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Who is Mike Prysner?

Sep 21, 2017 | By: Jennae Geren

I Had a Dream Project’s Second Subject, Mike Prysner:

Mike Prysner is a 34-year-old Iraq War Veteran, Political Activist and the Producer/Writer of the TV documentary and interview series, The Empire Files.  He grew up as a patriotic child who dreamed of being an action-hero infantry army man his entire life.  Two weeks into Iraq, his dream was shattered and Prysner uncovered a disturbing truth.  In, “I Had a Dream…to tell the Truth about War,” Prysner takes us from his time in Iraq to his great anti-war movement, and tears the wrapping off a rewritten story and history of colonialism sold to us as democracy, freedom and human rights.

“I wanted to go to this war. I believed very much in it. I believed very much in the military and our country. But all of the lies and indoctrination that we were being fed couldn't mask the reality because I had other teachers beyond the president and the military commanders. 

And those were the Iraqi people.

And there are several people who will always be burned into my memory that are the ones that taught me the truth, and taught me which side I was on.

It was men who were urinating themselves and bleeding through sandbags on their heads in detention facilities. It was a father who was shot through the neck and as he was dying, saying over and over, 'I just want to see my family, I just want to see my family.'

And the number one person, the one that really did it for me was...I have a little sister who's now 18, so she was eight at the time I deployed. I got her name tattooed on my arm before I left...

And we were ordered at this one point to kick these families out of their homes for whatever reason.

And there was this eight-year-old girl who looked exactly like my sister.  And it was my job to drag her out of her house as she was crying, as her parents were crying, as her siblings were crying, arrest the males in her family, put them on a truck and send them to those detention facilities. 

And I couldn’t stop looking at her face because it was my sister’s face. 

I realized that this girl was exactly like my sister, that the man who was shot was exactly like my father and that these people were just like my family…and then so what happened was I couldn’t stop seeing that everything that we were doing to the Iraqi people I was doing to my family because they are our family – they’re our brothers and sisters.”

 

- Mike Prysner, Iraq War Veteran, Political Activist and Producer/Writer of The Empire Files

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO

Mike’s story, "I Had a Dream…To Tell the Truth About War," launched exactly 10 years after September 15, 2007, when he marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. with a color guard of uniformed soldiers and 300 veterans, leading one of the biggest anti-war protests since the Vietnam War. 

 

 

What ended in what an outsider might perceive as a large defeat was merely a small victory for the 200 veterans and pacifists arrested for diving over the Capital wall that day.

It wasn’t always this way. When I met Mike in Los Angeles in the summer of 2017, he told me how he had dreamed of being a soldier his entire life, his toy gun in hand, pointed at an imaginary enemy, somewhere in those New England hills where those childhood dreams are laid to rest. But it wasn’t until two weeks into the Iraq War that the dream of the American solider collapsed.

What stood before him afterward was a disheveled image of the country he once justified, slowly threaded apart lie after lie after lie. 

Unlike many of his friends, he was still alive, and now, only two choices remained: to seal the memory of the Iraq War, as impossible as it seemed, or to let it float to the surface, and confront it - every single detail. 

Mike chose to tell his story, and to this day, he continues to tell his story. After all, not every soldier was given the chance.
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