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Iraq: Hot News and History

2011-12-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

“Crisis plagues Iraq as U.S. troops depart -- As the last U.S. soldiers exited Iraq Sunday and debate was raging about the nation's future, political crisis erupted in Baghdad that raised fears of more sectarian strife to come. Iraqiya, a powerful political bloc that draws support largely from Sunni and more secular Iraqis, said it was boycotting parliament, a move that threatens to shatter Iraq's fragile power-sharing government.” – CNN 12/18/11

“As US troops exit Iraq, Maliki moves against Sunni rivals -- Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, briefly arrested the Sunni vice president yesterday and has urged a vote of no confidence against the Sunni deputy premier.” – McClatchy Newspapers/Christian Science Monitor 12/19/11

“Iraqi Kurds maneuver in political minefield -- Iraqi Kurds, at odds with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over oil and power, have thrown down another challenge to the Shi'ite-led central government by giving refuge to Iraq's Sunni Muslim vice-president, despite a Baghdad warrant for his arrest.” – Reuters/Chicago Tribune 12/29/11

Long before the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was set up in the Pentagon to establish democracy in Baghdad, on just eight weeks notice before President Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion was launched, the British empire had a plan to make Iraq the very model of a modern democratic state.

The failure of British colonial administrators to plant a viable parliament in the Cradle of Civilization in a tumultuous 12-year effort (1920-32) should have been a sobering lesson to those running the American campaign, British historian Toby Dodge warned in a book published amid American self-congratulations on quickly overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime. In his timely book on the origins of Iraq—Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (Columbia University Press, 2003)—published amid daily news bulletins of violent attacks on “postwar” U.S. military patrols, Dodge shows how terribly relevant history can be.

Carved out of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Iraq was a British invention, a cobbling together of disparate desert tribes who were to be molded into a “modern” state. When the natives resisted, the reformers dispatched by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and other leading lights in London unleashed a deadly new device and bombed rural villages. “The British in Iraq in the 1920s, because of a lack of finance and soldiers, came to rely heavily on the coercive power of airplanes. Governance was delivered from two hundred feet, in the shape of regular bombing and machine-gun fire,” Dodge notes.

Now here’s the capsule lesson for Americans too busy reforming Iraq to read a history book:

“The Iraqis of the 1920s were deeply suspicious of British motives. Through violence and political mobilization, they forced the colonial power to leave much sooner than they had anticipated,” Dodge writes. “Ultimately, however, it was the way the British understood Iraqi society that came to undermine their attempt to build a stable state. British colonial administrators…set about devolving power to indigenous Iraqis they believed had social influence. Resources were channeled through those individuals in the hope that they could guarantee social order at the lowest possible cost. The resulting state was built on extremely shallow social foundations. The governments that inherited the state after independence had, like the British before them, to resort to high levels of violence and patronage to keep the population from rising up and unseating them.”

The ink on Dodge’s book was barely dry and The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Nov. 2, 2003 titled “Who Botched the Occupation?” Journalist David Rieff noted: “What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored.”

In Toby Dodge’s view, the parallels between British and American occupations of Iraq are hauntingly similar in their hubris. “The British did not mean to undermine the nascent Iraqi state. But, hobbled by an ideologically distorted view of Iraqi society and facing financial and political limits, they did,” he writes. “The United States in Iraq today must understand that it is both living with the consequences of that failure and is in danger of repeating it.”

As the US military ceremoniously hauled down its flags and staged its last conveys from its last base in Iraq, American historian Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel whose son died in the fighting in Iraq, summed up the dissenting view on the war that the vast majority of the American people came to embrace, despite the still simmering bout of war fever in Washington:

“Yet few of those defenders have demonstrated the moral courage—or is it simple decency—to consider who paid and what was lost in securing Saddam's removal,” Bacevich wrote in an essay posted recently on the CNN World website. “That tally includes well over four thousand U.S. dead along with several tens of thousands wounded and otherwise bearing the scars of war; vastly larger numbers of Iraqi civilians killed, maimed, and displaced; and at least a trillion dollars expended—probably several times that by the time the last bill comes due decades from now. Recalling that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda both turned out to be all but non-existent, a Churchillian verdict on the war might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.”

Writing the Way Home

2011-12-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

Across America, a special gift is arriving at numerous homes this week. This gift is a new book by Warrior Writers titled After Action Review: A Collection of Writing and Artwork by Veterans of the Global War on Terror.

What makes this book decidedly different from so many other gifts this holiday season is three-fold: its handcrafted artistry by young men and women who turned sleepless nights and troubled days into making art with hands that for too long held war weapons; its funding by dozens of supporters who collectively chipped in thousands of dollars to pay for the printing and postage; and its timing—published just as the war in Iraq was officially declared over and the last US military units departed that war-savaged land.

Here at home, a great many veterans of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are trying to turn off unrelenting war memories. Some try chasing off nightmares with hard drinking, drugs, death-defying lifestyles. Some find nothing seems to work. As Zach LaPorte, a former Army Ranger who served twice in Iraq, writes in a poem titled “Spliced”:

My life is like a slide show, spliced with images of the desert.
Mom asks me if I like the potatoes,
     A woman shrieks from a bloodied mouth.
My Professor hands me an exam paper,
     I’m riding in the door of a Blackhawk.
I walk alone at night past neon signs,
     Crimson tracers snap so close you could touch.
I sit in my air-conditioned cubicle,
     The blood in my brain boils.
The scars run deeper than they appear.

LaPorte’s poem is a troubling, yet heartening example of what the Warriors Writers project and this anthology are about: writing war images and injuries out, releasing them to the light of day, shared with those who care, aired to help heal hidden torments that long ago were called “soldier’s heart.”

"It's hard to overestimate how writing can heal long scarred over wounds that every veteran inevitably has,” Josiah White, a former Marine who was wounded by a suicide bomber, writes in a quote displayed on the back cover. “These stories and poems also have the power of communicating a near impossible message to non-veterans, those hurt by war, those hurt by tragedy, anyone who has ever suffered and asked the question ‘why?’ No one will read this book and come away unchanged."

With the 10-year war in Afghanistan still raging and flailing dangerously into Pakistan, this book raises veterans’ concerns that extend far beyond the mission in Iraq that just ended. In the Foreword, Brian Turner—author of one of the first poetry books to come out of the war in Iraq, Here, Bullet—writes that the works in this anthology “seem to suggest that we would be wise to take stock of where we are now, as a country.”

Many of the pieces in this collection by more than 60 contributors focus on an incident that triggered disconcerting change in perspective in the midst of military life. In a poem titled “Happy Birthday,” Zachariah Dean writes about suddenly realizing he just turned 26 as death whizzes by in the middle of a firefight in Afghanistan in which his rifle is jammed by a defective bullet. Scrambling to fix the rifle, it hits him how carelessly he’s led his life to end up in such a desperate jam. "I wrote this in a hurry in a machine gun turret several nights later,” he notes in the poem, stunned by the surreal experience. “Try to burn it out of memory by putting it on paper…"

Others focus on trying to find a thread that may bring deeply sought change for the better in a veteran’s life. In a sardonic welcome home for himself and other veterans, Garett Reppenhagen wrote in a poem titled “Black Out Drive”:

“Heeeey, welcome home brother.”
Just grip that wheel hero.
Stay alert, stay alive.
The real war has just started,
Your fight to survive.

Jacob George, who served three tours in Afghanistan with the Army, reaches out to fellow Americans in a poem titled “Support the Troops”:

don’t thank me for what I’ve done

give me a big hug
and let me know
we’re not going to let this happen again
because we support the troops
and we’re gonna bring these wars to an end

Unlike collections of writings by warriors of previous wars, women veterans take a prominent role in this anthology. Air Force veteran Kristina Vogt captures the bizarre military bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that she describes as, from a female perspective, creating “the womb of the WoMD” (weapons of mass destruction)—the official reason for invading Iraq, which became as illusive as a desert mirage.

“I am the savage,” writes Emily Yates, who served two combat tours in Iraq, describing bursting into “proud homes” looking for elusive enemies, where women and children “stand in the doorway with fearful faces,” while she the armed American soldier wields “the weapon of ignorance … the shield of arrogance,” speaking with “the voice of entitlement….”

Former Army sergeant Robynn Murray, in a poem titled “Eviscerated,” throws the disillusionment of serving in terrorizing raids on Iraqi civilians directly at war supporters back home:

I am your walking wounded broken toy soldier,
and your flag is burning and all your yellow ribbons have fallen down.
I cut open these festers to force your eyes to see the truth so damn it, LOOK!
Look at what has become of me, of us.

I will gladly reopen these wounds if there is change that will come of it.
So that no one else receives these scars. …

Woven throughout the poetry and essays in this collection is an arresting gallery of often startling artwork. These include an American flag made of bullet casings (“Bullet Flag” by Lars Ekstrom); a toy soldier inside a prescription bottle (“Trapped” by Malachi Muncy); and a drawing of a walking skeleton with flaming oil derricks crowning the skull (“Greed Walks” by Eric Estenzo).

Many of the works in this book address post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Chantelle Bateman, a Marine veteran of Iraq, writes about “anger is the color I sometimes paint the town with … louder than incoming and the sirens they play when I hit the deck … I’m just a pile of tears needing to punch you”. Another former Marine, Jon Turner, punches at everything in sight in Iraq and back home in a string of explosive, insightful, drunken, cold sober images of human encounters, rejections, attempts at reaching out that ends with these lines:

In the unwritten letters and poems—
are the hidden faces of war

Several pieces reach breathtakingly out of inner turmoil to find an uplifting path. “I desire to trust life,” writes former Marine Liam Madden, “to cultivate my unique and needed gifts/Loving with abandon/ I intend to weave a web of gratitude into my community.” His poem “Intention” is the first in the book, followed by a wide array of perspectives drawn from a decade of war. The last poem is called “Brio,” in which Army veteran Maggie Martin, who served twice in Iraq, joins others in various civic actions:

I sow community in re-acquisitioned places,
Crowded city street, marching orders, protest song,
Our hands and mouths’ unsinkable strength.
…
Old constructs crumble and blow away,
new consciousness takes root.

The concluding section showcases photos of veterans at Warrior Writers workshops in cities around the country, accompanied by a quote by Eli Wright, a former Army combat medic: "I used to write before I went to Iraq, but when I got over there, I wasn't able to write. So through Warrior Writers I have been able to slowly begin to find my words again and share my experiences and what happened over there. It's been a healing experience."

The nearly 200-page anthology was compiled and edited by Lovella Calica, the director of Warrior Writers, which is based in Philadelphia, PA, with the assistance of a number of contributors and supporters. I aided the project as an advisor and copy editor. The book was artfully designed by Rachel McNeill, an Army veteran who included thought-provoking photos shot on patrols in Iraq by herself and others. A series of drawings and paintings titled “Dust Works” by Army National Guard veteran Aaron Hughes provides a visual theme of roads through war on the cover and throughout the book.

After Action Review (paperback, $20) is the third in a series of anthologies of writing and art by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans published by Warrior Writers, and is available at www.warriorwriters.org.

Happy Holidays

2011-12-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

PEACE ON EARTH

Artwork on this greeting card was designed by Walt Nygard, a fellow Vietnam veteran; typesetting on the back is by Eli Wright, an Iraq war vet.

The cards were handmade and printed by Walt, Eli and me at the Printmaking Center

of New Jersey as part of a Combat Paper workshop.

A Commitment to Uncovering Local Environmental Issues

2011-12-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

toxic sites map/North Jersey.com

The headlines in a recent newspaper series unveiled a shocking story: “DEP let poison flow for decades” … “North Jersey riddled with failed cleanups” … “Desperate to move, but bound to stay; Residents say homes in Superfund site are worthless.”

Got your attention? That’s the intent of the “Toxic Landscape” series that The Record, a daily newspaper in northern New Jersey, has instituted as an on-going investigative look at industrial contamination lingering in local communities in its coverage area. Here’s the opening salvo in a three-part expose by Record environmental writer Scott Fallon that burst from the front pages recently:

A highly toxic industrial chemical has been spreading under a Garfield neighborhood for almost three decades, slowly seeping into homes and threatening the health of thousands.

Residents live in fear that hexavalent chromium is infiltrating their basements, that their families could get cancer and that their property values have been destroyed.

And state officials allowed it all to happen.

What occurred in Garfield over the course of 28 years is a story of an environmental oversight system that failed the people it was supposed to protect. In instance after instance, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection showed poor judgment, lax enforcement and bureaucratic indifference to an emerging public health threat…

After detailing the spreading contamination through groundwater under an urban neighborhood and the startling lack of government action even after a city firehouse was closed in 1993 due to the hazardous substance seeping into the basement, Fallon’s report widened the scope of the problem to encompass many more communities:

“Garfield is one of the more egregious examples of failed environmental oversight. But all over North Jersey there are botched cleanups caused by questionable decisions, bureaucratic indifference or both,” Fallon wrote. "’There are Garfields in literally every corner of this state,’ said Robert Spiegel, head of Edison Wetlands, an environmental advocacy group. ‘The system for cleaning thousands of sites has been dysfunctional, chaotic, and it just doesn’t work,’" Fallon’s report added, after listing a number of failed, incomplete or barely ever started contamination investigations and cleanups in North Jersey towns that have been periodically in and out of the news.

The back story behind this unusual newspaper series—which began last year with a detailed examination of unfinished cleanups at several federal Superfund sites across the region—is a recognition by The Record’s editors and publisher that hazardous waste cleanups habitually stall when there’s no on-going, in depth news coverage.

That realization was crystallized by a previous investigative series in 2005 called “Toxic Legacy,” which showed how the US Environmental Protection Agency allowed Ford Motor Company to claim it had cleaned up a toxic waste dump in the late 1980s in Ringwood, NJ. The newspaper investigation, which I participated in as a reporter, uncovered the fact that the officially approved cleanup barely scratched the surface of buried mounds of lead-based paint sludge and other potentially cancer-causing contamination that local residents, environmental groups and newspaper reporters found and made public.

A far more substantial cleanup has taken place since that investigative series, with every step reported by local newspapers, sometimes bird-dogged by national news organizations and further exposed to a wide television audience by a documentary shown on HBO titled “Mann v. Ford,” after the name of a lawsuit by residents of the affected residential area.

Yet, despite the residents’ lawsuit, the renewed cleanup in Ringwood stalled once the initial flurry of news coverage subsided. Record editors then expanded the “Toxic Legacy” coverage into on-going, frequent update reports published under the same label.

“The [initial] story was about the government’s failure to live up to its promise,” Tim Nostrand, The Record’s editor for investigative projects, told a gathering in September at Columbia University’s Journalism School that honored new and past winners of the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment. The “Toxic Legacy” investigative team led by Nostrand won the 2006 Grantham Prize, among a number of other national journalism awards.

Once congratulations on winning major awards are collected, news organizations usually ease off covering that topic and move on. But Record editors found their readers appreciated the “Toxic Legacy” coverage. And they found that government officials slipped back into old habits once that coverage eased off. “We did a five-year look back and found history repeating itself. We’re now staying on top of that,” Nostrand added in his account of how one investigative project morphed into a long-term commitment.

On top of reporting every new twist and turn in the Ringwood Superfund site case, six years after publishing a series that shook up the EPA, Record editors have assigned municipal reporters to dig into environmental contamination issues in the towns they cover, Nostrand told the audience of award-winning journalists, journalism professors and students at Columbia. Previously, as was my experience during a more than 20-year career at The Record, municipal reporters often ignored environmental issues unless they were prepared to wrangle with editors to provide time from the relentless pressure to file daily news stories in order to dig into often complex, hidden contamination problems.

The latest in The Record’s remarkable “Toxic Landscape” local reports rolled out this week. The first day’s headline conveyed a double drum-roll: “DPW cleanup tab put at $200,000; Decades-old pollution ‘ignored’ mayor says.” And thus residents of Dumont, NJ were told about the mounting costs of inaction by local officials and the state environmental protection agency in dealing with contamination from leaking gasoline storage tanks at the municipal Department of Public Works property dating back to the 1980s.

A Dumont Borough Council subcommittee trying to get to the bottom of why nothing was done, despite a DEP order in 1992 to do a cleanup, got some astounding responses, Record reporter Rebecca D. O’Brien found. A former councilman who served in 2004-2009 said “We never discussed any issues of any gasoline spills or any contamination down at that site,” O’Brien reported in her second-day article.

Another former councilman who served in 2003-2008 put this kind of investigative story into glaring perspective, when he testified that “he didn’t even know about the DPW contamination until he read about it in the newspaper,” O’Brien added.

So that readers can follow the newspaper’s probing into the tangled, toxic mess underlying much of the Garden State, The Record offers on its web site a special projects section titled “Toxic Landscape: Tracking contaminated sites in North Jersey,” which provides interactive maps and hotlinks to an extensive list of investigative articles on local contamination sites.

For more information:
http://www.northjersey.com/specialreports/full/toxiclandscape.html

What Would Woody Say?

2011-12-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

Sharleen Leahey (center) in concert

“Woody Guthrie spoke plain

About deportees and dust bowl days…

So what would Woody write?

Right now in these hard times”

That’s the sobering, yet enticing question that activist-songwriter Sharleen Leahey raises in her new CD collection, entitled “Rumors of Peace.” What would the “Poet of the People” who sang about plain folks’ hard lives during the Great Depression make of America today? With dobro, fiddle and guitar pickin’, reelin’ and strummin’ bluegrass, folk, country and gospel airs, Leahey offers her take on the times in a foot-thumping tribute to Guthrie.

“Now it’s time to speak plain

About bailed-out bankers having their way

While families are forced to move

People sick and tired of being attacked

Are standing up trying to fight back…

But the boss is getting richer as we go broke

They’re taking our jobs and our homes and our hope

Say Woody…has that much really changed?”

In a song titled “Corporate News,” she lambasts “CNN & Fox – talking heads who shock/ Fair & balanced they declare/ Dissenting voices kicked off the air.” Leahey lets loose, knowing she won’t be invited to appear on any mainstream television talk show any time soon. And neither will anyone else who doesn’t improve the corporate bottom line. Her chorus line to that damning fact goes: “And you know the rich men break the rules/ And oooh how they pull the wool/ And they think we’re fools/ Democracy is what we lack/ Free speech has been hijacked.”

So like Woody Guthrie, she takes what she’s got to say to people at the grassroots, singing at peace demonstrations, teach-ins, conferences, fairs, coffeehouses, bookstores, libraries, museums, churches. Sharleen Leahey, who grew up in New York City and now lives in suburban New Jersey, gets around with her guitar and her protest songs to places where the corporate-branded and approved entertainers on TV talk and squawk shows haven’t a clue as to what’s going on.

Here’s how she prefaced a recent performance at a small-town event: “Before singing ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ she said Mr. Guthrie wrote the song as an ‘anti-God Bless America’ song because he didn’t like how ‘God Bless America’ says God blesses the United States, but not other countries,” noted a news story in The Cranbury (NJ) Press in August. “‘Woody was defined by the Great Depression,’ she said. ‘He was one of us, a hard worker. He was an activist.’”

Other songs on her new CD address a vision for peace in the Middle East (Jerusalem – a cover written by Steve Earle), embracing the wonders of Nature (Wonder) and opening to personal and planetary change (Direction). A photo caption for her receiving, in July, a Peace Patriot Award from the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, NJ succinctly captured her song writing spirit: “For many years Sharleen has organized and performed at countless rallies, vigils and events to call attention to our urgent need to end our nation’s wars and occupations overseas and address our crises here at home.”

A couple of generations back, that kind of talk would have gotten a songwriter summoned to a grilling by the House Un-American Activities Committee. These days, it’s an invitation to join a picket line at the White House—as Leahey did at a recent Occupy Washington protest march.

For more information:

www.sharleensongs.net

At the Movies: Rising Up Down South

2011-11-23T01:13:00.000-08:00

The myriad marches, sit-ins, camp-ins and other protest demonstrations sweeping across America these days didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Such actions against entrenched injustice were honed in the civil rights movement that shook up authorities in the 1950s and 1960s. That movement energized and inspired a groundswell of grassroots movements against the war in Vietnam, for women’s liberation from stultifying traditions, against environmental destruction and for safer working conditions, among other heated issues of the time.

For those who’ve forgotten or never knew what that earlier era of dissent was about, I’d recommend viewing You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South, a documentary by Lucy Massie Phenix that’s just been re-released on DVD. This is the story of a nonviolent uprising that effectively challenged racial discrimination laws, night-riding Ku Klux Klan gunmen, police who beat African American citizens trying to register to vote, blatant dumping of industrial waste into water supply streams and other arrogantly authoritarian customs of the time in southern states still clinging—a century later—to calcified attitudes of the post-Civil War era.

“This film brought me face to face again with some of the people I most admire, those 'ordinary,' 'plainfolks’ people who see the wrong that exists so clearly they can't rest without doing something about it,” Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, said of this film. The black and white activists profiled in the film are down to earth, still feisty despite advancing age, and memorably articulate about what spurred them into action.

“There comes a time when people stop thinking about what happened to them and start thinking about what they are going to make happen,” said a woman involved in the civil rights movement, which repeatedly took a beating in sit-ins, marches, bus rides and bus boycotts until federal laws were changed and Southern states elected a different assortment of public officials—many of whom today are African Americans, whose ancestors were denied the right to vote.

“I learned that you don’t quit when you’re denied—you keep on going and try something else,” said another protest organizer, who banded together with fed-up neighbors and backpacking college students in an effort to save a landmark mountain in Kentucky from being deforested, blasted and bulldozed into a massive strip mine for coal.

“We can’t leave it up to somebody else to save it. We’ve got to. We’ve got to say ‘no more,’” said a third activist who helped lead a community revolt against the dumping of hazardous chemical wastes in a remote Appalachian corner of Tennessee.

The DVD of Phenix’s 1985 documentary was recently released by Milliarium Zero, a New Jersey based distributor of independent American and foreign art films and social issues documentaries. With an eye on attracting the current generation of students and teachers, the DVD version “memorializes the 50th anniversary of the Albany Movement — a landmark in the history of American civil rights activism — which was led by students, including Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder of the a cappella group Sweet Honey In the Rock and a nationwide leader for human rights) who appears in the film,” notes the distributors.

As the documentary shows through period film clips, photos, folk songs and flashbacks by an array of participants, challenging authority to change from protecting exploitative practices to championing democratic improvements on the premise of the Declaration of Independence has a deeply inspirational, illustrative history in this country.

For more information:

http://www.milestonefilms.com/movie.php/ygtm/

http://www.yougottomove.com/main.html

Planting a Peace Pole

2011-11-18T05:38:00.001-08:00

Jules Orkin and Puffin Peace Pole

Dedicating a Peace Pole at a community cultural center in Teaneck, NJ drew a small crowd of local officials, school children and war veterans the other day.

The carved wood pole was dedicated at the Puffin Foundation, as a band from Thomas Jefferson Middle School played and adults took turns exhorting the students and a television audience via a cable news program to help advance a cause that is often hard to hear in a nation engaged in seemingly perpetual war in various corners of the world.

“A world without war is a universal desire by untold millions of people,” Puffin Foundation Executive Director Gladys Miller-Rosenstein said on behalf of herself and her husband Perry Rosenstein, a retired industrialist and noted philanthropist. “We have sought to have our voices for peace heard. We have erected a ‘Peace Pole’ on our property. This pole will be shared by many young and old, who will take part in the varied cultural activities at our Forum. … There are presently 264 peace sites throughout New Jersey. We are proud to be one of the new sites in our state.”

“This is a community peace pole,” added Neil Rosenstein, vice president of the Puffin Foundation. “Peace is only achieved through community.” One of the community leaders, School Superintendent Barbara Pinsak, praised the Rosensteins—whose foundation assists local and regional arts programs, conservation and environmental education programs, as well as social action and investigative journalism projects—as role models.

“This is one of the things I am very proud to welcome to Teaneck,” said state Senator Loretta Weinberg, a well-known champion for a substantial agenda of domestic issues. “May peace prevail on Earth,” she said, quoting the message on the pole, which is printed in eight languages. “It is not an easy goal. It’s a long struggle.”

The idea of planting a peace pole at the Puffin Foundation, which hosts an eclectic collection of outdoors sculpture, was proposed by Jules Orkin, a member of Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21 New Jersey. A retired bookstore owner from neighboring Bergenfield, Orkin was named a Puffin Peace Fellow earlier this year in recognition of his participation in numerous peace walks, vigils and civil disobedience actions in protest of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his comments, Orkin proposed organizing “a walk between peace poles,” such as the annual walk in neighboring Leonia between peace poles at the high school and the Methodist Church to mark the United Nations International Day of Peace. And then he was off to pack for a peace walk from Atlanta, Georgia to Ft. Benning, Georgia to protest the training program based there for military officers from Latin American nations that until recently were bastions of military dictatorships.

Walt Nygard, vice president of Veterans For Peace Chapter 21, spoke about transforming Veterans Day to the original, peacemaking intent of Armistice Day.

Township Councilwoman Barbara Toffler offered an historic note of hope for peaceful change in the world. “There is a legacy of peace in Teaneck,” she said, holding up a copy of Teaneck High School’s 1959 yearbook. “The Class of 1959 dedicated its yearbook to peace,” she said, reading from that dedication, composed amid the Cold War nuclear missile stand-off with the Soviet Union by students who were born during World War II.

Peace Poles grew out of a project of The World Peace Prayer Society that began in Japan in 1955 as a response to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For more information:

http://www.ny1.com/content/your_nj_news_now/150545/teaneck-peace-ceremony-spans-all-ages

http://www.peacepoleproject.org/

Weather Wise

2011-11-14T10:29:00.000-08:00

Oct. 29, 2011 Teaneck, NJ (photo/Jan Barry)

Early Warning

Winter dropped from the October sky

Two days before Halloween—

Tree branches smothered in snow

On summer leaves snapping deep into the night

Made darker by downed power lines

Global warming! skeptics scoffed—

As this part of suburban civilization

Staggered for days without electricity,

Closed schools, postponed Halloween

Until tangled wires and lives are restored

--Jan Barry

Celebrating Drew Cameron’s Healing Art

2011-11-13T16:51:00.000-08:00

Drew Cameron

Remarks I gave at “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the Printmaking Center of New Jersey's awards dinner at the Somerville Elks Lodge, Bridgewater, NJ on November 12. The center honored Drew Cameron, the co-founder and co-director of Combat Paper, “a touring project with a compelling mission to use the healing power of art to transform the shattered lives of young veterans.”

I first encountered Drew Cameron three years ago at Rutgers University, where I was teaching a journalism class. He and several fellow Combat Papermakers were conducting workshops at the Brodsky Center in New Brunswick, turning military uniforms into posters and chapbooks of art and poetry, culminating in a jam-packed poetry reading. I went to the first workshop intending to spend a day—and ended up returning all week, intrigued by the interaction of vets, students, art instructors and passersby.

Though my intention was to observe and write about this fascinating project, I was pulled into the middle of it by Drew’s infectious invitation to join in. Presented the opportunity to cut up a desert warfare uniform, I found it very satisfying to disassemble an official symbol of military might. I wished I still had one of my Vietnam uniforms to slice up!

Many veterans have returned from war so angry, disillusioned, disgusted that they threw their uniforms away. After serving in Iraq, Drew decided to slice his war uniform off while filming his defiant act of performance art and turning the startling images into postcards and posters. This angry artwork was hand-printed on paper made of rag pulp from the shredded uniform. The genius of this idea to physically transform a war uniform into primary elements of papermaking art is that it is cathartic, as well as creative.

Through Drew’s networking and prodigious traveling, Combat Paper workshops and their thought-provoking art have appeared at scores of colleges and arts institutions across the USA and overseas. He has planted seeds of this cathartic art in many places and woven a new social fabric linking many war-torn hearts. As Drew notes on the Combat Paper web site: “From each new participant, I take a piece of fabric and mix it into the lineage pulp. This pulp is then mixed in with each new batch of pulp, so a little piece of each vet’s uniform is in every new piece of paper made.”

Another participant in the Rutgers workshops who also was deeply touched by the experience that Drew offers vets is Eli Wright. Eli has followed Drew’s path by serving as Co-Director of the Printmaking Center’s Combat Paper Program. As Eli said three years ago: “We’re all going through many changes in this project… I was a medic. I enlisted in the military to save lives, not take them. … This project saves lives, it gives us direction—to find we can build bridges and tear down those walls and remake sense of our lives.”

What an arts project—to inspire war veterans to live more creatively. Last year, I dropped by a Combat Paper workshop at the Printmaking Center and ended up hand-making, hand-printing and hand-stitching a chapbook of new poems I wrote, that were inspired by conversations with Drew and other Combat Papermakers. Last winter, I traveled to Buffalo, NY in a snowstorm to work with Drew on a poster for an arts event I was organizing. Here’s the result—a poster designed by Drew that highlights key words in my “Costs of War” poem by using an amazing woodcut design printed on recycled military uniforms.

For such hands-on, hands-down creative work that has inspired so many people through art, I’m honored to present Drew Cameron with PCNJ’s Erena Rae Award in Art and Social Justice!

For more information:

Combat Paper.org
http://odysseus.nervegarden.com/2009/04/10/drew-cameron-combat-paper-project/

Saving America

2011-11-04T15:19:00.000-07:00

Harvard law prof''s message

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party have a lot in common, not least of which is an historic mission to save the America that every public school class, politician and public officeholder pledges allegiance to. That’s the message that Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is taking around the country in lectures, blogs and a new book titled Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It.

Lessig is a former Reagan Republican and Obama Democrat whose latest foray into the political sphere has been hailed as “the manifesto of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” That is how he was introduced recently to a large audience at Ramapo College of New Jersey that crowded into an evening lecture swollen with students at the state college in Mahwah, NJ and senior citizens from surrounding suburban communities.

These days in the United States created by our revered Founding Fathers such as Jefferson and Franklin, our “government is an embarrassment to most of us,” Lessig thundered, undeterred by a faulty sound system. “This is not an issue of Left or Right,” he added, noting that nearly 90 percent of the American people have lost confidence in Congress, according to a recent Gallup Poll.

In a Huffington Post blog posted a few days earlier, Lessig summarized his on-the-road lecture in three concise points:

“For there is a common ground between the anger of the Left and the anger of the Right: That common ground is a political system that does not work. A government that is not responsive, or -- in the words of the Framers, the favorite source of insight for our brothers on the Right -- a government that is not, as Federalist 52 puts it, ‘dependent upon the People alone.’

“Because this government is not dependent upon ‘the People alone.’ This government is dependent upon the Funders of campaigns. 1% of America funds almost 99% of the cost of political campaigns in America. Is it therefore any surprise that the government is responsive first to the needs of that 1%, and not to the 99%?

“This government, we must chant, is corrupt. We can say that clearly and loudly from the Left. They can say that clearly and loudly from the Right. And we then must teach America that this corruption is the core problem -- it is the root problem -- that we as Americans must be fighting.”

In his campus lecture in New Jersey, Lessig drew a big round of applause when he said: “Revolutions happen in waves. The first wave was the 2008 election of Obama [who eloquently addressed this problem as a candidate]. Wave two was the Tea Party movement. The third crest is the Occupy Wall Street movement. My view is that each of these waves is linked. Each of these waves is driven by the grassroots.”

In his book, Lessig cites numerous studies showing the massive flows of corporate money cascading into congressional election campaigns and fielding armies of lobbyists flooding the halls, hearing rooms and offices of Congress in recent years. This money was used to buy votes or influence to tilt government policies and actions to financially favor the funders’ economic interests, he argues.

“My sense is that too many on the Right make the same mistake as many on the Left. They assume that change happens when you win enough votes in Congress,” he wrote. Not so, he argues, because “the current system of campaign funding radically benefits the status quo—the status quo for private interests and the status quo of the Fund-raising Congress.” That’s why both Republicans and Democrats in Congress voted to bail out Wall Street banks whose unregulated gambling spree drove the national economy over a cliff, he argues. And now both Obama and his Republican presidential opponents are trolling for mega-buck Wall Street donations to their campaigns.

Lessig’s proposed solution is to marshal a movement of “nonpolitician candidates” in both Democratic and Republican primaries to challenge congressional incumbents, support a new crop of reform presidential candidates, and mount a grassroots campaign for a constitutional convention with a mandate to limit the amount of money anyone can contribute to a candidate for Congress.

“I’m not sure that any of these strategies would work,” Lessig told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, “but if there is one that will work, it will have to be on different territory than the one lobbyists and members of congress now control. I think that the real challenge is we’re not used to exercising power as citizens anymore. We’ve been passive listeners to television commercials for too long, and not really active producers of democracy.”

To help spur civic activism on this issue, Lessig co-founded a nonprofit organization called Fix Congress First, which promotes an activist project call Rootstrikers that does outreach via a website, facebook and twitter.

For more information:

http://www.rootstrikers.org

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/a-letter-to-the-occupiers_b_1007459.html

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/lawrence-lessig-on-how-money-corrupts-congress-and-how-to-stop-it-20111005#ixzz1clcPkM60

The War at Home

2011-10-28T11:37:00.001-07:00

Scott Olsen (photo/AP)

In Boston, Massachusetts and Oakland, California, Veterans For Peace members have been assaulted by police while peacefully demonstrating on behalf of Occupy Wall Street protest groups’ constitutional rights.

The most seriously injured is Scott Olsen, a Marine vet of two tours in Iraq, who was hospitalized with head injuries after police in Oakland fired tear-gas canisters and other projectiles into an Occupy Oakland crowd assembled in front of City Hall. Olsen was wearing a Veterans For Peace T-shirt and desert camouflage field jacket and hat when he was struck in the forehead. He is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

“It was like a war zone,” Joshua Shepherd, a fellow vet who was standing near Olsen while dressed in his Navy uniform and holding aloft a highly visible, white Veterans For Peace flag, told The Associated Press. “Shepherd said it’s a cruel irony that Olsen is fighting for his life in the country that he fought to protect. ‘He was over there protecting the rights and freedoms of America and he comes home, exercises his freedoms and it’s here where he’s nearly fatally wounded,’ Shepherd said.”

In Boston, police knocked down, clubbed and tore Veterans For Peace and an American flag from the hands of a group of peace activist vets standing between the police assault and an Occupy Boston encampment the authorities set out to destroy. Among those dragged off to a paddy wagon was Rachel McNeil, an Army vet who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and was holding an American flag. Her crime: “Rachel loudly and continuously led a chant of the Oath (I do solemly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic); but she alternated it with ‘We have a permit. It's called the Constitution’ and also ‘This is a peaceful demonstration,”" a fellow Vets For Peace member noted.

Rachel McNeil (right) and fellow VFP members
“VFP members are involved with dozens of these local ‘occupy movement’ encampments and we support them fully,” VFP national officers stated. “In Boston, for example, our members, wearing VFP shirts and carrying VFP flags, stood between a line of police and the encampment, urging police to ‘join the 99%’ and not evict the protesters. In that case, several of our members were banged and bruised when the police decided instead to carry out their eviction orders…

“As with virtually every example of the occupy movement across the country, those encamped were conducting themselves peacefully beforehand, protesting current economic, social and environmental conditions in the U.S. brought about by decades of corporate control, a criminal financial industry and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are driving the U.S. global empire into bankruptcy. These ‘occupy movement’ participants are telling us something we need very desperately to hear. They should be listened to, not arrested and brutalized.

“Police in the majority of cities are acting with restraint and humanity towards the encampments, but Veterans For Peace will not be deterred by police who choose to use brutal tactics. In fact, as happens with repression everywhere, more people join the cause.”

Indeed, as The New York Times reported today, “the wounding of an Iraq war veteran … has provided a powerful central rallying point.” Thousands of people streamed into downtown Oakland the next day for a peaceful gathering on behalf of the Occupy Oakland movement. The mayor of Oakland commended the movement’s goals. The police promised an investigation into what caused Olsen’s injuries. News reports and videos taken at the time show what happened.

“ Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, stood calmly in front of a police line as tear gas canisters that officers shot into the Occupy Oakland protest Tuesday night whizzed past his head,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

"’He was standing perfectly still, provoking no one,’ said Raleigh Latham, an Oakland filmmaker shooting footage of the confrontation between police and hundreds of protesters at 14th Street and Broadway. ‘If something didn't hit him directly in the face, then it went off close to his head and knocked him down.’ The something was a projectile that apparently came from police lines, fractured Olsen's skull and put him in Highland General Hospital. Doctors upgraded his condition Thursday from critical to fair, and said they expect him to make a full recovery.”

Like many members of Vets For Peace, Scott Olsen felt it was important to demonstrate the peaceful presence of military veterans at the Occupy Wall Street encampments that have sprung up around the country. As The Associated Press noted in a report carried by Business Week and news publications nationwide, Olsen “makes a good living as a network engineer and has a nice hillside apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. And yet, his friends say, he felt so strongly about economic inequality in the country that he fought for that he slept at a San Francisco protest camp after work.

"’He felt you shouldn't wait until something is affecting you to get out and do something about it,’ said friend and roommate Keith Shannon, who served with Olsen in Iraq.”

For more information:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/28/MND61LN3LM.DTL

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QKTHS82.htm

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/news_detail.php?idx=123

From Making War to Book Making

2011-10-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Tearing a leaf from Edgar Allan Poe’s literary leave from the US Army, a similarly brash band of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans called Warrior Writers is raising money from friends, family and fellow vets to publish a collection of their own poetry, prose and art drawn from military experience.

Poe parted company with the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831 and published a collection of his poetry with funds provided by fellow cadets. A new crop of soldiers-turned-poets, writers and artists is currently seeking assistance to raise sufficient funds by Veterans Day to publish a new anthology compiled by the Warrior Writers Project. Their goal is to publish this eclectic collection of works by more than 60 veterans in December, just in time to celebrate the official winding down of US military operations in Iraq.

Having seen much of the work in this book-in-progress as an advisor to this project, it very much reminds me of the astounding and still memorable voices and images that emerged from Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and Demilitarized Zones: Veterans after Vietnam, which were published in a similar do-it-ourselves fashion in 1972 and 1976, thanks to many friends who contributed funds and helped sell copies across the country.

"Through our writing and art workshops, veterans are able to share their military experiences, receive support from other veterans and connect with their community,” notes the Warrior Writers group of this hands-on project by young men and women who aid each other in creatively forging new lives in the wake of military service in the current controversial wars, which they have much to say about.

Would you shed one drop of blood

for the gallons that we've given,

would you last one day in the conditions

we've spent years in?

Ray Camper, an Army National Guard veteran of Iraq from Minneapolis, MN, asks in a poem titled “Letter to the War Presidents.”

I wrote this in a hurry in a machine gun turret several nights later.

Try to burn it out of memory by putting it on paper…

Zachariah Dean, a Marine veteran of Afghanistan, writes in a poem titled “Happy Birthday,” about suddenly realizing he just turned 26 as death whizzes by in the middle of a firefight in which his rifle is jammed by a defective bullet.

Many of the contributors are active in Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace and other protest groups including Occupy Wall Street and offshoot demonstrations across America. Like Walt Whitman, the exuberant song-of-myself poet who was shaken by the carnage he saw in the American Civil War, they convey often blunt public messages tied to their personal stories of surviving the senselessness of modern war, seeking to stir or embrace movements for social change. Here’s how Maggie Martin, a former Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq, put it in a poem entitled “Brio”:

I have engaged the power of spring,

buzzing with life-force, ignorant of drought or death,

resilient as meadow grass and morning.

I sow community in re-acquisitioned places,

crowded city street, marching orders, protest song,

unsinkable strength, our hands and mouths.

I have heard the rumble of feet on ground,

drum-beat depth, commencement of the connected,

roll on, advancing steady, through cities hungry,

stirring a hum in open heads and hearts.

Old constructs crumble and blow away,

new consciousness takes root.

Warrior Writers produced two previous anthologies: Re-Making Sense (2008) and Move, Shoot and Communicate, a chapbook published in 2007. Much of the poetry and prose pieces in all three collections were developed in workshops and weekend retreats led by Lovella Calica, the group’s director, who organized book production crews to compile each anthology. Other work, including artwork, was solicited via a Facebook page, the Philadelphia-based group’s website and other outreach.

For further information about the forthcoming anthology, visit www.warriorwriters.org and click on the hot link for the Kickstarter contributions page. A copy of the new anthology can be pre-ordered with a $40 contribution.

Protest at Wall Street

2011-10-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Ken Dalton (center) holds VFP banner at Wall St. protest

A contingent of Veterans For Peace and Military Families Speak Out members from New Jersey joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City on Saturday, October 8.

Many in the crowd of young people, older folks who dusted off memories of the protests of the '60s and '70s, and photo-snapping tourists seemed delighted to see the VFP banner unfurled near a corner of Liberty Plaza facing the new office towers being constructed at the site of the former World Trade Center. Among the Jersey contingent was VFP Chapter 21 President Ken Dalton, a Navy vet of the Vietnam war, who worked as a fire fighter in search and rescue operations at Ground Zero in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

A common question of vets by news reporters who stopped by for a comment was “What do war and Wall Street have in common?” Duh. Millions of unemployed veterans and other folks caught in the web of trillion-dollar wars and an economic collapse that the federal bailout of Wall Street banks was supposed to fix could have told them in a New York minute.

Many of the demonstrators in New York on Saturday eloquently stated the reasons for their dismay in an array of hand-made signs, some of which are shown here.

(Photos by Jan Barry)

Saving Grace

2011-10-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Lake at Arrow Park, NY

Saving a corner of the Earth in its natural state is increasingly hard work. It takes many hands and, often, many organizations. So it was that, the other day, an eclectic crowd of people gathered beside a forest-fringed lake about 38 miles northwest of New York City, to celebrate the latest conservation success story.

For reasons related to recent and legendary events in American history, survivors of the New York City Fire Department’s staggering losses at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, stood besides Native Americans who brought a 20-foot-tall healing totem pole that was carved in Washington State. Leaders of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference in nearby Mahwah, NJ, stood with current and former New York state conservation officials, local municipal officials and private landowners in this remote corner of the Hudson Highlands in Monroe, NY.

To the beat of a Native American drum, the gathering of about 100 people celebrated the conservation buyout of nearly 260 acres purchased from the privately-owned Arrow Park, to be added to adjacent Sterling Forest State Park, which is part of the Palisades Interstate Park system. The conservation deal was brokered by the Orange County Land Trust with $5.3 million from the State of New York Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

“These projects would never happen without so many people,” said Paul Dolan, executive director of ABC News International and a conservation advocate for the NY-NJ Trail Conference, as a big swath of the audience was called forward to be lauded for their assistance. Dolan and his wife JoAnn, a former executive director of the hiking trails group, previously helped lead a bi-state campaign that preserved some 20,000 acres of open space that became Sterling Forest State Park. Developers had targeted the area with plans to build a sprawling city of housing and industry in the mountain forests that form the headwaters of northern New Jersey’s water supply.

Arrow Park was created in 1948 as a country retreat for a group of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish families living in New York City. Such large tracts of land in the region have increasingly been sold off or subdivided for housing developments.

The gathering at Arrow Park also celebrated the visit of a troupe of American Indians who’d previously traveled across the country in 2002 to erect a healing totem pole besides the lake in the heart of the park to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Now they were passing through with a new healing totem headed for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

“I was thinking back to nine years ago when we came to this very spot,” said Fred Lane, a filmmaker with the Lummi Indian Nation, which provided both healing totems. “We have to remember our ancestors, our elders. I remember something my father said, ‘What are you going to do to be remembered by?’”

Master carver Jewell James played a song on a wooden flute. “No matter who we are racially or religiously, we are all human beings,” he said. In 2002, James was profiled in a USA Today article on the making of the healing totem for 9/11 victims. He recalled how his tribe had helped him deal with grief when two of his children were killed in traffic accidents. So he decided to help others by carving healing totems. "You never know how much it might help," he said. "This is my gift."

The Orange County Land Trust’s website provides a poignant perspective on what happened in the wake of that gift that the Pacific Coast tribe brought east to Arrow Park. “Recently, the Fire Department of New York’s Counseling Service Unit presented the Orange County Land Trust with an award for leading this successful 10-year campaign to protect Arrow’s land which includes an 80 acre FDNY memorial planting tract. Since 2002, the families of firefighters who lost their lives in the line of duty on 9/11 gather at Arrow Park for a tree planting ceremony and day of remembrance.”

In his remarks at last week’s ceremony, Paul Dolan said “Our goal is that this be a place for all different groups to heal.”

The Orange County Land Trust website explains the genesis of that goal: “A remaining parcel of 75 plus acres [which includes a rustic complex of buildings] is under active study as a center for programs for children and families by a consortium of non profit sponsors. Currently Calvary Hospital runs a summer camp on this land for children who have experienced the death of a family member. This bereavement program has served over 400 children since it was started 11 years ago.

“Arrow has been the site of recent professional training programs for Orange County organizations working with veterans and their families. Prior programs and events have focused on children of war from Sierra Leone and recreational programs for children with special needs.”

For more information:

http://www.oclt.org/pr-01292009.htm

http://nlmtotem.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/guest-blog-arrow-park-n-y-blessing/

http://www.arrowparkny.com/Articles/LummiHealingPole/LummiTotem_USATODAY.html

Republican Peace Piper

2011-09-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Rep. Ron Paul

Ron Paul is the kind of presidential candidate the American people haven’t seen in a long time—one who’s dead serious about ending overseas military adventures. That’s a stance that is increasingly popular with disgruntled voters across the political spectrum, which could well spell trouble for President Obama. Activists on the left and the right are increasingly fed up with Obama’s military surge in Afghanistan and foot-dragging in getting the remaining troops home from Iraq.

At the Republican presidential candidates’ debate sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express in Tampa, Florida the other night, Paul drew a thunder roll of applause when he said: “We spend $1.5 trillion overseas in wars we don’t need to be in and we need to cut there. And then put this money back into our economy here.”

This kind of response is rattling the foreign policy establishment. With polls now showing that a majority of Republicans as well as Democrats and Independents want a drawdown of US forces from Afghanistan, one startled foreign policy analyst noted, “in the mid-August Republican presidential candidates’ debate in Ames, Iowa, one of the loudest applause lines was for isolationist Rep. Ron Paul’s demand to ‘bring our troops home.’”

Paul, the controversial, libertarian congressman from Texas, who served in the Air Force during the Vietnam war, doesn’t just toss out applause lines. Like Eisenhower, who ended the war in Korea and spent his presidency reining in a rambunctious stable of warhorses, Paul is determined to spell out the fiscal and social consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to rule the roost.

“We’re under great threat,” Paul continued during the Tampa debate, “because we occupy so many countries. We’re in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We’re going broke.”

He continued to press his point even when many in the audience began booing his contention that US military actions overseas stirred up a hornet’s nest of terrorist reactions. “We have to be honest with ourselves. What would we do if another country, say, China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?” Paul said.

It’s hardly news that Ron Paul has been saying these kinds of things for years. “Opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more generally to U.S. military activity abroad, has been a cornerstone of Paul’s candidacy and sets him apart from the rest of the Republican field,” ABC News noted in a report on its website.

What’s changed is the sharp rise in public unease over the decade-long war the US launched in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by 19 young men from the Middle East on behalf of grievances that are still being hotly disputed.

“Two in three Americans, 65 percent, now want to reduce or withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, up dramatically from 39 percent in 2009, according to the new German Marshall Fund 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey,” noted a blog piece by Bruce Stokes that CNN reposted from YaleGlobal Online.

“A solid majority, 58 percent of Republicans, now want to see U.S. forces in Afghanistan reduced or withdrawn. Such sentiment is up a dramatic 36 percentage points since 2009, according to the GMF survey,” Stokes continued. “Disengagement is even more strongly supported by Democrats (70 percent) and Independents (66 percent), but their swing to that position is less pronounced. Backing for reduction or withdrawal is up 23 points among Independents and 24 points among Democrats since 2009.”

Ron Paul’s stance on military spending, or more likely the tanking poll numbers on public support for the Afghan war, stirred a Greek chorus of war weariness from two other Republican presidential candidates, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and Texas Governor Rick Perry. Here’s an amen moment in the Republican candidates’ otherwise contentious debate that the liberal Nation magazine ran approvingly on its website:

Huntsman: We are ten years into this war.… America has given its all in Afghanistan. We have families who have given the ultimate sacrifice. And it’s to them that we offer our heartfelt salute and a deep sense of gratitude. But the time has come for us to get out of Afghanistan. We don’t need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan nation-building at a time when this nation needs to be built. We are of no value to the rest of the world if our core is crumbling, which it is in this country.

Perry: Well, I agree with Governor Huntsman when we talk about it’s time to bring our young men and women home and as soon and obviously as safely as we can. But it’s also really important for us to continue to have a presence there. And I think the entire conversation about, how do we deliver our aid to those countries, and is it best spent with 100,000 military who have the target on their back in Afghanistan, I don’t think so at this particular point in time. I think the best way for us to be able to impact that country is to make a transition to where that country’s military is going to be taking care of their people, bring our young men and women home.

Chances are that Obama, who successfully ran in 2008 on a platform of reforming the federal government, will face a Republican challenger next year pressing for real change in the war arena.

For more information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQeAzx8mc7g&feature=related

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/ron-paul-booed-during-debate/

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/14/the-u-s-public-wants-disengagement/?iref=allsearch

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163338/perry-and-huntsman-agree-get-us-out-afghanistan

Peace Beat

2011-09-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

War drums began beating across America before the dust settled at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s an all-American tradition to march to the beat for military action, the fountain of flag waving excitement that produces legions of war correspondents, bugle-blaring headlines and armchair commandos in newsrooms.

It is rare to hear that a drum-beat journalist felt, in retrospect, that rushing to war was perhaps a grave mistake. It’s almost historic, in fact, to see the reconsideration that Bill Keller, a top editor and columnist at the New York Times, published amid the flood of 9/11 commemorations on the 10^th anniversary of that explosive spark of war the US expanded to places most Americans had barely heard of before.

“The world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But knowing as we now do the exaggeration of Hussein’s threat, the cost in Iraqi and American lives and the fact that none of this great splurge has bought us confidence in Iraq’s future or advanced the cause of freedom elsewhere— I think Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder,” Keller wrote in a New York Times Magazine article revealing his conversion from the war hawk club of liberals beating the drums for military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aside from this astonishing note of atonement, the bulk of the Times’ massive retrospective in the Sunday newspaper is essentially a monument to the US news media’s cheerleading for a decade of military blunders.

A major reason for this is that, for all the war correspondents and warrior-editors, there are few if any journalists assigned to cover waging peace.

Do editors at the Times and other mainstream news organizations ever travel outside military-oriented circles and see what groups such as September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Peace Action, Veterans For Peace or the US Institute of Peace are doing? Even small newspapers have a military affairs reporter. Does any news organization in America have a peace beat?

The glaring lack of coverage of peace groups’ actions spurred a special report earlier this year by the Nieman Watchdog website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

“Antiwar activists repeatedly stage dramatic acts of civil disobedience in the United States but are almost entirely ignored by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations. During the Vietnam era, press coverage of the fighting and opposition to it at home helped turn public opinion against the war. This time around lack of homefront coverage may be helping keep military involvement continue on and on,” wrote John Hanrahan, a former Washington Post reporter.

“By ignoring antiwar protests almost totally, editors are treating opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan much as they handled the run-up to the war in Iraq: They are missing an important story and contributing to the perception that there is no visible opposition to the U.S. wars and ever-growing military budgets, even as polls show overwhelming support for early U.S. military withdrawal,” Hanrahan continued.

Among the examples of non-coverage of significant events that Hanrahan cites is this:

“Last December 16, in a demonstration organized by Veterans for Peace, 500 or more people gathered outside the White House, as snow was falling, to protest the war and to support Wikileaks and accused leaker PFC Bradley Manning. As Nieman Watchdog reported in a previous piece in this series, there were 131 arrests – including a sizable number of veterans of current and past wars – for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. (This was the most arrests at the White House at any point in 2010.) One of the arrestees had chained himself to the White House fence and another to a lamppost. Additional newsworthy factors: Among those arrested were the nation’s most famous whistleblower (Daniel Ellsberg); a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter (Chris Hedges, the former long-time war correspondent for The New York Times); a much-praised FBI whistleblower (Coleen Rowley); a former CIA analyst who used to prepare daily presidential briefings (Ray McGovern), among others. Additionally, the demonstration seemed newsworthy because it coincided with both the release of the Pentagon’s latest progress report on Afghanistan to President Obama and the results of a new ABC/Washington Post poll in which 60 percent of Americans responded that the Afghanistan war had not been ‘worth fighting.’

“The event was covered by The Huffington Post, the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, Salem-News.com in Oregon, and the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, but was ignored by The Washington Post, The New York Times and almost all other mainstream media,” Hanrahan found.

Veterans For Peace protest at White House

As the Nieman report notes, there’s been a colossal failure of balance in coverage of what’s going on in the world. It’s a cultural failure, as well.

“It’s been a decade since 9/11, time enough to let go and shift the way we approach our decisions about war, right? One might think so, but … I’m beginning to question if and when we will choose to let go and imagine a new way forward,” notes James A. Moad II, an Air Force officer whose career as an airline pilot was diverted to military missions by the long war.

“Like most Americans of drinking age, that September day is seared into my subconscious,” he continued. “As a young commercial pilot back then, I can still remember my own nightmares as I imagined what took place in those cockpits, thinking about an old pilot buddy who’d been murdered there, and more than anything, the feeling of insecurity reverberating out from the rubble of those two towers like great clouds obscuring the future and limiting us, blotting out the imagination necessary to see beyond the anger and destruction.”

Moad’s incisive comments were not conveyed in the New York Times’ galaxy of 9/11 reminiscences, but in a War, Literature & The Arts Blog that he administers.

The internet and community-oriented newspapers provide a vital forum for many voices with a different perspective than the usual sources featured in the national news media.

"One of the outcomes of 9/11 is we need to make the decision about what kind of society we want to be," Andrea Leblanc, whose husband Robert died on United Flight 175 when it smashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, told a local newspaper in New Hampshire, Foster’s Daily Democrat. "What do we want to teach our kids? The story isn't about the fact that for 10 years I've been a widow. It's about the real cost of 9/11. I think this country squandered its moral authority. To me, it's all about peace; what societies are doing to either move toward or away from conflict."

Leblanc credited fellow 9/11 survivors with providing a compassionate, activist community of support for her anguish.

“An eye opening thing for Andrea through her involvement with September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows is the people all over the world who are reaching across borders to converse and share with other cultures,” Foster’s reporter Jennifer Keefe wrote. “She noted the numerous women's networks in Afghanistan and youth networks that reach out via Skype to hold conferences with other youths to talk about love and understanding. The groups and organizations dedicated to forming unity and speaking out in the wake of 9/11 are not in short supply, and demonstrate each day there is a compassion across borders that breaches even the deadliest of wars.”

It’s not hard to find these stories. In Philadelphia, PA, CNN filmed a Saturday night crowd at World Café Live drawn to an evening celebrating peace and ice cream. “Philadelphia-based Christian author and activist Shane Claiborne partnered with Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, to raise public awareness about federal military spending,” noted CNN’s website report.

“The evening started off on a somber note with Cohen pouring 10,000 BB gun pellets into a metal container to illustrate the power of the United States’ nuclear arsenal in front of a stunned audience. ‘It’s that kind of overkill mentality that drives an out-of-control Pentagon budget,’ he said.” Another part of his demonstration is a tall stack of oreo cookies looming over tiny piles of cookies representing the military vs. everything else in the federal budget’s priorities.

Winding up the evening, Cohen said: “If we’re going to have fewer bombs and more ice cream, we need to shift our budget to what helps people live instead of killing people.”

The ice cream business maven has traveled the nation and partnered with community activists, business executives, war veterans and many others to present a stunning critique of military spending overseas while the home front economy crumbled. I first saw his BB and cookie demonstration at a journalists’ conference in Vermont five years ago. Video versions from presentations around the country are all over YouTube.

For more information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/sept-11-reckoning/keller.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=%22bill%20keller%22&st=cse

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Background.view&backgroundid=563

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110911/GJNEWS_01/709099949/-1/FOSNEWS

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/11/jesus-bombs-and-ice-cream/

Jan Barry is an award-winning investigative journalist. He has been a peace advocate since resigning from the US Military Academy after serving an Army tour in Vietnam.

Vietnam: Another Kind of Adventure

2011-08-22T23:28:00.000-07:00


Ken and Bill at old battleground in Vietnam

W.D. Ehrhart has been turning the tragedy of the Vietnam war inside-out, upside-down and sideways in a whirlwind of memoirs, articles, poems, poetry anthologies and travel pieces since surviving the battle of Hue in 1968—and living to ponder what the hell all the death, destruction and desperate encounters in Indochina added up to.

His latest literary foray is an online journal—titled “Ken and Bill’s Excellent Adventure”—of a journey to Vietnam this summer with a Marine buddy who was also wounded by the rocket explosion that shredded their shelter in a bedroom-turned-battle station. The story of this trip back in time is artfully laid out on a magazine-style website designed by Bill Ehrhart’s wife Anne, who took many of the photos accompanying the text.

As in most Ehrhart stories, there’s an unexpected twist. Ken is the nickname for Kazunori Takenaga, a Japanese citizen who ended up in the US Marines in Vietnam. And so Bill makes a side trip to Japan to visit Ken’s homeland. And then the two aging war buddies, accompanied by Anne and photographer Sachiko Akama, travel to Vietnam to re-experience old battlegrounds. Along the way, they also encounter memorable sights and historic sites in two Asian nations—Japan and Vietnam—that have created vibrant peaceful societies in the wake of wars with America.

“As we approached Hue, we crossed the bridge over the An Cuu Canal, just as Ken and I had done on the morning of January 31st, 1968, but the war was nowhere to be seen and there were no ghosts awaiting us, just a vibrant, throbbing city that was almost unrecognizable except for major landmarks like the Truong Tien Bridge spanning Song Huong—the River of Perfumes—Hue University, and of course the famous Citadel,” Ehrhart noted in a suddenly inward shift from describing Vietnam’s current scenery.

“Ken and I and a handful of other Marines had crossed Truong Tien Bridge during that first day of fighting, though we couldn’t have told you its name,” he continued. “We had tried to reach the Citadel, but had taken terrible casualties at the hands of hundreds of well-entrenched North Vietnamese firing down at us from windows and walls, and we’d had to fall back to the south side of the river, where most of the fighting took place during the first few weeks of the battle.”

“On another day,” he writes, “we drove from Hue to the old Demilitarized Zone marked by the Song Ben Hai. We walked—stoop-shouldered most of the way—through the tunnels of Vinh Moc just north of the DMZ, where an entire village of 70 families lived underground for six years to escape U.S. bombardment.

“We walked across the river, from north to south, on the Hien Luong Bridge, destroyed by U.S. bombing in 1967, but rebuilt post-war for pedestrian traffic. Several miles to the west of the bridge is Con Thien (‘the place of angels’ in Vietnamese), where Ken and I had spent a month living in a mud-infested, barbed wire-encircled collection of sandbagged bunkers, besieged by North Vietnamese artillery from the north side of the DMZ, but we could not go there because the area, still sewn with American mines, is too dangerous.”

Ken and Bill grin like they won the lottery as they pose for a photo together in the middle of the long-fought over bridge "straddling the 17th parallel at the old DMZ." During the war, Marines couldn’t have imagined walking across that bridge and surviving. Tens of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died in the battles over that geographic division.

The highlight of the trip is finding the house where the war nearly ended their lives. Better to let Ehrhart tell what it meant in the way that has made his memoirs and other writings on the war widely read around the world.

“The house, which in 1968 had had a brick wall around it, has since been entirely refurbished,” Ehrhart noted. “Looking fresh, crisp, and bright, it appears to be no older than the six-story four-star hotel built in two sections behind it, the two wings of the hotel forming an L into which the house nestles. The grass lawn has been replaced by a tiled driveway and parking area with a motorscooter rental operation and an outdoor coffee shop.

“The house itself is now the business and administrative offices for the hotel, the Duy Tan (named for yet another emperor). A young woman inside who spoke English told us that the hotel had been built in 2004, but the house dated to 1920. That was the clincher. This was the place. We were so amazed to be here, alive and happy and 62 years old (well, Ken is 63), that we did not have the presence of mind to ask if we could go up to the very room itself. No matter. This was close enough.

“That evening, Anne, Ken, and I, accompanied by Sachiko Akama, the photographer who traveled with us, went for an evening cruise on the River of Perfumes. On board with us were eight Vietnamese singers and musicians in traditional garb who performed traditional Vietnamese folk music for us.

“When they were finished, they gave us each two paper bags with candles inside. The tradition is to light the candles, make a wish, and set the bags afloat on the river.

“I cannot begin to tell you how magical that evening was, how profoundly satisfying, especially for two ex-Marines who had nearly died only blocks from that river so many years ago.

“Later, standing on a balcony of the Mercure Hue Gerbera Hotel, Ken and I looked out over the city and the river bisecting it. We could see the huge red and yellow Vietnamese national flag flying above the Citadel, illuminated by floodlights, the university that had been used as a refugee center during the battle, the park that had been our helicopter landing zone, the roofs of what had been the MACV compound (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), even a corner of that building we’d been in when we’d been wounded, now dwarfed by the hotel built around it. But the streets were crowded with noisy, jostling, energetic people on foot, on bicycles, in cars, in buses, and of course on scooters, scooters, and more scooters. Vendors hawked postcards and fresh bread and river tours. The river flowed with colorful tour boats.

“The bridge, with an unbroken stream of motorscooters going in both directions, blazed yellow to green to blue to purple to red and back to yellow. The Huda beer sign cast a neon ribbon across the water.

“We did not speak. There was nothing to say. This is what we had come to see. A country. Not a war.”

For more information:
http://wdehrhart.com/kbea-pages/introduction.html

Welcome Home

2011-08-10T00:10:00.000-07:00

Eli Painted Crow and fellow vets in "The Welcome"

Bob and Moe Eaton’s marriage, shadowed for more than 30 years by nightmares from the war in Vietnam, was about to implode. Ken Kraft, an Army officer who proudly served in Iraq, felt betrayed by his son’s refusal to carry on the family tradition of military service. Eli Painted Crow, a former Army drill sergeant, felt betrayed by the nation that sent her to war on dark-skinned, tribal people like herself.

These were just some of the rubbed-raw emotions that a couple dozen war veterans and several family members brought to an unusual retreat in Oregon. In this deceptively quiet setting, a film crew recorded real life dramas brimming with outbursts of bitterness and laughter, tears and hugs, dark humor and dawning revelations. The focus of the four-day gathering, just before Memorial Day 2008, was to sort out what they wanted to say—in a poem or a song or a concise statement—to a crowd of people preparing a public event to welcome these warriors home from war.

“I’m asking you to f------ listen!” Eli Painted Crow shouted at the other participants in a particularly tense point in the new documentary called “The Welcome.” A retired Army sergeant and Native American peace activist, Painted Crow was fed up with interruptions as she attempted to explain how she felt about her deployment in Iraq, where fellow soldiers called combat areas Indian country. “I just want to be heard with your hearts,” she added, before stomping out the door to cool off. “If you don’t hear me with your hearts, I can’t heal.”

In another scene, a member of Veterans For Peace said he felt like the enemy in Vietnam. Another Vietnam vet retorted that he wasn’t the enemy but killed people who were the enemy. That set off a whirlwind of war justifications by other veterans.

Such scenes pull viewers intimately into the inner turmoil of the aftermath of war that swirls through many veterans across America. Throughout the 93-minute film directed by Kim Shelton, veterans and family members openly struggle to tame the turmoil long enough to find some pathway to healing.

“Sometimes you stumble into something out of a sense of duty or good intentions only to find yourself absorbed and overwhelmed beyond anything you might have anticipated,” a reviewer for The Oregonian, Shawn Levy, wrote of this low-budget film that was an audience hit at the Ashland (Oregon) Independent Film Festival this spring.

“From virtually the outset, with a poem by Laura Carpenter, a veteran of Afghanistan about to deploy to Iraq, ‘The Welcome’ drills directly through any emotional reserves you might bring into it,” Levy added. “You're unsteadied, startled, galvanized, and brought to sobs again and again. There are dark jokes and harrowing accounts of the hellish confusion of war and its grip on the memory. There are angry outbursts as the various veterans try to establish terms of respect and conduct with one another. There are wry laughs and monumental silences. And there are staggering moments of courage in which the veterans look as if they're merely speaking aloud but in which they are actually performing open-heart surgery on themselves -- in front of an audience and a movie camera.”

Amazingly, the participants ignored the camera as they candidly interacted with each other and with retreat leader Michael Meade, described by the filmmakers as a “mythologist and story teller who specialized in working with traumatized communities.” Meade’s ritualistic mixture of Native American chants and Irish stories grated on Eli Painted Crow and another Native American woman veteran. But after an outburst about respecting traditions, they participated on their terms.

“One of the ways to heal is to find out what our gifts are and begin practicing giving them,” Meade said, in guiding the group to write poetry, which he defined as “the speech of the soul,” in preparation for a Memorial Day event at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Retired Army Captain Ken Kraft wrestled with how to make sense of a phone call he’d gotten in Iraq that his son had deserted from Army ranger training and denounced the war. He felt betrayed, he said, and bolted from the podium back to his seat. At the Memorial Day event, Kraft praised the intense interaction at the retreat and read a poem about his pride in being a soldier and noted that he was trying to reach out to his son.

A young woman veteran shyly read a poem about the shame of a sexual assault by a military superior. Another young woman vet read a poem about older veterans reaching out and clearing a path for them.

Cynthia Lefever, whose son was severely wounded in Iraq, read a poem about a dream in which rows of wounded soldiers marched down a road toward her, beseeching: “Be our mom—for God’s sake, bring us home!”

“I found a voice I didn’t know I had,” Mandy Martin, another of the retreat participants, said in a recent PBS television interview. "The impact has been pretty immense," she said of the veterans' healing project. A follow up on the film website notes that she now works at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a congressional communications officer.

Moe Eaton, whose husband Bob served in Vietnam, read a poem about his frightening mood swings and suicidal statements. “Me: Why can’t you count your blessings? He: I don’t know.”

Bob Eaton then haltingly told a story, which he said he’d never been able to tell his wife, about surviving a battle in Vietnam and having to shovel up the remains of dead soldiers blown apart by artillery explosions. “I thought every f------ night that that was going to happen again,” he added.

At the Memorial Day event, Bob Eaton pulled out a guitar, stared at the packed auditorium full of neighbors, friends and strangers and brought down the house with applause when he growled “I was heavily medicated for depression. I wanted to get off the medication and took up the guitar. You’re the first audience I’ve ever played for.”

“You’re coming home/ Feeling all alone/ Thousand-yard stare/ Nobody there,” he sang and then stopped, nearly breaking down. The audience clapped again encouragingly. “When will it end?/ The guilt and the shame/ Now it’s back again,” he continued. “That old war/ It still haunts me.”

In a recent PBS television interview about the film, Moe Eaton said the couple’s participation in the veterans’ retreat “had a lot to do with saving our marriage.” She realized, she said, that Bob’s war nightmares wouldn’t go away by continuing to say “get over it.”

For Bob Eaton, playing a song he wrote at the Memorial Day “Welcome Home” event launched a new career singing at veterans’ gatherings. “It gave me the courage to keep going,” he said.

The documentary was made by Kim Shelton and her husband, Bill McMillan, who are both therapists in Ashland, Oregon. They created the Welcome Home Project to provide resource materials for communities interested in holding similar events and are seeking film festivals and organizations that would be interested in hosting showings of the film.

For more information:
http://www.thewelcomehomeproject.org/
http://www.thewelcomethemovie.com/
http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2011/04/ashland_independent_film_festi_1.html

Poetry and Cannons

2011-08-07T01:36:00.001-07:00

Governors Island, NYC

The last time cannons were fired in battle at Governors Island in New York harbor was in 1776. After a long run as an Army and then Coast Guard headquarters, the ancient forts and cannon, 19^th century officers quarters and rows of barracks were given over a few years ago to New York to add to its tourist attractions. It’s been a long time since this tranquil setting has been disturbed by the upheavals of war. So it was that a highly emotional raising of voices amid the old battlements on Governors Island recently was from participants at the First Annual New York Poetry Festival.

One of the delights of demilitarization is enjoying the creative reuses of former military installations. An arts center run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council occupies a former munitions warehouse near the ferry dock. The roadways for munitions trucks and ranks of marching troops are now bicycle paths. Bugle calls have been replaced by music concerts. Cannon mounts are overshadowed by whimsical sculptures.

The tree-lined lawn in front of the Victorian-era houses along Colonels Row made an inviting setting for a poetry festival. The balmy summer day induced poetry lovers to sprawl on the grass, many settled in with food and drinks on picnic blankets. Billed as an eclectic gathering of diverse poetry groups, organized by the Poetry Society of New York, the festival presented three outdoors stages with simultaneous readings by poets with a wide variety of styles and topics, including the Nuyorican Slam All Stars, the Poetry Whores, the Mom Egg, Bowery Poetry Club and Warrior Writers.

Sean Casey, an Army captain who served in

Iraq

, kicked off the Warrior Writers reading to a relaxed but attentive audience with a poem tracing the swirling emotions of a soldier at the end of a second deployment in a war zone.

Two weeks to go, anticipation
Trained my replacement, he’s taking over, relief
Holding the release paper in hand, freedom
Boarding a plane for the final leg of this journey, warmth
Emerging from the gate, tension
Crowds applauding, embarrassment
Greeted by family, blank
Embraced by a loving girlfriend, empty
Reunited with all that was longed for, NUMB

At a previous reading of this poem at the Bowery Poetry Club, recorded on video by filmmaker Sara Nesson, Casey noted that this experience was set in motion by being called back to active duty after serving in Iraq and ordered to do another combat tour.

Noting how emotionally draining it was to read poetry in public, Eli Wright, a former Army medic in Iraq, presented a poem revealing a kaleidoscope of colors in ominous swirls that tracked his moods as a soldier and war veteran.

In a more chipper mood, Nicole Goodman, who also served in the Army in Iraq, introduced her set by saying, “Poetry is liberating. It’s good for your soul.” But the three poems she read were anything but upbeat. Here’s an example of the dark-night-of-the-soul mood she explored:

I am not a soldier today.
This desert wide and thick
has swallowed all of my courage up.
And so I let the sun bleed into my skin again,
All I sweat is reckless disregard.
I stopped wondering if I am to survive,
For I have died by living each day…

On the upside, Nicole Goodman is studying creative writing at the City University of New York after a rough patch after coming back from the war in which she and her young daughter ended up homeless. A profile of her in the New York Times—conveying her stark outcry that many soldiers don’t find home front support when they leave military service—brought an outpouring of assistance that helped get her back on her feet.

Another reader with the veterans’ poetry group was a woman who was in the Marines, whose name I didn’t get, who participated in a writing workshop at New York University. A fellow veteran from that program showed up, delayed by a long subway ride from the Bronx to the Battery to catch the ferry, just after the Warrior Writers session ended and another group took the stage. Yet he seemed happy just to breath in the atmosphere of a poetry festival on Governors Island.

And so was I. The last time I visited Governors Island, it was a closed Coast Guard base that occasionally hosted an open house for the public to visit. I remember feeling I’d been transported, via a short ferry ride, from frenetic Manhattan streets to a delightfully timeless New England fishing village. It was rejuvenating to return, with the military trappings relegated to history, and read poetry in such a setting.

Art seems like such a fragile reed to lean on. Yet the city of New York is relying on artists to create the beguiling sort of attraction on Governors Island that turned Greenwich Village, the East Village, SoHo and many other once rundown sections of the city into popular places to live as well as travel to, to hang out, spend some memorable recreational time and money.

Art and poetry can help people rebuild their lives, as well. That was why several war veterans were drawn to a poetry festival at a former military base on a sunny Saturday this summer.

For more information:
http://govisland.com/html/home/home.shtml
http://vimeo.com/27263873

Uncle Sam’s Dioxin Cover-Up

2011-07-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

Ford dump site in Ringwood, NJ (photo/Jan Barry)

Vietnam and New Jersey, despite the vast distance between them, share a deadly link. Both places, lushly beautiful this time of year, were poisoned by United States government actions regarding one of the most toxic chemicals, dioxin.

In Vietnam, dioxin was widely spread as a contaminant in forest-killing Agent Orange herbicides that the US government failed to warn Vietnamese and American soldiers could be deadly to their health. In New Jersey, where Agent Orange was manufactured at a Newark chemical plant and the herbicides were sprayed along power lines and elsewhere for years, the feds failed to warn Americans at home that their health could be endangered by exposure to a widespread substance in our daily environment.

A new documentary, Mann v. Ford, that opened on HBO television channels this week highlights the painful reality for a Garden State community that was poisoned despite government assurances that safety measures were in place to protect people's health from industrial pollution. In a stunningly symbolic scene, two leaders of the contaminated neighborhood walk along a path beside the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington on their way to the Capitol Building, their reflected figures weaving in and out among the long columns of names of soldiers who died in the war.

The film focuses on a lawsuit by residents of Ringwood, NJ who sued Ford Motor Company over cancer and other illnesses that beset many of their families after lead-based paint sludge and other industrial waste from a car-assembly plant was dumped near their homes. The dumping occurred in 1967-71, during the height of the war in Vietnam. Like soldiers in Vietnam, residents of the former iron mining community where the dumping occurred were long in the dark as to the hidden dangers of dioxin and other toxic substances.

Besides lead, arsenic, benzene, PCBs and other hazardous chemicals that EPA has determined were found in the Ringwood dump site area, the film shows environmental investigators for the residents’ lawyers testing for and finding dioxin in some homes and in the blood of some of the residents decades after the dumping occurred. Much is made by the attorneys how this can prove that residents were exposed to plumes of dioxin-laden air pollution when dump sites burned for weeks, spewing acrid smoke through the mountainside community.

Discussing why the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry hadn’t tested the Ringwood community for dioxin during initial investigations into potential health effects of the hazardous waste dumping, an environmental investigator says in the film: “There was a document that says you don’t have to sample for dioxin. That was about 1986 or ’87.”

This information about what wasn’t done properly and what was later found was never presented in court. The lawsuit against Ford was settled out-of-court, at the apparent direction of a state judge, shown in the film setting insurmountable requirements for presenting the health problems of more than 600 Ringwood residents and former residents.

It was not the first time the judicial system sidestepped holding an accounting of the government’s role in failing to protect the public from dioxin and other hazardous chemicals. A mass action lawsuit by Vietnam veterans in the 1980s against chemical companies that made Agent Orange for the US military was also settled out of court, under the direction of a federal judge.

Like the Ringwood residents, the Vietnam vets wanted to present evidence they and their lawyers had gathered. Instead, they were offered a few thousand dollars each to drop legal actions and go away. So the lid on health information the veterans sought to put on the record was lifted, not by lawyers or government actions, but by an angry high-ranking veteran.

Unraveling an Official Cover-Up

“Elmo R. Zumwalt 3d, son of the admiral who ordered the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and who was exposed to the defoliant himself, died of cancer today at his home. He was 42 years old,” The New York Times reported in August 1988. “In an article published in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 24, 1986,” the obituary added, “the younger Mr. Zumwalt said: 'I am a lawyer and I don't think I could prove in court, by the weight of the existing scientific evidence, that Agent Orange is the cause of all the medical problems - nervous disorders, cancer and skin problems - reported by Vietnam veterans, or of their children's severe birth defects. But I am convinced that it is.’”

Stunned by his son’s death, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. investigated the available studies and concluded, in a comprehensive 1990 report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, that there actually was sufficient scientific evidence to link various cancers and birth defects with dioxin. But, he found, this information had been deliberately concealed by federal officials.

“Unfortunately, political interference in government sponsored studies associated with Agent orange has been the norm, not the exception. In fact, there appears to have been a systematic effort to suppress critical data or alter results to meet preconceived notions of what alleged scientific studies were meant to find,” Zumwalt stated, citing examples of various agencies manipulating data and suppressing information about health effects of dioxin exposure.

“The flawed scientific studies and manipulated conclusions are not only unduly denying justice to Vietnam veterans suffering from exposure to Agent Orange," Zumwalt said in a quote circulated in a US Veterans Dispatch report in November 1990. "They are now standing in the way of a full disclosure to the American people of the likely health effects of exposure to toxic dioxins."

Years before Zumwalt’s scathing report, skeptical officials in New Jersey created an Agent Orange study commission in the early 1980s which found that—contrary to federal government assertions—dioxin could be found in Vietnam veterans’ bodies years after the war. As reports of long-suppressed health studies about dioxin exposure piled up, Congress in the early 1990s mandated that the VA treat or pay compensation to Vietnam veterans for a number of cancers, other illnesses, and their children with spina bifida. The list of illnesses associated with dioxin exposure has since grown substantially, and includes many if not most of the illnesses that beset the Ringwood neighborhood nearly surrounded by Ford dump sites.

Another Smoking Gun

During the time that the younger Zumwalt was frustrated that “existing scientific evidence” wasn’t sufficient to prove in court what he knew had poisoned him in Vietnam, a group of federal officials was busy trying to cover up an environmental bombshell.

“In August 1987, [a} report, entitled ‘No Margin of Safety’ and published by Greenpeace, burst like a bomb on the pulp and paper industry and its regulators within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Evidence gleamed from thousands of pages of the EPA's own documents demonstrated that pulp mills were spewing dioxins into the air and water, creating … a public health emergency,” noted an article published in Greenpeace magazine in 1989.

“But that was only the beginning. Someone inside the American Paper Institute (API), the paper manufacturer's trade organization, saw the report and sent a collection of documents to Greenpeace. These documents substantiated [activists’] charges that senior EPA officials and the industries the agency was supposed to regulate were working together to limit public knowledge about the hazards of dioxin and a host of other dangerous chemicals. According to US District Judge Owen M. Panner, the documents revealed an agreement ‘between the EPA and the industry to suppress, modify or delay the results of the joint EPA/industry [dioxin] study or the manner in which they are publicly presented.’"

Twenty years later, an attorney for the Ringwood residents said in frustration in the documentary that it would be very difficult to prove that Ford was primarily responsible for the residents’ health problems. That may well be true. The US government was supposed to have been in charge of enforcing environmental protection laws, not outsourcing enforcement to industrial polluters. Yet, as the Greenpeace article warned, by the late 1980s it was becoming apparent from various health reports the EPA was sitting on that potentially dangerous levels of dioxin were being found in fish downstream from paper mills and in paper towels, coffee filters and baby diapers, among other common household products made with bleached wood pulp.

Other ways that dioxin can get into the environment, Greenpeace reported in 1989, include: “Municipal incinerators, for example, produce dioxins when they burn garbage containing chlorinated plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Dioxins are also unwanted by-products in the manufacture of chlorinated chemicals, such as Agent Orange and the wood preservative pentachlorophenol (PCP).”

The missing element in the Ringwood pollution story—which has toxic dumping counterparts in communities across America—is a Congressional hearing where facts are presented under oath. As details about EPA’s lax oversight of Ford’s handling of its hazardous waste cleanup responsibilities in Ringwood appeared in news articles in 2005, New Jersey’s Environmental Protection Commissioner requested a criminal investigation. It never happened. Why not?

Another, vital missing element is for a knowledgeable insider to come forth and, like Admiral Zumwalt did on Agent Orange, bang some bureaucratic heads together until they get the job of protecting the public from dioxin and other toxic substances and helping the injured done right.

For more information:
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/ao.html
http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/white_wash_dioxin_cover_up.html
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/125703938_Ramapoughs__fight_against_Ford_detailed.html

Jan Barry is featured in Mann v. Ford as a lead reporter for the Toxic Legacy series published by The Record (Bergen Co., NJ) that revealed the extent of industrial contamination and health problems in this case.

Toxic Trails

2011-07-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

HBO flyer

Residents of a once-isolated mountain community in Ringwood, NJ have a bone-chilling tale to tell the rest of America. And HBO is offering its cable television services to help convey this story via a new documentary called Mann v. Ford.

Highlighting the community’s fight against a plague of illness and deaths they worry were caused by toxic waste dumped in the forest and abandoned iron mines around their homes, the film “follows members of New Jersey’s Ramapough Mountain Indian tribe in their five-year search for justice through a mass action lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company,” HBO stated in a promotion for the recent New York premiere at the Time Warner Center Theater. The film airs on the cable channel on Monday at 9 p.m.

During a discussion with the audience after the New York showing, Ringwood resident Roger DeGroat politely but firmly countered disparaging remarks about his Native American community that were cited in the film, such as in Ford internal documents about backwoods residents who lived adjacent to the company’s hazardous waste dumps in mine shafts and woodlands where local families hunted for deer and other wildlife: “I wonder what nationality has to do with dumping paint on people," said DeGroat, stirring an outpouring of applause. "I’d like to live to see the day they clean it up, all of it.”

Filmmakers Maro Chermayeff and Micah Fink display an array of stunning scenery and harrowing scenes to bring viewers inside a close knit hamlet on a forested mountain ridge above the shimmering Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey’s largest water supply source, and next to bucolic Ringwood State Park, where cancer, diabetes or other severe illnesses have stalked nearly every home. The residents’ ordeal started, they recall, when Ford bought the mining works around their homes where generations of family members were miners. From 1967 into the early 1970s, Ford contractors dumped thousands of tons of lead-based paint sludge mixed with benzene and other chemicals, as well as car parts from Ford’s massive assembly plant in neighboring Mahwah.

Others who think industrial waste doesn’t affect them should reconsider, film producer James Redford told an audience at a preview showing this week at Ramapo College, a mile downstream from the former Ford manufacturing plant in Mahwah. “To assume you are living in a safe environment may be a dangerous assumption,” he said. That’s a major message of this film, said Redford, son of movie star Robert Redford.

“I know what it means to not feel well,” said Redford, noting that he has had two liver transplants. “But I wasn’t lying in bed knowing I was there because of negligence from other people. To me,” he said of his interest in making this film,” the core issue is health, that people’s health could be compromised.”

As the film dramatically shows, the Ringwood residents’ health complaints, however, never made it before a jury. A state court judge raised seemingly insurmountable barriers to presenting the health problems of more than 600 people and the potential side effects of hazardous waste they were exposed to. And just then, the national economy tanked and Ford’s future as a viable vehicle maker looked increasingly shaky. The residents’ gold-star list of lawyers headed by The Cochran Firm urged accepting a $11 million settlement offer before Ford went bankrupt. The municipality of Ringwood reportedly paid an additional $1.5 million for its role in turning part of Ford’s dumping grounds into a municipal landfill operation.

What makes this story more than another American tragedy to be mined for how clueless to our own welfare we often can be is that the Upper Ringwood Neighborhood Action Association led by Wayne Mann, Vivian Milligan, Jay Van Dunk and others refused to accept defeat and successfully pressed the US Environmental Protection Agency to overturn a previous decision to accept Ford’s assertion that the worst of the toxic waste had been removed. This led to Ford removing several times the amount of tainted soil and paint waste as it dug up initially, including waste with elevated levels of lead that were buried in residents’ yards and an unpaved driveway where children played.

“While Ford admits dumping in Upper Ringwood, their lawyers insist it was legal at the time. The EPA placed Ringwood on the Federal Superfund List in the 1980s. Under EPA supervision, the site was officially ‘cleaned-up’ by Ford and taken off the Federal Superfund List in the 1990s, but most of the toxic waste remained. In 2006, the residents of Upper Ringwood made history when their community became the first site in the country ever returned to the Superfund List. Today, the EPA admits it ‘missed’ nearly 80% of the toxins in the original cleanup,” the HBO website notes. The film notes that Ford representatives declined to be interviewed.

Behind the scenes, Ford and EPA are still sparring with the Upper Ringwood community over whether or not to remove untold tons of hazardous waste that was dumped and bulldozed into deep mine pits just yards away from residents’ homes and mountain streams that flow to the nearby Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to some two million New Jersey residents.

“I hope the film is an inspiration,” director Maro Chermayeff told the Ramapo College audience, which included many residents of the Upper Ringwood community and supporters from neighboring towns where tons of Ford paint waste was also dumped, and in some cases was later removed and in other places is still there next to water supply streams. ”You can speak out. You can be heard. You can get out and help other people. I think you guys did an amazing job of banding together.”

“This community made history,” added director Micah Fink.

The Ringwood residents’ health issues and the extent of industrial contamination in and around their community were initially documented in a 2005 series of newspaper articles, accompanied by an extensively researched website, titled “Toxic Legacy” published by The Record of Bergen County, NJ. I was a reporter with the investigative team that did that project. Adding a far more visual rendering of this story, this documentary adroitly weaves on-the-scene reporting and follow up commentary by fellow Record reporter Barbara Williams and myself.

Going beyond the newspaper accounts, the filmmakers present haunting snippets, for instance, from 8mm home movies made by Milligan’s father that showed local children playing amid Ford contractors’ dump site equipment and paint sludge slurry while community adults scavenged through the hazardous landfills for saleable auto parts.

In more recent scenes filmed for the documentary, community residents talk about how friends and relatives who lived amid the expanding landfills began to die of cancer and other diseases at younger ages. Health investigators hired by the lawyers are shown discussing with residents that many of their health problems are known to be potentially caused by exposure to hazardous industrial substances such as PCBs, lead, arsenic and dioxin, a highly toxic impurity that can be released into the environment by burning many common chemicals. As the film shows, Ford’s dump sites in two of the mines burned for weeks, spewing thick smoke through the community.

“I like the fact that people are getting to see some of the hardships that we went through,” Vivian Milligan told a Record reporter after the showing at Ramapo College. Wayne Mann, a Ringwood State Park worker who led the community through the lawsuit battle with Ford, said watching the film “hurt because it was my family.” In a telling scene in the film, he shows a filmmaker a wall in his hideaway office full of photos and mementos of family members and friends who died young.

A sobering note at the end of the film states:
“During the five years spent making this film, thirty members of the community died, without ever knowing the outcome of the case.

“A year after the case was settled, Ford posted profits of $2.7 billion.

“In 2010, Ford posted profits of $6.6 Billion,
Its largest profit in 11 years.

“As of 2011, 74 million people in The United States live within four miles of a Superfund site.”

For more information:
http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/mann-v-ford/index.html
http://toxiclegacy.northjersey.com/
http://www.northjersey.com/news/071311_Upper_Ringwood_residents_environmental_battle_showcased_in_HBO_documentary.html

Sailing for Peace

2011-07-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

Golden Rule in June 1958 (Honolulu Star-Bulletin photo)

Beyond the July 4th fireworks celebrating historic battles against the British empire, American history includes many other memorable moments when courageous acts of conscience stirred the nation to steer a peaceful tack against the winds of war. One of those moments was in the spring of 1958 when a retired Navy captain, Albert Bigelow, set off in a small sailboat to nonviolently challenge the United States military use of the South Pacific as a nuclear weapons testing zone.

Concerns about radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests and the possibility of nuclear war worried many people around the world. When authorities stopped the “Golden Rule” as it sailed out of Hawaii and arrested Bigelow and his peacenik crew, a tsunami of antinuclear testing protests erupted across America. “Later that year, the beleaguered U.S. government agreed to a nuclear testing moratorium,” historian Lawrence S. Wittner recently noted in an article in Z magazine on the impact of what he called the “legendary” sailboat.

Bigelow—a World War II veteran who died in 1993 at age 87—continued protesting preparations for waging nuclear war and what he saw as other outrages, joining the Freedom Riders in 1961 on another history-changing journey. The “Golden Rule,” meanwhile, sailed off into oblivion until it was dredged up last year from the bottom of Humboldt Bay in northern California.

Shipyard owner Leroy Zerlang was torn between cutting up the salvaged wreck or preserving it in a museum, Wittner wrote. Now a crew of history-minded volunteers is working to restore the 30-foot wooden ketch and sail her under the flag of Veterans For Peace. "She's going to be the peace boat out to confront militarism and needless war," project coordinator Fredy Champagne recently told The Sacramento Bee.

“It was the Golden Rule's peace mission that captivated Champagne,” noted Bee correspondent Jane Braxton Little. “After a year of combat in Vietnam, he retreated to the hills of Humboldt County, living as a recluse with post-traumatic stress disorder. One morning in 1988, he suddenly decided to build a hospital in Vietnam.

“Since then Champagne has organized 23 teams of veterans to build dozens of medical facilities, schools and homes in Vietnam. His ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ campaign also includes driving the Kosovo Peace Bus, which held ‘teach-ins’ in major U.S. cities; building water systems in Iraq; and organizing a 2000 trip to Cuba for the Lost Coast Pirates Little League team.

"”Waging peace has saved my life,’ said Champagne.”

Champagne and other members of the Golden Rule Project of Veterans For Peace set a goal of raising $50,000 for repairs, including replacing the deck and cabin. They plan to launch the ship by next summer to tour U.S. waterways to promote the peace group’s “goals of nuclear disarmament, abolishment of war,” Champagne wrote in a report in the current issue of the Veterans For Peace Newsletter.

The Golden Rule Project organizers’ vision and enthusiasm is contagious, Grandmothers for Peace International’s director, Lorraine Krofchok, stated in that organization’s spring 2011 newsletter.

“This little ketch could be used to educate ‘the future’ and how peace is the only alternative to constant war and aggression,” Krofchok wrote after visiting the storied sailboat in dry dock in Fairhaven, California. “Our oceans are bombarded with ‘war games.’ The Golden Rule could become a lead boat in a Flotilla of Peace.”

For more information:
http://www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org/
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-golden-rule-will-sail-again-by-lawrence-s-wittner
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/28/3731864/eureka-volunteers-work-to-restore.html#ixzz1RI61yj6A

Eyes of Babylon in New York

2011-06-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Jeff Key

Jeff Key took the long road—via Iraq, a ditch in Texas and many other way stations across America—to perform on a New York stage. Key is currently presenting a slice of his own life as a gay Marine in his one-man show, “The Eyes of Babylon,” at 59E59 Theaters.

Reviewers have stretched to find cultural comparisons to Key’s mind-blowing monologue, which he developed from a war journal he wrote in Iraq in 2003 and worked out in unexpected places, such as Cindy Crawford’s roadside peace camp in 2005 outside President Bush’s Texas ranch, and honed in performances in community theaters from California to Kentucky. “[It's] as if Jack Kerouac went to war." (Salt Lake City Weekly) “A poetic depiction worthy of Allen Ginsberg." (L.A. Times)

I first met Jeff Key, who is a board member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, at an IVAW-sponsored Warrior Writers poetry workshop and reading in New York a couple of years ago. I’ve heard him at subsequent workshops and readings present variations and offshoots of the stories in “The Eyes of Babylon,” which runs 90 minutes. On stage, he is a more compelling performer than was Allen Ginsberg, who was no slouch at drawing rapt audiences. As a reviewer in The Advocate noted, Key’s dramatic presentation moves “from humor to tears to outrage in the blink of an eye."

Key, who grew up in Alabama, is proudest of presenting his bluntly critical outlook on the war in Iraq and coming out as a gay Marine in conservative places such as Liberty, Kentucky, that drew protests from gay-phobic Christians.

“There was a bigger audience there [in Kentucky] than was here tonight,” Key said after a recent preview performance at the off-Broadway theater complex on 59th Street near Park Avenue. “Liberty, Kentucky is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else and still they came out to hear me.”

What they heard and saw was a scene by scene awakening of a handsome, six-foot, four-inch tall, muscular Marine discovering in Iraq that his love of country and sense of patriotism had been hijacked to wage war in a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 assaults on America.

More unsettling for many people, audiences see Key hesitantly reveal to fellow Marines that he’s gay. What happens next is what makes this play work as both art and insight into cultural change in America. Reading his war journal to other Marines, Key discovers his voice for memorably conveying things the way he sees them.

"You can't say, 'I support the troops' and step over the homeless vet going to your flag-waving rally, and criticize veterans from this war who are speaking out against it," Key said in a 2006 interview by Sam Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle, posted on Leatherneck.com’s Marine Corps Forum. "To me, that says support the troops until they come home, or until their politics or their religion differs from yours."

As Hurwitt noted, Key’s play includes a clip on a large screen of “a Paula Zahn interview on CNN in which Key (who joined the service in 2000 at age 34) came out as a gay Marine against the war, and quotes a letter to his commanding officer in which he declares that the same principles that led him to join the Marines prevent him from silently going along with the military's discriminatory policy toward gays.”

The unexpected bombshell of the performance follows a penultimate scene in which this seemly model Marine slowly takes off his medal-bedecked blue dress uniform and lays it out as though for a funeral. Donning blue jeans and picking up a trumpet, Key states that when a fellow Marine convoy driver he eulogized earlier in the play died in Iraq there were fewer than 900 U.S. war deaths; yet now the number of military fatalities from Iraq and Afghanistan is more than 6,000.

Crisply raising the trumpet, Jeff Key plays the haunting notes of “Taps” as photo after photo after photo of soldiers’ grave markers flash on the screen.

“The Eyes of Babylon” show at 59E59 Theaters runs through July 3.

For more information:
http://www.theeyesofbabylon.com/
http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-27428.html

A Lasting Lesson in Courage

2011-06-14T01:09:00.001-07:00

photo/Library of Congress

In the spring of 1961, as I impatiently awaited graduation from high school, the news of the world was a blur to me. Unless there was a war zone or rumor of war involved, I paid little attention. So I don’t recall being aware of one of the big events of the time—the Freedom Riders challenge of racial color barriers in Southern states.

Keenly aware that the American Civil War started 100 years before, in April 1861, I was seeking my own battlefield glory in a war somewhere. So I scarcely gave a thought to the courage displayed by strangers risking life and limb to expand civil rights to “colored people,” as African-Americans were widely called at the time. Like most Americans, I think, I hadn’t a clue what “nonviolent civil disobedience” meant.

As a recent PBS special, “Freedom Riders,” graphically shows, the black and white volunteers who nonviolently sought to integrate long-distance buses and public restrooms and restaurants at transportation stations in the Deep South in 1961 were beaten by mobs of angry white men, arrested by local police and jailed by state officials. After a Greyhound bus that carried Freedom Riders was firebombed in Alabama and riders beaten at several stops, more than 300 civil rights riders were arrested and thrown into a Mississippi state prison, and a biracial group of 10 clergymen from the North were arrested for trying to eat together in an airport restaurant in Florida, the federal government stepped in and began enforcing non-discrimination laws that had been ignored for generations.

“Nothing would deter these Freedom Riders - not beatings, not burnings, not racist mobs,” noted Gregory Kane, the conservative Republican columnist, in a recent tribute to the men and women who mounted a nonviolent campaign to accomplish what Civil War battles and other clashes over the course of a century could not.

I got some insight into the impact of the Freedom Riders campaign when I was stationed at Ft. Rucker, Alabama some three years after these events. The focus of the civil rights movement had shifted to Selma, Alabama, where bloody confrontations with local and state police over marches for voting rights made national television news coverage.

Amid training for waging war via helicopters in Vietnam, the infantry unit I was assigned to was put on alert to be ready to assert the federal government’s role in upholding the US Constitution in Alabama. Old-timers in the unit joked about having gotten campaign medals for being dispatched in previous years to Little Rock, Arkansas and other Southern flash points where furious white residents and their local officials tried to prevent "colored people" from attending segregated public schools and colleges.

Having already served a tour in Vietnam, and declined a promotion to stay in the military and return to the war in Indochina that seemed wantonly senseless, I signed up for classes at a base branch of a nearby state college while awaiting my discharge papers. It was there that I met a professor who astounded the globe-trotting, way-of-the-world-savvy soldiers in his psychology class.

The professor noted that he had been teaching at a famous university up North and decided to come back to teach in his home state. “Why?” a seasoned sergeant blurted out.

Alabama in the winter of 1964-65 exuded the tensions of a third world country rumbling with pent-up hostilities between authorities and an emboldened group of natives protesting a culture of violent oppression. My brother was in Air Force training at another base in Alabama and got caught up in a police action in the state capitol, Montgomery, against a civil rights protest. The off-duty GIs hit the ground and hunkered behind cars while cops with fingers on their triggers roamed the streets and screamed at the Air Force boys to get the hell out of town.

Well, the civilian professor quietly said to his class of soldiers, this is where the fight is to change my part of the country for the better. He came back to teach, at Troy State College, he said, to help fellow white Southerners understand it was time to change their minds, their culture, their psychology, when it came to their fellow citizens who happened to have a darker hue.

Some day, I’ll remember that professor’s name. What I thought at the time was, that man just displayed more courage on behalf of other people’s welfare than I’d seen in an army lording it over people of another race while playing war on the far side of the world.

As for the civil rights protesters battered by state and local police in Selma, Alabama: On their third attempt to march to the state capitol, on March 21, 1965, the route was impressively lined by thousands of U.S. Army troops, National Guard members called up by the federal government, FBI agents and federal marshals, arrayed to protect 300 marchers. Some 25,000 people joined the last leg to the state capitol building for a rally for voting rights for black Americans.

That night, a white woman from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, was shot and killed while driving marchers back to Selma. The ambushers were Ku Klux Klan members who included an FBI informer. That roadside murder effectively was the last shot of the Civil War. The Selma to Montgomery march through Alabama stirred Americans to turn a big page of history.

“As a result of this historic event, the [federal] Voting Rights Act was passed on May 26, 1965,” notes a brief history on the National Park Service website for the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. Deep in the heart of Alabama, the majority of Selma’s city council today is African-American, as is Mayor George Patrick Evans, a graduate of Troy State University.

As my old professor in Alabama said, this was a timely fight—and it took more courage to do it nonviolently in the face of brutal encounters with police and hate-filled mobs. Yet the legacy for human dignity spurred by the Freedom Riders is far more enduring than the official slogans shading the violence unleashed in Vietnam in the name of democratic rights many Americans were denied and had to fight for at home.

For more information:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

http://www.nps.gov/semo/index.htm

“Poster Girl” Draws Crowd

2011-06-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Robynn Murray (photo/Stefan Neustadter)

“Poster Girl,” the 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary, drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 people in a recent showing at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ. The June 1 event also included a discussion with director Sara Nesson and Robynn Murray, the Iraq war veteran whose story is the focus of the film, which stirred a flurry of questions from the audience.

The 38-minute film unveils the life of a high-school cheerleader from Niagara Falls, NY who enlisted in the Army and ended up on combat patrols in Iraq, becoming a “poster girl” for women at war featured on an “Army Magazine” cover. Back home, Sgt. Murray battled the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries.

Shot and directed by filmmaker Sara Nesson, the film focuses on a veteran’s home front journey of anguish, rage and renewal. In hand-held camera shots, it shows her frustration in seeking Veterans Affairs aid, including her medical records being lost at the Buffalo VA office. In a creative turn of events, the camera closely follows Murray as she moves from kicking car doors and punching walls to working out her own healing regime of art and poetry, symbolic displays of tattoos and feisty public speeches to lance festering war memories.

An unexpected setback, highlighted in the film, is VA medical treatments that subject veterans to astonishing amounts of medication. Murray said this caused more health problems, including addiction to morphine after surgery to repair a back injury.

“I was on 14 medications at one time, from the VA!” Murray told the Puffin audience. While some VA doctors and treatments were helpful, she said, a better approach to sustained healing was getting involved with art and writing projects sponsored by veterans groups, educational institutions and cultural centers.

“I’m doing much better now,” Murray said. “My getting involved with Combat Paper [art projects] and Warrior Writers changed my relationship with my healing. No longer was it something that happened to me. It was something that I owned.” Murray added that she discovered the writing and arts projects through involvement with Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Nesson encountered Murray at a Warrior Writers workshop on Cape Cod while making a documentary on veterans turning war memories into art. "Poster Girl" has been showcased at a number of film festivals and was selected by HBO for a cable TV run in the fall.

The showing at Puffin was cosponsored by Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21 NJ; Military Families Speak Out, Bergen County; Teaneck Peace Vigil, Bergen Grassroots, Central Unitarian Church Social Action Team, Leonia Peace Vigil Group, Bergen County Green Party, Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice, Haiti Solidarity Network of the North East, NJ Peace Action, and People's Organization for Progress, Bergen County Branch.

For more information:
http://www.postergirlthemovie.com/

After Memorial Day

2011-06-04T20:18:00.000-07:00


Eli Wright (photo/Warrior Writers)

What do Americans do the day after Memorial Day? Move on, mostly, into the swing of summer, the resumption of daily routines uninterrupted by badgering advertisements for holiday sales and blaring reminders to commemorate the war dead.

So the crowd was sparse the day after Memorial Day at the Veterans’ Voices poetry reading at Poets House in New York City. Barely a couple of dozen Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and a handful of supporters mustered on a sultry evening in a glass-walled meeting room off River Terrace near the former site of the World Trade Center towers. The event was billed as “The Day After: Poetry by Veterans for Memorial Day and Every Day.”

Not a politician or a chaplain or a flag-waving color guard was in sight when former Army medic Eli Wright strode to the podium and said: “I’ve been kind of avoiding Memorial Day for a long time.” Wright, who served in Iraq in 2003-2004 with the 1st Infantry Division, proceeded to relate a story about an Army buddy who killed himself after coming home.

“Hey Johnny... I really miss you man... the day I found out you died was the same day I found out I was going to have a child,” Wright said. “They used us, brother, forced us to help them abuse the ‘others’…So we both became trapped in the prison cells of our own selves…We went over there as boys and came back broken men… I just wish that I had a tourniquet that could have stopped your soul from bleeding out…"

“Johnny was just one of thousands who are not on any memorial,” Wright concluded.

Losses not recorded on war memorials was a major theme of the evening. Attired in a dark T-shirt emblazoned “War Is Trauma,” Carlos Harris read a stream-of-consciousness poem about preparing to visit a friend about to deploy to Afghanistan, his own war experiences popping up like explosive forebodings. “I’m frightened for the friend, Jesse, I’ll have when he returns—if he returns,” Harris said.

“You’re in the Army? Really? You don’t look like you’re in the Army,” related Kristina Shevory, an eight-year veteran of peacetime posts, sarcastically recounting how her military service was frequently questioned and belittled by fellow Americans. “So what do you think a soldier looks like?” Shevory replied. Such widespread disdain for women in the military dampened her sense of pride in public service. Now, she said, “I’m also asking myself what it means to be a veteran.”

Alex Miller noted other ways the home front is frightening, bewildering. He described scary walks, on hyper-alert as on a combat patrol, from the subway at his stop in Brooklyn amid memories of growing up in a rough Chicago neighborhood where families were often shattered by drive-by, drug-related shootings. “The real war is at home … The bullet with death on its mind, aimed at no one hit everyone,” he said. And then the kicker for a soldier who risked his life for a chance at a better life: “How can I be a homeless veteran at 24?”

Robynn Murray prefaced a set of gut-punching poems by noting that she was 20 years old when she returned from a combat deployment in Iraq, angry at college students oblivious to the war that consumed her. “Friend, let me carry that burden for you—I could use some help, but you’re nowhere to be found” went the refrain of a poem about trying to find a friend who understood what she was going through and feeling “left behind” in civilian life.

“Warrior Writers saved my life. I really didn’t think there was anybody else like me,” said Murray, who was profiled in the 2011 Academy Award-nominated documentary, “Poster Girl.” The film shows her struggle to restore her sense of purpose through writing poetry, creating art works and giving blunt-spoken public presentations as part of the art-as-healing writing project sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Several other participants at the Poets House event credited writing and photography workshops sponsored by New York University’s Veteran Creative Writing Program and the NYU Military Alliance. They presented a slide show of photos from a recent exhibit titled “Seeing Here Now,” combined with poems that reflected on military scenes in one set of photos and, in turn, inspired a new round of photos of arresting scenes at home.

A photo of an immaculate wall of shower fixtures, for instance, inspired a prose poem by Army veteran James Dreiling titled “AWhite Lie,” in which a soldier tells his mother that these showers (exclusively for officers) were what enlisted men used in Afghanistan. This concocted story was meant to allay the mother’s fears that her son might be electrocuted by faulty wiring in a shower building, as she had heard in the news killed another soldier. The son tells us in the poem that he had bigger concerns. Dreiling, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, later noted that this story "was a work of fiction and I wrote it through a very cynical lens that occasionally pervades on certain long days overseas."

Robynn Murray noted that people at home are often clueless about the magnitude of memories war veterans carry around. “This Memorial Day, I was thinking about losses in my life,” she said in preface to a poem she’d jotted down on the subway ride to lower Manhattan. The poem recounted how she “helped a friend write an obituary for another friend who died in Iraq.” Drunk on drinks supplied by well-wishers honoring a man in uniform, the surviving friend jumped out of her car as she tried to drive him home. Stumbling to his own car, he raced off into the night until, she recalled, “he flipped his car six times.” Her war survivor friend ended up in a hospital, severely injured. “He acts about eight years old now,” she said.

Stanley Kunitz, a founder of Poets House and former US Poet Laureate, would surely have appreciated the significance of this low-key event as a solemn time for military veterans to share disturbing memories through their own writings. An Army veteran of World War II, Kunitz—who died in 2006 at age 100—spent most of his life promoting poetry as, he once said, a gift that is “life-sustaining, life-enhancing.”

Vietnam GI Challenged War Makers

2011-05-31T08:49:00.001-07:00

One of the most outlandish protests of the war in Vietnam, in the eyes of minders of military tradition, was a small independent newspaper, “Vietnam GI,” published by Jeff Sharlet, a feisty veteran of the early secretive stage of the conflict. With a top secret clearance and training in translating Vietnamese, Sharlet served in Army Security Agency operations in 1963-64 that monitored radio communications by both sides in what he came to see as a civil war in which the US government was propping up a corrupt, dysfunctional regime of revolving door generals and would-be dictators.

In the tradition of Ben Franklin-style colonial-era newspapers that challenged the coercive actions of the British empire, of Frederick Douglass’ “North Star” challenge of the entrenched institution of slavery, and of numerous other examples of journalism-activism in American history, Sharlet launched an antiwar newspaper for GIs, written by active duty GIs and young veterans of the controversial war in Southeast Asia.

Starting in January 1968, copies of the “underground” newspaper were widely distributed to soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines across the US and in Vietnam via informal networks of servicemen and women willing to challenge the official rationales for waging that war. Volunteer staff and contributing editors were members and supporters of the then-fledging Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. Sharlet paid for the initial printing with funds from a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship he had won for studies at the University of Chicago. Fundraisers with an array of peace movement supporters kept the monthly publication afloat.

Sometime in the spring of 1968, my brother Ted visited me in New York City and drolly told a story about how a copy of “Vietnam GI” had set off a big commotion in an Air Force special operations unit. It seems that a copy of the paper mysteriously appeared on the commanding officer’s desk in a highly secure area of a base in Hawaii. The unit did helicopter rescue missions for air crews whose planes crashed in the Pacific Ocean. It also, secretly, retrieved capsules from satellites that took photos of the Soviet Union and other places of interest to the US military.

Spying my name among the culprits on the masthead of this antiwar rag, Air Force investigators called in the FBI and targeted Ted, a paramedic in the air-sea rescue detachment. “Whose side are you on?” the commander demanded. The agitated colonel, who had lost a brother in the war, proposed that my brother join him in a raid on North Vietnam. The FBI agents flipped out a document that they said was a psychological profile of Ted’s radical brother, who resigned from West Point after serving in Vietnam. They implied that Ted was likely in his brother’s orbit.

Ted, who professed ignorance of the newspaper’s appearance in their midst, was saved by a lieutenant who noted that the airman was a highly regarded member of his crew, who had jumped out of helicopters with rescue gear to save pilots who crash-landed in the ocean.

But the damage to military decorum was done. Somebody dropped that paper on that colonel’s desk in a top secret facility. The Air Force and FBI knew that, whoever did it, antiwar dissent now reached deep into even highly trained, highly motivated special operations units.

Jeff Sharlet came out of that milieu, working in secretive communications-intercept units in Vietnam that other GIs called “the spooks.” Working with Jeff—who abruptly died way too soon at 27 of kidney cancer in June 1969—was a big step in my education that the hidden truth of what happens in wars can be revealed by participants willing to counter the official mythologies.

Jeff Sharlet’s ripples of influence on the Vietnam-era antiwar GI movement have been memorialized in numerous books, publications for GIs challenging the war in Iraq and at least two websites. “The most dramatic tribute,” noted Jeff’s brother Bob Sharlet in a widely researched wikipedia entry,” has been the award-winning documentary, Sir! No Sir! (2005), on the Vietnam GI anti-war movement screened in theaters across the country… co-dedicated to Sharlet, as the director David Zeiger put it, ‘for starting it all.’”

Another fitting tribute is Bob’s son, Jeff Sharlet, the investigative journalist and author of The Family and C Street, among other works.

For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sharlet_(Vietnam_anti-war_activist)
http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html
http://jeffsharlet-and-vietnamgi.com.yolasite.com/

Environmental Writing 2011

2011-05-26T23:01:00.001-07:00

From Agent Orange’s insidious grasp out of the past of the war in Vietnam to current health concerns of many residents of Ramapo River communities, to the potential future effects of global climate change, 11 student-reporters at Ramapo College of New Jersey dug into a wide array of ecological issues in the Spring 2011 Environmental Writing class.

Here are some of many insightful passages that summarize topics students chose to research and report in magazine-style final writing projects, all of which are posted on our class website, ramapolookout.blogspot.com, along with their other writing assignments throughout the semester.

“The Earth is as a storm. Violently it crashes and trumpets along its trillion year journey. Like a wildfire burning on a California horizon, the Earth surrounds itself in tapestry of both beauty and terror. In essence our planet is a hospitable destroyer. It will deny life as easily as it fosters it. Often times life will simply die off, a casualty of the constant unseen equation of nature. Still, despite the changes our planet has seen, the existence of life has always remained firmly rooted. However, our modern age has threatened life with a new villain: pollutants.”

--From Destroying our Oceans: Impact of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by John Clancey

“Beekeepers throughout the Garden State know there is something wrong. Some blame mites and pesticides but others are still puzzled as to what exactly is causing colony collapse disorder.

“’I had beehives that were full of bees and produced a great honey crop, and two weeks later were empty,’ says Joe Triemel, Corresponding Secretary at the Essex Co. Beekeepers.

“Why all the buzz? Bees are very critical to agricultural practices.”

--From New Jersey's Buzz on Colony Collapse Disorder by Courtney Leiva

“When being advised to follow a healthy diet, the one food that is indisputably on the top of the list is fish. Its Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals keep our heart pumping and our blood pressure low. It is an easy food to cook, requiring little preparation and, in most cases, done in less than 30 minutes. It is almost impossible to make a bad dish with fish unless, of course, the fish itself has been contaminated.

“With the recent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which was formally known to produce quality fish, particularly shellfish, fish lovers now question the safety of the fish coming from the Gulf. Do we believe the government agencies that maintain the fish from the Gulf is safe or do we stop buying, adding to the sorry economic state of the Gulf fishermen’s woes, who are just recovering from Hurricane Katrina?”

--From Is Eating Fish as Healthy as It Used to Be? by Virginia DiBianca

“Climate change, or global warming as it is often referred to, has been a hot button issue in recent years. It has dominated the environmental arena, and has even played a role in the political spectrum, as Democrats and Republicans hold very different ideas about the phenomenon. There is a lot of conflicting information about this so-called global warming and the process of weeding through all of it to separate fact from fiction can seem overwhelming. The truth of the matter is, depending upon who you ask, you will likely get a very different interpretation of climate change, its causes, its effects, and what it ultimately means for you and me. ...

“Climate change, or global warming, is certainly a very complex issue with a myriad of facts, data, and evidence from a host of different organizations to take into account. But these are the bare-bone facts of the situation. There is evidence to support hundreds of thousands of years of constantly changing climate situations on our planet. But there is also hard proof that humans have, if nothing else, sped the process up a significant amount. It is really up to each citizen of the planet Earth to make their own decision about climate change and make their day-to-day choices accordingly.”

--From Climate Change: A Complex Issue with Clashing Points of View by Lindsey de Stefan

“Jeff Genser, a Suffern native, pleaded to the council about flood issues. He stated, ‘You're proposing to eliminate 100 acres of flood plain, and turn it from a pervious area to an impervious. And that is unacceptable, in my opinion.’ He went on to propose his own idea for what could be built on the flood plain next to the Ramapo River, a Vertical Farm. ‘A building could be constructed that could supply food to half of Bergen County...use all the water it comes into [from the river], over and over again, and have no pollution and environmental impact.’ The idea seemed to stir no interest by the council.

“Many individuals mentioned how the mall would impact the surrounding community. Some were frustrated over the idea of Stag Hill residents being stranded in an emergency situation, being that the only access road to their community would become a constant point of traffic and congestion. Retired resident Ron Whalberg asked the council, ‘At what point do we stop endangering future generations?’”

--From A Changed Mahwah by Graig Mihok

“It is a race against time for a fading era of American heroes who served their country and feel they were poisoned by their government. It is a race against time for the Vietnamese people suffering from health conditions and birth defects. The U.S. government is left with a choice. It can accept responsibility and dedicate itself to all who suffered from the Agent Orange spraying campaigns, or it can wait for the end of an era. It can hope for the best that history will forget. The natural environment and the lives it gracefully sustains are in serious danger.

“For Agent Orange investigator Fred Wilcox, justice is yet to be done. ‘The government can start by saying sorry,’ he said.”

--From War After the War: The Environmental Assault of Agent Orange by Dan Savino

“Consumers seem to be paying attention to what they eat more and more. It is too soon to prove whether GM seeds, crops and foods will hurt or help us, but staying informed and questioning claims for will help to insure our safety. Big corporations own the rights to a very crucial part of the food chain. Urging others to ask questions, voice opinions and challenge tests is incredibly important. Food and its nutrients are what help us survive. As consumers and as humans we have the right to take control over the products we use daily.”

--From Genetically Modified Food: What Does it Mean for You and Your Kitchen? by Lorraine Metz

“Some say it’s just a coincidence; that it would take years, if not decades, for us to see any change in prices if we started drilling. Experts say that the process of actually obtaining the oil, refining it, dispersing it, and using it takes an extreme amount of time and money, so that we wouldn’t see any relief in the near future. The Energy Information Association found that increased drilling would have a very small, if any, impact before 2030. They also found that even once the oil starts flowing, it would only bring in about 0.2 million barrels per day.

“Others argue that just by lifting a ban on drilling, it would influence the market to lower prices. This is what seemingly happened between 2008 and 2010 with President Bush’s decision. However, other economists argue that the oil industry is part of a global market and since the United States would only be contributing less than one million barrels per day, it wouldn’t do much for the prices. How would one explain what happened after Bush’s decision? The theory of supply and demand seems pretty fitting, which would directly benefit us in this situation.”

--From To Drill or Not to Drill? Offshore Oil Drilling and How it Can Affect You by Brittany Shann

“’Many residents have told me they don't trust DuPont or the NJ DEP. They think DuPont is covering up pollution and DEP is rubber stamping inadequate DuPont cleanup plans,’ says Bill Wolfe, former planner and policy analyst for the state Department of Environmental Protection and former policy director of Sierra Club's New Jersey Chapter.

“’They are frustrated by the slow pace of cleanup, angry for not being told about vapor intrusion, and disgusted by repeated failures by local and state officials to provide full information and allow them to have a meaningful role in cleanup decisions that affect their lives, their family’s health, and their property value,’ he says.”

--From DuPont: Pompton Lakes Site Still a Source of Conflict After 25-Year Clean Up by Deanna Dunsmuir

“Some fluctuations in the Earth's temperature are inevitable regardless of human activity, but centuries of rising temperatures and seas lie ahead if the release of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation continues unabated, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for alerting the world to warming's risks.

“Over the next decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to regulate sources of greenhouse gases, imposing efficiency and emissions requirements. Until the UNFCCC starts taking action on a global scale, it seems that countering global warming and climate change is up to the people’s smaller actions and lifestyle changes. Maybe then those with the greater power will see that we are prepared for much bigger, even drastic changes.”

--From Global Warming: Small Steps Towards Conquering a Big Threat by Jessica Vasquez

“A tract of twenty-two acres of forest named after the former Governor of New Jersey, George Brinton McClellan, was purchased a few years ago by Seton Hall Prep School of West Orange, New Jersey. The school’s plan’s to clear the old growth forest rippled through the community and neighboring towns and has caused many concerns. For two years, town residents and students attended zoning board hearings to voice their opinion on the proposed clear cutting. …

“The Mallangas, both active members of the Sierra Club, also brought in Bruce Kershner. Kershner is a field ecologist who is also a national authority on old growth forests and took a survey of the 22 acres of trees. He identified the trees and expressed the historical and biological value of the forest. Board members attacked his testimony claiming that the use of the term ‘old growth forest’ can not be used if he cannot tell the exact age of the trees. They repeatedly interrupted him during his testimony to ask him for credentials and if he had a background in studying and observing old growth forests. Kershner has studied old growth forests for over 30 years all over the country, but that did not seem like a sufficient enough background for the zoning board members.”

--From Seton Hall Prep Clear Cuts Our Future by Amanda Nesheiwat

Rethinking National Security at the Pentagon

2011-05-10T22:25:00.001-07:00

“Sustainability” is the latest buzz word in academic and environmental circles. Now it is also buzzing around the halls of the Pentagon. As the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan run out of rationalizations and public patience, two staff officers working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff have developed a new twist on selling national security to the American people.

America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy,” assert Marine Col. Mark Mykleby and Navy Capt. Wayne Porter in an unusual, unclassified national defense report, recently published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, entitled “A National Strategic Narrative.”

This unofficial report by two serving officers was soon widely broadcast by The New York Times, not to mention picked up by war critics and spread around the Internet via Facebook and buzzing bloggers.

Unlike the “Pentagon Papers” and other in-depth reports on how the US got entangled in controversial military campaigns such as in Vietnam, that continued to grind on long after the loss of public support, this report offers few specific examples of why America’s armed forces need to change the current military way of life. It simply cuts to the chase and flatly states it is time to make major changes.

“It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow,” wrote Mykleby and Porter in a report that deliberately echoes the historic 1947 article in Foreign Affairs by Foreign Service Officer George Kennan that formed the basis of the containment strategy that guided US policy toward the Soviet Union for decades.

“It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability),” the career military officers wrote in an authoritative summary of a new wave of rethinking the military’s mission apparently coursing through the Pentagon. The New York Times duly noted that the two officers are special strategic assistants to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution,” they continued.

What that means was spelled out in a preface to this report by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor of international affairs who recently stepped down as director of policy and planning at the US State Department.

Slaughter noted that Mykleby and Porter’s boss, Admiral Mullen, has stated “publicly that the U.S. deficit is our biggest national security threat. He and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have also given speeches and written articles calling for ‘demilitarizing American foreign policy’ and investing more in the tools of civilian engagements – diplomacy and defense.”

And so the staff officers came up with a way of framing the tenor of these speeches into a new national security strategy. Their mission, apparently, is to stir up public discussion of these ideas outside the usual military-oriented circles.

Porter, for instance, cowrote an op-ed published in The Washington Times in March calling for creation of a National Service Academy to train “a corps of civilian experts” to work on diplomacy and sustainable development projects around the world. “Forging these tools to deliver credible influence worldwide, as part of a comprehensive strategy to sustain the growth of America's prosperity and to enhance our security, requires an investment in education and in Americans with a proven desire to serve. Too often, we have turned to our military to provide this service,” Porter wrote.

Mykleby meanwhile took the new strategy message on the road and addressed the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

“Rather than focusing primarily on defense, the security we seek can only be sustained through a whole of nation approach to our domestic and foreign policies. This requires a different approach to problem solving than we have pursued previously and a hard look at the distribution of our national treasure,” the staff officers maintain. “For too long, we have underutilized sectors of our government and our citizenry writ large, focusing intensely on defense and protectionism rather than on development and diplomacy.

“We need to pursue our [new] priorities of education, security, and access to natural resources by adopting sustainability as an organizing concept for a national strategy. This will require fundamental changes in policy, law, and organization,” they state, offering a legislative proposal to Congress.

“What this calls for is a National Prosperity and Security Act, the modern day equivalent of the National Security Act of 1947,” the staff officers assert. “This National Prosperity and Security Act would: integrate policy across agencies and departments of the Federal government and provide for more effective public/private partnerships; increase the capacity of appropriate government departments and agencies; align Federal policies, taxation, research and development expenditures and regulations to coincide with the goals of sustainability; and, converge domestic and foreign policies toward a common purpose.”

In Slaughter’s translation, this brass-hat broadside is a high-ranking acknowledgement that the Pentagon budget and war-fighting mission creep around the world must dramatically shrink to help save the nation from a home-front hollowing out that is destroying American livelihoods and communities. This is a now-hear-this message the public needs to tell Congress.

“Today our security lies as much or more in our prosperity as in our military capabilities,” she wrote in the preface. “Our vocabulary, our institutions, and our assumptions must reflect that shift. ‘National security’ has become a trump card, justifying military spending even as the domestic foundations of our national strength are crumbling. … We do not want to be the sole superpower that billions of people around the world have learned to hate from fear of our military might. We seek instead to be the nation other nations listen to, rely on and emulate out of respect and admiration.”

For further information:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/A%20National%20Strategic%20Narrative.pdf

Counting Up the Costs of War

2011-03-27T20:53:00.001-07:00

How many ways need it be said? America is going broke—and has become imperious, callous and cruel—waging wars around the world. A group of concerned citizens in New Jersey and New York set out recently to visually convey the costs of war for our nation. The result is a mind-boggling array of art work displayed at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ.

The “Looking at the Human and Economic Costs of War through the Arts” exhibition on display through April 14 includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, poetry, dioramas and posters by war veterans, military family members and other concerned taxpayers, artists, writers, teachers and students about various aspects of wars’ costs.

Among the most memorable items is a carefully crafted prosthetic leg lent by a World War II veteran, Bob Levine, who lost his lower right leg from grenade wounds in 1944 in Normandy, France. The VA-issued replacement leg is part of a multi-media display of photos, drawings, newspaper clippings, tables of statistics and a diorama conveying the destructive effects of landmines and other explosives on arms and legs of multitudes of maimed survivors of war zones around the Earth.

“The Million Dollar Soldier,” another diorama made from a US Army camouflage uniform crafted for war in Afghanistan, vividly displays another side of the costs of the conflict in that part of the world. Pinned to the fashionably designed combat jacket are oversize price tags for the cost per soldier per year of keeping an army fighting for nearly a decade halfway around the world in equivalent dollar amounts to the tax bills to local residents for running the municipality and public schools of Teaneck.

The cost in lives in the war on terrorism is represented by a display of poetry and photos conveying former New Jersey resident John Fenton’s tormented grief over the death of his son Matthew, who died in May 2006 of wounds received as a Marine in

Iraq

.

Costs in torment to war survivors and family members is the subject of many of the art works. Nightmares are evoked from images torn from military actions around the globe. “A few years ago if I’d seen that piece I’d have run out of here,” poet Dayl Wise said of a mixed media painting by Ruth Bauer Neustadter of a precariously standing man rendered as a jumble of parts and bones. Wise read to a standing-room-only audience a pair of haunting poems—about losing his sturdy jungle boots when he was wounded in Vietnam and, decades later, suddenly seeing dead Vietnamese farmers amid the “road kill” as he drove on a highway near his home in New York.

"Open Wound," Combat Paper pulp painting made with military uniforms, by Eli Wright, US Army veteran, Iraq

Other work addressing the corrosive impact of post-traumatic stress on war survivors includes a raging display of Combat Paper artwork made from shredded military uniforms by Iraq war veterans, including Robynn Murray, featured in the Oscar-nominated film, Poster Girl. Another piece along these lines is a "Costs of War" poster incorporating a poem I wrote, with calligraphy by Drew Cameron of Combat Papermakers, hand-printed on paper made from military uniforms.

To convey a fuller view of this exhibition’s arresting visual impact, I created a Shutterfly photo album of the artwork and performers who appeared at a Costs of War cultural program on March 20. My poem on this topic is below.

Costs of War

Legless,
armless,
homeless veterans,
dead civilians
in the millions—
orphans,
widows,
shattered families—
from blasted cities,
ghostly villages
full of ghastly graves
in the ruins, ditches, fields…
pillaged farmsteads,
defoliated forests,
ravaged lanes
sowed with landmines,
roadside bombs,
booming blasts of doom
to passersby…
poisonous debris
seeding cancers,
crippling disorders,
including traumatic stress
and birth defects
for generations
in hate-filled nations…
what a toxic residue,
billions spent,
billions still due

--Jan Barry

At the Movies: A Veteran’s War

2011-03-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

It was a long way from a machinegun mount in a military convoy in Baghdad. Robynn Murray’s getup was very elegant on Sunday at the Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, California. What made her stand out from the famous movie stars at Hollywood’s gala event was the brace of tattooed pistols perched on her chest atop a stunning black and gray dress.

Murray, a former Army sergeant, was there because “Poster Girl,” a documentary about her home front battles as a combat veteran of the war in Iraq, was a contender for the award for short documentaries. Despite its title—with an allusion to the Hollywood pinup girl photos of World War II—“Poster Girl” was one of the few films in the Academy Awards lineup that was very different from typical movie fare. The quick flickering of a few scenes from the film, before the Oscar was—dramatic pause—presented to another short documentary (“Strangers No More”), did not begin to convey how different this film is from standard Hollywood flicks about war as scary entertainment.

As the 38-minute documentary by director Sara Nesson shows, the aftermath of war is sometimes brutal for survivors. This film, a review in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press noted, profiles “a high school cheerleader and National Merit Scholar from Buffalo who enlisted in the Army Reserve at age 19 to work in a civil affairs capacity. Along with two female colleagues, she posed for the September 2005 cover of Army Magazine — hence the title of Nesson’s film. But beginning in May 2004, the military had Murray wielding a machine gun from the turret of a Humvee that was taking sniper fire. She returned home with wounds and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The film unflinchingly shows Murray back home in Niagara Falls, NY punching walls, kicking her car door and having a panic attack on camera, amid rambling talk about the times she wanted to commit suicide. Here’s a scene from the movie, as captured by Cythnia Fuchs in a review for PopMatters:

As Robynn recalls entering a home where a family has been shot and killed, she emphasizes the blood on the walls and mattresses. “They got shot in their sleep,” she says, then reflects on her own lack of response at the time: There was this piece of bread,” she recalls, “And there was this piece of brain on it.” Sent to assess the scene, she did just that, until she remembers walking up the stairs and seeing a bloody handprint o the wall. Here Poster Girl shifts time and place, pulling you into Robynn’s sense of lurching up the stairs: her steps are heavy, the camera pitches. The camera arrives in the attic of Robynn’s mother’s home, where Robynn is punching the wall, with boxing gloves. She slams through the surface, then reflects again: “Oh, that’s a problem,” she observes, as she sinks to the floor, beginning to sob. You hear more steps approaching. Her mother, Ann Marie Hacker, comforts her.

Going beyond the usual filmmaker fascination with lives descending into destruction, the documentary also shows her determinedly finding a path to recovery. Rebuffed by the VA, which lost her application for assistance, she found an activist path to another, better stage of life. As the Burlington Free Press noted, “Murray … discovered that her anguish could be ameliorated by making combat paper [artwork from shredded military uniforms]; penning poetry for the Warrior Writers, an initiative that provides opportunities for vets to articulate their experiences; and becoming an activist with Iraq Veterans Against the War, of which she is now a board member.”

Finding a network of assistance for healing from hidden wounds can be hit or miss. Robynn Murray stumbled across a compatible group of veterans and supporters who work together to transform tough times in their lives into artwork, poetry and other forms of creative expression. “Warrior Writers saved my daughter’s life,” her mother said to a circle of audience members at a recent showing of “Poster Girl” in New York City.

Hollywood movie-makers seldom get so close to filmed experiences that come that near to real life saved from the relentless jaws of death.

For more information:
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20110224/ENT/110223026/Oscar-nominated-director-s-path-started-in-Burlington
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/136611-poster-girl/
http://www.warriorwriters.org/

The Latest Farewell to Fighting Wars in Asia

2011-02-28T10:56:00.001-08:00

“Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.”

There’s a quote for the history books, broadcast last week at the US Military Academy at West Point by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is retiring this year. It was as blunt a reassessment of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as MacArthur’s scathing warning to steer clear of fighting in Vietnam in the wake of the war in Korea that ended his four-star military career.

As the Christian Science Monitor’s Brad Knickerbocker reported, “Gates’s message was clear: The US military services, as well as the elected and appointed civilians who send them to war, need better ways of foreseeing and preparing for national security threats.” Future responses need to avoid the costly deployments of armies to wage protracted battles in far-flung corners of the world, the Pentagon chief added.

“And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect,” Gates told the West Point cadets. “We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more – we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”

Expanding limited military missions, Gates emphasized, into nearly decade-long wars turned out to be the bloody mire that MacArthur warned against. “The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq – invading, pacifying, and administering a large third world country – may be low,” Gates said. To avert such a repeat scenario, the US government must do a better job that focuses on ways to “prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly—and controversial—large-scale American military intervention.”

Gates’ speech prompted Huffington Post blogger William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, to expand upon the implications of his scalding farewell address at West Point. “I'd like to propose a coda to the ‘Gates Doctrine’: Any current defense secretary who advises the president to prolong the current wars in Asia and the Middle East should have his head examined,” Astore wrote. “The future is now, Mr. Secretary. It's time to end our costly and futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's time to support our troops by bringing them home. And for our next and future nation-building target, let's take a look around us. There's plenty of work to be done right here in the good ol' USA.”

Egypt’s Path to Peace

2011-02-16T01:55:00.000-08:00

Not since the ancient Israelites slipped out on the Pharaoh in a famous dash through the Red Sea has a mass movement of people in that corner of the world so confounded the powers that be.

“The young Egyptian protesters who overthrew the Mubarak regime on Saturday have accomplished what two generations of violent Islamist revolutionaries could not,” Gwynne Dyer, the noted London-based columnist on international affairs, wrote the other day. “And they did not just do it nonviolently; they succeeded because they were nonviolent.”

This was not just historic, given the victory over violence unleashed against unarmed protesters, it points a path for others to follow. Dyer argues that the uprising in Cairo not only overthrew a repressive dictatorship, but also upended the myth of radical Islamism forever poised to sweep the Muslim world.

“It is a testimony to the good sense of the Arabs, and a rebuke to the ignorant rabble of Western pundits and ‘analysts’ who insisted that Arabs could not do democracy at all, or could only be given it at the point of Western guns,” Dyer concluded.

“It is equally a rebuke to bin Laden and his Islamist companions, hidden in their various caves. They were never going to sweep to power across the Arab world, let alone the broader Muslim world, and only the most impressionable and excitable observers ever thought they would.”

While many “Western pundits” on US television news programs howled over this unexpected display of democracy in a part of the world that’s been subjected for generations to Western guns, the demonstrators in Tahrir Square were gleefully dancing on the graves of colonialism, post-colonialism and American paternalistic patronage of Mubarak’s dictatorship. As the New York Times reported on Monday, the Egyptian revolution of 2011 was fueled by democratic ideas and nonviolent ideals that zipped around on the Internet under the radar of military regimes.

“ The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades,” reported David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger in the New York Times.

“They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley. …

“They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.”

After hundreds of billions of dollars in military “aid” to Mubarak’s police state, a trillion dollars spent in two wars chasing after the elusive bin Laden and his mythical Islamist appeals to violent revolutions that Dyer calls “spectacular failures,” the key to constructive change in the Middle East turns out to be far less expensive. It’s a free document called the Bill of Rights, innovative and inexpensive use of the Internet, and a set of books by an American peacemaker recycling a guy whose nonviolent tactics dismantled a large part of the British empire, named Gandhi.

For further information:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/02/137_81364.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Nuclear Legacies

2011-01-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

We may all be alive today thanks to two far-sighted women who died within days of each other this month. Imagine how many people would be living, if any, had the US-Soviet nuclear arms race exploded into World War III. Half a century ago, when the threat of such a war loomed large, Dagmar Wilson and Louise Reiss played key roles in convincing the public and national leaders to do something to avert catastrophe.

Wilson, the head of the Women Strike for Peace movement, in 1961 organized a telephone tree from her home in Washington, DC, to send an urgent message calling for ending the nuclear bomb tests that were an escalating edge in the bristling hostilities between the superpowers. The message was conveyed by a “network of 50,000 mothers, grandmothers and other women who left their kitchens and their offices for demonstrations in 60 cities across the country,” The Washington Post recalled this week.

“Calling on President John F. Kennedy to ‘End the arms race - not the human race,’ the women won wide attention from world leaders and the press. They built such a groundswell of support for nonproliferation that Kennedy credited them with helping to force the Cold War superpowers to eventually sign a partial nuclear test-ban treaty,” The Washington Post’s obituary for Wilson noted. .

High among the concerns that sparked the Women Strike for Peace demonstrations was cancer risk from the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in Nevada, the South Pacific and the Soviet Union. That’s where Louise Reiss came in. She directed a research project in St. Louis, Missouri in the late 1950s that showed a disturbing rise of strontium 90 levels in baby teeth in Midwestern children. Strontium 90 is a radioactive chemical created by nuclear explosions that was known to cause cancer. Children were exposed through drinking milk from cows in pastures tainted by radioactive fallout.

“The study ultimately found that children born in St. Louis in 1963 had 50 times as much strontium 90 in their teeth as children born in 1950 — before most of the atomic tests. Its initial findings were published in the journal Science in 1961 and came to the attention of President John F. Kennedy as he negotiated with the Soviet Union for a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing,” The New York Time’s obituary for Reiss recalled.
“In June 1963, Dr. Reiss’s husband [Eric] presented the findings in testimony before a Senate committee in support of a treaty. Two months later, the Partial Test Ban Treaty between the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain was signed.”

Among the lessons conveyed by the historic nature of the work that Reiss and Wilson did is the vital importance of independent research into the effects of government programs. “Dr. Reiss was proud that the project achieved its aims through science rather than politics,” noted The New York Times. “‘I continue to be moved by the knowledge that a group of organized people can effectively pressure government if they come up with data instead of rhetoric,’ she wrote in a letter to a colleague in the study in 1996.”

Another lesson is the importance of widespread, creative civic actions that focus public concerns. “The idea to form Women Strike for Peace, Ms. Wilson said, came to her in 1961 while she was sitting with friends in the backyard of her house in the Georgetown section of Washington. They were troubled by the jailing in London of the philosopher Bertrand Russell for his part in antinuclear demonstrations,” The New York Times recalled.

“Ms. Wilson, an artist and illustrator of children’s books, had never been an activist but had long been worried about nuclear fallout. Women, she decided, should strike — take time from their jobs and homemaking for the cause of peace. ’I decided that there are some things the individual citizen can do,’ she told The New York Times in 1962. ‘At least we can make some noise and see. If we are going to have to go under, I don’t want to have to go under without a shout.’”

Dagmar Wilson died Jan. 6 at age 94. Louise Reiss died Jan. 1 at 90. They bought us all some more time to enjoy longer lives.

For more information:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/23/AR2011012304127.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/science/10reiss.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/us/24wilson.html

American-Made Mayhem

2011-01-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

The good people of Tucson, Arizona are still reeling from the massacre in a shopping mall a few days ago that killed six public-spirited citizens and wounded 13 other folks including a popular congresswoman. Horrendous and heartbreaking as it was, it was just the latest outbreak of a peculiar American ritual.

Given enough time, every community from Florida to Alaska, Maine to Hawaii may experience the all-American, historical ritual of shooting up the place. On the first day of spring in 1995, one of these ritualistic, self-proclaimed rites of firing a firearm into a peaceful crowd took place in the town where I lived. It was another in a widespread pattern of such shootings across the USA that it had its own slang name: “going postal.” Here’s what I wrote about it some time after. Nothing much has changed except the names of the places and the victims.

March Madness

Bam.
Bam.
Bam.
Bam.
Bam. Bam.
Four men shot dead.

A fifth lies still
with two bullets in his head
trying not to twitch
until the intruder leaves
the neighborhood post office.

Rumors of a shooting ricochet
through newsrooms miles away:
murder and mayhem in Montclair.
I call home; no one answers.
From newsrooms across metro New York
journalists who roam the world
to cover wars and disasters
rush home to interview their neighbors
and check on their own kin.

Massacre in mediatown—
picturesque Montclair, New Jersey.
A dozen television cameras converge
on the flowery plaza opposite
the grotesquely spot lit post office.
The mayor appears amid the massed microphones
to express the shock of suburbia.

When captured, the shooter is found
to have grown up around the corner,
attended local schools,
and worked for the town DPW.
With a pistol bought like popcorn
at a shoot-‘em-up action flick,
he slipped under America's defenses
pointed outward to fend off
the evils of the world.

R.I.P. Ernie and Scott,
who cheerfully sold me stamps,
asking how things were going.
R.I.P. Bob and George,
who walked into the Watchung Plaza
post office at the wrong time.
Hang in there, David, who
miraculously survived two slugs.

But for fickle fate,
coulda been me:
What? Why? I’d have
screamed in my last breath
as a vaguely familiar figure
executed us in a row on the floor.

--Jan Barry

(from Earth Songs: New & Selected Poems)

Agent Orange’s Toxic Legacy Hits Home

2011-01-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

Retired Master Sergeant LeRoy Foster is haunted by the job that launched his 20-year career in the US Air Force—spraying herbicides along perimeter fences and fuel pipelines at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. This duty seemed inconsequential, field maintenance work done amid B-52 bombers thundering in and out to refuel for bombing raids over Vietnam and a beehive of other military operations buzzing at Navy bases on the small island in the mid-Pacific Ocean. Despite nasty outbreaks of acne that a military doctor recorded in a 1968 medical report, he couldn’t imagine that the government-issued weed-killers might be planting tiny time bombs powerful enough to destroy his health and the lives of many other people.

Forty-some years later, MSgt. Foster spends much of his time in a wheelchair, anxiously rocking his infant grand daughter, who was born last year with extra toes and fingers and a heart abnormality. At 62, living on VA disability and military retirement checks, he also spends hours on his computer in Westfield, NY, a small town near Buffalo, emailing to wider and wider circles of other veterans and public officials. High on his to-do list are pleas for a federal investigation and public health warnings of the potential effects of the toxic legacy of extensively contaminated land and water in Guam—as well as at many other active and former US military bases around the world.

Relentlessly working the Internet, Foster and a group of fellow veterans who were stationed on Guam have persistently lifted the lid on a long-hidden story beyond the widely reported use of Agent Orange herbicides in Vietnam. Their research unearthed information that their experience on Guam was hardly unique. The secretive transition of chemical warfare agents designed to kill crops and defoliate forests to routinely used all-purpose weed-killers had many way stations.

The Story Beyond Agent Orange

The wider story is that a witches’ brew of herbicides contaminated by dioxin, and other hazardous substances, were used at numerous military bases stateside and overseas. Far and wide beyond Vietnam—where a decade of massive spraying missions with Agent Orange and other herbicide mixtures left dioxin “hot spots” at former US bases and many local residents have gruesome birth defects and other severe health problems—hundreds more military sites were contaminated by a toxic mess of chemical spills, cleaning solvents, heavy metals such as lead, plus dioxin in many cases.

During the height of military use of herbicides, which started in the 1950s and mushroomed in the 1960s, millions of soldiers, family members and civilian workers were on these bases, from Florida to South Korea. It was an era in which chemical herbicides were a modern marvel; in which benzene, trichloroethylene and other powerful chemicals were routinely used to wash nearly everything, from “dry cleaned” laundry to engine parts and greasy hands, with the residue washed into the nearest drain. In the decades since, millions more people have been stationed at these bases, which in many cases ended up with some of the most contaminated soil and water outside of industrial plants that manufactured these hazardous materials.

Like many veterans, Foster didn’t connect his health woes to Agent Orange until recent years when news articles reported that the VA kept adding more and more diseases, plus birth defects in children, to a growing list of health effects associated with dioxin exposure. Then he painfully recalled his herbicide-spraying days as a young airman. The VA’s response was to deny Foster’s claim for additional compensation, beyond his 70 percent disability rating for spinal and heart diseases that were deemed service connected, stating that there was no proof Agent Orange was used in Guam.

Foster’s Internet research found that, elsewhere in the country, some veterans of Guam duty have gained VA compensation for Agent Orange exposure based on data they provided. That propelled him to document his knowledge of herbicide use and to tell his story as widely as he could.

“I prepared, mixed and sprayed Agent Orange herbicides on Andersen AFB Guam and off base fuels facilities and pipelines and security fences surrounding those facilities on and off base” from September 1968 into the 1970s, Foster wrote last spring in a blog forum response to the Chicago Tribune’s extensive series on lingering health effects of the US military use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. “Many of my buddies ended up sterile like me, chloracne covered my body, severe ischemic heart disease, diabetes II, high blood pressure, high cholesterol unaffected by meds, immune problems, ankylosing spondiolitis, spinal stenosis, osterporosis, severe arthritis, and many more diseases,” he wrote of the health problems in various combinations that he and others had developed. “This is the truth so help me God. Many of my buddies are dead now and many are dying.”

A few weeks later, Foster sent emails to officials at Department of Defense schools in Guam stating that he had learned from Internet networking that many former students of these schools have severe health problems. “Some of the alumni kids from Andersen AFB have contacted me with some of their stories of health problems,” he wrote. “This is very sad to find that they have problems like LUPUS, DIABETES II, AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES MIXED CONNECTIVE TISSUE DISEASE, MULITPLE MISCARRIAGES, STILL BIRTHS, BIRTH DEFECTS IN THEIR CHILDREN. ETC. I highly recommend that DoDDs Pacific, DoDDs Guam, the Air Force Surgeon General and student alumni associations contact one another to find out what is happening to them and do an investigation to help them.”

Last September, Foster was invited to address a federal Institute of Medicine committee meeting in Washington, DC on his research efforts about dioxin’s health effects on veterans and civilians who lived in Guam. It was the culmination of a determined campaign to get federal officials to examine the health concerns that disturb him.

“I believe that after conversation with the Buffalo NY Veterans Administration that United States Congress needs to direct the VA or the US court of appeals to order an immediate remand of all claims denied to Agent Orange exposure especially those which were outside the country of Vietnam especially Guam, Okinawa and Thailand,” Foster wrote to members of Congress in seeking a congressional investigation. “I was told by the VA in Buffalo NY yesterday that they will not seek out those veterans who were denied nor all of those dependent children of those veterans who would have been entitled to Dependency Indemnity Compensation DIC from the exposure of their father's and mother's to Agent Orange, Agent White and the other herbicides used during the Vietnam WAR.”

Air Force Has No Records

In response to previous congressional queries, Foster found, the Department of Defense maintained the Air Force has no records of Agent Orange being used in Guam. It insists that high levels of dioxin at Andersen Air Force Base discovered by an EPA investigation were due to burning hazardous materials. However, the DOD added in a letter to Rep. Lane Evans in September 2003, Army records show that Agent Orange and similar herbicides were used in testing, storage or war missions in numerous other places, including Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, California, Washington state, Hawaii, Maryland, Pennsylvania., Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, Canada, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

And by the way, the DOD added in its letter to Rep. Evans, another chemical agent called Herbicide Purple was stored on Guam in the early 1950s during the Korean War. Purple was part of a rainbow-colored array of military commissioned chemical agents—including Pink, Green and Orange—that were contaminated in the manufacturing process by a highly toxic byproduct called TCDD or dioxin. The most widely used, according to military records, was Agent Orange. Health studies reviewed by the Institute of Medicine, and accepted by the VA as a basis for claims, link dioxin to various kinds of cancer, spina bifida birth defects, ischemic heart disease, diabetes II, numerous other health problems and a skin disorder called chloroacne.

Other veterans Foster contacted found VA references to Agent Orange use along the DMZ in South Korea and at Fort Drum, NY. A 2001 government document noted that the VA was seeking further information on other “areas where veterans allege AO to have been sprayed [that] include:
1. Guam from 1955 through 1960s (spraying).
2. Johnston Atoll (1972-1978) was used for unused AO storage.
3. Panama Canal Zone from 1960s to early 1970s (spraying).
4. Elgin AFB (Agents Orange and Blue) on Firing Range and Viet Cong Village.
5. Wright-Patterson AFB (OH) and Kelly AFB (TX).”

Foster has heard from other veterans who say the herbicides were also used at bases on Okinawa and in the Philippines. At issue, Foster and many other veterans believe, is a fiscal resistance by federal agencies to acknowledge how widespread the health legacy of dioxin-laced herbicides extends. As Politico.com writer David Rogers noted last summer in an article titled “The bill for Agent Orange comes due”:

“Age and Agent Orange are closing in on Vietnam veterans, a legacy of hurt for those who served — and a very big bill for American taxpayers. It’s a world turned upside down from decades ago when returning soldiers had to fight to get attention for deadly lymphomas linked to the herbicide. Now the frailties of men in their 60s — prostate cancer, diabetes, heart disease — lead the list of qualified Agent Orange disabilities, and the result has been an explosion in claims and the government’s liability.

“The latest expansion, approved by Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki in October, adds ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s and will cost at least $42 billion over the next 10 years. The VA estimates 349,000 individuals are already receiving Agent Orange disability benefits, and that number could soon reach 500,000 — or one out of every four surviving Vietnam veterans by the VA’s count.”

Big Hazardous Waste Problem

In fact, the health bill could be far larger—if the effects of exposure to the full array of hazardous materials at military bases were subject to VA health care and compensation coverage. Foster found another veteran had dug up disturbing records of congressional hearings in 1987 on hazardous waste at military sites. These hearings noted that the Pentagon “in 1986, produced hazardous waste at 505 of its 871 installations in the United States. The types of hazardous waste found at DOD installations include, among others, solvents, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), contaminated sludges, acids, cyanides, and contaminated fuel and oil. … In a classified report concerning hazardous waste management at overseas installations, we also identified similar problems to those found at bases in the United States.”

Foster’s research found that one of the largest hazardous-waste problem areas is Guam, where the EPA lists more than a dozen Superfund sites, areas deemed among the most contaminated, at island bases. Meanwhile, he found, a private company that rates corporate environmental problems stated that Agent Orange manufacturers such as Dow Chemical and Monsanto have a growing liability problem in Guam. The 2004 report by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment risk group based in New York, noted:

“Agent Orange exposure has also become an issue for military personnel stationed outside of combat zones and for U.S. civilians as well. Soldiers stationed on Guam who handled Agent Orange have become ill and symptoms of TCDD (dioxin) poisoning are apparent in the general population of the island as well, TCDD contamination as a result of Agent Orange handling has been measured at up to 1900 ppm in some areas of Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Given that safe levels of TCDD have been placed at below 1 ppb by the EPA and even lower by many state regulatory agencies (toxic effects have been measured at parts per trillion), this implies an extraordinary level of contamination. TCDD has been shown in laboratory animals to have multigenerational impacts, not just on the offspring of exposed animals, but on the next generation as well.”

After all he has discovered about the toxic stew he helped to create while in the Air Force, Foster’s latest mission is to help spur ways for veterans and civilians who were at military bases, and their families, to exchange information and get the best health assistance.

“What shocked me is when kids contacted me on the Internet and I knew their fathers [on Guam]. I sprayed right past their houses,” Foster said in a recent interview for this article. Now grown, many of these military dependents, he learned, have severe health problems, including birth defects. “There’s been no movement by anybody to help the kids who were on Guam. I feel bad, because I was there going around spraying that stuff…

“My daughter found out what is being passed down to her children now, so she has decided not to have any more,” he added. “So I will only have one grandchild. This is a story of genocide to an entire section of Americans. We were the poor and the down trodden who served in the Vietnam War. We need our stories told and recorded for all time.”

Foster and several other veterans have kick-started the process of recording their stories by posting personal statements, VA claims records, military medical records, photos and other documents on a webs site, www.guamagentorange.info. Foster has also initiated an online petition seeking Congressional action on their concerns regarding Guam. The petition is at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/guamagentorange/.

“I want to convey to everyone, especially the veterans service organizations,” said Foster, a member of the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America, “and to all of the public schools and universities who have contact with vets and their children and grandchildren, to organize, to share, to be kept informed and to help one another. We are all in this together. I am sorry to say lots of information has been kept from us on purpose. They didn't want to scare us or make us so angry that we would result in uprisings or anarchy, but this is really bad and really terrible.”

For further information:
http://www.guamagentorange.info/home

Jan Barry, a veteran journalist who served in the Army in Vietnam, has investigated Agent Orange health issues in news reports carried by the Associated Press and published in the New York Times and many other publications.

(This article was also posted at Opinion Forum.)

The latest news on MSgt. Foster’s story is one of the quickest updates in my journalism career, conveyed in an email sent yesterday (Jan. 25):

THANK YOU EVERYONE. SGT RALPH STANTON, THE UNITED STATES SENATE VETERANS AFFAIRS COMMIITTEE, CONGRESSMAN FILNER, VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA OF NEW YORK, CONGRESSWOMAN BORDALLO, GUAM SENATOR BEN PANGLINAN, SENATOR SCHUMER, SENATOR GILLIBRAND, CONGRESSMAN HIGGINS, AMERICAN LEGION, MARY ELLEN MCCARDY, CAROINE WEKSELBAUM, GRETCHEN GARDNER, ALAN OATES OF THE VVA, MOOKIE PORTER OF THE VVA, TOM BERGER OF THE VVA, SHARON PERRY, THE DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS OF NEW YORK, DAVE BARKER, NY SENATOR CATHY YOUNG, AND COUNTY EXECUTIVE GREG EDWARDS,

The Buffalo VA Regional office called me this morning to tell me the good news that my long battle for AGENT ORANGE EXPOSURE is finally over. They told me that my claims were approved and that I would be a getting a very large claims package in the mail shortly. I believe this is the very first AGENT ORANGE HERBICIDE EXPOSURE CLAIM approved at VA Regional level. There were seven or eight previously approved claims but at COURT OF APPEALS LEVEL. I want to thank all of you for being a part of this battle and hope all veterans who were exposed to AO herbicides will be approved quickly. I hope those denied will have immediate reviews of their denied claims and the children / grandchildren affected will be helped quickly. thank you so much for your help and Praise God for answering our prayers for help.

LeRoy G. Foster, MSgt, USAF, Ret
Life Member of the DAV of New York At Large member
Member of the American Legion of New York Post 777, Celeron, NY
Life Member of the Vietnam Veterans of America New York Chapter 459
Member of War Vets of Fluvanna, New York
70% Service Connected 100% Unemployable
Totally and Permanently Disabled from Agent Orange on Guam

1/31/11 -- The latest twist of fate for MSgt. Foster is that he subsequently learned the local VA office approved an “increase of my disabilities [compensation payments] and the presumptive disease of AO but did not approve the AO exposure,” he wrote in an email. “They have denied my claim for AO exposure on Guam. I will be appealing it to the BVA AND I AM SURE TO THE COURT OF APPEALS.” He also launched a letter-writing campaign to Senators Gillibrand and Schumer of New York, seeking congressional action on this issue.

Coincidently, days later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer launched a series of articles on the lingering health effects of Agent Orange on families in Ohio and Vietnam: http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/unfinished_business_suffering.html#incart_mrt

Waging Poetry

2011-01-04T19:05:00.000-08:00

When I get blue, beyond the soothing realms of jazz or mother Nature or love, I reach for a book of poetry. The rhythmic kick of well-placed words works better for me than pills or booze. So it was that I recently sat in a wintry funk and read W.D. Ehrhart’s latest poetry collection, The Bodies Beneath the Table (Adastra Press, $18). I read each poem aloud, awash in thunderstorms of emotions set in motion by the poems and my own life, and got up refreshed. I could particularly relate to many of these poems because Bill Ehrhart has been a friend and literary companion for nearly 40 years, yet many of the tales in this collection were revelations.

Ehrhart’s most memorable poems look death, despair or being bummed out straight in the eye and tell a hair-raising story conveying how the author somehow survived that encounter. Often by picking himself up and relating in amazement that he’s still alive. Consider the conclusion of a poem to a former girlfriend whose companionship provided no salvation after a harrowing war tour in Vietnam, titled “Sleeping with the Dead”:

… O, to have been

so close, to have shared your bed, to have

felt like I’d been raised from the dead

after all those dead I slept with

every night. It almost drove me mad

to let you go.

But that was years ago.

You were eighteen then, and here I am

married eighteen years and sorry only

that I’ve never had the chance to tell you

that it’s okay, that I’m okay,

that no one could have saved me then,

not you nor God, that I don’t love you

anymore, but hope that someone does.

The theme of this collection—like most of Ehrhart’s previous 18 books of poetry and prose—is surviving in a world of hurt, as GIs in war zones would say of a miserable mission. Many of these poems expose deep pains of domestic life, as well as those from military battlefields, tangled together in thickets of nightmares. “I don’t remember a time when the house/ I grew up in wasn’t crackling with rage,” he writes in “The Damage We Do.” His flight from bickering parents was to join the Marines, becoming a raging veteran. Then he produced a lovely daughter

who’s angry all the time. I’d like to say

I don’t know why, but I do.

I’d like to explain that it’s not her fault,

but what’s she supposed to do with that?

I’d like to undo the damage I’ve done,

But I don’t know how.

Ehrhart’s method of waging poetry against deathly moods is to lance a long-festering wound with a sharp cut of insight, cauterize it with a hot poker of revelation of his own role in the mishap, and bandage it with a bumbling wish to do better next time. The healing is in the telling of these tormenting accounts in public, out loud.

Sometimes the healing consists of poems about trying to make peace with his volcanic father, saying goodbye to his mother on her deathbed, or waiting up all night for a distraught buddy to arrive with a gun in the car and offering breakfast with no questions. Often it consists of Ehrhart sharing innermost thoughts few moody souls dare reveal in poems. Thus National Public Radio listeners of Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” were perhaps startled and yet graced to hear one of Ehrhart’s signature poems, “Sins of the Fathers,” in the hectic run up to Christmas last month. Keillor’s somber, fireplace- crackling voice concisely conveyed the tone of a parent’s sudden revelation:

Today my child came home from school in tears.
A classmate taunted her about her clothes,
and the other kids joined in, enough of them
to make her feel as if the fault was hers,
as if she can't fit in no matter what.
A decent child, lovely, bright, considerate.
It breaks my heart. It makes me want someone
to pay. It makes me think—O Christ, it makes
me think of things I haven't thought about
in years. How we nicknamed Barbara Hoffman
"Barn," walked behind her through the halls and mooed
like cows. We kept this up for years, and not
for any reason I could tell you now
or even then except that it was fun.
Or seemed like fun. The nights that Barbara
must have cried herself to sleep, the days
she must have dreaded getting up for school.
Or Suzanne Heider. We called her "Spider."
And we were certain Gareth Schultz was queer
and let him know it. Now there's nothing I
can do but stand outside my daughter's door
listening to her cry herself to sleep.

For more information:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/12/06

http://www.wdehrhart.com/information.html

Living with Death’s Shadow

2010-12-23T06:41:00.001-08:00

Holiday blues. Survivor guilt. Withering blasts of grief.

Like so many war veterans, I’ve been living with these and other chronic nightmares most of my adult life. It often gets worse during holiday seasons and certain anniversaries. For many of us, this is an intensely private story that’s seldom talked about in public.

News stories in recent years have revealed the alarming number of American soldiers and veterans with post-traumatic stress issues from serving in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This dismal news has been amplified by reports of shocking rates of suicide among young soldiers and veterans, male and female, combat and support troops. Yet, little information has been provided on ways of living with this frightening malady. How older generations of survivors of traumatic events—including loss of health, home, job, family, friends—found ways to cope with the demons of disaster has gotten little attention.

Among the things I’ve learned is that the usual things said about grief are wrong. Time does not heal all wounds. “Get on with your life” and “suck it up” do not make the pain of grief go away.

I still get zapped, often at unexpected times that can cause an eruption of cursing, by memories I’d rather not dwell on—such as the hearty laughter of a buddy in my unit in Vietnam who died 47 years ago; an animated discussion of war poetry with a Vietnam vet who worked as a peer counselor and later committed suicide with a clipping of one of my bitterest writings in his wallet, as government budget cutters threatened to end the first VA program designed to help veterans cope with post-traumatic stress, nearly 30 years ago; the death at age 60 of a close friend, Dave Cline, whose body and soul and health were consumed by his efforts as a national leader of Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War to slay the dragons of war.

A Daze of Days

For years I got through what I once described as “a daze of days” by keeping busy—as an activist on war and veterans’ issues, as an editor and publisher of poetry by Vietnam veterans, as a relentless get-that-story journalist, as a hands-on parent involved in myriad ways in our community.

And then one day, death snuffs out our life support. There are worse things than surviving a war, as many veterans have found out when a child dies or their spouse. When my wife died of cancer, fading fast during a Christmas-New Year’s holiday season, I was hit by a tsunami of grief that’s still a bone-deep wound nine years later.

I survived thanks to a lifeline of support networks. In the early 1970s, I helped organize a workshop group of Vietnam vets and war-experienced psychiatrists seeking ways of addressing a mysterious malady that later was officially defined as post-traumatic stress disorder. And then I moved on with my life. When my wife died, I knew I needed that kind of help big time. I called a hotline asking to get into a support group for people who’d lost their wife or husband, spurred by nearly crashing my car on the way to work when I burst into tears as a memory of my wife welled up.

Fellow members and organizers of the support group at St. Barnabas Hospice Center were very supportive in working through initial stages of grief. So was another support group I attended, hosted by Montclair High School’s adult education program, that included local families who lost a loved one in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. I was also aided by attending a gathering with a trauma specialist who led a highly unusual reflective discussion by harried, in some cases haunted reporters, editors and photographers who had covered the collapse of the twin towers and the aftermath of grief that enveloped the New York metropolitan area and the nation.

What also got me through the worst time of my life is my editors at The Record of Bergen County (NJ) put me on medical leave. I spent six weeks recuperating in the countryside where I grew up, camping and biking from my parents’ place in the Finger Lakes region of New York, rediscovering what I enjoy about life. And having long talks with my father, a World War II veteran, and my mother, whose brother was killed in a sea battle off the Philippines on Armistice Day in 1944 and whose youngest son, my brother, died in a motorcycle accident.

Still, I have flare ups and setbacks. When I returned to work, I had occasional testy moments with colleagues and bitter outbursts that weren’t always confined to “normal” road rage screams over some other idiot’s driving. One day I realized I needed to find a less stressful line of work and retired from daily journalism to teach college courses part time.

Recently, thanks to a friend’s advice, I attended a much needed and instructive set of workshops for families hosted by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, after an altercation with a relative who has his own grief-freighted problems. At age 67, I flew off the handle like a young hothead back in the Army. To add insult to injury, I lost the stupid fight. I realized I needed to learn a better way of communicating and handling my own distress. It was a wake up call that I needed to stretch beyond the don’t-mess-with-me personality that’s been my core since growing up in the military in the midst of a war.

Writing It Out

Writing about troubling events in my life has been cathartic. I wrote about my wife’s death, our tumultuous life together and what I gained from that experience and earlier events, including soldiering in Vietnam, in a poetry collection titled “Earth Songs.” Working on those poems carried me through sleepless nights with a reinvigorating sense of creative accomplishment. A new collection, that helped work through more recent nightmares, is titled “Life after War & Other Poems.” I get through wintry holidays, which is the worst part of the year for me, by creating photo books of spectacular nature scenes I enjoyed discovering on outdoors treks.

Since my brush with the abyss, I’ve tried to aid others dealing with grief, working with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in Warrior Writers and Combat Paper writing and arts workshops, and addressing survivors of all ages in poetry readings sponsored by Post-Traumatic Press and other groups. I stay in touch with a prickly, yet supportive circle of fellow vets, spouses and friends who cope in various ways—from attending AA meetings, VA support groups, private counseling sessions, peace demonstrations, pilgrimages to old battlefields, memorial services, unit reunions, to grousing among ourselves.

People who have coped with death and grief are all around us. The hard part of reaching out, especially for active duty soldiers and war veterans, is admitting there’s a crack in our armor. It takes nerve, or desperation, to call a friend or some stranger and say: “I’m having a hellacious day. Ah… got time to talk?” But it can also lead to some amazing friendships and a booster shot of life.

Widening Gulf between Oil and Security

2010-09-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from BP's drilling platform that exploded and killed 11 workers fouled key fishing areas, befouled wildlife and relentlessly threatened to ruin the region's beaches and tourism industry. But perhaps the biggest shock was the out-of-control oil plume's jolt to Americans' sense of national security.

Facing one of the worse environmental disasters in American history, federal officials were stumped as to how to use the armed forces to protect a vital coastal region--except as emergency clean up crews.

As oil slicks swirled toward an endangered beach and marshland, an angered veteran of the Louisiana National Guard lashed out at the folly of fighting overseas to protect a steady flow of the toxic gunk now threatening the coastal way of life in his home state. "When I signed on with the National Guard, I did it to help protect America from our enemies, like in the Persian Gulf, not to clean up an oil company mess in the Gulf of Mexico," Guardsman Evan Wolf said in a television ad squarely aimed at fellow Americans.

"America needs a new mission. Because whether it's deep-drilling oil out here or spending a billion dollars a day on oil from our enemies overseas, our dependence on oil is threatening our national security," said Wolf. The ad, sponsored by VoteVets.org, asked viewers to contact Congress to support legislation backing energy alternatives, CBS News reported.

In a related TV ad from the same group, Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson, a former head of logistics in Iraq, pressed this startling message amid violent video clips of exploding military trucks: "Our troops are getting killed moving fuel we wouldn't need if our military was more efficient -- and our enemies know we're hooked on their oil," he said. "That's why breaking our addiction must not only be a military priority, but America's mission, and why the Senate needs to pass a clean energy climate plan."

In a statement on a veteran’s website, VetVoice.com, Anderson added: "It's through my experiences of overseeing the fuel resupply effort in Iraq that I learned the importance of energy efficiency, reducing risks to our troops, getting us off of foreign oil, and developing new, renewable fuel technologies."

These sobering public service-style ads by Iraq war veterans were not presented by "the usual suspects" on the Left of America's raging political wars. They came from military veterans who had directly experienced fatal flaws in policies that others debated in ideological terms.

Military Commanders Speak Out

Amid the alarums of news updates on oil slicks fouling beaches from Louisiana to Florida as undersea clouds of oil poisoned pelicans and prime fishing grounds, a group of retired generals and admirals also weighed in, issuing a joint statement putting Americans' addiction to oil into a larger, hotly contested context.

"Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place. It's threatening America's security," 33 high-ranking former military leaders contended in ads placed in Military Times publications. "America's billion dollar a day dependence on oil makes us vulnerable to unstable and unfriendly regimes. A substantial amount of that oil money ends up in the hands of terrorists... Taking control of our energy future means preventing future conflicts around the world and protecting Americans here at home."

The ad, sponsored by the Truman National Security Project's Operation Free and aimed at boosting public support for a bill in Congress, concluded that: "It's time to secure America with clean energy. We can create millions of jobs in a clean energy economy while mitigating the effects of climate change across the globe."

The "now hear this!" message by high-ranking military men (and a woman, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy) who had commanded large segments of the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps was the latest salvo in a campaign waged by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans involved in Operation Free. The campaign also included bus tours and rallies in state capitals and many cities around the country and lobbying missions to Washington, DC.

Gridlock in Congress

The politically divided Senate, however, failed to muster enough votes to act on the bill the veterans' campaign supported--the American Power Act, developed in a bipartisan effort by Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman.

"July 27 was supposed to be the day that the Senate finally took real action on the issue we have all been working hard for over the past year. It didn’t happen," blogged one of the green-energy lobbyists, Chris Miller, a former Army sergeant from Illinois who served two deployments in Iraq. "As we all got on airplanes throughout the country in high spirits, something was happening on Capitol Hill: nothing.

"By the time we hit ground in Washington, D.C. we learned that everything had changed. The Senate didn’t have the sixty votes needed to proceed to an up-or-down vote on the bill. We went to the Hill again to meet with fence-sitting Senators and their staff. The opinion we encountered there was disappointing, but not surprising: we need to do something about the issues of energy security, energy independence, and climate change, but we’re not going to do anything now."

Hero or Goat?

Miller's hometown newspaper in Carbondale, Illinois reported on his appearance in a TV ad that featured exploding roadside bombs like one that had wounded him in Iraq, and then extensively quoted a local member of Congress who dismissed the veterans' campaign to cut oil use as a cover for leftist politics on climate change.

"Not everyone agrees with Operation Free. U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, said he believes the organization has a political agenda," reported The Southern, Carbondale's local newspaper. "'In no way am I disrespecting Mr. Miller's service or other soldiers involved with Operation Free, but the public should be aware of the stances the group supports,' Shimkus said. 'Their website explains the leftist positions that global warming supporters continue to use to scare us.'

"Shimkus said he supports an approach to energy that includes increasing domestic energy production through offshore oil exploration and coal-to-liquid technology. Shimkus said energy independence is vital to our nation and it is not in our best interests to rely on foreign oil.

"'Increasing our domestic exploration and drilling of oil, which climate change legislation does not do, is the only answer,' he said. 'Operation Free uses our veterans' heroic service to advance an agenda that is not in the best interests of our nation.'"

Meanwhile, the mainstream news media often muddled or entirely missed the significance of the war veterans' revolt against the energy system status quo.

"National security isn't a perfect argument for moving away from oil, at least for environmentalists—it's too easy to see how an even dirtier fuel like Canadian tar sands crude could pass muster just because it doesn't come from a hostile nation," Time Magazine argued in a feature story on war veterans joining with the Sierra Club to highlight implications of the Gulf disaster. "But the oil spill has demonstrated that America must have a reckoning with the way it develops — and uses — energy, and oil especially."

Yet the outraged vets were essentially channeling similar calls for America to get off the oil standard that have been repeatedly stated for years by national security experts in and out of government. Time gave the oil-wary veterans credit for dramatically raising an issue from an angle that seldom gets headlines, TV specials or radio talk time. "Think renewable power is a joke?" Time poked at scoffers. "Well the Department of Defense has invested billions in energy efficiency and renewable power--in part because they know from Iraq, where a gallon of gas is priced at $400 given the long and threatened supply chain, just how vulnerable our oil dependence makes us."

Previous Calls for Action

In September 2004, several national security experts and representatives of public policy organizations including the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, Center for Security Policy, National Defense Council Foundation, and the American Council on Renewable Energy, issued an open letter to fellow Americans and a proposed plan for energy security called "Set America Free." The joint letter called for immediate action to dramatically reduce and replace America's use of oil.

"We are funding terrorism with our petrodollars," said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and a former high-ranking Pentagon official. "The bulk of the funding for terrorism is money that flows from state sponsors of terrorism and from there to terrorist organizations. In other words we're paying them to kill us...As one who approaches this from a pure national security perspective I really believe we have no choice but to seize the opportunity to move the country as rapidly as possible off the vulnerability associated with this current reliance on foreign oil."

In 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations issued an extensive report titled "National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency" prepared by a blue ribbon task force of former government officials led by past heads of the Department of Defense and CIA. The bottom line message was: "The Task Force is unanimous in concluding that stronger incentives are needed to encourage investment in energy efficiency and fuel
switching by the hundreds of millions of consumers and commercial enterprises in the United States."

Specifically, the national security task force "recommends that the federal government offer greatly expanded incentives and investments aimed at both short- and long-term results to address a wide range of technologies that includes higher efficiency vehicles, substitutes for oil in transportation (such as biomass and electricity), techniques to enhance production from existing oil wells, and technologies that increase the energy efficiency of industrial processes that use oil and gas. Government spending is appropriate in this context because the market alone does not make as much effort as is warranted by national security and environmental considerations."

Alluding to a previous Council on Foreign Relations report, the national security task force added: "In particular, policies intended to reduce demand for fossil fuels—such as those advocated here—can also slow the accumulation of gases that contribute to global warming."

The thrust of this foreign policy call to action caught the attention of editors at Scientific American, who profiled one of the oil-policy dissenters in an October 2008 article titled "For National Security, Get Off Oil."

"At R. James Woolsey’s farm in southern Maryland, solar panels on the roof of his house send electricity back to the utility grid when his family is not using much power. And he drives a Toyota Prius hybrid with a conversion kit that enables him to recharge the car’s battery pack using an extension cord and household current.

"Woolsey isn’t the average citizen who has gone green. As the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995, Woolsey warns that the U.S. faces a grave national security threat from its dependence on energy derived from oil."

Oil Threat Comes Home

As BP's oil well catastrophe dominated daily news reports for weeks on end, BBC radio producers focused on the larger ramifications and conveyed this exchange:

"The damage caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf is expected to affect the region’s environment and economy for decades. And some are suggesting it’s a greater threat to US national security than anything that’s going on in Afghanistan. The World’s Katy Clark has the story.

"KATY CLARK: Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University says that when requirements are great and resources limited, setting the right national security priorities is essential. Yet he maintains the United States has exhibited frustratingly bad judgment in recent years when it comes to addressing the greatest threats before it. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, are the most glaring examples.

"ANDREW BACEVICH: And if we look at what matters most, I would argue strongly that the events ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico are of far greater concern to the American people than the events that are going on in Kandahar."

Bacevich, a retired Army colonel whose son died on a military mission in Iraq, has written an outpouring of books and articles in recent years warning that America's foreign policy priorities are disastrous to American society.

In a recent radio interview on Democracy Now, Bacevich linked the national addiction to oil to a dangerously inflated sense of military power that administration after administration in Washington has projected through massive troop movements and fleets of bombers, ships, armored vehicles and humvee patrols, supplied by long, slow, easily targeted fuel truck convoys snaking through deserts, mountains and cities full of hostile people with long histories of fighting military invaders.

"We are in that part of the world because of oil," Bacevich said. "We are in that part of the world because Washington is insistent on its—that it will demonstrate that America’s will shall not be defied, you know, that we cannot afford to back down in Afghanistan, many people in Washington believe, because that would call into question American global leadership. I think American global leadership, in many respects, is an illusion, and it’s a self-defeating illusion."

Conservative's Call for Change

Bacevich, who describes himself as a conservative, is a historian who has turned his critical eye on current issues. In a recent interview in U.S. Catholic magazine, he addressed the wider picture of national priorities that he contends loom behind the oil addiction that long preceded the momentous drilling-rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"When people talk about culture of life they're usually talking about abortion and end-of-life issues and capital punishment, but it seems to me that also raises environmental questions that are of vital interest to the United States of America," Bacevich said. "If the planet sustains terrible damage through climate change, then freedom as we know it is going to be compromised, and the well-being of future generations is going to be deeply damaged.

"All issues that relate to energy--what kind we use, how we use it, and where we get it--if informed by that larger consideration of preserving the planet, would lead us to practical, specific near-term actions that would be different than those that we've pursued with regard to the Persian Gulf and the Middle East over the past 30 years.

"Jimmy Carter's infamous 'national malaise' speech in 1979 is an illustrative moment. Carter was trying to define a new energy policy that would reduce our dependency on imported oil, but he also said: 'This crisis is not simply about oil. It's about the meaning of freedom. We are at a crossroads and the choice is a fundamental one: How do we intend to organize American society?'

"He was exactly right. It was very clear what Carter was proposing in terms of national sacrifice and a new direction on energy policy. But in the next election Reagan was offering 'morning in America.' And we, the people--don't blame Washington--we, the people, made a choice. It was not the choice that Carter recommended, and we're living with the consequences.

"We decided that freedom didn't mean freedom from dependency on Mideast oil, it meant driving a gas-guzzler at 85 miles per hour and living 50 miles from where you work. If we had made a different choice in the way we organize society and get our energy, it could have meant vast changes in what we're experiencing today."

America's Gas-Happy Culture

But American motorists didn't make these choices in a vacuum. Relentless, snazzy advertisements to buy big cars, big trucks and then big SUVs played a substantial role in selling a gas-guzzling lifestyle to a largely hard-working public. So did the continuous expansion through federal funding of the interstate highway system to nearly every corner of the country, enabling people to commute long distances and easily undertake family drives to distant vacation spots. And behind the scenes, lobbyists for oil companies virtually set the national energy agenda no matter who was president.

"The oil industry and related trade associations have been lobbying to secure their bottom lines by risking our national safety for decades," contends Rebecca Lefton, a climate change activist with the Center for American Progress. Lefton cites, among other examples, BP's oil contracts in Libya on behalf of which it allegedly pressed for the release from prison of the Libyan national held responsible for blowing up an American airliner over Scotland.

The explosion of BP's oil rig off the coast of Louisiana revealed to the public that the British oil giant's entanglement with America's security comes even closer to home, as the news media took a closer look at what was going on.

"The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil giant comes under federal and state scrutiny for potential violations of clean-water and oil-spill laws related to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to U.S. and company officials," the Washington Post reported in July.

"Even before the Gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun probing the potential debarment of BP from all federal contracts -- including those reached with the Defense Energy Support Center, which buys all fuel for the military services. The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP's 2006 spillage of oil in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at its refinery in Texas," the Washington Post report added.

Oil Secrets Exposed

BP's Gulf spill lifted the lid off a number of secretive matters vital to America's security. These included lax enforcement of environmental regulations, lack of effective government oversight of deep-water drilling and failure to have a workable safety plan.

As Ramapo College environmental studies professor Michael Edelstein noted in a detailed critique of the Gulf crisis: "The BP Oil Spill disclosed to the world the full range of adverse consequences that such an event can cause. ... Perhaps most disturbing of all was the illustration that off-shore oil drilling, and perhaps other post-peak fossil fuel extraction, is dangerous in unanticipated ways and tests the ability of experts to mitigate. We cannot assume that problems that occur can be easily fixed or even that they can be fixed at all," Edelstein wrote in a forthcoming book chapter titled "Privacy and Secrecy: Public Reserve as a Frame for Examining the BP Gulf Oil Disaster."

"Yet, perhaps the most revealing of the causal issues is ... the failure of modern society to wean itself from its dependency on oil," Edelstein concluded. "Post peak, oil resources become harder and more risky to tap and the climate consequences of a combustion-based society become ever clearer. Our oil dependence is hardly a secret, and yet it is so central to our paradigm for understanding the world that it is assumed. It is invisible even if hidden in plain sight. Suggested is that the most hazardous secrets are the ones we ourselves collude in keeping."

In an examination of catastrophes that ended the Roman empire, Canadian peace and conflict studies professor Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that "our circumstances today are surprisingly like Rome's in key ways." The Roman empire, he contends, expanded over a vast area to control--with armies and engineering feats, like irrigation aqueducts--the best agricultural areas in the Mediterranean region in order to fed growing urban populations and enrich a tiny elite. Eventual over-use of these croplands set in motion a shrinkage and then collapse of the once-formidable empire.

Our modern, oil-fueled global civilization is following in the same path, Homer-Dixon argues in his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Readily available oil supplies have already passed their peak, forcing explorations of remote areas such as deep under oceans, he notes. "Oil will become far scarcer and costlier," he writes. "Could this lead to a modern version of the Roman empire's fall--caused by escalating tensions as players on the world stage struggle to control oil supplies and as skyrocketing energy costs contort our economies?"

White House Moves

While not endorsing such a gloom and doom scenario, the Obama administration has moved to nudge the nation into taking steps toward a more sustainable energy policy.

"For decades it has been clear that the way Americans produce and consume energy is not sustainable," states an "Energy and Environment" message posted on the White House website. "Our addiction to foreign oil and fossil fuels puts our economy, our national security and our environment at risk. To take this country in a new direction, the President is working with Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation to protect our nation from the serious economic and strategic risks associated with our reliance on foreign oil, to create jobs, and to cut down on the carbon pollution that contributes to the destabilizing effects of climate change."

While the Senate remained gridlocked in partisan battles over a clean energy bill and nearly any other proposal by the Obama administration, Obama ordered a number of executive actions, including "committing the Federal Government to lead by example and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020, increase energy efficiency, and reduce fleet petroleum consumption," the White House website noted.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has begun its own momentous turn from its oil-based traditions.

"No one is more acutely aware of this problem than the Department of Defense, and they are leading the efforts on breaking our dependency on oil," said retired Navy Lt. Robert Diamond, testifying to a Congressional committee in April on behalf of Operation Free. "This is critically important. Why? Because DoD is the largest energy consumer in the nation, and our nation is the largest energy consumer in the world."

Great Green Fleet

For example, Diamond stated, "Under the energized leadership of Secretary Roy Mabus, the Navy has set ambitious goals for shifting the Fleet to renewable energy sources. ... [including a] goal of sailing, by 2012, the 'Great Green Fleet'—a carrier battle group entirely powered by sustainable, renewable fuel sources, including nuclear power. Secretary Mabus has also set the goal of generating half of the power at the Navy’s shore installations from alternative energy sources—wind, solar or geothermal—by 2020."

In examining the causes of the collapse of Roman civilization, Homer-Dixon found some hope for our future. "We have an advantage over the Romans that gives us a head start: we understand much better how the complex systems around us behave," he argues. "We also understand that in any complex adaptive system, breakdown, if limited, can be a key part of that system's long-term resilience and renewal."

So the Gulf oil spill catastrophe, in this view, could spur Americans to fully embrace energy conservation and shift to more sustainable sources of energy. That's the goal of civic groups like Operation Free and reformers in and out of government, as well as researchers, writers and innovators seeking effective models.

"The Industrial Age was not planned but innovated. The next age will be no different," contend Peter Senge and his collaborators on a recently published handbook titled The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. However, they add, "to shape a sustainable future, we all need to work together differently than we have in the past." This is a book that perhaps the Obama administration has been reading.

Time for Change

"The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now," President Obama said in a televised address to the nation in June. "Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny."

After describing the scope of the immediate problem of gushing oil ruining Gulf fisheries, marshes and beaches, Obama put the crisis into the larger context of national energy policies. "For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

"The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight," he continued. "Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.

"We cannot consign our children to this future. Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us," Obama concluded. "As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors."

Another Kind of Hero

2010-09-05T03:59:00.000-07:00

Former Arizona Cardinals football star Pat Tillman was posthumously awarded the Silver Star by the U.S. Army -- for being killed by fellow Rangers on a mission in Afghanistan. The wrenching impact on his family of his death and promotion to poster boy for the War on Terrorism is the focus of a haunting new documentary, The Tillman Story.

From field commanders to President Bush, Tillman's gruesome death in April 2004 triggered a rush to whitewash the facts to fit a Hollywood-style heroic war story line. "The real Pat Tillman, as described by his family and fellow soldiers, was not the gung-ho jock and homespun patriot the Army tried to paint him as," noted Time Magazine's review of this film. While he gave up a professional football career to enlist after 9/11, Tillman was highly critical of the invasion of Iraq, where he and his brother Kevin were deployed before getting sent on the fatal mission chasing the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"I'm Pat f------ Tillman!" he shouted at a fire team from his own platoon who gunned him down on an Afghan mountainside as he tried to wave them off, according to a fellow soldier interviewed in the film. Outraged family members were equally blunt once they discovered the official story was a Pentagon p.r. campaign conducted to dramatic drumbeats from the Bush White House. Public outcry by his mother Mary and father Patrick Sr., a lawyer, triggered a series of official investigations culminating in a 2007 congressional hearing.

Documentary director Amir Bar-Lev presents a cavalcade of television news footage of the super-patriotic paeans to a fallen hero, tellingly contrasted with sobering interviews with survivors, who initially were drowned out by waves of "fact-free doggerel from clueless media," as Time Magazine movie critic Richard Corliss wrote.

"What I’ve come to learn while making this movie is what the military has that’s a stronger part of their arsenal than special ops is a team of publicists," Bar-Lev said in an interview in Filmmaker Magazine. "All that matters is CBS, NBC and the rest getting the right sound bite into their mix, and they do that very readily."

After a recent showing of the film at a New York theater, Bar-Lev told the audience that the Tillman family was wary of doing another round of interviews because they felt the news media had mindlessly echoed the Pentagon's propaganda.

Nearly lost in the flag-waving media circus was the stunned, bitter voice of Kevin Tillman, who quit a professional baseball career to join the Army with his brother and escorted his body home from a botched patrol.

Adding to the family's outcry, "in dramatic testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Kevin Tillman accused the Bush administration of twisting the facts of his brother's death to distract public attention from prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq," the Denver Post reported in April 2007. "His voice shaking, Tillman said the official account of his brother's death in 2004 was 'utter fiction ... intended to deceive the family and, more importantly, the American people.' "

In a blistering letter published on the Truthdig website in 2006, Kevin Tillman wrote of the war in Iraq that he and Pat served in: "Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes. Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground."

Another former Ranger who testified at the hearings, Bryan O'Neal, said he was ordered by a commander not to tell Kevin that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire. In the documentary, O'Neal somberly describes how his life was saved by Tillman's attempts to stop their fellow soldiers from shooting at them.

"I felt that I was going to die," O'Neal said in a 2007 interview with ESPN, which dug deep into the array of official deceptions. "In fact, I knew it. I was positive while it was happening. I felt what he did, the actions he took and then sacrificing himself the way he did, are really the main factors why I walked off of the area alive."

The ESPN report continued: "In the days just after the firefight, O'Neal gave an account of Tillman's actions to Army officials preparing a document that recommended Tillman for the Silver Star, the Army's third-highest distinction for combat valor. Since that document remains classified, O'Neal is unable to comment on it. However, he confirmed to ESPN.com the findings of a later investigator that his account in that case was altered so that it indicated Tillman had been killed by enemy fire, a version of the story the Army let stand for a month after the gun battle."

A central thread of the film is what happened in the wake of a memo, leaked to the Associated Press, by then-Major General Stanley McChrystal to top military commanders shortly after Tillman's death. The memo, written before the Silver Star citation approved by McChrystal citing enemy fire was announced, warned that it was "highly possible" Tillman was killed by friendly fire and that this should be conveyed to President Bush before he made public statements on the incident. At the congressional hearings three years later, none of the Pentagon brass on the distribution list could remember seeing this memo.

"Somehow lying is tolerated," Kevin wrote in his letter of protest over the conduct of the War on Terrorism as well as his brother's death. "Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance. Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country. Somehow this is tolerated.

"Somehow nobody is accountable for this."

For more information:

http://filmmakermagazine.com/news/2010/07/the-fog-of-war/

Deceit surrounding death of Tillman spawns disgust - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/ci_5743176?source=rss#ixzz0ye0xqvtK

Pat Tillman Investigation: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=2847392

Kevin Tillman letter: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LT6rQ3EXJwkJ:www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/+kevin+tillman+letter&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Winding Down a Misbegotten War

2010-08-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

As the last U.S. combat units rumbled out of Iraq under President Obama's August deadline, Time magazine's chief political columnist, Joe Klein, summed up the costly consequences of what he called "a war that should never have been fought." Blasting the Bush administration for blundering into "a neo-colonialist delusion" that caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and may still cost trillions of dollars for health care of a generation of war-mauled veterans, Klein then turned his ire, remarkably, on himself.

"As for myself, I deeply regret that once, on television in the days before the war, I foolishly--spontaneously--said that going ahead with the [March 2003] invasion might be the right thing to do," he wrote in a column titled "Never Again" in Time's August 16 issue. Although he subsequently wrote about the war with increasing skepticism, Klein added, "The issue then was as clear as it is now. It demanded a clarity that I failed to summon. The essential principle is immutable: we should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again."

War veterans who protested the invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq will take little pride in having predicted the disastrous impact on Iraqi society and on U.S. troops that Klein describes, seven years into what he calls "a profound misadventure" with toxic effects. A Time news piece that follows Klein's column cites a Rand Corp. study and military reports that found that "more than 500,000 troops have returned home to the U.S. in the last decade with a mental illness," created by the relentless stress of repeated war tours mixed with an epidemic of traumatic brain injuries from roadside bombs and other explosions.

Veterans For Peace activists, who warned of such dangers to soldiers and civilians for years, contend that the draw-down of troops in Iraq is a misbegotten maneuver by the Obama administration to claim peace in Iraq while waging a wider war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, under the same misguided strategy of the previous administration of trying to police unruly corners of the world with highly destruction military actions.

"The lessons of this disastrous intervention should also be an impetus for Congress and the administration to end the war in Afghanistan," Veterans For Peace leaders said in a recent statement. "It’s time to focus on creating real security here at home and rebuilding America."

But Time magazine and its chief political writer are not ready to tackle that issue. Like most of the mainstream news media, they take their cues from the White House on how to stay within accepted parameters in discussing foreign policy. "Obama's announcement [of the end of combat operations in Iraq, in a speech to the Disabled American Veterans] was no celebration. It was a somber acknowledgement that amends will be made to those whose lives were shattered and that their courageous service in an unnecessary cause will be honored," Klein wrote.

"A national discussion about America's place in the world, and the military's excessive place in our foreign policy, would also be appropriate in the wake of this disaster," he added, "but I'm not holding my breath." So that means a debate on the implications of the war in Iraq and lessons to be drawn for the war policy in Afghanistan isn't about to happen, unless the public overrules the press and politicians and demands it.

Post Traumatic Poetry

2010-07-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

Imagine if the US government promoted poetry by war veterans as ardently as it churns out lavishly designed, taxpayer-funded military recruitment campaigns. Imagine the Pentagon switching from selling patriotic hoopla to conveying the real deal of war's horrific legacies.

Here's what such an astounding change in perspective might look like: "FM 22-51 Post Traumatic Stress Field Manual -- Basic Load -- Department of War Poems - May 2009." That sly, yet sobering parody of military training manuals is the work of poet Dayl Wise, a New Yorker who runs a bootstrap publishing house dedicated to lancing lingering wounds of the war, such as the one he fought in Vietnam and Cambodia 40 years ago.

A retired engineer and draftsman who has forged a late-blooming literary career, Wise has created a new line of timely poetry collections by himself and fellow vets through a desktop publishing operation called Post Traumatic Press, based in his Woodstock, NY home. Wise's poems range from wry odes to can openers and other basic military equipment to hard-eyed elegies for dead comrades and other memories that still haunt his thoughts decades later.

"How far did we travel/ before they cut you off?" he wrote abruptly in "Ode to Boots."

Others came home,
not you, discarded
like a pair of unwanted slippers
piled in a bloody heap
of clothing and bone.

This theme of being discarded, unwanted, fundamentally disconnected from the nation he left at age 19 to fight in distant war zones that tore apart other nations, threads through his poems. Some are stunning commentaries on American life, conveyed in a tight-jawed economy of words, such as memories of trying out for a local American Legion baseball team as a kid and later coming home as a wounded Army sergeant.

In ten years, entering a bar, their bar,
he would be asked to leave...

Wise...you lost your war!

They may not read his poems at American Legion bars, but Dayl Wise has found a widening circle of compatible veterans who aim to shake people up with raw-edged passages of GI poetry and prose. Funded largely by small-scale book sales and sweat equity, including editing work by his wife, poet Alison Koffler, Wise has quietly marshalled a creative movement through publishing anthologies and chapbooks and organizing poetry readings focused on illuminating long-lasting consequences of war.

I first encountered Wise's work a couple of years ago when I stumbled across online references to a poetry collection titled "Post Traumatic Press 2007." In the midst of the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Wise presented what one reviewer called a "searing raw-whisky anthology by military veterans from World War II to Iraq."

A core poem in that collection is "America" by Larry Winters, a marine in Vietnam who is now a mental health counselor and widely published poet. "I killed for you," is Winters' refrain throughout this poem addressed to Americans who didn't go to war. "When I came home./ You expected me to heal for you./ To get on with my life for you," he concludes, ending with this damning line: "And most of all to forget for you."

In time for July 4th and other summer reading, Wise's small press recently issued a flurry of new and revised work by veterans intent on reminding their neighbors that soldiers are still killing and being killed or injured "for you" or for the American way of life or for military missions that may haunt the latest generation of wounded warriors the rest of their lives.

The new books include a revised edition of Wise's "Poems of War and Other Stuff," first published in 2004; a new edition of "Love & War" by Thomas Brinson, first published in 2009; "Wild Geese Returning: Haiku and Photographs" by Michael Gillen, a contributor--with Brinson and others--to the 2007 Post Traumatic Press anothology; and "The Summer Joe Joined the Army & Other Poems" by Walt Nygard.

Over the past year or so, I've gotten to know all these poets through Veterans For Peace poetry readings we've done together, reading and rereading their work, and jointly participating in a writing workshop for military veterans and families that has enriched my writing and my life.

An example of Wise's eye for telling details is the red plastic flower he highlighted in an old black and white photo of Lt. Thomas Brinson sitting beneath a machine gun in a jeep in Vietnam. That's the cover art for "Love & War." Sometimes, Brinson wrote in his introduction to this collection, he "stuck a live lotus blossom in the barrel of the M-60 Machine Gun, emulating the famous picture" of an antiwar protester putting a flower in a soldier's rifle barrel.

Perhaps the most chilling piece in this collection is Brinson's memory of coming home from war and looking out of the airliner descending to land at National Airport on April 4, 1968. "I rubbed my eyes, peered out the window again, thought I was hallucinating or dreaming, was much drunker than I thought I was, became very frightened, couldn't believe what I was seeing... I had just left that scene two days almost and 12,000 miles ago! Why was Washington burning?" Stumbling into a bar to order a stiff drink, he saw in a daze "TV news showing scenes of the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis three hours before I landed in D.C. Washington, like so many other ghetto areas in cities across our red, white & blue land, was a fire from the rage of blacks. 'Welcome Home, Son.' The bartender murmured."

Walt Nygard's poetry, as I wrote in a preview on the back cover of his new chapbook about wars then and now, mines popular culture and literary traditions, seeking ways for a modern-day bard to convey the nature of things today. Poems in this collection burst like midnight flares beyond the stark bounds of war poetry to illuminate the unsettling terrain on the homefront for a disillusioned Vietnam veteran whose son marched off to a new war; "my oldest son," laments this gray-haired vet, deployed to distant battles over oil and gas supplies from a suburban state whose prime patriotic symbol consists of humongous "American flags flappin'/ over car dealerships an'/mini-malls...wind-bent, storm-lashed/ almost to the point/ a 'snappin'..."

The cover art for this book is a color-enhanced night photo of an artillery barrage in Afghanistan by a 10th Mountain Division unit that included Nygard's son Joe. As this poetry collection was being edited and proofread, Joe Nygard was called back to active duty and shipped to Iraq. Walt Nygard's response was to add to these pages his own pen and ink drawings of peace signs entwined with flowers and American flags, a US soldier waving at a bright night star shining over a desert, and a hand with a pen writing "Dear Joe."

Like the adventuresome arc of his life, Michael Gillen's haikus range through time, seasons and places--sometimes sketching delightful miniature portraits of mother nature, sometimes unveiling startling encounters with human nature. That's a summary of "Wild Geese Returning" that I wrote for the back cover of this homage to migratory birds, arts and cultures Gillen embraces, starting with Merchant Marine voyages to Vietnam that set the course of a life that challenges human boundaries in war and peace.

In a poem titled "Brothers," he wrote:

Where are my brothers
As I take up oar and row--
Above and below.

And for a departed buddy, Bob Hennel, he wrote in a poem titled "Chu Lai":

After missions
He could wash choppers out
But not memory.

For further information:
Post Traumatic Press
104 Orchard Lane North, Woodstock, NY 12498
or email dswbike@aol.com

Clocking the Cost of War

2010-04-14T23:26:00.001-07:00

The cost of waging war overseas on the fumes of a sputtering national economy is stirring some unusual, creative protests. Mayor Matt Ryan of Binghamton, NY, is vowing to install a digital “cost of war” clock on the front of the municipal building to show local residents how much they pay in taxes for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ryan’s challenge of federal fiscal priorities quickly made national news.

“Every mayor in this country is struggling with one of the worst recessions we've ever seen, and we know better than anybody the negative impacts of diverting billions of tax dollars away from essential community needs to reckless wars and excessive U.S. militarism,” Ryan said at a news conference on Wednesday. Ryan was joined by members of the Broom County Cost of War Project, who donated the sign and offered to cover the installation costs, reported a local TV station, WBNG.

“For the last five years, I've been advocating for a dramatic shift in spending priorities in Washington, toward what Dr. Martin Luther King called programs of social uplift,” Ryan added. “I've also always encouraged community dialogue around important issues that affect our daily lives. So I am pleased to support this awareness campaign, and delighted to see residents take a more active role in one of the most important issues of our times.”

According to fiscal data provided by the National Priorities Project, the Broom County Cost of War Project stated that, “Binghamton taxpayers have contributed $138.6 million to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars since 2001, which is more than enough to cover ALL local property tax bills for the next FOUR years (revenue generated by local property taxes in 2010 City budget is $32.1 million).”

City Councilman Robert Weslar told WBNG that he likes the mayor’s idea. "If you were to give us the money that's spent on the war or a tenth of the money that's spent on the war," said Weslar, "we could cut taxes by all of it. We could fix every road."

The local FOX News station, WICZ, tagged the mayor’s move controversial. “Some veterans are protesting the sign, saying it neglects to show the importance of their decision to serve,” WICZ reported, then added: “But the mayor says that's not the point of the project. ‘We're not trivializing anybody's sacrifice. In fact, I think by having this debate and trying to find better ways to resolve our problems as human beings, we are actually honoring our soldiers,’” Ryan said.

“The numbers on the clock will change to show how much the country, state, county, and city is spending on the war,” WICZ noted. “Ryan says the sign will remain at city hall until the war has ended.”

George McAnanama of the Binghamton chapter of Veterans For Peace told WBNG that the war toll is far higher than the dollar signs that will flash on the cost-of-war clock. It also includes, he said, "The people that are coming home damaged from the war. The hidden cost of war. Who's lost a limb? Who's psychologically damaged? Who may never recover?"

Agent Orange Update

2010-04-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

For years, many Vietnam veterans in poor health were convinced that the disease that destroyed their life after the war had something to do with Agent Orange. I spent years as a journalist trying to help find answers to these haunting health questions.

Now, three decades after trying to bury concerns about exposure to herbicides used in Vietnam, the Veterans Affairs Department is gearing up for a tidal wave of health claims that are expected to cost the federal government billions of dollars.

"VA estimates that 185,839 claims will be filed when new rules take effect later this year that presume service connection for certain illnesses related to Agent Orange exposure," Marine Corps Times reported this week. The illnesses being added to a substantial list of diseases that VA covers regarding Agent Orange are B cell leukemias, Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease, a fairly common illness that is expected to account for the majority of new claims.

More than 80,000 of the anticipated claims are expected to be filed by veterans who were previously denied VA health coverage, the agency announced. Nearly 90,000 claims are expected by veterans with illnesses that will now be covered, but who never filed a claim. And more than 10,000 claims for financial compensation are expected from survivors of veterans who died of these diseases.The tab for handling all these medical cases is estimated at more than $13 billion this year and more than $42 billion over the next decade.

“This is an important step forward for Vietnam veterans suffering from these three illnesses,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki said in a statement. “These warriors deserve medical care and compensation for health problems they have incurred.”

Three things have changed since the 1970s, when the VA bowed to Pentagon pronouncements that Agent Orange didn't cause health problems. A big change is the leadership on this issue provided by Shinseki, a retired general who served in Vietnam. Another major change is widespread public acknowledgement that veterans' concerns about the hazards of these herbicides have been proven valid by health investigators, despite repeated attempts by officials under Democratic and Republican administrations to derail these investigations.

The third big change is that veterans no longer have to prove that they were in a certain location in Vietnam on a certain day between 1961 and 1971, when Agent Orange was sprayed on jungle areas by US military airplanes, helicopters, trucks or soldiers with backpack sprayers.

"In practical terms, Veterans who served in Vietnam during the war and who have a 'presumed' illness don’t have to prove an association between their illnesses and their military service," the VA stated in its latest announcement. It also noted that it now covers 14 diseases associated with Agent Orange as a result of studies by health agencies that include the national Institute of Medicine.

But getting to this point took decades of persistent efforts by veterans whose concerns were brushed aside by previous heads of the VA and Department of Defense. When I did a newspaper investigation into this issue in 1980 that was carried by The Associated Press, for instance, the government's official stance--widely aired on national television by a Pentagon official--was that no unusual health problems were found by the VA in examinations of some 84,000 Vietnam veterans in 1978-79. Veterans groups then demanded independent health studies, which found a much different pattern.

" The growing list of Agent Orange diseases stems [from] a court case, Nehmer v. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed in 1986. The class action lawsuit won by veterans, and reinforced by legislation, requires VA to direct the National Academy of Sciences to report every two years on any positive association between new diseases and exposure to herbicides in Vietnam," syndicated columnist Tom Philpott noted in a military.com analysis of the latest news in this long-running bureaucratic battle.

"In 2007, the Bush administration went to court to challenge the legal need for NAS studies on presumptive AO diseases to continue. It lost," Philpott added. "The NAS reports are to continue through Oct. 1, 2014, with the [possibility] that more diseases will be found to have an assocition with herbicide exposure."

A San Francisco-based veterans advocacy group, Swords to Plowshares, hailed the latest VA action. ''Our country neglected Vietnam War veterans and denied the harmful effects of Agent Orange for too long,'' the group's executive director, Michael Blecker, said in a news release. ''Our hope at Swords to Plowshares is that every Vietnam War veteran affected by the harmful chemicals will act now to file for what they are owed with the assistance of a veterans group.''

The VA bureaucracy can be so daunting that Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., the House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman, urged the VA to give automatic approval to health claims related to Agent Orange, subject to double-checking that the veteran served in Vietnam. Shinseki ordered the VA to hire an additional 1,800 people to process the expected deluge of new claims, Marine Corps Times reported.

According to the VA's latest statement on this issue, other illnesses previously recognized as caused by exposure to herbicides during the Vietnam War are:

AL Amyloidosis,
Acute and Subacute Transient Peripheral Neuropathy,
Chloracne or other Acneform Disease consistent with Chloracne,
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, (now being expanded)
Diabetes Mellitus (Type 2),
Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma,
Porphyria Cutanea Tarda,
Prostate Cancer,
Respiratory Cancers (Cancer of the lung, bronchus, larynx, or trachea),
Soft Tissue Sarcoma (other than Osteosarcoma, Chondrosarcoma, Kaposi’s sarcoma, or Mesothelioma).

For more information about the VA's new rules on Agent Orange: www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange.

Peace Action at Work

2010-03-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

In cold rain and summer heat, snowdrifts and bitter winds, a Veterans For Peace Chapter 21 contingent anchors a weekly peace vigil on a busy street corner by the NJ National Guard Armory in Teaneck. Chapter members are also active in numerous vigils, public meetings and marches around the state, as well as in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

"This is what the troops put up with, so we're out here in the same kind of weather conditions," one of the vets explained to a visitor to the Teaneck vigil one blustery day. The solidarity with today's soldiers extends from memories of guard duty and patrols in military units in Vietnam, Korea, even as far back as World War II. The solidarity also extends across American society: A retired cop stands next to a retired firefighter, a Jewish mother next to a Catholic priest, holding signs commemorating the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan of more than 5,000 US troops from across the nation, signs crafted by a house painter and carried by a plumber from his repair truck to every weekly vigil.

Drivers honk their horns, sometimes two and three in a row, and wave to the peace vigil regulars from family cars, delivery trucks, school busses. Some passerbys stop on cold days, roll down a window and with a big smile hold out a big container of coffee or hot chocolate. College students stop by between classes, parents drop by with young children, frazzled parents of soldiers and, sometimes, raw-edged young veterans come by for comfort for their unrelenting concerns.

Many in the chapter have protested the war in Iraq since the US invasion and violent occupation began seven years ago. Some joined to focus their protest on the war in Afghanistan, now expanding into it's ninth year. To address the deaths and destruction of soldiers and civilian societies by both wars, Chapter 21 cosponsors a wide range of public outreach activities, often in partnership with Military Families Speak Out, which has family members serving on active duty.

This month's actions range from a "Speak Out - Sing Out" at a church in Teaneck to a contingent from New Jersey joining a national peace march in the nation's capital; from conducting a writing workshop for veterans and family members in conjunction with vets in a neighboring area of New York state to planning workshops for the Veterans For Peace national convention in Portland, Maine in August.

"We're a movement," Chapter 21 President Ken Dalton said during discussions this week on plans to widen war protests to the doorsteps of national elected officials, incuding members of Congress and President Obama. "We can make changes. It may not be happening as fast as we'd like, but it's happening."

Adding to the pressures to wind down these costly wars is the disastrous financial squeeze on Americans, from state governments slashing staff and social programs to rising unemployment levels for young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Jobless rate at 21.1%" for veterans in their early 20s, The Washington Post reported last week. "It was significantly higher than the 2008 unemployment rate among veterans in that age group: 14.1 percent. Many of the unemployed are members of the National Guard and reserves who have deployed multiple times, said Joseph Sharpe, director of the economic division at the American Legion. Sharpe said some come home to find their jobs have been eliminated because the company has downsized. Other companies might not want to hire someone who could deploy again or will have medical appointments because of war-related health problems, he said."

These are issues that Veterans For Peace in New Jersey and across the nation have been repeatedly raising at public events with other groups and in talks with members of Congress and their staffs. Spending an estimated $1 million per year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan is unsustainable, especially as tens of thousands of Americans lose their jobs--and millions can't find jobs--at home. It's an urgent discussion that hopefully all Americans will join.

War Writing Retreat

2010-03-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

Far from the televised spectacle of Olympic athletes whooping or weeping in joy or anguish in pursuit of split-second victories, some other highly dedicated young people quietly gathered to share strategies for coping with relentless physical and emotional turmoil—in this case, from participating in deliberately deadly international contests.

The gathering of edgy veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan featured some whoops and weeping, amid an exchange of poetry and art works that was the centerpiece of a recent Warrior Writers’ retreat in Philadelphia, PA.

“The hard part is finding alternative methods for dealing with this,” Jon Turner, a former Marine machine-gunner, said to a standing-room-only audience during a Saturday night poetry reading at Robin’s Books, an out-of-the-way, second-floor bookstore in a downtown district booming with bars and night club-hopping.

“BOOM SMASH! That’s the sound of your Kevlar hitting the bullet proof glass… THUMP CRASH! That’s the sound of the mortar impacting in the dirt… CRASH AHHH!” Turner abruptly screamed into the microphone. “That’s the sound of your friend that now has a hole in his back…”

Release of still-unsettling emotions in poetry, short stories and memoirs was the focus of the three-day retreat, which also included many quieter discussions on the craft of balancing living and writing. Several of the vets noted how vital to their lives has been their participation in Warrior Writers and Combat Paper workshops, which offer hands-on making of artworks from military artifacts and memories.

“Warrior Writers, Combat Paper and love have saved my life,” said Turner, who drove with his partner, Kathy, and their dog, Sadie-Mae, from Vermont to share a new, self-published collection of his war and peace poetry, titled “Eat the Apple.”

Others were still exploring the idea of sharing private thoughts jotted down in a notebook or on a scrap of paper.

“I’m kind of a writer in progress,” said Maggie Martin, a former Army sergeant who traveled from a small town in Georgia with a sister veteran to see if this approach to dealing with the emotional freight of war would fly in the military bastion of the Old South. Pulling out a poem she wrote in a workshop that afternoon, Martin noted it was for an Iraqi friend, one of many people she met whose lives were upended by the US military invasion and occupation of their country. The concluding lines of her three-line haiku said: “forgive me friend/I never knew.”

Many of the roughly two dozen vets who participated in the reading or in workshops are active in Iraq Veterans Against the War and other veterans’ organizations on various issues, but the main aim of their writing is to sort out their own experiences and improve their life skills.

“I did two deployments, including a stop-loss,” said David Mann, an Army vet from Colorado, referring to a relatively new military policy that orders a soldier back into a war zone beyond the end of their enlistment period. “I found writing is such a help to me.”

Summing up the aim of the weekend gathering, Warrior Writers founder and director Lovella Calica said “I can’t tell you how many veterans I’ve seen who made art and their whole life changed.”

In stark contrast to the billion-dollar Winter Olympics games in Vancouver, Canada, Calica and a group of friends put together what she called a writing and wellness retreat on a shoe-string budget. This meant putting vets up in supporters’ homes, soliciting food donations from neighborhood stores, and offering writing workshops and Reiki, Yoga and Pilates relaxation sessions at Studio 34, a funky community arts center in a student-centric neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania.

A Sunday meeting on how to expand the three-year-old Warrior Writers program beyond its Philadelphia base was well attended by many of the vets and civilian supporters.

“I want to take this workshop [program] back to Chicago,” said Pete Sullivan, a former GI who during the bookstore reading the night before dedicated a poem to “my dad, who is a veteran.” Sullivan’s poem included this line: “I know about the battle you’re engaged in in your head.” Martin, who led the planning discussion, said she’d like to create a writing workshop in Savannah, Georgia. Others proposed helping to organize Warrior Writers workshops in a variety of locales, from Boston to San Francisco, in the coming year.

“We didn’t have enough time,” said Jon Turner, who has attended previous Warrior Writers workshops. “It was really good,” he added. “In June, come to Vermont, when it’s warm and we could go hiking in the woods.” During a 2007 retreat in Burlington, Vermont, participants celebrated publishing a collection of their early work and inspired creation of the Combat Paper project to add hand-made artworks to the array of healing offerings.

For further information about Warrior Writers programs:
http://www.warriorwriters.org/

Why Not a Peace Surge?

2010-01-19T22:39:00.000-08:00

Greg Mortenson is a one-man peace wave. While heavily armed soldiers and insurgents clashed and bombs burst across Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout most of the past decade, Mortenson repeatedly trekked into the disputed region—without a rifle or artillery barrages and bombing runs to clear a path—and helped villagers in dozens of communities build schools. Imagine providing many more such peacemakers, instead of another surge of military action churning up fiercely proud people who have been fighting foreign armies for generations.

“We've started schools this year in five new provinces … which have a lot of Taliban. And the reason we're able to work with them is because we work so closely with the elders,” Mortenson said recently on Bill Moyers Journal. “Many of the elders I know are really angry at the Americans,” Mortenson told the Christian Science Monitor last fall. “It has less to do with our presence and more to do with the huge outcries caused by drones and bombers attacking suspected Taliban hangouts but killing a lot of innocent people.”

A peace-making U.S. Army veteran, Mortenson is the author of Three Cups of Tea, his inspiring account of a people-to-people project that builds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan funded by Pennies for Peace fund-raisers by American students and community groups. His latest book is Stones into Schools: Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has attracted substantial news media coverage.

Mortenson’s advice for President Obama is to listen to the concerns of Afghan villagers, which center on surviving the violence of seemingly endless war and educating their children. “It would do more good than spending another $1 billion on combat operations or foreign aid,” he told the Christian Science Monitor.

Asked by Bill Moyers how many schools could be built with $1 million—the cost of keeping one American soldier in Afghanistan for a year—Mortenson said his grassroots campaign, which involves local villagers doing much of the work, could build 30 to 40 schools with that amount of money. Imagine how many schools could be built with the billions budgeted for Obama’s 30,000-troop surge, Moyers implied.

In a telling example reported by the Christian Science Monitor, Mortenson’s actions of providing school books instead of bombs resulted in a ceasefire in hostilities between Afghan villagers and U.S. military patrols near the Pakistan border. Lt. Col. Christopher Kolenda lauded Mortenson’s campaign. “Elders understand, better than anyone, what has happened to their society as too many young men and women have grown up without schools over the last 30 years,” said Kolenda, who sought out Mortenson to build a school in a village where residents retaliated against any incursions by foreign troops, except when the Americans trucked in school supplies. “I truly believe that education is the long-term solution to terrorism and violent extremism,” the colonel said.

Top American military officers say they are studying Mortenson’s approach and changing their tactics as a result. But U.S. peace activists contend that the military forces scouring Afghanistan and bombing suspected terrorists in Pakistan stir up the anger that fuels support for the Taliban insurgency that hides the elusive leaders of al Qaida.

“The Obama administration needs to replace its military campaigns with diplomacy in and around Afghanistan,” argue the authors of a new book, Ending the US War in Afghanistan. The book is written by David Wildman, of the General Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church, and Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

Bennis and Wildman call for ending combat operations in Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan, withdrawing U.S. troops and shifting funding from the Pentagon to the State Department for aiding education, police training, health services and other aspects of civilian society in Afghanistan. Convincing our government to make such a shift will require a sustained public education campaign. Bennis and Wildman cite the work of the Cities for Peace campaign to end the war in Iraq as a model for Afghanistan.

“Campaigns that organize around the costs of war at the local, congressional district, or state level have two major strengths,” they contend. “First, engaging with citizens at the local level encourages more people to engage directly in civic activism … Second, they provide an immediate link to the costs of war at a scale and in language that everyone can understand.”

Calls for winding down the war in Afghanistan have been made by military experts. “There is no battlefield solution to terrorism," The RAND Corporation, a top Pentagon research contractor, concluded in 2008 in a study of military campaigns against insurgency groups around the world since 1968. “In looking at how other terrorist groups have ended, the RAND study found that most terrorist groups end either because they join the political process, or because local police and intelligence efforts arrest or kill key members. Police and intelligence agencies, rather than the military, should be the tip of the spear against al Qaida in most of the world, and the United States should abandon the use of the phrase ‘war on terrorism,’” the report to the Pentagon stated.

A big problem with the military surge is that years of combat operations in Afghanistan have soured local villagers on America’s promises to help their society. “You're saying that people in Afghanistan find it confusing to have Americans coming off the same fortified base and some of them bring guns and are killing people and others bring money and are trying to fix things,” Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition said recently to the head of the Kabul office of the U.S. Institute of Peace, John Dempsey. “Well, exactly,” said Dempsey, who had noted that American provincial reconstruction teams work out of military bases. “And some Afghans, I think, are questioning whether or not the whole PRT concept is actually worthwhile. And some look at them with skepticism, saying having the military involved in development work is blurring the line between fighting a war and trying to reconstruct a country,” Dempsey said.

It’s high time for a peace surge in Afghanistan, argues Sherwood Ross, a veteran journalist and blogger. “The U.S. would be far better off if instead of pouring tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan it sent in a like number of unarmed Peace Corps volunteers with a comparable budget,” Ross wrote in a recent post on LA Progressive.

For further information:
http://www.gregmortenson.com/
http://www.stonesintoschools.com/2009/12/christian-dec-04-09/
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01152010/profile2.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122142362
http://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/obama-should-drop-plans-to-escalate-afghan-war-send-peace-corps-instead/

Writing It Out

2010-01-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

Riding out the storms of life can be rough. Sometimes it helps to write it out, when the world around you seems as unsettling as a ship in a hurricane—or a small boat chugging up a jungle river full of startling surprises.

I began jotting random thoughts on scraps of paper during an Army tour in Vietnam and graduated to pocket notebooks that I’ve filled with scribbling ever since. They are logbooks of discoveries, including titles of books to read, web sites to check out, snippets of conversation (real and imaginary), fragments of what might become poetry, ideas for an essay or a book.

“My poetry is mostly dealing with emotional turmoil,” I noted one day amid the latest upheaval in my life. “I’ll be working Xmas. So here’s a toast to the working stiffs who keep things humming on holidays,” I jotted on another occasion, setting the tone for a Happy Holidays letter folded into Christmas cards to family and friends.

As my life has migrated to constant use of computers, I also peck out and rewrite detailed drafts for blogs, journalism pieces, book projects. And I look for clues or encouragement in handling life by reading other folks’ writings.

Looking to share what I’ve found helpful, I’ve teamed up with other scribblers to offer writing workshops. Two upcoming events I’m participating in are open to the public. They are a Warrior Writers Retreat in Philadelphia, PA and a writing workshop for veterans and family members being held at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, NY. Here’re the details:

Northeast Warrior Writers Retreat

Who: Veterans, supporters, artists, healers
What: Gather for a healing and learning weekend of arts and wellness
Where: Studio 34, 4522 Baltimore Ave., Philadelphia, PA
When: February 26-28, 2010
Why: Because our society needs to heal and we can be a part of that
How: Writing, art, yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture, training, etc.

The Retreat will feature writing and art-making workshops, trainings in running workshops, meetings to discuss local support for veterans, an art show and performance and sessions in massage, yoga, reiki and acupuncture.

Financial assistance, such as “sponsor a vet” to attend, is welcome. The Warrior Writers Project is sponsored by IVAW, 630 9th Ave, Suite 807, New York, NY 10036. For more information: http://www.warriorwriters.org/retreat.html.

Write It Out Workshop

A free Writing Workshop for Military Veterans and Family Members

First workshop Feb. 2nd, 2010 @ 8 pm
Ongoing schedule, Tuesdays at 8 pm (frequency per month to be determined by participants)
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)
521 N. Broadway, Upper Nyack, NY

Workshop leaders: Gerald McCarthy, Jan Barry, Michael Gillen.
Poets and writers whose perspectives were shaped by military service in Vietnam, McCarthy is a professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College; Barry teaches journalism at St. Thomas Aquinas College and at Ramapo College of New Jersey; Gillen teaches Asian history at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY and a course on the Vietnam War at Purchase College, State University of New York..
For further information, contact: Gerry at gmccarth@stac.edu or 845-570-1410, cell. Office: 845-398-4134.

Jan Barry served in Vietnam with the US Army. A poet, author and retired newspaper reporter, he teaches environmental writing at Ramapo College of NJ and journalism at St. Thomas Aquinas College. His poems on the war appeared in diverse publications, from the Chicago Tribune and New York Times to A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. He coedited Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, published by 1st Casualty Press, founded by Jan Barry and fellow veterans Larry Rottmann and Basil T. Paquet. With W.D. Ehrhart, he compiled a sequel, Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam. He also edited Peace Is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest. He lives in South Bound Brook, NJ.

Michael Gillen served in Vietnam with the Merchant Marine. He teaches Asian History at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY, and a course on the Vietnam War at Purchase College, State University of New York. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Veteran, Post Traumatic Press 2007, and elsewhere. He is formerly editor of the Master, Mate and Pilot and an assistant editor of the Seafarers Log. He lives in White Plains, NY.

Gerald McCarthy is a USMC veteran with service in Vietnam. He is a member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 60, Tappan Zee Brigade and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His poems have been selected for inclusion in Hawaii Pacific Review’s Best of the Decade issue and in Twenty Years of Writing from Italian Americana. New poems also appear in The North American Review, War Literature & the Arts, etc. Trouble Light, a new full–length collection of his poetry, was published by West End Press/ University of New Mexico Press (2008). He lives in Nyack, NY and teaches writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Disastrous Lessons

2009-12-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, despite public statements that he sought no wider war, destroyed his political career. John F. Kennedy’s decision to veto hawkish generals and advisors and wage a secretive, low-key counterinsurgency campaign—which included approving a military coup that killed the American-installed president of South Vietnam and his hard-to-control brother—eerily foreshadowed JFK’s own assassination in office.

Now a new president has dramatically signed off on a major military escalation of what was a long-simmering insurgency in a distant Asian land. In announcing his decision in a televised speech at the U.S. Military Academy, President Obama assured the world that, unlike the ill-fated war in Vietnam, his military surge plan is the best option for concluding the eight-year-long war in Afghanistan, while saving an embattled American-backed government that has waning local support in battling a relentless insurgency.

The new plan is a slam dunk, it was revealed to reporters, because Obama and his advisors learned how to avoid the pitfalls of the past by reading books such as Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.

So far, the main lesson that Obama and his war cabinet seems to have absorbed from Goldstein’s book is how Johnson stage-managed a White House debate among advisors in 1965 to arrive at a plan to send a large contingent of combat forces he’d already approved through back door dealings with generals. LBJ got furious with Bundy when the former Harvard dean went on national television to debate war policy with leading academic critics of escalation.

“Johnson wanted to create the illusion of a deliberative process,” Bundy, who was Kennedy and Johnson’s national security advisor, recalled decades later. “He wanted the record to be every argument was made and every voice was heard.” LBJ, however, had already made it clear that he wasn’t about to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, so that option wasn’t seriously considered in the “debate” that quickly narrowed in on how many U.S. ground combat units to send in conjunction with an escalated bombing campaign. Johnson had already determined how many troops his field commander wanted as a minimum, and that was the number his war cabinet agreed was just about right.

“Political stagecraft,” Goldstein called it, based on Bundy’s notes and recollections.

Consider the Obama version, as reported in The New York Times: “The president welcomed a full range of opinions and invited contrary points of view,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview last month. “And I thought it was a very healthy experience because people took him up on it. And one thing we didn’t want — to have a decision made and then have somebody say, ‘Oh, by the way.’ No, come forward now or forever hold your peace.” But the only critic of the military plan that was the main focus of discussion—a request by the field commander for 40,000 more troops, more or less—was Vice President Biden, who argued for a lower profile counterinsurgency campaign with a focus on Al Qaeda leaders hiding out amid the Taliban in Pakistan. Negotiating with the insurgent Pashtun clans that make up the bulk of the Taliban who live on both sides of the border and have been fighting outsiders for centuries apparently never got serious consideration.

“Mr. Biden asked tough questions about whether there was any intelligence showing that the Taliban posed a threat to American territory,” The New York Times reported. “But Mr. Obama also firmly closed the door on any withdrawal. ‘I just want to say right now, I want to take off the table that we’re leaving Afghanistan,’ he told his advisers.”

During the months Obama was reviewing the war he inherited, he declined requests to meet with representatives of civic groups that argue for withdrawing U.S. troops from combat missions in Afghanistan’s mountains. A delegation from Military Families Speak Out got a meeting with White House aides in August, brokered by a New Jersey congressman, but never was invited back for a meeting with Obama.

“The American people want safety and security, as do the people of Iraq and Afghanistan,” MFSO leaders wrote in a recently released Open Letter to President Obama. “But we don’t believe these wars are helping to achieve these goals. The more we bring bombs and guns into Afghanistan, the more civilian casualties there are and the more our troops are seen as occupiers rather than liberators. … Please do not be the one to dash our hope for an end to these wars; for the swift and safe return of our troops; and for a new foreign policy that truly respects the lives of our service members who volunteer to put themselves in harm’s way, as well as the lives of children, women and men of other countries who are caught in the crossfire.”

In ducking out on meeting with families of soldiers and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are seeking a change in foreign policy, Obama made it absolutely clear he wasn’t going to even consider a peace plan. And like LBJ, Obama preferred a closed-door debate on narrow grounds of how many more troops to dispatch into a long, grinding war, rather than a public debate of all potential options.

As The New York Times dryly noted:

“And in another twist, Mr. Obama, who campaigned as an apostle of transparency and had been announcing each Situation Room meeting publicly and even releasing pictures, was livid that details of the discussions were leaking out.

“‘What I’m not going to tolerate is you talking to the press outside of this room,’ he scolded his advisers. ‘It’s a disservice to the process, to the country and to the men and women of the military.’

“His advisers sat in uncomfortable silence. That very afternoon, someone leaked word of a cable sent by Ambassador Eikenberry from Kabul expressing reservations about a large buildup of forces as long as the Karzai government remained unreformed. At one of their meetings, General Petraeus had told Mr. Obama to think of elements of the Karzai government like “a crime syndicate.” Ambassador Eikenberry was suggesting, in effect, that America could not get in bed with the mob.

“The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House.”

Eikenberry, a retired general, stated that he felt a U.S. military buildup could make things worse if the government in Kabul doesn’t improve. Maybe he read the bottom line lesson of Vietnam that McGeorge Bundy arrived at in hindsight: the decision Kennedy made every time his generals called for bailing out the floundering regime in South Vietnam with the U.S. cavalry and Marines. “Kennedy firmly and steadily refused to authorize the commitment of ground combat troops—in that quite decisive sense, he never made Vietnam an American war,” Bundy wrote in notes before his death in 1996.

No doubt, a book is already being written tracking how Obama’s war works out.

For more information:
Lessons in Disaster
How Obama Came to Plan for 'Surge' in Afghanistan
U.S. Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan
Military Families Speak Out

(This article is also posted at Opinion Forum.)

Ending War

2009-11-23T11:07:00.000-08:00

Army Captain Paul K. Chappell attended West Point with an usual goal, "determined to study war the way a doctor studies an illness." What he found in his studies and in a war tour in Iraq was a pragmatic way of envisioning what it would take to create a cure for war fever. "In the U.S. Army, as in ancient Greece, the most admired trait in soldiers is not their ability to kill but their willingness to sacrifice for their friends," Chappell notes in his new book, Will War Ever End? A Soldier's Vision of Peace for the 21st Century (Ashoka Books, 2009). His book argues that soldiers and folks at home, in order to protect each other, should mount a concerted campaign to wind down warmaking, due to the massively deadly threat of military escalation in the nuclear age. A better way of dealing with international disputes, he contends, is to adapt nonviolent tactics to produce conflict resolution that de-escalates violence.

In an essay titled "How Patriotism Can Save America," posted earlier this year on The Huffington Post and other websites, Chappell summed up his call for peace actions in terms that echo the stance of Veterans For Peace and other antiwar vets groups: "With the survival of our planet now at stake, our country needs patriotic Americans to question, think critically, and pioneer this democratic experiment. Now more than ever, our country needs us to help it become a beacon of hope that exports peace instead of war." Chappell, who served seven years on active duty after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 2002, is the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

In his book, Chappell argues that the war on terrorism "can never be won with an army alone, because terrorism is not a place we can occupy or a dictator we can overthrow." He also notes "how multiple deployments have pushed many soldiers to the breaking point." He argues that military actions are stoking the hatred fueling angry people who use terrorism as a tactic in fighting for their beliefs and causes. "If we are going to win the war on terrorism ... the United States will require many more soldiers, and not just soldiers who are armed with guns. ... During the challenging years ahead, our planet will need soldiers of peace who understand this truth of our brotherhood, because our survival in an interconnected world will not depend upon our ability to wage war. The fate of humanity will depend upon our willingness to wage peace."

Chappell grew up in a military family, where his view of war's widespread consequences was shaped by his father's raging threats to shoot himself. His mother, he adds, grew up in Japan during World War II and then moved to Korea, where her family endured the Korean War, where Chappell's father began a 30-year military career, which also included combat in Vietnam. "Throughout my childhood, I watched my father lose his grip on reality ... Rage overshadowed his once peaceful nature, and when I heard him complain about violent nightmares, I realized that something called war had taken my gentle father from me ... when I was a teenager, I wanted to know if war will ever end."

At West Point, Chappell studied peacemakers as well as warmakers. Gandhi, he discovered, was a British army medic during the Boer War in South Africa, where he took close measure of the British military culture that he outmanuevered to gain India's independence with a nonviolent campaign. Chappell found that some other West Pointers had come to the same conclusion as Gandhi. His book quotes General Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address as president, in which he warned that "another war could utterly destroy this civilization" and that people must learn "to compose differences" without war.

Chappell found a model for banishing war in the 19th century campaigns to ban slavery. "Slavery existed on a global scale for thousands of years, but due to the courageous actions of our ancestors who fought this injustice, no country today sanctions slavery. Together we have the capacity to create a world where countries no longer sanction war."

He was struck by how hard the military has had to work to train and prod soldiers to fight a battle, rather than flee for safety. This is proof, he argues, that humans don't have a gene for waging wars. And he took note of General Omar Bradley's comment after leading armies in World War II: "Modern war visits destruction on the victor and the vanquished alike. Our only complete assurance of surviving World War III is to halt it before it starts." Reflecting on his own military career, which started at West Point and spanned two world wars, Bradley stated, in a 1948 Memorial Day speech: "Wars can be prevented just as surely as they are provoked."

In the foreword to Will War Ever End?, Lt. Col. (ret.) Dave Grossman noted "there is cause to hope, and believe, that there can be an end to war. The West has won the Cold War without resorting to mega-death ... In recent years we have exercised the choice to step back from the brink of nuclear destruction." Chappell is currently finishing a sequel titled The End of War, designed to offer what Grossman calls a "toolbox" of information on peace actions.

For more information:
http://www.paulkchappell.com/
http://www.wagingpeace.org/

(This article is also posted at Opinion Forum and at the Chicago Sun-Times.)

Veterans Day Talk

2009-11-14T16:54:00.001-08:00

On November 11, 1918, my grandfather
on my father’s side was on a stateside dock
with his Army unit about to ship out
to fight in France,
when word was received
that the war had just ended.

Armistice Day, they called it.
Sometimes you’re lucky in war;
sometimes not.

On November 11, 1944, my mother’s
brother was killed in a Navy dive bomber
that crashed into the sea in a battle
near the Philippines.
There was no armistice
that Armistice Day.

Surviving war is no guarantee it’s over.
Never know when something from the war
may catch you unawares. A flare up,
a flashback, a smell from a bad day long ago.

With two bitterly contested wars churning out
more wounded, more dead, more veterans,
there’s still no armistice
on Armistice Day.

Veterans Day, they call it now—
as though all those war emotions
can be contained in a holiday.

In Vietnam, I was a Boy Scout
turned into Army radio specialist.
A communications breakdown
in a war zone can be fatal.
Communications failure among veterans
and our support network
of family and friends
can also have scary consequences.

That’s what we need to talk about today,
after the parades, the bagpipes,
the drums and trumpets, the bugle calls,
the solemn speeches, the moment
of silence, the hearty drinks at the bar—
when memories of war
still intrude into our dreams, our lives.

Dying on the Home Front

2009-11-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

An estimated 2,200 U.S. military veterans died last year because they lacked private health insurance or access to VA health care, a study by a Harvard Medical School research team found. In contrast, there were 155 combat deaths among U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, the researchers noted.

“On this Veterans Day we should not only honor the nearly 500 soldiers who have died this year in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the more than 2,200 veterans who were killed by our broken health insurance system,” Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in releasing the report this week.

Himmelstein added that the proposed health care reforms being considered by Congress would do little to change the situation for veterans too young for Medicare, not making enough to afford private health insurance and not eligible for VA care, which is restricted to military service-related health problems. “These unnecessary deaths will continue under the legislation now before the House and Senate. Those bills would do virtually nothing for the uninsured until 2013, and leave at least 17 million uninsured over the long run,” he said.

“Like other uninsured Americans, most uninsured vets are working people – too poor to afford private coverage but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard Medical School professor who coauthored the study. “As a result, veterans go without the care they need every day in the U.S., and thousands die each year. It’s a disgrace.”

The Harvard study analyzed the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey data on Americans asked about insurance coverage and veteran status. It found 1,461,615 military veterans between ages 18 and 64 were uninsured nor received health care by the Veterans Administration in 2008. That includes about 10 percent of Vietnam era veterans aged 55 to 64.

Based on a recently published report in the American Journal of Public Health that found being uninsured raises the odds of dying by 40 percent, causing nearly 45,000 deaths in the United States annually among those aged 17 to 64, the researchers estimated there were 2,266 preventable deaths among uninsured veterans in 2008. More than half that estimated death toll was among Vietnam veterans aged 55 to 64.

The Harvard study on veterans followed an earlier study of health data on all Americans called “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” published in September in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. These studies are pointed to by Physicians for a National Health Program as reasons for health care system reform.

Dr. Andrew Wilper, who worked on the larger Harvard Medical School study and now teaches at the University of Washington Medical School, said, “The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health. We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

Dr. Woolhandler, co-author of both studies and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Mass., noted: “Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance. Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives” annually.

For more information:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/over_2200_veterans_.php
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/september/harvard_study_finds_.php

Veterans Day Town Meetings

2009-11-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

On some issues that affect me personally, I do what I can to advocate for public education and sensible courses of action. Having lost a number of friends to the Vietnam war and its aftermath, this for me is a big one. What follows is a combination news release and resources list for war-injured veterans and families.

A drumbeat of recent news reports has called attention to rising rates of suicide among soldiers, post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hardships of military families facing multiple deployments to war zones. How communities can help address these often shattering effects of war is the focus of public forums in several cities on or around Veterans Day.

In Hoboken, NJ, the Nov. 11 event is being held at the high school under the sponsorship of Mayor Dawn Zimmer and the Board of Education. It features a showing of “Leave No Soldier,” a documentary by Donna Bassin about veterans helping one another deal with troubling war legacies; a staged reading from a new play, “Flashback,” by Penny Coleman, about the emotional turmoil in families of veterans who killed themselves; and a panel discussion of veterans and counselors with the audience.

“It is important that we honor our veterans and remember the sacrifices they have made to preserve our freedom and our way of life,” said Zimmer. “Equally important is our support as they transition themselves back to their families and society after months or years of serving their country.”

Similar events are being held at the City Library in Manchester, NH; First Unitarian Church in Ithaca, NY; Cable Car Cinema in Providence, RI; Rutgers Prep School in Sussex, NJ, and First Unitarian Church in New Orleans, LA. The events were organized by local civic organizations—including Military Families Speak Out, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi, Unitarians, municipal officials and students at a private school—as part of the Veterans Day Town Meeting Project. The project is directed by Donna Bassin and Jan Barry, coeditor of Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and a founder of one of the first Vietnam veteran support groups.

“Supporting our troops requires more than welcoming them home, but also listening and responding to their concerns,” Bassin said in offering her film for showings at Veterans Day town meetings. “A big concern for many soldiers and their families is how to handle the transition back to civilian life. A big concern for many older veterans and their loved ones is how to handle the emotional distress of flashbacks set off by current events.

“Among the most emotional of times for war veterans is Veterans Day,” she continued. “Community support is not complicated, but requires a welcoming space where veterans and family members can speak candidly and get feedback, and perhaps useful information and contacts, from a supportive audience.”

“Leave No Soldier,” directed and produced by Bassin, documents emotional journeys by two groups of veterans—Rolling Thunder, Inc. and Veterans For Peace/Iraq Veterans Against the War—that transformed a military oath from the battlefield to social activism. The two groups are divided by their politics, but united in devotion to their pledge to “leave no fallen soldier behind.” Bassin is a psychologist who aided 9/11 rescue workers and survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

“Flashback” was created by Penny Coleman, Elana Michelson and Patricia Lee Stotter based on the book, Flashback, by Coleman. It explores issues of post-traumatic stress injuries from the point of view of widows of Vietnam veterans who committed suicide.

Veterans Day Town Meeting events:

Nov. 5, 6 p.m. -- City Library, 405 Pine Street, Manchester, NH
Nov. 7, 7 p.m. -- First Unitarian Church, 306 N. Aurora St., Ithaca, NY
Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m. -- Hoboken High School, 800 Clinton St., Hoboken, NJ
Nov. 11, 7 p.m. -- Rutgers Prep School, Easton Ave., Somerset, NJ
Nov. 11, 7 p.m. -- Rhode Island Association of Psychoanalytic Psychologies, at Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St., Providence, RI
Nov. 11, 7 p.m. -- First Unitarian Universalist Church, 5212 South Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans, LA

For further information:
http://www.hobokennj.org/veterans-day-town-meeting/
http://www.leavenosoldier.com/
www.flashbackhome.com/play.html

Vets and Family Resources List

www.cominghomeproject.net/cominghome/
Coming Home Project is a non-profit organization providing care, support and stress management tools for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families.

http://www.giveanhour.org/
Give an Hour asks mental health professionals to donate an hour a week to provide free mental health services to military personnel and their families.

www.nvf.org/
National Veterans Foundation provides assistance and advice by veterans with experience from Vietnam to Iraq, trained in crisis management for PTSD and suicide prevention.

www.servicewomen.org/
Service Women’s Action Network promotes services for women in the military and women veterans.

www.thesoldiersproject.org/
The Soldiers Project offers free psychological treatment to military service members and veterans of OEF and OIF, as well as members of their families and other loved ones.

www.veteransforamerica.org/survival-guide/
Veterans for America sponsors Wounded Warrior Outreach Program and “The American Veterans’ and Servicemembers’ Survival Guide.”

www.veteranshealth.org/
Veterans Health Council, sponsored by Vietnam Veterans of America, provides information on health issues and programs for veterans and families.

www.vets4vets.us/
Vets4Vets is a non-partisan veteran organization dedicated to helping Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans through the use of peer support.

welcomebackveterans.org/
Welcome Back Veterans is a Major League Baseball-sponsored project to help find jobs and job training for returning veterans and to raise funds for mental-health programs.

http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/
Wounded Warrior Project offers services to help injured veterans cope with combat stress or trauma.

www.warrelatedillness.va.gov/nj/
War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in NJ is one of three VA centers that provide medical evaluations and information on difficult health problems from military service.

http://www.myhealth.va.gov/
My HealtheVet is the gateway to health benefits and services at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

www.vetcenter.va.gov/
VA Vet Centers provide readjustment counseling and outreach services to veterans of any combat zone. Services are also available for family members for military related issues.

www.state.nj.us/military/veterans/hotline.html
New Jersey Veterans Helpline Program -- 866-VETNJ4 (838-7654) -- provides free, confidential peer counseling and referrals for treatment to NJ soldiers and families.

www.ptsdinfo.org/
Gateway to four nonprofit sites that offer PTSD information and resources, including the National Center for PTSD.

www.ptsdsupport.net/
PTSD support site created by a Vietnam vet on how to navigate the VA system.

www.vfw.org/resources/vetservices/ptsd.pdf
Veterans of Foreign Wars outreach on PTSD, how to contact the VA’s Vet Centers nationwide and VFW service officers for assistance.

ptsdcombat.blogspot.com/
Combat PTSD blog featuring research, news, resources, and events for returning veterans coping with post-combat reintegration issues.

www.bianys.org/veterans/index.html
Brain Injury Association of New York State’s Traumatic Brain Injury Training and Military Veteran’s Services Project is a resource for providers and families on the symptoms of and treatment for TBI.

http://www.bianj.org/
Brain Injury Association of New Jersey helps returning military personnel and their families with information, support, resources, and training about traumatic brain injury.

http://www.taps.org/
Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) is a non-profit organization that offers grief support services to military families facing the loss of a loved one.

Complied by Veterans Day Town Meeting Project
http://www.leavenosoldier.com/

Duty, Honor, Dissent

2009-10-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

Matthew Hoh took a Foreign Service job in Afghanistan determined to make a difference in a key part of America’s war on terrorism. After trying to carry out the U.S. mission plan for Afghanistan, he resigned in a letter that may be far more meaningful than any other action one can take on behalf of his country. When he felt that his actions and those around him were counterproductive and making things worse, he spoke out.

“A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed,” The Washington Post reported this week. “But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency. …

“As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because ‘I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.'"

Hoh’s reasons for resigning were spelled out in a four-page letter to the State Department, which The Washington Post displayed on its web site.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Hoh’s letter makes several telling points, including that the insurgents are mainly local tribes fighting against what they see as a corrupt government backed by a foreign army. “Next fall, the United States’ occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union’s own physical involvement in Afghanistan,” he noted. “Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.”

Perhaps his most telling point is to reveal a candid view of the war that apparently is not being reported up through the official chain of command, and certainly not being conveyed to the American people.

“’We are spending ourselves into oblivion,’ a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America’s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer,” Hoh wrote. “We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years. Success and victory, whatever they may mean, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.”

For the former Marine officer, the bottom line of his reasons for speaking out is that our troops are fighting and dying or getting grievously wounded for an impossible mission.

“Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time,” he wrote. “The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.”

For more information:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33489374/ns/world_news-washington_post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf?sid=ST2009102603447

(This article is also posted at Opinion Forum.)

Winding Down Wars—And Ramping Up Real National Security

2009-10-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

The warning signs have been flashing for some time. Waging two wars in distant parts of the world simultaneously is unsustainable. Yet American leaders seem to have no clear-cut plan for winding down military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, from Baltimore to Detroit to New Orleans to many other cities and towns, once vibrant neighborhoods and business districts are ghost towns or pockmarked with derelict buildings and destitute people. A spreading blight of unemployment is impoverishing millions more families. A fixation on military maneuvers as national security priorities has blinded national leaders to the hollowed-out state of so much of the nation the U.S. government was designed to protect.

A big problem is that the United States has a checkered record at winding down wars and fostering a sustainable peacetime. After World War I, the U.S. Senate famously balked at supporting international efforts to create a climate of peaceful cooperation in Europe. Barely 20 years later, fueled by the economic chaos of the Great Depression, World War II broke out among the same militaristic nations that battered each other in World War I. More than 60 years after the bitter end of World War II, Europe is at peace thanks to U.S. policies such as the Marshall Plan. But the U.S. military is still stationed in the long-ago defeated nations—Germany, Japan and Italy, which are doing very well as peaceful societies—plus at scores of far-flung bases around the world.

In the name of national security, the U.S. is waging its second war in Iraq in the space of a few years. It’s waging war in Afghanistan against hostile Islamic groups not long after paying many of these same groups to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan. At the same time, the U.S. is perennially engaged in belligerent disputes with North Korea—where we previously fought a stalemated war—and with Iran, which not long ago fought a war with the U.S.-backed Iraq regime that the U.S. subsequently invaded.

Yet despite America’s bristling array of military forces around the world, 19 young men from the Middle East slipped through these defenses in hijacked airliners and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and blew up part of U.S. military headquarters at the Pentagon. The instigator of the 9/11 attacks was trained by U.S. agencies to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, according to investigators. Apparently, Osama bin Laden’s aim was to provoke the U.S. to chase him around Afghanistan, which has a history of mauling invading armies. His motive was anger at U.S. military bases near Muslim religious centers in his homeland of Saudi Arabia. The collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after its army was battered in Afghanistan played into this calculation that the U.S. could be up-ended by being sucked into a drawn-out war. This devious ploy got a boost when the U.S. also invaded Iraq, another part of the world that has bedeviled invaders.

While Washington power-brokers and presidential candidates debated fine-tuning troop levels in two multi-billion-dollar warfronts that have dragged on longer than World War II, the U.S. economy nearly collapsed. Yet even as it rushed to bail out Wall Street banks and bankrupt automakers with billions in borrowed money, Obama’s new administration appears intent on pursuing essentially the same war policies as were conducted by past administrations.

“American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why?” cultural critic Camille Paglia noted in a recent Salon.com column. “History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation. In many long-embattled regions, there are internal processes at work that simply must play themselves out. We are overextended abroad and committing financial suicide at home. The escalating national debt is our enemy within. Fanatical jihadism will continue to be a tactical problem, but its attacks, however devastating, will always be sporadic and local. Jihadism cannot destroy the U.S. But our own reckless politicians, spending us into oblivion and servitude to China, can.”

Before the bottom fell out of the economy, historian Andrew Bacevich warned that the U.S. faced an impending economic crisis while wasting precious time and money fighting ill-conceived wars.

In a comparison that may unsettle many conservatives and liberals, Bacevich argues in a recent issue of The American Conservative magazine that the U.S. is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet empire abruptly dissolved “the best minds in Washington proceeded to devise policies incorporating all the worst features of the Soviet policies that had hurtled the Soviet Union toward self-destruction. The Bush administration committed U.S. troops to what quickly became a costly, open-ended war, beginning in Afghanistan, then shifting to Iraq, then reverting in the Obama era back to Afghanistan. Like the Politburo of olden days, our political elites remain oblivious to the possibility that the real threats to the American empire might be internal: an economy in shambles and basic institutions wallowing in dysfunction.”

In a recent article in Commonweal magazine, Bacevich further warned that “If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: ‘Come home, America.’ The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on ‘the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.’ Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking—in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril.”

Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who served in Vietnam, teaches international relations and history at Boston University. His son was killed on an Army mission in Iraq in 2007. He argues that few if any officials in Washington learned the real lessons of 9/11.

“The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place,” Bacevich wrote. “Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. ... Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses.”

Maintaining robust defenses at home, vital as that is, will provide little comfort however to tens of millions of Americans under assault by economic shock waves. National security needs to be expanded from a military mantra to encompass building a sustainable economy to support a robust nation. So what can we do about it? For starters, check out Bacevich’s book, The Limits of Power (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

“Bacevich describes an America beset by three crises: a crisis of profligacy, a crisis in politics and a crisis in the military,” wrote Washington Post reviewer Robert Kaiser. “The profligacy is easily described: What was, even in the author's youth several decades ago, a thrifty society whose exports far outdistanced its imports has become a nation of debtors by every measure. Consumption has become the great American preoccupation, and consumption of imported oil the great chink in our national armor.”

For further information:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/10/14/teaparty/index.html
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/oct/01/00018/
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2609
http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-Project/dp/0805088156

Health Care Red Tape

2009-10-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

It's a term directed derisively at government bureaucracy, often accompanied by copious cursing. But something's happened with health care as administered by private insurance companies that can only be described as [expletive deleted] red tape. Here's a recent example that's astounding, given the rip-roaring national debate as to whether private insurers or government can provide the best service at the best cost.

I went to switch dentists, since I've moved to a different area than where I was living. First I had to search my HMO's web site to find a dental office that accepts my insurance plan and accepts new patients. I called an office nearby and was informed that I need to get a new insurance card from my insurance company listing this dentist's code number. OK. I called an 800 number on my old card and encountered a pre-recorded voice asking me why I was calling. The choices offered by the pre-recorded voice did not include changing dentists. I was instructed to start over and explain why I was calling. I said again, "I want to change dentists." "OK, you want to change dentists," the pre-recorded voice said this time. "You need to speak with a service representative."

Ultimately, a live person gets on the phone. He asks for my ID number and date of birth. Sorry, he says, that's the wrong date of birth. This was news to me. I've been enrolled with this same insurance company for years. I state again that this is indeed my date of birth. He asks for my social security number. That turns out to be acceptable. But there's still a problem with the recorded date of birth, he says. It could cause problems in paying bills from the new dentist. And his company can't correct the information it has on record, he adds. That has to be done by the company I retired from.

OK, I rummage around and find a phone number for the human relations office of the company I retired from. I call the number and get a pre-recorded voice that says there's a new number. I call that number, and the pre-recorded voice says there is a newer number. I call that number and leave a message. Someone calls back and says there was indeed a typo on a document that was sent to the insurance company and it will be corrected.

Back on the phone with the insurance company guy. He says, once they hear from the company I retired from about fixing my date of birth, they'll mail a new card with the new dentist's code number on it. The new card, he adds, will be effective next month.

Meanwhile, I rummage through piles of advertising stuff from insurance companies, slick brochures from politicians weighing in on the national health debate, and other mail. There's a form letter from my health insurance company. It informs me that the COBRA extension of my former company's dental plan expires in two months. It provides no information on what my choices are in getting dental coverage after December 31. There's also a bill for next month's payment, which includes a fine print warning that my policy will be cut off if I'm late in making that payment.

So now I've got to check out Medicare, which I joined when I retired last year, and see if the government can tell me how to go about getting to see a dentist.

Department of Peace

2009-10-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

The former community activist who garnered a Nobel Peace Prize shortly after taking office as president of the United States should appreciate the grit of this civic campaign. Signing legislation that would cap this grassroots effort, moreover, is the sort of action that would likely generate a wall of peace awards for Barack Obama.

The campaign to create a U.S. Department of Peace is backed by the usual suspects, including Veterans For Peace and the Student Peace Alliance, but also by more mainstream supporters like country music singer Willie Nelson. A persistent voice for grassroots causes like Farm Aid, Nelson is a spokesman these days for a cause that’s flared and sputtered and flared back up again throughout American history.

“I want to share with you why I feel this campaign to establish a U.S. Department of Peace is so important,” Texas-bred Nelson says in a web site promo for a bill that seems perpetually stuck in some committee in Congress. “We have the opportunity to make violence prevention and peacemaking a central conversation in our culture right now. And there couldn’t be a more urgent time to do so.”

In Brooklyn, N.Y., community activist Howard Rosenberg is conveying the same message, urging the New York City Council to join Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cleveland and other cities in calling for such federal action. "We have to engage the world as a community and open a dialogue," Rosenberg said, reported the New York Post. "Some say that's naive, but [Richard] Nixon went to China and he was the most conservative president in history."

In West Linn, Oregon, Councilman Mike Jones, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, joined the unanimous vote last fall to support the Department of Peace bill, the fourth city in the state to do so. Addressing a delegation of high school students who requested municipal support of this campaign, Jones said "What you've started and are working on here should guide you through your lives," according to the local newspaper, The West Linn Tidings.

“It's not just the will, but the skill to make peace," Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota said of the proposed legislation’s public education components. Ellison is among more than 70 cosponsors of the Department of Peace bill, HR 808, reintroduced in February by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who represents a Middle America district that includes the Polka Capital of Cleveland, Ohio—not to mention the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Versions of this bill, based on ideas going back to the founding of the country by rebels who revolted against the tyrannical behavior of the British army, have been kicking around Congress for decades.

An earlier version flared hot in the 1980s, leading to creation of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. The federally funded peace institute is constructing a new headquarters that’s rising on a corner of the Mall in Washington, D.C. overlooking the Vietnam, Korea and World War II memorials. Its mission is to sponsor research grants, books, pilot projects and conferences on nonviolent approaches to dealing with hot spots of violence.

For instance, last week “the U.S. Institute of Peace and the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute unveiled the first strategic ‘doctrine’ ever produced for civilian actors involved in peace operations. The ‘Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction’ (S&R) is a practical roadmap for helping countries transition from violent conflict to peace.” Why is this kind of document important? "Ad hoc, disorganized campaigns for peace have been the hallmark of past missions," said Amb. John Herbst, U.S. Department of State Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. "This two-year investigation into thousands of pages of documents written by dozens of agencies may help to mitigate the chaotic nature of these missions by finally putting into one place what we know."

The proposed peace department would have a cabinet-level seat next to the departments of state and defense. It would consolidate several existing programs that are now scattered around Washington. These include the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Peace Corps and the Office of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs of the Department of State.

It would also create public education programs to address outbreaks of violence in American communities, as well as abroad. That dual emphasis is what attracted Willie Nelson’s support, as well as that of a long list of civic organizations. “We see daily the tragic impact violence is having on the planet. And I feel heartened that so many practical solutions will be brought forth through a Department of Peace. There are many programs and practices that are already proving to be incredibly effective at reducing … gang violence, violence in our schools and our homes, as well as conflict around the world,” Nelson said.

Walter Cronkite, the late retired CBS News anchor, offered a thought-provoking take on this idea in a newspaper opinion piece in 2004. “Wouldn't it have been an advantage in the run-up to the Iraq War to have had a cabinet officer whose department was responsible for training U.S. personnel in human rights, conflict resolution, reconstruction and the detailed planning necessary to restoring a durable peace; in short, to do what was so disastrously absent when our forces rolled into Baghdad?” Cronkite wrote.

Besides Iraq, which remains more a battle zone than a functional nation, a change in U.S. policy to a peace-building approach would go a long way in lowering violence levels in Afghanistan. After eight years of escalating warfare, the U.S. military is flailing down the same path of destruction as previous armies that found it impossible to tame Afghanistan’s mountain tribes. And yet, as a little reading about the region shows, a peaceful visitor to these same parts has historically been warmly welcomed.

Creating a peace department would clearly demonstrate that Obama is developing a new plan for addressing increasingly unsustainable war policies.

For more information:
http://www.thepeacealliance.org/
http://www.usip.org/