Conscious Choice Seattle: Return Reverb

November 2005

Return Reverb

Peace activists and soldiers coming home from war have more in common than you might think

By Joe Follansbee

Memories of November 1969 still bother Bill Wood. The Seattle man was a 21-year-old U.S. Army soldier, a volunteer returning home after a year in Vietnam. He knew he would not be hailed as a hero.

Wood’s plane landed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport for a seven-hour, overnight layover. His voice trembles slightly when he tells how he was confronted by a group of people his own age; hippies, camped out in the concourse.

“I got spat on so many times that I just quit wiping the spit off,” he says. Confused, angry and alone, he ducked into a phone booth, hunkering down until his flight was called. He felt trapped in his uniform: He agreed with his adversaries that the war was stupid, but he couldn’t fight back. “I’m on your side, but I can’t take you all on,” he recalls thinking.

Wood eventually rejoined his family in Heidelberg, Germany, where his father, a career soldier, was stationed. He completed his army service in Europe a year later, but didn’t return to the States for five more years.

“I wanted nothing to do with this country,” he says.

Thirty-six years later, after Wood’s experience in Chicago, soldiers are again coming home from an unpopular war. According to the latest polls, more than half of Americans now say President Bush has mishandled the war in Iraq. Someday, most of the estimated 130,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen deployed in Iraq will come back to a country that feels the war may have been a mistake. How should we regard these men and women, most of whom think they did the right thing?

While the country no longer sees vets as villains, it’s time for the peace movement to see them as heroes. It’s already happening.

The country has matured since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. For example, during the war protesters might have yelled “Baby killer!” at a Vietnam vet. A few years after the war, embarrassed at the country’s poor treatment of vets, Americans belatedly welcomed them back, applauding them when the vets marched together in parades.

Today, peace and social justice activists recognize vets as their best allies. Jane Cutter, Seattle coordinator for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, says Americans listen to vets closely when they raise their voices against war. “I’m not going to stand in condemnation and spit on them,” Cutter says. “My attitude is how do we win them over?”

Dialogue is the key, says Daniel McPherson, a former member of the army’s Stryker Brigade based at Fort Lewis. He trained snipers. He received a medical discharge before his unit was deployed to Iraq. He knew many of the soldiers killed in Iraq and continues to exchange e-mail with comrades in his old unit. He encourages peace activists to talk to Iraq vets.

But McPherson cautions activists to be careful, to see the war first from the soldier’s perspective. Soldiers are trained to believe in their commander, including the president as commander-in-chief. They are told they are fighting for their country’s safety, and that they are liberating a people from oppression. Whether or not you agree is beside the point. In a dialogue with a soldier, McPherson says, a peace activist should start by listening, not talking.

Newt Kirkwood, from Chehalis, would probably follow McPherson’s advice. The 15-year-old high school student describes herself as a pacifist. In 2002 she started a youth group to oppose the war. But she admits she has never met a soldier sent to Iraq.

“I would be very curious,” she says. “I would want to talk to them about what they had been through and how it changed their view about killing and their own humanity.”

“I feel compassion for them,” she adds. “I feel sorry that they had to kill others. I don’t believe they are evil.”

Once the dialogue begins, what else can we do? For peace activists, it may mean fighting for the benefits that veterans earned. Many combat veterans face a lifetime of recovery from the trauma of war. More than 15,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq, and like some Vietnam vets, many returning soldiers may not suffer from wounds to their spirits until long after they come home.

And despite what the country has learned about compassion for veterans, the Bush Administration last spring sought reductions in veterans benefits, including increased co-payments for prescription drugs and a $250 annual fee to access formerly free services.

The proposed cuts angered veterans, including Sean T. Lewis, an army veteran who served in the Gulf War. “After all the rhetoric about supporting the troops and then they cut veterans benefits. It is unconscionable,” he says.

But even as vets march with them against the war, many activists may have trouble treating vets as heroes. In the case of Iraq, they volunteered to join the military. They pulled triggers and dropped bombs on innocents.

How is this heroic? Look deeper, says Reverend Leslie Braxton of the New Beginnings Church in Montlake Terrace. A soldier, in his own way, follows the scripture: “There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.”

Braxton says soldiers put themselves in harm’s way out of a sense of duty to their families, friends, neighbors and country. In a way, they are called by the same impulses as many who oppose war.

Joe Follansbee is a regular contributor to Evergreen Monthly.

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