veterans – Engaging Peace

NUCLEAR WAR AND ME: Annihilation Inscribed Across Time and Place, Part 1

Posted on December 31, 2018January 5, 2019 by kathiemm

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

Note from KMM: Today we begin the story of another lifelong peace advocate who exemplifies John Pavlovitz’s superheroes .

WWII Soldiers Return Home: I listen to War Stories

War’s horrors were inscribed in me as we welcomed back relatives and family friends who served in WWII. Women shrieked, kissed, hugged returning veterans, those who survived combat!

I stared at uncles and family friends with childhood awe and reverence. How courageous! I listened as they sat around tables quietly speaking to each other. No children or wives were permitted to hear their words; I hid behind a basement furnace or crouched underneath a table, listening, thinking.

Family and family friend veterans would sit together alone after dinner dishes were cleared. Ash trays and a bottle of Four Roses whiskey, shot glasses, and soiled napkins still gripped in hands. Salute! Shot glasses would be raised. Names and places, memorialized: Patton, Nimitz, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark; Places: France, Bulge, Aleutians. Heads nodded in agreement.

Cigarette smoke hung in the air: Camels, Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields. No filters! Veterans sat with bent elbows on table, looking down, occasionally wiping watery eyes with a crinkled napkin. Crying was unacceptable. Soldiers don’t cry!

Uncle Jimmy B . . .

I remember a close family friend we called Uncle Jimmy. Even as a child, I recalled his appearance as he went off to the wars in the 1940s. Uncle Jimmy was typically Sicilian in appearance and temperament: dark complexion, black wavy hair, a big smile on his face, constant jokes with me and cousins, a show of bravado, a display of courage to comfort those who would await his return.

When Uncle Jimmy returned home after the war, however, his hair was white, his skin pale, his eyes had bags, and his demeanor was serious and detached. There was no bravado, no Sicilian joviality, no presence; a few hugs, soft voices, silence. Family faces were grim! They understood something I could not imagine.

Jimmy sat quietly at the dinner table as my mother and aunts brought him and others pasta and salad: “Eat, Jimmy, eat! Do you want some more? Nina! Get Jimmy some bread.” My aunts kissed his head and shoulders.

Uncle Jimmy was an infantry soldier! He ended up fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the major battles of WWII. In December, 1944, Germany made a final effort to stop allied advances. The German military massed tanks and artillery in an area in the Ardennes region of Belgium and France, surrounding the American troops between December 16, 1944, and January25, 1945, pounding them daily artillery and fresh assault troops.

American soldiers fought back gallantly, but were over-matched in supplies and weapons; the American Airforce was grounded because of dense cloud cover. I remember my Uncle Jimmy saying the frontline troops hunkered in frozen foxholes, shitting and pissing, awaiting a deadly shell or German attack. It is estimated 19,276 American troops were killed; the second highest number in any battle.

As I tried to understand my Uncle Jimmy’s face and behavior, my mother, Nina, took me aside and said: “Uncle Jimmy was in battle. Don’t talk with him now. He doesn’t want to talk about it.” I shuddered. And then the child’s obvious question: “But why is his hair all white now, and why does he look so sad? He survived! He should be happy!” My mother never answered.

Uncle Jimmy died shortly thereafter! It was called “shell-shock.” No care was provided for many of the WWII vets who served. This remains a problem today for returning veterans from the Middle-East wars; there are 22 suicides each day. War! War! War!

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1

Posted on January 5, 2018January 5, 2018 by kathiemm

Note from Kathie MM: This post from long-time guest author Ross Caputi begins a new series on ending violence; his focus is on the role of veterans in promoting repair as an antidote to violence.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1

By Ross Caputi

Ever since I got out of the military, I’ve felt that those around me, conservatives and progressives alike, have bent over backwards to give me an opportunity to talk about my experience in Iraq. I think many people do it because they think they owe me this courtesy.

But others seek me out and ask me to speak about my experience because they know and I know that veteran stories accomplish a lot of political work. I always accept, because I have an agenda to push.

I want to end war and prosecute war criminals.

But I’ve always felt uncomfortable with using the authority of my voice as a veteran to accomplish anti-war work. It’s a strange corner that I feel backed into where I have to identify myself as a former soldier so that I can try to undermine our culture of soldier-worship. And I can’t help but feel troubled by the contradiction between the means and ends of this rhetorical strategy.

No doubt, the privileged status of soldiers/veterans in the US is a major reason why we play such an important role in the anti-war movement. Our biggest contribution is that we help civilians navigate support-the-troops jingoism and accusations that anti-war ideas are unpatriotic. For whatever historical reasons, veterans enjoy a near sacred status in US culture and society. We carry with us an enormous amount of symbolic capital, and our voices are privileged like none others. We then bring this symbolic capital and privilege with us to the antiwar movement.

Simply by letting us make short speeches at anti-war rallies, or even letting us wear our cammies in an anti-war march, organizers know that audiences will be more willing to listen and less likely to criticize. In short, veterans help legitimize anti-war ideas by vouching for them.

But we can do more than that. Stay tuned.

Ross is the co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay, from which this post is excerpted, can be read at VeteranReparations.org.

Healing of trauma, Part 2

Posted on November 18, 2013November 17, 2013 by kathiemm

Second and final in a series by guest author Dot Walsh

Using his own experience to connect with victims of violence and trauma, Father Michael Lapsley sees himself as a wounded healer:

“My visible brokenness creates a bond with others whose brokenness is often less visible but just as real. The truth is that pain unites human beings. In my work as a healer, many people say they can trust me because I know pain.”

In 1998, Lapsley came to the United States and began working with non-profits providing programs for victims of domestic violence. He helped establish the Institute for Healing of Memories (IHOM) as a non-profit with partnerships in this country and has worked with veterans through an organization called the Warrior to Citizen Campaign. He trains facilitators to set up workshops for veterans, many of whom are homeless or living in transitional housing.

Creating a safe environment for the workshops is essential because many participants, especially veterans, carry layers of pain they are unwilling to share with strangers. Since telling one’s story is the beginning of the healing process, trust has to be developed so that a person can feel comfortable enough to talk openly. One veteran described this process as “peeling the onion of my pain.”

Listening carefully and then acknowledging someone’s pain is a next step. As Lapsley explained, without acknowledging the pain, there can be no healing. One veteran who spoke in a recent workshop told people this was the first time in 41 years he was able to talk openly about what he experienced in war.

I came away from my interview with Lapsley with an understanding of the commonalities of all the trauma rooted in our commonality as one human family and of the importance of telling our stories and having them acknowledged.

The effects of trauma can leave a person as a victim or as a victor depending on the choice made. Fr. Lapsley says, “In the end, what matters most is whether we are able to transform pain into a life-giving force.”

Dot Walsh is a lifelong peace activist and member of the Engaging Peace board of directors

$300 billion in social costs (Cost of war, Part 4)

Posted on April 9, 2012April 24, 2012 by kathiemm

[The final post in the series by guest author Neta Crawford]

Now we come to the fourth reason our estimates for the dollar costs of these wars have been too low. Federal spending is not the entire cost of the Iraq war. There are several other huge categories of economic costs.

Targeting military spending; photo by Joe Mabel. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. From Wikimedia Commons.

There will be at least $300 billion in social costs of these wars, much of it borne by the close family members of injured veterans.

There are the macro-economic effects of borrowing for war, namely increased interest. Further, there is the opportunity cost of military spending.

The two largest opportunity costs are the consequences of the deferred maintenance of U.S. infrastructure and the potential jobs created by other forms of federal spending.

We are constantly told that military spending creates jobs. Indeed, every $1 billion in military spending creates about 11,200 jobs. If there were tax cuts instead and people spent that money themselves, more than 15,000 jobs could be created.

Indeed, military spending produces fewer jobs compared with spending on housing or non-residential construction, health care, or education.

Americans have been told at least three times — in May 2003 when the mission was “accomplished”; in September 2010 when the “combat” phase was over, and in December 2011 — that the Iraq war was won and over. All that was left was promoting democratization and stability.

But is the war really over for either Iraqis or Americans? Iraq remains extremely violent. Thousands of U.S. State Department and private contractors will remain in Iraq for the indefinite future. As Catherine Lutz wrote recently in Foreign Policy, “5,500 security personnel join 4,500 ‘general life support’ contractors who will be working to provide food, health care, and aviation services to those employed in Iraq, and approximately 6,000 US federal employees from State and other agencies.”

The dollar costs of war, as Eisenhower said more than a half-century ago, means dreams deferred or lost for millions. A few years before that, George Orwell’s main character in 1984, Winston Smith, wrote, “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

The next step in a full picture of the Iraq war’s toll would be to account for the death, displacement, and economic devastation the war has caused in Iraq and the region.

Neta C. Crawford is a Professor of Political Science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War study (www.costsofwar.org).