The same night George W. Bush trumpeted a series of sunny foreign policy successes in his State of the Union address, Tufts students heard a darker inside view of operations in Iraq from Kimberly Dougherty, a National Guardswoman who was deployed there for 10 months.
"When I was in Iraq, I didn't feel like I was protecting freedom," Dougherty said last night to a packed Pearson 104. "When we left 10 months later, the situation had only gotten worse and people had gotten more and more angry with our presence there."
Doherty was a sergeant with her National Guard unit, the 220th Military Police Company whose primary duty was to escort oil tankers and other supply vehicles on the grueling trip from Kuwait to a location three hours south of Baghdad.
The trucks would navigate through crowds of Iraqis who clamored and crowded around the vehicles. To accomplish their goals, Dougherty said soldiers shoved people back, shot rubber bullets and used mace, and ran over children if necessary.
The persistent fear among the melee, she said, was that someone in the crowd would fire a shot or set off explosives making "today the day that cost my, or one of my soldiers' lives."
Adding to the frustration, she said, the company would be ordered to destroy waylaid vehicles after having risked their lives to guard it.
"We would get called and told, 'They're not going to send a tow truck, just abandon the vehicle,'" she said.
"We're burning fuel tankers when they're waiting in line for hours waiting to fill up their cars. Once we destroyed a flatbed full of produce - while there's a huge food shortage."
Dougherty and her company also worked at vehicle security checkpoints - many of which had carried coffins containing family members on their roofs. "We had to search the [coffins], and they probably saw that that as a huge disgrace and a huge intrusion into their personal life."
As a pair of 'boots on the ground', Dougherty could see little connection between the public rhetorically-driven policies of "freedom" and "liberation" and her day-to-day missions.
There was no clearly delineated reason for their presence, she said. "We're put halfway across the world unsure of what they're fighting for or what their mission is," she said.
In Dougherty's view, the only parties that stood to gain from the weeks of grueling passages were the oil interests the American military guarded. "I felt I was there to guard corporate interests," she said.
Many of the soldiers had good intentions and truly wanted to help the Iraqis and do the right thing, she said. "But it didn't matter what our intentions were when policies passed down were completely different."
"This leads toward hatred on our part," she said, "It's a never-ending cycle of violence - I never saw violence escalate towards peace, I just saw it escalate towards violence."
Rose Gonzalez, a 31-year old whose 46-year-old mother of three is now serving in Iraq spoke as well. Gonzalez highlighted the unprecedented stress the Iraq war is placing on the National Guard as well as the stress of the military families.
"I was in denial, I couldn't believe they wanted her," Gonzalez said.
Of all the troops currently in Iraq, 50 percent are from the National Guard and reserves, Dougherty said.
Such people are usually "older career people, pursuing a life in their community while serving community and state" who never expected or were intended to be put on 12, 18, or 24-month tours of duty.
The troop shortages are not expressed in the American media, she said, and stability can only improve by immediate withdrawal and international effort for development.
Dougherty returned to the United States and co-founded Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), joining Gonzalez and other activists present in an escalating network of local and nationwide opposition to the war
IVAW, Somerville-Medford United for Peace and Justice (SMUJP), and Tufts Coalition to Oppose War in Iraq (TCOWI) collaborated to organize the event, which is part of a wider tour of speaking engagements about Iraq.
