We ask our military members to sacrifice a great deal. In times of peace, this may amount to a few years of discomfort punctuated by occasional high drama. Many thousands of our sons and daughters have experience in the uniformed services, and most of them have come back whole. That will not always be the case, and there are some duties we ought to shrink from assigning to idealistic young people.

One such young man was Sergeant Erik Saar, who volunteered for military service for the usual reasons: to see the world and to learn more about it. What he discovered wasn't covered in Army field manuals, but his education was deep and effective. Erik Saar is one of those soldiers assigned for a time to interact with the Bush Administration's "detainees" at Guantanamo, Cuba.

This Is Not Like Television

It was December 2002 when Sergeant Saar caught a flight from the East Coast to Cuba. He had completed Arabic-language training for the Department of Defense, and his new duty station offered rich opportunities to use this skill. He assumed at the time that there was an orderly procedure for interacting with the "unlawful combatants" placed in Cuba, and that his services would be utilized in an effort to get at the truth of their stories.

When he arrived on station, Erik was surprised by the conditions in which the detainees lived. There were about six hundred of them being held, from more than forty nations, and their "quarters" consisted of old shipping containers cut in half lengthwise that had been placed end to end to form a sort of cell block. (Saar & Novak, 2005, p. 45) He was surprised to hear many of the detainees ask why they were being held, which was unnerving, but he felt that they must have done something wrong to be in this place.

It took only a short time for Saar to notice that not everything added up in the interrogations, the public news reports about Guantanamo, and the way that the camp was administered. Military police were surly at best, and leadership seemed out of touch with the situation on the ground. The officer in charge of the operation, Major General Miller, claimed that his unit was getting good information from its interrogations and that the people being questioned were "the worst of the worst," but Sergeant Saar had reasons to question these assertions.

Erik was puzzled by the disorder within his interrogation unit. He also found the brutality toward detainees unhelpful either in understanding their position

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