A soldier in the U.S. Army who fled to Canada to avoid a second tour of duty in Iraq has been sentenced to 10 months in prison.
Kimberly Rivera pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of desertion and was sentenced to the prison term and received a bad-conduct discharge.
The 30-year-old has said she became disillusioned with the U.S. mission in Iraq while serving there in 2006.
During a two-week leave in the U.S. in 2007, Rivera crossed the Canadian border after she was ordered to serve another tour in Iraq.
By every account, U.S. Army deserter Kimberly Rivera is a pleasant person. But that’s not enough to keep you out of jail, where Rivera could remain for the next 10 months.
Rivera enlisted in the U.S. military in 2006. At that time, the U.S. was fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military was desperate for new personnel. Rivera herself badly needed money, and was enticed to enlist by a sign-on bonus of $8,000 the U.S. Army was offering to attract recruits during the conflicts.
Rivera eventually shipped out to Iraq, where she had several close calls and disturbing experiences, including seeing an Iraqi girl crying after her family was victim of apparent collateral damage. She came to question the purpose of the war. In 2007, while back home visiting with family for a leave, she was informed that she would be shipped back to Iraq for a second rotation after her first tour was complete. Rivera packed up her family and deserted to Canada, eventually settling in Toronto.
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After exhausting all of her legal options to remain in Canada, Rivera returned to the United States last year, and was detained by military authorities. Last month, she pleaded guilty to desertion and was sentenced to 10 months in jail. This has outraged many of her supporters, who consider her to be a prisoner of conscience. But this is, in fact, a fair, if sad, outcome.
When considering the case of Rivera, it is important to remember the context of her enlistment. She did not sign up in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when many thousands of Americans did what they considered their patriotic duty and joined up to protect their country. She did not enlist in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when many feared that Saddam Hussein possessed devastating weapons that threatened the security of the world. She didn’t even enlist during the initial phase of the Iraq War, when it was still remotely possible that the U.S. would go down in history as liberator of a once-oppressed country.
Rivera knew what she was getting into, and signed up anyway. She did so for a simple reason: She needed the money that the Army was offering
Rivera enlisted in 2006. Sept. 11 was five years in the past. Everyone but the most fervent Republican conspiracy theorist had acknowledged that the war was based on faulty intelligence and that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or the means to produce them. The Iraqi civil war was raging, and U.S. military forces there were losing dozens of soldiers each month trying to hold the country together.
Rivera knew what she was getting into, and signed up anyway. She did so for a simple reason: She needed the money that the Army was offering. She made a calculated decision for financial reasons, and when she decided she didn’t like the deal she’d signed up for, abandoned her duty and fled the country.
Even in America’s all-volunteer military, there were some soldiers who had good moral cause to desert. During the manpower crunch faced by the U.S. military, many thousands of soldiers were “stop-lossed.” This means their terms of service were summarily extended beyond the agreed-to period because there was no one else available to take their place in their unit. These soldiers could make a compelling case that they had been essentially conscripted into a war that they had chosen to no longer participate in after their original enlistment period.
Rivera, however, is not one of those soldiers. She simply experienced buyer’s remorse and fled.
Other soldiers approached the same circumstances differently. After becoming disillusioned by his experiences in Iraq and being stop-lossed, in 2009, U.S. Army computer technician Victor Agosto told his commanding officer, in writing, that he would refuse a deployment to Afghanistan. He later refused a direct order to deploy. He was arrested, pleaded guilty and served 24 days in jail. To Agosto, that was a fair price to pay to avoid participating in a war he believed unjust and immoral. One does not have to agree with Agosto to acknowledge that his methods were honourable. Even the military recognized that when handing down a mild sentence.
It’s easy to feel sympathy for Kimberly Rivera and her experiences in Iraq. But even in free societies with all-volunteer militaries, deserting one’s unit in a time of war is a serious crime. Given the circumstances of her desertion, Rivera’s sentence of 10 months behind bars is not unreasonable.
National Post
Aaron Vincent ElkaimKimberly Rivera
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