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Few remember anymore how a growing antiwar movement in the Vietnam era morphed into one significantly led by and filled with veterans who had fought in 'Nam and soldiers still in the U.S. military but in distinct opposition to the American war there. In the last years of that grim conflict, I was working as a (very) young editor at Pacific News Service (PNS), an alternative outfit set up in part to report on and oppose the nightmare of Vietnam. In those days, antiwar veterans often visited our office in San Francisco and, foggy as my memories may be of those times nearly half a century ago, I still remember that PNS had a soldier/reporter in South Vietnam covering the war.

In those pre-Internet, pre-everything days, we communicated by snail mail. How he first made contact with us I don’t recall, but I do remember that, knowing the military wouldn’t let him write honestly about the war he was part of, we used a pseudonym on his stories. And somehow, sooner or later, we found out that the Pentagon, displeased with his reports (which were appearing not just in the alternative press of that moment but in mainstream newspapers that PNS also dealt with), checked out every soldier in Vietnam with a name similar to his pseudonum trying to dig him up. (Meanwhile, the FBI, as we would later learn from Freedom of Information Act documents, had an informant of some sort checking out our offices and us, too).

All of this -- and the large and enduring struggle to end that war -- came back to me recently because of Danny Sjursen. He was that rarest of beings in our time, an Army major still in uniform when he contacted TomDispatch early in 2017, ready to write critically under his own name about this country’s disastrous forever wars.  He had fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His first piece, tellingly enough -- and it was a gutsy gesture at a moment when no real antiwar movement, military or otherwise, existed despite those never-ending conflicts -- was aptly titled “Mission Unaccomplished, 15 Years Later.”

Twenty-nine TomDispatch pieces later and now a retired veteran of the so-called war on (though it’s also been a war of) terror, Sjursen is now active in a developing antiwar movement among veterans about which he offers a vivid report today. His new book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is due out in September (and I’m looking forward to it). Tom

Undercover Patriots
Trump, Tulsa, and the Rise of Military Dissent
By Danny Sjursen

It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump’s latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country.

We never planned to go inside the cavernous arena where that rally was to be held. I was part of our impromptu reconnaissance team that called an audible at the last moment. We suddenly decided to infiltrate not just the perimeter of that Tulsa rally, but the BOK Center itself. That meant I got a long, close look at the MAGA crowd there in what turned out to be a more than half-empty arena.

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It’s true that, since George Floyd died, the protests have never quite ended, but in all these weeks what’s generally been protested might be called the war at home. (After all, according to a recent New York Times report, Floyd was only one of 70 Americans who, in the last decade, said “I can’t breathe” before dying in police custody.) Still, it remains striking that America’s so-called war on terror -- a series of conflicts that has extended from the Philippines and Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East and ever deeper into Africa -- has remained largely unprotested here at home since it began almost 19 years ago.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for this, but one, recently highlighted in a study by Heidi Peltier at Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project, is the way so much of American war-making in these years has been fobbed off on private contractors, now responsible for $370 billion (or more than half) of the Pentagon budget, and on those they hire -- in that way “concealing the true financial and human costs of America’s post-9-11 wars.” It’s not just the literal weaponry of war that’s been so privatized (with soaring costs) but even the “warriors” or at least those supporting them in the war zones. In 2019, for instance, stationed in the Middle East were 53,000 private contractors hired by U.S. companies and only 35,000 American troops. Similarly, since 2001, 8,000 contractors have died in that region (or 1,000 more than American troop deaths there). Many of them, by the way, were hired foreign nationals, so their deaths went completely unattended to here.

In other words, what Peltier calls the “commercialization” of war has helped make Washington’s forever wars so much less noticeable in this country where the American taxpayer has funded them all these years (to the detriment of everything from domestic infrastructure to preparations for possible pandemics).

Today, Pentagon expert and TomDispatch regular William Hartung considers how that increasingly privatized and corrupt military has been coming home and just how well it’s meshed with, and supported, both the American system of policing and imprisonment (itself being privatized) on a scale unmatched elsewhere on this planet. It should be a scandal and a half. Tom

Police, Prisons, and the Pentagon
Defunding America’s Wars at Home and Abroad
By William D. Hartung

Think of it as a war system that’s been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the American military machine and the wildly well-funded damage it’s been doing for almost 19 years across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Distorted funding priorities aren’t the only driving force behind police violence against communities of color, but shifting such resources away from policing and to areas like jobs, education, housing, and restorative justice could be an important part of the solution. And any effort to boost spending on social programs should include massive cuts to the Pentagon’s bloated budget. In short, it’s time to defund our wars, both at home and abroad. 

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Honestly, all these years later, I still miss him. When the world shifts in strange ways, I sometimes can’t help but wonder: What would Jonathan think? Then I have the confounding urge, despite the fact that he died six years ago, to pick up the phone and ask him. Still, I recently discovered that there is one thing I can look to if I want to be reminded of Jonathan Schell. The Library of America has just issued a new collection of his work, three of his classic books, the last of which I actually edited in another life. It includes his 1982 bestseller, The Fate of the Earth, the follow-up to that volume, The Abolition, and last but hardly least, The Unconquerable World. (Indeed, in these last years, the U.S. military has continued to prove him so on the mark when it comes to our world’s unconquerability.) I recommend the book to anyone who has the urge to be reminded of one of the truly thoughtful and insightful writers of our time. And today, on this July Fourth weekend, as a best of TomDispatch, I repost the brief version of an obituary I wrote on his death to accompany a wonderful interview with him by Chris Appy (from Appy's book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides) on how in 1966, as a young man stumbling into Vietnam in the midst of that terrible American war, he became a journalist and thinker of the first order on the subject of our ever more endangered planet. Tom]

The Widening Lens
Jonathan Schell and the Fate of the Earth
By Tom Engelhardt

“Up to a few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people.” That is the initial line of The Village of Ben Suc, his first book, a copy of which I recently reread on a plane trip, knowing that he was soon to die. That book, that specific copy, had a history of its own. It was a Knopf first edition, published in 1967 in the midst of the Vietnam War, after the then-shocking text had appeared in the New Yorker magazine. An on-the-spot account of an American operation, the largest of the Vietnam War to that moment, it followed American troops as they helicoptered into a village controlled by the enemy about 30 miles from the capital, Saigon. All its inhabitants, other than those killed in the process, were removed from their homes and sent to a makeshift refugee camp elsewhere. The U.S. military then set Ben Suc afire, brought in bulldozers to reduce it to rubble, and finally called in the U.S. Air Force to bomb that rubble to smithereens -- as though, as the final line of his book put it, “having once decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed.”

I had read the piece in the New Yorker when that magazine devoted a single issue to it, something it had not done since it published John Hersey’s Hiroshima in a similar fashion in 1946. I never forgot it. I was then 23 years old and just launched on a life as an anti-Vietnam War activist. I would not meet the author, 24-year-old neophyte reporter Jonathan Schell, for years.

To look at that first edition some 47 years later is to be reminded of just how young he was then, so young that Knopf thought it appropriate in his nearly nonexistent bio to mention where he went to high school (“the Putney School in Vermont”). The book was tiny. Only 132 pages with an all-print orange cover that, in addition to the author and title, said: “The story of the American destruction of a Vietnamese village -- this is the complete text of the brilliant report to which the New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue.” That was bold advertising in those publishing days. I know. As an editor at a publishing house as the 1980s began, I can still remember having a fierce argument about whether or not it was “tasteless” to put a blurb from a prominent person on a book’s cover.

The year after Ben Suc was published, he wrote The Military Half, his second great book on that horrific American war, in which he widened his lens from a single devastated village to two provinces where almost every hamlet had been destroyed, largely by American air power. To report it, he rode in tiny forward observation planes that were calling down destruction on the Vietnamese countryside. He then went to work as a staff writer for the New Yorker and in 1975 widened his lens further in his book The Time of Illusion, taking in the history and fate of a single administration in Washington as it waged “limited war” abroad in a nuclear age and created constitutional mayhem at home, bringing yet more violence to Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as to the American political system.

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In the wake of the death of George Floyd, history -- specifically the history of slavery and colonialism -- has become a central part of this protest moment. From the desire to rename American military bases named after Confederate generals (and often slave owners) to the tearing down or removal of statues to debates at museums about how to remember our past, the history of slavery in particular, that central feature of the American story, and the white racism so essential to it, has become a national and global issue. At the same time, President Trump has been praising those very base names (“these Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage”) and recently threatened to jail for up to 10 years anyone trying to mar or fell such a statue or memorial. And yet the reality TV star who won the 2016 election looks increasingly like he’s a fixture of an outmoded past.

What a change! As historian Nathan Huggins wrote so long ago in the introduction to his classic 1977 book Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery, "White historians shared the view of the general white public -- the view of the Founders -- that black people did not exist in the world that mattered. Even in the writing about slavery, where blacks might logically be considered the principal subject, the habit was to write about it as an abstract social or economic institution, to see it as provocative of sectionalism and as a contributing cause of the Civil War. The slave's testimony was never sought and never recorded by historians.” Until recently, in other words, black lives didn’t matter.

Perhaps, then, it's an appropriate moment for TomDispatch regular Lawrence Weschler to offer some thoughts on the future commemoration of men like the president who, in these last years, have been so deeply involved in making this country the economic, legal, and pandemic morass it now is. In particular, how indeed are we going to memorialize in an appropriate fashion white figures whose acts are guaranteed to leave our children and grandchildren “breathless” in ways that will prove truly catastrophic? Tom

A True American Monument to Trumpian Times
Chief Justice John Roberts Auditions for a Spot on Mount Rushmore 2.0
By Lawrence Weschler

The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizeable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument. Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original, if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it, which they certainly didn’t the first time around.

After all, back in the late 1920s, less than three decades and not 70 miles from the site of the ultimate treachery of the Wounded Knee massacre, that original undertaking to carve the faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt into the side of Mount Rushmore barreled heedlessly along, oblivious to Native American concerns. In the process, it desecrated one of the Sioux’s holiest sites (the stark cliff face the Lakota ironically called the Six Grandfathers) in order to celebrate the leaders of the very nation that had stolen their land and then so savagely repressed them.

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Ever more often, as I face the latest news from this increasingly woebegone American world of ours, I imagine bringing my long-dead parents back to view it. After all, they knew bad times and good. They lived through the Great Depression as young adults, World War II (my father was in the U.S. Army Air Corps), and the 1950s and 1960s. Those were the decades of my youth when, thanks to both Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the boom the war had triggered, economic inequality in this country narrowed drastically from the “roaring twenties.”

I now regularly picture the two of them in this pandemic moment, comfortably social-distanced from me, as I start to describe our present world by telling them something that’s astounded me since I first stumbled across it in 2017: three men -- Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett -- now have more wealth than the bottom half of American society. Three years later, at a moment when so many Americans have ended up unemployed, I'd have to add that billionaires generally continue to thrive. Or perhaps I would point out that this country now has “the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap on the planet.” In their day, a CEO got about 20 times the pay of a typical worker. Now, it’s 278 times.

Or I would mention something that would seem inconceivable to them: that this country's infrastructure -- bridges, dams, ports, roads, you name it -- was given a grade of D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers, since the U.S. government no longer seriously invests in it (and that it’s become something of a standing joke in Donald Trump’s Washington). Or perhaps I’d just mention to them that, when it came to a kind of infrastructure they would never have heard of, high-speed rail, China now has 19,000 miles of it and the U.S... well, essentially none.

And how would I even begin to tell them about our current president? Maybe I’d have to show them his recent 14-minute Tulsa rant about hobbling down “icy” stairs at West Point on a perfectly warm day, a commentary approximately six times as long as the Gettysburg Address. After that, I would need to assure them that this half-demented billionaire former TV personality is indeed the president of the United States.

Amid all of this, which would undoubtedly seem beyond unbelievable to them, here’s the one thing they might not be surprised by: the Covid-19 pandemic. After all, they lived through the catastrophic 1918 Spanish Flu as children (though they never mentioned it to me). Still, to them, the American world of 2020 would otherwise be remarkably unrecognizable and, in a way, at my advancing age, it’s becoming increasingly unrecognizable to me, too, which is why I found TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s look at how this nation has entered a kind of free fall especially illuminating. Tom

Fear of Falling
Can Making Black Lives Matter Rescue a Failing State?
By Rebecca Gordon

You know that feeling when you trip on the street and instantly sense that you’re about to crash hard and there’s no way to prevent it? As gravity has its way with you, all you can do is watch yourself going down. Yeah, that feeling.

I had it the other day on my way to a Black Lives Matter demonstration when I caught my toe on a curb and pitched forward. As time slowed down, I saw not my past, but my future, pass before my eyes -- a future that would at worst include months of rehabbing a broken hip and at best a few weeks hobbling around on crutches. I was lucky. Nothing was broken and I’ll probably be off the crutches by the time you read this.

But that feeling of falling and knowing it’s too late to stop it has stayed with me. I suspect it reflects a sensation many people in the United States might be having right now, a sense that time is moving slowly while we watch a flailing country in a slow-motion free fall. It has taken decades of government dereliction to get us to this point and a few years of Trumpian sabotage to show us just where we really are. To have any hope of pulling back from the brink, however, will take the determination of organizations like the Movement for Black Lives.

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