Heather J. Lakemacher

April 19, 2009

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing in support of the request of my husband, HM2 Daniel J. Lakemacher, to be classified as a conscientious objector and to be discharged from the United States Navy on these grounds. I understand his beliefs about the immorality of war to be the result of deep and sustained reflection and to be rooted in the ethical standards by which he seeks to live his entire life. To provide an accurate picture of how these beliefs have arisen since he joined the military, I intend to describe how I first met Daniel and how our relationship has changed over the past twelve years.

Daniel and I met toward the end of eighth grade when his family began attending the evangelical Christian church that my family and I had attended since I was four years old. I don’t specifically remember our first few interactions, but I do remember that by the time he left for a mission trip to the Philippines the next summer, I was impressed enough with his character that I wrote him a letter while he was gone. During high school, Daniel and I became good friends, but we rarely just hung out together. Our friendship developed in the context of ministering to other people. We coached a children’s sports team that was sponsored by our church. We went with other students from our youth group to visit a local nursing home. We intentionally invited “fringe” members of the youth group to hang out with us and our friends. We took turns tutoring a friend’s little sister. We went on mission trips together. In short, we were both devoutly committed to living out the spiritual teachings of our church as best we knew how.

During this time, several aspects of Daniel’s personality and character particularly drew me to him. I liked his sense of humor, especially how he used it to put people at ease. I was struck by his immense concern for others around him. In particular, I had never met a boy who could so consistently make girls feel like they were safe with him. He demonstrated a level of respect for both older women and the girls who were his peers that was unparalleled in my experience. He was remarkably intelligent, and he exercised his intellect by studying theology in his free time. We could have extended conversations about the finer points of Calvinist theology, but he was always concerned about how the ideas that he was studying should impact his behavior. Most of all, I was impressed by how seriously he took his Christian faith and how it pervaded every aspect of his life.

After graduating from high school, we both enrolled in a Bible college with the intent of becoming involved in professional ministry. For him, that meant preparing for the pastorate, and for me, it meant probably becoming a teacher. During the spring of our freshman year, Daniel asked me to marry him, and I accepted without hesitation. I was nineteen; he was eighteen. Much to the chagrin of our parents, many of the people at our church, and our professors at school, we married less than a year later. Although we both felt that our marriage was God’s will for us, others had distinctly different opinions about the wisdom of our decision. Although in actuality, we had both had simmering doubts about aspects of our religious beliefs for almost two years, this conflict was the first obvious sign of the coming upheaval in our lives.

Over the next couple years, we both began to question the legitimacy of basing decisions upon “the will of God” when so many people claimed that justification for contradictory beliefs and actions. This became especially clear after our church was rocked by a sex abuse scandal. The ministers at the church had tried to cover it up by claiming that God had not wanted the issue to damage the church’s witness in the local community. We found it suspicious that God would sanction lying for the sake of such politically expedient ends as job preservation, but Daniel’s attempts to spearhead a call for the resignation of the staff members involved were vehemently opposed by the church’s professional leadership. He spent months working to get other lay leaders of the church to face the problems head on, but eventually he was run out of the church by a smear campaign that targeted him and the few others who had supported the victim’s family throughout the ordeal. We left the church disgusted by the behavior that we had witnessed, but even more disgusted by the realization that there was a sick sort of logic to the behavior and excuses that the church’s ministers had put forth.

By this time, Daniel had given up on the idea of becoming a pastor. We had been asked to leave the Bible college over our supposedly imprudent marriage, and we had been forced out of our church over his advocacy for a victim of sexual abuse. Although his faith in Christianity was badly shaken, it wasn’t completely destroyed. He began searching anew for God’s will in relation to his career, and he eventually decided to join the military. A variety of reasons played into this decision. He liked the prospect of adventure. He wanted a more physically active job than the one he had at the time. A friend of his from high school was frequently telling him about how cool his work as a SEAL was. He had a sense of patriotism that had become more pronounced since 9/11 and the entry of American troops into Iraq. Both of our families thought highly of military service. The college benefits would be helpful down the road. Most of all, though, Daniel felt that military service was highly compatible with what he understood his role to be as a godly man. He had read numerous books that praised a quasi-literal interpretation of the idea of being a warrior for God. He thought that fighting in defense of America was ultimately taking a stand in defense of his family and his God as well, so on July 19th, 2005, less than three years after we had gotten married, Daniel reported to RTC for boot camp.

The next two years held a lot of changes for us. Daniel completed boot camp and Corps School at Great Lakes before heading to Portsmouth for Psych Tech School. I got a new job and learned how to deal with being by myself for long stretches of time while he was gone for training. Once Daniel received permanent orders to Great Lakes, we bought a house, and I enrolled at a local college with the intent of finally finishing my degree. We had never really found another church where we felt comfortable, so during this time, we gradually stopped going altogether. We had begun talking more and more about how the Christian faith of our childhood didn’t make nearly as much sense anymore, but I still assumed that someday we would find a place where we could once again exercise a vibrant faith, both together as a couple and in community with others. That all changed after Daniel’s first deployment, though.

In July of 2007, Daniel left for a seven-month deployment to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Through IM, emails, and phone calls, we stayed in touch as best we could. I knew that he was spending most of his free time reading, but since most of my time outside of work was being spent on studying for school, I had no chance to read the growing list of books that he said I really ought to check out. I got a sense of what he was reading and thinking about from the snippets that he would read to me over the phone or the shorter articles that he would email me to read over my lunch break. The ideas of natural law and personal liberty were increasingly the topics of his focus, and items of faith were almost non-existent.

As the months wore on, another issue began to impress itself on me. Daniel was becoming more and more disturbed by his on-going experiences at Guantanamo Bay. He rarely told me any details about his nights at work, but after having been married for five years, I knew that there was only one reason that my normally talkative husband would fail to share details of his day with me – there was something wrong. In light of the less than ideal means of communication that we had available to us, I didn’t press the issue, but I was getting increasingly worried about how different he might be when he got home.

When Daniel finally came home in February of 2008, we immediately went on vacation to reconnect. It was during this week away from home that some of the changes that he had undergone while in Cuba began to manifest themselves. One night after dinner, we sat in our hotel room, and he described a litany of things about Christianity that just didn’t make sense to him any more. They weren’t little quirks of denominational practice, though. They were fundamental doctrines of the faith. Although he didn’t quite come out and say it, I realized that night that my devoutly Christian husband had become an atheist. However, at that point, I think that the beliefs that would come to replace his Christian faith were as much a mystery to him as they were to me.

Over the next several months, Daniel gradually shared more about what had been bothering him in Cuba. He was bothered by the contrast between how he was treated by some of his superiors and how he was expected to treat the detainees. He was bothered by the media’s portrayal of the conditions at Guantanamo. He was bothered by the government’s rationale for the detention camp. He was bothered by his association with a place that many people thought of as synonymous with torture. He was bothered by the level of hate that had emanated throughout the camp. In short, he couldn’t help but reflect on the actions on all sides that had created Guantanamo Bay, and he increasingly felt that he couldn’t condone the reasons for those actions.

To say that Daniel was disturbed by his experiences in Cuba is something of an understatement. Toward the end of June or the beginning of July, I remember noticing him laughing. It sounded so good. Why was it such a relief to hear him laugh, I wondered to myself, and then with a start, I realized why. I hadn’t heard him truly laugh since he had come home five months earlier.

Daniel did try to see a military psychiatrist at one point, but since he wasn’t exhibiting any signs of PTSD, it didn’t prove to be helpful. The doctor wasn’t especially interested in talking about possible ethical issues related to the forceful detention of foreign nationals, and since that was what was bothering him, Daniel didn’t make a follow-up appointment. Instead, he was left to sort out his thoughts on his own or with me.

In the year following his return from Cuba, Daniel gradually came to a greater ability to articulate what had struck him as so wrong during his time there. After having abandoned his faith in Christianity as incoherent, inconsistent, and ultimately illogical, he had come to hold natural law as the foundation for his ethical beliefs. As I understand it, the core of natural law is that individuals are naturally entitled to the preservation of their person, property, and liberty insofar as that preservation does not infringe on the equal liberty of others. Roughly, this belief equates to the maxim common to several world religions of, “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” Ultimately, Daniel came to the conclusion that war was morally incompatible with his new beliefs and that his level of distress over his experiences in Cuba was primarily rooted in his gut-level intuition of that fact even prior to his conscious ability to articulate it.

The ethics of natural law have replaced Daniel’s prior belief in Christianity in every demonstrable way that I can think of. Instead of studying the Bible and theological texts, he spends the majority of his time reading authors like John Locke, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Instead of spending time cultivating relationships where he might be able to persuade someone to accept Christ, he talks about the ideas of natural law with anyone seems open to considering them. Instead of considering how he might minister to others, he thinks about how to be involved with the advancement of liberty though financial support of non-profits, attendance at seminars and lectures, and ultimately his long-term career goals. In short, he is just as passionate about his belief in the ethical superiority of natural law as he was about Christianity when I first met him.

Although I have witnessed more closely than anyone the dramatic change of belief that Daniel has undergone in the last two years, I can honestly say that there are some things about him that have not changed. He is still incredibly passionate about what he believes to be right. He is still willing to take a stand for his beliefs even in the face of opposition. Most of all, he still seeks to be a man of integrity, that is, a man whose beliefs and actions are integrated into a consistent whole. It is because of this drive to live as he believes that Daniel has requested to be discharged from the remainder of his military service. I am confident that the beliefs that have led him to conclude that war is immoral are firm, fixed, and sincere. He is a conscientious objector to war, and I believe he ought to be discharged as such.

(signed)

Heather Lakemacher

*The above letter was signed and notarized on May 1, 2009.