This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War

  • Kokesh being Kokesh

    After his last video in which he took up for gun owners, I sent Adam Kokesh an email and complimented him. But then he goes out makes this ideo in which he tries to get a Sergeant First Class (not a Staff Sergeant, Adam) at work during the inauguration to admit that he’s a pawn in the great military industrial complex. The Sergeant First Class Staff Sergeant does the best he can with the situation and Kokesh keeps pushing it and then concludes that the troops will come and take our guns without asking questions.

    Yeah, I feel uncomfortable for the young sergeant just doing his job and being harangued by Kokesh. Of course he has a mind of his own and will question orders that he thinks are unconstitutional and he’s not going to make stupid statements on camera.

    Also notice that Kokesh starts trying to sell Oathkeepers to the young sergeant. That’s why I don’t like Oathkeepers – they supported Kokesh’s candidacy in his Congressional race two years ago. We don’t need a club to obey the oath of service. I noticed that he mentions his membership in Oathkeepers, but not IVAW.

    Kokesh is back to calling himself a sergeant again. He was discharged as a corporal after he was busted from sergeant for smuggling a pistol back from Iraq.

    Thanks to JP for the link.

  • Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations urge troops to refuse deployment

    KOMO News reports that some derelicts in Washington State are urging deploying troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord to ignore their deployment orders. they call themselves Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations. I’d never heard of them before, and looking for their presence online tells me why. They’re a coalition of organizations I’d never heard of before, well, except the 555th Parachute Infantry Association “Triple Nickle” which was an association of the Black paratroopers of WWII. The last I knew, they were pretty much defunct because of membership numbers or the lack thereof. It was a small group to begin with and time has taken a toll on membership around the country. I know that the Triplenickel in the DC area had folded themselves into the 82 Airborne Division Association a few years back.

    In the article, they mention one member of the VCO, Gerry Condon.

    Army veterans say going for conscientious objector status is a better way.

    “There are actually some alternatives. They’re not necessarily easy ones; there’s no guarantees,” said Vietnam war resister Gerry Condon.

    Condon was a special forces medic in the Vietnam era who fled the U.S.

    Of course he was a special forces medic. Here’s his bio from another website where he’s advocating for Brianna Manning;

    In 1968, Gerry Condon refused Army orders to deploy to Vietnam, for which he was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison and a Dishonorable Discharge. But Gerry was able to escape from Fort Bragg, North Carolina and leave the U.S. For six years he lived in Sweden and Canada, where he organized against the war and for amnesty for all war resisters. Gerry is an active member of Veterans For Peace and co-chair of its GI Resistance Working Group. He serves on the steering committee of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

    He was probably a medic in the 82d, because 1968 was the year that the Golden Brigade deployed to Vietnam, but being “special” sounds cooler, I suppose. So he never really went to Vietnam, but tossing that in makes him sound more authoritative on the subject.

    The article also mentions Mike Prysner who we’ve known for years here.

    “We signed up to serve our country, but we didn’t sign up to have our lives thrown away in a political chess game,” Prysner said.

    We? Prysner must have a mouse in his pocket because he had his life in danger. he wears his old uniform every chance he gets so we know he has no CAB (and we have his records at the link) and it’s a pretty good bet that he never left the wire as a radar operator. He founded ANSWER’s March Forward, their veterans arm, because Prysner didn’t think IVAW was radical enough. He also tried to run for the board of directors at IVAW in a failed attempted coup to turn the organization more radical.

    So that “Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations” is nothing more than the usual suspects under a different banner.

    Thanks to Kateser and CB for the link.

  • “F*** the troops” Kokesh interviews Raub

    You may remember that we discussed Brandon Raub and the fact that he was tossed into a hospital, supposedly for his Facebook posts. Personally, I think there’s more to this than what’s been in the press. According to Raub, in an interview in Business Insider;

    “They were concerned about me calling for the arrest of government officials.”

    Yeah, I really don’t believe that because all of Veterans For Peace, Code Pink and most of IVAW would be locked up if that were the case. According to an FBI Richmond spokeswoman;

    “We went out to interview him because of complaints that our office had received about people coming across his posts and perceiving them as threatening so our office along with Chesterfield County Police Department on Thursday…”

    I think someone was disturbed by more than his Facebook posts, and the FBI wasn’t trolling his FB page – it was part of their investigation. What I saw on his FB page was a bit twisted, but nothing worth getting thrown in the hospital.

    Anyway, if I was trying to convince everyone that I’m not crazy, Adam Kokesh is probably the last person I’d talk to. You know the Adam Kokesh who was leading a “F*** the Troops” campaign a scant few weeks ago. But Old Trooper sent us this video of Adam interviewing Raub by phone. It’s interesting, to me, that “F*** the Troops” Kokesh is wearing his IVAW T-shirt again. Anyway, here’s the interview.

    Again, all we’re hearing is Raub’s side of the story. It’s also interesting that the Rutherford Institute, the same folks who led charge against the Stolen Valor Act in the 9th Circuit appeal of Xavier Alvarez are taking up the mantle for Raub.

    This will shake out one of two ways; 1) Raub did some nutty shit that frightened someone somewhere, or 2) The SPLC and DHS has convinced the local PDs that veterans are really a bunch of nuts who should all be locked up.

    I’m betting on #1.

  • Abdo gets life

    Naser Abdo, the ambitious fellow who plotted to bomb and then shoot up a restaurant in Killeen, Texas, outside the gates of Fort Hood has been sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge, according to the Associate Press.

    Let’s recap, shall we; Abdo was AWOL from Fort Campbell after winning conscientious objector status from the Army, before child porn was found on his computer. His lawyer was James Branum, famous around these parts for defending countless deserters and AWOL soldiers at Fort Hood. After going AWOL himself, Abdo shows up in his lawyer’s stomping grounds, in the vicinity of “Under the Hood” an IVAW-sponsored coffee house where much of the local anti-war crowd gathered to plot the voicing of their displeasure with the wars. And where James Branum recruited clients for his law practice.

    Abdo had no visible means of support, yet he was living in a motel in Killeen and he was able to buy guns, ammunition and components for his bombs, not to mention military clothing he needed to execute his plot and the things like food and stuff.

    On the day Abdo was arrested, IVAW and James Branum went absolutely silent. Within a few weeks, Branum was out of the military lawyer thing and he’s gone back to Oklahoma to fail at practicing his trade there.

    We had IVAW members and some of their former fans from the Killeen area emailing us asking about how they could get in touch with the FBI in the hours following Abdo’s arrest. I don’t know how any of that turned out, and we’ll probably never know. But we can guess what all of that drama was about.

    Maybe someday Jason Abdo will tell us about it. I’d write his book for him.

  • UPDATED: A reply from the Rag Blog.

    A few days ago I asked for your experiences from the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War. Many of you responded about your personal experiences in response to the accusations that these never happened. A few days ago the main editor responded in the article.

    I was heavily involved in the movement against the War in Vietnam from its earliest days through its duration — working primarily in Texas, but also in Northern California and New York. I helped organize and attended dozens of demonstrations and public events, including major national actions like the massive March on the Pentagon.

    I rarely saw GIs in any way disrespected and never saw a single instance of physical abuse. It was a highly-charged time and certainly there were some idiots out there, but to suggest that there was widespread disrespect towards GIs from within the peace movement is patently absurd.

    The Vietnam War became extremely unpopular among the general populace and also within the military itself. There was major opposition — and active resistance — among soldiers in Vietnam.

    GIs and returning vets were at the heart of the peace movement and we considered GIs — who were overwhelmingly draftees and many of whom were our childhood friends — to be our brothers and sisters, and to be victims of the system. They were certainly not the enemy.

    This is a terribly destructive myth and a disgraceful — and highly political — reinvention of history.

    How in the world do you expect us to believe that returning veterans were welcomed by the anti-war groups when people in the current anti-war generations have made it vary vocal to the contrary? Or do you mean the veterans that say want you want them to say?

    But the main point is that how can you say that the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War was a friend to US Veterans when the the current one has been anything but?


    Update:     More comments are coming in.

    In the 47 years I have been back from that war, I have yet to find a veteran who can speak first-hand about being spat on or any of the other right wing lies about how the antiwar movement treated veterans. I am sure “Masterspork,” who probably never got closer to combat (assuming he actually ever served) than the “warehouse wars” in Cam Ranh Bay over how many cartons of cigarettes were going to be “lost” for later sale on the black market, can’t tell any first-hand accounts either.

    Yea, because I never deployed for 14 months and went on over at least 164 missions in that time.

    No one can account for every hippie walking through an airport. But it was the consistent policy of every antiwar group to reach out to soldiers. Why else did we found the Oleo Strutt and a dozen other GI coffee houses?

    Yea like Under the Hood? The place where several people used as a place to meet before and after trying to stop the #rd ACR from deploying?Telling them they were going to “Die like Shit”?

    But the best one of all.

    As a Vietnam War veteran who volunteered and served honorably, I feel I was very naive when I volunteered, but slowly realized that I had been lied to and duped. When I returned I was never accosted or abused by anyone, especially not the students at the University of Texas, or while I traveled; and I never observed this happening to any Vietnam Vet. As to those who say they did, well I just do not believe it. The book mentioned above (The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York University Press, 1998) researched and documented the news reports and magazines of the time and never found a report of spitting or calling “Baby Killer.” That line by Unknown (Jul 21, 2012) above, “They shouted “baby killer” and spit on me” is right out of the movie “Rambo: First Blood in 1982 ” where Sylvester Stallone delivers a monologue saying, “”It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you and I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and I see maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting, calling me baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap!” ” The only true part of that is the, “It wasn’t my war.”

    UPDATE x2

    Your statements are absolutely false. There were many of the lying, so called “Swift Boaters for Truth [sic]” and others who made the statements you did. For this reason VVAW had a strict rule that when we participated in protests we were to always carry our DD214s to prove our service in Vietnam. To this day I still carry a copy of my DD214 and my orders to report to the 5th Special Forces Group when I protest another war. When the liars, Scott Swett, Jerome Corsi, Larry Bailey, and B. G. Burkett, made those claims to me at the 5th Triennial Vietnam Symposium at The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, I pulled out my DD214 Burkett waved me off and said, “That doesn’t mean anything, those can be changed.” You can view and hear the SwiftBoat Liars talks here. Note at 1:12:44 Larry Bailey’s response to me when he asked for questions:

    Then you can watch the VVAW responses here:

    As to your claim, “Anti-War groups were very violent and intolerant of anyone in a military hair cut” you are painting all those who protested the Vietnam mess with the same brush. There were those who, after years of protest, became angry and may have been violent. However, most of it was overblown. And the SwiftBoat Liars tried to say that VVAW and John Kerry were violent, yet the very FBI records that the SwiftBoaters refer to stated very clearly: “The delegations from New England and the East Coast proposed activities a week before Christmas and advocated non-violent civil disobedience.” The VVAW New England and the East Coast were Kerry’s delegations to the VVAW Steering Committee, yet the SwiftBoating Liars used the violent claim against Kerry in the 2004 election, all LIES!

    It was the Texas VVAW who helped the GIs in the Oleo Strut Coffee House in Killeen. We were not “intolerant of anyone in a military hair cut,” we were there to help and support them. If you felt that way, I suspect it was your own projection that made you feel that way, because it did not come from the VVAW.

    Peace, Terry J. DuBose, 1st Lt. US Regular Army, Airborne, Vietnam 1967-68; Texas VVAW State Coordinator & National Steering Committee, 1970-1972.

  • Asking for your experences with the the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War.

    I recently read one of the blogs that I avoid for this reason. This time the Rag Blog is writing about the insults and saliva that the Troops faced when they came back home. In this post they claim that it was all just a myth that never happened. That all of it was done by the media to discredit the anti-war movement.

    In addition the government and its “partners” will be distributing educational materials about the war, according to the Pentagon, but it is unlikely that the Vietnamese side of the story or that of the multitude of war resisters in the U.S., civilian and military, will receive favorable attention. Many facts, including the origins of the war will undoubtedly be changed to conform to the commemoration’s main goal of minimizing Washington’s defeat and maximizing the heroism and loyalty of the troops.

    Granted this is nothing new but this is the sentence that made me post about this.

    Thanks for this. It’s always amazed me that people would claim returning Viet Nam vets were badly-treated in the U.S. Hell, these guys were our friends; we all knew people who went over because they personally saw no alternative. We were on their side and we welcomed them home.

    Know who’s been making this shit up? The guys who backed the war but evaded service –– and who do nothing for veterans even now: the chickenhawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld and the AWOL Bush

    So if you have a experience with the anti-war movement feel free to head on over there and tell them your story.

  • Millard plays the expert on war again.

    Well looks like our good buddy Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard is being used as a expert voice into war. It seems that he is the main source about Iraq in the article called War Is Betrayal Persistent Myths of Combat.

    He relates the story of a traffic-control mission gone awry when an eighteen-year-old soldier made a bad decision. He was sitting atop an armored Humvee monitoring a checkpoint. An Iraqi car approached, and the soldier, fearing it might be carrying a suicide bomber, pressed the butterfly trigger on his .50 caliber machine gun. He put two hundred rounds into the car in less than a minute, killing a mother, a father, a four-year-old boy, and a three-year-old girl.

    “They briefed this to the general,” Millard says. “They briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says: ‘If these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’

    Yea mean while every person who has have used or familiar with the M2 and the rate of fire knows the errors in this, the author gets sucked into it.

    Those who return to speak this truth, like Goodell or Millard, are our contemporary prophets. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. The words these prophets speak are painful.

    Also considering that a case where a entire car being shot up would be in EVERY media outlet known to man that you think that it could be covered up? But it has more claims like this by him.

    The briefing that Millard and his superiors received after the checkpoint killing was one of many. Sergeant Perry Jeffries, who served in the Fourth Infantry Division in Iraq after being called out of retirement, said the killing of Iraqi civilians at checkpoints was routine.

    “Alpha troop and Balad Ruz shot somebody at least once,” he says, referring to a troop detachment and to the soldiers manning a checkpoint in a small Diyala Province village. “Somebody else on what we called the Burning Oil Checkpoint, they shot somebody with a .50 cal, shot a guy once, and then several times.”

    Killing becomes a job. You do it. Sometimes it unnerves you. But the demons usually don’t hit until you come home, when you are lying alone in bed and you don’t dare to tell your wife or your girlfriend what you have become, what you saw, what you did, why you are drinking yourself into a stupor, why you so desperately want to forget your dreams.

    But of course he is the good guy in all of this.

    Millard’s thirteen months in Iraq turned him into a passionate antiwar activist. He is the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and served as its president for three years. He has taken part in numerous antiwar demonstrations around the country, was one of the organizers of the Winter Soldier hearings, returned to Iraq on a humanitarian aid mission in 2011, and now directs a homeless veterans initiative.

    But the best line is this one.

    If veterans speak of terrible wounds, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax.

    Yea no. There were some other names that I did not recall were Jessica Goodell. Anyone else know who she is?

    Jessica Goodell came to understand that torment only too well, as she relates in her 2011 memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. Goodell wasn’t poor. She grew up in a middle-class home near Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked at home. But her “universe fractured” when she was sixteen and her parents divorced. She could barely continue “the motions of everyday existence.” She was accepted at Ithaca College her senior year, but just before graduation a uniformed Marine came to her high school. He told her he had come to find “tough men.”

  • Millard Time (Continued)

    Looks like it’s time for a quick update on that studly young former NY ARNG soldier, Geoffrey “TBI” Millard.

    A third party sent me a copy of a Millard FOIA  they recently received from NPRC.  Recently, as in “less than a week ago”.  It’s linked here.   I redacted the source’s name/address info and the name of the NPRC records tech who processed the FOIA.  Nothing else was omitted.

    For comparison, Millard’s 2008 FOIA is found here, as is Millard’s purported but suspect 2005 DD214 and photos of Millard publicly wearing the awards listed on that suspect DD214.  Plus photos of Millard also wearing some items not listed on that suspect DD214, like a CIB.

    So let’s compare these old documents with the one from last week.

    What they show:  both the new and 2008 FOIAs say Millard has the National Defense Service Medal , has one (1) Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal, and the Army Service Ribbon.  Both FOIAs show he was discharged as a Specialist.  Both show the same dates of service – 14 May 1998 to 13 May 2007 – in the Army National Guard.  And both show Initial Active Duty for Training (IADT) from October 1998 to February 1999.

    What they don’t show:  neither FOIA shows Millard having any mobilizations or time spent overseas (the only assignment shown outside the state of New York is his IADT in Fort Leonard Wood, MO).  Neither FOIA shows him having any Meritorious Service Medals, let alone 3.  Neither FOIA shows Millard having an Army Commendation Medal.  Neither FOIA shows Millard having an Army Achievement Medal, much less 3. The FOIAs also don’t show Millard having the Good Conduct Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal,  Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terror Service Medal, Humanitarian Service Medal, or Armed Forces Reserve Medal.   And they also don’t show him having a Combat Infantry Badge or an Army Reserve Components Overseas Training Ribbon, either.

    In fact, both of Millard’s FOIAs from NPRC look remarkably like those of a “slick-sleeve” Army National Guardsman who enlisted, went to IADT, then did nothing besides show up for drill and annual training on and off for 8 years.  They look like the FOIAs of someone who was never mobilized, never served on extended Federal active duty after IADT, never deployed to combat, never got a personal decoration other than one ARCAM, and screwed up enough along the way that they failed to receive what should have been an automatic second ARCAM.  (The latter is essentially the equivalent of the Good Conduct Medal for the Army’s Selected Reserve).

    In contrast, Millard’s purported 2005 DD214 shows him as a Sergeant, not a Specialist, who was mobilized and who served overseas in “Kuwait/Iraq”.  And it lists all of the above medals except for the Humanitarian Service Medal.  (It also does not list a CIB.)   That’s . . . odd.  Because that DD214 was purportedly “issued” over 6 1/2  years ago.  You’d think it should be consistent with his records on file at NPRC.

    Then again, we already know there are numerous inconsistencies in Millard’s purported 2005 DD214.

    In fact, it’s now over 5 years since Millard was discharged from the ARNG.  He’s completed all  8 years of his military obligation.  I’m pretty sure the NY ARNG should have retired his personnel records by now.  So I find it a bit . . . curious that NPRC wouldn’t have copies of all of Millard’s military records by now.  That’s particularly true concerning those records relating to Federal active duty because of mobilization and service in Iraq in 2004-2005.

    A FOIA on Millard is currently on its way to the New York Army National Guard.  Because something, somewhere, just ain’t quite right here.