"They're Sending My Friends to Their Graves" - An Army Vet Protests the War  

by Zach Lindsey, photo by Zach Lindsey

Dan Murphy presents a warrant for the arrest of Bush and Cheney on a Washington DC street corner

Dan Murphy is standing on the corner watching the March of the Dead clog up the streets of Washington. He's got his hands jammed into a hoodie that says "Iraq Veterans Against the War". Murphy is a Lehigh Valley resident who made a pilgrimage to Washington by train, to be here on the 19th. He came here independently. Partly just to see.

The advantage of not being with any one specific group is that you can go anywhere. Murphy is all over the city of DC today, and he was all over yesterday.

He sticks mostly to two groups: the OurSpringBreak.org crew, which has Valley connections, and the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Murphy joined the Army right out of high school, and served two tours in Iraq. OK, maybe when he joined, he wasn't thinking about do-good-ist politics. It's that he spent too long in the jam music scene, talking circles with heads at Phish shows. He wanted to straighten out.

And there is the the military. Straighten him out? Maybe. The Army taught him enough about physical fitness for him to consider a career in nutrition. It also left a much deeper impact on him, one that was by no means intentional.

He arrives in 2004, and Iraq is like a phoenix before him. A whole generation of Iraqis scrambling for scraps of American freedom. But he couldn't find the phoenix on his second tour of duty. Two thousand six, and this place has done a 180. It is war, and here's the truth of war.  

Murphy comes out of the Army in December 2007 knowing the truth of war. He started growing his hair and beard out, thick curls like so many discontented veterans before him. Not all of his friends are home yet. Surge or no, victory or no, when the media says, "less troops died this year at this time than last year at this time", Murphy still feels those troops.

He's a college student and a veteran. He deserves "and probably needs"a good vacation. But he's here in DC, where the rain has come down in sheets for hours now. In DC where a woman approached a veteran earlier and said, "Do you realize that people died for what that flag stands for?"

The veteran replied, "yeah, we're vets. Our friends died for what that flag stands for, and what we have the freedom to do."

"Well" said the woman, "maybe you should go back there and die."  

Dan is in DC where Dick Cheney is NOT. Cheney spent the day on a yacht in Oman, according to the ABC News. But it's where Murphy is: at his first large-scale anti-war protest. To see what the scene is, and to remind people that it's not just a number. That his friends are the ones under the gun. That a war is going on, and that the youth of the United States are fighting it.

"Nothing is changing right now. Oil prices are ridiculous. We're not gaining anything. They're sending my friends to their graves," he says, "that's it."