Winter Soldiers Speaking Truth To Power

The Whole World Is Watching... Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan

By

Billy X. Curmano

Billy X. is a VetSpeak.org contributor who attended WS: Iraq & Afghanistan as part of our 12 person contingent of contributors and support personnel who attended this historically epic in order to cover it for VetSpeak, and also to serve as VVAW front gate security for the event.

I recently returned from the Iraq veterans Against the War (IVAW) Winter Soldier Iraq Afghanistan Testimonies (March 13-16) at the National Labor College near Washington D.C.

Because of my role on security, I could not attend all of the sessions. However, I was most impressed with the overall professionalism and dedication for the event. Our security team worked closely with the Labor College Security and Maryland Police to assure a safe and peaceful 4 days. Counter demonstrators and crazies were kept well away.

One disruptor with false credentials was able to utter only one sentence before being carried out and turned over to the police. Eyewitnesses said he was out in about 8 seconds. A couple of journalists with a disruptive style were escorted out. I personally was able to politely turn away a gentleman wanting to expose the KGB brain probes installed in Brittney Spears and George W. Bush. The more obnoxious and well financed Gathering of Eagles had made threats and promised hundreds of counter-demonstrators. In reality, they couldn't even fill their bus. Their SUV and a few of their bolder followers were turned away at the main gate.

Inside, veterans of the occupation testified to what they had witnessed. A special IVAW teamed screened all testifiers for authenticity and proof of service. Health care providers, counselors and lawyers were on hand to ease the testifiers through their often highly emotional state. Another level of bonding with peers, older combat vets, peace activists and, of course, Resistance the therapy dog also helped keep Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at bay. Unfortunately, as a Vietnam Veteran that has also testified to the barbaric culture of war, I know that their stress has not been exorcised.

As soldiers, we sign an oath to protect the constitution of the United States from all its enemies - not to follow blindly behind the president. The current administration has taken more liberties with this document than any in recent memory. Their policies have created a freshly disillusioned generation. Wars built on lies cause patriotic young people to question authority. Bonding together, they create their own new and vibrant culture with new music, art, films, books and poetry. Pay attention - Don't miss out.

My biggest regret while working the historic event was knowing much of the American media would ignore these brave young men and women. Film makers and news outlets from around the globe were there. The whole world was watching. The London Times covered it, but where was the New York Times? If you are a news outlet, please help America take our blinders off.

Supporting the troops is not driving around in an SUV with a magnetic yellow ribbon. It's listening to their concerns and acting upon them. It is still possible to view streamed video and hear testimonies on the web through http://ivaw.org Audio has been cataloged and archived by KPFA Radio at http://www.warcomeshome.org

Peace Out…

www.VetSpeak.org

Winter Soldier Reflections

Sitting in on the Winter Soldier Investigation
By
Alex Primm
Alex is VetSpeak.org contributor who testified at VVAW WSI, Detroit, 1971, and joined us at WS: Iraq & Afghanistan to observe and to write about the event from a Past Winter Soldier perspective, and to serve on our front gate security group at the site, the George Meany College of Labor, in Silver Springs, Maryland, with his wife Cathy at his side, and in the company of 10 other VetSpeak contributors and supporters who also attended.

Friday, 14.3.08 noon

I'm silent as an hoot owl on the roost in this ample auditorium with some 500+ other diverse citizens... young, old and not many in between... angry, freaked out... aging vets and peaceniks... my people... I feel more comfortable here than anywhere... no one passive, everyone silent and respectful.

We're listening to the Iraq war vets. I've been given a few minutes leave from guard duty by the front gate at the National Labor College where the Winter Soldier Hearings 2 are going on. I can't seem to leave... there is no break from the testimony where I can easily get up and get back to checking people, so I take notes on the Apple and let thoughts stream through me.

A couple is talking about their son... what they say reminds me of one of our foster daughters... not easy stuff to listen to... but riveting.

Nightmares. The son I knew fell apart. Panic attacks. Unable to focus. Balance is compromised. A tree picked from behind the house. PTSD. "Come in to see a therapist as soon as possible. He did. Six employees to get him down and hold him there." Hanging, suffocation or overdose. Should take away the knives and that hose. Or one of these, but outside the house. Three phone calls.

Why should I take the call? Why should I listen? How is it possible not to listen? A mother's words demand involuntarily commitment.

A song now makes sense... this testimony has become unquestionably powerful, so in some ways I'm just as glad the words are not coming thru... how much longer can I sit here... should be back by the gate soon to check out people who might be trying to disrupt these hearings.

I'm just as glad the lights are bright, and for the people who read from prepared texts to track an untimely death. Many deaths... mostly Iraqi, just like we did the Vietnamese... Haji... Gook...

This way hidden wounds can be seen. A suicide will not happen here now. Just grief. A woman leaves weeping. A sister, a mother? Why aren't we all weeping and storming the White House to bring that jerk to justice?

We find ourselves forced into ourselves, alone. But we are not left behind, just sickened... silent... weak... the frail spirit exhausted by this disease of death.

Even this hard chair feels good on my sore butt. It is something real and physical, it is mine and alive. I will not kill myself.

No pain could equal the lone tree and the names of so many more. We are not the only family, the only Gold War Family.

No funds, no staff, no support, so he is ignored. Each story worse than the last.

Even one from Missouri to end things... home from the war a few weeks... nothing helping... no doc can reach him... rampaged in the house last night so the sheriff had to come out... he's he jail now... they are going to charge him... that's all they know to do... keep him in jail... charge him... he's gone crazy.

It's over... time to go back and try to talk to my fellow vets about the past when we were young and crazy with our own senseless war. It still rots within so many souls... so many families... the sacrifice of youth for almost nothing.

www.VetSpeak.org

Truckin' To Winter Soldier:

Truckin’ to D.C.

By

Alex Primm

Alex testified at VVAW Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, and is a Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan on-site correspondent for VetSpeak.org.

Tuesday, 11 March 3 p.m.

Finally we’re on the road, just when gas prices reach a new American record. I’m typing away on the Apple as Cathy drives. I have some things burning to be said.

Gas isn’t really a surprise to Jack, as I’ll call him, a young veteran I talked with yesterday. You’ll see Jack around the county. He’s got a cool new business…

A pushcart. Yes, chrome and everything, reportedly…

Jack’s selling hot dogs and related New York-style deli food. He takes the cart to a local factory then to Big Lots later in the day.

We talked in the Giddy Goat coffee-shop, it wasn’t a good time to meet. I was in the middle of getting ready for this trip and Jack was cooking up a business deal.

He was a student in the last Political Science class I had at East Central College, one of the better students.

“I did eight years active duty as a Marine,” Jack said. “I was seriously thinking about re-upping for another time. But my second tour in Iraq made me think twice,” he said or something to that effect… normally I show articles to people I interview before they are published – for accuracy. In this case, I won’t be able to do that. I don’t have Jack’s e-mail. But I trust myself and Jack enough to know that he will be comfortable with what’s written here.

Jack didn’t hold it over anyone that he was 10 years older and 100 times more experienced than most of the kids – and maybe his instructor too…

Wow, just passed a row of blooming jonquils in woods along U.S. 60 outside Paducah, the first we’ve seen this year. Cath says, “Let’s get out the veggies, I need a break….”

She’s listening to a Nero Wolff mystery… I don’t need a break…I’m glad to have this chance to write… we just passed the Paducah Information Age Industrial Park, which is right across the highway from the Blandville Executive Estates or something like that… America, where everything is possible.

Jack is like that. He did everything right... he went to Afghanistan right after 9.11... chased Bin Laden in the mountains… then later to two deployments in Iraq.

But first he was sent to New York, Ground Zero, a few hours after the towers came down. He was a trained Marine firefighter and spent weeks working cleaning debris that was still burning when he arrived.

"They told me not to wear a mask of any kind,” Jack said. “Don’t worry about the air quality. I know now that was wrong, totally wrong.”

VA doctors have told Jack he has boron-tungsten fibers in his lungs. Unlike other particles he may have inhaled, the boron-tungsten won’t ever come out and it cuts through his lung tissue slowly and steadily. He has lost roughly a third of his breathing capacity and loses a few percent more every year when he is tested. Partial payments for service-connected disabilities help , but it is not enough.

Jack worries whether he will be here to see his young son reach high school. He also wonders why he and all those he served with were sent to Iraq. In his gut he feels it was to keep gasoline prices high, and to enrich President George W. Bush and his corporate supporters.

“I put myself in harm’s way for a war I see as a lie. I also believe we haven’t been told the whole truth about what happened at the Twin Towers,” Jack said.

x x x

x

We finally reached D.C. about 9 a.m. on Wednesday, the 12th, after a great drive thru the Blue Ridge, stopping only briefly at Seneca Rocks where the10th Mountain Division trained before going overseas during World War Two... an awe-inspiring place as was the traffic on the I-495 beltway to Silver Springs where Winter Soldier 2 is to start tomorrow.

Already it is inspiring to see a few old veteran friends, esp. Willie Hager who we met at Lubbock when I presented a paper on the Winter Soldier 1. We had several presenters who there, at the Texas Tech Vietnam archive, showed how the whole process of soldiers speaking against the Vietnam War were patriotic and as accurate as humanly possible.

Some people consider both the original Winter Soldier in 1971 and the event to begin shortly in D.C. questionable on several levels… that war has always been hell and immoral… and that testimony against it in someway may affect the safety of American troops presently fighting overseas. Do people forget our President Harry S. Truman first rose to national attention when he conducted hearings on war profiteering during World War Two? That was not considered unpatriotic. Veterans who are working to expose the immoral and illegal practices in Iraq are not much different. The veterans will be speaking out on a variety of topics in our current war…

All I can do is urge you to check it out on the live feed the web, or get a copy of Iraq Veterans Against the War’s DVD of WSI 2 which should be available soon. It will shock you more than cost overruns or kickbacks, small potatoes comparatively. But maybe our financial system is falling apart even as we talk.

My student has managed to leave his anger and frustration behind. He won his Associate’s degree at the community college and has begun as business that is paying off. It was great to talk with him… I’d like to do a longer interview with him and other vets who have managed to survive and move on.

www.VetSpeak.org

Winter Soldier Redux

Escaping Ice in Detroit
By
Alex Primm

Alex, who testified at the VVAW Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, shares his thoughts with us as he and his wife Cathy prepare to depart for IVAW's Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan, to be held in Silver Springs, Maryland, March 13th thru 16th, 2008, at the George Meany College of Labor campus.

I can't quite recall how I ended up in my friend's old Mustang driving to Detroit all night one winter without a heater. I mainly remember the drive. Everything else deeply lodged back in dreamland... charged up veterans, Jane Fonda being beautiful and aloof, an angry mass meeting, the cold... all mostly a fog... though fragments now emerge.

Or maybe it wasn't all night because I remember staying at someone's apartment in Valparaiso. John went to college there. He too must have been drafted after graduating.

He was infantry. Me, an Army correspondent. We weren't kids. We knew we had seen some serious craziness. Nothing like what our fathers did.

This is all ancient history, 1971. Were you even alive then? Did Iraq exist then? The CIA?

Sure. Bad stuff was out there. That's why we were on the road with a can of Sterno.

No, no, no... We weren't drinking it... we hadn't sunk that low... we had the little can set in the console between the two bucket seats and kept the blue flame alive. More cornfields than billboards in those days. The tiny fire made it easy to light cigarettes. We were nervous. Might have even been drinking beers as we cruised through the Midwestern night. Crazy and uptight.

x x x

Where we would end up? Reassuringly our goal was Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in downtown Detroit. Back then HoJos was near the pinnacle of respectability. Comfort and good taste reigned as it advertised something like 28 flavors of ice cream. No one was interested. We were revolutionaries.

The lobby was filled mostly with longhaired scruffy guys wearing cast-off pieces of uniform. Lots of milling around, waiting for the local radicals to find us a flop... or a party. This was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War's first national action, funded largely by Fonda, Graham Nash and others that we learned about later. John and I went, maybe after demonstrating in St. Louis. This was different... no marches... no angry or turgid speakers... no one trying to twist their ideology around your neck.

The actual Winter Soldier Investigation, Numero Uno, took place back in a small ballroom. You went in, registered, showed your paperwork, told your stories from Vietnam and someone would ask questions to make sure you got it right, that it wasn't fake. Some of it was filmed, all of it must have been recorded, transcribed then parts published by Beacon Press later.

x x x

I didn't have much to say as the former editor of the Army's newspaper for the First Logistics Command, a division-sized unit that ran resupply for the Army all over South Vietnam. The Army didn't lie much, we just left out stuff, especially any mention of American casualties or KIAs.

I forget what John testified to. It's probably in the book. When we got back we held a Veterans' Inquiry into the War in St. Louis, spring of '71.

People listened... a few... more and more over time... we had to say what we had seen. We about filled an auditorium at a Lutheran seminary.

We had to talk... we had seen so much waste and craziness.

Luckily we hadn't tried to take over the GM Building in downtown Detroit when WSI was finally over. Some wanted to do that. There was enough anger they almost got their way.

We ended up going by the Detroit Institute of Arts, a sane, peaceful place.

www.VetSpeak.org

Going Broke... Going Bonkers... Going East...

By

Alex Primm

x

Alex testified at the original Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit in 1971. He will be at Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan, to be held at the George Meany College of Labor in Silver Springs, Maryland. He will be there in support of the current ranks of Winter Soldiers as they Speak Truth To Power, and to the American People.

This March, 2008, marks our 5th anniversary in Iraq... we invaded on the 19th... shock and awe... the same day Cathy and I jumped the broomstick.

It's two days before the equinox... this can put people on edge... caught between two seasons... especially the season of cold and cabin fever.

Our Ozark college town had a demonstration the day before, more than a hundred showed up. Not me. Good luck, they were trying to stop the war even before it started.

I sort of believed President Bush, that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy who was going to blow up America with his secret weapons.

I believed in GWOT... briefly... the Global War on Terror. What happened to that? It seems to have had a short shelf life indeed...

I wanted Ahmad Chalabi to be right... the guy who was going to make Iraq a model democracy... whatever happened to him... another war criminal?

Has it all come down to Iraq? Who has benefited from the trillions of dollars... the thousands killed?

Iraq and the price of gas... and the price of bread... or heat... or life.

Everything going up... prices... casualties... confusion... frustration.

So why not go to D.C., the center of it all? That's where the Iraq Veterans Against the War are holding their investigation of this war... the Winter Soldier Investigation... numero dos.

Cathy's an intrepid traveler... let's go... it can't hurt. The same energetic attitude she had 25 years ago.

What finally made up my mind was talking with Willie Hager... a Vietnam vet like me... a smart dude with a good sense of balance who can laugh at this craziness because he saw beaucoup daily in Nam.

"You testified at the first WSI," Willie said. "You oughta think about coming to help these young vets now. Help get their stories out."

x

So, Cathy and I are going East; for memories, and for the future.

www.VetSpeak.org

xx

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