Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejias is Out of Iraq

U.S. soldier and Iraq War critic, Omar Mora, continued serving in Iraq until his untimely death last week. Mora and a fellow war critic, Yance T. Gray, died when their U.S. Military vehicle overturned outside Baghdad.

Gray and Mora were part of a group of seven soldiers that wrote The War as We Saw It, a letter critical of the war published by the NYTimes in August.

Camilo Mejias--another soldier turned war critic--took a different path: He refused to return to the Iraqi war theatre. For that, Staff Sergeant Camilo was court-martialed and spent 9 months in a military prison.

In a war, the bad is often measured against what’s even worse, and that, in turn, makes a lot of deplorable things seem permissible.

Camilo, a Nicaraguan immigrant (Omar Mora was from Ecuador), has written Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía (New Press), a book highly critical of the U.S. Iraq War, its prosecution and the appalling behavior of some soldiers.

The latest issue of Colorlines includes My Road Out Of Iraq--a piece from Camilo Mejias' Road from Ar Ramadi.