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

Category: Veterans For Peace/VVAW

  • The final chapter of IVAW’s Matthis Chiroux

    In regards to Matthis Chiroux, the deserter who had his administrative discharge hearing yesterday in St. Louis, it was the best we could hope for. Chiroux writes as if he scored some huge moral victory, but the board gave him the worst discharge they could award under the circumstances;

    Today, I stood before the Army. I looked a board of officers in the eyes, and I told them I thought they were sending people off to participate in war crimes. And what did they say? Get out of here, Sergeant, and keep your damn G.I. Bill!!!

    Indeed, folks! The Army awarded me a recommendation for a general discharge under honorable conditions from the Individual Ready Reserve for my refusal to deploy to Iraq last summer. This landmark decision means not only am I a free man, I’m free to continue school this fall with the “new” G.I. Bill that I earned while on active duty.

    Though this discharge is identical to the one I refused in exchange for having this hearing, I can now rest easy knowing I never submitted, I never backed down and the Army has heard my story.

    And not just my story, but the stories of those brave veterans at Winter Soldier and those who’ve participated in IVAW’s Warrior Writers’ program. Full texts of both books were submitted to the Army this morning, and I can only imagine the fun they’re having transcribing them into the record.

    I testified, Marjorie Conn, the president of the National Lawyers’ Guild, testified, and my mother Patricia testified as to why my refusal to deploy was quite legitimate and not deserving of attack by the military.

    Though Maj. Laws, the prosecution, did everything he could to keep my legal arguments from the ears of the board (he even prevented me from reading to them from my Constitution calling the document irrelevant), our voices were heard loud and clear by a board of gentlemen who’ve given me a new respect and hope for our nation and servicemembers world-wide.

    The hearing, which lasted around four-and-a-half hours, cemented in my mind that not only is military resistance to our illegal occupations righteous, it is finding new breath amongst troops who are fed up with the status quo.

    This all came after a provocative appearance this morning on the local Fox News Channel (http://www.fox2now.com/ktvi-ap-soldier-on-trial-042109,0,1094348.story) in which I wore a patriotic symbol of distress (an upside-down flag) on my uniform.

    During the hearing, my girlfriend Alexandra among others were present in the board room to offer moral support. Having them there made all the difference as I squared off with the military over human slaughter that we’ve all been forced to bow down to.

    So what does this mean for the military? RESIST!!!! Now’s the time, ladies and gentleman. The flood-gates are open. Your leaders are listening, and more and more, they are agreeing. Resisters are moving away from being the exception, and slowly becoming the norm.

    If I can refuse to go to Iraq, climb monuments, march into presidential debates, lobby congress, face the military, not go to jail and not even loose my G.I. Bill, we just don’t have any excuses anymore! Resistance is rising, and IVAW will stand firm underneath it. My story is now history, and I humbly pass the torch.

    More to follow soon on my testimony at Winter Soldier and the juicy details of my hearing. Now, I’m going to sleep like I haven’t in a year!

    Peace and Solidarity,

    Matthis Chiroux

    Yes, he wore an upside down flag to the Fox interview. I’m pretty sure his scraggly-ass turned it right side up for the board, though – especially since he doesn’t mention the flag in regards to the hearing.

    This is the guy you folks at IVAW have attached yourself to. Now he claims he’s going to testify at Winter Soldier – about what? What has he seen? What has he done even related to actions in this war. He’s already demeaned the job YOU did, because he’s not done anything, he’s said “So what? You didn’t either”.

    Chirouz is out there, as a former member of IVAW told me yesterday, selling the Warrior Writer books with your writings, your experiences, your attempts to deal with what your tours were like, to line his own pockets and buy more pot – and doesn’t have an inkling of the meaning of your words. He’s stealing your valor, your money, your life for his selfish reasons.

    And it’s all because pretty boy Chiroux didn’t want to be uncomfortable. He didn’t “resist”, he bailed.

    Chiroux thinks his GI Bill benefits are a foregone conclusion, but that’s not exactly true. I talked to LTC Quon yesterday, the Personnel Command PAO in St Louis, and she told me that some personnel think because the discharge is described as general under honorable conditions, it is as good as or the same as an honorable discharge. However, a general discharge may preclude participation in the GI Bill, service on veteran’s commissions, and other programs where a fully-honorable discharge is required. It’s up to the DVA whether they’re going to curtail his benefits or not. But I’m pretty sure that to preclude another monkey parade like this one, the Shinseki DVA will continue his benefits.

    Here are some of the past posts on Chiroux;

    Chiroux’ military records. Chiroux real personality by someone who knows him. Chiroux, the blow hard, tries to defend himself and pulls everyone down into the mud with him.

    Chiroux talks like this is only the beginning, but, folks, as soon as he’s tapped the money and the good will from IVAW, he’ll be gone, gone, gone. He got his free education and that’s all he wanted. Unless you folks keep pouring money over him, he’ll leave faster than a Spanish hooker on payday night (if you’ve ever been in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas you’d understand that one).

    One former IVAW member emailed me yesterday;

    think about it he was a combat corespondent, he could have had the world as his oyster and done real reporting from the front and spin it as he could… but he would rather balk at the thought of getting stitched by a AK and coming home in a coffin.. my thought is he could have been a ‘private joker’ if you know what i mean. but he choose to stay home. and in that his cred is shot for me at least.

  • More (good) bad news for IVAW

    Aaron Glantz is a Berkely grad who claims to be a journalist. He co-founded Pacifica Radio and he has written two books.

    When the war against terror began, he decided he’d become a propagandist focused on returning veterans. One book was entitled “How America Lost Iraq”. It was wildly popular for about a minute. The last time I looked for the book, it was selling for a penney on Amazon;

    Well, he went on to write “Winter Soldier; Iraq and Afghanistan” about IVAW members and their stories of the war. TSO reviewed some the book back in January. It’s not in Amazon’s bargain bin yet, but it’s headed there.

    One of the reasons it’s such a poor seller, aside from the ridiculous stories in it, is because Glantz excluded many of the stories that were half-way true. The reason he did that was for strictly political reasons. Some of the IVAW members actually think they’re doing the whole IVAW thing for their country – those aren’t the people Glantz included in the book.

    I get to talk to a few IVAW members in the course of my business and they tell me stuff – one told me that he was upset that Glantz left him right of the book after all this particular member had done for IVAW. In fact, he wasn’t allowed to partake in the bounty of speaking tours and book royalties and he was bitter about it. He was also really pissed off that moocher Matthis Chiroux, who isn’t an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran, was draining the coffers of IVAW while people who needed the money and were real Iraq or Afghanistan veterans were hung out to dry – in some cases they were denied help in securing their earned benefits from the VA by their IVAW/VFP/VVAW mentors.

    Glantz had a litmus test for including stories in his book – a political litmus test. He included only IVAW members who were pledged to the International Socialist Organization – like in the email that TSO published yesterday.

    Well, let’s look at how that’s paying off for Glantz;

    Well, no one ever accused socialists and communists of have much business sense, I suppose.

  • If the Civil War don’t get ’em, the financial malfeasance probably will…

    Well, lookee here, the Great Man was reporting to his masters of VFP, and things don’t look good financially for IVAW. It’s almost as if the money went up in smoke. Like, they are so poor them don’t have a pot to piss in. I hate to be blunt, but doesn’t look like it is rolling in the way it used to eh? In every garden, a few weeds will grow, isn’t that right Matthis?

    By the way, as a helpful hint, you may want to look into why none of you filed lobbying reports after you testified before Congress… Ooops, that one could be a problem if someone filed a complaint, no?

  • Leopard shows his spots

    Remember that old yarn about how IVAW loves America, believes in the Constitutional protection of free speech, how they only do this for the soldiers…..

    Well, reconcile that with this email Camilo Mejia sent to our frenemy Army Sergeant if you can.

    What you have before you, Selena, is a typical GI Resistance publication, Vietnam-era style. Many such publications were the work of civilians who were working alongside GIs, which is the case of GI Special. Tom Barton works with members of VFP, IVAW, VVAW, etc and they reprint articles from papers like the Army Times, and from web sites such as our very own.

    Your opinion of this publication is a reflection of just how out of touch you are with the organization you’re in. Have you ever checked out Vets For Freedom? They loooove the constitution, they’re flag waving patriots, and they want troops to reenlist. I bet they would have a similar opinion to yours about GI Special.

    I’m not going to waste too much on this, Selena, but I really think you should explore other organizations that would better meet your desire to be a hard core patriot. IVAW is really not that place.

    Yours truly,

    cm.

    This is the same man who can’t keep his stories straight between one appearance and his book.

    Isn’t it about time for the DoD to classify these guys as subversive?

  • The unprotected class (Updated)

    When TSO wrote that post the other day about the Department of Homeland Security’s report on “right-wing extremists” I was so pissed I couldn’t see straight. And before TSO identified the “prominent civil rights organization“, I knew which it’d be. But, even the public outcry from veteran groups can’t end this despicable smear. One prominent blogger from the Right whom I respect deeply, and won’t name, whisked the report away under his electronic rug and advised us to ignore it because it didn’t say what we thought it said.

    I started to pen a note to him to explain that he was wrong this time, but I didn’t want to see what that note would have turned into if I’d hit the “send” button. So I’ll just do it here where I have control of the context.
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  • Hippies; put the troops in harm’s way, dammit!

    Someone sent me this article from the Atlantic Free Press in which a stupid hippie tells us about how he became anti-war in the 60s because the media published pictures of the horrors of war. He laments the fact that media doesn’t continue to feed his perverse need for gory photos.

    A key reason my—and millions of other Americans’ — eyes were opened to what the US was up to in Indochina was that the media at that time, at least by 1967, had begun to show Americans the reality of that war. I didn’t have to look to hard to find the photos of napalm victims, or to read about the true nature of the weapons that our forces were using.

    Today, while the internet makes it possible to find similar information about the conflicts in the world in which the US is participating, either as primary combatant or as the chief provider of arms, as in Gaza, one actually has to make a concerted effort to look for them. The corporate media which provide the information that most Americans simply receive passively on the evening news or at breakfast over coffee carefully avoid showing us most of the graphic horror inflicted by our military machine.

    Oh, goodness, he has to make a “concerted effort” – poor child. How can the media do this to a poor hippie – making him actually do something besides smoke pot and scratch his ample ass. But, see, it’s the media’s fault this war has continued – it couldn’t be because we learned our lesson in the 60s that we have to fight our wars to a successful conclusion, could it? Naw. Couldn’t be.

    We may read about wedding parties that are bombed by American forces—something that has happened with some frequency in both Iraq and Afghanistan — where the death toll is tallied in dozens, but we are, as a rule, not provided with photos that would likely show bodies torn apart by anti-personnel bombs—a favored weapon for such attacks on groups of supposed enemy “fighters.” (A giveaway that such weapons are being used is a typically high death count with only a few wounded.)

    Now, the poor thing is a bomb damage assessment expert – even though he successfully avoided the draft when it was his turn to serve. But, he tells us that we’re all a bunch of morons because we need graphic depictions of deaths before we understand that war kills people.

    We ain’t not smart enough to cipher that from them scribble thingies on that there paper stuff – we needs pitchers. Maybe them hippie fellers could buy us some crayons and them books that we kin color in, too.

    Of course, he’s one of those goofy elitists who claims the scales fell from his pro-war eyes the minute he went to college. Well, anyway, this goofball thinks we send soldiers into the fight instead of using drone aircraft;

    Meanwhile, the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan is only likely to increase with the expanding use of Predator drone aircraft which kill from the sky, piloted by pilots based in control trailers in remote places like Nevada.

    To bolster his point he quotes John Grant, the stupid hippie Hun that butts heads with our buddy Skye and her Sheepdog friends in West Chseter, PA. Grant is the president of the local Geezers for Peace chapter;

    Is this who we want to be as citizens of the world, essentially hiding away in our comfy homes afraid of engaging with the world except through remotely piloted drones or controlled visits to Disney World? Considering the long history of warfare, why is this kind of warfare not cowardly? Are drones the answer to not wanting our young men and women brought home in aluminum boxes?

    So who do you want to be, John? The guy who is calling for more of our troops to come home in aluminum boxes so you can feel better about yourself?

    ADDED: Some guy named Thus Spake Ortner at some other blog I’ve heard of from time-to-time wrote about Dave Lindorff, the author of this nimroddery, here and here.

  • Weekend Phony Soldier round-up

    Our friend, CJ Grisham, ran into what looks like another phony soldier, Ed Hart from the Alabama Geezers for Peace. He claims to be a Marine aviator from World War II, but I think he looks a little too young to have served in some of the battles he claimed to CJ. What really sets off alarm bells, though, is the way Hart reacts to discussions about CJ’s combat experience as the same reactions I got from Jim Goodnow (a Coast Guard veteran from 1959-1961 who never served in combat) and Ward Reilly (the Army Ranger who fought the Vietnam War from Augsburg, Germany).

    Here’s a sample of the email exchange I had with Ward Reilly last week;

    I would be the FIRST man out on the streets defending my home and my family, and I have more honor in my asshole than you have in your entire being.

    In the same email that he wrote the above statement about his (shiver) asshole, he demonstrates how he’s superior to me;

    The difference between me and you is that I attack policy, and you attack persons, which shows you are soarly [sic] lacking in character.

    See, he doesn’t know me, but he attacks my honor – but only in regards to policy.

    Speaking of email, Jesse MacBeth and I exchanged emails briefly, until he discovered that I was saying the same things about him on this blog that he was saying about himself in his videos. But until he severed our communications, he wrote (and I use the term “wrote” loosely) this explaining how his DD214 got forged and who was involved with it. Again this is Jesse MacBeth in his own “words”.
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  • Ward Reilly’s DD214

    Yes, Robert Ward Reilly is a great fan of This Ain’t Hell. Yesterday, we began an email exchange about him calling himself a Ranger. So as proof, he sends me this which is supposed to take the place of his DD214;
    Yes, I’m convinced that Ward Reilly is a Ranger now, aren’t you? I have a picture of me standing next to General Patton’s grave – so I guess that makes me a General.

    Supposedly, this should convince me that his unit called themselves Rangers when he was assigned there (when he wasn’t AWOL and a deserter). Now the picture is pretty old (like Reilly himself), but I noticed a flaw in the picture that might be tape or a piece of paper on the sign;

    I don’t know if there is something covering the word “Iron” or not, but it’s enough to make me wonder and the discoloration is just a little too coincidental. The thing I am sure about is that Reilly isn’t an Army Ranger no matter how many pictures he sends me.

    Oh, he also wanted me to know that he brushes his teeth every day – so he’s not as nasty as I think.