Rewind with Todd Boyle: Veterans for Peace, 2012

Presenter: Rewind with Todd Boyle to 13 years ago this week: It’s July 1, 2012, and the president of Veterans for Peace shares how her life was completely changed in Eugene, Oregon. Here’s Leah Bolger:

Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): So, my name is Leah Bolger. I joined the Navy when I was two years out of college in 1980. In 1980, women couldn’t be in any kind of combatant situations or billets, so we were kind of tossed in—women officers were kind of tossed in this catchall category, ‘general unrestricted line officer.’

[00:00:46] So I was a line officer, but I did various jobs that were not combatant. I joined the military really because I needed a job. And I was a fine arts major in college, and I worked at a grocery store to put myself through school. And I didn’t really think about how I was going to earn a living, and then one day I was mopping out the checkstand at Safeway and thinking, what’s wrong with this picture? You know, I have a degree, and I’m mopping, and you know.

[00:01:16] So you also have to know that I grew up in this small town of Warnsburg, Missouri, which is about 10 miles away from Whiteman Air Force Base. It’s in the middle of not very culturally-savvy area, and we moved to Warrensburg from Kansas City when I was a freshman in high school. And so I went to high school there and then I went to college in the same little town. And Warrensburg, Missouri, and Central Missouri State University, home of the Fighting Mules, if you’ve heard of us. [audience laughs]

[00:01:52] So, yeah, so by the time I had been through high school and college in this town of 13,000, you can imagine and you think back to when you were a teenager and then early 20s, I wanted out of this little Podunk town in the worst way.

And I joined in 1980. I never intended to spend a full career in the military. But it was interesting. I spent, you know, I was stationed all over the world.

[00:02:20] Every tour was a little bit different. I was out of that little Podunk town. And so I ended up spending 20 years. And without really giving a lot of thought to what I was supporting and what I was doing. It was really a job, it was interesting, it was in the middle of the Cold War and I didn’t feel like I was killing anybody.

I wasn’t, it wasn’t like, you know, today where we’re in a hot war, sharing it folks. So I just, you know, I did my job, and I got through it, and pretty soon I was to 10 years, and I thought, “Well, i’d be stupid to get out now, because I’m halfway to retirement age,” so I stuck around, and I got out.

[00:02:59] I retired when I was 42, and now I’m a full -time peace activist, and I’m able to live on my pension. So thank you, taxpayers, for being like me, and so and I am asked, ‘What transformed you from a warrior to a peacemaker?’ And I was never a warrior. I was in the military for 20 years, and most people in the military don’t end up shooting or being in combat. There’s so many support people, especially in times of peace.

[00:03:33] So I would never think of myself as a warrior, but I did transform from a kind of unknowing, ignorant, indifferent to foreign policy person to one who became more aware and that was my transformation. And I was always sort of out of place in the military.

[00:03:58] I always thought that ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was stupid and I get into arguments with people about that. But when I was a student at the Naval War College, I wrote papers on war termination and the importance of the U.N. and those ideas were not especially popular. So I was always kind of left leaning, but not enough to really do anything about it or be an active piece organizer.

[00:04:25] So my pivotal moment, where I turned from kind of indifferent apathetic to active was at this exhibit, the ‘Eyes Wide Open’ exhibit that was sponsored by American Friends Service Committee, AFSC, and this was in Eugene. And I saw these rows of boots that are lined up as if they were tombstones at Arlington, and I had a visceral reaction to this exhibit.

[00:04:51] It just was like a kick in the gut, and I was so upset. And then you see the civilian shoes for an Iraqi child. And this, after I left this exhibit, is when I really started getting involved.

[00:05:05] Question: Excuse me, so are those all military boots? –

[00:05:08] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): These are all American military boots, right. –

[00:05:11] Question: What do they say on each one? –

[00:05:12] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): The tags, it’s like this. It identifies the soldier to whom it belonged. And these represent actual military and there’s sometimes there’s dog tags or other personal memorabilia that the family has given. So the shoes is a real way of humanizing it more than if it were just a marker, but the human touch of the shoes, it just was devastating to see that. And then what I really appreciated about this exhibit was it was not just about American fatalities and they represented the children and the innocence people in Iraq that we are responsible for killing and they had big panels with information and it was it was ‘Eyes wide open.’

[00:05:57] [Comments on the Eyes Wide Open exhibit in Eugene, 2005]

After I left the military, my husband, I retired on the same day, we sold all our belongings and we lived on a sailboat for a few years and then we moved to a little RV and we landcruised for a few years. We weren’t, I wasn’t engaged at all in politics or foreign policy or activism at all until we settled down in 2004 and moved to Corvallis.

[00:06:32] So with VFP, I joined VFP. I don’t really remember how I heard about it, but I joined it, and I was an at-large member. At the time, there was only one chapter in Oregon, and that was the Portland chapter, chapter 72. And I was at an event where I was getting signatures for something. It was some kind of peace event, and there was a fellow there from that Portland chapter, and saw my T-shirt and he said, ‘Leah, you know, you should get your own chapter going.’ And I thought, ‘Well, okay, you know.’ So I got, I got, you have to have 10 people, 10 veterans to form a chapter.

[00:07:11] I found the veterans and it was kind of a little funny story about how I did that. It’s, you know, men of a certain age, a lot of them are World War II or Korea veterans. And so I, one day, I was having lunch in a fast-food restaurant and I saw a group of men sitting there around this table and one of them had a copy of The Nation magazine and I thought, “Ooh, he’s reading The Nation. He’s probably a progressive guy.” So I just walked up to these fellas and I said, “Hi guys, are you any of you veterans?” And almost every one of them was and they were, I think, four or five of our charter group was from that lunch counter. But I’m normally not quite so bold.

[00:08:00] So I formed the chapter. I served as president for three years and then I was elected to the National Board of Directors and I served as the vice president for a couple, two or three years, and then this year I was reelected to the board and now I am the president, the national president of the whole shebang.

[00:08:15] Veterans for Peace was founded in 1985 by Jerry Genesio and his wife. His wife was not a veteran, and that’s important to know later when I talk about our membership. They had been on a Witness for Peace mission to Nicaragua, and they came back and they were presenting their story, what had happened to them at a Unitarian church, and he met somebody who said, ‘Oh, you know, we should form a group.’

And they got together and decided to form their own organization, and Jerry describes it as the idea was to build, make a bridge between the veterans’ organizations and the peace groups. And this was, he’s a Vietnam vet and that was the idea to try to find a common group.

[00:09:08] It’s a five-part statement of purpose and I think most people, and in this room, I bet you most of you will agree, could agree with most of the tenets. And this is almost the same statement of purpose that Jerry and the others put together in 1985. It’s changed a little bit since then, but the work of leading the organization is done by volunteer board of directors. We have 13 directors and the directors choose they vote on the leadership.

[00:09:37] So out of the 13, four of us are the officers and we elect new officers every year. We serve for three-year terms and then a maximum of two terms total back to back and then you can run again after a while.

[00:09:51] We have about 150 chapters in 48 states, including three chapters in Alaska and one in Hawaii. The only two states that we don’t have chapters in, you might not guess, but South Dakota and Nebraska, for some reason, we don’t have chapters there, but they’re veterans everywhere.

[00:10:10] So I think we have potential to build chapters and lots of places. We’ve recently expanded to have an international outreach. We have a chapter, we’ve had a chapter in Vietnam for some time that are expatriates that were stationed in Vietnam and they’ve built a friendship village and they do a lot of Agent Orange reparation work and really very heartwarming work.

[00:10:34] So there’s that chapter, but the newest thing is that we’ve developed a group of British fellows that most of them were resistors against the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and they refused to fight in the British Army and they have formed a chapter of Veterans for Peace in the U.K., so I think that’s very cool.

[00:10:56] A lot of our work is done with working groups and committees and one of the things I think is, it’s a plus and a minus, the way our structure is with this volunteer board and national staff, this is referred to as ‘National.’ If people in chapters will say ‘National did this’ or ‘National’ or ‘You need to send it to National,’ well, there is this notion that ‘National’ is doing all kinds of things and we’re not. I mean we’re the directors and they’re searching on the same page.

[00:11:56] The way it is now (and I think this is to our detriment), I mean, it’s great that we have 150 chapters and they’re autonomous and they can do what they want as long as it falls within our statement of purpose. However, sometimes it’s as if we have 150 different organizations. And this group is working on PTSD and other groups are working on depleted uranium and what if both groups are working on both things? You know, so, we’re not realizing our full potential, I think, because we are all these different chapters.

[00:12:25] And yeah, so, membership, we have, we have full members which are veterans and then we have associate members who are non-veterans but they are active in the organization. We have honorary members .

[00:12:40] This is really our overall goal: to abolish war as an instrument of national policy. That is what we are are about. And Veterans for Peace is not a veteran service organization. We are not the VFW or not the American Legion. We don’t, that’s not where our energies are focused. We want to end war. That’s the primary thing. That’s this focus. So if you decide you want to join us, this is where we’re going to be focusing.

[00:13:08] So this is my own personal little theory, I guess. I wrote an essay on this, and it was published a while back, but why should we end war? To me, there are four basic reasons.

And the first one, it’s immoral, should be enough. That should be the reason. And to me, to talk about the other reasons is almost, I don’t know, it’s somehow wrong that that is not reason enough for most people, but it’s not. And you see that, you know, we don’t care. We’re indifferent to the lives that we’re taking, and we only seem to care about American lives.

[00:13:49] It’s illegal. The Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, it violates so many international laws, U.N. Charter, Geneva Conventions, Nuremberg Principles, it’s illegal.

[00:14:01] It’s ineffective, it rarely accomplishes what it sets out to do or what it says it sets out to do.

[00:14:07] And it costs too much. It costs way too much in money terms. And out of the four, though, it seems as if the economic argument is starting to take up a little traction.

[00:14:24] And so to me, I wish we would oppose war for the first reason. But whatever works, you know, and if people are getting behind this idea of every dollar spent, is taking away from what we really want, the human needs, or whatever reason, if they can identify with that, then let’s go with that. Let’s go with whatever is resonating with people. So the economic question is important.

[00:14:59] What I see as Veterans for Peace’s power: we are the only veterans’ organization calling for an end to war. There are other organizations that are against certain wars. But we’re the only one that says it should be stopped. We want it: ‘No war.’ That’s it. We’re opposed to all wars before they started, and we want to end them as soon as we can after.

[00:15:23] We feel like our voices as veterans are—it’s very hard to challenge them or to diminish them or to say, ‘Well, what do you know?’ So our stories, our experience, that is the strength of the organization, our people, to explain, whether you served in combat or not.

[00:15:41] And I was in the military for 20 years, and I never saw combat. But I do understand how the military works and how it’s integrated with the military industrial complex and all these things. So veterans do have an insight into the machine and I think it’s very important for us to speak out and with authority.

[00:16:05] So the big problem, as I mentioned, to me it’s when people say, ‘Why isn’t the peace movement more effective?’ Or, ‘What can we do?’

[00:16:15] Well, it’s not just ending one war. The problem is so big and so intertwined with military, with politicians, with Congress and elections, media is huge, and it’s very hard to know where to try to start unraveling this knot, because it’s so so tight. There’s so many things that are all play on each other.

[00:16:41] The big problem in talking about media and corporation and and bias and the people who control—I mean it, there, we have so many problems and they are all very much intertwined.

[00:16:52] So, you know, you can say, well, if we just got the right politicians in office, well, to get the politician in office, they have to take all this money, and the money comes with strings, and so we think, okay, campaign finance reform, that’s what we need. Well, then, well, how do you, how do you even get that…?

[00:17:12] Well, you know the people that the stakeholders, the ones that can change it, don’t want it to change. They’re happy with the status quo. Yes, sir, well, that’s what, military and yeah, military-industrial complex and this is what President Eisenhower warned us against 50 years ago. So that’s the corporations.

[00:17:35] The other thing is priorities. And what I mean by that is American priorities, what we say we want our money spent on, our federal budget, is quite different than what the Congress does. And they do not listen to our priorities.

[00:17:55] There has been a study by the University of Chicago every year for over 25 years, every year, that asks people: Should we spend more money or less money on all these 22 different categories? And for the past 20 years, the number one and two priorities for the American people on where they want their tax money spent is what? Education and health care. Exactly right. Education and health care. This is what we’ve been saying for over 20 years.

[00:18:25] But it’s not near the top. No. And guess where defense spending, it’s number 18, and it’s the first category that people say they want less money spent on. And you’ve all seen the big pie chart that shows where our money’s spent, and it’s not following our priorities. So that’s part of the big problem.

[00:18:50] So strategies to oppose war, amplifying veterans’ voices. I think collaboration with other organizations is really critical. And Veterans for Peace certainly can do it on our own. We’ve been around since 1985. We’re recognized by the U.N. as an NGO. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. And we have a certain amount of power and leverage, we don’t have a lobby arm, we’re not a 501(c)(4), we’re not allowed to go to do direct lobbying.

[00:19:24] But we can work with other organizations who do, like FCNL, the American Friends Service Committee has their branch, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, that does lobbying. So, in collaboration with these other groups, UNAC stands for United National Anti-War Coalition, and it is a coalition of, oh, well over 100 big groups and small groups that are working on, they’re more of a mass mobilization type organization to bring people out in mass to stand up against war.

[00:20:02] And there’s dozens of groups that we can work together in collaboration. I think it’s important to find that peace through education and education is critical.

[00:20:13] But it’s not just enough to sit and talk amongst ourselves, you know. And we’ve got to risk something, I think. I organized a protest several years ago on the anniversary of the Iraq war, And I invited a couple to speak who’s son had been killed in the war. And the story is so sad.

[00:20:37] He was in the National Guard, and he joined the National Guard because he was a cook in his civilian life. He was a chef and he wanted to provide food services when natural disasters and, you know, he set up the kitchens and that’s what he thought he’d be good at. He joined the National Guard, he was a cook, his unit won awards for his cooking and everything was great and then he was called to active duty service in Iraq.

[00:21:07] Now, you know, he had no clue that he would have been called up and at a certain point in our history, that would have been just absurd to even think about. You joined the—and you remember the advertisements, you know, one week—one weekend a month, two weeks every summer, you know, and they show these guys getting extra money and they’re just having a great time. Well, that’s what the recruiters will tell you. It’s just one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer.

[00:21:37] And up until the Iraq war, it would been unheard of to be activating these people above the reserve forces. So all of a sudden we’ve got guardsmen and all our reserves are called up and this fellow was in, they made him a machine gunner. machine gunner. They said well we don’t need cooks in your unit because Halliburton does the cooking for us. We contract that out and so we’re going to make him a machine gunner and they put him on the back of an unarmored Humvee and he was killed within two weeks of being in Iraq.

[00:22:15] But the point of what I was trying to say is when his parents spoke they said they looked out and we had a crowd of about 300 in Corvallis, which is significant, but they said, ‘Where is everybody? Every day, every day I call, I march, I write, I protest, I vigil, and where is the outreach? Where are the people in the streets?’

[00:22:42] And I think what he was urging people to do is to step out of their comfort zone. And if you are somebody who, you know, you say, ‘Oh, isn’t this war awful?’ And ‘Boy, I don’t want to have war against Syria or Iran.’ Well, that’s good that you’re standing up and you’re speaking your mind. But unless you do something about it, it’s wasted. You have to be able, you have to, I think, push yourself out of what’s comfortable.

[00:23:12] And so if maybe you’ve never, maybe all you’ve done is just tell your neighbor, ‘Boy, isn’t this a bad idea to go to war?’ Well, so maybe you could write a letter to the editor and put your name on your opinion, put your name in public and say, yes, this is what I believe and I urge you to stand up.

[00:23:31] And if that’s comfortable for you, then maybe you need to go stand on the corner with a sign and reveal yourself to the public that this is what I stand for. And if that’s comfortable for you, maybe you need to go sit in your congressman’s office. And if that’s comfortable for you, maybe you need to get arrested, but it’s, you have to keep pushing. 

[00:23:50] Our statement of purpose, as you remember, the overarching part of our statement of purpose is abolishment of war. That is anti-war, no war, anti-war. So to me, you can say you’re for peace, but our overarching mission is to get rid of war. I mean, everybody would say yes, I’m for peace. But as you know, building a culture of peace and Mercy Corps is what I was thinking of. This is the culture. This is the kind of thinking in a global community.

[00:24:21] So I think for us to actually realize the abolishment of war, it’s one thing to talk about how to end a war or the war. And the other thing to talk about how to end war in general, how to end that whole idea of war.

[00:24:37] And that is going to take all of these things. We’re going to have to educate people. We’re going to have to get our priorities straight. We have to stop thinking about other countries and being afraid of other people for no reason and thinking that we’re the best and everything exists to serve us.

[00:24:55] And thinking as if we are a global community and that what I do affects you and that you are my sister and you are my sister and you are my brother, everywhere. And it’s not just about Americans. It’s not when you hear, ‘Oh, there was a plane accident in Peru, were there any Americans on board?’ You know, this this is what you hear all the time?

[00:25:16] So I think we have to start thinking about terms of everybody affecting everyone and valuing the lives of people in other countries as much as we do our own. And I contend that if thousands and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan children have been killed in these wars or as result of sanctions, But if 10 American children were killed as a result of these conflicts, we would be rising up and outraged and we would not let it happen.

[00:25:51] We have to really take advantage of our veteran’s voice, this is what we specialize in. Our veterans’ voices can speak about war and militarism with an authority and credibility that the average civilian doesn’t have.

[00:26:04] KBOO listener: I’m not a veteran, but I’m a member of KBOO Radio in Salem, which I get from Portland, and every month is ‘A Veteran’s Voice’ by Marvin, and I forget the other man’s name. And they’re Veterans for Peace. And so they give a veteran’s perspective to me of what it is like to be a veteran.

[00:26:23] And they have a wide variety of topics. I heard a powerful one recently about the children of Vietnam vets who were exposed to Agent Orange. And these children, well, they’re about my age now, or a little bit younger, have serious health defects.

[00:26:41] I mean so there’s, I heard about the ‘Bunker Busters’ down in Monmouth that are helping connect vets to services. So I hear a lot about, I’m getting educated about the Veterans for Peace, which for me I find that healthy and good.

[00:27:00] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): Well, you know, you mentioned Agent Orange and the problems of American servicemen’s progeny, well, what about the Vietnamese children? Right, you have to talk about that too. Second or fourth generation having problems with it. We see this with the depleted uranium. That’s like the Agent Orange of the current times.

[00:27:20] But Americans will be concerned about, they will ask about, and you’ll see legislation for this too, testing soldiers to see if they were exposed to the uranium in case, you know, so they, you know, they could be cautious about, you know, failing planning and things like that if they’ve been exposed.

[00:27:41] What about the Iraqis? You know, we have, we are the aggressors and we are responsible and this is, this is why I, I don’t want to discuss me personally and my organization and I’m saying this as me Leah Bulger, I think it is so selfish, for lack of a better adjective, to think about only American progeny and American children, American PTSD and American exposure to pleaded uranium.

[00:28:16] We are the aggressors and all the people that we have harmed were in their country and we illegally invaded it and we poisoned it and it’s not going away for four million years and where is the outrage about that? –

[00:28:35] And the birth defects that are coming out, just horrific, you can’t even look at this, it’s just so upsetting. So when I bring up depleted uranium to a politician, they’ll say, ‘Oh, yes, we need to pass legislation to test our service members.’ No, we need to stop bombing people with depleted uranium weapons and killing them.

I mean, my God, it’s just, I so get so mad about this, all Americans, Americans, and PTSD. What about these children? They’re watching their parents being killed. They’re hearing the drones over here. They don’t know when somebody’s going to kick in their door at night. That’s what we need to be outraged about, and it needs to stop. So, I mean, we have to stop thinking about Americans, and we’re the victims here. And I just, I get so angry about this.

[00:29:23] I think too many Americans think it’s American thing and that whatever we do is right. And well, you know, Obama is blatantly, you know, challenging the law or not challenging, he’s just, you know, he’s just ignoring international law by waging wars of aggression. This is the highest international crime there is, a war of choice.

[00:29:48] I think, you know, with Occupy, people are starting to see the police brutality and for the first time , white people are being hit over the head with clubs and they’re saying, ‘Hey,’ you know, so I think people are starting to recognize problems, that kind of problem as well.

[00:29:35] Veterans for Peace, our veterans’ voice is trying to speak out against something that we know, and that’s war…

[00:29:45] Okay, well, I will tell you that Veterans for Peace says that we pledge to use nonviolent means to do our work, Okay, and we urge you to join us, okay. So, but there are members of Veterans for Peace who would say, ‘There is such a thing as just war theory that you’re talking about,’ World War II and that’s the example most people come up with. Well, what about World War II? That was, yeah.

[00:30:18] Attendee questioning effectiveness of nonviolence: I think personally, had there been a more organized way of getting an action going, it probably could have worked. They were human, too. There was always that option. But it wasn’t possible to organize. I mean, just the whole way that that came about, and you can see it, history kind of repeating itself now, which is very frightening, but by the time it gets to that point where you have concentration camps and things like that, it is beyond the point, I think, where you can easily do nonviolence.

[00:31:20] Even Gandhi said that the amount of suffering it would have taken for a nonviolent movement at that point would have been really huge. I think you would have had to have lots of people just sacrifice their lives. But individually, in those cases, it does work in this room, they’re still human. And had there been organizations already in existence like now, today you think about how many peace organizations are around the world who are practicing and learning nonviolent skills, we have a much better chance of having a nonviolent movement against something like that now than they had back then.

[00:31:53] Presenter: In 2012, then-president of Veterans for Peace, Leah Bolger.

[00:31:58] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): We don’t know what would have happened if we had not entered the war, you know. (We don’t know what would have happened with my family okay.) But how many millions of people died in fire bombings and in nuclear attacks? And how do you justify that? Those were innocent people. So this is the idea that a war, you cannot justify the taking of innocent lives. And Howard Zinn is a very famous quote, ‘There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’

[00:32:30] And no matter how, I mean, I don’t know how you can weigh it and say, “Well, this life is more valuable and this life is less valuable and this one has to be sacrificed to maybe save this one.”

[00:32:44] Questioner: Question, in a different direction, that that’s for peace, the Iraqi wars. The – Iraq vets for peace groups.- Iraq veterans against the war. (Right.) How, what are you saying from the young people about, are they speaking out about the war? Are they not? I mean, it’s a different group of people because they join.

[00:33:05] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): Okay, yeah, that’s good. I’m glad you brought that up. IVAW, Iraq veterans against the war, was kind of born out of veterans for peace at our convention in Boston. And they formed and we were their fiscal sponsor for a number of years and we supported them and they did their conventions with us and they were kind of like our little birth them sort of. And they started out as their membership requirements was anybody who served after 9 /11. And they had a three point plan, was end the war in Iraq, bring those people home, and take care of the– take care of the health care for the soldiers and reparations for the Iraqi victims.

[00:33:51] And that was– it was all about Iraq. Then they– Afghanistan got bigger and bigger. And you know, Aaron Wattata, you know the name Aaron Wattata, right? He was willing to go to Afghanistan. So there was– at the And there was not so much opposition to the Afghanistan War, and there were a lot of people in IVAW who were not against the Afghanistan War. So over the years, they developed a caucus within IVAW, the AVAW, and Afghanistan Veterans against the war.

[00:34:29] And they did come out with a public statements saying that they are opposed to the Afghanistan war. They have been vocal in speaking out and very notably in Chicago. The IVAW soldiers or service members led the march and then they threw back their (medals)—it was very powerful, right, right. So and they just speak out and we still collaborate with them on issues and work with them. (What did they throw back?)

[00:35:02] Their medals, their medals that they had won as a result of their campaigns in Afghanistan and NATO wars. However, IVAW is much more concerned, they don’t have a blanket opposition to all war. They are case by case and now they’re on record as saying they’re against Iraq, they’re against Afghanistan. They have not come out and say we’re against war on Iran or Syria or Pakistan or against drones or, you know, they haven’t done any of that.

[00:35:34] And they are more of a support organization for each other and to have peers that know what it’s like to have been stationed here, or fought here, or done these missions. And they spend a lot of their time helping each other. They’ve got something called Operation Recovery. This is a campaign that they’ve got going on.

[00:36:02] The premise of the campaign is that soldiers have a right to heal, and that they’re upset that soldiers are going on back to back to back deployments, and they have traumatic brain injuries, TBI, and they have PTSD, and they’re on psychotropic drugs, and they’re really not fit for duty, but they’re being sent back into harm’s way.

[00:36:22] Well, to me, the corollary of that is, ‘Well, if it’s your first tour and you’re healthy, then it’s certainly fine to go into war,’ and I don’t buy that. So that’s sort of the difference between they spend a good bit of time trying to get benefits and treat PTSD symptoms. And that’s fine, it’s all good, you know, that’s where they’re focused. VIP has a different focus, and yeah.

[00:36:17] Todd Boyle: Since every single war since World War II has not been self-defense, it’s relatively easy to totally get on board the mission statement as it is to abolish wars. Another crucial point is that the U.S. is the most powerful, actually the only superpower, and if we can abolish war, others are in a position to abolish war. Nobody else is really in that position.

[00:37:11] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): That’s true. Can you all read the quote on my shirt? This is Eisenhower and when I spoke at the NATO summit, the protest, I mentioned this, you know, here’s the guy who was the first supreme Allied commander of NATO, and he said, “I hate war!” You know? (I didn’t catch the whole quote.) Can somebody read it out loud?

[00:38:00] Shirt reader: ‘I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility, and its stupidity.’

[00:38:12] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): Yeah. So he also said, I mean, Eisenhower made some very good good points. In fact, we have a chapter named after Eisenhower. He talked about every gun that is made, every bomb

[00:38:23] President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Cross of Iron speech, April 16, 1953): Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

[00:38:54] Leah Bolger (Veterans for Peace, July 1, 2012): He got that. He was the one who talked about military industrial complex. Here you go. We have nine chapters in Washington and six chapters in Oregon. If there’s not a chapter near you, I bet we could form one.

[00:39:06] So, we really just want your energy, we want you to get you on our mailing list so that you hear about all the good work we’re doing and we can tap into your energies and I really think that collaboratively is the only way we’re going to be successful. We can’t all do it alone and we have to work together.

[00:39:27] Presenter: Rewind with Todd Boyle goes back to 2012 to listen to President Leah Bolger of Veterans for Peace. You can see all of Todd’s three decades of videography at his YouTube channel.

Rewind with Todd Boyle is a production of KEPW News on 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.