It's been a week since I travelled up to Corvallis to hear a member of IVAW speak. It was well worth the trip and it bears recounting.
Tim Goodrich is a 24 year old Air Force veteran. He enlisted after turning down an AFROTC scholarship and the kicking around Buffalo after high school. As is so typical, joining the military was 'the only way out' of town. He was active in Afghanistan and was just finishing up his enlistment as the Iraq invasion was in its early stages.
It was at that point that he began doing background research online about our reasons for war. He and one or two others in his unit started talking about the fact that we weren't actually defending ourselves in any way by starting a war with Iraq. Eventually, "we were told to shut up because we were creating discourse."
Maybe Tim mis-spoke there, or maybe he was being very witty about the military mindset. Or maybe that's what his higher-ups actually said. I've heard worse come out of military mouths.
While on terminal leave (Tim had the good fortune to be early enough not to be stop-lossed), he decided that he needed to actively speak out against the war. And that's what started his journey to Corvallis.
He urges us to remember that Iraq was being bombed
daily before the 'war' started. In the six months before the invasion, he said that the raids went from perhaps once per day to several. He also noted special forces troops deploying through Saudi Arabia before the 'shooting war' started. I keep using those quotes because I want to start stressing that we have been at war with Iraq for 15 years.
Tim has also visited Iraq as a civilian. In January 2004, his group bribed a border guard $3 to enter the country. "Porous" was his word--I thought that was something you only heard on the radio. He described widespread wasting syndrome--20 year olds that looked 12. Remember: 15 years of war.
He heard from doctors who stated that the Coalition Provisional Authority never provided medical relief for civilian hospitals, and spoke of injured children being turned away from military hospitals (this last detail matches plenty of news reports). Tim learned that the famous 'statue topplers' were not just coached by the Marines--they were bussed into Baghdad for the occasion. The man on the street in Baghdad understands that there was no plan for the US military to administer the country after the invasion.
Tim went looking for reconstruction projects. He stated that he wanted to be fair, that with all the attention that television pays to them, he wanted to make sure he wasn't just being shown the bad parts. In two weeks of driving around the country, he says he was only able to find one--the same elementary school that Bechtel 'rebuilt' and has been shown on TV over and over. Unfortunately, they didn't clear the sewer line, so the building is still unusable. But it looks nice with its fresh paint and new desks. Tim saw no construction projects, no cranes, no repaired buildings. None.
Tim speaks regularly with returned troops--that's one of the advantages of being a veteran, you have entre into a whole community that most of us know nothing about. Many report receiving special training on how to secure oil fields before the war, but he can't find anyone who received advanced training on securing nuclear facilities or controlling crowds in an urban area. Tim says that active duty troops and discharged veterans are very receptive to IVAW's message.
IVAW as a group is young, but it has grown from the 7 who publicly announced the organization last July to 110 active members. Tim said that veterans came out of the woodwork during last year's Republican National Convention protests in New York. As has happened during other wars, and even during peacetime, when you're in the military and you start having doubts about what you are being told to do in Freedom's name, you may think you're the only one.
He also has advice for those of us in the anti-war camp.
