Seven Oaks Magazine.

On his first night as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Alex Ryabov watched orange lights streak across a black desert sky.

The glowing tracers sped through the night, illuminating the darkness. Sometimes they converged into one bright line; other times they collided, sending the orange streaks in new directions. It was mid-March 2003, and Ryabov’s artillery unit was stationed in Kuwait, launching shells over the Iraqi border.

Working furiously on the sandy ground, surrounded by shell casings and debris, Ryabov thought about the devastation the American firepower could yield. As he helped load more shells into the cannons, he waited for return fire. It never came.

A year-and-a-half later, Ryabov is home in the United States, protesting his former job in Iraq. The Brooklyn Marine is co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, which opposes America’s actions in Iraq and the president who initiated them. After a contentious election, the veteran’s group is appealing to a divided country that has long revered its military.

With tightly cropped, curly brown hair, and neat sideburns that frame his young face, Ryabov, now 21, still looks like a kid. Sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, wearing an immaculate, white Nautica sweatshirt, and equally pristine white sneakers, he hardly looks like the unruly anarchist sometimes portrayed as the face of the protest movement. In fact, Ryabov, a novice but committed peace activist, is a bit surprised himself.

“Before I got involved in protest movements, I had no idea there were so many different types of people who had the same ideas,” said Ryabov, who’d recently returned from a Washington vigil for those killed in Iraq. “I’ll see punks with Mohawks and stuff, and at the same time, have anti-Bush pins.”

“I’m glad to see that,” he concluded. “It’s good to see people voicing their opinions.”

Speaking over a plate of sushi that he dots with small green blobs of wasabi, Ryabov meticulously outlines his arguments against the war. In a soft voice, almost drowned out by restaurant chatter, he affirms the claims of an anti-war camp that insists President Bush was wrong to start a war.

Iraq was not, Ryabov argues, an imminent threat: “ How could Iraq be a threat if we took the capital in just three weeks?” And the oil industry’s powerful hand influenced this war, he thinks: “We’re taking oil that’s been formed over millions of years… corporations are putting that money into their pockets.”

But unlike most young, anti-war protesters who voice the same arguments, Ryabov brings a four-year military record to the table. His experience resonates both with a public that might otherwise dismiss youthful discontent, and with political leaders who ultimately call the shots. “I might not know the exact names of certain laws,” he said, recalling an exchange with a senator’s aide about funding for US troops in Iraq. “But he hasn’t seen the stuff first hand.”

Alex Ryabov was born in Kharkov, Urkaine, but his family left the country soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Settling in East Brooklyn, his parents – a homemaker and a maintenance manager – raised Ryabov and his two younger siblings. Today, the young vet still lives with his mom; at one point in the interview she calls his cell phone and he quickly switches to Ukrainian, his words peppered with the low “dzh” and “k” sounds of Baltic tongues.

As a Midwood High School student Ryabov did well until 10th grade when, “everything went downhill,” and his grades dropped. He was bored with school, and when military recruiters visited Midwood, he filled out an application. They returned two years later promising money for school, health benefits and a steady job. Not feeling ready for college, Ryabov signed a contract in January 2000. He was 17.

His parents were divided about the decision; his mom accepted his resolve, but his dad objected – after all, they had come to the United States from a country where military service was mandatory. Looking back on it, Ryabov says he was “naïve,” but at the time he was looking forward to the work. It was almost two years before 9/11 and he never thought his stint in the Marines would land him in a war.

But by late 2002, the United States and Iraq were sparring over weapons inspections. Troops had been deployed to the Persian Gulf and war seemed inevitable. Early the next year, Ryabov’s first sergeant gathered his battalion at Camp Lejeune, South Carolina and he delivered this shocking order: “We’re not going there for weapons of mass destruction or to topple Saddam Hussein,” Ryabov remembers. “We’re going there for one reason alone, and that’s oil.”

The blunt words disturbed some younger troops but Ryabov had three years service under his belt, and shrugged off the sergeant’s assessment. He’d grown used to the hypocrisies of the military. Besides, he had to think of his fellow Marines. “I wasn’t going to abandon my friends,” he says, unapologetically. The kinship that develops in the military is strong, Ryabov explains. You’re not going to let down the guys who share your work and life.

Ryabov’s voice rises slightly as he describes inadequate gear given Americans fighting in Iraq. At the war’s start, he had just one of two ballistic plates – bullet-proof shields inserted in the front and back of a flak jacket – and felt unduly exposed to enemy fire. “That’s why I get pissed off whenever they show stuff about $87 billion,” he scowls. “It did not get to us.”

Following the orange tracers they launched their first night in the desert, Ryabov moved with his battalion through Iraq, where he witnessed chaos and destruction first-hand: twisted metal, shards of skin, dead corpses, leveled homes. He talks openly about entering areas devastated by American artillery fire, often grilled about the subject by reporters.

Ryabov also had a close call on his own life in what he describes as “the artillery unit equivalent of a fender bender.” Traveling along a dusty road early one morning, his truck – which luckily had its windshield blown out – rammed into a cannon being pulled by the truck ahead of it. Half asleep in the passenger seat, an M-16 cradled in his arms, Ryabov jerked awake to find the cannon just six inches from his tired body.

“I’m not very religious,” Ryabov says. “But I kinda thought that God had spared me.” He untucks a small, silver Star of David from his white sweatshirt, an icon he put on when he went to Iraq and has not removed since.

Ryabov returned from the Middle East in May 2003, disturbed and exhausted. He was sent back to Camp Lejeune and was frustrated to learn his battalion could soon be thrown back into the fray. “They expect us to pick up where we left off with training,” he remembers, clearly annoyed. “We fought; we deserve six months without regular training.”

“Each person needs time to sort stuff out.”

But worse than the military’s demands was watching television coverage of the war he’d just left. Every day, more troops died, faceless numbers in television reports. Every day, he thought the media sensationalized the conflict, even endowing it a Hollywood moniker, “Showdown in Iraq.” Every day, Ryabov became more convinced the war was a mistake.

“We’re going into countries under these false pretenses of WMD’s and saying the country’s an imminent threat,” he says. “These reasons didn’t hold much weight to begin with, and now they’re completely falling apart.” He felt powerless, however, to speak out until he’d finished active duty.

Through a friend from his unit, Ryabov got in touch with Veterans for Peace. Not knowing what to expect, he showed up at a meeting and was surprised to stumble on a group of men more than twice his age.

Ryabov appreciates his predecessors’ contributions to the veteran’s peace movement and he lists their endeavors in learned detail: World War II vets who fought against the spread of fascism; men sent to fight wars in Korea and Vietnam; and now men and women who have returned from Iraq. “I had no idea people had been doing this for 20 or 30 years,” he says.

Soon after that first Veterans for Peace meeting, Ryabov and four others launched Iraq Veterans Against the War. The group made its first public appearance in July at the national Veterans for Peace convention, just weeks after Ryabov completed active duty. Since that time, IVAW has swelled to almost 60 members. The group organizes rallies and protests, brushing shoulders with high profile progressives like Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsberg and Jesse Jackson. Ryabov is one of the group’s youngest members.

“He’s kind of known as the humble and quiet guy,” says Tim Goodrich. Goodrich, an IVAW member who was honorably discharged from the Air Force in April, 2003, has known Ryabov since the group’s inception. “He’s already spent four years in the military. He had a near death experience in Iraq,” he says, endorsing his friend’s credentials.

The veteran’s group has allowed Ryabov to express his emerging political views at a turbulent period in American history. He remembers being too young to vote in the last election, and caring little about its outcome. “But now people are talking about politics at the dinner table,” he says – even his 20-year-old brother. “It seems to me that now people are more likely to question things.”

It is November 11, and New York City is hosting its Veterans Day parade under velvety gray clouds. By 11:30 am the biggest military groups and loudest marching bands have already walked up 5th Avenue cheered on by a thin, but enthusiastic crowd standing on the perimeter of police barricades.

Ryabov, however, remains stationary on a feeder street, along with another Iraq war vet and about 40 members of Veterans for Peace, mostly older men who’d fought in Vietnam. The group has been given one of the last spots in the parade. They stand in front of a high school marching band from Connecticut and not far from a float called “The Glory Girls,” featuring flag-draped pre-teens, and a massive, spinning globe.

“The people who organize this parade ‘welcome us’ with quotation marks,” says one vet.

As the sun appears unexpectedly through the clouds, the vets merge onto 5th Avenue, looking slightly haphazard – their clothes don’t match, they carry handmade signs and they don’t march in unison. Ryabov, dressed in a desert camouflage shirt and hat stands up front, carrying one end of a banner for IVAW. In solidly Democratic Manhattan – where John Kerry received 82 percent of the vote in the presidential election – the group mainly receives cheers, peace signs and applause from the crowd. But even in this cradle of anti-war sentiment, support is not unanimous. “That’s John Kerry’s group,” mutters one pedestrian to a friend as they move between the towers of concrete on 5th Avenue. Louder hecklers also call out to the group.

“Give it up – Kerry lost!” yells one.

“The Iraq war was started so we could stand here and stand for peace!” shouts another.

At the end of the parade, Ryabov seems unperturbed by the comments. He’s surrounded by a small media scrum that asks about his experiences in Iraq, his activist efforts and the presidential election that’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. “I feel really let down that Kerry gave up so easily,” Ryabov says.

After four months with IVAW, he’s grown used to microphones and television cameras, and he takes time to speak to all journalists who request an interview. Ryabov insists IVAW is making progress. At some protests, vets who’d fought in Iraq approach the group, asking to join the peace movement. “They had never been part of any protests before,” Ryabov remembers.

Hoping to start college in January, Ryabov now keeps busy with Veterans’ Associations meetings, speaking engagements and interviews for Iraq Veterans Against the War. The schedule is busy and draining. When he sees parents carrying pictures of their deceased children, he feels distraught. He can’t help but think, “That could be me in the picture they’re holding.”