Military Recruiters Must Be Confronted
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080526_ron_kovic_on_berkeley_recruitment_resistance/
May 28, 2008
By Ron Kovic
As a former United States Marine Corps sergeant who was shot and
paralyzed from my mid-chest down during my second tour of duty in
Vietnam on Jan. 20, 1968, I am sending my complete support and
admiration to all those now involved in the courageous struggle to
stop military recruitment in Berkeley and across the country.
Not since the Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s has there been a
cause more just than the one you are now engaged in. Who knows better
the deep immorality and deception of military recruiters than those
of us who, decades ago, entered those same recruiting offices with
our fathers, believing in our hearts that we were being told the
truthonly to discover later we had been deceived and terribly
betrayed? Many of us paid for that deceit with our lives, years of
suffering and bodies and minds that were never the same again. If
only someone had warned us, if only someone had had the courage to
speak out against the madness that we were being led into, if only
someone could have protected us from the recruiters whose only wish
was to make their quota, send us to boot camp and hide from us the
dark secret of the nightmare which awaited us all.
Over the past five years, I have watched in horror the mirror image
of another Vietnam unfolding in Iraq. So many similarities, so many
things said that remind me of that war 30 years ago which left me
paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for life. Refusing to learn
from the lessons of Vietnam, our government continues to pursue a
policy of deception, distortion, manipulation and denial, doing
everything it can to hide from the American people their true
intentions and agenda in Iraq. As we pass the fifth anniversary of
the start of this tragic and senseless war, I cannot help but think
of the young men and women who have been wounded, nearly 30,000,
flooding Walter Reed, Bethesda, Brooke Army Medical Center and
veterans hospitals all across our country. Paraplegics, amputees,
burn victims, the blinded, shocked and stunned, brain-damaged and
psychologically stressed, a whole new generation of severely maimed
men and women who were not even born when I came home wounded to the
Bronx Veterans Hospital in New York in 1968.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which afflicted so many of us
after Vietnam, is just now beginning to appear among soldiers
recently returned from the current war. For some the agony and
suffering, the sleepless nights, anxiety attacks and awful bouts of
insomnia, alienation, anger and rage will last for decadesif not
their whole lives. They will be trapped in a permanent nightmare of
that war, of killing another man, a child, watching a friend die ...
fighting against an enemy that can never be seen, while at any moment
someone, a child, a woman, an old mananyonemight kill them.
These traumas return home with us and we carry them, sometimes
hidden, for agonizing decades. They deeply impact our daily lives,
and the lives closest to us. To kill another human being, to take
another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is
something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with
that person. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing,
and even hope and happiness again, but that scar and memory and
sorrow will be with you forever. Why did the recruiters never mention
these things? This was never in the slick pamphlets they gave us.
Some of these veterans are showing up at homeless shelters around our
country, while others have begun to courageously speak out against
the senselessness and insanity of this war and to demand answers from
the leaders who sent them there. During the 2004 Democratic National
Convention, returning soldiers formed a group called Iraq Veterans
Against the War, just as we had marched in Miami in August of 1972 as
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Still others have refused
deployment to Iraq, gone to Canada and begun resisting this immoral
and illegal war. Like many other Americans, I have seen them on
television or at the local veterans hospitals, but for the most part,
they remain hidden like the flag-draped caskets of our dead returned
to Dover Air Force Base in the dark of night, as this administration
continues to pursue a policy of censorship, tightly controlling the
images coming out of that war and rarely allowing the human cost of
its policy to be seen.
Many of us promised ourselves long ago that we would never allow what
happened to us in Vietnam to happen again. We had an obligation, a
responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, as human beings, to raise
our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the
intensive-care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their
lives, those long and painful years after we came home, those lonely
nights. There were lives to save on both sides, young men and women
who would be disfigured and maimed, mothers and fathers who would
lose their sons and daughters, wives and other loved ones who would
suffer for decades to come if we did not do everything we could to
stop the momentum of this madness.
Mario Savio once said, "There's a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't
take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to
indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all."
It is time to stop the war machine. It is time for bold and daring
action on the part of us all. Precious lives are at stake, both
American and Iraqi, and military recruiters must be confronted at
every turn, in every high school, every campus, every recruiting
office, on every street corner, in every town and city across
America. In no uncertain terms we must make it clear to them that by
their actions they represent a threat to our community, to our
children and all that we cherish. We must explain to them that
condemning our young men and women to their death, setting them up to
be horribly maimed, and psychologically damaged in a senseless and
immoral war, is wrong and unpatriotic and will not be tolerated by
Berkeleyor, for that matter, any town or city in the United States.
The days of deceiving, manipulating and victimizing our young people
are over. We have had enough, and I strongly encourage all of you to
use every means of creative, nonviolent civil disobedience to stop
military recruitment all across our country. I stand with you in this
important and courageous fight, and I am confident your actions in
the days ahead will inspire countless others across our country to do
everything they can to end this deeply immoral and illegal war.
--
(Note: This statement represents portions of several essays and
writings I have done over the past five years.R.K.)
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