 I'm Maria Santelli, I'm the Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War. And in addition to speaking some words from my heart and my experience working with conscientious objectors, people who in the course of their military service have a crisis of conscience and seek discharge as conscientious objectors. In addition to my own testimony from my heart and with my experience with those folks, I would like to also share with you the words of the words and testimony of my dear friend, Tony Garcia. I'm a 24 year veteran of the armed services. I joined the US Navy in July of 1980 and was trained as a hospital corpsman. I was sent to serve with the US Marine Corps as a fleet Marine Force corpsman where I spent most of my career. I served my country in three wars. In 1991, during Desert Storm Desert Shield, I was awarded the Navy League Award for exceptional leadership and bravery. In the aftermath of 9-11, I was sent to Afghanistan to take part in the deployment of an experimental vessel. I understood the need to go into Afghanistan to remove the Taliban and to find bin Laden. In February 2003, I entered Kuwait with First Marine Expeditionary Force in preparation for the ground war in Iraq. We were told the children would welcome us with flowers. Instead, they had grenades. I left Iraq in July 2003, not long after President Bush announced mission accomplished. While I was in Iraq, I never questioned my orders because if you do that in war, you get people killed. Upon returning to the States and reflecting on my own experience, I realized how misled we have all been about this war. There was no clear mission. The reasons why we were there kept changing. First, we were told there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. Then they told us we were there to get rid of Saddam and fight terrorism. We captured Saddam, and we know that Iraq was not responsible for 9-11, but we're still there. Now they tell us we can't leave because we have to rebuild Iraq. As the invading and occupying power, the U.S. cannot be the force to rebuild the country we destroyed. And our sons and daughters are caught in the middle, dying every day. But not all wounds are visible. People who come back from war alive or with both arms and legs still have wounds that will always remain with them. I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. In 2005, I entered a PTSD program at the VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas. I was the first Iraq war veteran to finish the course. Many of the Iraq war veterans, especially the younger ones, are not ready to seek help. All of the patients with me in Topeka were Vietnam veterans who have been suffering from PTSD for 30 years. I believe that a lot of the Vietnam veterans see similarities between this war and their experience in Vietnam and the tragedies of Iraq trigger their trauma. A whole generation of Vietnam veterans were never diagnosed or treated for their trauma, and many of them ended up living on the streets or in prison. If we are not careful in treating the veterans from this war, we risk seeing another generation follow that path. No one can say I am not a patriot. I served 24 years of active duty service, but it's time to bring the troops home. Tony wrote those words in 2006 on the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion. More than 10 years later, his words are still relevant, only he is no longer here to speak them himself. Tony died on Veterans Day 2010 after years of struggling with the trauma of his war experiences. It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to accept lives wrecked by the trauma of war as inevitable because we shouldn't be accepting war and violence as inevitable. They are not embedded in the roots of our acceptance of violence and injustice is the misguided belief that humanity is predisposed to this violence and predisposed to war. In our work at the Center on Conscience and War, the stories of military conscientious objectors serve as daily reminders and individual case studies that prove to us that humanity is naturally predisposed to peace. Our conscience tells us that cooperation with others is right and that injustice and violence against others is wrong. Remarkably, it might be the military who knows this better than those of us on the front lines of movements for peace and justice. Often I hear people who dedicate their lives to working for peace exclaim things like the world is such a violent place or people are so violent. I also hear people say things like, oh, I could never join the military because I can't kill. Those people who join, they're different from me. They can kill. Well, they can't kill either, not without consequences. I know this because I talk with them every day. I know this because I have seen the lengths the military goes through to turn ordinary individuals like us into killers. Look no further than basic military training. This is a science which has been expressly developed to circumvent the human conscience to teach service members to kill by rote to kill reflexively without thinking and without filtering through the conscience. Training to kill requires constant reinforcement. If killing was natural, it would come easily for us, be good for us and allow us to thrive. Hundreds of thousands of veterans struggling with the trauma of moral injury wounds to the soul caused by a transgression against the conscience are poignant proof of our tragic misunderstanding of our own nature. The inevitability of violence and injustice is a myth, a myth that persists at the hands of a media and government who choose to strengthen their own influence and harden their own power by sowing fear and division among our communities. A perfect example of this is right in front of us today. Among the many horrible and unspeakable stories coming out of Syria, there are also many that speak to the best angels of our nature. The one that fits here is the one about the hundreds of thousands of young men who are choosing to leave their homes, not out of fear for their lives, but for fear that they will be conscripted to take the lives of others. These young men are conscientious objectors and we should call them that, instead of letting the dominant narrative write their story for them and for us. The media tells us that the image of thousands of young men coming from the Middle East to the West should frighten us that these refugees are coming not to flee violence, but somehow to bring it with them. But the stories of these young men, these soldiers of conscience, tell a different tale. They are coming to the West not to hurt us, but so that they don't have to hurt anyone else. One man in Turkey who has been aiding Syrian refugees puts it this way. Young men have to decide before they reach military age, either to leave or learn to kill. Surely it is better that they leave, he asks. The simple and scientific truth is that morality against war and violence is inherent in who we are. Consistently, we actively choose cooperation and kindness, and by default, we reject conflict. Don't believe me. Look around you. And then please tell the story of your witness. Thank you.