When he was only 17 years old, Iowa native Joshua Casteel enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. Hailing from a military family with an evangelical religious background, it seemed the right path for him. But after basic training, studying Arab linguistics, being deployed to Abu Ghraib in June of 2004 and interrogating prisoners, he found himself confronting a self-professed jihadist from Saudi Arabia.

“The entire time we spoke,” Casteel, now 27, explains, “he talked to me with a gentle calmness and evangelical tone. He tried to convert me to Islam from start to finish, and being an evangelical, I felt in familiar territory, as if I were speaking simply to my Muslim counterpart.” When their conversation turned to war and violence, Casteel asked the prisoner why he came to Iraq to kill: the man’s response was to ask Casteel the same question. “At that point I knew I could go no further, unless I wanted to get into a debate about which one of us had the ‘more just’ cause.”

Very soon thereafter Casteel filed for conscientious objector status and was granted an honorable discharge on May 31. Since returning to his Midwestern home, he has been studying Nonfiction and Playwriting at the University of Iowa, combating post-traumatic stress with art.

Last February, he was in Chicago performing in Returns, a play he wrote which explores living with his memories of war in Abu Ghraib. It was staged at Columbia College, with an intimate audience and limited props — everything they used fit into a suitcase. The idea was that the play could travel easily and be performed in church basements, VFW halls, and schools. It will be staged again in November at Princeton’s McArthur Theater under the direction of David Gothard, of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre.

Casteel was also interviewed in Iraq For Sale, David Greenwald’s documentary on war profiteering, and is featured in a new documentary called Soldiers of Conscience, as an “ambassador of the Christian message.” On February 16, in an act of conscious civil disobedience, he was arrested at a sit-in organized by the Occupation Project. Later, while sitting in a jail cell with his friends, he joked, “If only my detainees could see me now.”

Also in February, Casteel traveled to Rome and Assisi to speak with the pope, members of the curia, cardinals, and archbishops about the Just War doctrine and civil disobedience, where he proposed making more contact with individual Catholics about refusing to fight in an unjust war.

Now living in Grand Rapids, MI, while completing his thesis, Casteel says he is putting much of his focus into finishing his memoir and in publishing a collection of war correspondence, called Letters from Abu Ghraib. In it, Casteel writes, “I know who I am and where I am going by the act of remembering.” By making the realities he faced in the war real, he invites us to remember with him.

Check out Soldiers of Conscience (socfilm.com) and Iraq for Sale (iraqforsale.org) and keep your eyes peeled for Letters from Abu Ghraib, due out in January 2008.

— Jessie Tierney for Conscious Choice Magazine, photo by Jessie Tierney