Somehow, we at NACC have been making grants for now five years: I find the accumulation of time/history quite surprising. Quite an amazing collection of groups and good works. In selecting the 2005 recipients, we again faced our usual dilemma: how to sort the requests from a large number of great groups doing good work, into the fewer we would be able to help out.
This year we spread our grants to eight groups, giving a total of $7,500. When we began our initial reviews, we realized that almost one half of the applications were from groups doing counter-recruitment (CR) work, mirroring what has, due to the combination of the war in Iraq and the unfolding of the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) act that allows military recruiters access to high-school students' information, become a national focus of anti-militarist work.
The latter aspect has meant that all high school students face at least some contact with the issue of recruitment, so the war affects students directly. We decided the urgency and importance of CR work meant we should select from several CR grant applications, and we selected three.
The highest CR award, $2000, went to one of the forerunners of CR work. Project YANO in San Diego county -- home of a huge naval base -- has been engaging in CR work for twenty-two years. As the CR movement gained steam nationally, Project YANO's long-time staff person, Rick Jahnkow, was called upon to do several hundred trainings and provide strategic advice to the large numbers of people who came to CR work recently-averaging 50 inquires per day for a while! Project YANO is clear that CR work is part of strategic anti-militarism work, and they focus on youth involvement and the economic issues of the U.S. military's recruitment targeting of the lower class. Their history of accomplishments, and excellent materials, are inspiring. It was wonderful to be able to help such a leader in CR work.
The two other CR grants were for specific campaigns. The Military Out of Our Schools-Bay Area group was awarded $750 for a youth CR conference, to educate and nourish youth leadership in CR work, and to carry the energy beyond the conference into specific actions in several area schools. The Bay Area MOOS network came into being after another long term CR/anti-militarist group, CCCO, came into town for a training. The conference will build CR and anti-war knowledge, capability, and energy by gathering youth activists and those with many years' experience. The Bay Area network is a fine example of the growth of the CR movement in the past couple years.
The second project is in South Dakota -- a quite different situation than the Bay Area; we granted them $750. The South Dakota Peace & Justice Center has found almost no public knowledge of the opt-out provisions of NCLB (and no implementation by the schools), and there is also widespread acceptance that the military and National Guard are typical job choices for many young adults. Hence, the SD project plans to train and provide materials for teams to work in seven communities to educate and pressure schools to provide the ability to opt out from recruiter notification, and also to challenge militarism generally, and recruitment specifically by educating on the reality of military life. South Dakota teams will work in high schools and college age teams will focus on education at cultural gatherings.
The other five grants went to Peace & Justice work, reparations, and a computer-capacity-building project.
Three P&J groups got support: Puget-Sound-based Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action suffered a catastrophic fire which destroyed the Center's house. Ground Zero has been resisting the Bangor Trident sub-base since the early '80s, when warheads first started arriving; the base fence runs along the back yard. In recent years the county prosecutor has refused to press charges for Nonviolent Direct Action that Ground Zero has organized at the base, since juries were finding the resisters not guilty under International Law (there are hints that may be changing).
The Ground Zero grant of $1,000 will help them rebuild their house, and continue exposing the horror of Trident subs.
The Peace & Justice Center in Fort Collins, Colorado was granted $625 for general operations. They have grown from an all-volunteer group to having a paid staffer, and thereby increased their actions. They are focusing on peace & justice, immigration, and youth and militarism; and have a women's peace & Justice coalition and help run a local barter project. In addition, they are working to build an environmental project into their work. They help bring together single-issue groups, and also stimulate networks between Fort Collins activists.
The third peace & justice group was the nearby Whatcom County Peace & Justice Center, which is planning a weekend training on Nonviolent Direct Action with the goal of sparking the formation of a number of people able to resist our government's actions, using Direct Action when necessary. We granted them $750.
The final two grants were unique. A Seattle alternative high school, NOVA, has a sister school in East Timor, a relation that grew out of students' work against the occupation of East Timor.
The Sister-School project has shown the students the direct impacts of U.S. foreign policy, and the program is now focused on both involving students in learning the United States' dark history of involvement, in addition to raising money in reparation for the damage the U.S. government caused.
The students have raised a significant sum to help their sister school and a health clinic,. Last year a group of students was able to visit the East Timor school -- a transformative experience. We granted $625 to help lower-income students make the trip to East Timor this year. This curriculum is a training ground for the young becoming lifelong activists.
The Riseup Network received $1,000; they are a computer resource collective, providing e-mail accounts, hosting numerous activist listservs, and some websites. They are highly attuned to supporting activists in the Global South who have a harder time with access to tech resources.
Their new project creates a secure server to help Global South tech collectives expand their actual tech capacity as well as the services they can provide. This project is specifically collaborating with groups in Brazil, Columbia, and Uruguay. It is quite remarkable how such relatively small resources can have a multiplicative impact; the tech wizards of Riseup are an inspiration.
NACC's 2006 granting cycle will be announced in the next couple of months; in the meantime, check out these groups, tell your local organizations about our grants for progressive social change, and send a donation so we can grant even more in support of the great work being done in every corner of this land.
-- Scott McClay
In its March 15 issue, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a new study by Col. Charles Hoge, MD, of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Hoge's study shows that fully one-third of veterans of the Iraq war have already sought out mental health care treatment upon their return. The numbers are consistent with those in a new study from the Veterans Administration (VA), which also shows that in the first three months of FY 2006 (Oct.-Dec. 2005) the VA saw a 21 percent increase in Iraq and Afghanistan vets treated; 144,424 returning veterans were seen by the VA medical system through the first quarter of FY 2006, 33,858 more than the Bush administration had estimated in its budget proposal for the entire year.
Wholly a third of that treatment has been for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), an affliction that the Pentagon and VA hospital system only thought would -- and budgeted as if it would -- afflict only some 18 percent of returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Yet the National Center for PTSD estimates that over the course of their lifetimes, over half of all male Vietnam vets, and nearly half of female Vietnam vets, have suffered full or partial PTSD. In other words, Hoge's study and the VA's data should not have been a surprise, but was; the Pentagon vastly underestimated the number of soldiers who would be mental health casualties of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were more PTSD diagnoses in the first three months of FY 2006 than were expected for the entire year. Defense Department officials estimated last December that only about 18 percent of troops in Iraq and 11 percent in Afghanistan would develop PTSD in their lifetimes, numbers far lower than both the Vietnam experience and what's already been reported thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is utterly consistent with how the Department of Defense and the Bush administration have, since the inception of the so-called “War On Terror”, sought to minimize the physical and mental costs of the war for the soldiers who fight it. Most public attention has focused on the over 2,400 American fatalities, and how Donald H. Rumsfeld's Pentagon prohibits photos or civilian witnesses of returning flag-draped coffins, and famously tried to manipulate public details of the Afghanistan friendly-fire death of football hero Pat Tillman for political gain. George Bush has never attended an Iraq or Afghanistan soldier's funeral, and does not bother to hand-sign the condolence letters sent to slain soldiers' families. The White House would like to pretend that war does not generate death, and would prefer that you not notice, either.
But it would also prefer that you not notice the far larger number of physically and mentally wounded. According to the Pentagon, over 16,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But that number is misleading, because so many of those 16,000 plus injuries are life-changing: paralyzing spinal injuries, arm or leg amputations, blindness. The improvised bombs responsible for many of the casualties are maiming, and dramatic advances in battlefield triage medicine mean that injuries that once surely would have been fatal often now leave soldiers alive, but not entirely whole. Washington state has a disproportionate number of such injuries; only eight states, most of them far more populous, have had as many "traumatic injuries" treated through the VA, with only the military base-heavy North Carolina and Georgia having more such injuries per capita.
Beyond the Pentagon's reported injuries, as of December 8, 2005, the military had evacuated another 25,289 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries or illnesses not caused directly by enemy bullets or bombs, according to the U.S. Transportation Command. That statistic includes everything from serious injuries in Humvee wrecks to routine sickness to battlefield-related PTSD. These evacuees are not counted in Pentagon totals.
All told, an October 2005 VA report shows 119,247 service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan already receiving health care from the VA. Some of that may be routine, but given that most armed-forces members are under age 40 and are otherwise in good physical health (or they wouldn't have been considered fit enough to fight within the last four years), the vast majority are likely to be under care for problems related to their service in the War on Terror. Nearly 37,000 have mental disorders; over 46,000 have musculoskeletal problems. And those figures don't count a large number of PTSD victims whose symptoms are either going untreated or being treated elsewhere.
War has other health costs, too. A December 9, 2005 Stars and Stripes article reports that, "Army researchers saw alcohol misuse rise from 13 percent among soldiers to 21 percent one year after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan." The article also notes that "researchers also saw soldiers with anger and aggression issues increase from 11 percent to 22 percent after deployment. Those planning to divorce their spouse rose from nine percent to 15 percent after time spent in the combat zone." While firm studies have not yet been done, anecdotal evidence suggests that the same stress- and violence-induced behavior is resulting in higher rates for returning vets in drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide. And returning vets are also beginning to report the same sorts of clusters of symptoms that characterized Gulf War Syndrome, and at even higher rates than their Gulf War compadres.
"VA's own experts on PTSD have repeatedly questioned whether VA has the resources to meet the needs of new combat veterans. VA needs additional resources and staff to meet the mental-health-care needs of veterans," says Lane Evans (D-IL), ranking member of the House Veteran Affairs Committee. Much of the additional information on increased Pentagon casualties and VA treatment has been wrested from the Bush administration by persistent Democratic critics in the relevant House and Senate committees. Veterans' advocacy groups, too, have been harshly critical of the lack of budget resources to meet the needs of returning soldiers.
But rather than increasing resources for returning vets needing health care, the Bush administration has been trying to reduce them. For instance, Charles Sheehan-Miles, Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense, reports that, "Last year, the VA began an aggressive review of PTSD claims, reopening the claims of 72,000 veterans with the most serious PTSD. Rules were changed to require additional approval for PTSD claims. The review of the 72,000 claims ended only when at least one of those veterans received a letter from the VA and blew his brains out. The subsequent outcry drowned out the most important finding of the VA's investigation -- of the 1,000 reviews they completed before halting the program, not one constituted fraud."
Sheehan-Miles, criticizing the Pentagon's lack of mental health care for returning soldiers, notes that, "Often, the only readjustment counseling a military veteran receives on the end of a year-long combat tour is a fifteen-minute chat, in a group, with a chaplain."
Taken together, all these statistics and stories paint a picture of wartime service that is far more dangerous than most incoming military recruits realize. The number of U.S. fatalities among soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan has been relatively small for the hundreds of thousands who have now fought there. But it's far more likely -- some 20 times as likely, according to the Pentagon's own numbers -- that a soldier will be shipped home due to physical or mental injury. Many of those injuries will be permanent and life-changing. And still more soldiers suffer later, after they get back, after the shooting has stopped, as the full weight of what they have survived and what they have done hits home. Some never recover.
This is the story Pentagon recruiters don't tell, and one that needs to be told. War is not the clean, antiseptic operation, as conveyed from pristine briefing rooms to the television sets of America. It's violent, ugly, horrifying for the soldiers, even worse for the civilians who never asked to live in a war zone. With the overwhelming technological superiority of U.S. armed forces, invariably America kills far more of "them" -- enemy and civilians alike -- than "they" kill of us. But soldiers suffer, too: from physical maimings and injuries, and from the mental toll of fear of death and the ugliness that comes from knowing you've killed fellow human beings. The Bush administration, the Pentagon, and that friendly local military recruiter would prefer you didn't know. It's best never to forget.
-- Geov Parrish
As noted on our main page, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is returning to Seattle for the first time since Clinton/Gore were walking tall.
While much of the meeting will be dedicated to NWTRCC business, and War Tax Resistance generally, workshops and panels will also explore other means by which the Peace Movement resists the Administration's permanent-war-polity.
If you'd like to help out with planning, organizing, housing, or other details, feel free to get in touch with the office!
If it feels like it's been a long time since the previous NACC newsletter, well, you're right. We decided not to publish a second 2005 newsletter after the first one in January, so that we would have more money available to allocate to CMTC grants.
It still wasn't near enough, as even the organizations that didn't get funded last year submitted very impressive applications.
It's too early to know whether we'll opt to make a similar decision this year. But donations to NACC (which are added directly to the pool available to grant), and/or deposits to the CMTC Escrow Account (the interest from which is added to the pool) are always welcomed!
You can utilize the form located on our website to make either a donation or a deposit.
Also available at the NACC website, new versions of some of the more popular NACC literature, which was given a major overhaul in the Spring of last year.
We've updated the flyers "War Tax Resistance: How To Stop Paying For Militarism", "NACC's CMTC Escrow Account For Refused Military & War Taxes", and "Telephone War Tax Resistance: A Monthly Low-Risk Action For Peace". All three, along with NWTRCC's "Why Isn't Everyone Who's For Peace A War Tax Resister?" are online in PDF format. Feel free to download, print, photocopy and distribute!
We've ordered a new batch of the War Resister's League's War Tax Resistance: A Guide To Withholding Your Support From The Military. Most recently updated in 2003, this is the best over-all introduction to the philosophy, history, and practice of WTR.
You can pick up a copy from the NACC office for $15.
Nonviolent Action is published biannually by the Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia (NACC), formerly the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign.
NACC, 4554 12th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98105, (206) 547-0952, nacc (at) drizzle (dot) com, http://seanacc.org/.
The Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia is a Seattle-based organization which uses nonviolent direct action to create political and social change. NACC acts to interrupt and transform militarism and other forms of violence, and to build a society based upon community, economic justice, environmental awareness, personal empowerment, and feminist, queer-positive and anti-racist principles.
NACC uses creative nonviolent direct action, war tax resistance, public education, grants to activist groups, and coalition building towards these ends, creating community and developing empowerment and conflict-resolution skills in the process.
NACC has an office staffed part-time by Geov Parrish, Scott McClay, and Eddie Tews. We welcome new members. For more information, contact us at the address, phone number, or e-mail address above.
NACC is an affiliate of the War Resisters League, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, and the Northwest Disarmament Coalition.
The Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia
4554-12th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105. An affiliate of the
War Resisters League and NWTRCC
Tel: (206) 547-0952, Fax: (206) 547-2631. E-mail: nacc (at) drizzle (dot) com