargeant Gives Up Resisting ‘Illegal War’
Shortly after returning from Iraq last year, army sergeant Ricky Clousing gathered a few belongings and sneaked out of Fort Bragg.
He left behind only a note quoting late civil rights leader the Martin Luther King.
After six months spent seeing the “daily physical, psychological and emotional harassment of civilians,” the 24-year-old Clousing said he was confused and disenchanted with the United States’ role in the war.
On Friday evening, he turned himself in to military officials at Fort Lewis, said attorney David Miner, who accompanied Clousing.
“I stand here before you today about to surrender myself, which was always my intention,” Clousing told several dozen friends, family members and war veterans who gathered earlier on Friday at the University of Washington campus.
If military police find that Clousing is either a deserter or absent without leave, he will be…
sent back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the post he walked away from, Fort Lewis spokesman Joseph Hitt said.
Officials at Fort Bragg did not return a call for comment on Friday.
Speaking earlier from a friend’s home in Seattle, Clousing said he won’t participate in what he considers to be a “war of aggression” that has “no legal basis to be fought.”
Clousing sneaked out of Fort Bragg in June 2005.
Beginning last fall, his lawyers said, they contacted Fort Bragg and later Fort Lewis to try to negotiate a discharge.
But neither installation claims responsibility for him, attorney Lawrence Hildes said. Finally, Clousing decided to just show up at Fort Lewis.
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