Author: mopress

by Susan Van Haitsma,
also posted at the makingpeace blog

On the eve of Veterans Day, four veterans of the Iraq war spoke on a panel at the University of Texas to offer a reality check to the jingoism surrounding most November 11th commemorations. Organized by the student group, CAMEO (Campus Antiwar Movement to End Occupations), the event was designed to echo the Winter Soldier model where veterans of the wars/occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan speak from their own experience about what is happening there. In the months since the first Winter Soldier hearings were held by Iraq Veterans Against the War near Washington DC in March (patterned after the historic hearings by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971), IVAW members have been speaking on regional and local panels across the country, giving Americans more opportunities to hear directly from veterans in their communities.

Are Americans listening? That is the question. The virtual media blackout in the main stream press has been at least partially offset by good reporting among independent and international media, and IVAW itself has accomplished its own publicity through effective web outreach and creative nonviolent direct action. Thanks to student groups like CAMEO and other community sponsorship, veterans’ stories are being aired, and the mainstream can’t claim ignorance. Truth has a way of finding the light of day.

The first of the four panelists to speak on Monday night was Hart Viges, one of my colleagues in the group, Nonmilitary Options for Youth. Hart has taken a strong interest in reaching out to young people who are in the position he was in when he felt the best thing he could do for his country was to take up arms on its behalf. Now, on his army shirt, he wears the Nonmilitary Options logo: a gun with its barrel twisted in a knot. “I’d rather talk to a high school kid than a politician any day,” he says, “because that politician isn’t going to join the military.”

Hart enlisted on Sept. 12, 2001 out of a deep sense of patriotic duty. He trained with the tough Army Airborne, hoping to jump into Iraq the hard way. Instead, he rolled into Iraq on the ground, conducting house raids and setting mortars for “soft targets.” He discovered that the mythical battleground was actually someone’s community. After one tour, Hart came to grips with his beliefs about war, crystallized by his experience of it, and he applied for a discharge as a conscientious objector. He was one of the lucky ones whose claim was approved, and he received an honorable discharge. Since then, Hart has been devoting much time to IVAW, Nonmilitary Options for Youth and the GI Rights Hotline as a telephone counselor. He has spoken widely in the US and abroad and was one of the veterans who testified at the Winter Soldier hearings in March. He also participates in a veterans therapy group at the VA, has taken some college courses and works full-time.

When he talks to high school students about his experience in Iraq, Hart encourages them to see not only the “ground zero effects” of war but also the larger picture, the system that perpetuates war. He talks about the tax dollars that fund it and the mindset that rationalizes it. Students listen because he has been there. “I know that my real tax dollars turn into real bullets that kill real people,” he says. “What I saw over there was a gross misdirection of resources and power.” When he shows students the pie chart showing the billions of federal tax dollars funneled into military spending – money that could easily pay all the college expenses of every college-aged person in the US – he asks them, “What would you rather have – two wars or a completely educated society?”

In some respects, Hart is continuing the mission he began when the Sept. 11th hijackingss spurred his instinct to protect his community with his life. Now, the community he wants to protect extends beyond the borders of one country and encompasses future generations. Instead of using a gun, he’s using his gifts.

Second panelist, Bryan Hannah has been stationed at Ft. Hood, TX and is in the discharge process after applying as a conscientious objector. He spoke primarily about the role of private contractors in the “war on terror,” and the exasperation he feels about the lack of accountability in so many aspects of the war, from the Bush Administration on down. He didn’t describe his own experiences in Iraq, but an excerpt from a blog he writes gives a clue to some of his feelings during a recent training exercise at Ft. Hood:

“I remember the first time I waited in line for my M-16 in basic. I was like a little kid at Christmas time. Now, as I stand here to the side, as everyone draws their weapons for the field, I feel like I’m not here. Seeing people fight to gain position in a line to get their weapons sooner than the next guy, I listen in from my own little world, hearing the mutters of anxious, motivated privates in chorus with the broken vets, loathing the cold black maiden that has broken families and destroyed lives. The ball and chain wrapped around their souls and anchored into a mired existence. Due to my Conscientious Objector packet, I don’t have to carry a weapon and it almost feels like I successfully kicked a habit, or that I might actually separate from the Army one day and begin to heal.”

Bryan also has written for the IVAW publication, “SIT-REP.” In their Memorial Day ’08 issue, he authored an article about soldiers who die of injuries sustained in Iraq whose deaths are not counted in official tallies. He asked, “What about the other casualties of war? The amputees, paraplegics, quadriplegics, people with brain damage and hearing loss, personalities that are permanently changed for the worse, marriages ruined (divorces among officers have risen 300% and enlisted people have a 200% higher divorce rate than before 2003), and children who are messed up by separation from their parents. Is this war worth it? Is any possible success worth the cost?”

Bryan closed his remarks on the panel by saying, “We have to remember that apathy is the dying side of freedom.” That’s a quote for the ages.

Mike Nordstrom, a US Marine, opened his portion of the panel discussion by informing his audience, “Today is the Marine Corps’ birthday: November 10, 1775.” Mike spoke about the difficulties that arise when one of “the few, the proud” is injured and faces the stigma associated with seeking treatment. Mike sustained physical and psychological injuries during his two tours in Iraq but was hesitant to check into the VA because he didn’t want to “take away resources” from vets with injuries that seemed worse than his. He also said that he felt embarrassed using the VA. It took pressure from his family and friends to finally get him in the door. Once there, he dealt with lots of paperwork and long waiting periods for appointments. Now, he meets regularly with a group of other vets at the VA and openly discusses the PTSD that he said is considered a “weakness issue” in the Marines.

Final panelist, Ronn Cantu, discussed in some detail the job he held during his last tour in Iraq as part of a human intelligence team. He feels he can finally speak openly about what he did in Iraq because he has just been discharged this month from the US Army. Ronn described the process he and others in his intelligence unit were ordered to use to “make a citizen into a detainee.” The process involved capitalizing on Iraqi grudges and loyalties and their desperate need for employment and cash. He spoke about the “dual sourced” intelligence they were supposed to gather to incriminate Iraqi men of military age (documenting two information sources for every suspect). “What makes an Iraqi want to turn in another Iraqi? Money and a lot of lying,” he said. Orders would come down to “speed things up,” meaning that higher-ups wanted more detainees, so they “cast the net” wider. He said that the more they had to speed it up, the less often they found the right people. So that numbers could increase, men of military age were rounded up and detained without cause. Ronn also said that he saw evidence of detained men having been beaten, but when he asked about it, he was told that if he didn’t witness the beating, there was nothing he could do about it.

Ronn had already served an enlistment in the army when he was inspired to re-enlist after hearing Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN arguing for an invasion of Iraq. “I bought it, hook, line and sinker,” he said. But, “after the life I took in my first deployment and the deceit in my second, I was done. I wouldn’t be a part of that anymore. I decided human beings weren’t made to treat each other like that.” Ronn did some writing from Iraq, began to speak out more publicly and filed a claim as a conscientious objector, but the military decided to use an administrative discharge. Ronn is relieved to be out, and plans to re-start his college career this spring. “As a 30 year-old, I don’t know how it will be going to school with 19 year-olds,” he says, but he is anxious to get to it. While he’s gathering intelligence in a new way, his classmates will have a lot to learn from him, too.

photos by Susan Van Haitsma

by Susan Van Haitsma
also posted at makingpeace

When Camilo Mejia walked into the auditorium of UT’s Garrison Hall where he was to speak last Thursday night, his first reaction was to shake his head at the large book-cover images of himself that were projected onto screens in front. He’s a humble guy, and self-promotion is not his leaning.

But, he’s on the Resisting Empire speaking tour with the new Haymarket Books publication of The Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia: An Iraq War Memoir, so he was in Austin to promote both the book and the mission of his fellow Iraq Veterans Against the War: immediate and unconditional withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq, adequate care for all veterans and reparations for Iraq.

With his youthful good looks, casual attire and backpack slung over his shoulder, Mejia could have been one of the many students in his audience. But, when he began to speak, his seriousness revealed a deeper level of experience. He invited the five other members of Iraq Veterans Against the War who were present to join him in the front and take questions from the crowd, creating an instant IVAW panel that personified the variety of membership within the rapidly growing organization.

As chair of the board of IVAW, Mejia reported that from 7 original members who organized the group in July 2004, IVAW membership has expanded to about 1400, including the most quickly growing contingent: active duty soldiers. One of the newest chapters formed at Ft. Hood this year.

Mejia stressed the importance of the camaraderie that he and other vets experience through their involvement with IVAW. The sense of shared purpose and belonging mirrors an aspect of military life they value. He also said that in his role with IVAW, he has learned a new sense of what leadership entails: “respect, communication and shared ideals,” rather than leadership based on fear and punishment that he was trained to demonstrate as an army staff sergeant.

Mejia’s primary message is that conscience, not combat, is the source of our freedom. When a soldier is in the midst of combat, it is very difficult to think about moral implications. “You’re under so much pressure; there’s so much fear, so much fatigue.” Soldiers can’t be expected to weigh right and wrong in the middle of a firefight. Drilled in reflexive fire training and armed with powerful weapons, they don’t have to get an order to kill civilians; they’re just thrown into situations where they do it. Mejia said that in the five months he was in Iraq, his unit killed 33 civilians. Only 3 were armed.

Mejia talked about following orders to abuse Iraqi prisoners. He describes this also in the new film, Soldiers of Conscience, a documentary that happened to air in Austin the same night that Mejia spoke here. While in Iraq, Mejia felt conflicted about what he was doing, but it wasn’t until he was home on a two week leave that he had the time and distance to really think about it. “Some people say, ‘once a soldier, always a soldier,’” he says in the film. “Well, once a human being, always a human being.”

Through his interviews, his appearances in documentaries like Soldiers of Conscience and The Ground Truth, his speaking tours and in his own incisive writing, Mejia has modeled what IVAW has been aiming to do as a group through the “Winter Soldier” hearings and panels. As he said in the concluding remarks of the initial Winter Soldier hearings held in March ’08 — now transcribed in a new book (also published by Haymarket Books), Winter Soldier, Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations,

“Iraq Veterans Against the War has become a source of stress to the military brass and to the government … We have become a dangerous group of people not because of our military training, but because we have dared to challenge the official story. We are dangerous because we have dared to share our experiences, to think for ourselves, to analyze and be critical, to follow our conscience, and because we have dared to go beyond patriotism to embrace humanity.”

Winter Soldier testimony from the March hearings can be seen on the IVAW website, and the book can be ordered there, too.

As terrible as it is to hear the testimonies of these veterans, it is even more terrible to have lived the stories, either as a soldier or as an Iraqi or Afghan civilian. As US Marine veteran Anthony Swofford writes in his foreword to Winter Soldier, “Do not turn away from these stories. They are yours, too.”

As I walked home from Mejia’s presentation, I passed the UT tower on which is inscribed the new testament passage, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I passed the Cesar Chavez statue that includes several Chavez quotes, such as “You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore,” and “You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride.”

We don’t turn away from civil rights stories, from freedom movement stories, because they are our stories. Veterans who are using their voices and actions to try to stop war are joining this proud legacy, exchanging weapons for the power of truth. The freedom they are gaining is ours, too.

photo courtesy of Camilo Mejia

by Susan Van Haitsma, also posted at makingpeace

When I attended the presentation at UT on Tuesday evening by Daniel Ellsberg, the concept of freedom of conscience was already on my mind. 

A few days prior, I had gone to a special commemoration of Gandhi’s birthday, where conscience was posed as a religious freedom issue by one of the speakers, a local war tax resister.  Souvenir bookmarks containing Gandhi quotes were distributed around the tables, and the one I happened to pick up read, “In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.”

Then, over the weekend, an inaugural conference was held in Austin, organized chiefly by the pastor and congregation of the Austin Mennonite Church.  The National Assembly to Honor Freedom of Conscience featured guest speakers Walter Wink (noted theologian and nonviolence trainer), Gene Stoltzfus (former director of Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Ann Wright, whose book, Dissent:  Voices of Conscience was published this year and includes a foreword by Daniel Ellsberg.  Conference panelists included conscientious objectors and GI resisters whose stories parallel those in Wright’s book.

Ann Wright spoke also at a book signing event at BookWoman on Monday, where matters of conscience, government, law, risk, family and the military were discussed by those present, including, again, several conscientious objectors.  The week seemed to come full circle with Ellsberg’s Austin appearance the following evening.

In conjunction with a UT conference planned for the coming weekend, Ellsberg was asked to compare what was happening in 1968 with what is happening now.  He packed a lot in – dates, names, places and people – while his primary message echoed what I had heard all week: truth can free us from war. 

Ellsberg did not talk much about the tragedies and tumult of 1968, but rather focused on what he saw and experienced as a government insider.   “1968 is a year I don’t like to relive,” he admitted.  He spent most of his time describing events leading up to that year, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the tangled web that was spun from it and later documented in the Pentagon Papers.  Ellsberg also recounted something about the less tangible factors that led to the escalation of the Indochina War – the human strengths and frailties of the political and military actors at that time, including him.

Ellsberg spoke with an intense clarity of memory, recounting the details of who said what when, what they probably meant and what they probably did or didn’t know at the time.  I sensed that in spite of the strange mix of pariah/hero status he attained following the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, he still is proud of the insider position he once held and perhaps even misses the feeling of closeness that resulted from being loyal to powerful people and knowing their secrets.  In fact, he said that being called a traitor is something he has never gotten used to.

In his talk, Ellsberg didn’t fully explain his inner change of heart, the private crisis of conscience that led him to shift from personal loyalty to the president and joint chiefs of staff to a more abstract loyalty to the Constitution and international law.  But, as he wrote in an article in Harpers in 2006 (quoted by UT’s Evan Carton during his introduction of Ellsberg),

“I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of the president’s secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a president’s man depended). I’m not proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm’s way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath ‘to support and uphold.’  It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution.”

More about the role of conscience in Ellsberg’s moral conflict can be found in a passage I read about ten years ago in Daniel Hallock’s collection of writings and interviews, Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak. The book includes an interview with Ellsberg in which he recalls these pivotal personal events in 1968 and ’69:

“Now, two things affected my life at that point.  I’d been reading Gandhi since the spring of ’68, when I happened to meet people from the Quaker Action group at a conference in Princeton.  I had gone there to study counter-revolution, and they were there as nonviolent revolutionaries.  So I started reading MLK, Stride Toward Freedom, and Barbara Deming, who wrote an essay called Revolution and Equilibrium.  I read and reread many times a book by Joan Bondurant called The Conquest of Violence, on Gandhian thought, which converted me very strongly, very impressively.

Then, in late August 1969 I went to a conference of the War Resisters League – they were founded by World War I CO’s; Einstein was once their honorary president – and in the course of this conference I was induced to go to a vigil for somebody who was going to prison for draft resistance, which was a very unusual thing for me to be doing.  There I was, standing in the street outside the Philadelphia post office, passing out leaflets.  This was not the sort of thing the GSA Team did.  It seemed, you know, rather undignified – giving away your influence and your access in such a ridiculous way, just handing out leaflets like a bum.

Then, at the end of this conference, I met another young man, Randy Kehler, a Harvard college graduate who had gone on to Stanford but then stopped his studies to work for the War Resisters League.  He gave a talk and at the end he announced that he was also on his way to prison for refusal to cooperate with the draft.  And this came to me as a total shock.  It just hit me that it was a terrible thing for my country that the best he and so many others could do was go to prison.  I went to the men’s room and just sat on the floor and cried for about an hour and thought, ‘My country has come to this?  We’re eating our young.  We’re relying on them, to end the war and to fight the war?’  And I felt it was up to me.  I was older.  I was thirty-eight.  It was up to us older people to stop the war.”

Ellsberg realized his tool was information and his sacrifice was the loss of his insider position and a risk, like that of the draft resister, of imprisonment.  MLK’s April 4, 1967 admonition, “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” gained special meaning for him.

Ellsberg feels we are in a similarly critical time now.  It’s a time that calls for greater risk-taking.   He said that Obama, for example, could risk standing against an escalation of the Iraq war into Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Links ought to be made between the economic crisis and the war. “Can we afford to murder people at this cost indefinitely?” is the question we must ask, he says.  He pointed out that in the five years after 1968 – when the Indochina war had lost almost all popular support, four times as many bombs were dropped in Southeast Asia as were dropped prior to 1968.  He fears the same kind of enlargement of war could easily happen again.  “Power doesn’t learn from history,” he said.  “Power follows its own dictates; power doesn’t give up its power.”

Ellsberg concluded, “This country needs to advance in another direction.”   Directed by conscience and moved by the acts of conscience of others, people can change course.  His life is a case in point.  Truth can stand up to power, and a bum with a leaflet can change the course of history.

photo from Wall Street action by arts group, “The Critical Voice,”  Oct. 7, 08.  Photo courtesy of CodePink                            

By Susan Van Haitsma

September 21 is International Day of Peace, a day established by the General Assembly of the United Nations for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace within and among all nations and people.”    UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon  has urged all combatants to honor the day by standing down from battle.   “I call for a day of global ceasefire:  A 24-hour respite from the fear and insecurity that plague so many places,” he stated on this date last year.  “I urge all countries and all combatants to honor a cessation of hostilities.  I urge them to ponder the high price that we all pay because of conflict.  I urge them to vigorously pursue ways to make this temporary ceasefire permanent.”

What is peace?  Is it a temporary condition between periods of conflict?  A worthy but unattainable ideal?  Just a hope, or a dream?

Peace is not as elusive as that.  It has a future because it has a past and present.  Peace is not so much a goal as a process.  As the great nonviolent organizer, A.J. Muste famously said, “There is no way to peace.  Peace is the way.” 

Peace is not the absence of conflict — it’s a way through it.  Because we humans are always going to be in conflict in some form or another, making peace means actively addressing – not running from — conflict and injustice, while using nonviolent methods.  The choice is always available.   

Some forms of peacemaking are so common that most people do it just like breathing.  It’s the smile of affirmation, the word of encouragement, the humor that eases tension, the candid statement that clears the air.  It’s the community garden, the guitar lesson, the basketball game.   We make peace a hundred times a day because it’s the natural thing to do.

Peacemaking is also a discipline.  We can make conscious decisions to refrain from gossip or name-calling, learn how to apologize, let go of a grudge, and firmly and respectfully stand up to bullying.  Nonviolence, at its best, involves confronting an adversary while simultaneously preserving the adversary’s dignity. 

People using principled nonviolence catch courage from one another.  Like the father who forgives the man who murdered his daughter and then visits him in prison, the unarmed peace team that intercedes between armed militias, the former gang member who talks kids out of retaliatory violence, the soldier who refuses to return to war.      

Peacemaking is done spontaneously or may be strategically planned – and is often both.  Actions may be immediate responses to overt violence or symbolic acts that address root causes of injustice.  Methods include civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and creative intervention.  Like the elderly woman who is first to crawl under the barricade, the young people who sit in the road to halt business as usual, the cellist who plays Bach in the middle of a besieged town square, the student who faces down the rolling tanks.      

The more we know about nonviolence, the more likely we are to use it.  If media reports about people who commit violence dominate the news at the same time that nonviolent actions are ignored or minimized, what message does this convey, especially to young people who want to be heard?

I’m not convinced that violence sells the news, but I do think that the news sells violence, and it doesn’t have to. 

I’d like to see what would happen if, even just for one day, like a Global Day of Ceasefire, all major media outlets around the world directed their journalists, photographers and videographers to document the ways people are choosing  active nonviolence in the face of conflict, terror and injustice.  Inspiration is contagious.   A temporary ceasefire could become permanent.