I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, From George Washington to John Murtha is the tentative title of a book I’m working on for University of Caifornia Press.

Before I became a journalist full time I worked for a range of nonprofit organizations – most crucially, for about four years I helped coordinate the G.I. Rights Hotline and worked on issues around military personnel. Talking to soldiers every day changed my life; what I learned then eventually led to this book. For more on me as a journalist, see my web home, Incredible Panic Rules.

This website is a loose conglomeration of some of what I’ve noticed along the way, and what the people whose stories make it live have had to say about it all. The site is a work in progress, just like the book; for more information, you might want to check out the Facebook page I’ve been maintaining since the summer.

I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, 1754-2008

Promote Your Page Too

p.s. I am totally stopped by this.

That was what I first put up on Facebook when I got the news of the Fort Hood shooting. Today, I’m still watching twitter feeds and news reports try to figure out what happened. (I did catch myself wishing Hasan had called the GI Rights Hotline.)

I have my own theories and worries, some of which I’ll express later in more depth. But for now, I’ll avoid the orgy of speculation and suggest that you do the same. Much love to those on the ground trying to keep people safe, including those having to fight rank speculation about Arab-Americans.

 

 

Maxine Hong Kingston’s sangha speaks

This coming Monday, with “Veterans Day Sales” all over the newspapers, most Americans observe Veterans Day with flags and parades, honoring men and women who have gone to war for the United States. These days, few recollect that the original name of the holiday was Armistice Day, in honor of the November 11, 1918 end of World War I, then called the “war to end all wars.”

One who has not forgotten is Maxine Hong Kingston, whose National Book Award-winning The Woman Warrior is a staple on college campuses and who garnered a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at last year’s National Book Awards. Kingston famously shifted gears in 1991 when her house burnt down in a devastating fire, and with it all trace of her book in progress. “I decided right then,” she said, “that my first book needed to be a book of peace.”

Not only that, but she needed for the new book to include the voice of veterans of war. “I had lost my writing,” Kingston told interviewer Miel Alegre, “and I wanted a community of writers around me. I asked that these people who would write with me be veterans or families of veterans because I wanted to ask the hardest questions: How do we come home from war? Can we end war? Can we end war that goes on in our very souls? And How do we make peace? These are the questions that I was asking as I was working on that lost book. What can one small individual do in this big world to have any effect?”

The result was The Fifth Book of Peace, which ends by narrating Kingston’s acclaimed veterans’ writing workshop, and a collection of work by its members, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Below are three short poems by veterans from her workshop, followed by a reading by Kingston and three veterans at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. These voices form a strong counterpart to the veterans in Monday’s parades.

Sharon Lee Kufeldt, USAF, 1969-1971.

Ripples in the Pond

I drop a pebble into the vast pond

Ripples spread in all directions

Wrap around rocks
, twigs

Remnants reach the farthest shore

What ripples am I spreading today

With my intentions, 
zctions,
 words

Seeking peace for our world

Bombardments

Half the night up, spent as casings of brass, face it, we begin this way: there are no women, no satellite tv, no coca-cola, not even the sun, hidden as it is behind billowing black smoke. There is only an x on this map with an arrow pointing north to a line of scrimmage. This is simply a departure, demarcation of any sign of hope: caramel apples, wet grass, cotton candy, watermelons, laughter. We are year-worn, indrawn and compact. We are small, broken toys with maps and guns. I can remember my mother, I can’t imagine a father. I can’t write you because everything’s humming a new color, unfamiliar as childhood, a distant planet. I didn’t expect to escape. I had a blueprint, the life of a famous poet, picking cherries in June, fireworks over Penn’s Landing. Now I wake to the sleep of Lorca’s apples, walk through the meadow. This is just a place. These are just words flashing in the grass. To the north, there is the whine of distant jets and heavy bombardments. We must find a way between them.

The Phoenix Program

Fred Marchant, USMC 1967-1970.

Afterwards, the children stood outside
the house of their birth
to witness how it too had to be punished.

When they came of age, they fled to the capital,
lost themselves in the study of history and great works of art,
graduated in swirling carmine robes.

Burdened with a knowledge that murderers
name their deeds after winged deities,
they dream for awhile of claws on the back,

but later they become certain there was
nothing they could have done.
And they are not alone.

It is like this throughout the city.
On each corner you can see them—
leaning as if the vanishing point on their horizon

were other than ours.
They speak quietly only to one another.
They play no instruments, and do not sing.

(Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change.)

is this the Alabama portion of Wisconsin?

I’m told it’s not. But what about this?

Although the parade website says the event is “Honoring all Americans who have served,” it has refused to allow Veterans for Peace members – many of whom are combat veterans with Purple Hearts – from taking part in the observance on Saturday, Nov. 7.

The parade committee said Veterans for Peace is “a politically motivated group,” and therefore not welcome to be in the parade…

Yet the Veterans of Foreign Wars is welcome to march in the parade, even though its commander, Thomas Tradewell of Sussex, WI, recently called on President Obama to “heed the assessment and advice of his military leaders” and send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, suggesting that as commander-in-chief Obama’s job is to do what the generals recommend.

Maybe that’s what happens when you turn Armistice Day into something that could be its opposite.

Someone else’s billion-dollar FUBAR?

Foreign Policy notes that $500 million for a new U.S. embassy in Baghdad has yielded a literal house of cards:

Among the most shocking problems still present at the embassy: The walls are in danger of cracking; the “safe areas” for emergencies aren’t safe; the fire protection systems might not protect from fires; and oh, by the way, the plumbing and electrical systems don’t work.

This is only the latest piece of bad news for the lead contractor, First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting, a firm the U.S. has used for hundreds of projects in Iraq but stands accused of shoddy work and widespread abuse of third-country workers it ships in from all over the world.

John Owens, one of the First Kuwaiti foremen on the project, quit in disgust after witnessing what he called labor trafficking and widespread worker abuse, including tricking migrant workers into going to Iraq, placing them in sub-human living conditions, and holding their passports so they couldn’t escape.

I wasn’t that surprised, when I saw that the contractor in question was First Kuwaiti — which first came to my attention, as with many of us, when I saw and wrote about Lee Wang’s Someone Else’s War. I’m glad to see ProPublica, just this summer, mention it in its report “Foreign Workers Are Casualties Twice Over.” Not all the human trafficking involves sex workers. (Click on the link to see clips, and a chance to order the DVD.

The film also mentions one American soldier who helped a group of the Filipino enslaved contractors get away. Wang told me his name, but I’ve never been able to find him. That’s true heroism, in my book.

“because you can’t live that way and keep anything inside you”

That was my original title for the Guernica piece, a quote from All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m reminded of it now, as I’ve started to get letters from families of soldiers that tear at my heart.One, in particular, wrote that someone they loved

…did two tours in Iraq and was nearly killed by shrapnel.  He is now home with a  diagnosis of PTSD. He sits and stares and reveals nothing of his inner turmoil to his family. The VA medicates him and sends him on his way.

Your article should be required reading by anybody who has a relationship with a vet.  We worry about him and the many like him who do what they are asked to do and are then disposed of without thought to their well being.

Thanks for providing the walk through history.

That’s why I drew so extensively on this guy’s words:

I was also heartened to hear from an active-duty soldier, who called the piece “solid.” And another set of parents wrote to remind me that many soldiers enlist for a mix of reasons:

Very powerful……Unfortunately, most of the recruits are coming from homes of economic hardship. These kids join for the money, the opportunities, the benefits. They have no idea what the horrors of war actually are.

Others enlist because of their sense of duty and patriotism, my son being one of them. He was driven by images of the 9/11 attacks. Again, not having any concrete idea of what they will be facing and what they will experience.

The sacrifices of these soldiers and their families draw my loyalty, not the war itself.

Me too.

Now I get to hope the book honors them properly.

“It’s about the demilitarization of society.”

Via Stephen Funk, who was the very first U.S. soldier I interviewed for the book three years ago. I’m so heartened to see it: while Iraq Veterans Against the War argued out a nonviolence resolution, these guys see it simply: “It’s about the demilitarization of society.”

Among demilitarizations tasks they include eradicating sexism, which matters more than ever now as military sexual assaults keep rising. More later on that. But meanwhile, savor the prospect of these two streams weaving themselves together.

News you can use – and a taste of how I write

With the book’s pub date at least a year away, I know it’s too early for excerpts. But when Michael Archer, who has built a giant of online publishing since he and I parted ways as Fred Tuten’s students at CCNY, asked if I had something that might suit, what could I do but pull together this essay? It may end up being my book’s prologue. (Many thanks to Toward Freedom, a web site put together in honor of David Dellinger, for linking to the piece.) I still prefer my original title, “because you can’t live that way and keep anything inside you,” but I guess “Loyal Opposition” tells you much more immediately what it’s about.

Those of you who read my reporting on Winter Soldier 2008 will find the opening familiar, but before long the story, like me, is unstuck in time.

Clay MacCauley at extreme left.

I particularly liked  being able to characterize Clay MacCauley, veteran of the Battle of Chancellorsville and a foe of the Philippine war in 1899, as a “sort of sepia Kerry.”

To see what I mean by that, click here. Tell me what you think, when you have the time. Who and what am I missing?