Johnathan Millantz

By Joshua E. S. Phillips

Johnathan Millantz was working what he called "Joe jobs," like pizza delivery, in his hometown of Greensburg, Pennsylvania when terrorists struck the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The attacks filled Millantz with renewed patriotic fervor and antipathy for terrorism. Six months later, he joined the U.S. Army.

He signed up to be trained as a health care specialist. He hoped to apply his training in a clinical setting, but soon learned the Army had designated him to be a combat medic. A year later, Millantz was deployed to Iraq.

In Iraq, he used his medical skills to help fellow soldiers. But he was also assigned to check on Iraqis who'd been taken prisoner and held in a makeshift detention center. Millantz says what he saw there changed him forever. In the end, those experiences transformed him into an anti-war activist.

Millantz was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division, and arrived in Iraq in April 2003 during the U.S. military's "shock and awe" bombing campaign.

"When I got into Iraq, what I saw was a country desperate for help and desperate for food, water and necessities to live," remembered Millantz. In time, he "arrived in Baghdad - to a city blown apart, bodies laying everywhere, and just a total mess."

But while Millantz saw some parts of the country laid to waste, he saw other areas where Iraqis happily greeted him and his fellow troops. The soldiers helped broken communities and worked cooperatively with locals.

"When we first arrived we were handing out water, candy to kids…and it was all right for the first few days," he said. "Eventually getting to our operating base wasn't too bad -until we started going on patrols."

Millantz joined 1st Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment (or Battalion 1-68) at Forward Operating Base Lion in Balad, 70 miles north of Baghdad. Some of the patrols were known as Quick Reaction Force (or QRFs), which were often tasked with locating and capturing Iraqis suspected of being insurgents.

"We would go to a house, kick down the doors, take the people who we had intelligence [on]…who were in terror cells," Millantz recalled. But the process of identifying terrorist suspects seemed haphazard to Millantz; "We really didn't know if they were guilty or not. It was just a potluck thing that we grabbed them up," he said.

"And I saw some stuff that really turns my stomach."

He and other soldiers at FOB Lion described how they kept detainees up all night with loud noise and physical exercise. As a medic, Millantz was charged with checking the prisoners' vital signs to "make sure we weren't killing them."

Milllantz said officers encouraged abuse and "told us that if [detainees] touched us we were supposed to break their arms."

Millantz says he saw soldiers do appalling things, but he doesn't just blame them. He believes commanders gave "[too] much power and responsibility to a bunch of guys who are full of hate and resentment…getting shot at, and watching their friends get killed…and seeing people decapitated - and then putting those guys in direct control of the people who did these things…

"I think any human being in that situation would have done similar things."

But Millantz says he's haunted by what he did in Iraq.

"From my point of view, keeping a person alive while doing these so called 'interrogation techniques'…definitely burns an image in your brain that you'll never forget," said Millantz.

Millantz returned to Pennsylvania in 2004. He went back to school, but found he couldn't stick with it. He dropped out of college and fell into debt. Then he began abusing drugs and developed seizures.

"I got addicted to painkillers and just pretty much ruined my life," Millantz said. He consumed "anything that would give me the euphoric effect that I used to have all the time before I went to the Army. And I couldn't receive that without taking drugs to try and forget the pain."

Plagued with guilt, Millantz tried to unburden himself spiritually and emotionally. "It's very tough when you have a conscience that is filled with atrocities that you know you did to people," he said. "I went to confession, I went to counseling. I still can't forgive myself for what I did to those poor people."

He went in and out of treatment at the local Veterans Administration hospital, and found that "everybody came back with problems. People got home…and tried to drink their troubles away."

Millantz found he best related to fellow veterans. Some of his friends were involved in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Millantz began attending anti-war rallies.

"I was pretty much at the verge of suicide at that time…and it really helped me out," he said. "I saw that there were a lot of people like me who had problems adjusting to civilian life after coming back from the war. But it was also political - it was about getting out of this war, educating the public, and helping veterans."

Today, he has pulled back on some of that political activism, and is "looking out for number one" right now, focusing on trying to overcome his addiction, and returning to school.

Millantz says people have called him a traitor for his stance against the war. But he said he still reveres soldiers and their service. "I love the soldiers I served with," he said. "They're some of the greatest, finest Americans in the world.

"I'm still a soldier, and always will be," he said. "I'm soldiering on and I'm not going to give up…. It's been hard over the years coming to terms with what actually happened over there.

"I don't know if I'll ever have closure."

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