Spc. Alexis Hutchinson of the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division has been arrested and awaits court-martial hearings. Her crime? Being a mother who must care for her infant son.
Hutchinson is a single mother of a 10 month-old baby boy. She has refused to deploy to Afghanistan because she has no relatives who can care for her child. Her mother, the one person who might have been able to help, is already overwhelmed caring for other ailing relatives.
The Army had promised Hutchinson an extension so that she could find a suitable caregiver, but as with all promises the military makes to those it recruits, this too turned out to be a lie.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Hutchinson did what any caring mother would have done: She did not show up on the date her unit was being deployed. The Army had her arrested and her son put in foster care.
It is an outrage that any woman would be forced to even consider surrendering her child to a foster home so that she can be deployed as part of a criminal occupation. The U.S. military command has no commitment to its soldiers or their families, only to its ongoing wars and occupations. The Pentagon is in the business of destroying lives—here at home and in the countries it occupies.
It is time for all enlisted soldiers in the U.S. military and their families to stand against the imperialist war machine and say, “No, we won’t go!”
