[Peace-discuss] NYT: Midshipman, Then Pacifist: Rare Victory to Leave Navy

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/nyregion/23objector.html

February 22, 2011

Midshipman, Then Pacifist: Rare Victory to Leave Navy

By PAUL VITELLO

NEW LONDON, Conn. — The question that changed Michael Izbicki’s life
appeared on a psychological exam he took not long after graduating in
2008 near the top of his class at the United States Naval Academy: If
given the order, would he launch a missile carrying a nuclear warhead?

Ensign Izbicki said he would not — and his reply set in motion a
two-year personal journey and legal battle that ended on Tuesday, when
the Navy confirmed that he had been discharged from the service as a
conscientious objector.

In the process, Mr. Izbicki, 25, went from Navy midshipman in the
nuclear submarine fleet here, studying kill ratios, to resident of a
small Quaker peace community a few blocks from the Thames River, where
he prays several times a day, studies Hebrew and helps with the
organic garden.

He is one of only a few graduates of the nation’s military academies
to be granted conscientious objector status in recent years. And while
every case is deeply personal, his long struggle for an honorable
discharge offers a glimpse of a rarely viewed side of military
experience in the post-draft, all-volunteer era: the steep challenge
facing any service member — and especially a graduate of a service
academy — who signs up as a teenager to become a warrior and then
changes his mind in adulthood about his willingness to kill.

The Navy fought his request hard, in much the same way that the Army
contested the conscientious objector application of Capt. Peter D.
Brown, a West Point graduate and an Iraq war veteran who was
discharged in 2007 after a protracted court battle.

Academy graduates accounted for only a dozen of the roughly 600
applicants for the special status between 2002 and 2010, spokesmen for
the service branches said. Of those requests, fewer than half were
approved. And like many of the other academy applicants, according to
lawyers who handle such cases, Mr. Izbicki won his discharge only by
taking his petition to federal court.

The Navy rejected Mr. Izbicki’s application twice, questioning the
sincerity of his beliefs despite the support of several Navy chaplains
and the testimony of two Yale Divinity School faculty members who said
his religious convictions seemed to be mature and sincere.

One Navy commander suggested that the pacifist strain of Christianity
that Mr. Izbicki embraced was inconsistent with mainstream Christian
faith. The same commander likened the Quakers, who supported Mr.
Izbicki, to the Rev. Jim Jones and his People’s Temple, a suicide
cult.

J. E. McNeil, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War,
a nonprofit group in Washington that helps service members navigate
the conscientious objector process, said that a case like Mr.
Izbicki’s posed a profound challenge to the military. “You were
someone they thought was going to be a leader,” Ms. McNeil said. “They
spent four years training you. Now you want nothing to do with that
world.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, which filed a
federal lawsuit on Mr. Izbicki’s behalf in November seeking a reversal
of the Navy’s decision, announced on Tuesday that the Navy had granted
Mr. Izbicki his discharge. Mr. Izbicki, who has continued to work at a
Navy desk job, may have to reimburse the service for all or part of
the cost of his education, said his lawyers, Sandra Staub, legal
director of the A.C.L.U. of Connecticut, and Deborah H. Karpatkin and
Vera M. Scanlon, of New York.

Mike McLellan, a spokesman for the Navy, said Mr. Izbicki had been
discharged as a conscientious objector because “the Navy Personnel
Command determined there was sufficient evidence to satisfy the
requirements for this designation, and determined that it was in the
Navy’s best interests to discharge him.”

Mr. Izbicki, a National Merit Scholarship finalist in high school,
chose the naval academy at Annapolis, Md., over a bevy of colleges,
including the California Institute of Technology, that offered him
four-year scholarships, because he felt an obligation to serve his
country during wartime, he told investigators in his application for
discharge.

He grew up attending nondenominational Christian services in San
Clemente, Calif., and remained a regular churchgoer during his four
years at the academy, where Christianity is the dominant faith. Cadets
are required in their junior year to study the “just war” theory, a
doctrine justifying military action, based largely on the writings of
St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Not until his senior year did Mr. Izbicki register a sense of unease
over what he would refer to in his application as “the frankness with
which people talked about killing.” He wrote: “The training did not
live up to the ideals of the just war as I envisioned them. I saw
formulas for calculating the number and types of casualties that would
result from using each of our weapons systems. We calculated the
extent of civilian casualties and whether these numbers were
politically acceptable.”

Still, Mr. Izbicki said, he remained convinced that his Christian
beliefs could be reconciled with military culture, and that as an
officer he would be able to effect change from within.

After graduating from the academy, he earned a master’s degree in
computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University in preparation for
what he said he expected to be a career in nuclear submarines.

But Mr. Izbicki said he also began exploring his commitment to
Christianity. He studied the Gospels, read widely about the early
history of the church, took up Hebrew so he could read the Old
Testament in the original, and started to measure his faith according
to the evangelical touchstone “What would Jesus do?”

It was in that light that he encountered the exam question about
launching a nuclear missile in early 2009, shortly after he was
assigned to submariner school at the Nuclear Power Training Command in
Charleston, S.C. Seeing the question spelled out like that, he said,
made it impossible to hide his emerging pacifism any longer.

“I realized that I could not be responsible for killing anyone,” he
later explained.

His answer flagged him for psychological testing, and a consultation
with a Navy chaplain, who was the first to suggest that Mr. Izbicki
consider applying for discharge as a conscientious objector.

“I had never really heard of it,” Mr. Izbicki, a reserved, soft-spoken
man, said in an interview last week at St. Francis House, a Quaker
residence. “It was one of those things people did in the ’60s.”

The transcripts of the hearings on his two applications for a
discharge — which read partly like a court-martial, partly like oral
exams for a doctor of divinity degree — run to more than 700 pages.
They include esoteric queries about “just war” theory, the letters of
St. Paul and the protocols known as the Six Capabilities of the United
States Navy’s Maritime Strategy.

Mr. Izbicki’s beliefs are probed intensely for inconsistencies and
deviations from conservative Christian belief.

One investigator, Lt. Cmdr. John A. Price, expresses surprise when Mr.
Izbicki says he is not convinced that every word in the Bible is
inspired by God. He questions how Mr. Izbicki can be sure, then, that
the Sermon on the Mount, on which he bases his claim to know what
Jesus would do, is accurate: “You realize that there’s a danger when
you start believing that some stuff in the Bible’s not true, because
then we might start believing that Jesus is not true.”

At another point, Commander Price asks, “If Jesus was a pacifist, why
didn’t he tell all Roman soldiers to leave the army?”

Navy officers tried to persuade Mr. Izbicki to consider alternatives
to discharge: Could he become a Navy medical officer or dentist? He
replied that his pacifist beliefs were irreconcilable with any effort
to prepare troops for battle. “I could not contribute in any way
whatsoever,” he said.

Mr. Izbicki said he had made no plans for the future other than a
return to his parents’ home in California. His discharge, he said,
“has opened the whole world up to me.”

--
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org