On this week’s episode of Catalyst Radio, Catalyst Radio spoke with Jason Moon, a veteran of the Iraq War, who spoke recently in Grand Rapids about his experiences serving in Iraq from March of 2003 to April of 2004. Moon begins the interview by discussing the priorities of the United States in Iraq which he argues were to secure oil (evident in the disregard for protecting Iraqi museums and historical sites) and to dehumanize the Iraqi population. He explained how he was given orders that he could shoot into a crowd of up to 30 Iraqi civilians in order to kill one insurgent and that to him that suggested that the military valued the lives of Americans more than Iraqis. He described how by the time he left Iraq in April of 2004 that he could not find a single Iraqi who had not had their property seized or had been detained by occupying forces and that the insurgency was motivated by this form of collective punishment. His experiences in the Army also made him aware that in many cases, the military has a similar disregard for its own soldiers with Moon describing how a suicidal enlistee was told that he could not harm himself because he was government property.

To hear more about Moon’s experiences in Iraq, listen to the interview.