Peaceful warrior

Iraq war veteran William “Zac” Gable fought a battle of principle with Uncle Sam. He lost the first round, and went to Iraq against his wishes with the National Guard’s Charlie Company. He continues to oppose the war, however, from his Oroville-area home. Right now, it’s a quiet and simple opposition—he’s posted a blue and white sign in his front yard that says, “War is not the answer.”

Gable views the war as an immoral occupation driven by “greed” and culture clash. But he also opposes the way in which it has been conducted—in particular the use of Guard troops that he says were often poorly equipped and sometimes under-trained. Furthermore, many of the guardsmen fighting in Iraq are middle-aged, he notes.

“You have these men in their late 40s and early 50s going out in 130-degree heat in body armor and getting shot at,” says 24-year-old Gable. “If we didn’t have the people, the armor and supplies to fight this war, we shouldn’t have started it.”

Gable is a tall, slender man who was warm and forthcoming when this reporter turned up at his home in modest Thermalito, where he lives with his fiancée Alyce Ross. Like other men who have returned from Iraq, he says he’s tormented by nightmares and sleeping problems. His dreams are “gory, grotesque;” he has trouble shopping at Wal-Mart because crowds make him anxious, and he feels guilty about much of what he did in Iraq.

“I was there to support my buddies, people from our community, to keep people here naive and free and happy. But the things we had to do to survive made me feel guilty,” says Gable, who believes that the much of the violence in Iraq is directed toward Americans, but also the result of warring tribes within the country. “I’ve seen hundreds of people, the local nationals, get maimed and killed. I’ve been in firefights and killed people, but I wasn’t prepared either psychologically or training wise.”

Gable joined the full-time U.S. Army when he was 18 for the GI Bill after being home-schooled in the Berry Creek area. “I was poor, and had no way to go to college,” he says. He completed two years of active duty, part of which was spent as a Patriot crew member in Korea. As he was going through the discharge process in Texas, he says he was approached by a National Guard recruiter.

The recruiter told him he could drill weekends in his hometown, and would probably be called to full-time duty only in the case of a “dire emergency.”

Gable agreed to the Guard’s “Try One” program that requires only one year of active duty. But along came the war in Iraq, and Gable was deployed two weeks before his discharge date. He opposed the war, and contacted Rep. Wally Herger, R-Chico. “I feel we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction,” Gable says.

Herger contacted an Army colonel about Gable’s case. But ultimately, they were unable to help because of a stop-loss order issued by President Bush that was designed to keep soldiers on active-duty status. Saddam Hussein’s regime had fallen, but the Bush Administration was increasingly concerned about the emerging insurgency. It needed troops to back up and replace those from the exhausted full-time Army.

Uncle Sam, apparently, wanted Gable. He says the stop-loss order named soldiers who were to be kept on active-duty status, and he was shown his name on an e-mailed list.

After he was deployed, the Chico-based men were sent to Fort Irwin in the high Mojave Desert for four of eight weeks of training. During this time, the guardsmen were taught to look for “insurgents” and fake roadside bombs in mock villages. Native Arabic speakers helped with “role playing,” Gable says.

In Iraq, he says, many of the soldiers were issued “soft-top” Humvees—lightweight vehicles with canvas tops, and were forced to seek scrap metal from junkyards in order to armor them. (In a separate interview, Sgt. T.J. McClurg said they usually waited until a Humvee had been blown up by a roadside bomb to look for the needed material).

By the time the company left in spring 2005, there were almost enough armored Humvees issued, Gable adds, though some of the new issues were replacing destroyed soft-tops.

Gable says the men “made a big fuss” about the unarmored Humvees and were grateful to the Tennessee guardsman who confronted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during a December 2004 press conference in Kuwait. The guardsman asked Rumsfeld why soldiers were issued poorly armored vehicles, and informed him that they had resorted to looking through landfills for scrap material.

Gable says he found the poor in Iraq happy to conspire with America’s enemies because of their disdain for the occupation. “There are lots of poor people living in mud huts, and they don’t like us there,” Gable says. “They’re attacking us with whatever means they have.”

Finding munitions for an attack is relatively easy because of the country’s history of military interventions, he says.

“There’s munitions scattered across the desert, a huge amount of weaponry laying around in the sand,” Gable says. “You walk through the fields and there’s unexploded bombs everywhere. I saw a farmer [accidentally] blow himself up.”

On one occasion, after finding an unexploded roadside bomb, Gable recalls the guardsmen picked up a bystander who they later came to believe was responsible. He had a “crisp $100 bill in his hand,” Gable says. “Someone had handed him the money and told him to place the IED there and gave him a remote control.”

Gable is finally using his GI Bill, studying at Butte College and planning to become a mechanical engineer. But he says he loved the Guard because of the camaraderie; that he found friends who were more mature and settled than the younger men he had met in the full-time Army. He notes that the guardsmen tend to be “very positive members of the community” and compared to many of the young soldiers in the full-time Army, have a “little more humanity.”

Because he had already served abroad and not yet been discharged, he accepted his deployment and decided to use his experience to keep fellow guardsmen in Iraq safe. But he opposes the use of the Guard in Iraq.

“The National Guard is supposed to help out in floods, fires and earthquakes,” Gable says. “The president has warped and changed the rules so he can use the Guard for this.”

Gable believes the United States should withdraw from Iraq, and soldiers should consider disobeying deployment orders. The capacity to disobey—even if it means jail time—is the difference, he argues, between a soldier and a warrior.

“Soldiers take orders,” Gable says. “Warriors fight for something they believe in.”