Via Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Anti-Imperialist
Military Resistance 12D4
[Via Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Anti-Imperialist]
A Marine Sgt. Silent No Longer On Gay Marriage:
“There Is Still Time To Be On The Right Side Of History”
[Thanks to Clancy Sigal, who sent this in. He writes: “I identify with this because my best friend came out to me in my mid 20s and I handled it very badly. Like practically all Communist gays (a word not then in use) of the Fifties period he vanished, swallowed up.”]
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April 3, 2014 by Roger Dean Huffstetler, The Washington Post. Roger Dean Huffstetler is a former Marine Corps sergeant.
I slept with a gay man for six months in Afghanistan.
No one asked. He did not tell.
In 2005, I and 200 Marines in my squadron deployed to Afghanistan to support the global war on terrorism.
We were stationed at Bagram air base, a deep bowl surrounded by snowcapped mountains, where it rained and snowed while the sun beamed, prompting one Marine to remark, “Welcome to Afghanistan, the only place on Earth where you get all four seasons and a rocket in the same day.”
We lived in “B-huts,” wooden houses with no internal structure, subdivided into “rooms” by flimsy plywood boards.
Every moment was spent in close quarters: working in small offices, eating meals in the chow hall, sleeping in our racks, exercising. We saw each other at our best and our worst, shared secrets and fears, lost patience with and supported one another through the duration of deployment.
Sgt. Santiago and I spoke often, if casually. He routinely had one of the highest physical fitness test scores in our unit and never missed a chance to go salsa dancing stateside with fellow Marines, including our senior enlisted Marine and his wife, whom he persuaded to join a few times.
He also proudly displayed his Puerto Rican flag in his barracks. Nevertheless, he was a reserved man, quiet, private.
I assumed these were inherent personality traits. I didn’t realize that he was hiding something.
I believed I knew the men in my B-hut better than I knew most of my friends at home, yet the man sleeping next door had a secret he dared not reveal for fear of being removed from active duty.
It never crossed my mind that he was gay — or that I could have done so much more to be his friend.
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Even as a kid, Andy was exceptionally affable, the kind of person who could talk to a trash can. He never met a stranger, and he unfailingly seemed to know where he was going. Andy was surrounded by a close group of friends, always together, always laughing. It’s fair to say everyone enjoyed being around him.
In our teens, Andy and I would go on mission trips around the country, helping to clean or build homes, with a little vacation Bible school on the side.
Perhaps Andy knew then that he was gay — it seems likely — but he flirted with girls, same as the rest of us. If he did know, he kept it to himself, and I lived in ignorance about it.
It would be 20 years before Facebook told me what I didn’t know about my childhood friend.
About the same time, Sgt. Santiago’s news broke through the same social network:
Both men were engaged to be married. To men.
There was suddenly nothing I wanted more than make amends.
No, I never gay-bashed. I didn’t bully, I didn’t hate, I didn’t torment.
But I did say “fag” to a fellow Marine in front of Sgt. Santiago.
I did stay seated in the pew when my minister challenged, “Don’t let anyone tell you that this church is soft on homosexuality.” Silence is a most powerful consent.
I would think: Civil unions, what’s wrong with that? I considered myself “accepting” and “tolerant,” excusing the soft discrimination that’s easy to shrug off, the implicit inequality of separate but equal.
The irony was that I had always imagined that if I’d lived in the time of segregation and the civil rights movement, I would be the white Southerner who was proud to march with the NAACP — that I would tear down bigoted beliefs and demand equality for all, even putting myself at risk if need be.
But I didn’t do those things. I watched the fight right in front of me without question, inactive and accepting — just like the generations before me.
Well, no longer.
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Andy and Sgt. Santiago both happen to live in New York now, and in a single visit I managed to apologize to and feel the weight of my embarrassment before each of them.
I blinked back tears as I spoke to Sgt. Santiago, who slept next door in Afghanistan, watching for my life as I watched for his:
“I’m sorry I let you down.”
To Andy, my childhood friend who still worships the same God as I do:
“Finding out you are gay has been instrumental in my supporting gay marriage. I’m sorry it took this long.”
And to both of them:
“I aim to do everything I can to make up for being late to the party.”
We don’t need to look backward for a chance to stand up for principles.
Life isn’t about always being right — I was wrong for a long time — but about learning from mistakes and making amends.
So I started with those conversations and writing about the effect these two men had on me, about how someone raised a Southern Baptist can love everyone equally and can advocate marriage equality.
If you’re reading this and you go to church every Sunday but you know that discrimination is wrong, or you’re serving overseas and worried that you or others in your squadron can’t be themselves, there is something you can do.
Write. Speak out.
Find the Andys and Sgt. Santiagos in your life and make amends.
There is still time to be on the right side of history.
FORWARD OBSERVATIONS
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.
“We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
Frederick Douglass, 1852
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
-- Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach"
What’s Buried At Fort Hood?
Photograph by Mike Hastie
From: Mike Hastie
To: Military Resistance Newsletter
Sent: April 04, 2014
Subject: What’s Buried At Fort Hood?
What’s Buried At Fort Hood?
The U.S. Military is highly classified.
So conveniently concealed as
National Security.
National Security being the Pentagon and every
level of the U.S. Government and Wall Street.
And when soldiers are morally wounded,
they are submerged in a world of cover-up.
The distance between what is happening at
the level of the Pentagon, and what is being
revealed to the American public is the distance
between the Earth to the Sun.
When I came back from Vietnam, and with countless
other Vietnam veterans and activists I have met over
the past 45 years, the truth was revealed to me in a
simple statement:
Lying Is The Most Powerful Weapon In War.
It is the great truth that has great silence.
The truth can be so threatening that the only
way to deal with it is through denial.
Denial:
Refusing to acknowledge something.
As in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam on
March 16, 1968.
The Pentagon first revealed it as a highly
successful U.S. military operation.
128 enemy soldiers killed,
as was recorded in the New York Times.
But, here is what really happened--what might
be called the distance between the Earth to the Sun.
504 Vietnamese civilians were murdered at point-blank
range. Small children and infants were cut to pieces.
In the infamous ditch at My Lai, there were
infants who were headless because of the
explosive impact of machine gun fire
and hand grenades.
I photographed that ditch in 1994.
The massive U.S. bombing campaign throughout
the Vietnam War was nothing but My Lai’s from
the skies.
You deny the truth, because if the truth gets out,
what is really massacred is one’s belief system.
And if that happens, the mind begins to cross
examine itself, because the moral compass no
longer exists.
Betrayal becomes a disease.
Once the belief system has been decimated
through emotional deceit, everything begins to
fall apart.
That is why soldiers and veterans
commit suicide or commit murder.
Millions of veterans in America are being
medicated by the VA to shut up the voices
in their heads, because that is the truth that is
trying so desperately to get out.
But,
the norms of society will never accept
information that threatens its belief system.
Validation for soldiers and veterans is paralyzed.
So, soldiers and the veterans are stuck in time.
It’s called: "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
But, that is not what is really going on.
What it should be called is:
Post-Traumatic Lying.
The Pentagon can’t let the truth out,
because everything depends on utter
Obedience.
Obedience to the lie.
Total manipulation of the masses.
The profound fear of freedom.
Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam
April 4, 2014
On Wednesday April 2, 2014,
a soldier at Fort Hood, Texas shot
and killed three fellow soldiers and
wounded 16 others. Just before he
was about to be apprehended by the
military police, he put the gun to his
head and massacred the voices in that
concealed prison.
Photo and caption from the portfolio of Mike Hastie, US Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71. (For more of his outstanding work, contact at: () T)
One day while I was in a bunker in Vietnam, a sniper round went over my head. The person who fired that weapon was not a terrorist, a rebel, an extremist, or a so-called insurgent. The Vietnamese individual who tried to kill me was a citizen of Vietnam, who did not want me in his country. This truth escapes millions.
Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
December 13, 2004
Ukraine: “We Need New People Who Can Say No To The Oligarchs”
“Again We See Mercedes And BMWs Bringing Deputies Who Are Supposed To Represent The People”
“We Don’t Want To See These People Again. We Want To See People From The Square, From The Revolution”
“Angry Demands That The Parliament Raise Pensions, Reopen Closed Hospitals And Find Work For The Jobless”
Comment: T
It may be useful to recall what the Ukrainian revolution was about. Certainly the Ukrainians who rose up to fight the dictatorship haven’t forgotten, and are likely to be heard from again.
FEB. 24, 2014By ANDREW HIGGINS,The New York Times Company [Excerpts]
KIEV —
As Ukraine’s parliament moved to fill a power vacuum left by the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanuovych, Irina Nikanchuk, a 25-year-old economist, stood outside the legislature building on Monday to give voice to a widespread feeling here: Throw the bums out.
Waving a banner calling for early elections to a new Parliament, she cursed members of Parliament and opposition politicians like Yulia V. Tymoshenko who have so far become the principal beneficiaries of a revolution driven by passions on the street and bubbled with disgust at Ukraine’s entire political elite.
“We need new people who can say no to the oligarchs, not just the old faces,” said Ms. Nikanchuk, referring to the wealthy billionaires who control blocks of votes in the Parliament but who, with a few exceptions, hedged their bets until the end about which side to support in a violent struggle that left more than 80 protesters dead between Mr. Yanukovych and his opponents.
“Tymoshenko is just Putin in a skirt,” she added, comparing the former prime minister and, until Saturday, jailed opposition leader with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.
All the same, the sight of luxury cars dropping off members of Parliament at the colonnaded legislature building, is now guarded by “self-defense” units that previously battled government forces, has stirred dismay and anger.
“Again we see Mercedes and BMWs bringing deputies who are supposed to represent the people,” said Mr. Kuak, “We don’t want to see these people again.
“We want to see people from the square, from the revolution.”
“We need people from Maidan, not people like you,” screamed an angry woman as Volodymyr Lytvyn, a former speaker of the Parliament known for shifting with the wind, left the legislature building.
As he tried to answer questions from the crowd, protected by two bodyguards and a solid wrought iron fence, a cry went up clamoring for “lustration of everybody,” a term usually associated with the purge of officials and politicians suspected of serving Communist regimes before the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern and Central Europe.
Peppered with angry demands that the Parliament raise pensions, reopen closed hospitals and find work for the jobless, Mr. Lytvyn struggled to respond but basically called for patience, a virtue that is likely to be in short supply if the interim government does not manage to convince people it is working to improve their lives, not line its own pockets.
Mr. Turchynov, the speaker and effectively Ukraine’s new president until elections, gets credit for swiftly shepherding a raft of legislation through Parliament to establish the legal basis for a post-Yanukovych order. But few see him as representing the revolution.
“He knows parliamentary routines but he does not have the support of the people,” said Nikita Kornavalov, a teacher, 29, who left a job in Norway to support what he hopes will be a new era free of the corruption and brutality that have marred the country since its independence in 1991.
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U.S. Accidentally Repatriates Israeli Spy To Iran
DAVID BUIMOVITCH / AFP
April 4, 2014By Duffel Blog Staff, Duffel Blog
TEL AVIV – Convicted Israeli spy and former adult film star Jonathan Pollard was released from U.S. custody today and repatriated abroad, the State Department has confirmed, but an apparent mix-up had him accidentally sent to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Pollard pleaded guilty in 1987 of stealing more than 360 cubits of classified documents from the United States and selling them to Israel — America’s greatest and most loyal ally ever — which held onto all the documents because that’s what best friends do.
He later admitted he’d chosen Israel solely out of a moral obligation to its people, but also after he failed to sell classified material to Pakistan, South Africa, Taiwan, Argentina, Australia, his Iranian neighbor, and Candyland.
Pollard’s release comes after months of tortuous shuttle diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry, whose hard-hitting negotiating style has razed peace expectations in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, personally flew in to Tel Aviv to deliver the good news to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the State Department, Netanyahu had originally demanded the unconditional release of Pollard as part of Israel’s peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He also demanded the release of other conscientious whistleblowers Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
However, after hard bargaining by Kerry, Netanyahu ultimately settled on a one-for-one exchange trading Pollard for Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu. Kerry even threw in the bodies of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a bonus.
In a goodwill gesture, Kerry insisted that Pollard’s release be implemented swiftly, boding well for future peace negotiations. He then fled from the rooftop of the American embassy in a helicopter to escape yet another unwinnable quagmire.
At that point, Pollard was supposed to have been flown out of North Carolina on a plane specially-chartered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, which handles sensitive flights of this nature.
However, there appears to have been some confusion at the ONI. Instead of landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Israel, Pollard was somehow unceremoniously dumped onto the tarmac at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Iran.
ONI director Rear Admiral Elizabeth Train blamed the similarity of the names, pointing out that both are called “international airports.”
Upon landing in Tehran, Pollard was received by a special welcoming committee from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and was whisked away for what they laughingly called a “thorough debriefing.”
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Pushing Back!
Demonstrators clash with riot police officers during a European trade union protest against government attacks on their standard of living in central Brussels April 4, 2014. (REUTERS/Francois Lenoir)
A demonstrator throws garbage at riot police officers during a European trade unions protest against government attacks on their standard of living in central Brussels April 4, 2014. (REUTERS/Francois Lenoir)