Valley Students Lend a Helping Hand

2007 by admin.

Diana Quezada

Cavalry Scout Edgar Cuevas refused to degrade an 18-year-old Iraqi in front of his family, taking care to comfort the youth instead. His compassion earned him the title “dirt-bag” from his military peers. These were the type of stories told at the “Let’s Talk about Iraq” forum on April 17 in Monarch Hall, sponsored by Democracy Matters. The club put on the event in hopes of educating students about the realities of war while creating a supportive place for veterans to speak their views on governmental policies as part of a week-long commemoration for soldiers killed in action. “We are the new Romans,” said Chicano Studies Professor Pete Lopez, alluding to the fact that the United States is occupying land that does not belong to them. The one-sided event started late and opened with a 10-minute documentary trailer “Arlington West,” which displays “temporary cemeteries” in various locations, which honor more than 2,500 unacknowledged fallen U.S. soldiers. “We [are] just supporting a government that is really run by the political and economic leaders who care very little about the rest of us when they send us off to a war,” said Lopez, who is against bloodshed and expressed his feelings that innocent Iraqis and soldiers are being killed in a conflict with no purpose. “We have been in Iraq longer then we fought in World War II … [and] we are halfway through the time we spent in Vietnam.” He further explained that, “war in itself is a bankrupt policy [because] wars are profit driven.” “While we prance around wired to our iPods or cell phones,” said Silvia Jimenez, ASU’s evening division event coordinator. “We forget those who sacrifice their lives for our ‘way of life.’” Steve Fine of Neighbors for Peace and Justice presented a timeline leading up to the Iraq conflic, saying, “The war is a propaganda sales campaign to convince the American people to support a war of aggression against a country that did not have any WMD program, connections to 9/11, or the ability to attack its neighbors.”

Members of “Iraq Veterans against the War” and David Merrell and Cuevas spoke about their first-hand experiences.

Cuevas served in Iraq February 2004 to March 2005, when 12 days from seeing his family, was involuntarily extended for another year and a half. “They don’t want to help us out because there are so many of us coming back with issues and problems,” he said about his difficulty in obtaining counseling for his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “No one gets out of this war clean and we’re all hurt in some way.”

“What we’re doing over there is a position of dominance where we basically scare Iraqi’s into trying to do what we want,” said Merrell, a national guard who was in Iraq from 2005-2006. “I went over there with the assumption I could help people make a better civilization and home and I learned very early that what were doing over there is not helping Iraqi people, [but] actually hurting them … that’s when I decided when I came home, I would speak out against this war.”

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