Sara Rubin here to say thank you to all of you who have served in the United States armed forces. The potential ask—that you risk your own life for your country—is for many people unfathomably big.
But for many people, including Justin Loza of Monterey, it comes naturally. Coming of age in a post-9/11 world, Loza, who is now 38, was motivated by a sense of patriotism to enlist in the U.S. Air Force at 18 when he graduated from high school in Aptos. “Our patriotism was just off the charts,” he recalls. “I just wanted to serve and help get those terrorists.”
Loza, a mechanic and command post technician, served in California, New Jersey and Mississippi, and was also deployed to Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates. He did not ask questions out loud during his service, but he started thinking them while reading The One Percent Doctrine, a 2006 book documenting then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s belief that even a tiny chance of harm to the United States justified the War on Terror. Loza wasn’t so sure.
He got out of the military and launched a successful career in IT. But his frustrations as a veteran kept mounting and in 2016, when President Donald Trump was first elected, he joined Veterans for Peace, an organization he had once been taught to view with suspicion. He became the president of Chapter 46, and since last year, has organized regular, monthly protests outside of Naval Support Activity Monterey. He’s also a regular co-organizer of protests at Window on the Bay, with messages about a variety of military conflicts from Israel to Venezuela, and now Iran.
“There’s no serious, immediate threat to us. It just seems like we don’t have to go through this,” he says of Iran.
And it is personal; he served at the Al Dhafra base in the UAE that has been hit with Iranian weapons.
As Loza’s local leadership role has grown during the Trump administration, so too has his confidence. His frustration about the war in Iran motivated him to participate in an action last week, on Monday, April 20, in Washington, D.C. He joined some 150 other veterans on Capitol Hill in the Cannon Building of the House of Representatives for a protest organized by VFP along with About Face and other groups.
Just a few minutes after they took over the space, standing in rows, he was one of 66 arrested by Capitol Police. (Loza describes it as orderly and respectful. “For the most part, they were nice,” he says.) He and the others paid $50 for citations and were released.
“This definitely felt different [than other protests],” Loza says. “It was really serious and heavy. I thought about [the risk of getting arrested] a lot ahead of time. This was one I was willing to do because of how serious it is in Iran…
“I think it can help move the needle, even a little bit. I feel like I am actually doing something.”
I asked Loza if he still feels patriotic, 20-plus years after he enlisted. “I am standing up for the country, absolutely, 100 percent,” he says.