Anti-Warriors: Fighting for peace

Fighting for peace

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=12650

Vets have family in the anti-war movement

by Sandra Svoboda
3/19/2008

When he enlisted as a U.S. Marine in 2003, Lars Ekstrom believed Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein needed to be
ousted to prevent terror strikes against the United States.

He trained as an infantryman and spent several months on ships in the
Persian Gulf with a maritime special purpose task force where he set
up blocking points and searched boats. He was also on the ground in
Kuwait where he experienced sniper fire.

By the time his unit was back stateside in early 2006 and training
for a second deployment to the Middle East, Iraq had been
unsuccessfully scoured for weapons caches and Hussein had been found
hiding in a dirt hole.

Those threats gone, he says he re-evaluated the military's role in
the region. Between the newly proven futility of the original
invasion and the stress he experienced in combat, Ekstrom broke.

"Rolling it over in my head, over and over again, one day I just
started crying for no reason. I cried for four to six hours. I asked
to see a chaplain," Ekstrom, 22, says. "After that, I suffered a
catastrophic blow to my morale. ... I just completely lost faith in
the chain of command and I developed chronic depression."

He wasn't ready to leave the military but wanted an administrative
assignment where he could get mental health treatment that he didn't
think would be available in a combat setting. He accepted an
administrative separation and was discharged in June 2006.

Coming home to Madison Heights, he found a night-shift job, enrolled
at Oakland Community College and thought about the conflict he'd been
a part of. Surfing the Internet, Ekstrom found the MySpace page for
Iraq Veterans Against the War and joined.

"Just in talking to other people, they have similar stories to mine
and have an understanding of what I've gone through. It's helpful," he says.

The Washington, D.C.-based group, founded in 2004 and now counting
nearly 1,000 members, is one of several military-related
organizations opposing U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With members who are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, veterans of
other wars and family members, the groups have several roles. They
provide a sense of community for veterans who, like Ekstrom, are
conflicted about their newfound opposition to war. They lobby for
medical care and other issues directly affecting servicemen and
women. They publicize the stories of active-duty soldiers and
Marines. And they constantly hope to leverage their unique
perspective to have Congress or a new president end the war.

"When you have the actual veterans and their families who have
experienced it, I think there's nothing better for credibility," says
Deborah Klein Walker, the immediate past president of the American
Public Health Association, a professional organization worried about
the health effects of war on civilians, veterans and their families.

Re-generation

World War II Navy veteran Bob Fehribach says Iraq has re-energized
his anti-war efforts. The Sterling Heights man was "pro-military" for
decades. But then a friend shipped off to southeast Asia in the late
1960s and early 1970s, which made the conflict more personal. With
the nightly news showing bodies coming home in bags, he thought about
the reasons U.S. troops were in Vietnam, and how those circumstances
differed from those of World War II. Over time, he saw leaders lie
about the situation in Vietnam and realized American troops had no
legitimate reason to be there. He feels the same way about Iraq.

"I just took a complete turnaround and ever since, I've been speaking
up," says the 80-year-old retired social worker, who is active with
the southeast Michigan chapter of Veterans for Peace, one of 120
chapters with 7,500 members internationally.

"I spoke up against the war in Vietnam. I went to Washington. I've
marched for peace. We're against any kind of war. We don't think we
should do any nuclear armaments of any kind. We just don't believe
that's a way of solving anything."

Such veterans' involvement in anti-Vietnam campaigns was credited
with helping turn public opinion against that conflict. Today's
groups say they have a "tougher" sell to the general public, which
may not immediately realize the effect the war is having on the home front.

Without a draft, there isn't a universal fear among Americans that
someone they know will be injured or killed in combat, so they don't
care as much.

"People are once removed from seeing immediate family, seeing their
sons and daughters going off to war," says Audrey Mantey, a former
U.S. military Russian linguist and intelligence analyst now active
with southeast Michigan's Veterans for Peace chapter. "People aren't
as affected by it."

But when military men and women do come home from Iraq and
Afghanistan, families then realize the toll war has taken, says Nancy
Lessin, who co-founded Military Families Speak Out in 2002 when her
stepson was deployed with the Marines. The group now counts 4,000
families as members.

"Our focus is on ending the U.S. military occupation in Iraq,
bringing our troops home now and getting them the care they need when
they get home. That's truly supporting our troops," says Lessin, who
lives in Boston.

And today's veterans' needs are many, according to Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit support group based in New York.

Traumatic brain injury is the "signature wound" of the Iraq War, the
group says, but the Department of Defense has not implemented
mandatory screening despite surveys that show as much as 20 percent
of Iraq veterans about 300,000 people suffer the injury.

The current Army suicide rate is the highest it's been in 26 years,
at least 40,000 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans have been treated at a
VA hospital for substance abuse, and 20 percent of married troops in
Iraq are planning a divorce, according to studies. Yet the U.S. Army
Medical Command found nearly one-third of soldiers and Marines in
Iraq worry about the effect a mental health diagnosis could have on
their career and more than half worried they would be considered
"weak" if diagnosed with a psychological problem.

Christopher Arendt would count himself among those veterans who could
use some better medical, educational and financial support. Halfway
through his senior year at Olivet High School in 2003 Arendt says he
bought into the military's "masculine concept and all the heroism."
He joined the Army National Guard, believing a recruiter who told him
the guard would only work domestically.

"That was immediately turned on its head," Arendt says. He was
enrolled at Kalamazoo Community College during the fall of 2004 when
the news came. "My unit was going to be deployed to Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, to be prison guards. I withdrew halfway through the semester, I
lost all the money. We deployed in December," Arendt says.

During training in New Jersey where he learned to guard prisoners,
Arendt filed papers describing himself as "psychologically unfit" for duty.

"I had a history of being depressed. I had a couple of suicide
attempts under my belt by the time I was deployed," he says. Being
assigned as a prison guard at the Cuban facility exacerbated his problems.

"I didn't want to be involved in the oppression of people. I didn't
like it. I didn't want anything to do with it," he says. But he went
and says he was a "successful soldier." Arendt received awards, was
offered promotion and supervised troops, he says.

But his views about the war put him at odds with the military
establishment. "We were being used. I thought it was offensive to
global politics. I thought it was offensive to human beings," he says.

Arendt says his post-service mental health issues are mostly
attributable to his military experience. "I think 75 percent of my
issues come from the military and 25 percent is from my life in
general," he says.

Now attending school in Chicago, Arendt says involvement with
anti-war groups helps him "find a sense of community and find a peace
for this part of my life."

Last weekend Arendt and Ekstrom were among the 250 people who
participated in an anti-war event organized by Iraq Veterans Against
the War in Washington, D.C. Called Winter Soldier, it was patterned
after the anti-Vietnam War event of the same name held in Detroit in 1971.

The first Winter Soldier hearings were sponsored by Vietnam Veterans
Against the War and largely credited for fueling the anti-war
movement in the United States. Then a young veteran, John Kerry
participated. A few months later he would testify at the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee where he famously asked, "How do you ask
a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Ekstrom says veterans need to continue speaking out and making their
opposition visible. He's hung anti-war fliers near military
recruitment materials on public bulletin boards and would like to
start a local chapter of the Iraq veterans' group.

"It will just kind of shake up the myth that veterans all support the
war," he says.

Anti-Warriors

Friday, March 21, 2008

Fighting for peace

0 comments:

Blog Archive

About Me