Frustrated Iraq Vet Moves On

Student activists won't put aside their differences, says Joshua Farris

By Cydney Gillis, Staff Reporter

Southwest Washington native Joshua Farris returned from the Iraq war, enrolled in college, and founded a UW anti-war organization, only to find apathy and factionalism hard to overcome. Photo by Andrea Lee.

Sitting in a picture window of a cafe in the University District, Farris’ baby-blue eyes flash steely gray as he explains that he’s tried everything he can think of, first as a student at Seattle Central Community College and now at the University of Washington, to call people’s attention to the war and organize resistance to it.

After serving in Baghdad from April to October of 2003, Farris “slipped out” of the service in 2004 during a short window in which the Army wasn’t stop-lossing soldiers, or keeping them past their discharge dates. He started school at SCCC and joined its Students Against War, put on rallies and forums with the group and, in 2006, was one of seven people who staged a 27-hour sit-in at Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office demanding that she clarify her position on Iraq.

Last fall, Farris, who plans to be a teacher, took the movement to his transfer school, the UW. He founded a new group, Washington Huskies Against the Military Occupation, or WHAMO, which mounted an Arlington Northwest memorial of faux gravestones on campus in November. During the time he was organizing that, Farris went to an Eastside Democratic fundraising dinner where he jumped up and called down Sen. Patty Murray’s continued votes to fund the war — a confrontation that can be seen on YouTube.

It’s been a heroic effort. But now Farris is done. Though he’s flying to Washington, D.C., for a March 13 event at which veterans will tell their stories, WHAMO is no more, a casualty, he says, of the bleakness and the bickering that drives the anti-war fight right out of people like him.

How did you regard the war before you went over?
Well, my dad and grandpa always said, basically, question conventional wisdom. My dad always said, “If somebody says they’ve got all the answers, they’re full of shit.…”

The big thing that I remember was I was in the chow hall with a buddy having lunch and we were watching Colin Powell give his address to the United Nations and he was beating his fist on the table. Billy looks at me and he says, “Look at these war pigs, dude.” And I was like, “Yeah, we’re going to war. This is crazy. This doesn’t make any sense.”

So you were there at the start of the war?
[No.] My unit was 11CAD in the first Army division out of Germany. We were supposed to go into Turkey and through the north [of Iraq], but that didn’t happen, so we ended up missing the whole war. We had to go the long way around, through Kuwait … By the time we get into Iraq, everything’s done.

[After stints of guard duty and night patrols in Baghdad], we started driving around the Bradleys. You could hear these vehicles coming from a mile away, so we’d never see anybody, but our vehicle got hit [by an IED]. [One guy] gets his face peppered with shrapnel. There’s blood everywhere. The driver gets his eardrums blown out. My buddy Lazarus was in the back with me, sitting there freaking out … It was weird because I had broken the back hatch the night before, so the day the vehicle was hit, [the hatch] should have taken my head off. It was like I’ve got a guardian angel or something looking out for me. I was really freaked out by that.

That was as close [to battle] as I got. But I just kept seeing over and over that we weren’t there to help out these people. There were people who came up to us and were begging us to help them and I would be told to turn them away. There was one particular situation where this man was just begging me to help him because somebody was hurting his family … I’m like, “We should do something,” [but] I had to send him away. It really dawned on me at that moment that if there was any chance of me to do good while I was in Iraq, it was right there, and I was really powerless to help this guy. So I came back and I was really disturbed about that.

But you didn’t leave the service ready to protest in the street?
No, and I really didn’t understand — I didn’t feel the anti-war movement got me. I didn’t feel like that was a legitimate outlet for my energy. But I wanted to do something.

Why didn’t you think the anti-war movement got you?
Well, the thing when they talk about racism and when they link it to social stratification and Palestine… that’s not why I think we should get out of Iraq. I think we should get out of Iraq because we never should have gone there to begin with and because we’re supposed to be going after the actual people that attacked us, not these other people. Saddam Hussein’s one thing, but there’s lots of bad people in the world that we could go after… why not send some Special Forces in there to kill him? Why send the whole frigging U.S. Army in there? …

All these other things that people threw onto it didn’t really click with me. Listening for the last three years to these old, lefty professors, I’ve pretty much [made] almost this complete political evolution where I understand all these things are connected to [the war]. But I also still think you can’t get 80 percent of the people in the country to rally around Palestine and all this other stuff. I think it’s wrong to try organize people on what 10 percent agree with. You’re better organized with what 80 percent of the people agree with.

So what turned it around that you got involved?
There was a thing in 2005 — January 20, I think — where this group [at Seattle Central Community College] had kicked the recruiters off the campus and they tore up all their literature. It wasn’t really that violent, but there was so much rage directed at these two recruiters that I felt like it was kind of an attack on me, which was wrong, [but] I escorted the recruiters off with security and I apologized for how these young students were treating them. I started talking to these students and [asking] what do you want, a draft? Recruiting is a necessary thing. And they were like, “We don’t know.” They were just doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? And they were really cool kids. I ended up having a few beers with them and ended up coming to their meetings. I’ve never seen anything like it since: They had like 50 students coming to one meeting and it was a two-hour meeting. There were these really strong women [in charge] and they made things kind of fun. It was art, it was positive.

[But] there were these two students [from the International Socialist Organization] and they would yell at people and there was lots of arguing. In the course of about a month, all the energy that had built up with this thing from Jan. 20 was gone. People didn’t want to deal with these meetings and the arguing and the bickering.

Over what?
Well, like the big thing with racism, right? It’s universal in all wars to dehumanize the enemy combatants, because it’s not a natural phenomenon for one human being to kill another human being. And they kept talking about this racism and this is the same time where they’re talking about supporting the Iraqi insurgency, which are the ones killing our guys. This is huge. Talk to some of the people in SNOW (Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War). They say this is the reason that the whole anti-war movement in Seattle fell apart, was because of this one divisive set of politics.

These are just young kids who want to do something positive and make a difference, and they couldn’t deal with it — nobody could, nobody wanted to. And I saw more and more people just get pushed away. Finally we told the ISO that we didn’t want them involved in the group anymore. We wanted them out … I ended up working with the group for another two years. I got it going myself [in 2006], and we did some really good things. So I figured now that I’m at the UW, I should start up a group here. It was pretty amazing to me that there wasn’t already a group.

The UW had no anti-war group?
No… They’ve had three different groups in the last five years and they’ve all died. They last a couple of months and they die off. I think they’ve had the same problems that we had at Seattle Central.

What happened with your group?
The first thing, being an activist with your sole focus being the war in Iraq, it’s a dreary, dreadful thing. It’s horrible trying to keep yourself motivated, and then to have all these arguments and bickering and infighting. [People] just don’t want to be associated with it. They’d rather try to save the puppies and the dolphins or something…. I had to stop everything to get myself together. I had three breakdowns, getting angry at people.

One of them, I’m handing out flyers at the Hans Blix event. [The former U.N. weapons inspection chief for Iraq] comes to town and you think these people would be sympathetic, but I walk up to six people [with WHAMO flyers] and consecutively one after the other, I get, “No, no, no, I’m not interested.” The sixth person that said that to me, I said, “What? You’re not interested? Why the fuck are you here to see Hans Blix? What is the significance of this guy? I’m an Iraq veteran. I’m kind of interested in this. I’m a little concerned with this. I give a fuck. Do any of you give a fuck?” I’m yelling in a room of hundreds of people. I grabbed the flyers and threw them on the ground and I’m like, if anybody touches me right now, I’m going to hit them in the face, I’m so angry at everybody.

What do you do now?
I’m tired of being completely wrapped up in the war and just constantly thinking about it. I’d like to do something like maybe work on getting clean election reform passed. There’s already a group established that’s trying to get people educated about it. And also I need to start taking care of myself. I need to finish college and start teaching.