Voices of the IVAW: The Path to G.I. Resistance Abstract: As in the Vietnam Era, antiwar veterans are playing an increasingly important role in the antiwar movement. Founded in July 2004, Iraq Veterans Against the War began organizing recent veterans and active-duty service personnel to: immediately end the occupation of Iraq, guarantee adequate support and assistance for returning veterans, and insure reparations be paid to the people of Iraq. This piece explores the phenomenal lives of antiwar veterans through oral biographies of members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. These personal narratives capture the members’ transformation from children to soldiers to antiwar activists. These oral biographies are accompanied with a history of GI Resistance in the United States. Comparisons are made between the wars in both Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the antiwar movements in operation against them. Introduction Soldiers follow orders. This axiom is the bedrock of how Americans view their military; they are the brave young men and women who volunteer to defend the freedoms the nation holds so dearly, they do so with unquestioning loyalty and a determination that is unmatched. Soldiers surrender themselves to the demands of the government , a government comprised of citizens, acting on behalf of the people as a whole, which is committed to securing liberty, democracy, and equality. This romanticized version of heroic and conscience-deprived soldiers is only applicable to this equally romanticized and illusional fantasy government. In reality, those in positions of governing power are rarely noble conduits from which the will of the people flows. Positions of power attract those individuals with a lust for power, which is often coupled with greed, traits which do not lend themselves to the aims of securing liberty, democracy, and equality for the body as a whole. These improprieties within the political process greatly 1 diminish the virtue of a soldier without a conscience. In a world where politicians operate in the service of less than admirable motivations, the truly heroic soldier must be willing to break with the perceived historical tradition of obedience and not follow orders. Like so many other stories throughout the history of the United States; the history of GI resistance has gone largely untold to the American public. People never knew or have forgotten that some of the most ardent opposition to the Vietnam War came from veterans. Just as they are now failing to realize that some of the most passionate and articulate pleas for peace are coming from young men and women who have risked their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and have seen the true horrors of war and occupation in the 21st century. The oral biographies contained within this work attempt to give voice to this often-marginalized segment society: the antiwar veteran. These personal narratives of members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) provide a penetrating look into the lives of soldiers of conscience who vehemently oppose the continued occupation of Iraq. Their narratives depict - in their own words - the path these individuals took to become soldiers, as well as the journey they made to become the antiwar activists they are today. The stories of people like these often have a difficult road to travel if they wish to make it into the history books. The primary objective of this project is to preserve the stories of these individuals for posterity, to insure that future generations will have a greater ability to avoid being duped into another intractable, immoral, and costly conflict in the future. As a nation, we seem to have largely forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, lessons veteran and civilian antiwar activists worked tirelessly to engrain into the society. Our failure to receive their messages from the past and recognize neocolonial imperialist aggression has led to the present situation in Iraq where thousands of US troops are dead or severely wounded and Iraq is in ruin with incalculable 2 levels of death and destruction imposed upon it. Listening to and preserving the messages of these truly courageous individuals who have experienced first hand the disturbing realities on ground and have chosen to serve their conscience, should serve as a focal point of ending and remembering the Iraq War. The path to this project has been long and arduous with many alterations and adaptations made throughout. In January of 2008 - as I began my last semester at American University - I confidently submitted my detailed capstone proposal to the Honors Department, however this project is a far cry from the proposal I submitted oh-so-many months ago. I had originally proposed and began work on a project which would be a collection of oral biographies of homeless veterans. The high levels of homeless veterans on the streets each night represents a serious problem for America, modest estimates state that approximately twenty-five percent of the homeless population is made up of veterans.1 This phenomenon of homeless veterans has long fascinated me. The possibility that these very people who are revered as having near saintly qualities for their military service, could in the same society which idolizes them, be forgotten in large numbers and left to die in the streets on a cold winter night, highlight some of the deep institutional and systematic failures of the system itself. Especially since the veterans who end up on the streets are not bad soldiers, quite the opposite, approximately eighty-nine percent of homeless veterans have received an honorable discharge.2 I was also attracted to the plight of homeless veterans because they are a clear representation of two of societies greatest failures: war and poverty. Unfortunately, after several months of research and many attempts to establish contacts with people working with homeless veterans, I began to realize finding people to talk with would 1 National Coalition of Homeless Veterans. Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://www.nchv.org/ 2 Ibid. 3 be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. For starters, the possibility of finding good subjects for interview is diminished by the priorities of members of the homeless population, if you are living on the streets just trying to survive each day, you are unlikely to have much interest in helping someone from the academic world with a project. In addition to difficulties finding willing participants, there were also serious problems getting the information out of those willing to be interviewed. These problems were further confirmed after I conducted a couple of interviews with some homeless veterans. I quickly learned that individuals faced with the trauma of combat or of extreme poverty are unlikely to be able to present a clear narrative of their lives, which means it is highly unlikely that someone who has suffered both the horrors of war and of poverty will be able to do so. These problems are not horribly surprising, considering that seventy-six percent of homeless veterans “experience alcohol, drug, or mental health problems.”3 Many of these problems are related to the presence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is an “anxiety disorder that can occur after you have been through a traumatic event...[a] traumatic event is something horrible and scary that you see or that happens to you”4 It is estimated that approximately thirty percent of people who serve in a combat zone will develop PTSD, however it is difficult to estimate the exact number of those suffering from PTSD because cases will often go unreported, due to certain stigmas associating the disorder in the military.5 Many of the problems homeless veterans face are symptoms of PTSD; the substance abuse, the inability to find or hold a job, difficulty interacting with people are all symptoms of PTSD. This horrible 3 Ibid. 4 US Department of Veterans Affairs: National Center for PTSD, What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? Retrieved April 22, 2008, from http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/ncdocs/fact_shts/fs_what_is_ptsd.html 5 Meagher, I. (2007). Moving a Nation to Care Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops. Brooklyn, N.Y: Ig Pub. 4 disorder causes its sufferers to experience time in a “stand still as the trauma survivor skips back repeatedly to the event through intersuve thoughts, nightmares, and other triggers.”6 The prevalence of PTSD among homeless veterans was problematic for my work for two reasons. The first of which is obvious, that people with PTSD will be unable to deliver any kind of coherent -let alone accurate - account of their military service or their lives. Conducting interviews with homeless individuals with severe cases of PTSD would also pose a moral problem for me, because I would run the risk of doing potential damage to the individuals kind enough to allow me to interview them. My questioning could easily trigger some repressed memories and reengage an individual back into their state of trauma and cause further damage to their development. Not being a trained counselor of any kind, I knew I would be unable to risk causing serious damage to these individuals who have clearly suffered enough throughout their lives. With less than two months until my capstone would be due, I was now faced with the issue of not having a topic. I did know I wanted to keep my methodology roughly the same, due to the passion I have for oral biographies. This fondness for oral biographies had been long standing, but was further cultivated during the fall 2007 semester at American University, when I took Julian Bond’s Oral Histories of the Civil Rights Movement. The main objective of professor Bond’s course was for each student to create an oral biography of an individual who was active during the Civil Rights Movement, upon completion of this task I had developed quite a taste for oral biographies as a method of historical research and preservation.