From The New Soldiers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Soldiers-
Brother Jacob’s Last Stand
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:
A while back, maybe a couple of
years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches about guys, about war
veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s and did not
get a chance to complete since the publication that I was writing them for out
in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media
operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience for
such journals went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics.
Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope
with the “real” world after Vietnam and had built themselves an alternate
“community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances
got called the “brothers under the bridge.” Let me reproduce my motivation in
part for that series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories
about guys and gals from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t
cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what
they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like that long ago “brothers
under the bridge.”:
“In the first installment of this
series of sketches [Brothers Under The Bridge] I mentioned, in grabbing
an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod,
that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under
The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long
time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series
of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California
East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one
reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world”
and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the
“jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad
sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly
down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
The editor of the East Bay Eye,
Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller
series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans
by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that
series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying
to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece.
My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans
since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period
although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been
involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI
coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another one down near Fort Dix
in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s
generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a
running start.
After making connections with some
Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with
after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way.
I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the
rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving
the old Eye archives on the Internet, I went up into my attic and
rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint
articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes
from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I
could round them into shape.
The ground rules of those long ago
stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel,
spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too
much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this
current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this
far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.
Not every guy I interviewed, came
across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air
from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no
real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off
their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have
presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a
generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his
mind.
Some wanted to give a blow by blow
description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in,
others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times,
or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back to
the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught
up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his
whole blessed life pointed the other way…”
Now, after having recently as a
favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served
in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he
could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their
stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these
introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question
Brother Jacobs’s sign is the sign of the last stand.
This sketch is slightly different
from a previous one about Private Jack Dawson’s private war in the aftermath of
his service in Iraq and Afghanistan where I knew many details about his life
from his father, an old high school classmate of mine, and later Jack himself
when I found him down in Southern California. In the case of Brother Jacob I
only know what was presented in his memorial from the Chelsea Manning
Support Network about his life. I do know this though that Brother Jacob
automatically rates a nod (the old school days “nod” that signified that a guy
who you did not know, was not one of your corner boys but who you maybe played
some pick-up game against, maybe had in class was “cool”) for his early and
fervent support for his fellow soldier, Chelsea Manning (formerly known as
Bradley), who was in a heap of trouble with the American government and its military
of which she was part for leaking lots of information about American atrocities
in Iraq and other information that the government would rather not have us know
about on the vital questions of war and peace.
Brother Jacob like many ex-soldiers,
myself included, came to Chelsea’s aid once he got “religion” on what seven
kinds of hell the American government was up to in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Brother Jacob was, as we in Veterans for
Peace and other ex-soldier supporters, just following the old adage learned
early on in basic training-you do not leave your buddy behind. And Brother
Jacob and the rest of us will not leave Chelsea behind to face that thirty-five
year sentence alone. Now we have Brother Jacob’s memory to honor as we continue
our work. Let me place the comment from the Chelsea Manning Support Network
here to fill in some of the information about Brother Jacob’s fate:
Brother Jacob, Presente!, yeah,
Brother Jacob, Presente !
Jacob David George
(1982-2014)
September 22, 2014 by the Chelsea
Manning Support Network
“I’m a bicycle ridin,
banjo pickin, peace ramblin hillbilly from the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas!”
Jacob George at Fort Meade to protest
to the court martial of Chelsea Manning, 6/1/13. Photo by Ward Reilly.
The Chelsea Manning Support Network is
greatly saddened to learn the news of veteran and Manning supporter Jacob
George’s passing. Due to his years in service, Jacob suffered from
various physical and mental injuries that he worked through with anti-war
activism. Jacob rallied for Chelsea Manning at Fort Meade, attended
Chelsea’s court martial, and was one of the first people to rally to Chelsea’s
defense in the days following her arrest in May 2010.
Jacob was a veteran of three combat
tours in Afghanistan—Operation Enduring Freedom. To overcome those demons,
Jacob cycled thousands of miles, “A Ride Till the End,” he called it, to
promote peace and justice. He rallied fellow veterans to take political action.
And he stood strong for military resisters–especially those who were prosecuted
for refusing to do the things he himself had participated in.
Every day at least a dozen US military
veterans take their own lives, with some estimates at over 22. In the end,
these will far outnumber the fatalities on the far away battlefields. We are
reminded that statistics are easy to live with, until the statistic strikes
close to home.
We will likely never know why Jacob
took his own life. He seemed to have done more than anyone to heal himself from
the unseen physiological devastation of war. Today we simply remember an
amazing individual whose contributions to our community go far beyond what
words we can muster.
Donations to Jacob George’s Memorial
Service:
The Human Cost of War: IVAW Testimony
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