Category Archives: veterans

one soldier’s triple avatars: Washington, Lincoln, FDR – and Mahatma Gandhi

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I know it’s been forever since I posted. At my paper, I was dug in on some longtime obsessions, like illegal hotels and the 2004 RNC, as well as the shiny new NYC being dreamt for Hudson Yards.

For my book, I mostly dug in on writing, and got Chapter One, about the 18th-century soldier-dissent, completely drafted and revised. My characters including not just the 1781 Pennsylvania mutiny I mentioned earlier, but some more unexpected figures – including Simon Girty, whose name was used as a threat to make colonial schoolchildren behave.

The draft of the chapter was well received by my editor at Cal, whose short comment means so much to me that I’m tempted to post in on my wall: “It engages the reader completely.” Now, of course, I have to do a similar job 12 more times – by July 1, 2008. I had some ideas about how the book will be shaped, which I’ll reserve for another post.

But I also kept up as best as I could on today’s dissenters, which meant I went to this conference —which I failed to write about but was absolutely worth it (and dedicated to the memory of Dave Cline — and spent a good deal of time with this brave captain, who just opened his online shop here.

I was struck when Montalvan and I spoke how much inspiration he drew from earlier eras – this well-decorated Iraq vet was unafrad to draw as much from FDR and Gandhi as from the combat-tested Washington and Lincoln. Such a voice appears, to me, invaluable in any discussion of what the U.S. is actually doing in the Middle East – 0r anywhere else.

many mazeltovs to a giant

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When the Macarthur Awards were announced this spring, I can’t believe I missed it;  that one went to Dr. Jonathan Shay. Luckily,  Lily was more attentive, noting it on her own invaluable blog, Healing Combat Trauma. The debt owed Shay by so many of us is hard to quantify.

HCT has the links to several recent appearances; but spend some time while you’re there,  The bibliography alone is worth the click, let alone all the analysis.

And speaking of combat trauma, I just finished 1968 by Joe Haldeman, better known as author of The Forever War. Writing that good makes you want to either give up, in the face of a master, or dare yourself not to settle.

you look up and who’s there? dave cline.

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The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there?
—Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.
I smell your grief.
—I sent my grief away. I cannot care
forever. With them all align & again I died
and cried, and I have to live.

Last year, when Hugh Thompson died – the hero of My Lai, who swooped down with his helicopter and stopped that particular bleeding – I wailed to my partner, “But I didn’t interview him yet!” Not that I yet had any realistic expectation of doing so.

But David Cline I did. I’d met him a dozen or so times,  the former president of Veterans for Peace, whose famous journey — from the killing fields of Vietnam to the GI antiwar movement to the fight for Agent Orange survivors — was made briefly famous by his friend David Zeiger’s great film. Cline loved the idea of my book, and he and I had countless canceled interview dates, often shoved aside by events in Fayetteville or Washington. I always thought there would be time, and looked forward to seeing him at the Rutgers conference on veterans in two weeks. He was only sixty, after all. Also brilliant and passionate and down to earth.

Silly me, silly us. There is no time, and Cline knew that better than anyone. I can’t hope to match the deeper tributes here from fellow Vietnam veterans and here from the Iraq vets he was so busy mentoring. So I’ll fall back on Berryman, again, who finds a sideways way in to the worst.

—Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.
That is our ‘pointed task. Love & die.
—Yes; that makes sense.
But what makes sense between, then? What if I
roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and
just sat on the fence?

—I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.
—It’s fool’s gold. But I go in for that.
The boy & the bear
looked at each other. Man all is tossed
& lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat.
William Faulkner’s where?

(Frost being still around.)

tangled webs scooping up veterans’ lives

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Take the Walter Reed scandal, cross-breed it with the U.S. Attorney scandal,and you end up with this. A man who secured VA disability benefits for PTSD, after a long struggle, now sits in jail for receiving those benefits. (Warning: the link, like many/most VA stories, can drive you a little nuts.)

 The determination of PTSD-related benefits relies upon medical evidence (such as being diagnosed by five different medical professional that a vet has PTSD) and the existence of an in-service stressor (such as the reality that a man was crushed to death by a C-54 aircraft while an Airman was on duty), per 38 CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) 3.304(f). All a veteran has to achieve in first-person testimony is corroboration, not verification. The Code defines Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as Service connection for post-traumatic stress disorder; (PTSD) requires medical evidence diagnosing the condition in accordance with 38 CFR 4.125(a); a link, established by medical evidence, between current symptoms and an in-service stressor; and credible evidence that the claimed in-service stressor occurred (38 CFR 3.304(f))].

Officials from the Milwaukee Regional Office and Special Agent Raymond Vasil’s Inspector General’s office were included in the series of e-mails including one e-mail from Vasil dated January 27, 2005, stating: “The U.S. Attorney is interested in prosecuting. He is not 100% yet and wanted me to interview any additional persons I could find that were present when the original accident happened in 1969. … “

I wonder if my old friend J.B. White,  former Marine and veterans’ advocate now working for Senator Joseph Biden, can get a little traction on this.

and so it begins.

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Deep breath time, exhale, and find the reserves you didn’t know existed.

Eighteen months after I started doing actual reporting for this book, I had a long talk with my editor at Cal last night, and came up with a tentative plan — one that gets her a draft of a first chapter by October 1 or thereabouts. Not the introduction, where I will blather about my ground rules, and not the prologue, but a full-fledged chapter, beginning with the aforementioned moment in 1781.

A chapter like that is about 8.000 words. All properly sourced and grounded, revised to make it feel not like a novel but like stepping into events. This in addition to my obligations to Chelsea Now (where I’ve sworn: no new big stories, ha!). All while, at the moment, shaping begging letters — excuse me, grant letters — to the discretionary funds of any foundation that might help this project end well.

I do not have the luxury of time that some of my role models had, time to spend three years on a dissertation and THEN two years making it sing (yes, Mr. Moser, yes, Mr. Joseph, I mean you). But by June 30, 2008, all these important and compelling stories, from William Bowser to Ricky Clousing, have to coalesce into a document that speaks to people. Which means, given my penchant for unglamorous first drafts, I have to get serious.

Thus the title of this post, its words to be pronounced in a deep voice, as close as possible to that of the late great Andreas Katsulis. Though at least I’m not fearing that if I screw up, something that looks like this will get me.

Or maybe I am. Only Carl Jung knows, apparently.

the words of young men sounding old

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Now here I was, all prepared to write what I think will be the first actual scene in my book — painting Princeton in January of 1781, with General George Washington contemplating taking the trip to confront 11 protesting brigades — when I saw this op-ed piece, entitled “The War As We See it.”

If you didn’t notice from the bylines that the authors were active-duty sergeants, you’d know it from the measured, carefully damning opening:

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

Read the rest: it’s worth it. But when you do, know that actual realities are underneath every understated, precise, somewhat abstract sentence, if not the rage those realities provoked:

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

I wonder if they’ve yet dared make contact with these veterans, or these, or thought about signing this.

a jury of their peers

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On the current war news front, I’m interested in the choices being made by the military jury in this case. Perry at the LA Times is careful to note that the jury was composed completely of Iraq veterans. I so wonder what was in their minds and hearts as they listened.

P.S. That goes double now. I wonder if I could, as a reporter,  be as dispassionate as this Reuters story, even so long after the events/

the wisdom of old men, not all of them dead

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August 3

Time goes by so fast! Two weeks now since I set up the site. That day at the Schomburg, I mostly found material on the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, and squinted at seemingly endless microfilm loops of Frederick and Lewis Douglass’ newspaper the New National Era. The latter less illuminating than I’d hoped, but that’s partly because newspapers in those days were so crammed with type, and the microfilm effect can make it even harder to glean what’s useful.

That day I also snapped up, at the Harlem Book Fair, a copy of this amazing narrative history of the black power movement. I finished it last night; historian Peniel Joseph is actually incredibly good. I feel now as if I were a living, thinking near-participant in events I only half-witnessed as a child, or in the distorted mirrors of media reports.

Though when I see that this book, which covers a span of about 35 years, is the product of two year-long fellowships plus, it makes me a bit more frantic about my own project spanning 200 years, to be done in much less time amd with fzr fewer resources. (Of course, first the book was a dissertation, published by Routledge as simply The Black Power Movement, and then Joseph got a bigger contract and another year to make it sing.)

The following weekend, I interviewed the Korean War vet who invented the term “chicken hawk,” who then sent me a copy of his book 1600 Killers, and a guy who ran a London safehouse for deserters during the Vietnam War, who says he doesn’t often think of himself as a World War II veteran.

During the ensuing week, as if to continue the conversation by any means necessary even while I was supposed to be newspapering, I learned while researching another story entirely that W.E.B. Du Bois was arrested for his anti-Korean War activism at age 83. (It happened in the Breslin Hotel — see my story in Chelsea Now if you like).

a few notes to start

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I’d sworn off blogging after this graphomaniac exercise, but here we are.

Today is typical. As I sit here, trying to sort out today’s work, between the transcription I need to finish for next week’s stories at the paper and my trip today to NYPL’s Schomburg Library, news old and new shouts for attention:

  • The Nation’s Chris Hedges, of course, has begun compiling the Iraq war’s Winter Soldier testimony, in this must-read. I had coincidentally just begun to spend time with the 1971 testimonies, since I’m shifting my research focus more directly to the Vietnam era; the stories out of the Iraq vets offer eerie echoes and some lucid differences. I’m having to pace myself as I read both.
  • Meanwhile, the court-martial of Lt. Ehren Watada is now set for October 9, despite a mistrial declared this spring. Will the Supreme Court end up hearing this case? Do we want this Court to do so?
  • On a much lighter note, this tireless group of “garmentos” I’ve been chronicling hit the big time with their “Pin Day.” They got the attention of Women’s Wear Daily, Newsday, the global textile newswire Bharattextiles, and even the Times‘ Sewell Chan! I’d say it’s not my story any more – which makes sense, given my rather spectacular lack of a fashion sense – except that almost all the stories either ignored crucial parts of the story or got them literally wrong. (Perez at AM New York, for example,writes as if the glitz was already in the Garment District, and limits her definition of “apparel industry” to the disappeating factory floors.)

Time to go to the library and dig into manuscripts and letters from”Negro” soldiers in World War II. Their dissent had so many layers and notes, it’s like a piece of modern music.