Winter Soldier Read Free Page A

famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry concluded, “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be—and these are his words—‘the first president to lose a war.’ We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”3
    Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hoped that Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan would play a similarly historic role. So far, however, they’ve run up against indifference at high levels of Congress and the corporate media. Though the March 2008 gathering was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was held in Silver Spring, Maryland, less than ten miles from the White House, the personal testimony of hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans garnered scant coverage. The Washington Post buried an article on Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan in the Metro section. The New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS ignored it completely.
    Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan did garner interest from the foreign press and military publications including Stars and Stripes and Army Times. Winter Soldier also caught the eyes of members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and on May 15, 2008, the caucus invited nine veterans to speak on Capitol Hill. “We now have an opportunity to hear not from the military’s top brass but directly from you,” Caucus Co-chair Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of California said, “the very soldiers who put your lives on the line to carry out this president’s failed policies.”
    Again, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets passed on covering the Progressive Caucus forum on Winter Soldier, and, as of this writing, no standing committee of the House or Senate has extended an invitation to IVAW like the one extended to John Kerry in 1971 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its prestigious chair, William Fulbright.
    Members of IVAW find these developments upsetting but not discouraging. Many say it’s more important to organize within the ranks of the military than inside the halls of Congress. Many observers believe the army is already close to its breaking point. In February 2008, General George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said, “The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance.”4
    Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that cutting the time soldiers spend in combat is an integral part of reducing the stress on the force. In 2007, Senate Republicans and President George W. Bush sabotaged Democratic attempts to ensure troops as much rest time at home as they’d spent on their most recent tour overseas. Cycling troops through three or four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the only way Bush has been able to maintain a force of more than 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Many of IVAW’s most active members are veterans who served one tour in Iraq and then filed for conscientious-objector status or went AWOL to avoid a second deployment.
    “We don’t need to rely on the mainstream media,” said Aaron Hughes, a former Illinois National Guardsman who drove convoys in Iraq. “We’re building up this community that’s saying: ‘I don’t have to follow these illegal orders. I do have a voice. And you know what, I’m not going to let a politician or a general or the media speak for me anymore. Let me tell you what’s really going on.’” Hughes added, “Let’s have those conversations in public, and together as a community we can end this war, because you know what—when the soldiers stop fighting this war, the war’s over.”
    In the two months following Winter Soldier, IVAW increased its membership by 25 percent. Veterans around the country began holding smaller, mini-Winter Soldiers at which soldiers who had been unable to travel to Washington were able to tell their stories. Despite the media blackout, the grim reality