Salon's People of the Year: Sgts. Omar Mora and Yance Gray

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Salon's People of the Year: Sgts. Omar Mora and Yance Gray

Before they died in Iraq, Sgts. Mora and Gray proved that in a democracy, dissent is patriotic, even when it comes from soldiers on the battlefield.

By Michael Scherer



AP photos

Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, left, and Sgt. Omar L. Mora


Dec. 19, 2007 | In warfare's long history, the rules of the battlefield have remained unchanged. Soldiers follow their orders, and refrain from criticizing their command. It is a pact. They will fight, kill and die for the decisions of kings, generals and presidents. They will do it all as service, to country, to friends, to family, to honor. In exchange for abstractions, they offer all they have.

So it was noteworthy on Aug. 19, 2007, when seven active enlistees of the U.S. Army published a letter from Iraq in the pages of the New York Times. Over the course of 1,414 words, they offered America a military critique from the field -- about the intractable war, about the current military strategy, about the hollowness of the political debate in Washington. In passages thick with nuance, they did what soldiers, even noncommissioned officers, rarely do. In an unmistakable act of patriotism, they went outside the chain of command.

"Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal," the essay began. "Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched."

The men did not write in a vacuum, or from the comfort of a Washington think tank. As they were preparing their essay, one of them, Staff Sgt. Jeremy A. Murphy, an Army Ranger, was shot in the head. He survived. Less than a month later, two others, Sgt. Omar Mora and Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, died in a vehicle rollover in western Baghdad. Still in their 20s, each left behind a wife and a young daughter.

It is, of course, impossible to note in a single article the stories of each of the 892 American men and women who died so far this year serving in Iraq, or of the 3,895 who have died since the war's inception or the 28,661 who have been wounded. But in the story of Mora and Gray, we are given a clear glimpse of what our soldiers died for. They did not just die for the mission, as prescribed to them by their superiors. "We need not talk about our morale," they wrote in the Times. "As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."

They died in service to a country where even the soldier in the field has the right to question the judgment of the commander in chief. They died in service to the idea that political and military leaders must be held to account for their failures and challenged on their facts. A month after their article ran in the Times, the soldiers words echoed through the halls of Congress, when the war's Gen. David Petraeus and its chief diplomat, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, came to testify. "Are we going to dismiss those seven NCOs? Are they ignorant?" asked Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who opposes continuing the war, at one hearing. "They laid out a pretty different scenario, General, Ambassador, from what you're laying out today."

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/12/19/person_of_the_year/