[Peace-discuss] We Will Reclaim Our Armed Forces

[Lisa Chason]

We Will Reclaim Our Armed Forces! 
By Stan Goff 
BringThemHomeNow.org 
 
Wednesday 15 December 2004 
 
I want to thank the organizers for this very important defibrillation of
the anti-war and anti-empire work that was put on hold by the recent
elections. I want to thank my fellow speakers and presenters, and I want
to thank everyone who is here for your tireless and stubborn refusal to
confuse setbacks with defeats. 
 
I tend to think of resistance politics these days as if they were a
Charles Dickens novel. There is always a happy ending in the last
chapter, but every chapter leading up to that ending... is sad. 
 
I'm extremely honored to be here with Christian Parenti, whose book
Lockdown America I consider canonical in many ways, and which should be
required reading prior to entrance into any university. I quoted Mr.
Parenti extensively in a long analytical piece I did in From The
Wilderness that attempts to show how utterly connected the incarceration
industry in the United States is with the entire system of late
imperialism, and in particular why these most direct and brutal forms of
social control - including prison rape and sexual humiliation, which are
secretly sanctioned by the state - draw a straight line from a place
like Pelican Bay maximum security to Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. 
 
There is another book I want to recommend, while I'm at it, that is not
about Kabul or Baghdad, but about Southern California. It is written by
radical urban theorist Mike Davis, and it is entitled Ecology of Fear.
In it, Davis describes, among many other things, how the development of
high-end residential housing enclaves in the suburban foothills of LA
spread into the habitats of mountain lions. Now, from time to time,
explains Davis, a mountain lion - described as a rogue, of course - eats
Fluffy the Cocker Spaniel, or encounters and attacks one of the yuppie
joggers, demonstrating how the feline diet can be diversified to include
spandex. 
 
This is extremely interesting, because these encounters are referred to
by the press and by members of these communities as... a mountain lion
problem. 
 
Obviously, the mountain lions are not getting equal time on the nightly
news at these Young Republican settlements, or the mountain lions might
explain that they were there first, and that from where they stand,
there is a people problem. 
 
But the mountain lions don't have equal time, and this phrase - mountain
lion problem - this phrase and this concept stick, because it is
repeated over and over again until it is incorporated effortlessly into
casual conversation and folded into descriptive lists until it becomes a
single signifier. There is no longer a problem between people and
mountain lions. The mountain lions are the problem. 
 
This is how the standpoint of selfish, clueless yuppies is enshrined as
an axiomatic premise that is out of reach of any critique, because we
simply breathe that premise like the air, and like the air, we take it
for granted. 
 
This is one reason we are important to the movement not just against the
war, but the movement to overthrow a system that breeds war, why
veterans and military families and dissident soldiers are so important
in this crucial period. In this period when the old tricks no longer
work, and the depredations of this global system have once again
consumed the very bases of that system - its subordinated people and its
wrecked environment - the essence of that system, its true essence, the
gun and the bomb and the rape and the prison, are being unmasked by the
necessity to use these colonizers' tools openly to preserve power. 
 
George Bush didn't start this war. This war was waiting at the end of a
road that we stepped onto decades ago, and by continuing to walk down
that road we have inevitably encountered what is at its end. How many
Iraqis did Bill Clinton kill? Why did we not want to hear during this
last electoral folly that the anti-Bush candidate selected for us by
Wall Street and the DLC did not promise to end the war, but to expand
it? 
 
The communities of the military are in a unique position - they have a
special standpoint - to say we were there. We were not on CNN. We were
not in the New York Times. We were there when you rained dioxin on us 35
years ago as you killed 3 million Southeast Asians, and we were there in
our family hothouses when we carried the dioxin and the death back into
our living rooms, into our relationships, in to our children who were
the hostages of our pathologies. We weren't in the swimming pool
communities in the LA foothills. We are the mountain lions, and now you
have a veteran problem. Now you have a military family problem. Now you
have an I'm-awake-and-I'm pissed-off-soldier problem. 
 
Only we are not mountain lions, consigned by our own natural limitations
to helplessly watch our own destruction by this system. 
 
We were there! We are there! We have a special capacity and a special
pedagogical responsibility to stop others from taking the air for
granted, because that air is contaminated. It is poisoned by the
criminality at the very genetic core of this whole system, that needs
Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium to enforce its will on those it would
dominate and those who refuse to surrender their own humanity to this
criminality. 
 
Who we call statesmen are often as not thieves. Who we call statesmen
are often as not vandals. Who we call statesmen are often as not mass
murderers, and who better to out them for what they are than those of us
who have been held closest to their criminal hearts in their time of
need. 
 
Our demands have a special force, and so we have a special
responsibility. 
 
The movement demanded that we not invade Afghanistan to kill 4,000
civilians as vengeance for the 2,800 killed on September 11th. The
movement demanded that we not invade Iraq - where our government had
already overseen the destruction of over a million human beings, half of
them not having reached the age of majority... and Iraq has never been
any kind of threat to the United States. 
 
Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out held out in the face
of feint-hearted anti-Bush resistance and never listened to the siren
call of compromise and chauvinism that led many of our allies to tell us
to drop the word NOW from our campaign to Bring Them Home NOW. We were
clear about the system, and we knew that the vandal that destroys your
home is not the right person to decide who will rebuild it. 
 
We stuck to our demand, and time is proving us grimly correct. We were
correct to demand that this criminal class cease and desist. Now the
elections that put a mask of legitimacy on this system are past, and we
have to reiterate that demand. 
 
Now we all know that demands are the glue that holds movements together,
whether or not the powerful meet them. One of our pedagogical tasks in
the next period, I think, is to educate the public about the difference
between a demand and an assertive request. 
 
I already have my post-election bumper stickers to impeach. But I also
know that these little provocations, like that bumper sticker, which is
intended to be provocative, are useful mostly to further polarize our
society - which I think is a good thing, because as long as we stay
polite we never seem get to the point. A Congress of the criminal class
is not going to impeach a fellow criminal, unless a scandal is so out of
control that it threatens the whole structure. 
 
One thing I agree with Christian Parenti on is that I oppose the
criminal justice system as it is, but I think we will need prisons for a
long time. 
 
I say that because while my bumper sticker says impeach, what I really
want to see - for these people who are presiding over yet another
generation of our kids being sent abroad to do their criminal wet work -
what I really want to see is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Colin and Condoleeza I-forgot-who-I-am, Paul Wolfowitz, and
cabinet members old and new... slammed up against a wall, searched as
roughly as an Iraqi detainee, put in handcuffs, and their sorry asses
thrown into a cell at Guantánamo Bay... after we give it back to Cuba. 
 
Our job is not to be conciliatory. We are not diplomats. Our job is not
to comfort the comfortable by reinforcing their denial. Our job is to
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Because we were
there. We know what these people have sent our children to do, and what
they have sent our children to become. 
 
And I'm not whining about that. I'm not going to cry about what was done
to me, because the upside to it is that I'm grateful to the dominant
class for my military career. I'm grateful for my education. I'm
grateful to be a soldier... I'm just not their soldier any more. 
 
On my 19th birthday, I left McCord Air Force Base to begin my
international studies program in northern Bin Dinh Province. My
professors were a Black buck sergeant named Eaves, a professional
con-man named Westmorland, and the courageous and patriotic soldiers of
the NLF and NVA who taught me what it looks like to say NO. I learned
that a person can put one foot in front of the other for a long time. I
learned that mosquito clouds and thirst and sleeping in the mud won't
kill you. I learned to accept my own mortality. I learned that what most
of suburban America thinks is extreme and exceptional hardship is the
daily reality of most of the world... and I began the process of
learning that the comfort of those suburbs comes at a price often paid
by those we never see and whose hardship we cannot comprehend. 
 
What the Bushes and the Rumsfelds have failed to understand about
soldiers, old soldiers and new soldiers, and the families of soldiers
who learn these things from and with us, is that when we learn that
there are different experiences in the world, and when we learn to keep
putting one foot in front of the other, and when we learn that we can
survive extreme hardship, and when we learn to accept our own mortality,
and when we learn to recognize con-men, and when and if we finally learn
that everything they say is a lie, and every mission is vandalism and
murder, then what is left behind is still a soldier, but he or she is
not THEIR soldier any more. 
 
Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter
the cost. 
 
Movements start with those who are not afraid, and they grow with those
who are only a little afraid. The veteran just back from Iraq, and the
veterans of past conflicts, who have snatched their humanity back from
this system are not going to fall for every bullshit story. We are not
going to fall for their appeals to criminality cloaked in patriotism. We
are not going to be intimidated by their with-us-or-with-the-terrorists
rhetoric. 
 
I hope they are listening, and I expect they are. 
 
George and Dick and Don, you are not going to shut up these veterans,
and these families, and these soldiers by shaking your Patriot Act in
our faces. Some of us worked pretty hard and risked everything to fight
for lies. Don't you know that we will fight harder against you now that
we know the truth? 
 
Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter
the cost. 
 
Patriot Act! We are the ones who have the responsibility to teach the
rest that the patriotism of someone defending their home is not the same
as the patriotism deployed to take our children away from home. The
patriotism of the invader is not the same as the patriotism of the
invaded. 
 
We can teach that, because we went then, and we are going to witness
now. 
 
Man, they hate witnesses, don't they? They hate witnesses the way all
criminals do. 
 
And I've got something to say to those soldiers and veterans who are not
with us yet, but who are wandering in the wilderness of post-combat
shock. Witnessing will heal you. PTSD is not the outcome of violence.
PTSD is the recognition that you have been betrayed and that you were
helpless when it happened, because you couldn't do any better or you
didn't know any better. Do people know what the single most common cause
of PTSD in the United States is? 
 
Rape. 
 
Rape victims report that confronting their attackers - and not just in
court where the system tries to rape women again - but confronting one's
attacker with a support group and outing that attacker are highly
therapeutic. It is a way to recapture that lost agency from a former
state of helplessness and standing back up in the world. 
 
For combat veterans, we have a group right here for you, and we will
stand beside you when you out the authors of the crime by describing
what it really looked like. We know that some cling to denial, that some
are broken in body and spirit, that some rage, and that some turn their
anger in on themselves and crawl into a needle or a bottle or the
chamber of a pistol. But there's a way out of that wilderness, and it's
the path of the witness. 
 
Imperialism has staked a claim on our children in uniform, and that's
why we will never relinquish our claim on them. We will never surrender
in the struggle for the souls of this and future generations. Never. 
 
Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter
the cost. 
 
I'm a grandfather now. Those of you who are grandparents know what I
mean when I say, Dick Cheney don't put yourself between me and my
grandbaby and expect me to retreat. 
 
We're not only not going anywhere, we are coming after all of them. The
veterans of this war are already organizing against it. Troops in Iraq
write to us. The whistleblowers are emerging from within the service.
The MFSO family list is growing. The number of conscientious objectors
is growing. The mutinies have already begun. We are going to court with
stop-loss suits, and to defend military refugees in Canada. Soldiers in
theater are setting up blogs that bypass the Centcom censors. There is a
Camilo Mejia or a Mike Hoffman or a Kelly Dougherty in every squad
waiting for us to invite them into the light. 
 
George Bush, we are going to fight you for every last one of them. 
 
Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter
the cost. 
 
To those troops who are not yet ready, we'll be there when you are. We
don't go away. We put one foot in front of the other. We will never
stop. When you decide that its time to see what's on the other side of
all those taboos, its us you'll find there. Veterans and military
families. 
 
I made that Dantean journey you are on for two decades, separated from
the very people who most wanted to confirm my humanity when I thought I
had abandoned it along the road through eight conflict areas as a
servant of this Ivy League mafia. But when I made the leap, they were
there to catch me, and they catch me when I fall to this day. This
movement is your family, and the door to that home will always be open. 
 
If we're not home, look for us in the street. 
 
That's where we're headed now. One foot in front of the other, until we
get where we gotta go, because those troops are OUR armed forces, and we
have to reclaim them no matter the cost. And those people in Iraq are
not our enemies, and they have to reclaim their children no matter the
cost, and we are reclaiming them from the same criminal clique. 
 
Look for us in the street, and don't think we are making requests any
more. 
 
We are going to delegitimate this war and this system. And if that's not
enough, we will disobey. And if disobedience is not enough, we will
disrupt that system. We slept in the mud and did their dirty work, and
we brought their wars back into our homes to be the burdens of our
families. They made us soldiers, so that's how we are going to act. We
are not afraid of poverty. We are not afraid of prison. We are not
afraid of death. So now what are they gonna do? Without our fear, they
have no power, and in movements, those who are not afraid will show
those who are a little afraid the way. 
 
We are not making a request. We are making a demand. 
 
That demand is to let the Iraqis be the architects of their own future,
and bring the troops home now. You want a compromise, turn on Judge
Judy. You want a retreat, go book a cabana in Hawaii. You want a
surrender, go visit Appomattox and read the plaques. 
 
We ain't goin' nowhere. 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Master Sergeant Stan Goff served in the Army Special Forces. He
delivered this speech at a public meeting and speak out in New York City
on December 15, 2004.
 
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