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In January, U.S. Army officials announced four separate court-martial charges against Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother who missed her deployment to Afghanistan in early November 2009 when her childcare plans for her infant son, Kamani, fell through at the last minute. Hutchinson was jailed and threatened with a court-martial if she did not agree to deploy to Afghanistan. Kamani was placed into a county foster care system.

Hutchinson, in accordance with the family care plan of the U.S. Army, had been allowed to fly to Oakland, California to leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes. However, after a week, Hughes realized she couldn’t care for Kamani along with her other duties of caring for a daughter with special needs, her ailing mother, and an ailing sister. She told Hutchinson and her commander, Captain Gassant and the Army granted a Hutchinson an extension so that she could find someone else to care for Kamani. In the meantime, the boy came back to Georgia to be with his mother.

But only a few days before Hutchinson’s original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy despite the fact that her son had nowhere to go. Faced with this choice, Specialist Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.

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From the National Radio Project:

Will the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ever end? And when they do, how will we measure victory? For journalist and author Dahr Jamail, who’s reported from Iraq and the middle east extensively since 2003, both wars have already been lost. And it’s only getting worse.

On this edition, we interview Jamail about the stresses on U.S. soldiers, on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing refusal to serve among members of the US military. Jamail’s new book is titled: The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Appearance on Al Jazeera English’s Riz Khan Show:

Veterans Day is this week, and the shootings at Fort Hood this week brought to the forefront many questions about soldiers and military personnel: how are soldiers surviving the wars, and readjusting to life at home? What are we doing to help them, and is it enough?  With the war in Iraq supposedly winding down and the war in Afghanistan ratcheting up, it’s time to take a serious look at some of these questions, and try to understand the role that the military plays in all of our lives.

We discuss these questions and more with Anuradha K. Bhagwati, executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, Dr. Anna Burton, psychiatrist with The Soldiers Project, Dahr Jamail, independent journalist and author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Nadia McCaffrey, Gold Star mother and founder of the Patrick McCaffrey Foundation.

As families and friends mourn the thirteen individuals who were shot dead at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, questions continue to be raised about what might have motivated Thursday’s rampage. The suspected gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was an Army psychiatrist who had spent most of his career at Walter Reed Hospital before being transferred to Fort Hood earlier this year. He had also recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan. We speak to Private Michael Kern from Fort Hood and independent journalist and author Dahr Jamail.

Dahr Jamail author of “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan” speaking at Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility 2009 Annual Dinner September 26, 2009.

Talk by independent journalist Dahr Jamail author of “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan” given September 27, 2009 at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle as a benefit for the GI Coffee House - Coffee Strong.

Dahr Jamail continues to describe some of his personal reactions to interviewing U.S. soldiers. He points out that some 1.4 million Iraqi civilians are said to have perished since the 2003 U.S. invasion. The soldiers too are victims of the U.S. Military, ‘the green machine’ Jamail says. And the Military doesn’t care any more about them than about the Iraqi people.

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Dori Smith with Talk Nation Radio conducts an in-depth, heart-felt interivew with Dahr Jamail about his new book. Dahr discusses US foreign policy under Barack Obama, the U.S. Empire Project, and a growing number of soldiers who are refusing to take part in it.

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As the US continues to step up war efforts in Afghanistan, the number of US soldiers refusing deployment to war zones is also increasing. On the ground, they find themselves being terrorists, says writer Dahr Jamail. Russia Today’s Marina Portnaya talks to Dahr about the subject of his new book, The Will to Resist.