Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

A poll.

Three articles in the fall, 2006 VVAW Veteran supporting in-service Iraq War resisters.

VVAW Supports All the Troops
As veterans who have experienced an illegal and immoral war, there is little doubt among members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War that the war in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Orders to prosecute that war are therefore illegal and immoral.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice requires all members of the military to refuse illegal orders.

Nevertheless, VVAW is fairly sure that our brothers and sisters who refuse those orders will be convicted and will face extensive, strict punishment.

As former members of the military, we understand the courage it takes to face "military justice" after defying orders. We also understand that these cases may carry more-than-average risk, since they have high profiles and political ramifications.

VVAW respects the courage of the many service members who have refused deployment and thanks those who have exposed the atrocities of this war. We hope their sacrifices will illuminate the true character of the war and help to bring a swift end to this shameful chapter of our history.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War salutes all those in uniform who decide to stand by their principles and follow their consciences. We appreciate their gallant actions.

Standing With Military War Resisters

Statement on Behalf of Lt. Ehren Watada

pretty much all of the above.

hence the need for a new paradigm.

the one i grew up with, you know, just past the plastic green toy soldier grunts and new respectable merchants of widespread death (for a cause) on the TV is getting a little sleepy by now. and we all need our sleep at some point. tomorrow might be different, though not really, not without that paradigm thing.

I think they are mostly young
I think they are mostly from small towns and the inner cities
I think most of them are just young americans trying to make lives for themselves in a country that eats its young. A lot of them were week end warriors, national guardsman who thought they were going to pick up a little extra money on the weekends, maybe get some help with college tuition. Help out in natural diasasters like Katrina.

This article below is old about two years and I don't know if the facts are facts or propaganda, but I have a hunch it is true, still true, all true.


Paste
Weekend Edition
December 11 / 12, 2004


Which Side Are You On?
The Horrible Toll on US Troops
By SHARON SMITH

Last June, Iraq veteran Jeffrey Lucey went into the basement of his family's Massachusetts home and hung himself. The 23-year-old Marine was subsumed with guilt after killing two unarmed Iraqi soldiers last year.

He told his sister he looked the men in the eyes before closing his own eyes and pulling the trigger. He threw the two dead soldiers' dog tags at her and shouted, "Don't you understand? Your brother is a murderer!"

The Pentagon does not track suicides among returning soldiers, but has already coldly calculated that a flood of Iraq veterans who survive the war will be fighting its ghastly memories for the rest of their lives, and many will lose the battle.

The Army News Service reported in March, "Soldiers indicated their most troubling experiences in combat came from seeing dead bodies (67 percent), being shot at (63 percent), being attacked or ambushed (61 percent) and knowing someone who was killed or seriously wounded (59 percent)." Roughly 90 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq have been involved in a firefight, and already 20 percent of Iraq veterans seeking Veterans Administration (VA) care need mental health treatment.

As in Vietnam, the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a product of the character of the war, in which U.S. soldiers are under orders to terrorize an entire population, fighting a growing and well-organized resistance.

Anticipating a surge in PTSD, the VA announced that it will place a psychiatrist or psychologist on staff full-time at all its 856 outpatient clinics, revitalize substance abuse treatment programs and provide 10,000 spaces for homeless veterans across the country. This will undoubtedly prove grossly inadequate to treat what the VA predicts will be an "epidemic" of PTSD among active-duty combat troops (average age: 19) in coming years.

National Guard troops and reservists--who make up 40 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq--are offered no organized mental health programs. The U.S. government is already turning its back on returning troops.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, military mom Teri Wills Allison recently described a returning soldier who "routinely has flashbacks in which he smells burning flesh...seeing people's heads squashed like frogs in the middle of the road, or dead and dying women and children, burned, bleeding and dismembered." But "nstead of getting treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, he has just received a 'less than honorable' discharge from the Army. The rest of his unit redeploys to Iraq in February."

PTSD is also associated with family violence. Yet one soldier's wife told the New Yorker she was advised before her husband's return, "'Don't call us unless your husband is waking you up in the middle of the night with a knife at your throat...He'll have flashbacks. It's normal.'"

Cpl. Travis Friedrichsen, who returned from Iraq in September, soon began to shake uncontrollably while sitting in bed, recalling a bomb that exploded just feet away. Friedrichsen, age 21 and married, now has trouble controlling his temper, "exploding into tirades that he says have gone on for an entire weekend," according to the Chicago Tribune.
Those who equate "supporting our troops" with supporting the war should think again. Shortly before he died in Iraq last month, 28-year-old Marine Staff Sgt. Russell Slay wrote a farewell letter to his family. He told his 5-year-old son to "stay away from the military. I mean it."

According to the Army News Service Survey in March, fully 72 percent of the soldiers said their unit morale was low. In September, a Marine infantryman put it more bluntly to the Christian Science Monitor, "We shouldn't be here. There was no reason for invading this country in the first place...I don't enjoy killing women and children. It's not my thing."

Supporting our troops should mean supporting Veterans for Peace, whose statement of purpose reads, "We know the consequences of American foreign policy because once, at a time in our lives, so many of us carried it out. We find it sad that war seems so delightful, so often to those who have no knowledge of it."

Sharon Smith writes for the Socialist Worker.





WWW http://www.counterpunch.org

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/03/Persp ... easo.shtml

in today's sunday perspective st pete times
Special to the Times
Soldiers of all seasons
As the war in Iraq passes another milestone, it's up to veterans of this war and others to open a discussion on when and why and whether we should fight, and what it means to come home.
By KATHLEEN OCHSHORN
Published December 3, 2006,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

she quotes an absurdity by pres dumbass

So what lessons are there to learn?

When President Bush landed in Vietnam last month, he made a mind-boggling comparison between the wars, suggesting our long haul in Vietnam had somehow contributed to that county's eventual success and stability.

i thought we left Vietnam scarred, defoliated, wounded, with eastern Cambodia carpet-bombed beyond recognition. That was my impression after a year there flying cargo planes. It's an absurdity. He uses doublethink inside his own head, something he evidently learned from Rumsfield.


she also goes on to talk about the veterens day activities with the 2 anti-war films shown, previously discussed in http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8604
leters to the editor we had written

Two films about war were shown on Veterans Day at Studio@620 in St. Petersburg, sponsored by WMNF Community Radio and Veterans for Peace. Both films present the disturbing views of returning veterans. The first was the rereleased 1972 documentary Winter Soldier about the 1971 gathering of Vietnam veterans in Detroit. Gainesville antiwar activist and Vietnam veteran Scott Camil, who is prominently featured in the film, was on hand to lead a discussion with the audience, which included veterans of Vietnam and Korea and longtime peace activists. The second film, The Ground Truth, dealt with resistance to the war in Iraq among more recent veterans.

Camil was once a gung-ho Marine who served two tours in Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts. He now spends time counseling veterans on a GI rights hotline and going into schools to educate students about the consequences of war.

Veterans loyal to each other

The films evoke the loyalty veterans felt toward each other but also their pain and confusion about their service in the wars they have come to reject.

Winter Soldier is a famous though seldom screened film about a public inquiry into U.S. official conduct in Vietnam. It took place one month after revelations of the My Lai massacre. More than 125 soldiers took part, testifying about standard operating procedures in their units, including atrocities against civilians and routine destruction of whole villages.

The title of the film and the inquiry takes its name from a quote by Thomas Paine: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Paine was urging commitment to the American Revolution and the glorious triumph he envisioned. But these winter soldiers define their patriotism by their courage to question their war.

Pain, guilt and outrage characterize the testimony of the soldiers who stood up in 1971 to relate their Vietnam experience. In a landscape where the enemy is seldom identified, soon loyalty is only to close buddies. Many of these winter soldiers went on to form Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

In the second film, Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth, released this year, veterans of the Iraq war are interviewed about their experiences. The parallels between the conflicts, the agony and horror experienced, were especially evident when we watched these two films back to back.

Like The Ground Truth, a new book Mission Rejected: U.S Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq by Peter Laufer, profiles a recent crop of winter soldiers who are speaking out. But some Vietnam vets have been making these connections all along. In the winter of 2004, I spoke to a small band of Vietnam veterans who were waving flags on Tampa's Bayshore Boulevard, a few blocks south of the Bayshore Patriots at Bay to Bay.

These vets also supported the troops but some opposed the war. As Scott Camil said at the film viewing, "To see my country doing the same thing to my children's generation shows we didn't learn anything. It's like kicking dirt on the Wall."

vietnam 1970-71 blood and arvn on my cargo plane

as for the south vietnamese troop and for the afro-american grunt, i would not easily describe them as willfully ignorant, altho they and i were agents of american imperialism, yes, inheritors of the french empire and the world wars.

i am certain neither of them, if still alive, is unchanged by the experience.
one hopes for transformation and sanity above all.
yeah dealing with ptsd
unresolved
bullshit
alienation

i used the above photo to make a drawing that i submitted for design for a pamphlet for the
st pete vet center, way back in about 1990,



welcome home

was gonna try a nyingma buddhist meditation group i found out is in gulfport, 1 1/2 miles away, monday nights
healing meditations,
but i got stoned
stepson is the doctor
the joke's not over

I think they are mostly young
I think they are mostly from small towns and the inner cities
I think most of them are just young americans trying to make lives for themselves in a country that eats its young. A lot of them were week end warriors, national guardsman who thought they were going to pick up a little extra money on the weekends, maybe get some help with college tuition. Help out in natural diasasters like Katrina.

where is jimmy carter when we need him?

Anticipating a surge in PTSD, the VA announced that it will place a psychiatrist or psychologist on staff full-time at all its 856 outpatient clinics, revitalize substance abuse treatment programs and provide 10,000 spaces for homeless veterans across the country. This will undoubtedly prove grossly inadequate to treat what the VA predicts will be an "epidemic" of PTSD among active-duty combat troops (average age: 19) in coming years.

National Guard troops and reservists--who make up 40 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq--are offered no organized mental health programs. The U.S. government is already turning its back on returning troops.

one advantage they do have is the unit deployments
i guess
mebbe it don't help much when yer stuck at the butt end of a bad deal.
But the VA and vet centers are available to all of them, at least for the shrinks,
(i don't believe that last statement.)
the intensity is there
and how is it justified within the psyche?
that's why the bewilderment
cracks in the cosmic egg
we are wired to be suckers
then wake up too late

who's not voting?

Still thinking.
Before I vote I would like to know if there will be a paper ballot to verify the results of my vote. I am not sure I trust electronic polls.

keith olbermann don't vote
louis black does
he says, "ya gotta vote! even if,,,,,"
ya know what.

the best we can hope for on a national level is an absurd coalition
but not so tragic as what we have now in the wart haus
thank gawd for guys like senator elect webb
no bullshit

I could google jim but i am too tired
what I been hearing and only from second hand sources is that the guard troops get nothing as far as counselling for ptsd, and the marines are getting not much. I read a woman say she called the local va and they told her unless you wake up with your husband holding a knife to your throat don't call us, twenty two year old marine hung himself because he was haunted by the two unarmed men he shot.

they called him a sissy soldier and gave him a less than honorable discharge

listen I am just quoting all this from a geezer memory of what I read. You know more about it than I do. I hope I am wrong. I read, listen, and watch a lot of news everyday. I need to start taking notes.

I been reading Fiasco, interesting. A chapter called The Silence of The Lambs. It is about congress and the questions they did not ask. Boxer, Pelosi, Lincoln Chaffee (republican defeated in last election) and a few others were asking, they thought it was a snow job, sounded peculiar, again quoting from memory. Kerry a better man than me even if he is a boob. Feinstein and hillary are twats in my book. Sure they are good senators but they let us down.

e-dog I think your poll is bull shit, nothing personal.

I will put a link here for Fiasco asap

sorry about the emoticon e-dog



It is a Hobson's choice to me, they are all of the above and none.

"It's a buck dancer's choice my friend...
what I want to know is are you kind?"

here a the link to Fiasco.

Amazon.com: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: Books ...Amazon.com: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: Books: Thomas E. Ricks by Thomas E. Ricks.
http://www.amazon.com/Fiasco-American-M ... 159420103X - 175k - Dec 4, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.amazon.com ]

jimbo posted

the VA announced

There it is in a nutshell jimbo
The va announced,
but are they doing it?
not what I been reading.

Announcements are cheap.

I don't think I got to vote
bullshit not very eloquent
I suppose I could have said it better

e-dog thinks I am some kind of turd

he talks about me in the third person like I ain't here.
thats okay
he is intersesting
we have this much in common
we were both sorry to see perezoso go.

yes Webb sounds like the real deal from what I have read.

e_dog wrote:who's not voting?

i voted for 'all of the above', did i not?

I suppose that was my point.
All of the above. And then some.

"Human behavior is over determined." Freud.