On October 26th, 2007 Aimee Allison and Chris Capps visited Tübingen to talk about their work in the counter recruitment. Aimee was a medic in the Persion Gulf War in 1991, applied for concientious objector status and after two years was given an honorable discharge. She is grassroots activist in Oakland, CA. Chris was a technician in the present Iraq War for 1 year and deserted in January of 2007 and is now living in Germany. Since then he has been active with the Iraq Veterans against the War.

In the morning of the 26th Aimee spoke at two different schools to about 200 students. She showed a short video on anti recruitment and had a number of slides depicting the recruitment campaigns going on in the US. Aimee spoke of the need to support soldiers to get out of the army or, better yet, prevent the recruiters from baiting the young kids in the first place. The recruitment campaigns have become completely prolific. They are having a harder and harder time getting new soldiers and are resorting to more drastic, even illegal means to get new blood.

The response from the young boys and girls was great. They asked lots of questions and seemed very interested.

In the evening Aimee and Chris spoke to about 50 people at the German American Institute. There was a lively discussion afterwards and a number of representatives from other peace groups showed up. See http://tpablog.twoday.net/stories/4393069/ for a detailed report of that evening.

The press response was also a success. There was a good, long article in the local newspaper “Schwäbisches Tagblatt” on Oct. 29th and the “Sonntag Aktuell” which serves a large region in southern Germany, will be printing an article. The Frankfurter Rundschau (Oct. 25th) and the Tageszeitung (taz) (Oct. 29th), two national newspapers, also had good articles. In the taz there was even an editorial related to their visit.

It was so inspiring to listen to and get to know Aimee and Chris. They gave us many ideas on how our local peace group can continue our work against this dreadful war. Chris’ story of gathering up the courage to desert from his unit shows that soldiers can say no and don’t have to continue participating in this madness. At the age of 17 many youngsters can’t imagine what it means to be in a war. Certainly even an adult who has not experienced war can not imagine what it means to be out there. It is understandable that so many young people sign up. They see the military as an opportunity and they are mislead and lied to by a multi-billion dollar recruitment campaign. Chris brought this all close to us and we thank him for that.

Aimee has been active in the area of counter recruitment ever since she left the army back in 1991. Her words and experience are such an inspiration. She sees first hand the outrageous lies going on in the US surrounding the war and regarding recruitment efforts and she counsels soldiers who have returned from Iraq and want to simply lead normal lives.

After some introductory words by Gus, the evening started out with a short anti-recruitment film (available for viewing at notyoursoldier.net) with German subtitles. It is a face-paced, flashy film designed, as Aimee put it, to appeal to the MTV generation. The film unmasked and countered the deceptive tecniques used by military recruiters in the United States.

After the film, which Aimee described as a "subvertizement" to subvert the military's messages to young people, she went on to make a number of major points:

- Every country that builds an empire and fights wars is faced with the problem of finding enough young people to go an fight. With the social fabric in the U.S. crumbling, the costs of higher education skyrocketing, the military PR machine focuses on the career and education prospects offered by signing up. The Army's PR campaign "Army Strong" (which in my day was "Be all you can be" and was later "Army of One") is run by the exact same corporation that invented Tony the Tiger.

- The military also latches onto other structures and institutions, especially schools and colleges, to get their message out: Not only do they have a physical presence on schools and college campuses, most of the advertizing in the public for-high-school TV channel is recruiting propaganda. Recruiters also have a strong presence in MySpace, at sporting events, and even online multi-player video games, including one that the Defense Depart itself bankrolled for $10 million. It is a so-called "ego-shooter" called America's Army with the expressed goal of "deeply penetrating youth culture." In that context, Aimee also mentioned a resistance effort being waged by people who enroll for the video game under the name of "Dead in Iraq" to provoke other players and protest against recruitment and the glorification of the war.

- She described more of what she called the "military recruitment complex", a $4 billion industry in 2006. It involves using all means available, like those above, to create "recruitlandia," the term recruiters use to describe conditions congenial to joining the military - a condition they try to create as early as eight years old and lasting 10 years (until high school graduation). Aimee showed a rock-climbing park sponsored by the Army with an advertizement in Spanish.

- There are 9000 recruiters on the job in the U.S. The recruiters try to build relationships with young people (a tecnique which, I might add, is almost identical to what the Mormons call BRT - building relationships of trust to encourage membership). For some, like the child of Taiwanese immigrants that Aimee told about, the recruiter becomes the only adult in that young person's life who takes time with them.

- The militarization of schools was one of her themes. Not only are recruiters present at schools. She showed a picture of some high school children doing rifle drills with mock wooden rifles, presumably as part of the JROTC program. (She pointed out that the same school has a "zero tolerance policy" for violence!) Aimee also noted that the United States Marine Corps has just opened its own high school in Chicago.

- The military is clearly desparate. Since 2005, they have raised the age of elligibility to join the armed forces up to 45, lowered the required scores on standardized tests, and begun a campaign of recruiting in prisons. The number of "moral waivers" - that is, persmission to join the military despite a criminal record - has increased significantly. There have been more such waivers over the past year than over the past 10 years combined.

- Recruiters never talk about Iraq and, if asked, will sometimes emphasize how unlikely it is that the new recruit will be sent there. Another lie by omission is that they don't talk about what is arguably the main purpose of a soldier: to kill our country's enemies. Chris Capps, the other speaker, stepped in that this point and noted that his sergeant major was quite clear on that aspect - but only after he had joined. Another bit of important information that recruiters don't mention is that about 1/3 of female soldiers are raped during their time in the military and that sexual harassment is rampant.

- Aimee then told the story of a young man - not untypical - who wanted out even before basic training was over. While learning urban combat tecniques in a mock search, he was admonished to fire at a dummy representing a young boy. He told his parents, "I can't learn to kill children."

- Another theme was the cooperation of the corporate mass media with the military establishment. They don't show American casualties, they carefully select their images to put a positive spin on the war (showing clapping children in an intact street in Falludja, for example, instead of showing what the 60% of the city which was destroyed looked like after the battle).

Aimee pointed out that to address all these problems, the peace movement is no longer interested in organizing large protest marches. They are ignored by the media and the leadership and hence, lead to nothing. Instead, grass roots action, "people politics" as Aimee called it, is the approach. Examples:

- Chris Capps and Aimee Allison told about Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW.org), soldiers speaking out against the war both to their local environments and to the broader public. They each told their personal stories of how they changed their own hearts and minds and then went on the road to tell others. Chris put his story in the context of other recent conscientious objectors and deserters such as Watada and Aguayo and showed pictures of them and told their stories as well. Chris left his dead-end job as a pizza delivery boy. His time in Iraq was unspectacular - he was a communications technician at Camp Victory. But doing things like upgrading the communications with Abu Ghraib prison gave him misgivings. He saw rampant corruption and how obvious it was that the U.S. bases there were meant to be permanent. He bolted when the unit he later transfered to in Germany was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan.

- They showed a leaflet campaign in Oakland, CA, to inform high school students and their parents about how the military recruiters get their personal contact information.

- Aimee told about a successful effort in Chicago to shut down the recruiting infrastructure for several days. In operation "Befriend a recruiter", fewer than 20 people managed to engage the recruiters and busy them with appointments and questions, taking up all their time, until they actually cancelled all activity for several days.

- There were other actions like the "raging grannies", old women who tried to sign up to join the military, and the "Insurgent Rebel Clown Army" that disturbed recruiting offices with jokes and silliness. In Chicago, the result of all this was the closing of a recruitment office!

It takes the direct action of only a few determined individuals to make a noticeable difference.

Aimee's presentation included several stories of individual recruits or potential recruits she has worked with. She told about one young lady who was dead set on joining the military because she was a self-described "bad ass." She was tough and strong and she liked the "structure" offered by the military, despite the fact that her father, a 20-year veteran of the USMC, begged her not to join. She stayed in touch with Aimee after seeing one of her presentations. When Aimee suggested she become a firefighter or even a smoke jumper - something requiring strength and courage and offering "structure", the girl had an awakening and cancelled her ticket to boot camp. Counter-recruitment, Aimee said, is about giving people ideas.

They closed their presentation by emphasizing that supporting GI resistance is the best way to stop the war.

The discussion began with a brief exchange about how habeas corpus has been weakened in America. There was disagreement between the speakers and a member of the audience as to how severely it has been curtailed. Then I asked if Aimee was advocating a principled pacifist position, whether she would disband the armed forces for example, or whether she was just opposing this particular war. She answered that her resistance was aimed at the current state of affairs, but with a call to discuss alternatives to traditional defense models (such as "social defense"). Our current system is wrong and must be stopped. She is dead set against our currect program of empire.

There was then a brief policy discussion about what to do in Iraq. Someone in the audience objected to Chris and Aimee's position of an immediate and complete withdrawal from Iraq followed by reparations to the people who have been damaged by the war. Chris - and some from the audience - offered a vigorous defense of withdrawal. The chaos and civil war that are conjured up for a time after withdrawal is already happily. The conversation also revolved around the U.S. role in fueling the conflict there with weapons and money - weapons and money which get "lost" as part of our aid to our allies there. Part of the discussion was also about Iran and the need for an enemy after the Cold War to feed the defense industry.

One of our own TPAers steered the discussion back to peace and counter-recruitment by asking that Chris tell about his participation in the peace efforts against American bases in Italy, which he briefly did. Then he was asked and told about the relationship of IVAW to the earlier Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement of a generation ago.

Asked how dangerous their work is, Chris and Aimee both made it sound safe and easy to be activists. While Chris noted how difficult it can be to speak out while still in the military, the worse Aimee has ever experienced was being told by a Marine Corps member that she is "ruining our country." She went on to tell how she diffused the situation and won over the man's respect, albeit not his complete agreement with her cause. Her luggage never arrives with her when she flies. She has seen black SUVs at events she has attended. But she has never been harassed or abused.

The discussion turned to the media. They related how it has become more favorable over the past six months (I recalled the scathing abuse that Cindy Sheehan got from the right-wing noise machine a few years ago). The discussion included brief questions or remarks from the audience and the speakers about the role of contractors, religion and recruitment (no connection), economic recruitment, and the structure of the IVAW (it has about 500 members from all five branches of the armed forces).

Aimee closed again by emphasizing her "Army of None" approach: build on the power of relationships, "people politics", to make a difference at the bottom in your locality.

Yesterday, the 6th of October, seven of us Americans from Tübingen, Stuttgart and Heidelberg spent about four hours on the Königstraße near the Schloßplatz with an information stand about the Tübingen Progressive Americans, the Military Counseling Network, and the militarization of the European Union. There was a lot going on that day in Stuttgart and there was a heavy, constant stream of people past the stand.

Unfortunately, we didn't get much resonance. We only managed to engage a few people in discussions. One of the more interested passers-by insisted that 911 was an event orchestrated by the government to create fear. While most of us would agree that 911 has been abused and its exploitation can clearly be seen in the context of the "New American Century" project, we don't sign on to that depth of government depravity (yet?).

	Here are Karen and Gus behind our stand.
	This picture shows a that we did get some attention.

Various explanations for the general lack of interest were put forward by various members of the group: our poor presentation, the beautiful weather, the competition from flee markets, live music and shopping, the a-political nature of people in Stuttgart, recent general disinterest in the war.

We only ran into a few Americans, including an American student from Tübingen. We did not see or meet any American military personnel.

There was a general consensus that it would be more worthwhile to go to downtown Stuttgart/Vaihingen in the future. There, there is less of a crowd, but more American military people.

We braved the snow and ice and had our infostand today on the Tuebingen Holzmarkt together with members of the Friedenplenum. Our "mini-demo" was to show solidarity with the mass demonstrations to take place later today in Washington, D.C. opposing the "surge" of more U.S. troops to Iraq and any possible future acts of war on Iran.

Click to enlarge. Photo by M. Davis

Penny has a report on the event:

It was important to those of us who made it out to the Holzmarkt Saturday to stand in solidarity with people (hopefully hundreds of thousands) in the United States agitating for new alternatives in foreign and domestic policy. It was cold, it was icey, not many people were out and about, but those who came by were glad to see us there . I always feel that any opportunity to have a discussion with people on the street makes such a showing worthwhile. It gave us a chance to awake passerby curiosity about political activity in the U.S. We forged a new co-operation with the Tübingen peace organization Friedensplenum (we'll be helping them with their public demo February 7). Also, our stand stood next to a group of Turkish and Armenian students expressing mourning for the murdered Armenian journalist Dink. We joined them in their circle. And we had a chance once again to represent our support of Conscientious Objectors, with pictures and information about Agustin Aguayo's court martial March 6 and 7. Donations of 20 Euros in coins for his legal defense means that at least 20 more people (at 1 Euro per person on average) have shown their sympathy to our ongoing fundraising effort.

It simply felt good to be out there together making our statement on the day of the U.S. demonstrations: thanks to Helen, Monica, Carolyn, especially Gus for hauling the table in on his bike! , Carla and Paul of Friedensplenum, Fritz for hauling me and the materials! Mark for getting infostand permission and Nicole for coming by even though she had the flu.

I have blogged the most recent Arab-American Dialogue over at blog '66.

Most of you know that the Pacifism Conference was held this last weekend, with international peace activists, scientists, journalists, academics and politicians speaking in acknowledgement of International Human Rights Day (Sunday). Tübingen Progressive Americans were gratified to be in on the international public discourse. Our infostand was well (wo)manned, well visited and well received. The attendees really liked our name!

We had the extraordinary opportunity to contribute a presentation. Janice Hill had suggested at our last meeting that a soldier's voice would be our best contribution, and it worked out that we could include
Gulf War- Kosovo -Iraq veteran Bob Evers on the program, with Michael Sharp, co-ordinator of the Military Counseling Network. They both communicated movingly the dilemma of conscience; they put a human face on the military experience; and they made a plea for asylum in Germany for soldiers that refuse to follow illegal orders to fight an illegal war. The audience response was extraordinarily supportive. After our stage presentation, as we listened to an Iranian guitar and flute duo whose music was transcendant, I was overcome with how fruitful the evening had been for us. Bob and Michael were also able to talk personally with German politicians present and with some of the international peace leaders.

I am convinced we have not only shown that Americans want to participate in the international public discourse, but we have also succeeded in giving Bob Evers a chance to express his very articulate views. One of our goals has been to support him, soldiers like him, and their message. This evening went a long way toward accomplishing this. Not only that, we all had a great time working on it together, brainstorming and co-ordinating what we would all say on the podium.

HEARTFELT thanks to Charles and Tim for setting up the table and helping to (wo)man it with Janice and Gus.
Your commitment and your being there the whole time legitimized our participation in a very visible way.
We can't thank Bob Evers, his wife Carolin, Michael and Tim for coming again all the way and taking the courage to speak in front of a high-powered crowd. We won't forget this event.

Tübingen is a center of peace activism not only in the area, but in all of Germany. We are now part of that momentum, which gives us an opportunity to keep realizing our hope to co-operate with our German partners.

Penny P.

We had a long meeting last Sunday night where we exchanged impressions of the evening with Bill Evers and talked about our future plans.

We have decided that our next big project will be a party/dance to raise money for the legal fund of conscientious objector Constantine Aguayo. You can read all about his case at his webpage. The party will be in Tübingen at a yet-to-be arranged location on the evening of Saturday, 17 February, 2007. Admission will be charged, food and drinks will be sold, and we are considering offering a silent auction as well. Several of our members have been involved with the Aguayo family and the Aguayo case for some time. He will need $6,000 to cover his legal fees, and we have decided help him raise it.

We also discussed a more abstract project for the spring and summer of next year, a series of discussion evenings which will continue alongside our activism. The idea goes back to proposal by one of our members. Our members or, possibly, invited experts, will introduce and lead discussion on a topic of interest or expertise. A schedule will be published over the next several months.

I have blogged a few lines about the Arab-American Dialogue last night over at blog '66.

Last night we showed the film Gunner Palace at the German-American Insitute here in Tübingen. We are happy to report that about 50 people came to see the show, including a large proportion of Americans.

After watching the first hour of the film, Bob Evers and Michael Sharp took the stage to answer questions. Michael Sharp represented the Military Counseling Network. Bob is a former NCO with 14 years in the military behind him. He participated in the 1991 Gulf War as well as in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo in 2002. He spent seven months in Iraq before being wounded and then released on a medical discharge. We invited him to come to the event to comment on the film and field questions from the audience. It turned out to be an unforgettable event.

Here are Bob (left) and Michael speaking.

One of the main elements in the film - a dcoumentary about an artillery unit on occupation duty in Baghdad - are raids on Iraqi residencies to round up people for questioning, get suspected insurgents or capture weapons caches. These scenes clearly moved Bob and he began his part of the evening by describing such raids as very terrifying events for all concerned. He said that the scenes of dozens of soldiers bashing down a door and rushing into some living room might seem excessive when viewed on the cinema screen, but was quite normal considering that there is often resistance and people do not just open the door when you ring the bell. Bob noted that soldiers are often killed or injured during these operations. He got his purple heart on a raid. While often nothing is found, they often turn up exactly what they're looking for: armed bad guys. He also recellected one case where U.S. soldiers uncovered a stash of discarded American letters - letters from home which G.I.s had thrown away. The isurgents had gone through the trash and were obvioulsy collecting information on American occupation soldiers, including home addresses - a very scary thought.

Mr. Evers also spoke about patrolling the streets of Baghdad, something the movie also showed. He recalled the constant fear: checking every window, every alley, every pedestrian. You never know who may want to kill you. Very tellingly, he contrasted his experience in Iraq with what he felt in Kosovo in 2002. There, he said, he had the feeling of being a liberator. He was approached daily by people who thanked him for what he was doing. His mission had saved lives. He had been in houses where people had pictures of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on their walls. In Iraq, he was not wanted, not thanked. He realized he was doing more harm than good, and, he noted, "For me that stings." "When I joined the military," he continued, "I joined to defend the constitution of the United States. I believed, I still believe, that we have a special responsibility as the sole superpower in teh world. It is absolutely devestating to see what we have been doing and what we have become."

Bob's account of the Kosovo operation is food for thought for those in the peace movement who oppose all use of armed force.

Asked by a member of the audience whether doubts about the mission were distracting for soldiers doing their duty on a day to day basis, he said they stay "on task." "You do whatever you need to do to stay alive and keep your friends alive." As a squad leader, he said he would have done anything for the 10 men for whose lives he was responsible. Getting them home to their families was at the top of the list. For one soldier in particular, he recalled, he was the family. That young man had no parents, wife and children waiting for them back home in rural California. Even now that young soldier is back in Iraq and Bob is still a mentor for him. There is a scene in Gunner Palace where a soldier raiding a house recounts seeing an Iraqi going for a weapon. The soldier punches the Iraqi. Bob noted that he is not sure he would have merely punched the man.

Later in the evening, Bob noted how difficult it was for him to watch his unit return to Iraq without him.

It was during moments like these that Bob's account connected not only with the movie in an especially vivid way, but also showed us live what we know about soldiering from countless popular accounts of war and from the social science literature on men in battle: the mechanism of small-unit loyalty that drives men to do things they otherwise would not do; the ability of war to limit empathy for the enemy, etc.

Empathy for the enemy was a topic of discussion when an Arab member of the audience observed that Americans only turned against the war when it went sour for Americans. Iraqi, Arab lives matter much less. One of our members noted that this is the same mechanism that still dominates our memory of Vietnam: The 50+ thousand American dead are the tragedy, not the over one million Vietnamese dead. That sentiment seemed to divide the audience into those who agreed and those who defended the American people as a whole. Bob admitted that he had been in favor of operation Iraqi Freedom in the beginning because he had trusted the administration. He had taken Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. to the bank, so to speak. When that turned out to have been a lie (he used a explicative referring to the feces of male bovines), that is when the war became wrong in his eyes. There were those in the audience who then briefly debated the issue of whether even real WMD would have justified the war. One even brought deposing Saddam Hussein into the equation. There were somewhat caustic, rhetorical questions about how many Arab or American lives are worth which political result. The evening was not supposed to be about "big" politics, however, but about one man's personal story, and the discussion quickly focused on the ground level again.

A theme throughout the movie, and something Bob Evers confirmed quite colorfully, is the sense of isolation among our men and women in Iraq. People who have been to Iraq form a distinct subset of Americans who have a very, very different perspective from the rest of the population. Bob recounted going home and sitting in a restaurant seeing the people at the next table laughing and having fun. These people went about their
daily lives totally untouched by the war. If they pay any attention to the war at all, then only during the two minutes of coverage on the nightly news. Bob said he felt like going over to the other people and shaking them. That "really, really bothered me...nothing has changed for them." Asked about the yellow ribbons sported by so many American patriots, he said, "If I see another ribbon on an SUV I am going to shake somebody." It reminded me of the scene in All Quiet On The Western Front where the narrator returns home to feel alienated by the normalcy and shallow patriotism of his home town while on leave.

One member of the audience, referring to friends who had joined the military even after it had become obvious that the administration's arguments for the war were bogus, asked rhetorically, "Why should we care?" (about the soldiers in Iraq). After all, they had brought it on themselves. Bob observed that most of the men and women over in Iraq are "people who have been failed by the economic and political system of the United States." Later, he also expressed his respect for those who aren't like the chickenhawks who are for the war, but only send other people's children into the firing line. If someone is willing to go over and fight the war themselves, then at least they are consistent.

Part of the discussion revolved around the qusetion of PTSD - post-traumatic stress syndrom. Both Bob Evers and Michael Sharp from the Military Counseling Network spoke about a disgraceful state of affairs in the U.S. military: Men coming out of Iraq are screened for PTSD, but most fall through the holes in the net since they are in a hurry to get home. They are filtered through a series of medical "tents" in Kuwait where they are surveyed about their needs and symptoms. In Germany, PTSD has become so pervasive that the military community around Kaiserslautern is starting to draw on local English-speaking doctors to treat American personnel. According to official data, something like one third of American soldiers with combat experience in Iraq have PTSD in some form. But even that figure is low, considering the measures taken by the military to avoid PTSD diagnoses. The intent is clearly to save face and keep military retention rates high by making as few PTSD diagnoses as possible.

Bob recalled that he had gone to Iraq with every intention to let his wife in on everything he experienced. He would keep nothing from her. He said that lasted "about three weeks" in Iraq. He also related another family encounter. He comes from a military family. His father had been in the Navy in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and had been decorated in Vietnam. Before it was clear that Bob would get a medical discharge and not have to return to Iraq, he had already decided that he could not go back and "enforce a policy that I think is fundamentally wrong." He
needed a week to work up the courage to call his father and tell him he would sooner go AWOL than continue fighting. His father fell silent on the line for a few seconds and finally replied, "Good."

Asked by a member of the audience how we who are not in Iraq can stay informed about the reality of the war, Bob recommended looking at individual stories, stories with a name and a face. The statistics on the news are not the real story.

Asked about the quality of military blogs from Iraq, the speakers mentioned a project by the American military to censor U.S. soldiers' blogs. They have a whole national guard unit set up to surf the web for blogs and look for any excuse - the revelation of ostensibly classified information, for example, to shut the blogs down.

As an example of a real story, Bob recounted what he wanted to be the core message of his contribution to the evening: "If you don't remember anything else tonight, I want you to know that I had the responsibility of zipping up one of my friends in a plastic bag and taking him down to the mortuary and doing the official identification for the military. His name was Peter Enos. he was from Massechussetts. He was two weeks shy of 24. He had a wife and a six-month-old baby at home who will
never know his father."

Asked what we could do from here for friends and acquaintances in Iraq, Bob said it depends on the people. We can write, send things, stay in touch. It was clear that supporting the troops must mean more than a yellow sticker, more than just "keep on shopping," and also even more than the now proverbial "Bring them home now."

The officers’ most emotional objection seemed to be that the peace flag we had taped to the table was dragging on the ground, and that to them was an insult to those who died „under that flag“, when it was obviously meant to be a version of the American flag. The other objections they voiced were 1. that we shouldn’t be apologizing for the American government , which would diminish America in the eyes of the Germans who have always been against us anyway. 2. That we had not been „on the ground“ in Iraq to see all the good things the army was doing there so how could we know? 3. How could we use the word „Empire“ when the U.S. had never claimed any territory for its own 4. If what we were saying were true, everything they had done in their lives up to that point (one had joined at 17 and had been in the army for 12 years) was „null and void.“ I hated to be the one to tell them that I did wish they had different options for employment.

My objections to their objections came from totally different convictions and life experiences. I was personally caught between wanting to have an impact on them so they would begin to think differently, and feeling total compassion that they were so young and had no alternative but to bolster their defences of what they are being asked to do. Our issues are not with them as individuals, but with the people who are using them for the purposes we are convinced are immoral. They were right, we should take our infostand to the people who make the policies.
Now how?

Penny