As the man's wavering voice rang out over the valley filled with banners and posters and bodies, the tears rolled down my cheek as I hugged my friend Bryan, whose body shook with sobs. Kevin and Joyce Lucey stood close to each other on stage and haltingly told of coming home to find their son Jeffrey, a Marine who had just come back from a tour in Iraq, dead by his own hand, hung by a garden hose in their basement. Kevin and Joyce joined Military Families Speak Out Against the War. They were one of dozens of family members, former and active service members and community organizers who spoke out at Fayetteville, North Carolina March 20, 2005, on the second anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
As a 10-year protest veteran at the ripe old age of 25, I have gotten pretty cynical about rallies and demonstrations and whatnot. Most of the time it's marching around slow as hell to stand around and listen to speakers say the same thing over and over again for hours under the watchful eyes of hundreds of heavily armed cops just itching for an excuse (or itching to manufacture an excuse) to intervene. I go to protests because I don't have anything better to replace it with, and because of guilt.
But Fayetteville was incredibly different. The town is the base town to Ft. Bragg, housing the 82nd Airborne and the Special Forces, so it is definitely a military town. Having grown up on military bases and then gone to high school at a small Oregon school where a disproportionate number of the kids were going into the military, I immediately recognized the feel of Fayetteville. The accents were different, but pretty much everything else was familiar. At least 20 active duty GIs defied orders from Ft. Bragg to come listen at the rally.
Rather than another massive convergence in DC or New York or San Francisco, people were traveling to a spot that has very real historical and political implications. Folks in the community and in surrounding areas of North Carolina and the larger South spent a good year planning and outreaching to affected communities. The result was over 4,000 people coming together in the largest gathering Fayetteville has ever seen (they had a similar protest last year that was over 1,000). I have been to protests with hundreds of thousands of people, been able to look up and down the street and see nothing but bodies, but I can't remember the last time I was so moved, more impassioned.
It was the people most affected by this war who were organizing, planning, speaking and making decisions before, during and after the rally. Led by Military Families Speak Out and the recently formed Iraq Veterans Against the War, the list of speakers included mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, and children of people currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, people who had come home shattered and wounded physically or emotionally, or people who hadn't come home at all. There was also an impressive slate of people who had gotten out or were trying to get out of the military who loudly voiced their opposition to the racist, imperialist war that this country is waging; some had served prison time rather than be deployed to kill civilians and occupy a country.
Rather than a party line, a didactic rant or a rehearsed spiel, these were folks who were speaking straight from the heart about their real-life experiences, speaking up for their loved ones, other soldiers and themselves. Talking about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to stop-loss orders to depleted uranium wasn't an intellectual discussion, it wasn't a theoretical supposition, it was real life that these folks have to live with every day. It was Camilo Mejia, a member of the National Guard, who refused to deploy to Iraq and spent nine months in military prison. It was Jimmy Massey (interviewed in the January, 2005 Objector) who served as a Marine in Iraq and testified at a hearing concerning the illegality of the war that his unit bombed civilians and were given orders to fire on a non-violent demonstration of Iraqis with M-16s and 50-caliber machine guns. [Is this right? The Objector interview speaks of killing people at roadblocks]. It was Daniel Berg, father of Nick Berg who was decapitated in Iraq after being held by US officials and Muntada al-Ansar. It was Kevin and Joyce Lucey cutting their son Jeffrey down.
The entertainment aspect to the Fayetteville rally was also truly incredible. I traveled down to Fayetteville with the Puerto Punx band Ricanstruction from New York, who performed at a concert the night before as well as at the rally. The organizers did a fabulous job of weaving in talented and engaging performers throughout the speaking, so there was a break in terms of voices and also in terms of energy. Much of what the speakers had to say was incredibly powerful but also incredibly heart-wrenching. Splitting it up with performances touched the chord that art always touches, inspiring people in ways that simple words by themselves could not. Art has always been a central part of any successful movement of resistance, throughout the history of the world. So of course Ricanstruction was amazing as always, and so were the other acts. But one performance captivated the entire audience, myself included. The Cuntry Kings, a drag king troupe from North Carolina, performing an amazing counter-recruitment drag piece to Trapt's “Headstrong.” (“Headstrong/take you on/Headstrong/Take on anyone/ I know that you are wrong/ This is not where you belong…”) It was utterly stunning. It went through the entire recruiting process, and then the queer bashing that happens when someone is outed or comes out in the military, and finally the determination of the main soldier not to fight for a homophobic, transphobic oppressive military/government. It was an incredible piece of art, very talented, creative and moving. As an artist, I always feel that we have to better incorporate art into our movements in new and innovative ways, and this was the perfect example. You have to check out Cuntry Kings. (Their website is www.cuntrykings.com, they're still adding to it, and there is actually a clip of this performance if you go to traprockpeace.org/fayetteville_rally_2.html and scroll down.)
Another amazing thing about the performances was not just the quality of them but that almost every single group included a military veteran. It was incredibly powerful to see people who perhaps have kept their involvement in the armed forces a secret be able to express their feelings about that, and work to oppose the militarism that is seducing and lying and stealing young working-class people of color and sending them to kill and be killed by other young working-class people of color for the establishment of a global empire and even more disproportionate distribution of wealth.
There was a small contingent of counter protesters across the street from the convergence, probably no more than 100 people. It seemed, however, so much more laughable than other counter protests I had seen, because despite their taunts that we were all “commies” and “dirty hippies,” clearly the buzz cuts and desert camo of the vets, the glasses on chains and pressed slacks of the family members belied that. Regardless of whether they agreed with what speakers were saying and what we were there for, they could not deny the fact that these are people who have been intimately and horribly involved in this war.
As someone who is from a pro-military family, it was healing for me to be at the protest. Many of my relatives are or were in the military. My brother, nephews, cousins, grandfather — we represent all branches. It is always a conflict of how to support and love them, while holding true to my principles and being uncompromising in my commitment to justice. How do you love someone who you know has committed heinous acts, who has been a part of a killing machine that has bulldozed through so many countries and committed unconscionable acts of genocide? Being at this protest where people understand that dilemma very personally and clearly, seeing soldiers trying to atone for what they have done, trying to pull something good out of their experience, seeing family members hold the people they love accountable while still affirming that love, even just seeing cheesy slogans like “We support our troops, so bring them home” made a very deep impact on me.
One of the glaring holes in the event, however, pointed out to me by a brotha at an anarchist people-of-color conference I went to the weekend after who had volunteered the day of the protest, was the lack of representation and voices of the over 100,000 Iraqis who have died since the invasion of Iraq, and the over one million Iraqis who died due to the embargos that have been in place since the first Gulf War. The 1,500 u.s. soldiers who have died and the 20,000 who have come back wounded (that's not including mental and emotional wounds for the most part) were very clearly represented, given names, faces and families. Humanized. The Iraqis who are dead were simply a number. Even though the protest was very anti-war, it replicated the government line of seeing “enemy” casualties (especially civilian) as “collatoral damage” rather than people murdered by the state. As people in the belly of the beast, we must put out that information, we must make those connections for people, get in contact and support the Iraqi people however we can. We must support people's rights to self-determination. Regardless whether amerika likes another country's government or not (and this current regime has absolutely no credibility when it talks about illegally elected and illegitimate dictatorships), it is not the place of the government to go in and overthrow a ruling body and then engineer a puppet election to install its mouthpieces into positions of power so it can better exploit the natural resources of the country. We as an anti-war movement, as people of conscience, as souljahs and strugglahs and activists have to constantly question that, and also raise the reality that the Iraqi people don't want the u.s. government there. There has been no headway made in quelling the rebel forces, because they have the support of the people. It is their country, they know it, and they want the u.s. out. That has to be the ultimate demand we make of this government as well as paying reparations for the heinous atrocities it's committed in Iraq for over a decade. But we have to link this war to the other wars this country wages, link it to prisons (most of the young people of color who are recruited into the military are poor with no other job options, and are facing the reality of going to prison for illegal activities to make ends meet or going into the military, and that's called the poverty draft, cause that ain't no kind of choice), poverty, exploitation, sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, classism. We have to link it to Afghanistan and Vietnam and Colombia and Venezuela and Syria and North Korea and Compton and Harlem and South Central and North Philly. Without those connections being made, we will never truly win, because the goal cannot just be u.s. troops out of Iraq, it has to be to stop this government's plan for global domination, to oppose oppression in all its forms, to tear down this corrupt system and to build a loving, open society where people can have their needs met and be free to explore themselves.