A Call to Action

Alice Walker

Veterans For Peace held its 27th national convention last month in Miami, Florida. Among the highlights were a tribute to the organization by former TV talk-show host Phil Donahue and a call by novelist and poet Alice Walker for a new wave of outreach to enlist veterans on the verge of suicide to join social change campaigns.

"I admire Veterans For Peace for one central reason above everything else," Donahue told the August gathering of community-to-international activists. "Veterans For Peace walks the walk."

Donahue was there to show and discuss his film, Body of War, the story of a severely wounded Iraq war veteran, Tomas Young, who flung himself into peace movement activism, interacting with many of the veterans attending the convention. 

“Hundreds of veterans with knowledge of war and dedicated to the abolition of war were gathered for the opening night ... [of] their first international convention as VFP has opened a chapter in the U.K. from which members are attending. VFP also has a chapter in Vietnam,” the St. Louis-based group noted in a news release.

Walker, the Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple and numerous other books, was the keynote speaker at the convention’s concluding evening banquet.

In a soft, firmly focused and melodious voice, Alice Walker presented an extended poem/riff on the deaths of war veterans who killed themselves and her persistent, well-put plea that the best way to address this tragedy is to issue a call to veterans in despair to join the fight for human rights at home and abroad. 

“The madness of war is given mute testimony by our young men and some young women who take their lives,” she said, “rather than continue to murder others or to self-murder in slow motion while feeling half-alive…

“We need them beside us with all that they have learned, with all of their valor and expertise, the lack of fear of dying—the lack of fear of dying—which can be a very good thing. Stay with us, I say to them, stay with us—we desperately need you…”

 
She cited the example of Howard Zinn, the historian and vet for peace who was horrified by his role in bombing European cities and villages during World War II. Walker recalled how Zinn, one of her professors at Spellman College in Atlanta, persistently got arrested in civil rights demonstrations in the early 1960s and the long arc of his life of social activism. 

A video of Alice Walker's speech is here: 
 http://warisacrime.org/content/video-alice-walker-veterans-peace-convention

"Not included in the video is what happened right after Walker finished," Vietnam vet Paul Appell of Illinois wrote in an email.  "Carlos Arredondo, who you know lost his first son Alex to war by way of a bullet in Iraq on August 25, 2004 and then lost his remaining son Brian to war by way of suicide on December 19, 2011, spoke.  Carlos asked everyone who had lost a family member to suicide to stand.  Almost every table in the banquet hall had someone stand up."

Peace Boat Update

By Jan Barry

The Golden Rule, the storied sailboat that sparked a successful campaign to stop nuclear bomb testing in the South Pacific, is well on the way to going to sea again.

Two years after a storm-battered relic was raised from Humbolt Bay in California, a crew of volunteers is working with experienced boat workers to restore the 30-foot wooden ketch and launch her under the flag of Veterans For Peace.

The Golden Rule sailed into history in 1958, when a retired Navy commander, Albert Bigelow, and three other men set out from Hawaii to deliberately intrude into the US nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands as a protest of exploding radioactive bombs in the Pacific Ocean. Their arrest by the US Coast Guard set off a wave of protests across America that prodded President Eisenhower to halt the testing and start negotiations with the Soviet Union that culminated in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty that ended atmospheric nuclear tests.  
  

The “peace boat,” as Project Coordinator Fredy Champagne calls her, “will once again sail …in opposition to militarism and the manufacture, testing, and use of nuclear weapons,” to quote the project mission statement. “Over a period of years, we plan for the Golden Rule to take its message of peace far and wide – on all three coasts, as well as the Great Lakes and inland waterways.”

The sailboat is being restored at Zerlang and Zerlang Boat Yard in Fairhaven, CA. Boat yard owner Leroy Zerlang salvaged the ship and donated space for the restoration. “The Golden Rule showed up in Humboldt Bay 10 years ago as the property of a local doctor,” Zerlang told the Eureka Times-Standard earlier this year. “It sank in a big storm two years ago this month. After he raised the battered 30-foot hull from the bottom of the marina, Zerlang said, the boat nearly became firewood.

”If it wasn't for her history, her very unique history, the boat would have been destroyed,” he said. “People have come from the East Coast to visit this boat. They come from Canada to visit this boat.”

During a visit to the boatyard on a vacation trip in July, I got an opportunity to see the work in progress. I was especially interested in the plank I’d purchased for $100 as part of a Golden Rule fund-raising swing through the East Coast that I encountered at the 2011 Clearwater music festival on the Hudson River.

“Pick a plank!” Restoration Coordinator Chuck DeWitt said with a chuckle, sweeping a hand along the restored hull. I missed the “Whiskey Plank” party in March, when the last new plank was put in place. Still, I was glad to have made a small contribution that helped put the project’s phase one $50,000 fund-raising goal over the top.  

DeWitt, a Navy vet, and Champagne, an Army vet, clambered up the scaffolding and into the boat’s open innards to show off the new Yanmar engine that an anonymous veteran had purchased. The boat lies in a specially built boat shop, surrounded by salvaged and donated rigging, masts, sails and other parts.

It is being restored as a project of Veterans For Peace Chapter 22 with the aid of other VFP chapters, other groups and individuals, including family members of the original Golden Rule peace crew.
  

“The Golden Rule will be a powerful out reach effort,” Elliot Adams, past national president of Veterans For Peace, said in a support statement. “[H]er story is an inspiration to all of us, she will attracted local media attention and all of that will be used to deliver the message of peace and motivate people to work for peace.”

In a letter of support from VFP Chapter 61 in St. Louis, MO, chapter President Tom Tendler wrote: “We hope the Golden Rule may some day find its way up the Mississippi River.” Other chapters providing support for this project, and welcoming the Golden Rule to sail its waterways, range from San Francisco to Vermont.

Champagne reports in a recent email that work is well along at “cutting, fitting and installing the deck beams. … We have all the parts now to finish her, just trying to keep the funds coming to pay the worker to keep working with our volunteers.”
 

Plans are to have the ship seaworthy in time for the 2013 Americas Cup Yacht Races in San Francisco and then tour ports along the West Coast, Gulf Coast, East Coast, Great Lakes, and rivers and canals in the Mid-West.

“The Golden Rule project is seeking regional volunteers to sail and to join the committee as the tour moves from one area to the next, and logistical and publicity assistance from local activists, especially from VFP chapters. Financial assistance is also welcome,” Champagne wrote in a recent article in The War Crimes Times. 

For more information:

www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org.

Bring NJ National Guard Home from Afghanistan

This opinion piece appeared in The Record of North Jersey on Aug. 23, 2012

'Green on blue': N.J. feels ominous turn in Afghan War

By Walt Nygard


Is it any wonder that our enemy wears the uniform of our friend?

IN THE DAYS before Memorial Day, I noticed the banner strung above Cedar Lane at Palisade Avenue in Teaneck. It welcomed home U.S. troops. Presumably from Iraq, since President Obama had recently declared that war over.

I didn't get it. Afghanistan is happening, at that point hitting 2,000 killed. And didn't Teaneck know that our own 508th Military Police Company was on orders to depart July 19?

Looped into a 45-day training cycle at Camp Shelby, Miss., the soldiers would fly out for nine months at Camp Phoenix, Afghanistan, about six miles from Kabul International Airport. They are assigned to train and mentor Afghan National Police.

The 508th is entering an Afghan cauldron where every man, woman and child has been at war their entire lives. We started out in Afghanistan fighting al-Qaida. Now, the 508th finds itself with a new enemy: our allies. "Green on blue" violence is the new front in the Afghan War. This year more than 30 American, British and French soldiers have been killed by members of the Afghan National Army or police. Many others have been wounded. Green on Blue casualty totals already surpass the number of such killings in all of 2011.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. General Martin E. Dempsey, speaking of Green on Blue, said, "I'll tell you definitively at this point that our national security interests are such that we have to take the additional risk that this brings."

Our "national security interests" have nothing to do with young Americans being killed by Afghans fed up with foreign invaders occupying their land. Our "national security interests" would have been better served if, at the time of the Soviet collapse, we had assumed the benevolent and diplomatic mantle of the sole world power. Instead, we have loosed barbaric invasions on country after country to feed the corporate greed that has corrupted our government and the star-studded luminaries of the U.S. military. We have made ourselves hated around the world and crippled our country in the process.

The "additional risk" now falls to an under-strength MP company from New Jersey. 146 soldiers: The two dozen female soldiers will have to be reassigned out of sight lest they offend the religious sensibilities of Afghan mentorees. In Mississippi, the 508th will shake off their part-time status and screw on their full-time courage. By month's end, they'll be bound for Afghanistan. There are those, however, who are paying attention. Introduced May 14, 2012, Assembly joint resolution 66 calls upon the president of the United States and the secretary of defense "to withdraw all New Jersey National Guard troops from Afghanistan."

AJR-66 notes the $1 trillion cost — so far — of the Afghan War. It does not mention an earlier trillion dollars squandered in Iraq or the ongoing deluge of funds for the shadow wars on Iran, Pakistan and Yemen. It doesn't mention the secret wars in Honduras or Colombia or the wars-in-the-works in Africa and Asia. The resolution further notes the potential vulnerability of New Jersey to "natural disaster or terrorist attack" and "the close proximity of the state to potential terrorist targets." New Jerseyans know we'll bear a lot of grief for anything that happens in New York City. The local disruption of lives, business and economy is noted as military families, children, employers and co-workers deal with the absence of their citizen soldiers.

The untried soldiers of the 508th are about to become veterans. As the World War II old-timers used to say, they have chosen to stand up and be counted. Unlike those soldiers of yesteryear, the 508th is off to fight a country that never attacked us and was once our ally, just like Iraq. Is it any wonder that our enemy wears the uniform of our friend?

I spoke to my son Joe. A veteran of 16 months in Afghanistan (10th Mountain Division) and a year in Iraq (256th Infantry Brigade), he is now a .50-caliber machine-gunner assigned to the 508th MP Company. He tells me training is good, but Mississippi's even hotter than Jersey. They have Middle Eastern people role playing on the maneuvers. They know all about "Green on Blue." Worried that the .50 caliber — a thunderous and effective weapon that I saw employed, ironically, by a Marine MP company south of the Danang airstrip a lifetime ago — might be too large to be brought to bear against an up-close target, I ask him if he has a pistol. He knows what I'm asking, and he answers in the affirmative. He tells me he's good to go. He's got a 9mm pistol and an M4 carbine.

I am a veteran for peace, and, although I know he knows, I tell him anyway: Keep that pistol with you at all times.

As I write this, three more American soldiers have been killed: "Green on Blue." AJR 66 should be passed in the Legislature by acclamation. Every state should pass an AJR 66. The silence of the American people throughout the prosecution of illegal and disastrous war over the last decade has been deafening. It is time to reclaim, not just our state and our country, but our very soul.

Walt Nygard, Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, lives in Teaneck. His son is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Walt is a writer, artist and member of the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper projects.

Tackling the War Machine

By Walt Nygard  

The Pentagon's Achille's Heel: U.S. War - Profitable But Unwinnable, Sara Flounders' valuable primer on "the converging crises of the capitalist system and it's military," is an important source book for any activist looking to be re-charged in these days of numbing American totalitarianism.

Ms. Flounders does not shrink from the ominous danger our government has created around the world. In a relentless series of essays, she exposes a military budget that when expenditures hidden outside the Defense Department are factored in - military pensions, Treasury Department; nuclear weapons, Energy Department; financing foreign arms sales, State Department - exceeds $1 trillion a year.

The environmental assault on the entire planet by the U.S. military, the insidious subversion of the Bill of Rights under the National Defense Authorization Act and the disgraceful neglect by our government of the American worker, his/her family, educational, social and artistic institutions and the infrastructure that holds it all together are but a few of the topics of these essays.

While daunting in it's immensity, the struggle against American totalitarianism has reason for optimism and renewal of effort. Ms. Flounders insightful comparison of WikiLeaks and the invention of the printing press provides a historical context for those who would work for social change, liberation or revolution. "New forms of technology are inherently destabilizing to the established order," she declares, and her "small book aims at mobilizing the forces that can stop the war machine."

For more information:
http://www.ipgbook.com/the-pentagon-s-achilles-heel-products-9780895671776.php


Walt Nygard is Vice President of VFP Chapter 21. He served in the US Marines in Vietnam.

Marching for Peace and Justice

The People's Organization For Progress (POP) is a grassroots community organization based in the African-American community in Newark, NJ with members and supporters throughout Essex County and beyond. Their issues are our issues. Their struggles are our struggles. We inspire each other. In fact, members of VFP have joined POP and members of POP have joined VFP!

On June 27, 2011 POP took on the challenge to have a demonstration for 381 consecutive days - the same amount of days of the historic Birmingham, Alabama bus boycott which took place from Dec.1, 1955 to Dec. 20, 1956. This initiative calls for justice, equality, a national jobs program and an end to war in Afghanistan. Other organizations have been asked to "take a day" and VFP / Chapter 021 took a day in April 2012. It was a great experience!

On Wednesday, June 27, VFP Chapter 021 is taking another day - Day #266! - as POP comes down the homestretch. (The final day will be July 11, 2012.) VFP / Chapter 021 will be demonstrating from 1630 - 1800 ( 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm) at the intersection of Springfield Ave. and West Market St. (by the Lincoln Monument) in Downtown Newark. This is not far from Penn Station Newark - which is serviced by NJ Transit, Amtrak, PATH, Newark Light Rail, various bus lines and taxis. It is approximately .8 miles from Penn Station Newark to the demonstration site.

For further information about POP check out their website: njpop.org/wordpress/

For any members with special transportation needs or questions contact me at 201-388-1684.

Michael Kramer
Chapter Secretary

Suicide and Military Veterans

letter sent to The Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ:

I was appalled, but not surprised by your Memorial Day article “Rutgers genetics center to study Army suicides.”   This $2.4 million grant will fund the university’s collection of 55,000 blood samples taken from active-duty soldiers, to be studied by Rutgers’ Human Genetics Institute in a joint effort with the National Institute of Mental Health and the Army to determine beforehand individuals who might be “biologically” pre-disposed to commit suicide due to a genetic inability to cope with intense stress.   Also, the study will determine whether the experience of combat or stress actually changes the soldier’s genetic make-up. 

How fitting that this news should appear on Memorial Day.   As pointed out in the article, the current rate of suicides among active-duty personnel is about 18 per month, and your Memorial Day Editorial “Our War Dead” (on a different page from the Rutgers article) adds that the Department of Veterans Affairs states that 18 military veterans commit suicide every day.   In fact, more victims of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have died by suicide than have died from enemy fire.

I am a Vietnam veteran, and I cannot escape my memories of the genocidal (“The only good Gook is a dead Gook”) training we received, nor the barbarity and cruelty we witnessed.    That war, like the present ones, was born of lies and misrepresentations, and prolonged far too long while the military establishment garnered its ribbons and promotions, and the “defense” contractors wallowed in obscene profits.   In the years since the Vietnam tragedy, we have seen our country abandon its manufacturing and moral foundations. 

Today we spend more on militarism than all the other countries in the world combined, and our chief exports are death and destruction.   Our brave young soldiers join, often because it is the only employment available to them, for all the best reasons.   However, when they see modern combat, the horrible effects of modern weapons, and the brutality encouraged by today’s American way of waging war, many are mentally and emotionally scarred for life.  In most of these cases, PTSD is not a post-traumatic stress DISORDER.   It is the soldier’s humanity, respect for other human beings, and distress at the “collateral damage,” or atrocities that our country is unleashing upon the innocent peasants and poor who get in the way of the carnage.   It is outrage at the actions of our “leaders,” from politicians down to the officers and NCOs, that cause so many unnecessary wounds and deaths among their peers.   What is so disturbing about this article is the continuing strategy of our military to blame the soldier for his or her very normal reactions to the horrors of war.   That $2.4 million could be better spent, perhaps on a study of how to avoid wars.


John Ketwig
Washington, NJ

Ketwig is the author of …and a hard rain fell: A G.I.’s True Story of the Vietnam War, originally published by Macmillan in 1985 and currently published by Sourcebooks.

Healing from War through Art

Healing from War through the Arts:

Vets’ Art Exhibition, Workshops and Readings

Saturday April 21 at Teaneck’s Puffin Cultural Forum

An exhibition featuring handmade paper art crafted from military uniforms by war veterans will open April 21 at the Puffin Cultural Forum from 5-9 p.m. The Puffin Cultural Forum is at 20 Puffin Way in Teaneck, NJ. Reservations recommended; call 201-836-3499. Requested donation is $5 or bring a food dish for potluck supper. 

The featured art was created by participants in the NJ Combat Paper project, Veterans’ Sanctuary in Ithaca, NY and workshops in other cities. At these hands-on events, which grew out of Warrior Writers writing workshops, veterans transform war uniforms into cathartic works of art. The uniforms are cut up, pulped and formed into paper sheets, which are turned into posters, book covers and other creative objects decorated with images from a veteran’s military and post-war experiences.

The April 21 event will open with workshops, starting at 5 p.m., in making Combat Paper, writing and drama, which are open to veterans, military families and friends. The workshops will be followed by a potluck supper at 6:30 p.m. The art show grand opening is at 7:30 p.m., followed by readings of poetry and prose by Global War on Terrorism veterans from the new Warrior Writers anthology, After Action Review.

The Combat Papermaking workshop facilitators are David Keefe and Eli Wright, coordinators of the NJ Combat Paper Project at the Printmaking Center of New Jersey; they will be aided by Nathan Lewis of the Veterans’ Sanctuary in Ithaca, NY. The three all served in the US military in Iraq.

The drama workshop facilitator is Dustin Evans, who coordinates drama workshops at the Bronx (NY) Veterans Affairs Medical Center. An actor and playwright (“Perimeters”), Dusty is a Vietnam war veteran.   

The writing workshop facilitators are Lovella Calica, director of Philadelphia-based Warrior Writers, and Jenny Pacanowski, writing facilitator at the Ithaca, NY Veterans’ Sanctuary; Jenny is an Iraq war veteran.

The event is curated by Jan Barry, a poet and Vietnam veteran, and Walt Nygard, a writer, artist and Vietnam vet. It is cosponsored by Military Families Speak Out – Bergen County; NJ Combat Paper Project; Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21 NJ; Veterans’ Sanctuary, Ithaca, NY; and Warrior Writers.

Facebook Event Link