I Ain’t Marching Anymore

It get misty around here, but welcome.

2012 Sundance Docs in Focus: THE INVISIBLE WAR

Reblogged from what (not) to doc:

My look at the 2012 Sundance US Documentary Competition passes the halfway point with Kirby Dick’s powerful exposé of rape in the US military: THE INVISIBLE WAR …

preview #3: wars over original sins

Health problems and deadline pressure have kept me silent on this blog. But I thought I’d offer, for anyone wandering across this space, my meditation on America’s “second war of Independence,” and whose independence matters now.

 

The dark-skinned fifteen-year-old boy looked up at the two genial soldiers and wondered how to get clothes that fine.  Certainly nowhere near this drafty boarding house in the Bronck’s part of New York, with ocean winds chilling the bone.
William Apess had spent most of the past two months running. He’d lost his traveling companions, with whom he’d sailed from New England paying only with borrowed charm and fake war stories.  Apess didn’t know what to do now: his master swore he had another year left on his indenture, but he was done with being tormented by some Connecticut farmer who thought he could batter the half-Pequot Indian and half African man at will. He grinned when the soldiers offered him another drink, and again when they made their offer.
“By then I had acquired many bad practices,” Apess wrote 20 years later in his memoir A Son of the Forest. After a few drinks, the soldiers “told me about the war, and what a fine thing it was to be a soldier. I was pleased with the idea of being a soldier, took some more liquor and some money, had a cockade fastened to my hat, and went off in fine spirits.” Not that he was particularly interested in the new war. It was 1812, not the Revolution, and “I could not think why I should risk my life, my limbs, in fighting for the white man, who had cheated my people out of their land.”
Apess would go AWOL after six months of basic training on Governor’s Island and watching as a captured deserter was executed before trainees’ eyes, be tortured upon his return in mock “scalpings,” and operate a cannon in the unsuccessful invasion of Montreal all before he reached legal age. It would be decades still before Apess became famous in the Pequot land of Massachusetts for organizing a quiet revolt by the Mashpee Indians, and praised in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

In many ways, the War of 1812 was the first of what was often to come: wars begun by men without military experience for ever-changing reasons, feeding the development of events that became clearer casi belli, fued by underlying economic rationales even as the deep economic and human costs became clearer.

This “Second War of Independence” was paired with continued action against American Indians, most memorably by war-hero-turned-politician Andrew Jackson. As Jackson sparked the “removal” of Indian tribes to points far west, his successor would corral thousands of regular and militia soldiers into extending the nation throughout the continent. Slavery, that other original sin, awaited its own war while shaping these.

The Louisiana Purchase, a mixed-blessing gift from Jefferson, brought all of the original sins into sharp relief: “purchased without blood,” the new territory contained slaveholders and rebel slaves and so did the war that followed a decade later. Would the new territories – and those won in that other war, against Indian nations – be slave states?  What kind of armies and navies would “defend’ them?
Competing land claims would raise the first war costs/who pays fights, with war veterans and widows still pleading their cases before Congress while many vets poured out their harrowing war stories in land claims hoping for a piece of the promised future. Early mavericks — most of them battling Andrew Jackson, whose “Indian removal” strategy enacted what Jefferson had only warned of — included William Lloyd Garrison, whose early refusal of militia service prefigured his future as a scion of abolitionism; Revolutionary veteran Noah Worcester, founder of the first national pacifist organization the American Peace Society; Texas icon Davy Crockett, and the Hamlet of American expansionism, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, one of many graduates of the brand-new West Point to play a role in this story. Others included cadets Thomas Ragland and Nicholas Trist, who helped lead one of the first mutinies at the Academy, and Edgar Allan Poe, who started as a civilian “Private Perry” to support his writing and would eventually be poking fun at another, the future conqueror of California General Winfield Scott.

Meanwhile, the only women to insert ourselves here is Nicholas Trist’s mother, Thomas Jefferson’s close friend Elizabeth, while we can only deduce soldier’s heart in mirror image from the fury of Andrew Jackson and from the hundreds of soldiers, both in Andrew Jackson’s naval wars and those on the frontier, who occasionally “deserted by squads.” Throughout, the pesky men of conscience, whether liberal vets like Noah Worcester or stick-in-the muds like Garrison, would keep moving the zigzag path further along.

The war’s immediate causes, contested for the past century by historians, were as simple and complex as described by historian Albert Klyberg: “impressment of sailors, British trade restrictions for Americans doing business with the Continent, an American desire to annex Canada, and British-inspired Indian uprisings in the West.” The first on that list, impressment, became in Congressional debates conflated with less tangible concepts of the new country’s “honor” and credibility. “If we now recede we shall be a reproach to all nations,” said Henry Clay, perhaps originating a now well-worn theme.

Uniformed dissent in this new war was surprisingly robust. In private journals, petitions and public campaigns, both officers and ordinary soldiers raised questions about the federalization of the armed forces and the wars’ sometimes brutal conduct. It is not that surprising that so of our resisters sprang from West Point, equipped by its Ivy League-style education as much to challenge authority as assume it.
“You will find a great variety of characters at the Academy but generally high minded young men and some of them quarrelsome and extremely tenacious of their honor,” Charles Peters told his brother-in-law Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of the founder of the Green Mountain Boys.

“the poor and Midling will bear the burden”

I promised more last time, so here are some mavericks, some eary CO’s, and the guys who pioneered the idea that “War costs. Who pays?” As my last (?) deadline on this book looms, pieces like this will come faster, I think. (At right: the cover of one of my book’s precursors, by the acclaimed Carl Van Doren — who narrated in much more detail than I could one of the first such rebellions.)

“ all being Volunteers”

The Continental Army was itself built upon a “revolutionary crowd,” the “mobs” who stomped on the Stamp Act and and threw tea into Boston Harbor.By 1775, the empire began to crack down, finally noticing that these “mobs” had gradually acquired more and more autonomy for themselves and their legislatures. Parliament enacted the Administration of Justice Act, under which a soldier who killed a rioter could only be tried back in England, out of sight of the colonists being suppressed.ⁱⁱ When four thousand nervous redcoats laid siege to Boston, one result was the “Massacre.”

The militia responded in kind on April 19, 1775, alerted by Paul Revere and his cohorts. A young Minuteman named Daniel Shays was among the 70 militiamenwho mobilized after the redcoats had set fire to homes and fields and most civilians to flee Boston.^v Shays was one of the many Irish immigrants that joined the call early, inspired to fight the same oppressors that had driven them across the Atlantic.

After Lexington and Concord, armed rebel supporters camped out at Harvard Square. Most were from already-existing state militias^vi from all the Mid-Atlantic colonies, come to defend Boston’s famous Minutemen and the towns’ “Committees of Safety.” It was this possibly-unruly lot that the First Continental Congress then declared an Army under the command of George Washington, a former British Army colonel from Virginia. Among the enthusiastic recruits at “Cambridge Camp” was young Daniel Shays, who was soon commissioned second lieutenant in the new Army.

A similar offer was being made to Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, and their Green Mountain Boys, who by then included a printer’s assistant named Matthew Lyon. Lyon had arrived in New-York from Ireland in 1765 (the week the Stamp Act was passed); after eight years of indentured service to the captain who’d brought him over, he started drilling with Allen and moved to the border area known as “New Hampshire Grants” (now Vermont). On May 10, the Boys flooded into the nearly-unguarded Fort Ticonderoga and seized it from the British; the ammunition inside helped end the siege of Boston and equipped the new army for the battles in New-York. Inspired by these victories and emboldened by Jefferson’s 1776 poetry, even more joined the fight.

The new Army was thus a loose coalition of regulars and state forces organized along regional lines. Commanders and newspapers alike lauded the “Maryland Line,” the Connecticut and New-Jersey Lines, the swelling forces of the western frontier in Pennsylvania. Some native allies were reported to join in: in Boston a local chief was quoted as “offering to raise a tomahawk” against the British, given the Bostonians’ solid treaty agreements. Benjamin Franklin, who’d spent the revolutionary spring in France, exulted in July: “The Tradesmen of this City were in the Field twice a day, at 5 in the Morning, and Six in the Afternoon, disciplining with the utmost Diligence, all being Volunteers.”

That “utmost Diligence” included immunity to the cause for desertion so often parodied in Voltaire’s Candide, that “Swiss disease” known as nostalgia^vii — at least according to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Continental Army’s first physician. In letters, Rush exulted that the more they felt like a national army, the less subject they would be to the disorder now known as PTSD:

Revision sneak peek: preview of chapter one

Wonder how those themes I identified earlier play out in an actual war narrative? So did my peer reviewers. even though I thought I was hitting people over the head with them…

Here’s the opening of chapter one of Ain’t Marching, with a somewhat-expanded musings about why these particular rebels made the cut. What do you think? Some longtime observers may note that I changed the tag  for one of those themes, leaving Jerry Maguire behind for the less-pop-culture-y War costs. Who pays?) Thanks to Greg Turner for the evocative photo, “This is What Revisions Look Like.”

Chapter One: A Military Born of Dissent

Lt. Matthew Lyon was just getting to sleep when he heard the shouts. “ Turn out! Turn out!”

Lyon opened his eyes and reached for his weapon, a light infantry “fuzzee” with tamped-down bayonet.Were the Algonkin attacking already? Had the spies been lying? He sat up and ran out the door of the hut, sweating. It was July 1776, and all the river breeze in the world couldn’t stop the heat from rising off his neck.

What Lyon saw, he had feared. Not the redcoats of the British, nor the tanned and paint-spattered skin of the 500-strong Indian warriors reportedly massing at the next hill: just the backs of his men in formation, and preparing to leave the camp forever. In some ways, the 26-year-old lieutenant couldn’t blame them.

This was not the mission he had promised when he got them to reenlist. Not here in Upper Canada, ordered to stay after Washington retreated and“guard” land owned by some rich men they didn’t know. Starving as they were, they told him, they would never buy corn at the owners’ war-inflated prices.

Nonetheless, he had orders. The Indians were coming. Lyon issued commands that turned to pleas. He himself, he told them, would rather suffer death than the dishonor of court-martial; wouldn’t they?

“All entreaties were ineffectual,” Lyon told the U.S. Congress 20 years later. “They declared they had been abused—there was no chance for their lives there…As they were going to take the canoe to the other side, they insisted on [the officers] going [with them], and threatened violence if we refused.”

The men submitted to arrest after the company was returned to Fort Ticonderoga, which many of them had helped seize from the British. Their court-martial was overseen by Gen. Horatio Gates, a rival of George Washington’s and a dear friend of John Adams – the same general who had ordered the company north, on behalf of his wealthy supporters who owned that land. Gates ruled that the men were to be publicly flogged, while Lyon was “cashiered” and given a wooden sword in place of his prized musket.

By the time Lyon told his story publicly, he was a member of Congress. Adams was president, and not there to hear him speak. But he was very familiar with Lyon and his newspaper, The Scourge of Aristocracy and the Repository of Important Political Truths. A few years after his testimony, Lyon would be one of the first Adams ordered clapped in prison, for the new crime of criticizing the Presithedent.

That Jericho mutiny happened before many had finished reading the Declaration of Independence – a document that mentions, as cause for action, both oppressive standing armies and their suppression of dissent. Many in the new country’s uniform saw such agitation as just another fundamental, newly-asserted right. And for nearly every touchstone in what is popularly phrased the American Revolution, you find men in uniform acting as the full citizens they had just been declared.

Like the “Committees of Safety” that evolved into state assemblies, soldiers mostly went about asserting their grievances like citizens: they formed committees, petitioned their officers, assigned the more literate among them as representatives. They did so during the so-called “French and Indian War,” when enlistees held their enlistment papers as golden; they did so in the new Continental Army, which was was in its own way composed of the armed mobs who’d assembled in response to Lexington and Concord. They did so during early naval battles, including the first known military whistleblowers in 1777; in 1779, marching on the house of the future Treasury Secretary to protest hoarding, just as the colonies had secured assistance from Continental Europe and the British retreated from Philadelphia, and an even larger contingent leaving their posts entirely in January 1781, after years of pleas for better supplies. A few found themselves newly members of peace churches, like new Quaker Jacob Ritter, or in exile, like Simon Girty, a “white Indian” Army scout who deserted rather than perpetuate an original sin.

In the fragile depression years after the British surrender, Revolutionary veterans generated the anti-banker protest known as the Shays Rebellion, while others spoke on behalf of conscientious objectors at the Constitutional convention, or started newspapers in stark opposition to the government they had helped found. By the time of Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800, the deciding vote in a deadlocked Congress was cast by Matthew Lyon, who chose to have the ultimate dissenting answer to the man who had imprisoned him in 1798.

As the mini-history above might suggest, of our core themes the most prominent is the one identified by Lt. Ephraim Faulkner and other Pennsylvania militiamen in 1798: “the midling and the Poor shall bear the burden.” Or, in less 18th-century diction, “War costs. Who pays?That was the heart of Shays Rebellion, the January mutineers, even the New England militiamen waving their enlistment contracts on weary British commanders.

Also key from the beginning: the very few moved by conscience to refuse to fight, whether experiencing a mid-battle insight or staking ground for the original “peace churches.” The latter were also among the few consciously protesting one of the country’s two main original sins, since Quakers also spent a fair amount of time witnessing against slavery. In the face of that original sin, we have soldiers of color at a time when their very existence threw out multiple challenges, a few also participating in explicit rebellions. As for the other sin, only murmurs in soldiers’ letters and desertion by a few half-breed “White Indians” signaled any problem with “claiming” formerly Iroquois or Pequot or Shawnee or Alachua land.

Mavericks were there in full presence, if not exerting as much muscle as later. We see our very first military whistleblowers in 1777, in the form of Navy sailors who violated the chain of command because their commander was torturing prisoners of war. The nation’s first veterans were not shy in supporting press that made trouble, including Matthew Lyon’s Repository. As for combat trauma, explicitly regarded by American physicians as a “European” disease unfit for their young patriots, signs of it are still detectable in some veteran diaries and after-war memoirs, especially by Quakers – the latter, of course, beginning their perpetual role as official extreme that opened up room for everyone else to ask questions, some telling the extremists Hold onto your beliefs, brother. By the end of the era, as newer wars approached, you could even see the Revolutionary veterans preparing guides for the ones to follow.

Next, more details about just a few of these stories, though I can’t reproduce the entire chapter. Do let me know what you think?

the singer of the song

I’m in final revisions on the AMA book, so my focus here is shifting for the next five weeks or so; expect to see some musings on the book’s themes, and new stories getting inserted at the last minute. But I’m unlikely to be following the news quite so closely, and there will be silences.

In the meantime, seek out the movie above if you can. Between his traumatized World War II vet dad, his time at military school (see left),  and his proud history at GI coffeehouses, one can’t imagine someone better to provide this book with its title than Philip David Ochs.

Updated: Naser Abdo, who now sullies the name of dissent.

This came up on a Google Image search for "conscientious objector." BIG problem.

I wasn’t the only one sunk when we read through this piece about the guy who almost tried another Fort Hood massacre.  Because he was AWOL, and one of us – someone who could have been me – helped him fill out a conscientious-objector application:

Like the soldier charged with killing 13 people in the shootings, Abdo is Muslim, but he said in an essay obtained by The Associated Press the attacks ran against his beliefs and were “an act of aggression by a man and not by Islam.”

Abdo was approved as a conscientious objector this year, but that status was put on hold after he was charged with possessing child pornography. He went absent without leave from Fort Campbell, Ky., during the July 4 weekend.

On July 3, he tried to purchase a gun at a store near the Kentucky post, according to the company that owns the store. Abdo told an AP reporter a week later that he was concerned about his safety and had considered purchasing a gun for protection, but had not yet done so.

I won’t comment on the child-porn charge except for a heavy sigh. But the rest sent me scurrying to my book, to make sure he wasn’t in it. And as a Muslim, he sullies the name of Muslim dissenters, too – like one guy who is, and who was one of the first:

At the very first wave in February Ghanim Khalil, a young Marine who had already served for four years at the Parris Island supply depot, had found his way to the podium among the 500,000 crammed into the New York City demo to shout that he would resist all efforts to deploy him. After he said his piece, Khalil received a warm hug from David Cline, formerly of the Vietnam-era Oleo Strut, who’d retired from 20 years at the post office and become the full-time President of Veterans for Peace.

The case raises far more pressing issues than my book, of course. GI counselors everywhere are wondering if they could have misjudged someone like Abdo, thinking he might be another dissenter of integrity like Ghanim Khalil.  In one Facebook discussion, Gulf War vet Jeff Paterson, said what most of us feel: “I would rather err occasionally on misreading someone’s future intent than to not help someene who needs it.” Still, it’s hard not to feel  betrayed, and many expressed that in that same discussion.

The mission of the advocates is, of course, somewhat different from mine, and yet the same: to see clearly and tell it with conviction. To the extent that Pfc. Abdo’s actions make it harder for anyone trying that for themselves or someone they know, it hurts us all. I think we need to offer the alternative vision.

Update: Iraq Veterans Against the War has issued a statement about Abdo, which I’m reproducing below. It’s going to take all of us to push back against people’s preconceptions.

Abdo is not now and has never been a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

In August 2010, IVAW supported his application for Conscientious Objector status to reflect our commitment to protecting G.I. Rights for all service members and access to a fair C.O. application process in accordance with Army Regulation 600-43 andDoD Directive 1300.06. In October, IVAW publicized a statement by Abdo condemning Islamophobia. Finally, in November 2010, Abdo offered his support at Ft. Campbell to SPC Jeff Hanks, whose own battle with combat-related trauma earned him the support of IVAW’s Operation Recovery Campaign.

IVAW has not been in contact with Naser Abdo since that time.

As we await additional information on the details of Abdo’s arrest, IVAW reiterates its commitment to non-violence, as outlined in our 2009 Resolution on Non-Violent and Peaceful Actions. Per the organization’s mission, IVAW supports the health and safety of all American troops, and never condones the threat or use of violence against military or civilian establishments or individuals.

Can you handle the truth? A guest post from Jane Fonda

The role of Jane Fonda in the Vietnam-era GI movement has always deeply intrigued me, but I had no idea she’d been turned anti-war after meeting deserters in Paris. The fuller story fascinates.

I’ve long known the “Hanoi Jane” stuff was a smear job. Now, in “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi,” which she explicitly asked be reposted,  Fonda gives the fullest description yet of her role before her Vietnam trip as well as what happened to create the infamous photo.  It’s a story that deserves far, far broader circulation. And someday, I hope to talk to Fonda about the GI Rights Hotline.

I grew up during World War II. My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn’t have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

For the first 8 years of the Vietnam War I lived in France. I was married to the French film director, Roger Vadim and had my first child. The French had been defeated in their own war against Vietnam a decade before our country went to war there, so when I heard, over and over, French people criticizing our country for our Vietnam War I hated it. I viewed it as sour grapes. I refused to believe we could be doing anything wrong there.

It wasn’t until I began to meet American servicemen who had been in Vietnam and had come to Paris as resisters that I realized I needed to learn more.

Bradley Manning: WIRED folds, and my dilemma is moot.

WIRED has just released the full transcripts of the conversations between Manning and that snake Adrian Lamo – meaning that everyone that cares about Manning, thinks him hero or traitor, has no way of not knowing about the gender issues. They’re mesmerizing reading, though I agree with Gawker that Lamo turns out to be even more unethical than we knew before (and as much of a scumbag as Glenn Greenwald has said all along.)

And here I just got my letter from David Coombs, basically refusing to discuss it – and I was trying to figure out if that was a coded request to honor what was left of his client’s privacy. Now, I feel that writing about this respectfully is the only way to show that respect. What do you think?

More later when I’ve finished reading the transcripts:  comments sorely requested. Was it Hemingway who said, “The writer’s job is to find out the truth and then write it. But that can be very difficult.”?

Operation Recovery’s Oleo Strut

About a year ago, Iraq Veterans Against the Wars began a campaign that sounded almost conservative: Operation Recovery, against the deployment of traumatized troops. The celebrated Camilo Mejia, when he and I talked in Philadelphia, was skeptical : “Sounds like the VFW.”

Actually, it’s a sign that IVAW gets it, in a very deep way.

Photo: New York Times

By “it” I mean the confluence of dissent-ingredients I’ve been tracking in my book, most especially the multifaceted effects of combat trauma. This week, a team at Fort Hood in Texas reported on what they saw:

-       We listen to the Military Police Sergeant talk about her soldier that is only 21 years old and after one deployment just can’t function any longer. He needs help and treatment, and their commander makes his every attempt to get help harder as opposed to easier.

-       We listen to the Medic Sergeant talk about the number of suicides and attempted suicides that no one is talking about.

-       We listen to the soldier on extra duty talk about being shot on his third deployment, needing to take pain relievers, running out of pills, taking his wife’s pills to get through the day, and then getting courtmartialed for taking the wrong medication.

-       We listen to the soldiers talk about their non-commissioned officers that are shaken and struggling with anxiety and memories but are gearing up to deploy again.

All of the above is often greeted with “Suck it up and drive on,” at least in the Army. To insist that the Pentagon do otherwise is actually quite a sucker punch to the machine that relies on obedience to that one instruction.

My friend Luis Carlos Montalvan, told TIME Magazine (published this week): “There are 18 suicides a day among veterans. I’d do anything to help prevent that tragedy.” We all know now that the numbers for active-duty guys are just as troubling. Luis and his amazing book (buy it!) are on a mission of essential if non-controversial service. Op Recovery, as I said to Camilo, is just as essential and potentially revolutionary. Dave Cline, founder of the Vietnam-era Oleo Strut, would have been proud of them.

Word is out

Image: New York Magazine

About Bradley Manning, I mean. Among what he reveals: most of those folks holding “I am Bradley Manning” masks don’t know what the hell they’re saying.

Ever since the story began to break, I’ve felt more and more drawn to it as a writer and, yes, as a queer person (any way you want to hear that). As I told someone this morning on Facebook, Manning in so many ways encompasses so many of my themes, from PTSD to gender to whistleblowing, that I sometimes think I made him up.

This has especially been the case with gender stuff — in which dimension I’ve walked very gingerly. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my friends who’ve undergone gender transitions, it’s that only the person in question is entitled to talk about it. Period. Manning was out as gay, but relatively few pursued the clues pointed out by Gawker last year, such as Manning’s chat log saying that “my CPU doesn’t match the motherboard” or that he feared media exposure “as a man.”  Without Manning saying anything of the kind in public spaces, we all steered away from it, even though military intelligence didn’t seem to be (why else have the boy sleep naked in front of other soldiers?).

I didn’t even say anything after I watched the clip from PBS Frontline above, and told my wife that “the way Manning stands in that party, that’s a girl.” Only to my wife: it wasn’t mine to say. Still isn’t in some ways.

But now there’s this breathtaking piece in New York magazine, Bradley Manning’s Army of One.  Steve Fishman, the journalist, seems to be in about the same place I am with Manning, and traces what I call in my book the “this is for fighting, this is for fun” gender wild card – but in the process, he violates all my rules on respect for gender transitions.  In the process, he limns what I can only suggest – that even as in years past to even BE female OR gay in the military was inherently subversive, Manning’s outsider-self may have catalyzed a more profound kind of dissent.