Active-duty sailor Jonathan Hutto signed up to join the Navy in December 2003, at the age of 26. Previously a college activist fighting police brutality in Washington, D.C., and later an organizer with the ACLU, he was not the sort of recruit one usually imagines enlisting in the U.S. military. But his experience as an activist would serve him well as he began to protest unjust practices within the armed forces, where almost from the start, he battled institutional racism and the unwillingness of the chain of command to punish it, while also fighting oppressive and arbitrary disciplinary practices by his commanding officers. In 2006, he co-founded Appeal for Redress, one of the only active-duty anti-war groups since Vietnam, devoted to ending the war in Iraq.
Read full story
