Dollars for Death, Pennies for Life

by Norman Solomon
When the U.S. military began a major offensive in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, the killing of children and other civilians was predictable. Lofty rhetoric aside, such deaths come with the territory of war and occupation.

A month ago, President Obama pledged $100 million in U.S. government aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti. Compare that to the $100 billion price tag to keep 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a year.

While commanders in Afghanistan were launching what the New York Times called “the largest offensive military operation since the American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001,” the situation in Haiti was clearly dire.

With more than a million Haitians still homeless, vast numbers — the latest estimates are around 75 percent — don’t have tents or tarps. The rainy season is fast approaching, with serious dangers of typhoid and dysentery.

No shortage of bombs in Afghanistan; a lethal shortage of tents in Haiti. Such priorities — actual, not rhetorical — are routine.

Last summer, I saw hundreds of children and other civilians at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5, a miserable makeshift encampment in Kabul. The U.S. government had ample resources for bombing their neighborhoods in the Helmand Valley — but was doing nothing to help the desperate refugees to survive after they fled to Afghanistan’s capital city.

Such priorities have parallels at home. The military hawks and deficit hawks are now swooping along Pennsylvania Avenue in tight formation. There’s plenty of money in the U.S. Treasury for war in Afghanistan. But domestic spending to meet human needs — job creation, for instance — is another matter.

Joblessness is now crushing many low-income Americans. Among those with annual household incomes of less than $12,500, the unemployment rate during the fourth quarter of last year “was a staggering 30.8 percent,” Bob Herbert noted in a February 9 column. “That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.”

Herbert added: “The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent. These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution.”

The current situation is akin to the one that Martin Luther King Jr. confronted in 1967 when he challenged Congress for showing “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

Such priorities are taking lives every day, near and far.

Early this month, the National Council of Churches sent out an article by theologians George Hunsinger and Michael Kinnamon, who wrote: “What the Haitians obviously need most is massive humanitarian relief. They need food, water, medical supplies. They need shelter and physical reconstruction. . . . Over half of Haiti’s population are children, 15 years old or younger. Many were already hungry and homeless before the earthquake hit.”

But the warfare state, with vast budgets for military purposes, has scant funds for sustaining life.

These priorities kill.

Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

ELLSBERG FILM ATTRACTS WIDE AUDIENCE

by Tamara Strauss

On first impression, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” is the kind of documentary that no Sarah Palin-loving red stater would be caught dead seeing.

Daniel Ellsberg is the subject of the Oscar-nominated film. (Photo: Mill Valley Film Festival)

It is made by Berkeley lefties. It is a tribute to a man who leaked 7,000 pages of top-secret Vietnam War documents, revealing that our highest public officials were liars and essentially murderers. Its subtext is that we are awash in government deception again.

But the documentary – which follows Ellsberg’s path from Harvard wunderkind to Marine commander to White House and Defense Department consultant to political pariah – has been embraced by old and young, dove and hawk, earnest leftist and ardent right-winger as an inspiring story of patriotism and moral courage. Even stranger, the film has widely been described as entertaining.

Oscar nomination

Ehrlich and Goldsmith, who are preparing for the film’s opening in their hometown of Berkeley on Feb. 19, are both thrilled and exhausted by its initial success. “The Most Dangerous Man” has been nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary, and has received the Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Audience Awards at the Mill Valley and Palm Springs International Film Festivals. It will be seen around the globe this year, at festivals, in theaters and on TV.

Yet the filmmakers say they feel especially rewarded by positive reactions from young Americans. “They’re very, very savvy, and immediately get the parallels to today,” said Goldsmith. “They get as much as older audiences, maybe more so, that this isn’t a film about the past. This is a film about the present.”

Ehrlich, who recently showed the film to 1,000 students from the Palm Springs, Fla., area, said, “One hundred hands went up after the screening. They said, ‘How can I be a better citizen?’ ‘How can I change this country?’ ”

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not directly addressed in the film, but Ehrlich and Goldstein say the parallels to Vietnam were the main reason they both jumped into the project. They are also tremendous fans of Ellsberg, becoming charged with emotion when they talk about the personal risks he took 40 years ago and his work since to support whistle-blowers and anti-war activists.

“What has struck me about his character is that he doesn’t give himself a break for not doing more,” said Goldsmith, noting that Ellsberg has been arrested 79 times for acts of civil disobedience. “I think he’s so personally engaged in trying to do all he can to stop injustices and wars that he’ll never rest.”

Ehrlich and Goldsmith were among a handful of award-winning documentary filmmakers who wanted to make a movie based on Ellsberg’s 2002 memoir “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” Errol Morris was first in line, but when he opted out the two started courting Ellsberg.

“Dan had been an adviser on my film about World War II conscientious objectors and on Rick’s film about (journalist George) Seldes,” said Ehrlich. “He knew our work, so he decided we would give him a fair shake.”

Editorial control

Among the inevitable criticisms of Ehrlich and Goldsmith’s film is that Ellsberg is the main subject, star and narrator. In other words, it’s as if Ellsberg hired the two to make the movie. But the filmmakers are quick to defend their choices and to point out that although Ellsberg was allowed to have input, they wrote the script, included 20 other people in the film and exercised full editorial control.

“For the story, we had to have someone who was on the inside, someone who was in the halls of power,” said Goldsmith. “Dan was next to McNamara. He was next to Johnson. He was attacked by Nixon. He was in the middle, so I don’t think it’s inappropriate to have him tell a lot of the story.”

Ehrlich also feels that if Ellsberg were sidelined, the movie would not tell a universal story of personal transformation – about “an individual who had this tremendous change of heart and found his conscience and did something that went against everything he was trained to do.” Plus, she said, “Dan is an amazing narrator – good as any actor I have ever worked with, if not better.”

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: Co-produced and co-directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. Opens Feb. 19 in San Francisco and Berkeley.

Howard Zinn, Historian who Challenged Status Quo, Dies at 87

by Mark Feeney

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

Portrait of Howard Zinn by Robert Shetterly from his series, Americans Who Tell the Truth.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966). Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970); “Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and “Declarations of Independence” (1990).

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: “Emma,” about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and “Daughter of Venus.”

Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.” The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.

Dr. Zinn’s wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two grandsons.

We’ve Ignored King on War

Our title, Speak Truth to Power, taken from a charge given to Eighteenth Century Friends, suggests the effort that is made to speak from the deepest insight of the Quaker faith, as this faith is understood by those who prepared this study. We speak to power in three senses:

To those who hold high places in our national life and bear the terrible responsibility of making decisions for war or peace.
To the American people who are the final reservoir of power in this country and whose values and expectations set the limits for those who exercise authority.
To the idea of Power itself, and its impact on Twentieth Century life.

Our truth is an ancient one: that love endures and overcomes; that hatred destroys; that what is obtained by love is retained, but what is obtained by hatred proves a burden. This truth, fundamental to the position which rejects reliance on the method of war, is ultimately … a belief that stands outside of history.

Yes, it was written in 1955, but it contains lessons we have yet, as a country and world, to learn.  Ms. Kelly is a powerful voice speaking her truth to power and the organization she represents, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, is planning an important effort leading up to President Obama’s budget submission for fiscal year 2011 to stop the funding of an endless war that only serves to create more folks who hate us and to destroy the lives of many of those who serve.  Here’s what she has to tell us:

There’s a phrase originating with the peace activism of the American Quaker movement: “Speak Truth to Power.”  One can hardly speak more directly to power than addressing the Presidential Administration of the United States. This past October, students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University had a message for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  One student summed up many of her colleagues’ frustration. “We don’t need America,” she said. “Things were better before they came here.”

The students were mourning loss of life at their University where, a week earlier, two suicide bombers walked onto the campus wearing explosive devices and left seven students dead and dozens of others seriously injured. Since the spring of 2009, under pressure from U.S. leaders to “do more” to dislodge militant Taliban groups, the Pakistani government has been waging military offensives throughout the northwest of the country.  These bombing attacks have displaced millions and the Pakistani government has apparently given open permission for similar attacks by unmanned U.S. aerial drones.   Every week, Pakistani militant groups have launched a new retaliatory atrocity in Pakistan, killing hundreds more civilians in markets, schools, government buildings, mosques and sports facilities.  Who can blame the student who believed that her family and friends were better off before the U.S. began insisting that Pakistan cooperate with U.S. military goals in the region?

In neighboring Afghanistan, 2009 was the deadliest year for Afghan children since 2001, according to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor. In a January 6 statement, the group noted that in 2009 about 1050 children had died in suicide attacks, roadside blasts, air strikes and the cross-fire between Taliban insurgents and pro-government forces, both Afghan and foreign.  The group’s director, Ajmal Samadi, noted that this figure amounted to nearly three children per day. It’s estimated that nearly one third of these children’s deaths were caused by US/NATO coalition forces. This week, hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in protest after the Afghan government said its investigation has established that all 10 people killed by U.S. led forces on January 3rd, in a remote village in Kunar province, were civilians and that eight of those killed were schoolchildren, aged 12-14. The London Times reports that the U.S.-led troops were accused of dragging the innocent children from their beds, handcuffing several of them, and then killing all eight of them.

Stories of carnage, horror and impoverishment aren’t new in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan.  Ten years ago, each of these countries suffered under severely repressive governance and extremes of poverty. In the case of Iraq, these conditions were made immeasurably worse by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions that punished innocent Iraqi citizens for their inability to rise from under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, all the while rendering them completely dependent on Hussein’s regime to meet their basic survival needs. Yet in all this suffering that preceded the U.S. invasions of the region, there were very few accounts of suicide bombings in the lands where the U.S. is now at war.  The kidnapping and torture industries, now rife in all three countries, had not developed, and their entire economies had not been hobbled by blatant official corruption.

What has U.S. invasion and occupation unleashed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? And how are these wars creating security for U.S. people?

The New York Times reported on November 14, 2009 that, according to internal U.S. government estimates, it costs one million dollars to keep one soldier in Afghanistan for one year.   Consider this sum in light of the fact that, in Afghanistan, district governors earn 70 dollars per month. Their operation budget is 15 dollars per month, and half of them have no dedicated office.  Or, in light of the UN estimate that the Gross Domestic Product, per capita, in Afghanistan, is less than $1,000 per year.  Or that The United Nation’s Children’s Fund, better known as UNICEF, says Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be born, having the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live births.  Only 70 percent of Afghans have access to clean water.

Kai Eide, the outgoing Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan, briefed the UN Security Council on January 5, 2010.  With regard to military activities, he bluntly stated that “civilian casualties, house searches, and detention policies are sources of recruitment for the insurgency.”

President Obama’s administration is soon expected to request another “emergency” supplemental expenditure for the Iraq and Afghan wars, this time for between 40 and 50 billion dollars.  If (some would say, when) this figure is approved, it will make 2010 fiscally the most costly year of the ongoing War on Terror, surpassing President Bush’s expenditures by a significant margin.   Before the year is out, President Obama will also have submitted a budget item to fund the wars in 2011, with military services already planning to request something in the range of $160 to $165 billion.

The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.  We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures. For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project.  (www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org [1])

We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.

Please join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live.   Visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org [2], to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington.

We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.

Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. [3] Kathy Kelly’s email is kathy@vcnv.org

WHY A RESISTER CHOSE CANADA OVER THE WAR IN IRAQ

by Rodney Watson
I am from Kansas City, Kansas, and I joined the U.S. Army for financial reasons in 2004 after my steady job of seven years ended.

I enlisted for a three-year contract with the intention of being a cook and not in a combat role. I wanted to support the troops in some way without being involved in any combat operations.

A recruiter promised that I could do this.

In 2005 I was deployed to Iraq just north of Mosul where I was told that my duties as a cook would be to supervise and ensure that the local nationals in the dining facility were preparing meals according to military standards.

But instead of supervising in the dining facility, I was performing vehicle searches for explosives, contraband and weapons. I also operated a mobile X-ray machine that scanned vehicles and civilians for any possible explosives that could enter the base.

I had to keep the peace within an area that held 100 to 200 Iraqi civilian men who would be waiting for security clearances, and shoot warning shots at Iraqi children who were trying to set up mortars to fire at the base.

In Iraq I witnessed racism and physical abuse from soldiers toward the civilians.

On one occasion a soldier was beating an Iraqi civilian, called him a “sand nigger,” threw his Qur’an on the ground and spat on it. The civilian man was unarmed and was just looking for work on our base. He posed no type of threat and was beaten because soldiers brought their personal racist hatred to Iraq.

This was not what I had signed up for.

After all the wrongs I witnessed in Iraq, I decided that once my one-year tour of duty was over I would never again be part of this unnecessary war.

When I returned home, my unit was informed that we would be redeployed within four months. This would put me beyond the term I signed up for. I was going to be stop-lossed and forced to serve past my contract.

While on two-week leave I made my decision to come to Canada and not return to my base at Fort Hood, Texas.

I have been here in Vancouver since early 2007. I have been self-sufficient. I have fathered a beautiful son whose mother is Canadian. I plan to marry her and to provide our son with a loving and caring family unit.

I have made many friends and I have built a peaceful life here.

My son and my wife-to-be are my heart and soul and it would be a great tragedy for my family and for me personally if I were deported and torn away from them.

I think being punished as a prisoner of conscience for doing what I felt morally obligated to do is a great injustice.

This Christmas I hope and pray that people will open their hearts and minds to give peace and love a chance.

I appeal to the Canadian government to honour your country’s great traditions of being a place of refuge from militarism and a place that respects human rights by supporting my decision, and the decisions taken by my fellow resisters to refuse any further participation in this unjust war.

I ask that you urge your government to respect the will of the majority of Canadians by acting on the direction it has been given twice by Parliament to immediately stop deporting Iraq War resisters like me and to let us become permanent residents here.

My heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones in this unnecessary war.

© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2009
Rodney Watson is an Iraq War veteran who was ordered deported by the Harper government this fall. On Sept. 18 he took refuge in Vancouver’s First United Church. Dec. 27 will be his 100th day in sanctuary. Watson’s request to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds remains outstanding.

Then I saw this piece last night and since it expressed some of the thoughts I have been having and since it harkened back to some of the history that I believe has relevance, I want to share it.  Not only does it feature someone whose name betokens a time in our history when decisions were having to be made about how to proceed in a war that was already a severe drain on our economy and our spirit as a nation, but it also features another McGovern, no relation to George, who is taking a stand against this war based on deeply held beliefs and principles.  James P. McGovern – a representative from Worcester in the very heart of Massachusetts, the state where the majority of voters supported the earlier McGovern and many of us had bumper stickers that read “Don’t Blame Me, I’m from Massachusetts”, is seeing and saying that the people our government says it wants to eliminate, al Queda, have almost entirely left Afghanistan and are currently in Pakistan – and Yemen, Somalia and heaven only knows where else. Escalating the war in Afghanistan, aside from the expense in lives and money, is just not the right move to accomplish what the government is holding aloft as a noble cause.  Here are McGovern’s words, “In 2001 we voted to dislodge Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda moved. They are in a different neighborhood now, a different country: Pakistan. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Why do we need 100,000 American troops to go after less than 100 members of Al Qaeda that might be left in Afghanistan. It makes no sense to me.”  Me either!  And wonder no longer about Mr. Kerry.  The man who famously said after returning from Vietnam, “Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake?” refuses to acknowledge that this war, and now its escalation, begs the same question…

There is another path and Mr. McGovern offers it – a route to ending this war that has us making a major humanitarian aid commitment and has us acknowledging that no matter what we do to rid this part of the world of terrorism, we shall fail, because such a mission cannot help but simply lead to the relocation of those our government would seek to destroy.  Here’s a comment that followed the article below at www.commondreams.org and reminded me of Randy Newman’s song “Let’s Drop the Big One” in which we realized we had enemies everywhere so… “Since at least one Al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, also helped plan 9-11, we must start dropping bombs on Germany right away. Germany could become a terrorist sanctuary again, too! And so could Canada. And Monaco. Or Texas, or… gosh, the list is so long–it includes every country!!!!! Let’s just bomb them all.”  It is time to stop the madness, not compound it by throwing more firepower at it…

Another McGovern Takes On a War

Massachusetts Congressman mobilizes foes of Afghan surge

by Michael Kranish

WASHINGTON – Representative James P. McGovern, a political activist since he was a schoolboy in Worcester, walked into his congressional office yesterday and proudly pointed to a 1972 presidential campaign poster on his wall: “We’ve been misled too often. Demand Truth. George McGovern.”

It was a moment that brought Jim McGovern full circle. As a seventh-grader during the Vietnam War, he passed out antiwar campaign literature for the former South Dakota senator, and as a college student he interned in the senator’s Washington office.

Representative James McGovern and a poster on his mentor, Senator George McGovern. (Brendan Smialowski for The Boston Globe)

Now the Massachusetts Democrat, a 50-year-old whose parents still own a liquor store in Worcester, is assuming his mentor’s mantle in more than name (they are not related). He has become one of the most outspoken opponents to President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, putting forward proposals to cut off funding for the 30,000 additional troops Obama plans to send there and to demand a clear-cut exit strategy.

McGovern said he has no qualms about tak ing on Obama. Even those with the potential to be “great presidents” make mistakes, he said. “There is going to be a fight on this. The question is whether we get it sooner or later.”

While his quest may seem as quixotic as his mentor’s presidential run and has made him a lightning rod for those who deem his antiwar stance misguided, the congressman says he is pushing forward in the belief that every antiwar campaign begins with modest steps.

“McGovern was right” about Vietnam, the congressman said of the former presidential candidate. And he believes that he will be proven right about Afghanistan.

“The mission in Afghanistan does not reflect what Congress voted for in 2001,” McGovern said of the resolution authorizing the military action following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “In 2001 we voted to dislodge Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda moved. They are in a different neighborhood now, a different country: Pakistan. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Why do we need 100,000 American troops to go after less than 100 members of Al Qaeda that might be left in Afghanistan. It makes no sense to me.”

McGovern’s emergence on the issue also makes him the most visible antiwar leader in Congress from Massachusetts, partly due to a confluence of factors. Senator John F. Kerry, who rose to fame by opposing the Vietnam War, generally supports Obama’s troop surge. The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who led the opposition to the Iraq war, has been replaced by Paul G. Kirk Jr., who opposes the surge but will be in office only a few more weeks. That has provided an opening for McGovern.

When most of the Massachusetts delegation met Wednesday night at a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill to discuss the Afghanistan strategy Obama had announced the night before, Kerry was openly in favor (although with some qualifications), while McGovern said he was strongly against it.

McGovern said it is “a little bit ironic” that Kerry is a leader in the prosurge effort. Kerry played down the disagreement, praising McGovern as “enormously thoughtful” and saying in a statement that the war “presents as thorny an issue as you’ll find in American foreign policy. There are no good options, and even thoughtful people who care and think alike are inevitably going to find themselves in different places.”

George McGovern, who came to Worcester last month to celebrate his protégé’s birthday, is counting on the congressman to warn Obama that the mistakes of Vietnam are being repeated.

“It is very similar,” the former senator, 87, said in a telephone interview. Former president Lyndon Johnson “thought that by putting in more and more troops into Vietnam that we could make a mistaken war become correct. It just made it worse,” he said.

But others, including Obama, dispute the Vietnam analogy, pointing out that the Sept. 11 attacks were plotted from Afghanistan and warning that it could become a terrorist sanctuary again.

Having learned his skills as a top aide to the late J. Joseph Moakley, the South Boston Democrat, Jim McGovern is following a familiar antiwar strategy focused on funding. As vice chairman of the Rules Committee, he has one of the most powerful positions in Congress, enabling him to be the traffic cop on countless pieces of legislation. He also has a key post on the Budget Committee.

In May, McGovern vocally opposed a funding bill that included money for Obama’s request for 17,000 more troops in Afghanistan. McGovern’s action infuriated the White House. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who had worked closely with McGovern during his time as a congressman from Illinois, screamed obscenities at him in a phone conversation, warning that the president’s agenda was at stake, according to McGovern. Emanuel did not respond to a request for comment.

That funding bill eventually passed, but McGovern then made another proposal that angered the White House. He authored a measure that would require the administration to provide Congress with a detailed “exit strategy” for the military to leave Afghanistan. In June, the measure failed, but gained 138 backers, including a majority of Democrats and seven Republicans. While this week, Obama proposed pulling out troops beginning in July 2011, McGovern said that “no one believes” that it is a commitment for withdrawal on that schedule.

Tom Andrews, a former US House member from Maine who is chairman of the Win Without War Coalition, said McGovern’s call for an exit plan has been effective, calling it “a platform from which to build” an effort in Congress to end the war.

But Tarah Donoghue, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Republican Party, criticized McGovern’s position, saying, “Winning the war in Afghanistan is critical to our security.” So far, however, the GOP has not come up with a candidate to run against McGovern next year.

McGovern wants the US military mission to be replaced with a massive humanitarian effort. With troops mostly withdrawn, he said, the United States could build schools and do other works that he said would be more helpful to winning support from Afghans.

He acknowledged that seeking a vote on the funding for Obama’s troop surge could take months, perhaps after many of them are already in Afghanistan, which would make a funding cutoff even more politically difficult.

“There are some people who are very anxious about the policy, but say, ‘Let’s low-key it a little bit,’ ” McGovern said. But he said he hopes to win over skeptics by arguing that there should at least be a vote before more Americans are put in harm’s way.

“There’s no way,” he said, “members of Congress can avoid taking responsibility for this.”

To any of you who might help a dear friend of ours, now in need of shelter in Washington D.C.

Tom Mahany has begun a hunger strike as of 11, November, toward the pull-out of our troops from the Afghan and Iraqi fronts.  Tom is a Viet Nam War Vet, a long ago protester and hunger strike activist against that war.

Now past 60, he has driven himself to Washington D.C. to try to raise awareness of the great human toll and waste of this current war.

He is desperately in need of shelter in the D.C. area, from which he can reach out his message to The President and those in power to make military decisions.  Tom attended West Point, served in Viet -Nam, is an upstanding member of his Michigan community. The events a week ago at Fort Hood have made a horrible impact on Tom’s conscience, and spiraled him into this hunger strike to try and make a difference.His message below explains his position.

I am attaching the letter which he hopes to circulate.

I am urgently in hopes that you have contact in D.C. which can offer this kind and caring man shelter immediately. He is running out of strength rapidly.

I am most sincerely yours,

Janet Levine

janet@iwild.com

President of the United States

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC

Dear Sir,

In May of 1970 I spent 29 days in Lafayette Square fasting for Peace in Viet Nam. I now feel that is time to act again. Accordingly, as of 0600 Hours, Nov 11, Veterans Day 2009, I have taken my last material sustenance other than water until specific action is taken by your Administration and our Military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in cases of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome which is rapidly approaching endemic proportion amongst our Fighting Men and Women.

I fought in Viet Nam and I also lost a brother-in law from suicide caused by PTSS. He had two young sons. I have seen firsthand what this can do to a family.

In taking my action I hope to elicit from the national populous moral support sufficient to spiritually bolster you while making your upcoming decision concerning our military presence in Afghanistan.

Mr. President, please end this needless, incessant war making. We have long ago surpassed humanely reasonable demand exacted upon the fruit of our middle class as well as wrought excessive death and destruction on unwitting civilians in foreign lands. Let us tone down the hatred and stop the violence that has engulfed our society.

I beg you in the words of Abraham Lincoln; please do not yield to the “peculiar and powerful interests. [Sic] With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, [Sic] let us strive on to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, [Sic} to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. [Sic} The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart, [Sic] will yet swell the chorus [Sic], when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”

Sir, I pray you find the strength to make the honorable choice and the courage to implement it.

Withdraw our military men and women from the Middle East now. Take them away from the ordeal of continually dealing with adjacent, senseless mortality. Deal with the cause, not just the effect.

Again, I am resolved to partake of no food until some concrete positive action on your part has come to pass. During this time I shall, if allowed, keep myself available to the public in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

Respectfully yours,

Thomas E. Mahany

Thomas E. Mahany

Royal Oak, MI

101st Airborne Division, USRV, 1969

]]> http://www.vietnamwardraftstories.com/blog/2009/11/13/a-plea-from-a-vietnam-vet-trying-to-persuade-obama-not-to-escalate-in-afghanistan/feed/ 5 http://www.vietnamwardraftstories.com/blog/2009/11/01/women-war-and-ptsd-suffering-alone-and-in-silence/ http://www.vietnamwardraftstories.com/blog/2009/11/01/women-war-and-ptsd-suffering-alone-and-in-silence/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:37:40 +0000 Tom Weiner http://www.vietnamwardraftstories.com/blog/?p=273 The latest article in a series by the N.Y. Times about American women soldiers in the two wars is all about how PTSD is affecting so many of those who have served and continue to serve in the U.S. military.  It is a difficult story to read since it focuses in not only on the ways in which these womens’ lives have been transformed by PTSD, but it also higlights what makes it even more difficult to acknowledge the need for and to receive the help that they require.  The stigma attached to being a supposed non-combattant and suffering acute mental health symptoms combined with the tendency of many women to feel that they should not need such support makes matters even worse.   We have changed the composition of the armed services significantly and yet the efforts needed to be made by the military and the V.A. to cope with the new reality of women soldiers experiencing enormous trauma and not having the resources available or the encouragement to seek help, are just not happening.  The result is an alarmingly increasing number of women veterans who are being marginalized by insensitive and unaware family members and health care proessionals and isolating themselves as a a result.

The other articles in the series are:

Wartime Soldier, Conflicted Mom
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The U.S. military has in large part adapted to women fighting successfully alongside men. Motherhood, though, poses a more formidable challenge.
September 27, 2009

Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In
By STEVEN LEE MYERS; LIZETTE ALVAREZ CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM NEW YORK.
American military women have changed the way the U.S. goes to war without the disruption of discipline and unit cohesion that some feared.
August 17, 2009

G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ; STEVEN LEE MYERS CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM BAGHDAD.
Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Afghanistan and Iraq have changed that.
August 16, 2009
We need to know about what is happening to the women we are sending off to war and, perhaps even more importantly, our government and people need to lovingly and creatively both honor what they have been through and provide the services they need to heal from the scars they have withstood.  Here’s the story of what a number of them have experienced as women warriors and returning veterans.

November 1, 2009
Women at Arms
A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
By DAMIEN CAVE

For Vivienne Pacquette, being a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder means avoiding phone calls to her sons, dinner out with her husband and therapy sessions that make her talk about seeing the reds and whites of her friends’ insides after a mortar attack in 2004.

As with other women in her position, hiding seems to make sense. Post-traumatic stress disorder distorts personalities: some veterans who have it fight in their sleep; others feel paranoid around children. And as women return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.

Many spend months or years as virtual shut-ins, missing the camaraderie of Iraq or Afghanistan, while racked with guilt over who they have become.

“After all, I’m a soldier, I’m an NCO, I’m a problem solver,” said Mrs. Pacquette, 52, a retired noncommissioned officer who served two tours in Iraq and more than 20 years in the Army. “What’s it going to look like if I can’t get things straight in my head?”

Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.

Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. With commanders needing resources in wars without front lines, women have found themselves fighting on dusty roads and darkened outposts in ways that were never imagined by their parents or publicly authorized by Congress. And they have distinguished themselves in the field.

Psychologically, it seems, they are emerging as equals. Officials with the Department of Defense said that initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time outside the relative security of bases in Iraq showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex, though research continues.

“Female soldiers are actually handling and dealing with the stress of combat as well as male soldiers are,” said Col. Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Research Program at the Department of Defense. “When I look at the data, I see nothing to counter that point.”

And yet, experts and veterans say, the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home have created differences in how they cope. A man, for instance, may come home and drink to oblivion with his war buddies while a woman — often after having been the only woman in her unit — is more likely to suffer alone.

Some psychiatrists say that women do better in therapy because they are more comfortable talking through their emotions, but it typically takes years for them to seek help. In interviews, female veterans with post-traumatic stress said they did not always feel their problems were justified, or would be treated as valid by a military system that defines combat as an all-male activity.

“Some of the issues come up because they’re not given the combat title even though they may be out on patrol standing next to the men,” said Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division at the National Center for P.T.S.D., a wing of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

While more men over all suffer from the disorder because they are a majority of those deployed, Dr. Resick added, “people underestimate what these women have been through.”

Indeed, at home, after completing important jobs in war, women with the disorder often smack up against old-fashioned ignorance: male veterans and friends who do not recognize them as “real soldiers”; husbands who have little patience with their avoidance of intimacy; and a society that expects them to be feminine nurturers, not the nurtured.

War as Equalizer

When Mrs. Pacquette joined the army in the ’80s — inspired by her father, who served in World War II — men often told her she did not belong. “Women were seen as weak and whiny,” she said. “Men had to go on sick call all the time but when a woman went on sick call, it was a big deal.”

Even before she was deployed to Iraq in 2004, however, she sensed what thousands of women have since discovered: that war would be an equalizer. And it was.

In early October 2004, her convoy of about 30 vehicles set out from Kuwait for Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities. On the way, she said, they were hit three times with roadside bombs. One exploded 200 feet from the unarmored Humvee in which Mrs. Pacquette spent day and night pointing her rifle out an open window.

Gunshots arrived, too, on a bridge in Baghdad. Soldiers took up positions outside their vehicles, and an Iraqi was killed. “It was my birthday,” Mrs. Pacquette said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’ ”

Instead, she surprised even herself by remaining calm.

“There were guys on the ground that I was responsible for as an NCO,” she said, adding, “As a leader, I had to keep my fear inside.”

But later on, the war’s consequences began to weigh more heavily. On Dec. 21, an Iraqi suicide bomber walked into a mess tent at a base across the street from her own and blew himself up amid the plastic lunch trays, killing more than 25 people.

Then a mortar attack hit the motor pool where her unit worked. At the scene, she saw three of her friends torn up beyond recognition.

Recalling the scene nearly five years later, Mrs. Pacquette’s dark brown eyes began darting back and forth, as if looking for another rocket. She was in St. Croix, the island where she grew up, but her body stiffened like a wound coil — releasing only after her twin sister brought their faces together, in a silent hug that lasted several minutes.

Her mind had returned to the moment. And this emotional flashback is just one in a long list of post-traumatic stress symptoms that female veterans now know intimately. Fits of rage, insomnia, nightmares, depression, survivor’s guilt, fear of crowds — women with the disorder, like men, can and do get it all.

Mrs. Pacquette’s twin, Jamilah Moorehead, said she noticed it soon after her sister’s first tour. “In the middle of the night, I heard this loud noise and there was Viv,” Mrs. Moorehead said. “She was crouching as if holding a weapon and she was not even awake.”

A military doctor gave Mrs. Pacquette a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in March 2005, but she refused treatment. “I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said.

That November, she returned to Iraq, where she said she managed to keep the disorder hidden because she often worked alone. She retired from the military in 2006, but is still struggling with how to face the diagnosis.

The worst part, she said, was seeing her personality harden. First, she lost the ability to trust the Iraqi soldiers she served with. Then at home, she said, she fell out of touch with loved ones, though her husband has stood by her side. Now simply standing in line with other people is enough to turn her into what she calls “a witch, but with B.”

Dr. Carri-Ann Gibson, Mrs. Pacquette’s therapist, who runs the Trauma Recovery Program at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla., said the hardest part for women is that they often feel ashamed and guilty because “they’re not supposed to punch a wall, they’re not supposed to get aggressive with their spouse.”

Dr. Gibson said that for men, rage, paranoia and aggression are more accepted, while women are typically expected to snap back into domestic routines without any trouble.

“Women apply that pressure to themselves as well,” she said. “They live with that inner feeling of anger, and that’s why we see more events happening at home than actually out in public.”

Dr. Resick of the National Center for P.T.S.D. said much was still unknown about how the minds of men and women handle war. But at this point, she said, men and women differ mainly in how they manage similar symptoms.

“You put a man and a woman in a truck and they get blasted by an I.E.D., we’re not seeing big differences there,” Dr. Resick said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “That said, there are different context factors that affect how people cope.”

“The women — because they are not surrounded by other women, they may be surrounded by men — may withdraw more,” she continued. “The question is, Who are they with when they come home?”

Homefront Isolation

Many women traumatized by combat stress described lives of quiet desperation, alone, in just a few rooms with drawn shades.

Nancy Schiliro, 29, who lost her right eye as a result of a mortar attack in 2005, said that for more than two years after returning home, she rarely left a darkened garage in Hartsdale, N.Y., that her grandmother called “the bat cave.”

Shalimar Bien, 30, described her life, four years after Iraq, as a nonstop effort to avoid confrontation.

And for those with husbands or young children, finding a social equilibrium is especially difficult. Veterans like Aimee Sherrod, 29, a mother of two, say they constantly struggle to balance their own urge to hide with demands from loved ones to interact.

Ms. Sherrod said that five years after her last deployment to Iraq, she still makes only a few trips a week outside her home in Jackson, Tenn., usually to drop off or pick up her 4-year-old son at school.

She often feels like a failure because her son pushes for what she cannot handle. “I don’t take him to Chuck E. Cheese because I’ll get angry,” she said, noting that the arcade’s bells and bangs make her jumpy. “Take him to a park? It’s a lose-lose. I don’t like open spaces.”

She can identify a handful of causes for what her mind has become. In Baghdad with an Air Force rescue squadron from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, she worked on helicopters, sometimes cleaning off the blood from casualties, and regularly receiving indirect fire. “I was getting mortared all the time,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “So someone was watching me.”

She also feels damaged from her time in Jordan, at the start of the Iraq war. One of only two women in her unit, she said, she was ostracized after asking to be shifted to nights because some of the men would not stop harassing her. Her superiors, she said, broke a promise to keep her complaint quiet and after that, the men in her unit lashed out. “This one guy said if I was on fire he wouldn’t even piss on me to put me out,” Mrs. Sherrod said.

Many female veterans report being treated with respect by male colleagues, more so as they proved themselves. But several women said in interviews that some men made their wartime experiences even harder.

Mrs. Pacquette said that on her second tour, in Baghdad, she took showers with an open knife on the soap dish after seeing a man flee the bathroom trailer, having just attacked a woman inside.

In Mrs. Sherrod’s case, the harm came more from being shunned by her unit. For months in Jordan, she said, she had no e-mail access. No phone. No friends. She was isolated.

So at home, she got used to pushing people away. On her first date with the man who became her husband, she told him she had post-traumatic stress, figuring he would not stick around. He did, but they have struggled to stay together.

She always wanted to be a mother, and described her first child as a product of a whirlwind return from war. She became pregnant with her son within a month of reaching home, she said, after a night of drinking. When she later got pregnant with her daughter, who is 9 months old, she said she still thought the doctors were wrong about her stress disorder.

Now, having finally accepted the diagnosis after connecting with other veterans online, she fears her own temper more than anything else.

The other day, in the car, she lost control when both of her children demanded attention. “I can handle one or the other,” she said, “but she was crying and he kept saying, ‘Mommy, mommy,’ so in the middle of the road, I stopped the car and yelled: ‘If you do not be quiet I’m going to turn around and hit you.’

“The look on his face broke my heart,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “He just wanted to talk to me. He wasn’t doing anything bad.”

She paused, then said: “I’m like that all the time.”

Homefront Ignorance

When Heather Paxton started working at the V.A. hospital in Columbia, Mo., two years ago, she discovered something she did not expect: no one saw her as a veteran.

Despite her service in Iraq, patients assumed she knew nothing of war. A male colleague who chattered about weapons dismissed her like a silly little sister when she chimed in.

“He’d give me the stink eye,” Ms. Paxton said. “He’d just walk away.”

For many female veterans today, war and their roles in it must be constantly explained. For those with post-traumatic stress, the constant demand for proof can be particularly maddening — confirming their belief that only the people who were “over there” can understand them here.

Men express similar sentiments; combat veterans of both sexes often complain about insensitive questions like, “Did you kill anyone?”

But women say they are also treated to another line of inquiry. Would male veterans, they ask, hear friends or relatives say, “How was the shopping?” Or “In that heat, how did you wear makeup?” Or “How could you have P.T.S.D. when you sat at a desk with a typewriter?”

Female veterans say they have heard them all.

They have also seen their sacrifice overlooked, in bars, where strangers slide past them to buy drinks for men who were never deployed; and at “welcome home” events where organizers asked for their husbands.

Tammy Duckworth, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot who lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, said such experiences show that “we’re going through a change — just like in World War II with African-Americans, the military is ahead of the American public.”

What many do not realize, said Ms. Duckworth, who ran for Congress and is now the assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs for the V.A., is that in war today, “it’s not a question, Can women can do a combat job. They just are.”

Some women have found ways to at least minimize the slight.

Ms. Paxton now has a picture above her desk, showing her, her mother and her brother, all in uniform.

Mrs. Pacquette has placed a decal on her cane (like many veterans, she has damaged knees and a bad back from lugging gear) that identifies her as an Iraq war veteran.

Sometimes, though, simple messages are not enough. Renee Peloquin, 25, a member of the Idaho National Guard, had to design a bumper sticker that says “Female Iraqi War Veteran” because the basic “Iraq War Veteran” message on her car led strangers to thank her long-haired boyfriend for serving, even though he has never spent a day in uniform.

“I’m so sick of being stereotyped,” Ms. Peloquin said. “Or being ignored, that’s a better word.”

The military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have worked hard to make the public more aware of women’s roles. There are now Army recruiting advertisements featuring women in war zones. The V.A. has bought hundreds of copies of the documentary “Lioness,” which profiles female veterans in Ramadi, while producing a video of its own with Jane Pauley that shows the history of military women.

Last year, the veterans’ agency also began a systemwide effort to make primary care for female veterans available at every V.A. medical facility nationwide. At Ms. Paxton’s V.A. in Columbia, and Dr. Gibson’s in Tampa, women’s centers take up separate wings of the hospitals, as the V.A. prepares for its population of patients who are women to double over the next few years.

For some women with post-traumatic stress, like Angela Peacock in St. Louis, the V.A. has been a godsend. She said that the doctors who helped her detoxify from drug and alcohol addiction saved her from suicide.

Many others, however, insist that the military, the V.A. and other established veterans organizations have not fully adapted to women’s new roles. The military, they say, still treats them like wives, not warriors.

Some therapists, case workers and female patients also say that because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, women must work harder to prove they saw combat and get the benefits they deserve.

V.A. officials, including Ms. Duckworth, say there is no systemic bias. V.A. statistics show that as of July 2009, 5,103 female Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 57,732 males.

But the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who had applied, making a comparison of rejection rates impossible.

At best, women are caught in the same bureaucratic morass as men; the backlog for disability claims from all veterans climbed to 400,000 in July, up from 253,000 six years ago. At worst, women are sometimes held to a tougher standard.

Ms. Paxton is one of at least 3,000 female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with stress disorder diagnoses and no disability benefit, as shown by the V.A. statistics.

Serving in Tikrit, Iraq, five years ago with a civil affairs unit, she took part in missions several times a week on roads regularly rigged with bombs. She worked closely with two Iraqi translators who were killed — she saw one in his bullet-ridden car just after he had been assassinated — and she came home with nightmares, depression and anger.

Though she received a diagnosis of stress disorder by a V.A. doctor, she had her first disability claim rejected in 2006. A second refusal came a year later, and the third arrived in 2008, despite a letter verifying what happened from a captain with her unit.

Her V.A. case worker, Julie Heese, said the rejections highlighted what made the benefits system so challenging. “The claims process is a tough one because you have to have really clear evidence,” Ms. Heese said. She added that it works best “with a well documented battle or attack,” not with experiences that may go unrecorded, like the death of a translator.

Newly proposed V.A. rules easing requirements for documenting traumatic events could help Ms. Paxton’s case. But she said she feared a fourth disappointment.

She said she no longer cared about getting money. After experiencing the grave shock of war and its never-ending aftermath, she would like a little more recognition.

“Just admit that it happened,” she said, her voice rising, over a meal her husband cooked at their home in Columbia. “Then it’s over.”

Diana Oliva Cave contributed reporting.

“All that needs to be done is draft everyone between the ages of 19 and 26 – men and women – from the 150 or so most affluent zip codes in the US. No exemptions, exceptions, or deferments. They stay in and available for deployment for three years(after training), are in active reserve for a year, and then in country reserve for a year. Once they’re in-country on reserve, they go back from whence they came – school, job, beach, whatever. Even though they may be rich, all of the GI Bill benefits would be available to them, as it should be for anyone who serves. For those who may have a legitimate medical, moral, or religious concern, there would be a 5 year hitch in civilian service. WPA/CCC types of endeavors. The civilian benefits would not be as far-reaching as a GI Bill; if they want the big stuff, they’ll have to pick up a rifle.”

ESCALATING AFGHANISTAN: WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE CLASS WAR, DADDY?

by Peter Laarman