The Cause That Passes Through The Military Prisons

The Cause That Passes Through The Military Prisons-With The Heroic Whistle-Blowers And Military Resisters Supported By “Courage To Resist” In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Ralph Morris, ex- Army soldier, Vietnam, 1968-70, was furious when he heard the news recently that Private Chelsea Manning, the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower who blew the lip off of American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and other nefarious acts by the American government under both Bush II and Obama, now serving a thirty-five year sentence at Fort Leavenworth out in the wheat fields of Kansas, had been threatened with solidarity confinement for some trivial offenses. Her offenses; having unauthorized printing matter and other “contraband”, the prize possession being a copy of Vanity Fair, the issue not unimportantly featuring the former Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon Bruce Jenner in her new publicly declared  sexual identity as Caitlyn Jenner. As Ralph told his old friend and political comrade Sam Eaton whom he had met under his own prison-like circumstances on May Day 1971 on the floor of RFK Stadium after both had been arrested with other members of their respective contingents (his Vietnam Veterans Against The War and Sam’s The Cambridge Radical Front) for attempting to “shut down the government if it did not shut down the war” this was to use an old Army phrase “chicken shit.” (The war Vietnam for those with short memories or who were too young or not born in case there was a question of which of the endless wars of the American imperium of the past few decades.)

 

[That “not unimportant” mentioned above in regard to the Vanity Fair copy is particularly relevant since Ralph and Sam had both worked hard from the fall of 2010 on after hearing about Chelsea’s incarceration in solidarity and under torturous conditions down at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia after she had been “finked” out by a fellow soldier trying to get out from under his own problems with the military. At that time as both men knew Chelsea, then known as Bradley, had her own sexual identity questions which were kept under wraps until after the trial and sentencing were over. So it was very appropriate for her to find out about Jenner’s story and condition although transgender issues were not relevant to the specifics of Chelsea’s case, of her heroic actions in exposing the common military atrocities attributable to American/Allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and other nefarious actions of the government via Wikileaks and their support for her.]

 

Although Private Manning was found guilty of the various transgressions, those prison disciplinary infractions, as charged by the Army and those will show on her record and affect her time going forward, perhaps affecting parole and time considerations she was not placed in solidarity at least in part through the beauties of the Internet, for once. Once the charges and possible penalty became known a very fast Internet petition gathered over 100,000 signatures and that slowed the Army down a bit. Still the whole “chicken shit” scene as he had seen in Vietnam, stuff like setting up any guys who talked back, talked about the craziness of the war although he was not one of them, he held his tongue, for the “kill” by having them walk point which in his years was like painting a target on their backs made Ralph very angry, anger that the now gentle angry man usually kept in check. And Sam knew that the episode would have that effect on Ralph since he had been through this kind of thing before when the cases of military resisters hit the front pages of his mind.

 

Ralph to his eternal sorrow had not been a resister, had in fact extended his tour of duty during Vietnam from a year to eighteen months in order to get out a little early not for political reasons then but just to get on with his life. That extra six months though and the hell he and his company went through in the Central Highlands finally turned him against the war. Finally got him “religion” about the issues of war and peace. Thereafter he would tell anybody who would ask (and will still tell if anybody is willing to listen) that he did what he did, he wished that he had not, and wished that the American government had not made him and his Army buddies nothing but animals toward people whom he and they had no quarrel with.               

 

 See too Ralph knew stuff, knew some ugly intelligence about certain massacres happening in his sector, and kept as quiet as a church mouse, quieter, about it. Such things weigh on a man, weighted on Ralph. Ralph had been doing “penance” ever since. So it was no accident that working-class Troy, New York-bred Ralph Morris turned up in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 in Washington with his contingent of fellow Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and met working-class Carver, Massachusetts-born with his contingent of Cambridge radicals there to avenge a fellow Carver corner boy killed in the war. (Jeff Mullins who in an ironic twist also served his time in the Central Highlands and who begged Sam in repeated letters home to tell the world what a fucked up war that was if he did not make it back.)  

 

And it was no accident that through a long and hard political career of anti-war street politics that Ralph would work hard for soldiers who resisted the American military juggernaut. And not as the Chelsea Manning case illustrates just for the “chicken shit” stuff either, not by a long shot. The road to freedom for Chelsea just got harder but Ralph and Sam would stay the course, would as Ralph had heard a speaker mention during a speech in defense of Chelsea on Armistice Day in an anti-war program at a Veterans For Peace-sponsored ceremony at Sam Adams Park in Boston one year when he was visiting Sam-“we will not leave our sister behind.”