I’m listening to a program on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about the events of May 4, 1970, at Kent State University. including a survivor of the shootings and a few historians that reminded/explained the super-intense political context. While I was eight years old at the time, this year I feel I do have some memories to offer: those of the people I’ve spent four years writing about.

The U.S. had just invaded Cambodia, sparking mass protests around the country. William T. Ehrhart, later of the laureates of Vietnam poetry,  told Gerry Nicosia, author of Home At War, that he and his fellow vets in Philadelphia were stunned:

We hadn’t heard of [Vietnam Veterans Against the War] yet but they were in green and they were obviously Vietnam vets and they were obviously trashing the ROTC building with great glee. And the students ate it up: “The Vietnam vets are going crazy!” The next morning we found out about the students getting killed at Kent State.

On May 4, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen after the university’s ROTC building was set aflame. The lasting image in a nation’s mind was not  the one the protestors remembered, of hippies facing down children who’d joined the Guard (perhaps to avoid Vietnam) and putting flowers in their M-16s, but one young girl weeping over the dead body of Alison Krauss, twenty years old.

Erhart told Nicosia what the killings meant to  new vets — to people who, like him, had thought they were sent abroad to prevent the harming of U.S. civilians.  It isn’t enough to send us halfway around the world to die, I thought. It isn’t enough to turn us loose on Asians. Now you are turning the soldiers loose on your own children. Now you are killing your own children in the streets of America. GI’s and civilians protested together in dozens of cities. In Seattle, near Fort Lewis, nearly 13,000 blockaded the Seattle Freeway, to protest both the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State and Jackson State killings.

Turned cynical by Chicago '68, Ochs always turned up for soldiers.

Two weeks later, the national Armed Forces Day traditionally celebrated near military bases was celebratcd differently at some U.S. bases, in the first annual Armed Farces Day. At Fort Bragg, 700 GI’s marched through the base, addressed by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland at the rally’s end; at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota Phil Ochs, in his now-trademark gold suit, asked over his guitar “Who’s the criminal here?”

At Fort Lewis, 20 miles from Seattle, my old friend Steve Morse, once a young Quaker who had not been subject to to the draft, was Sgt, Morse, appearing before a special court-martial for distributing seditious material.  Instead of a term in the brig, though, Morse was soon headed to Cambodia as a member of K-Troop, 11th Cavalry Division.

What? I hear you cry,

That same question was sort of what inspired me to do the book in the first place; I first published Steve’s story, about the Quaker boy who ended up a GI organizer, as an article in the 50th-anniversary magazine of the now-defunct Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. (When I started the book I phoned him and said, “Steve, I’m writing a book about….you!”) To read my  version of the rest, you’ll have to wait till the book comes out.

But I’ll take this moment to salute the veterans who, just like the former hippies, are busy calling each other to say – “F***k, has it really been 30 years?”

I mentioned Kelly Kennedy last week, before she granted me the honor of an interview. I *still* haven’t transcribed and written up that talk, in which she blew me away even more than her  book had. (Imagine being 22 and watching your friends blown up in Somalia.)  But the book came out this week and Fresh Air is all on it.

It’s airing at 3 p.m. in NYC and Philadelphia: go listen, or click the audio link. I’ll be listening too.

Some DC reporters  looked more closely at the letter McCain was waving around, saying many officers supported the policy. They found the  average age of the signers was 74, most had never served since 1993, and quite a few denied signing the letter at all.

But the juiciest part was the,ummm, questionable record of some of the most prominent:

• Rear Adm. Riley Mixson in 1993 received a career-ending letter of censure from then-Navy Secretary John Dalton for involvement in the 1991 Tailhook scandal, during which he failed to take action against allegations of sexual misconduct. According to the New York Times, “Mixson was cited for failing to take action when he saw a woman drink from a dispenser made to look like a rhinoceros’ penis and men shaving women’s legs.”

• Gen. Carl Mundy made several statements in 1993 on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that racial minority soldiers “don’t swim as well” or perform other duties as well as white troops. He also once unilaterally banned married recruits from joining the Marine Corps, a move Defense Secretary Les Aspin rescinded the following week.

• Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle was head of Marine Corps Aviation in the late 1990s, during the design and test phase of the V-22 Osprey. He oversaw cost overruns and allegedly falsified records — all while praising the aircraft. McCorkle now works for and sits on the boards of several companies that manufacture Osprey components.

There’s much more at the link. I wonder if David Mixner has seen this yet, and if the letter’s full exposure might inspire Elaine Donnelly, the old Phyllis Schlafly aide whose organization first published it, to finally close down her tired show. (Maybe she can retire to Florida, where she can make no sense amid people as delusional as she is, like the Scientologists.)

Three headlines this week that go well together: Pentagon To Focus on Brain Trauma and Soldier’s Suicides at Historic High – “15 month deployments may play a role in the latter,” they say. (You think?)

I’ve little time this morning to comment on either, but luckily we have the incomparable Michael Jernigan’s commentary on The Hurt Locker,  which brings us back to our earlier discussion about writing about war. I’ll check in later in the day with a very different commentary on The Hurt Locker.

I’m far from the only one to have shared that heartrending New York Times essay by Shannon Meehan, entitled “Constant Wars, Distant Ghosts.” And perhaps as a result, veterans of all generations raised their voices and became this piece on “War and Conscience.” Some bits that hit the hardest:

As a former World War II combat infantryman, I really appreciated this piece — especially for how well it was written. Sixty-five years later, I still remember the sight of my first enemy corpse (I hadn’t killed him) and the thoughts are still with me of what his death had meant to a family like mine in another country….

—-

I never killed anyone or even fired my weapon in anger. I was trained to do it and I believe I would have done it but who knows for sure when until the moment is upon them? At one time, I agonized over the fact that I did not have “combat vet” on my resume. Thirty five years later, and uncounted reminiscences like Captain Meehan’s, I think maybe I should be grateful that I never had to be in that position.

And one that I’ll be mulling over awhile, from a young woman:

I served in the 1st Cavalry as well and witnessed that which I pray my children never have to. However I like to believe that I returned from Iraq with a higher regard for human life, not an eroded one. Facing your own mortality and living in the shadow of those who did not survive changes a soldier. But not always for the worst. It is so very often assumed that the soldier always comes back broken from their experiences. We may not come back the same but that doesn’t mean that we always come back worse. I am a better parent to my children, a better spouse to my husband but most of all an even more grateful human being because I know what it is like to have lost so very much. I never lost regard for my own life. The deaths of my peers, if anything, instilled in me a greater regard for my life and the promised life that awaited me once I left that hell hole…..

Their voices swirl and debate, but without the animus that keeps me out of most comments sections. Go read the whole thing.

I’ve wanted to investigate this for a long time. But luckily, the crack teams at ProPublica have done an awesome job at it. Their story starts with one who came home and hanged himself:

More than three years later, Dill’s loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide. Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure. “We’re circling the drain,” she said.

While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.

No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.

If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.

Most of the soldiers/vets I talk to are understandably angered by these guys, who work for companies with generic names like Executive Outcomes and Titan and who, in theatre, are often making five times what they are.

But as Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, taught us long ago, these shadow armies are more and more embedded in U.S. wars — often outnumbering guys in uniform.

And while the contractors have no right to care from the VA, yet another private firm is making millions with contracts to care for those who do.This is something I’m trying to learn more about: anyone have a Valor Health story to tell me? I’ll write next with what I found — and why the phrase “veterans’ healthcare” doesn’t belong in the same sentence as that for “private equity.”

Either way, however, the care for these war vets has to be counted as a cost of war. And if they thought they’d have to pay for it,  could even the likes of John McCain vote to authorize the wars?

No disrespect meant to the Army Chief of Staff, who lost his father in Vietnam in 1970 and has more years of service than most I know. But sir – did you really say that to the U.S.  Congress with a straight face, as reported in the Washington Post? Didn’t you live through the dramas of 1993, the last time a President tried to end the gay ban? Does no one  on your staff know how to use “the Google,” to find the 20 or so other studies that have all said there would be no military harm from openly gay service? The Crittenden Report, commissioned in 1957 and kept secret for 20 years, was frank:

The concept that homosexuals pose a security risk is unsupported by any factual data… The number of cases of blackmail as a result of past investigations of homosexuals is negligible. No factual data exist to support the contention that homosexuals are a greater risk than heterosexuals.

As David Mixner (a close friend of Leonard Matlovich, left) said when I interviewed him a few weeks ago for Guernica Magazine, “What are they going to study now? Our patriotism? Our morality? [Are] they going to put our democratic rights to a poll in the military? It’s not as if we’re not there: we’re there already!”

And when you’re getting those Google results from your staff (tell them to try PERSEREC and Crittenden), pass those on to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norten Schwarz. He said in that same hearing that there wax “little scholarship” on the issue. Or, better, take an amble down to the Palm Center, whose staff  are probably reading a packet of long-concluded studies,with more pages than the collected works of Shakespeare.

matWhy am I so passionate about this? Like Mixner, I’m a pacifist who cares passionately about soldiers. And antics like those two generals’ make me suspect that what they really wish would be studied is how to coddle their own, irrational prejudices. No matter the harm done. And as the 1975 TIME cover above might suggest, it’s far past time for them to get over it.

… if it concurs with the experience of someone you know – or maybe you. From Shannon Meehan’s excellent piece in today’s Home Fires:

Killing enemy combatants comes with its own emotional costs. On the surface, we feel as soldiers that killing the enemy should not affect us — it is our job, after all. But it is still killing, and on a subconscious level, it changes you. You’ve killed. You’ve taken life. What I found, though, is that you feel the shock and weight of it only when you kill an enemy for the first time, when you move from zero to one. Once you’ve crossed that line, there is little difference in killing 10 or 20 or 30 more after that.

War erodes one’s regard for human life. Soldiers cause or witness so many deaths and disappearances that it becomes routine. It becomes an accepted part of existence. After a while, you can begin to lose regard for your own life as well. So many around you have already died, why should it matter if you go next? This is why so many soldiers self-destruct when they return from a deployment.

I know something about this. The deaths that I caused also killed any regard I had for my own life. I felt that I did not deserve something that I had taken from them. I fell into a downward spiral, doubting if I even deserved to be alive. The value, or regard, I once had for my own life dissipated.

I guess this is why Lt. Col. David Grossman spends so much time giving seminars to soldiers: to get them over that first hump so they can accomplish their mission. But it’s also why you see him sometimes, in those peppy seminars, in the same segments that start with soldiers’ suicides — something that Meehan also talks about.

The Pentagon is trying right now with special training to rewire people after it’s over, something they call “Battle-Mind.” Or have they moved on to a new name, a new idea? Or is it now just tossing handfuls of Zoloft, crossing their eyes and hoping for the best?

I’ve hoped to grow up to be  Kelly Kennedy ever since my friend, rockstar author Alia Malek, profiled the Military Times reporter for Columbia Journalism Review. I knew it was impossible, of course, as the very first line of Kennedy’s author bio makes clear: “Kelly Kennedy served as a soldier in Desert Storm and Mogadishu, Somalia.”  Back when I was stuffing envelopes and marching to stop the wars she was in, Kennedy was in uniform, making all my experiences working with GI’s kind of feel beside the point.

Still, the latter may have accounted for the way I responded to her book, a month-by-month chronicle of the travails of Charlie Company, 26th Infantry Regiment , in the first few years of the Iraq war — during which the tight-knit unit lost more than half its men.

The book’s climax, I knew before I started, was a mutiny: echoing for me those during the Vietnam War chronicled in David Zeiger’s film Sir! No, Sir! Kennedy notes that echo, but also notes that these soldiers acted not so much in opposition to the war but because they knew their orders  would likely result in losing more men.

In an email exchange before I got the book, she and I talked about the difference. When I said “her” boys belonged in my book, she asked “Oh, I guess you mean the mutiny?” I said yes — especially to illustrate an important change among today’s soldiers.  In Vietnam, troops went in and out one by one (thus the “he’s a short-timer,” common lingo in all Vietnam films). Now, with whole units staying together through multiple deployments, members re-enlist. don’t go AWOL. take all their action out of a deep sense of loyalty — that profound love about which soldiers that Homer wrote so beautifully.

“In the framework I’m working in,” I told Kelly, “[that mutiny] feels like a near-perfect example of how a strategy designed to make wars go smoothly (encouraging greater unit cohesion than in, say, Vietnam or Korea) can have unplanned consequences when you take today’s slightly older, mostly brilliant, thinking soldiers into account.” And she agreed: “I’d say that’s what the title says, really — In Vietnam, nobody cared about the FNG [fucking new guy], and it seems as if the guys could opt out of getting to know people they knew they’d lose. These guys got to the point where they didn’t care about the war, but cared deeply about each other.”

None of this chat prepared me for the book itself — which I recommend highly, but also recommend keeping a box of tissues nearby. I had to stop reading for days on end because I kept crying: because she has made me care about Willsun Mock, Juan Campos, Jeff McKinney — and then she blew them up, or rather the war did.

I can’t even choose passages to quote, because just reading the names makes me well up. Go ahead and buy a copy, share it with everyone you know.

Last, two lessons for me from the book’s compelling writing:

First, she integrates the complexities of today’s PTSD challenges as well as anyone can — and keeps it close to the narrative. The medical professionals come off as both essential and often clueless about how to cope with these responses in the middle of a war zone. It’s stunning, actually.

Second, Kennedy does not appear as a character ONCE. Having just read another acclaimed book whose author kind of gets in the way of her story, I’m even more determined to keep my own details away from the book as a whole.

I’m glad to have a chance to blog here as my book I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, From George Washington to John Murtha approaches publication with University of Caifornia Press.

Before I became a journalist full time I worked for a range of nonprofit organizations – most crucially, for about four years I helped coordinate the G.I. Rights Hotline, while on staff with CCCO, and worked on issues around military personnel. Talking to soldiers every day changed my life. What I learned then eventually led to this book, which was years later first developed at Columbia Journalism School’s Book Seminar. My portfolio and other journo bona fides are over at Incredible Panic Rules.

This blog is a loose conglomeration of some of what I’ve noticed along the way, and some of what the people whose stories make it live have had to say about it all.It’s is a work in progress, just like the book; feedback is always welcome, either here, on my original site, or the book’s Facebook page……

watch?v=L5pgrKSwFJE

I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Soldiers Who Dissent, 1754-2008

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