The year I was in Viet Nam saw the undoing of my character.  I was disassembled by the war and have spent the past 39 years putting myself back together.   The year I was in Viet Nam was July 70-July 71. One year at the age of 19 that would forever change me. I watched and participated in a growing GI resistance to the war. One day in my company three combat medics quit the war. We refused to go out on any more missions and announced our intentions to the First Sgt and Lieutenant. High on binoctal and alcohol we came to blows in the CQ. For striking a superior and mutiny we were arrested and thrown in the stockade. We were all decorated combat veterans but we had had enough of their war. Scotty and Nick refused to return to duty and served time in LBJ (Long Binh Jail) and received BCD (Bad Conduct Discharges) which stripped them of all veterans benefits and constitutional rights. I returned to duty but continued passive resistance. I kept men who were short (about to DEROS home) on sick leave so they were not sent out to the field. I falsified medical reports to keep men out of combat. In the end I too was discharged. I made a choice to retain my human shape and not descend into the Dark.

Back in the World (the US) there was a growing body of politically radicalized veterans. Viet Nam Veterans against the War had over 50,000 members and the GI coffee house movement was widespread. The Winter Soldier hearings put a face on the atrocities and massacres and showcased the pain and rage that was twisting the spirit of the armed forces. We in the armed forces at the time regarded ourselves as citizen soldiers. I was an enlistee, RA all the Way, regular Army and volunteered for Viet Nam. I enlisted out of a sense of duty as a calling. It was not nor ever should be regarded as a JOB. The current professional volunteer armed forces has become a contracted killing machine, a constitutional abomination. I have begun to question who it is loyal too. I swore an oath, …”to protect and defend the US constitution against all enemies both foreign and domestic.” I have never released myself from that oath.

Here is what has become of us. Blackwater(Xe), DyneCorp, Triple Canopy and Hallibuton KBR have become the mercenary assistants of the US Armed Forces. Iraq Veterans against the War in concert with Veterans for Peace and VVAW have exposed the corrupt relationship between the Pentagon and the military industrial complex. Former veterans of the US armed forces have contracted out as body guards and hired killers to the CIA and State Dept expecting to be cared for and protected by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They do not deserve nor have earned it. They and their corporate employers are subject to the Geneva conventions and International Law under the Nuremberg rulings.

Here is what we can do. We can support and advocate GI resistance. We can constantly put the cost of the war to our economy in the public eye at every and all city council or legislative hearings. Go to icasualties.org and read the names of the American dead in public. We in the Underground can bring the truth above ground.

Dave Ionno
Veteran for Peace

Artist Linda Abadjian discusses her paintings which are now on display at Charter Oak Cultural Center.  Her work depicts decades of destruction in the Middle East, mostly her native Lebanon, and tries to find hope in the depths of war. Visit LindaAbadjian.com for more information and images.

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When I was a soldier in Viet Nam we, the grunts, use to play a game while passing a bowl and listening to Hendrix and the Doors.  We called the game, “Suppose”.  It involved our imaginations and was filled with a soulful longing for a just and better world.  It went like this, “Just imagine what would have happened if Hernan Cortez and his men had been blown off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead of Vera Cruz.  On the other hand imagine that the pilgrims had been blown south by a terrific gale and the Mayflower had run aground in the Yucatan?“

This imagining led to a description of an alternate history that had the Iroquois nation defeating Cortez and the Aztecs confining the Puritans to an island isolating the dreary Protestant work ethic and a Mexican Border patrol would have kept those pasty faced people at bay.  Alexander Graham Bell and James Watt would have been born in Cuernavaca to a Mixtec woman and in 1739 30,000 Aztecs would have joined the Irish in invading England defeating Cromwell as an Aztec soldier tears his heart out.  All of this “supposing” would have meant no United States waging war in Viet Nam as we would have a racially diverse and culturally Amerind nation.

I want to “suppose” an alternate history for Obama and his wars.  Suppose Obama shuts down the Pentagon and withdraws all United States Armed forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan and Germany.  Suppose he orders all the military industrial complex to re-tool their  factories for economic conversion, to make cars, cargo ships, TV’s, refrigerators, etc.  Suppose he signs the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and has all National Guard and Reserve forces rebuilding Houston and New Orleans. Imagine what our country would look like.   Alfredo Vea, a Nam veteran , wrote of the “suppose” story in his novel “Gods Go Begging”.  His main character is a Nam veteran whose name is Jesse Pasadoble.  Only a Viet Nam veteran who knows Spanish would understand the significance of this name.  He is Jesse “two step”, which is what we called the very deadly and poisonous bamboo viper.  If bitten you took two steps and died.

The will to resist tyranny is born from thought and imagination.  Thought begets heresy, heresy begets retribution, those veterans who resist will suffer retribution.  They will be jailed, discharged under other than honorable, lose benefits they bled and killed for but they still resist.  After my tour in Nam I denied them my body, I denied them my faith and they denied me as a human being.  Suppose what a world we would have if our President listened to us and heard us.  Supangamos mi hijos.

Dave Ionno
Viet Nam Veteran Against the Wars

We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were
Going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many
Of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence
So many benefits brought by us to populations in need
Of our assistance and our civilization.
  We were able to verify that all this was true, and because it
Was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of blood, to
Sacrifice our youth and our hopes.  We regretted nothing, but
Whereas we over here are inspired by this frame of mind, I am
Told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery
Flourishes, and that many people in their uncertainty and
Confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment
And vilify our action.
    I cannot believe that all this is true and yet recent wars have
Shown how pernicious such a state of mind could be and to where
It could lead.
    Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow
Citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves
Are protecting the glory of the Empire.
   If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached
Bones on these desert sands in vain, than beware of the anger of the
Legions!

Marcus Flavinius
Centurion in the 2nd Cohort of the Augusta Legion
To his cousin Tertullus in Rome

This frontispiece is written at the beginning of Jean Larteguy’s novel The Centurions.   The author was himself a member of the marquis, French resistance in WWII , a soldier in the French Foreign Legion , a participant in the First Indo-China war and then a war correspondent.  

The book starts at the collapse of the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.  10,000 French soldiers and their allies have been defeated by bare-foot guerrilla’s led by Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh. 

The Viet Minh forces disassembled artillery and carried it piece by piece up the mountain passes, bombed daily by the vaunted air power of France and the United States. They pounded the French positions and overran them capturing 4.000 officers and enlisted men of the French paratroopers and infantry.  For 4 years they languished in re-education prison camps giving self critiques on the crimes of colonialism and capitalism.  They survived by learning how the methods of Viet Minh had been successful.  The French called the Viet Minh, les myrmidons, the termites (ants). 

On their release after the 1958 Geneva Accords, many of them went to war in Algeria, as the 10th Parachute Regiment.  They saw the same methods being used to wage a war of independence.  The Algerian Moslem rebels catchword was Istiqlal, independence.  On May 13th 1958, officers of the French paratroop regiment enacted a popular movement to recognize a Franco-Algerian independence accord that would require removal of all French troops. Istiqlal.

I read these books little realizing that MY WAR in Viet Nam was born long before I was.  I walked the same kliks (kilometers) that the French walked.  I fought the same men the French fought.  We have learned nothing. 

Today my brothers in arms are fighting the same war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Veterans are coming home and bringing the wars with them.  IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) has been enacting street theater viewed on YouTube as Operation First Casualty.  Resistance among active duty troops is rising, as it should.  We are being sacrificed and that sacrifice is being purposely hidden by the media. 

Who reports daily on the KIA and WIA?  NO ONE.  Who will tell the tale of 48 dead last month in Afghanistan and 7 dead in Iraq?  NO ONE.  If no one will talk or listen to us, the veterans, we will talk and listen to each other.  Time will come when we will act, as the legions come home.

Dave Ionno
Veteran for Peace and Viet Nam Veteran against the Wars

By Steve Thornton (courtesy of Homefront) – It’s August 6, 2009. On this warm summer night, the Diaz family is walking through Riverside Park in Hartford. The kids are thirsty and they’re on the way home across the highway to their house in the new Stowe Village. Read the full story

RadioActive takes you to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Hartford, CT where the IVAW of CT staged a protest called Operation First Casualty.

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