Yesterday, the day after Memorial Day, the first Guest Lecture sponsored by the Portland Chapter of the Pacific Green Party took place in the cafeteria of Portland Community College's Rock Creek Campus.
The speaker, Benji Lewis, is a Marine veteran who has served two tours in Iraq, but who refused to report for a third as a matter of conscience. As Benji has said, "My resistance was a conscious decision to cease participation in the continued maintenance and creation of empire."
The Day after Memorial Day
May 27th 2009
by Michael Meo, former Pacific Green Party candidate for U.S.Congress, Member of the PGP's State Co-ordinating Committee, and himself a concientious objector of another war - the Vietnamese War
Yesterday, the day after Memorial Day, the first Guest Lecture sponsored by the Portland Chapter of the Pacific Green Party took place in the cafeteria of Portland Community College's Rock Creek Campus.
The speaker received a public, credible threat to his life.
Benji Lewis, an honorably discharged former Marine, served two terms in Iraq, between 2004 and 2006. He received his discharge in the spring of 2007, but in October of last year Benji was notified of possible call-up and deployment for a third tour by the device of "involuntary assignment as ready reserve" or the so-called "stop loss" orders.
Benji responded to the coercion by the military in two ways: he publicly announced his intention to refuse re-assignment to a war he knew from experience to be criminal, and he set about using his own struggle against the military establishment to help raise public sentiment for ending the war.
He started a public speaking tour, co-sponsored by, among other groups, Veterans for Peace and the Rural Organizing Project which has brought him at least 15 different venues so far.
The engagement at Portland Community College was arranged through the good offices of Courtney Savage and Michael Sonnleitner of the Political Science Department. Professor Sonnleitner, a national delegate of the Pacific Green Party, served as master of ceremonies.
On Memorial Day Benji spoke at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland in tandem with Cindy Sheehan, the national anti-war activist and recent Independent candidate for U.S. Congress. He explained how his life has moved from his growing up an enthusiastic member of a multi-generational career military family to becoming a veteran convinced of the stranglehold of militarism in almost all important aspects of American life.
He dwelt upon the deliberate psychological damage inflicted upon members of the military, in order that they kill upon orders without reflecting upon the act. Studies indicate that approximately one in ten U.S. soldiers in combat during World War One fired their weapons at the enemy, and the recently organized community of psychologists went to work to increase that percentage. As the result of the psychologists work, about half of the soldiers shot at the enemy in World War Two, and over ninety percent do nowadays.
The dehumanizing ordeal of Boot Camp, is imagined as "making a man" out of the recruit. The fact is, boot camp - where Benji found drill instructors forcing their charges to drink water until they vomited, and keeping recruits at attention until they wet their pants - is intended to reduce the personality to a suggestible, ductile drone who won't do anything without orders, and acts as expected to violently assault any indicated target.
Loud rock music surrounds the recruits in training while they watch gory movies, and the same tunes are then piped into troop carriers as as the troops are being brought to combat. Any independent thought about your circumstances generates insult and ridicule; the authorities provide the answers. Veterans lose the ability to articulate, even to their peers, what they are experiencing.
Benji's thesis is that we have lost control of accentuating the capacity to kill others: we engage in constant senseless wars, accept corporate propaganda for even more wars, and destroy the the institutions of our own self-government. When Professor Sonnleitner called for questions from the audience a dramatic illustration of exactly what Benji had been saying took place.
A tall, husky, close-cropped man at the back of the audience shouted, "Lewis, Come here!" Benji identified the universal use of last name without title as one of the ways of dehumanization that the military employs; he did not respond to this bullying address. Professor Sonnleitner brought the microphone to the scowling audience member and asked if he had a question. "Are you through whining?" he asked. "You've been crying for an hour now about what you are expected to do." Advancing to within a foot of Benji Lewis, and the man condemned Benji for being a disgrace to the Marine Corps. The angry man shook with anger as he yelled. The response from Benji was inaudible to me. Professor Sonnleitner calmed the tension by his quiet demeanor and a constant expression of appreciation, inconceivable to me under the circumstances, for the questioner's participation.
"You watch what you're doing, because I have some friends who just might kill you!" the man loudly concluded.
"I'd like to thank you very much for your participation," replied Professor Sonnleitner in a totally unruffled tone, as if an undergraduate had offered an opinion on a metaphor in a poem. His - and Benji's - refusal to enter into an exchange of hostility with the man had its effect; he turned and left.
The campus police were notified. The question period continued, haltingly. The solution to our difficulties with militarism is not all that evident, but the extent of the problem certainly is.