Profiles in Protest

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During the last days of the first Gulf War, a 19-year-old tank crewman named Charles Sheehan-Miles found himself face to face with the enemy in the southern Iraqi desert. Assigned to stop Iraqi forces from fleeing to Baghdad, his division had found a fuel truck filled with Iraqi troops. The Americans blasted the truck with cannon fire; when those still alive tried to run rather than be taken prisoner, Sheehan-Miles and his platoon mates shot and killed them. "What we did was militarily right," Sheehan-Miles says now. "But I had to live with myself after that. It was really a turning point."

After returning from the front, Sheehan-Miles left the Army and helped start the Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md., one of the first groups to call attention to the plight of Gulf War veterans who have suffered from illnesses since returning home.

Sheehan-Miles also became a critic of U.N. sanctions against Iraq. And since Bush began talking about another war, Sheehan-Miles has tried to organize opposition to it among fellow Gulf War vets. He says he will reluctantly support a war if it comes, but he is embarrassed that the Administration has been so aggressive in pushing for it. "The Administration seems to be grabbing for a reason," he says. "My biggest concern is that we seem to think...everybody in Iraq will wave a U.S. flag and say thanks for liberating us. But we've encouraged more hostility [in Iraq] than we're aware of."

Some of the antiwar vets plan to attend rallies in Washington this week, hoping to bring more Gulf War veterans to the cause. But like the rest of the antiwar activists, Sheehan-Miles has plenty of persuading to do. In late September, he set up an antiwar website veteransforcommonsense.org and sent out e-mail messages to all the veterans he knew, encouraging them to sign a statement that calls on the White House to get U.N. Security Council authorization before mounting an invasion. So far, about 300 vets have signed on. --Reported by Perry Bacon Jr./Washington, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles