Army surrenders: Marc Hall free, discharge announced!
Soldier
jailed for rap lyrics Is discharged Until April 17, US Army Spc. Marc Hall sat in a military brig at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, facing an imminent court-martial for challenging the US military’s stop-loss policy in a song. Saturday morning, Spc. Hall was granted a discharge by the military. On December 17, 2009, Hall was jailed for writing a song about the personal impact of being forced to remain in the military beyond the scope of his contract by the stop-loss policy. Stop-loss is a practice that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders, despite public pledges by President Barack Obama to phase out the policy. Hall's song included lyrics the Army claimed were veiled threats of violence. He was charged with five specifications in violation of Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, two of those for wrongfully communicating a threat based on song lyrics. Article 134 is a vague rule that outlaws anything "to the prejudice of good order and discipline." Lyrics included Hall saying he may "go Fort Hood," a reference to the mass shooting at Fort Hood on November 5, which prosecutors for the Army claimed was a threat of violence.
According to Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist, an Oakland-based organization dedicated to supporting military objectors like Hall, he was not jailed for the song, but was instead jailed "in retaliation for his formal complaint of inadequate mental health services available to him at Fort Stewart. The Army used an angry song that Spc. Hall, a combat veteran of the Iraq War suffering from post-traumatic stress, had produced criticizing the stop-loss policy as the pretext." What put the 34-year-old New York City native in the brig were, according to Paterson, Hall’s persistent assertions of inadequate mental health care that culminated in a December 7 complaint to the Army Investigator General. Just five days after that, Hall was charged with violating "good order and discipline" at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and was shipped out of the country for a court martial in Kuwait. |
To the hundreds who wrote letters and donated
to his defense, Marc shared via phone from Kuwait, "Thank you, thank you
for all of your love and support!" 
"I explained to [my first
sergeant] that the hardcore rap song was a
free expression of how people
feel about the Army and its stop-loss
policy," Hall said at the time.
"I explained that the song was neither a
physical threat nor any threat
whatsoever. I told him it was just
hip-hop."
