I interviewed three Vermont members of Iraq Veterans Against the War last weekend and wrote an extensive cover story for Seven Days, the alt. weekly in Burlington, VT. The web version (Peace Talks: Three Vermont vets share their (anti) war stories) has audio links, excerpts from a book of IVAW writing, and two chilling video clips from an IVAW reading last Saturday night.
I'm posting this here because I was really haunted by their stories, and I think they deserve a wider audience.
I keep coming back to this quote from Matt Howard, a 25-year-old former Marine:
"I mean, even as we’ve reached this wonderful point now where the majority of Americans are against the war, it’s still not on the forefront of everyone’s waking thoughts. It’s still, Anna Nicole takes precedence over 150 people died in Iraq. You know, for us veterans, that’s all we think about. You can’t get this war off of your mind. You walk around, and see people just going on with their daily lives, and there’s this huge level of inner frustration with that, how nobody gets it. Don’t we realize there’s a war going on?"