National Defense: Saving the Environment

One of the biggest forces of destruction of the natural world are military actions in wars and training exercises, such as extensive explosions at bombing ranges and pollution of groundwater from leaking gasoline storage tanks, chemical and nuclear wastes. Imagine if “national defense” missions were reconfigured to fully focus on saving the environment that sustains life on earth. A germ of that idea is contained in a current advertisement on the Military Times website, placed by Colorado State University.

The Sustainable Military Lands Management (SMLM) Certificate program is a
one-of-a-kind online educational opportunity that trains current and future
professionals in the breadth and complexity of military land management to
provide you with knowledge of the rapidly evolving practices, technologies, and analytical tools necessary to support this national defense mission. Civilian and military land management professionals learn the key concepts for conservation and sustainable management of natural and cultural resources on Department of Defense lands. The knowledge and skills gained can be used by a wide array of United States and foreign, federal and state land management agencies.

This certificate will help you understand the importance of military lands management and the cultural and ecological significance of sustaining these lands. You will learn the general practices and the theory of land management as well as cultural anthropology. You will also study the ecological principles of military training and testing areas and the impacts of disturbances caused by these activities. Topics covered will include an overview of military lands in the United States in historical, geographical, and environmental contexts, cultural resources laws, policies, management, and preservation as they apply to military lands.

Imagine if every soldier, sailor, marine, airman, secretary of defense, member of Congress and president had to take this course. Under a law signed by President Eisenhower in 1960, the Department of Defense—which oversees 30 million acres of often prime wildlife habitat—is obligated to develop and follow a natural resources management plan. The purpose of these management plans is “to provide for the conservation and rehabilitation of natural resources on military lands,” according to an agreement signed in January 2006 by the Department of Defense and US Fish and Wildlife Service. Under other laws, the Department of Defense is obligated to clean up contaminated sites it owns or that were used by military manufacturing contractors, including some of the most heavily polluted Superfund sites in the nation. This is a mission that may require an army of well-trained experts to do right.

For more information:
http://www.learn.colostate.edu/certificates/military-lands-management/
http://cbey.research.yale.edu/uploads/Conservation%20Finance%20Camp%202008/Mark%20Shaffer-DoD-FWS-AFWA%20MOU.pdf
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=931

Recruiting for Peace

Suel D. Jones is on an unusual mission. The 60-ish Vietnam vet, who hails from Texas and has a hideaway cabin in Alaska, wants to create a Veterans For Peace chapter in Hanoi. “I already got 10 members,” Jones said last week as he talked up his latest campaign, while hawking copies of his memoir, Meeting the Enemy: A Marine Goes Home, at the 24th national convention of Veterans For Peace.

In his memoir, Jones wrote: “At a Veterans For Peace convention in 2006, I was asked about how I was recruited into the Marine Corps. I replied that I didn’t have to be recruited. My parents, the church, and society had recruited me since birth.” After years of wrestling with rage he brought home from the war, Jones moved to Vietnam and did volunteer work with the Vietnam Friendship Village, a hospital for children and Vietnamese veterans affected by Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used by the US military to destroy much of the forests in Vietnam. “I felt that as a warrior I was not complete until I returned to the country where I had fought in order to help heal the wounds of the war,” he added.

At a nearby table, Marine vet Doug Zachary of Austin, Texas, was selling a variety of books, buttons and bumper stickers on peace themes, including War Is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler, the legendary Marine major general and two-time winner of the Medal of Honor. Among the most popular items for men and women who stopped by between workshops on conflict resolution and other aspects of peacemaking were olive drab T-shirts emblazoned with the Veterans For Peace logo—a white dove on a military helmet—and an unusual team spirit message: “Recruiting for Peace.”

The event at the University of Maryland also drew Master Sergeant (ret.) Wesley Davey. A draftee during the Vietnam war, Davey ended up in Iraq with an Army Reserve unit at age 54. He arrived in College Park on a dual mission. A founder of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Davey is also challenging the official “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that discriminates against gays in the military. “I was against this war, but felt that as the first sergeant I should deploy to Iraq to look out for the good people in my unit,” Davey told an assembled gathering of antiwar activists with ties to the military.

In a news article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2007, Davey bluntly said: “For the second time in my life, a president has plunged our country into a quagmire where there is no way to win a victory which can be defined. I thought we learned a lesson in Vietnam. I was wrong.”

Another participant was a mother of a young war veteran who attended a workshop on poetry for peace. “My son has several poems in this anthology,” said Tina Richards, a Missouri member of Military Families Speak Out, waving a copy of Warrior Writers: Re-Making Sense, a collection of poetry and art by members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Writing and reading poems on the war at antiwar events was a great help to her son, who was struggling to cope with severe health problems after two tours with the Marines in Iraq. When requests to the VA and traditional veterans’ organizations for assistance proved fruitless, Richards said she found Veterans For Peace on the Internet.

“I called my son and said ‘we’re going on a march to New Orleans,’” joining a protest march by veterans’ peace groups in 2006 through hurricane-ravaged towns awaiting federal assistance while billions of dollars were spent on waging war in Iraq. During an evening of songs and poetry by participants, her son got up, she recalled, and read a poem he’d jotted down on a napkin. And now he’s a published poet, Cloy Richards, with a growing family of his own and a future he couldn’t see through the pain before.

The veterans’ convention in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, drew scores of people from across the United States. It also drew one of the newest members of Congress. “It is important to hear a voice for peace. We who are working for peace have to open up the space for people to move in that direction,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland), who was elected last year. “I think that the work you do as veterans working for peace gives the rest of us validation for what we do,” she added.

In her keynote speech, Edwards noted that she grew up in a career Air Force family and lost her brother at age 27 as a result of “psychological problems” from his military service. “I feel that I, as a very strong opponent of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, am a great patriot,” she said. Yet in working to change these policies, activists need to “work for peace with respect” for other people’s perspectives, she advised. Noting that she went on a tour of Afghanistan with other members of Congress, she concluded that the US strategy of widening the war with more troops “will not work. I’m a big supporter of President Obama. But I disagree with him on this.”

Summing up the focus of the convention, Michael T. McPherson, executive director of Veterans for Peace and a Gulf War I veteran, wrote in the program book that “We must reach out and educate about the full horrors and impact of war. … We must provide and live alternatives to war. We must become examples of conflict resolution in all aspects of our lives and build solidarity with allies in search of justice. … This weekend we gather to gain strength and learn from each other to do that work.”

For more information:
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
http://www.ivaw.org/
http://www.mfso.org/

Health Bills Debate

In a scathing critique of health care coverage by America’s news media, the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contends that “this year’s health-care debate sounds like the one in 1993.” That debate produced the Clinton administration’s proposed reforms that were politically dead on arrival.

“With few exceptions … the press has done little to challenge this reality or help to broaden the health-care debate,” wrote Trudy Lieberman, a Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor who monitors this issue. “Rather, it has mostly passed along the pronouncements of politicians and the major stakeholders who have the most to lose from wholesale reform. By not challenging the status quo, the press has so far foreclosed a vibrant discussion of the full range of options, and also has not dug deeply into the few that are being discussed, thereby leaving citizens largely uninformed about an issue that will affect us all.”

As Congress winds down its latest try at reforming America’s hodge-podge health system, eying the exits for a long vacation, there’s been no real debate, for instance, over a bill in the hopper that would create a single-payer plan.

A Democratic Congressman from New York, Anthony Weiner, raised this issue last week to deafening silence in the national news media, which was all agog over the latest distractions to comprehensive reporting of what‘s happening on the medical-bills battlefront. Weiner is a cosponsor of the U.S. National Health Care Act (H.R. 676), sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). This bill has 85 co-sponsors and is backed by a coalition of doctors, unions, civic groups and local governments in support of a single-payer system.

“Without acknowledging it, both sides seem to agree with the argument for a single-payer system. But instead of having a debate about its value, both sides have turned the idea into an odd punching bag,” Weiner said. “The right uses the term ‘single-payer’ to condemn the White House approach, while the White House — and my colleagues in the House and Senate — quickly decry the scurrilous charge and concoct legislative language to make their public option look less, well, public. By conceding that the public option would have less overhead, be more efficient and have the freedom to focus on health care rather than profits, opponents of the public option are in fact arguing for it. Isn’t complaining about the marketplace ‘advantage’ of the public plan just another way of saying that people are going to want it?”

Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program, lauded Weiner’s stance and lambasted the reform plan cobbled together by House leaders as a “proven failure.” Young argued, in a news release on behalf of his group of 16,000 doctors, that “state-based reforms of this type — Massachusetts being the latest example — have repeatedly foundered.”

“Although many supporters of the House tri-committee bill are well-intentioned, it’s an inconvenient truth that only by replacing the private health insurance industry with a single-payer, Medicare-for-All program can we save $400 billion annually on overhead and bureaucracy — enough to provide comprehensive, first-dollar coverage to all,“ Young added. “Surveys show that two-thirds of the public favor national health insurance, as do most physicians. Over 550 labor organizations support H.R. 676, as do scores of civic and religious groups and city governments.”

The $400 billion savings that Young referred to would come from eliminating the administrative overhead in private insurance plans, which eat up 30 per cent of their billings, in contrast to Medicare’s administrative costs of 3 to 4 percent, freelance journalist Dave Lindorff recently noted on his website, http://www.thiscantbehappening.net.

“So, want to have some fun? Tell your congressional delegation to demand that the Congressional Budget Office, which just came up with an estimate that the Senate’s health ‘reform’bill would add $1.6 trillion in costs over 10 years, do a study of what expanding Medicare to all would cost, after netting out the savings to individuals and employers of having their insurance payments and out-of-pocket health expenses eliminated,” Lindorff wrote in an op-ed piece that’s been popping up in various corners of the blogosphere. “And then tell them to support Michigan Congressman Rep. John Conyers' single-payer bill, HR 676, which would extend Medicare to one and all.”

That bill is not even on the radar screen in the Senate, where leaders of the finance committee are crafting a minimalist reform measure that excludes any hint of extending Medicare to more citizens. “After weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits a requirement for businesses to offer coverage to their workers and lacks a government insurance option that President Barack Obama favors, according to numerous officials,” The Associated Press reported today. “They said any legislation that emerges from the talks is expected to provide for a non-profit cooperative to sell insurance in competition with private industry, rather than giving the federal government a role in the marketplace. The White House and numerous Democrats in Congress have called for a government option to provide competition to private companies and hold down costs.”

While Congress takes off on vacation in August, maybe its members will start paying attention to what local folks have to say about the health-billing mess. Consider what this emergency room doctor in Michigan argued today in the Detroit Free Press website:

“In order to maintain their profit margins, insurance companies are raising premiums while pushing more of the costs of care onto individual policyholders. Premiums are increasing annually at a rate that is three times the rate of inflation. Fewer employers, especially small firms, continue to offer comprehensive coverage, and for workers with employer-based insurance, out-of-pocket expenses increased 34% between 2004 and 2007. Those who have been laid off are finding that extension coverage under COBRA is overpriced and unaffordable,” noted Dr. James Mitchiner of Ann Arbor.

“But there is a viable alternative,” Mitchiner added. “Single-payer health insurance is simply a way to finance universal health care. By replacing the 1,200 private insurance companies – each having its own set of regulations, provider networks, prescription drug formulary, pre-authorization forms, 1-800 number and Web site – into a single insurance entity, such a single-payer system would reap the benefits of economies of scale, reduce administrative waste, mitigate bureaucratic duplication, sever the link between health insurance and employment, reduce health care disparities, and at last provide creditable coverage for the millions who lack it now.”

For more information:
http://www.pnhp.org/
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/july/why_we_must_vote_on_.php
http://www.freep.com/article/20090727/BLOG2506/90727072/1068/opinion/The-health-care-debate
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_CARE_OVERHAUL?SITE=ALMON&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Socialized Medicine

The federal government is once again considering instituting a national health care plan, something first proposed by President Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago. The problem is that many Americans are scared of getting dreaded “socialized medicine.” You know, like they have in Canada, where people have to wait for weeks to see a doctor, unless it’s an emergency. I can relate to that, having recently waited for four weeks to see a specialist for a knee injury and another two weeks for the MRI results. And that was under the current American health system!

So what’s going on here? When I was born in 1943, millions of Americans were in the armed services, subject to military health care. I don’t recall any complaints about how during World War II our soldiers and sailors, marines and air crews had to endure government-run “socialized medicine.” When I served in the Army in the early 1960s in Vietnam and stateside, I don’t recall any horror stories of soldiers being subjected to “socialized medicine.” For all the complaints about sometimes horrific problems at Veterans Administration hospitals, veterans’ groups have continually demanded that the government-run system be improved, not abolished.

I don’t recall anyone moaning that they dread Medicare, the government health care program that every American qualifies for when they retire and go on Social Security. Meanwhile, horror stories about families bankrupted by medical bills under the privately run HMO system have appeared in newspapers and magazines and TV reports for years.

No doubt Medicare, and any expanded national health care plan, will have glitches. But I’m dubious that it can top many of my nightmarish experiences with the non-governmental health care system. Besides recently waiting more than a month for treatment of a painful knee injury, I’ve previously waited in emergency rooms in utter agony—after dropping a filing cabinet on my foot, from kidney stones (twice)—so long to see a doctor that I wished I could have run to Canada for relief.

During a previous round in the long-running debate over health care, Bill Bradley, a senator from New Jersey at the time, suggested a simple, yet profound reform—give every American access to the same health care plan that members of Congress enjoy. Bet the naysayers in Congress don’t call what they’ve got “socialized medicine.”

Remembering Robert McNamara

“McNamara’s War” is what a senator called America’s disastrous military invasion of Vietnam. Reading news items about Robert McNamara’s death this week at age 93, I remembered how wide the gulf was between a soldier and the Secretary of Defense, whose exalted place in the chain of command we had to know by heart, when I served in Vietnam in the early 1960s. In 1967, after resigning from the US Military Academy and a military career, I sent McNamara a letter at the Pentagon enclosing my war medals and a protest of the conduct of the war. I never got a reply, although he subsequently had me investigated by the FBI for signing an antiwar statement in The New York Times. For a man who was often in the news with his views on Vietnam and war, it seems McNamara had lots to say to everybody except to the troops who disagreed with what he was overseeing.

A fellow antiwar veteran, Ben Chitty, illuminated this dark side of McNamara in an Internet posting. “Back when McNamara's memoir ‘In Retrospect’ came out, I wrote him a letter. Never did get a reply,” noted Chitty, a college librarian in New York City. Here’s what Chitty wrote to his former boss at the Pentagon:

Sunday, April 30th, 1995

Robert S. McNamara
c/o Times Books, Random House
New York, New York

Secretary McNamara,

I'm writing because of your book, In Retrospect.

I enlisted in the United States Navy in 1965, and deployed twice to Vietnam, in 1966-7 and again in 1968. I was medically discharged in 1969. Right away I joined an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) -- perhaps you've heard of us. I spent the next three years doing what I could to stop the war, especially working to keep 18-year-olds from being drafted into it. I had some success in the latter and smaller task, but we had none at all in the larger. Disillusioned, depressed and exasperated at our failure to stop the war, I left the country in 1972, returning only when Nixon had resigned.

So I read your book with some interest. Of course it told me nothing new about the war's cost and futility. Nor did it change my conviction that the war we waged in Indochina was a crime. Not a mistake, however deadly and tragic, but a crime. I believe we disagree in that assessment.

Howver, you say you wrote the book because you believe that we -- the people of the United States -- need to come to terms with the Vietnam experience and its legacy. I certainly do not disagree there.

We may not agree exactly what that legacy is. You rehearse a long series of errors in geopolitical understanding and mistakes in the procedures by which decisions were made, and describe a certain amount of wishful thinking. You offer to contribute to our understanding of the Vietnam experience by confessing your mistakes -- "our" mistakes, since you served and remained loyal to your presidents and their successors, our representatives in power.

A beginning, perhaps. Of course the veterans and victims of your war may be bitter about your late confession. Certainly the illusion that we could have won the war has been important to them all these years. Certainly that delusion needs to be deflated, since it deflects us from the process of understanding, healing and reconciliation. But the delusion that we could have won the war is not the main or central legacy of the Vietnam experience. That legacy is easy to delineate.

Our government undertook a war in which there were no military means of accomplishing "our" political objectives. A very large number of citizens realized this, and tried every means possible -- mostly constitutional -- to persuade "our" government to stop the war. Although "our" government -- at least many people in it, including yourself -- knew that the anti-war movement was right in its assessment of the war, "our" government fought this opposition bitterly, and finally unconstitutionally. The anti-war movement failed to stop the war. The direct legacy of Vietnam was Watergate. The political tragedy of Vietnam for our country -- then and now -- is that the anti-war movement failed.

This is the legacy you do not address. Our own government was beyond our control. Two issues can illustrate the problem.

You write of concern about widespread cynicism and distrust of government. Yet you do not reflect on the consequences of government deceit, or acknowledge the extent to which government deception remains common practice. During the years you remained silent, Geronimo Pratt, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, was imprisoned in California, convicted of a murder the FBI knows he did not commit. He's still there. Just as your book was going to press, our government assured Jennifer Harbury it knew nothing about her husband's capture, torture and execution -- but the CIA did know; in fact, their informant did it. These cases are part of the legacy of the Vietnam experience too. There are very many others.

You write of the role played by the politicians critical of your war effort, the people we called "hawks." You and your Presidents feared their political influence, and concocted your war policies to deflect their criticism. You might say that tens of thousands of Americans -- mostly soldiers "serving their country" -- and hundreds of thousands of Indochinese -- mostly non-combatants -- died so that Lyndon Johnson (and Richard Nixon) could be President. Ronald Reagan and George Bush used these deaths again to help themselves get elected, and these deaths may yet help elect Bill Clinton's successor in 1996. Some of the hawks are still in Congress. Their political heirs just swept the last Congressional elections. You have little to say about them, except that some are your friends. But they feed (and feed on) the very delusion of a winnable war from which the rage against you rises, and which in fact you permitted to fester all these years.

This is not an issue of Republican and Democrat. There are plenty of hawks and their heirs on both sides of the aisle, and I myself am a veteran of Lyndon Johnson's war, your war, though I protested against Richard Nixon's war, and Henry Kissinger's. It is an issue of democracy and citizenship. I saw American "democracy" in action in Vietnam. I came back to the world and saw American "democracy" at home.

The American Legion has demanded that you forego your "profits" from this book. This is a little ironic, since the Legion always supported the war.

I myself don't much like capitalism, but I think that the Legion's criticism of your "profits" is trivial, though understandable. As you have suggested, it would be a good idea to support an inquiry into the mechanics of the mutual failures of the Vietnamese and American governments to end the war.

I'd like to make a different suggestion. The Americans who learned the best and the most from their experience in Vietnam are surely the veterans who have tried to help repair the damage you sent them to do, to compensate for the crime you commissioned. And unlike the programs for Vietnam veterans, where the need is so great that all your profits would hardly be noticed, for activities like the Veterans Viet Nam Reconstruction Project, Project Hearts and Minds, the Veterans Initiative or the U.S. Indochina Reconciliation Project, a little conscience money would make a lot of difference, both to the Vietnamese and to the veterans themselves.

Peace,
Ben Chitty

Clearwater Legacy

When folk singer Pete Seeger and some friends launched the Clearwater project in 1969, the Hudson River was an open sewer for industries, cities and towns along its majestic sweep from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Bay. In the years since, the full-sail sight of the Clearwater sloop tacking up and down the river with a pickup crew of excited kids and adults has been paced by outbursts of activism on shore that has prodded cleanups and publicly targeted the major sources of pollution.

The inspiration for this hearty brand of environmental activism is a 90-year-old guy who still tramps around with a banjo singing old-fashioned folk songs. In recent weeks, Seeger has energized hand-clapping, standing audiences of all ages in singing grassroots movement songs at a jam-packed high school auditorium in White Plains, NY; the annual Clearwater Festival/Great Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park; a 90th birthday bash and star-studded Clearwater fundraiser at Madison Square Garden in New York —not to mention, leading the television-watching nation in singing “This Land Is Your Land” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during the inauguration celebration for President Obama.

“I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been before,” Seeger said at an Earth Day fair at Columbia University’s Teachers College in April, where he was the keynote speaker/entertainer. He said his optimism is fueled by the computer-generated “information revolution,” which has sped up the process of exchanging good ideas. “I now speak with people I never used to speak with—some on the left, some on the right. I think, I believe, we will see more miraculous things happen,” Seeger said. And then he launched into his trademark patter of story-telling songs with an activism hook.

One of these chestnuts is Seeger’s infectious channeling of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hymn-based anthems of the civil rights movement. The refrain goes:

Don’t say it can’t be done
The battle’s just begun
Take it from Dr. King
You too can learn to sing
So drop the gun.

Seeger, a World War II army veteran, is an ardent peace activist as well as an environmentalist. In his view, the two issues are not unrelated. When the Clearwater campaign began, a major polluter was the US Military Academy at West Point, which flushed raw sewage into the river at its picturesque site in the Hudson Highlands. In his war protest songs, Seeger prodded the Pentagon to clean up its act in Vietnam, as well. The Clearwater campaign provided potent ammunition for Congress to pass the 1972 Clean Water Act, which forced West Point and Hudson River cities to build modern sewage treatment facilities.

Pete Seeger has long been more than a singer with a protest message. He relentlessly organizes people to change things from the way they are: Build a replica of a 19th-century river sloop. Take people out on the river and show them the pollution and where it’s coming from. Raise money to hire scientific experts to testify at public hearings. Mobilize crowds of people to attend public meetings. Organize festivals where musicians and activists can energize each others’ work.

At the recent Clearwater Festival at Croton Point, happy concertgoers tramped through mud and rain puddles to hear a baker’s dozen of musical acts—including Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Taj Mahal, and the Hudson River Ramblers—and to also check out the wares at scores of tents set up by activist organizations, handicrafts merchants and food vendors. A Veterans for Peace contingent was setting up its display early Saturday morning when Seeger wandered by, sipping a cup of coffee. Throughout the weekend, he dropped by various events with his banjo and joined in for a song or two.

Behind the scenes, Seeger was also overseeing the next step in the Clearwater campaign. Earlier this year, his Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization announced its “Next Generation Legacy Project.” The first stage is the Clearwater Center for Environmental Leadership, a youth education camping program opening this summer in Beacon, NY.

“Clearwater youth education programs presently reach over 15,000 people each year. At Camp Clearwater, it is planned that several hundred students will be in the ‘leadership pipeline’ at any time, experiencing life-changing programs at camps, seminars, retreats, demonstrations and green jobs programs,” Communications Director Tom Staudter said in a news release. A longer range goal, he said is “the establishment of eight Green Cities / Green Jobs Satellite Centers in Environmental Leadership along the Hudson River in partnership with local environmental and community groups. This is to ensure that eight targeted cities / communities—New York City (Harlem), Yonkers, Peekskill, Newburgh, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Kingston and Albany—have powerful connections to their waterfronts through environmental education programs that will, in turn, support green job development and training programs for young people from the region’s inner cities.”

There’s still a state advisory warning about eating fish from the Hudson River. But a major source of contamination is finally being reduced. In May, General Electric began dredging PCBs from a heavily polluted stretch of the Hudson River after a decades-long battle with environmentalists. “This has always been a classic grassroots effort, achieved in large part due to the tireless and scientifically-based work of past and present Clearwater staff members and volunteers, our collaborative partners in the Friends of the Clean Hudson Coalition, and the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote letters, signed petitions and cared enough to take action,” said Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental director.

Meanwhile, the Clearwater campaign fired warning shots in another battle. In March, it filed a contention with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board “focusing on United Water New York’s application to build a desalination plant to extract water from the Hudson River for use as municipal drinking water for Rockland County.” The Clearwater’s stance is that if river water just downstream of the Indian Point nuclear power plant is to be used as a source of drinking water, the plant owners and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must re-assess the environmental impacts of the power plant’s license renewal application. That stance sparked an investigative project into the potential for radioactive contamination of the river and area ground water, conducted by environmental students at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The student report concluded that an effective energy conservation program combined with wind and solar power could replace the aging nuclear power plant and negate its potential dangers.

At the Clearwater Festival in June, a group of New York City high school students proudly showed their newly learned skills in boat building and offered tours on the river in hand-made, wood reproductions of classic sailboat tenders. Nearby, Pete Seeger slipped into a rain-drenched tent and joined in a round of sea shanties with a crew of bearded old salts. Embracing a 60ish singer wearing a Vietnam Veterans Against the War cap, Seeger coached the audience to chime in on an old Irish ballad. Then he was off to the next gathering, joining a stage full of folk song luminaries and belting out one of his favorite tunes:

Don’t say it can’t be done
The battle’s just begun…

For more information:
http://clearwater.org/index.php
http://www.peteseeger.net/
http://www.rockingtheboat.org/programs/boatbuilding/

Tackling War Trauma

How to handle traumatic war events has famously ranged from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—exhorting survivors of fratricidal, in some cases suicidal Civil War battles to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain”—to General Patton slapping a soldier hospitalized for psychoneurosis, a term used in World War II for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now we have a general screaming at soldiers back from multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan that they better not dare commit suicide. "It's bad for soldiers, it's bad for families, bad for your units, bad for this division and our army and our country and it's got to stop now. Suicides on Fort Campbell have to stop now," Brigadier General Stephen Townsend recently told 101st Airborne Division paratroops, according to news reports. Townsend is the commander at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which “has recorded the highest rate of suicide in the army, with at least 11 confirmed or suspected suicides,” Agency France-Presse reported in May.

“Last year 128 soldiers took their lives, up from 115 in 2007, as tours of duty since 2001 have come ever more frequently and last longer. With 64 confirmed or suspected suicides so far this year, the army looks likely to surpass last year's record numbers,” the AFP report added. Why so many soldiers are killing themselves should be no mystery to military leaders. “Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he believes the suicides are tied to the repeated deployments that have put a strain on soldiers and their families.” Mullen has ordered the military to “look at ways to relieve that stress.”

But the macho posture of military culture hasn’t changed much since Patton slapped a soldier and called him a coward. “In a 2008 poll by the American Psychological Association (APA), 61 percent of servicemen and women said that asking for help to treat psychological problems would have a negative impact on their career, and 53 percent said it would decrease their status among their peers,” AFP noted.

“When we all come back from Iraq and we seek help from our command, they call us ‘weak’ and ‘cowards,’” a Marine veteran of Iraq recently told a Congressional committee. “The lines for a psychologist is almost a year long, and the only thing that can help us is the alcohol and the prescription pills they’re giving out to us like candy … The last thing I want to tell you is about a roommate … a Marine who was on the suicide watch for about few months on and off. The last three weeks before we were deployed, he was constantly on watch. A week before family day, when the family comes in and says goodbye to their Marines before we deploy, he was released from the watch, so that he would not say anything to his parents, and he did not say anything to them. About a month into deployment, he blew his brains out in the shower stall. Actions like that show the poor judgment of our command … The Marine should have never gone to Iraq in the first place, and nobody was held responsible for his death. If there is no care for your own Marines, what care do they have for the people of Iraq when they give the orders?”

The best way of handling this crisis would be to change the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan from aggressive military actions to more modest peacekeeping operations that greatly reduce the role of the military in countering small groups of militants disturbing the peace in distant nations.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism," The RAND Corporation, a top Pentagon contractor on national defense research, concluded last year in a study of military campaigns against insurgency groups around the world. US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are not working, the study concluded. “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,’ researchers concluded.”

Speaking from a soldier’s perspective, Vincent Emanuele, a Marine veteran, told the Congressional committee that “the overwhelming majority of those I served with who did not think dying in Iraq was honorable or acceptable, nor did they enjoy or want to go back to Iraq a second or third time. Unfortunately, because of personal circumstances, whether they be financial or family issues, many indeed were deployed up to three times during their four-year enlistment. In fact, many, including myself, at times did not have intention of helping the Iraqis. Because of the hostile intent, as well as the loss of lives close to us, our best friends, our unit had a general disdain and distaste for Iraqis and their country. Further, our unit, for the most part, did not trust our command and had a general mistrust and distaste of this occupation from its inception onward.

“I could also speak to the personal attacks veterans, including myself and many others, had to encounter once we were willing to be treated for PTSD within our unit,” Emanuele continued. “The idea of being a real Marine that does not complain when coming back home and who sucks it up and just does the job that we were tasked to do, this mentality resulted in many of the Marines I served with, including myself, turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with the horrors of this bloody occupation.”

What can be done for those who have already been through the meat-grinder of the wars on terrorism? If the Pentagon can’t handle the problem, release soldiers with PTSD from active duty on medical discharges and expand Veterans Administration services. Provide assistance to veterans’ self-help groups. Goeffrey Millard, an Army veteran of Iraq, replied this way to a question by a member of Congress.

“Well, in Iraq Veterans Against the War, we didn’t wait for the VA. We started a counseling group called Homefront Battle Buddies. In the Washington, D.C. chapter, which I’m the president of, we meet every Sunday at the Washington, D.C. office, our home, to meet for our Homefront Battle Buddies. That program is expanding nationally. We in Iraq Veterans Against the War have a saying, that we’re not going to wait for politicians to end the war. We ended the war every day in what we do. We also do the same when it comes to our other goals, including taking care of veterans: we’ve started counseling groups.

“The GI Bill is the start” of better government assistance, Millard continued, ”but also making sure that the Veterans Administration is fully funded, making sure that there is no waiting list for PTSD care. We have seen multiple suicides this year alone on veterans who have been waiting on a waiting list to get mental healthcare at a VA. This is inexcusable. There should never be a waiting list for any veteran, especially not one so young coming home from Iraq, when they ask for mental healthcare.”

For more information:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gOEDhkP9VVYuG0sPh4b3QJTRCNHA
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/25/memorial_day_specialwinter_soldier_on_the
http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/07/29/