When War is Too Easy

 In 1965 I lived in Peshawar, Pakistan on a small US military base. The base existed to spy on China and the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1965 a war broke out between India and Pakistan over the nation of Kashmir. For those who don't know, Kashmir is a region on the subcontinent that is claimed by both India and Pakistan. It is also the home of a longtime independence movement. After a summer of increasing hostilities in other parts of the country, the war came to Peshawar. On my tenth birthday, the Indian Air Force bombed military and civilian areas near the US base where my family lived with a couple hundred other US citizens. The next day, US troops dug deep long trenches in the yards of the Americans, place sheets of plywood over them and covered the plywood with dirt. These would be our bomb shelters. They also painted every window on base black and began enforcing a curfew that required us to turn off all electric lights at dusk. For the next week, the bombers came every night. We spent most nights in the trenches in our backyards. Anti-aircraft guns fired all around us and we heard the ack-ack of the guns and the bombs whistle as they fell, then explode. It was both scary and adventuresome. My siblings who were with me in that trench continue to deal with the trauma it created. After a week of bombing, the Pentagon evacuated the women and children from the base. After an overland journey to Kabul, Afghanistan and then a flight on a C-130 outfitted for troop transport, we ended up living in military barracks in Karamursel, Turkey. We stayed there for three months. The nations supplying weapons to each side halted their shipments and a truce was negotiated at peace talks in Tashkent.

This was my first brush with war. The other was when my father deployed to DaNang, Vietnam in late 1968. Despite a couple close calls, he made it home physically intact and relatively stable emotionally. My experience in Pakistan taught me two very important things. The first was that war is a foolish, if not downright idiotic method of problem solving. The second lesson was that a war could be ended if the combatants ran out of weapons and ammunition.

That week of huddling through the night in hastily-made air raid shelters while bombers dropped their ordnance a couple miles away and heavy artillery on the ground tried to shoot them down was enough war for me. I knew then that I would not allow the draft to take me. I wasn't going to die for that nonsense and I wasn't going to kill. The lessons I learned from my experience seem to be the exact opposite of the lessons learned by those who make and profit from war.

My week of war is nothing compared to those who have fought in wars or lived in countries where war ripped apart their lives. However, that week is considerably more experience than the majority of those politicians and profiteers who now insist on escalating the war between Russia and Ukraine. These men and women, who act as if war is a Hollywood film or a video game, act as if they have little understanding of the trauma they are inflicting. Nor do they seem to be considering alternatives to the escalation they champion. Their lives as US citizens are lives full of triumphalism and military madness—a madness that sees war not as a last resort, but all too often as the only resort. Even after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, these politicians and all too many who vote for them reject the compromise peace requires in favor of combat; combat most often carried out by working class men and women.

Instead of spending billions of dollars on weaponry for Ukraine's military, banning all things Russian and reviving the lend-lease legislation of World War Two, the US should be insisting on a ceasefire and a negotiated peace. This approach may lack the optics of war, but is most likely where the war will end up, anyhow. Unfortunately, for the reasons stated above and more, Washington demanding a ceasefire is unlikely to happen any time soon. The madness of war is in place. This war is just too easy for US politicians and their constituents, especially those who make money from war: no body bags of US troops, big profits and no protests. It is the perfect war crime.

A US War Resister in Germany: A Matter of Conscience

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/06/a-us-war-resister-in-germany/


a slight correction...Since the piece began with Andre thanking you for "a forum in which I can provide factual information on the case,"  I thought it might be helpful to correct some of the mis portrayal of who qualifies as a CO. 

Andre is right that the person needs to be opposed to any war they can imagine themselves fighting in.  (It is not a requirement that the person state whether they accept or reject the war that gave birth to the US.)  Someone who says they would fight in certain wars probably would be turned down.

Religious basis is not a separate way to get out.  No matter what religion the person still must be opposed to participation in all war.  Also, a person need not be religious at all as long as the moral principles that direct their life are comparable in strength to those held by religious people.  We deal with many atheist and agnostic applicants who still get out for CO.

The third issue is sincerity.  A person's lifestyle can help indicate their sincerity. Giving up paintball and combat video games can indicate sincerity of a conscientious objector but a person does not have to give up these things. I have worked with legitimate, sincere conscientious objectors who still bow hunt and nevertheless were discharged.  (There is more than one way to show sincerity).

I realize that for Andre conscientious objection didn't feel right and that is fine.  I just want to be careful that others who might well qualify don't mistakenly believe themselves ineligible because of Andre's mis characterization of the actual definition.  Anyone who even wonders whether they qualify can call the GI Rights Hotline 877-447-4487 to explore whether or not conscientious objection might be the right fit for them.  People who are having issues with the military often go online to learn about others with similar beliefs.  For others reading this interview with Andre it may be helpful to include a note of clarification so as not to unnecessarily limit the pool of future Conscientious Objection applicants.   

Peace,

Steve W.

Holiday in Peshawar: My Christmas 1965

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/24/holiday-in-peshawar/

When the Sunshine Rose and Set On the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

The popular history of the 1960s includes a number of stories that are rife with rumor and unsubstantiated tales. From the possibility of conspiracies that killed two Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the rumors begun by a college student in 1969 that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, the period was an amalgamation of truths and exaggerations. Its history is the same even today. One of the groups whose history has been always shrouded in mystery is the Laguna Beach, California-based spiritual and drug operation known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Intimately connected to acid guru Timothy Leary and--through circumstance, LSD and money--the Weather Underground and Grateful Dead, this band of Southern California street toughs took LSD and became proselytizers for a new world based on love and spirituality. Their story was the subject of many a stoned conversation, DEA report, and partially informed newspaper article. Given the fact that the folks involved in the Brotherhood were smuggling, manufacturing and distributing illegal substances, it's easy to understand why no members wanted to talk about the group.
Investigative reporter Nicholas Schou has changed all that. In his recently published book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Mr. Schou provides the most complete history of this 1960s phenomenon to date. Based on numerous interviews, research, and driven by an apparently intense interest in the subject matter, the story told in Orange Sunshine captures the idealistic beginnings of the Brotherhood and its disintegration into just another drug operation with guns, egos and greed. While reading Schou's book, one can feel the genuine desire of the group's founders to change the world through marijuana, LSD, and an alternative way of living outside of the technological suburban nightmare they perceived all around them. The transformation of these founders from pot dealers, addicts, street toughs and surfers who obtained their first acid by robbing a Hollywood personality at gunpoint to a group led by John Griggs-- a man Timothy Leary called the holiest man in the world-- reads like a novel under Schou's pen. So are the story's next chapters as the Brotherhood develops a scheme to smuggle hashish from Afghanistan into the United States and use the profits to set up a utopia in the canyons of southern California, manufacture Orange Sunshine LSD and turn on the world.

About That Orange Sunshine
During its heyday, rumors about Orange Sunshine were as rampant as rumors about Bob Dylan playing at Woodstock. Some were true and some you just hoped were true. The second time I ever ate acid was in 1971 and the source was a friend of mine who had gone to boarding school in New England and then come to Germany to stay with his parents (who worked for some US corporation). It was a summer afternoon in Gruneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main. My friend took out a little leather bag and produced two orange wafer thin tablets and a piece of green blotter paper that had a drawing of the R. Crumb character Mr. Natural on it. The orange tabs, this guy began, are Orange Sunshine made by a guy in California who used to be Owsley's apprentice. You only need half a tab. In what was probably one of the saner decisions I ever made when it came to LSD, I took his advice and only ate half a tab. Then the melting began. My buddy R saw the Grateful Dead in 1971 at the shows that would later be culled into the Skullfuck album and insisted until his death that people on the stage at the Fillmore East were shooting balls of paper with orange sunshine tablets into the audience.
Even the Village Voice got into the Orange Sunshine story circle when it ran a story in the spring of 1971 about a guy who went by the name of Sunshine John. It seems John was somehow connected to the Brotherhood and, as part of its mission to spread Orange Sunshine around the world, was one of its primary distributors on the US east coast. According to the story (and Schou, as well), there was an acid drought in late 1968 because of the arrests of the primary US manufacturers of the drug. Then, along came Orange Sunshine. Tens of thousands of hits began to appear on the streets, at rock concerts and in rural communes. Most of them were given away for free as part of the Brotherhood's mission to spread peace, love, and acid. As the experiences related above make clear, the acid continued to be manufactured and distributed well into 1971 at least.

The Beginning of the End
Naturally, all this LSD drew the attention of the authorities. Until the early 1970s, most of the anti-narcotics work concerning the brotherhood had been carried out by local police in Laguna Beach. One officer in particular, Nicholas Purcell, was behind most of the arrests and harassment of the Brotherhood and those who distributed its acid and hashish. With the intensification of the war on drugs under Richard Nixon's White House, Purcell and his cohorts were able to involve California and federal agencies in their mission to destroy the Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued to smuggle marijuana products and distribute LSD. Simultaneously many of them were moving to Maui after the ranch in the canyons was raided and Timothy Leary was arrested and their leader John Griggs overdosed on synthetic psylocibin. In addition, the mission to spread peace and love via LSD was foundering. Like so many other spiritually inclined endeavors, when the Brotherhood lost their spiritual leader, the mission became confused by the more earthly desires of some of those next in line.
Egos and easy money transformed enough of those involved into just another bunch of drug dealers with guns and cocaine. Drugs, too, had ceased to serve a liberatory function. After those first few years of revelation and communion, they were now often just crutches or, even worse, tools of the oppressor. I knew this when acid and pot dealers I knew began considering guns a necessary tool of the profession. When old-time hippies who had always considered themselves providers of a sacrament began thinking only in terms of dollars, the signs were there. Greed became the watchword for some of its biggest dealers and cynicism replaced the hopes of just a few years earlier. To borrow a phrase popular at the time, like so much of the counterculture, the Brotherhood had become part of the over-the-counterculture. It had succumbed to the all powerful capitalist god of cash.

The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is simultaneously the story of the southern California 1960s counterculture and a metaphor for the phenomenon in its entirety. The story of Orange Sunshine LSD could easily be the story of the later years of the 1960s US counterculture. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that money, ego, and law enforcement trumped everything else in that period known as the Sixties in America, despite the most positive intentions.