Skip to main content

ATTENTION: This site is no longer active but remains as an archive.

Iraq Veterans Against the War has become About Face: Veterans Against the War. About Face can be found at aboutfaceveterans.org

Iraq Veterans Against the War

Join IVAW

Donate to IVAW

  • About
    • Founding of IVAW
    • Mission, Values, and Vision
    • War in Afghanistan
    • Why We Are against the Wars
    • Resolutions
    • IVAW Timeline
    • Board of Directors
    • Advisory Committee
    • Staff
  • Events
  • Campaigns
    • Operation Recovery
    • Winter Soldier
      • Breakdown of the Military
      • Civilian Testimony
      • Corporate Pillaging
      • Cost of War at Home
      • Crisis in Veterans Healthcare
      • Future of GI Resistance
      • Gender and Sexuality
      • Legacy of GI Resistance
      • Racism and War
      • Response to DoD
      • Rules of Engagement
      • Press Coverage
      • Press Releases
    • Right to Heal
  • Members
  • Resources
    • AWOL
    • Active Duty
    • Conscientious Objector
    • Depleted Uranium
    • History of Resistance
    • IRR Reactivation
    • Lariam
    • PTSD
    • Profiles of Resisters
    • Resources for Veterans
    • Stop Loss
    • Women's Resources
    • Mesothelioma
  • Press
  • Contact
    • Press
    • Speaker Request

Primary tabs

  • View(active tab)
  • Contact

Alejandra Rishton

Facing homelessness and in need of health care I enlisted in the US Army at the age of twenty. I went off to Basic Training where I trained with about 60 other women who mostly came from the same socioeconomic background as I did. What I found was a culture saturated in misogyny and racism. Cadences about how Napalm sticks to kids, and how much fun it is to massacre Haji children were commonplace. All of us were repeatedly told that if we didn’t “man-up” and stop acting like “pussies” we were never going to be able to complete our training. The truth is that when you teach soldiers to dehumanize “the enemy,” you dehumanize the soldiers themselves as well. Basic training was a way for them to switch our emotions off and keep us focused on following orders. Critical thinking was not allowed. I left Basic Training and went to the Department of Defense Information School. I was to be trained as part of the Personal Relations sector of the Military. We were treated as the elite; with our high tech facilities only a stone’s throw from the NSA. What I learned there changed my perception of our Military forever. As I was taught to spin images and stories to suite the Army’s political needs I realized how much of what I had been taught as History in school was propaganda. Basically, we were taught to stay on the sunny side of war. Civilians only mattered when they made the soldiers look good; you were never allude to the existence of dead civilians. Our cultural addiction to technology has left us emotionally disconnected from the realities of war. While drones drop bombs like video games, my generation sits at home transfixed by digital illusions. I understand now that there is no sunny side of war. Ninety percent of all deaths in any war are civilian deaths. Nobody prospers from war, except the elite who capitalize off it. When one country sends its poor people to slaughter the poor people of another country, nobody wins but the weapons manufacturers. With our own social programs facing budget cut after budget cut, our government is assuring that it will always have fresh crops of troops gambling their lives and mental health for health-care and a steady paycheck. My time in service was filled with much emotion, much friendship, and much tragedy. Today while our Vietnam Veterans continue to suffer and die from the effects of Agent Orange poisoning, a new cohort of soldiers returns home from Iraq with Depleted Uranium contamination. One of the biggest propaganda campaigns I encountered was the myth that our troops are overseas to help liberate women. Dropping bombs on women is not liberating. Using Depleted Uranium munitions on civilian populations deprives the women of their most basic humanity by robbing them of their reproductive capabilities. There are regions in Iraq where eighty to ninety percent of the infants born are dying within the first year of life from exposure to DU weapons. Under the U.N.’s Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, this qualifies our aggressions as genocide. Great atrocities are being met with great indifference. Most of all I hope to learn enough to find a way to show others the need to end all of our illegal and immoral aggressions. It is time for us to work together, to spread awareness and to spare future generations from having to live through this massive systematic abuse of power.

Alejandra Rishton's Posts

Alejandra Rishton's picture
Is Peace Activism Feminist?
This is a short video I created for my Feminist Online Spaces at Pitzer College. The video is the culmination of my semester long interaction with Iraq Veterans Against the War, and is a tribute to their work: For this video I took my daughters to the Arlington West Memorial on Santa Monica beach. The memorial consists of crosses placed on the...
Pre-Election Day mini-Action and Election Day Reaction
                I’m afraid I’ll sound overly cynical to my classmates (not at all to my IVAW peers), so I’ll just jump right in and say it:  I’m not wildly enthusiastic about Obama’s re-election. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of Mitt Romney with control of our drone program and a presidential “kill list” exerting all of his political power in order...
Alejandra Rishton's picture
IVAW: Providing a Safe Space for Women and People of All Colors
When viewing the IVAW.org community through a feminist and anti-racist lens, one will find a positive and equal environment for people off all genders and colors. The content of the site allows for information to be collected that falls way out of the public discourse, enabling the most repressed voices of our time to speak. The victims of our...
Alejandra Rishton's picture

Branch of Service:

United States Army

Unit(s):

35th Signal Brigade, 18th Airborne Corps

Military Occupation:

25 Mike, Multimedia Illustrator

Where Served:

Fort Mead, Fort Bragg

Donations

Make a single donation or become an IVAW sustainer by making your donation a recurring one. Please consider making your generous gift right now.
Donate Online Today!

Speaker Request

Please be advised that we get many speaker requests, but regret that we are sometimes unable to fill them.
Speaker Request

Joining IVAW

Iraq Veterans Against the War is open to Active Duty, National Guard and Reservists who have served since 09/11/2001.
Join IVAW

Navigation

  • About
  • Events
  • Campaigns
  • Committees
  • Chapters
  • Members
  • Resources
  • Contact