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Fayetteville Ripples Spread Across America

Bring Them Home Now!

The more than 3000 veterans, military family members and supporters from around the South and around the country who marched in Fayetteville, North Carolina, last weekend had one simple message: Bring Them Home Now! Now they are taking the message from this inspiring demonstration back home with them. Below are some of the voices who are carrying that message.

First, the truthout website has posted a live news report from the Fayetteville demonstration < http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm >

Second, the invaluable Internet newsletter GI Special < http://www.militaryproject.org/ > just printed the following interviews with returned veterans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq conducted by Martin Smith (USMC, ret’d)

Kellie Dougherty.

Can you tell me your name, rank, and service?
My name is Kellie Dougherty. I was an E5 Sergeant in the National Guard and then the Colorado Army National Guard for eight years and I was released last August, 2004.

Did you serve in Iraq?
Yes, my unit was in Iraq for approximately eight months and then Kuwait for another two. I was in a military police company.

Why are you here today?
I’m here today to show my support for the peace movement and to show to the public and to our government that we want an end to the occupation of Iraq.

What made you come to that conclusion?
I didn’t believe the reasons that we were being given to go to war in the first place, and then when I got there and saw the horrible impact that the war and the occupation was having on the population of Iraq and on our own soldiers and all the reasons we were given were false to go to war, so it was people dying and people suffering for lies.

What did you see in Iraq?
I saw that the people were living in extreme poverty. Their situation wasn’t getting better when we were there. They’re just getting more desperate. Just things like an overt hostility on the U.S. soldiers’ part towards the Iraqi people, and house raids. I know we raided people’s houses even when we weren’t sure if it was the right person. We searched people’s vehicles. There were unintentional things like Iraqi children and families getting run over by our cars. And then just the continued poverty and the unemployment of the people.

What would you say to someone that’s thinking of joining the military today?
You can probably count on going to Iraq and maybe talk to a veteran or someone who’s been there, because if you just rely on your recruiter, they’re just trying to sell you a sales pitch, and they’re not telling you the whole truth.

Have you heard of the movement to kick military recruiters off of campuses?
Yes, and I think that’s good, because schools are supposed to be places of learning, not places to become militarized, especially on high school campuses. I think that the recruiters shouldn’t be on high school campuses, because basically what they doing is just preying on the lack of opportunities for young people, particularly low income and minority students.

Nicholas Przybyla

Can you tell me your name, rank, and where you served?
My name is Nicholas Przybyla. I was an E3 in the Navy. I served on the U.S.S. Peleliu with the Peleliu Amphibious Ready Group, 13th Marine Special Operations Capable. We did the first initial invasion of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002.

Why are you here today?
I’m here to stop the war I guess trying to put an end to it and let people know what’s going on is total bullshit. I had a top secret clearance and every day we would receive intelligence briefings twice a day, and it came down towards the end of our deployment that we had killed about twenty suspected terrorists, members of the Taliban.
We got about seven hostages onboard and the total deaths of civilian casualties was about three thousand-most of them were children?, and I just don’t think that’s a good way to fight a war just to blow the shit out of a country, kill a bunch of innocent people, and then charge into another country that has nothing to do with it.
Towards the end of our deployment the intelligence briefings that we got said that the 13th Marines had Osama bin Laden and all his buddies cornered in the Tora Bora Mountains, and it was only a matter of time before we uncovered them. After we were relieved, we were relieved by the (Bomb Homer Shard) Amphibious Ready Group. They went in and did the same thing that we did, have him even more cornered and after that they just let him go.
All the troops were pulled out and sent to Iraq over bullshit when the real person that was responsible for September 11th was set free. That’s a fact.
That’s the true intelligence, military intelligence that I received on a day to day basis and they say according to our intelligence the real threat was Iraq. Well I remember receiving those intelligence briefings and that’s not the truth at all and I’m starting to think that’s all a fact and my personal opinion is that I think the Bush administration wanted bin Laden to go free so that they could scare the rest of the country and just keep them scared and move into Iraq and not be questioned about it.

Did you know anything about Afghanistan before you went over there?
I joined during peacetime-the whole "Navy let the journey begin" thing-I came from a real shit hole in the Detroit area pretty much an abandoned industrial town because all the automotive companies pulled out so we didn’t have any money.
I joined the military to try to give my parents a chance to retire.
We got to Darwin Australia on September 11, so we were the first troops deployed to Afghanistan and we didn’t hear very much about it. The most vivid thing I can remember is just to show you how much the troops are brainwashed. When the planes hit the towers we heard that New York and Washington had been attacked and lots of Americans were dead. There wasn’t any remorse on the ship, of course they were a couple of exceptions, but the majority of troops though on board were celebrating because they finally got a chance to go to war.

What would you say to someone that might be thinking of joining the military today?
I would say don’t do it. It’s not worth it. I joined the military and now like I said before sometimes I get people that come up to me and say thank you for your contribution thank you for protecting us and I think that’s kind of stupid because we weren’t protecting them at all.
O_ ur National Guard is gone. America’s weaker than it’s ever been on a home front attack, and it’s completely pointless to go to Iraq and die over something that serves no purpose. It’s completely insane.

Why did you choose to join Iraq Veterans against the War?
I think the main reason why I joined is because what happens is after you’re involved in something like that and you know that people are dead from a direct result of you and the rest of your fellow soldiers, and sailors, marines and airmen being there that it just tears you apart inside and I think it’s my duty to try and counter-recruit and get people to stop joining up so that they don’t have to deal with this the rest of their lives.
It’s been about four years since it happened to me, and I still think about it every day. I don’t want that for the rest of the year. _ Look at what Vietnam did. You walk down the street and look at the homeless and almost every single one of them is Vietnam-era age, and it’s all happening again.

What do you know about the soldiers that fought in Vietnam?
My good friend’s father was a Vietnam veteran and the last thing that he worked really hard after he got out of the military the last thing he wanted to do was have his son join the military, but his son went ahead and did it instead.
The day before his son left to go into the forces, the first time he told us about his tour in Vietnam and he said he just couldn’t explain how horrible it was walking through the jungle constantly, just covered in sweat, for nothing coming across your buddy and he’s got his mouth sewn shut and went you cut the stitches to open his mouth his testicles come out of it.

Can you describe your Military Occupational Specialty?
My Military Occupational Specialty was photography. All the people from the different branches in service go to the same photography school in Fort Mead, Maryland. One of the courses of training is combat photo investigative photography accident photography.
They trained us for a reason, but when we got to the Middle East and people were coming on board?prisoners of War, injured people, accidents, and stuff like that.
We were take pictures to be translated and to be sent back to the United States and Military Police would come up and erase them from our cameras. And they did that because they were being told to do that. Obviously, I don’t think that our Commander in Chief and all his buddies in office want our people seeing those kinds of images.

I see you have film equipment today. What are your plans?
I’m putting together a documentary that will hopefully get distributed to show the rest of the people that are out there who are feeling alone that the Iraq veterans are here and to come and join up.
We can’t be ignored, because a veteran of that war can not be ignored.
You can’t say you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been many places where there will be somebody talking about you know those guys they go over there and when they come back you don’t see the guys that went over there coming back and complaining because know that they’ve been there they know that it’s for a cause.
And I say, excuse me sir, what do you know about the military and he says my dad was in the military or something like that. It’s completely ignorant. And I think the media that’s being transmitted now days; they all have an agenda behind it. I just want to make this and show people exactly what’s going on.

Have you heard about the military recruiters being kicked off some of the campuses around the country?
No, I haven’t but I go to a community college in Los Angeles and I see recruiters there on a weekly basis and usually for the most part they’re guys that have just joined. They don’t know what they’re talking about so you can’t hold it against them, because they’re going through the same brainwashing that we all went through when we were in there.
So what I like to do is put on my cammie jacket and go stand right next to them and while they’re passing out pro-join the service documents I hold out documents of peace from Iraq Veterans against the War. I think that I’ve successfully counter-recruited at least five people.

Tim Talib

Can you tell me your name, rank, and what service you were in?
My name is Tim Talib and I was a hospital corpsman third class in the United States Navy, and I served in Iraq with the Marine Corps?

How long did you serve in Iraq?
I was in country for seven months.

Why are you here today?
I’m here today to protest the on going occupation in Iraq. I believe that it’s immoral and illegal under international law and I believe that we went into Iraq that our motivation had more to do with oil and imperialism than to do with Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction which were never found or connections to 9/11 which were never made.

How did you come to that conclusion?
I believed much of that before I went over but my experiences in Iraq reinforced what I’d already believed, particularly with regard to weapons of mass destruction. We spent some of our time searching for WMDs, and nothing was ever found. Nothing was ever brought to light by the Bush administration. Their claims were completely false, and all the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) officers and other people that I talked with in country that were working on WMD searches never found any thing either.

Did you have any contact with the Iraqi people?
Yes, I had a good amount of contact with the Iraqi people in the Sunni triangle region so it was mostly Sunnis and a few Shiites. I didn’t meet any Kurds at all.

Did you opinion of the Iraqi people differ from what the military said it would be like?
I never believed what the military told me about the Iraqi people to begin with.
I went over there with the belief that the majority of the Iraqi people were good people that they didn’t necessarily support Saddam either but they equally did not want us occupying their country and those beliefs were confirmed.
I found that a lot of people in Iraq were intelligent, well educated people who already had some understanding of what they wanted for their country and the democratic processes that they wanted to implement and they didn’t need us to come over and force those ideas on them.

What would you say to somebody that might be thinking of joining the military today?
Consider other options. It’s not a good idea it’s not a good time to be in and you don’t want to be forced to participate in an occupation.

Hart Viges, 11 1/2 Months In Iraq, Army:

I’m here to make reparations.

When you realize that there is no boogeyman, people in Iraq are just like you and me with the same fears and loves and concerns, it just makes too much sense that war is not the answer. It’s not supposed to be like this.

We need to make change.

We went out to look at a water construction project, and we had gunships as escorts. Two men with RPGs ran across the road, and I swung my rifle over and as he made it to a house, he froze in the doorway. And I froze with my weapon, and I saw his face, and it was not the monster I was expecting to see. He was a man like me, and I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Andrew Plummer, Electricians Mate Third Class, Navy, Served On The USS Eisenhower.

Just discharged. Asked about what he would to say to someone thinking of enlisting:

You think it’s a good opportunity. You think you’re going to make your life better. You’re not.

You think you’re going to serve your country. That’s not what the military is there for.

You think you’re going to make the world a better place. That’s not what the military is doing today.

The military is protecting American business interests and killing people to expand our power and generate more wealth for wealthy people in America.

Especially on high school campuses, it’s very important to get the military off campus. These kids are 16 and 17 years old. They couldn’t even get a car loan without a co-signer, and we have people coming and trying to get them to sign a contract to go kill and be killed.

Joshua Despain; In Iraq A Little Over Six Months:

That slogan (Support the troops) has been eating at me.

I’ve seen lots of people who have yellow ribbons on the back of their car, and I try to talk to them. The one thing that you can do to support me and the troops is to listen to our voice, and most people who have the mentality support our troops don’t want to hear what we have to say about ending the war.

They think that supporting the troops is supporting the war, and it should be the opposite.

Support President Bush and our troops? That’s a conflicting statement.

If you’re supporting Bush, then you’re not supporting our troops. And if you support our troops, you don’t support Bush.

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