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	Friday, August 28, 2015 Veterans For Peace Calls upon U.S. to Reduce Military Tensions in Korea Veterans For Peace, a major peace organization of veterans in the U.S., welcomed the announcement on Tuesday, August 25th of an inter-Korean agreement to de-escalate the current military tensions in Korea. Among the items agreed to, the South agreed to stop its anti-North propaganda broadcasts in the DMZ, while the North agreed to end its “semi-state of war.”  <Full Statement> Back to Top Aug 30:  Join VFP at the Picnic For Peace at the White House Congress has to vote on the Iran nuclear deal by September 17, and we need your help to ensure that they vote in favor of this historic agreement. Popular Resistance and Code Pink are hosting a Picnic For Peace with Iran event in DC with different sectors of the community who care about peace for a fun action that is visible to the press. Veterans For Peace is organizing a table for the picnic. Please join us. RSVP here. WHEN:  August 30, 2015 at 4pm – 6pm WHERE:  Lafayette Park 16th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC , DC 20006 United States Google map and directions For more information contact the national office at 314-725-6005. Back to Top The Golden Rule Flies the VFP Flag Along the West Coast In photo, Orion Sherwoord,crew member of original Golden Rule Click here to view a list of events the Golden Rule has scheduled along the west coast Aug 28th through Oct 15th.   Back to Top Veterans For Peace 2015 Annual Spring Tour to Viet Nam Dates of travel:  Mar 14 - Mar 30, 2016 Each year since 2012, members of Việt Nam's Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 of Veterans For Peace invite up to 20 veterans, non-veterans, spouses & peace activists to come to Việt Nam for an insider's 2-week tour. The Hoa Binh chapter is the first & only overseas VFP chapter of American veterans living in Việt Nam! The mission of the tour is to address the legacies of America’s war, as well as visit a beautiful country & form lasting ties of friendship & peace.  For more information, email Nadya Williams @ nadyanomad@gmail.com Back to Top Writing Workshop for Women Veterans in Indianapolis, IN Women veterans of all ages are invited to join this free memoir-writing workshop designed to help them craft their military stories through prose or poetry.  This is a 12-session class, running from October 2015 until March 2016, will meet the first and third Tuesdays of each month, from 1:30-3:30 p.m., at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, 304 N. Senate Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46204. Dates: October 6 & 20; November 3 & 17; December 1 & 15; January 5 & 19; February 2 & 16; March 1 & 15. For more information, contact Shari Wagner at msharimwagner@aol.com. Back to Top Travel Opportunities for Activists Location Sponsored by Dates              Contact for Additional Information Palestine Code Pink Nov 1-8, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Code Pink Nov 20-29, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Jim Ryerson Jan 2016 For more information email Jim Ryerson at jim@cubaconnections.org.. Cuba Code Pink Feb 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Việt Nam Việt Nam's  Hoa Binh (Peace) Chapter 160 Mar 14 -Mar 30 2016 For more information, please email Nadya Williams Cuba Code Pink May 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders May 21 -Jun 1 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Palestine Jul 16 - Jul 29 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Palestine Oct 24 - Nov 6 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Back to Top		In This Issue: Veterans For Peace Calls upon U.S. to Reduce Military Tensions in Korea Aug 30:  Join VFP at the Picnic For Peace at the White House Writing Workshop for Women Veterans in Indianapolis, IN The Golden Rule Flies the VFP Flag Along the West Coast Veterans For Peace 2015 Annual Spring Tour to Viet Nam Travel Opportunities for Activists New VFP Chapters Announced! Back by popular demand - Vietnam Full Disclosure Shirts Say Hello to VFP's Fall Intern! Member/Chapter Highlights Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events New VFP Chapters Announced! Please welcome Chapter 175 - The Casey Sheehan - Tomas Young Chapter.  Chapter 175 is located in Janesville, WI on the South Central Wisconsin Stateline. Members/Supported of Tijuana, Mexico Chapter 176 We would also like to announce and welcome Chapter 176 - Tijuana, Mexico.  Chapter 176 is made up of U.S deported veterans currently residing in Tijuana. Back to Top Back by popular demand - Vietnam Full Disclosure Shirts The ‪#‎VietnamFullDisclosure‬ shirts are available again, in both hoodie and  t-shirt styles. Order your shirt by September 1st! American Apparel Hoodie - $17 Gildan 8 oz Heavy Blend Hoodie - $30 Order yours today! 2015 marks 50 years since U.S. ground troops entered the war in Vietnam -- and 40 years since they left! Wear this beautiful apparel to call for all commemorations to offer Full Disclosure of the Vietnam War. Back to Top Say Hello to VFP's Fall Intern! Dan Baren has joined VFP's St. Louis-based national office this fall semester. Dan is a sophomore at St. Louis University, studying Economics. He is originally from Cleveland, OH and recently spent the summer in Peru, teaching English and Microfinance. Dan looks forward to learning more about the war economy and wastful Pentagon spending. He will be part time in the office, helping with calls to members, data entry, and other projects related to our work. Dan can be reached at dan@veteransforpeace.org. Back to Top Member/Chaper Highlights VFP Albuquerque, NM Chapter 63 member, Sally Alice Thompson and Dr. Hakim Zamir release white doves symbolizing peace prior to a presentation by former CIA agent turned peace activist Ray McGovern at Albuquerque Mennonite Church this week.  <Article courtesy of Alburquerque Journal> VFP San Francisco Chapter 69 member, Michael Wong, shows support for the “comfort women” memorial being considered in San Francisco.  The term ‘comfort women’ refers to an estimated 200,000 women and young girls who were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II.  <Article> Members of VFP Rochester NY Chapter 23 rallied in support of the Iran Nuclear Deal.  <Tv Spot> Back to Top Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Aug 27 - 28  - Anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact Aug 28 - Oct 15 - Golden Rule Schedule of Events Sep 21 - International Peace Day in your city Sept 24 - 30 - Iowa Speaking Tour with Ray McCovern and Coleen Rowley Oct 7  - Anniversary of U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan Oct 9-24 - Maine Walk For Peace Nov 20-22, 2015 - SOA Watch 25th Anniversary Vigil Back to Top Did you know? In 1991, VFP Chapters  and  members  organized  University  teach-Ins,  town  meetings,  panel  discussions  and  Congressional postcard/call -in  campaigns  nationally  to  debate  the  Gulf  War.
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On The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

On The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 I got my “religion” on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this post, the day when Bruce Springsteen sprung his Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the issuance of the album Born To Run to a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past.

Here comes that ass-backward part though. See I really was “unavailable” in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast trying to cope as best we could with the “real” world and not doing a very good job of it mostly not succeeding against the drugs, the liquors, the petty robberies, and the fight to stay away from the labor market. Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black marble  down in D.C.-although maybe they should be. Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital trying to get well for about the fifteenth time and that was that. The next step was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work I admit I got embarrassed. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the song of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out making all that noise (and where are they now). Singing about getting out on that Jack Keroauc-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night, of hitting thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, taking that girl down to the Jersey shore going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita, and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road, coming home from down in Jungleland. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.          

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days

 

Click below to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

Sam Eaton had to laugh, laugh a little anyway when he read something written by his old friend and longtime political accomplice Ralph Morris whom he had recently asked to write a little remembrance of the time in the 1970s when he first started to identify with the working class anthem, The Internationale, for an archival protest music blog that another friend of his Fritz Jasper ran. By the way don’t take that accomplice designation in a criminal way just because they had been arrested a number of times at various sit-ins, walk-ins, and the like, hell, once in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971. That had been the day they first met just for being on the streets, although both would have to confess the reason for being in the streets was to shut down the government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War and maybe the government from its bastardly perspective had reason to sweep them up. Sam just didn’t want to use the word comrade these days when it had fallen out of favor as a term for working together politically. 

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classic. Sam who was living in a commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before they broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Ralph, who had served in the military in Vietnam, had been a grunt, and who had even extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment, had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly but also the key one for this piece the May Day demonstrations down in Washington, D. C. on May Day 1971 when they attempted, massively unsuccessfully attempted, to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war.

That event is when Ralph and Sam met, Sam having come down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war. They met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week) when Ralph noticed Sam wearing a VVAW button and asked him if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that made him question what was going on. At first he had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.” Sam too at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.”                           

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both sensing that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

They were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up them peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

But Ralph remained for a long time very unsure that studying with “reds,” studying Marx was the right thing to do, and Sam would confess later that he too had concerns based on his upbringing in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts, the cranberry capital of the world then, and another working-class town like Troy, New York. Ralph had imbibed all the all the working class prejudices against reds (you know communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy), against blacks (stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with him and his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people sometimes to their faces), against gays and lesbians (you know fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where they spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other), against uppity woman (servile, domestic women like his good old mother and wanna-bes were okay). Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar. But mainly he had been a red, white and blue American patriotic guy who really did have ice picks for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around his hometown way).

Such thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when he thought of Marx, Lenin (he was not familiar very much with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s before heading home.

And the Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had been running since his father’s death (although for periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodied for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. They would now just keep showing up to support the good old cause.               

Fritz Jasper comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.

*************

Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.

************

Additional Fritz Jasper comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International).

While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, merely smitten by late Victorian fox hunts with the upper crust. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series specifically the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.

History of the Paris Commune, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, translated by Eleanor Marx, Black and Red Press, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2007

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. This book by a participant and survivor of the Commune has historically been the starting point for any pro-Commune analysis. The original English translation by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, has given the imprimatur of the Marx family to that view.
Through a close study of the Paris Commune one learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
As a final thought, I note that in the preface to this edition that the editors have given their own view about the lessons to be learned from the experience of the Paris Commune. Although virtually every page of Lissagaray’s account drips with examples of the necessity of a vanguard party their view negates that necessity. While we can argue until hell freezes over, and should, about the form that a future socialist state will take one would think that there should be no dispute on that necessity at this late date in history. In any case read this important work (including the above-mentioned provocative preface) as it tells the tale of an important part of our working class history. 

Brothers under the bridge

Wim Wender's Buena Vista Social Club -An Interview

Interview with Wim Wender

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/30/435508372/german-filmmaker-wim-wenders-sums-up-his-work-in-one-word

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning 

Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

During the early stages of the Vietnam War, say 1965, 1966, frankly, I was annoyed at, dismayed by, appalled by and perplexed by guys my age, who were refusing to be drafted, refusing in some cases to even sign up for the draft (although I admit I was “late” signing up myself not for political or moral reasons but because I was not living at home having left on the first of about six estrangements from my family and did not receive the letter about the legal requirement to register until much later). Refusing and making a big public deal out of it. And this draft resistance movement was not some faraway situation heard on the news out in the suburbs about actions in the big cities or on some ivy-covered Ivy League elitist campuses but because while I was going to school I supported myself by getting up very early and servicing coffee- making machines in various locales in downtown Boston, including near the landmark draft resistance center, the Arlington Street Church (now U/U –Universalist-Unitarian but then I believe home to only one of the two having subsequently united but I am not sure which denomination ruled the roost at that location then although I believe it was the blessed Unitarians, now blessed for their generous help in the struggles against war and lesser known place of refuge for vagrant monthly folk-music friendly coffeehouses.) The Arlington Street Church moreover held itself out as a main sanctuary protecting under long time religious principles draft-resisters who had taken shelter there in order to avoid being arrested by federal law enforcement agents. So many mornings there would be a bee-hive of activity outside and around the church in support of the resisters. The sight of straggly guys and their supporters protesting would get my blood pressure rising.   

Now it was not that I was particularly pro-war even then, probably had not been in favor of escalation of that war and support to the South Vietnamese government since about the time of the Diem regime, the time before Jack Kennedy was murdered in 1963. Somehow I sensed that with each tragic turn there the noose of the draft would tighten around my own neck. But in those days, whatever else I held politically sacred, I, a working class guy from North Adamsville, held all of the usual patriotic sentiments about country, about service and about military duty of my neighborhood and upbringing.

 

As my grandfather, a veteran of World War I, said of his own experience of volunteering when President Wilson pulled the hammer down looking for recruits back then, never volunteer but if called you go, say you went willingly if anybody asked. So the thought of anybody “shirking” their duty if called really rankled me and while later I did a complete turn-around about the draft resisters, especially the ones who chose jail rather military service then I was disgusted. Disgusted as well by what I perceived vaguely as a class-bias about who was refusing to go and who had to go if those who would normally be called refused to go-working class and minority guys. Don’t hold me to some kind of prescience on that because that was just a vague underpinning for my general reasons of patriotic duty but in the case when I did my own military service, my infantryman grunt service guess who the other guys in the barracks and tents were-yeah, working class and minority guys.

 

I, on the other hand, have always admired military resisters since my knowledge of them and their actions came later after I had begun my sea-change of views. Knowing too by personal experience that “bucking” the Army system and winding up in the stockade, or worse the dreaded Fort Leavenworth every drill sergeant made a point of telling us about if we screwed up. But I was no resister having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out and began to see things without “the fog of war” and its infernal “do it for your buddies” which is what a lot of things came down to in the end blinding me and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources.

 

At first I began working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army, for one reason or another whether the craziness of pursuing the war, racism, or just guy being fed-up with being cannon-fodder for Mister’s war, was half in mutiny and the other half disaffected toward the end of American involvement in that war. The Quakers front and center on the military resisters just as they had been with the draft resisters at a time when there was a serious need as guys, guys who got their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted and why I hadn’t expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work was most satisfying and rewarding as I actually worked with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire although that experience was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business (another futile attempt to rekindle the family ties) I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades here in America for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.  

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown  up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go (I will tell you more of the details some time when I ask him some questions about events that I have forgotten) and did his time in the military that way.          

Sean’s story, and in a sense my belated story, are enough reasons to support Courage to Resist since, unfortunately, there are today very few organizations dedicated to providing informational, legal, and social support for the military resisters of the heinous onslaughts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization needs the help of every ex-soldier who got “religion,” of every anti-war activist, and of every honest citizen who realizes, now more than ever, that the short way to end the endless wars of this generation is to get to the soldiers, get to the cadre on the ground fighting the damn wars. Enough said.