I RISKED MY LIFE TO COME HOME TO THIS?

 AT OCCUPY CAMPS, VETERANS BRING THE WARS HOME

By Noor al Haqiqa

Snippits and Snappits

November 12, 2011

The thousands of indefatigable Wall Street protestors, risking their eyes and recording equipment against Wall Street’s personal jack-booted thugs in the NYPD, recently garnered even more support ~ the US Marines. That’s the type of support that may make an NYPD cop think twice before he decides to go all Tiananmen Square on a group of teenage girls, armed with chalk and cardboard signs (maybe it’s because they are spelled properly?).

The Occupy Wall Street movement may have thought it broke new ground when the NYC Transit Union joined their movement, but that ground just tipped the Richter Scale with news that United States Army and Marine troops are reportedly on their way to various protest locations to support the movement and to protect the protesters.

Surviving men and women returning home from service have had their eyes opened and been trained by the REAL enemy itself in the ways of survival. A very high percentage of these people are good decent people, now forced to live in tent camps with no water or electricity, helping each other, standing on street corners asking for money for food. Down and out when, unknowingly in most cases, they were duped by a lifetime of mental conditioning to serve their country. They left with eyes shining with delusion, and return knowing the truth and, bodies used, are cast adrift to shift for themselves in an America they now realize they never truly understood.

Said one vet:

“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.

My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protesters. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the F*ing Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets…

We can organize once we’re there. That’s what we do best.  We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing."

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano portrays veterans as victims ~ not perpetrators ~ of right-wing extremism and has sought to combat the political controversy arising out of an April 14 Homeland Security memo warning that returning soldiers could be ripe for domestic terrorism participation. “The report is not saying that veterans are extremists.  Far from it,” Napolitano said on CNN’s State of the Union. “What it is saying is returning veterans are targets of right-wing extremist groups that are trying to recruit those to commit violent acts within the country. We want to do all we can to prevent that.”

In other words, the official view is these men and women are saps without a brain of their own. The truth is that they are afraid on some level of these veterans.

Returning vets have weapons training, military knowledge, courage, skill, love and sacrifice for country and they have been put into mortal danger, by a pack of lies and bovine excrement seeping out of Washington D.C. like a cesspool. They are not so dumb as to not know something is wrong with the daily mass media hate garbage, 9/11, rigged elections with machines, unemployment, jobs going overseas, high gas prices, home foreclosures, and illness from required military injections. For these reasons and many others, the American Homeland Defence has marked these men as a threat to America. I prefer to see them as HOPE for America. 

The following is a short series of interviews with young but seasoned vets by Tina Dupuy of The Atlantic Home .

Expert at living in tents, some veterans are finding new purpose in the streets

 

We're in a coffee shop near McPherson Square, the location of Occupy DC, and Michael Patterson, 21, and I are having hot cocoa on a cold November night. He's wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt and baggy shorts. It's freezing outside. "I'm from Alaska," he offers as an explanation. He's been sleeping in a tent in D.C. for over a month now. I've traveled to five Occupations in two countries. In every demonstration (including the one in Canada) I've found a vet to talk to: 

In Zuccotti Park, Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, was sitting next to a table of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) literature. On his sweater were two buttons: an Iraq Campaign metal and one from the IWW. He served two tours in Iraq and now says he's unemployed and can't find work for over $10 an hour. And he can't live on $10 an hour. 

When I asked him why he's at Occupy Wall Street he says,

"I went and fought for capitalism and that's why I'm now a Marxist."

At Occupy Baltimore, I met 21-year-old Justin Carson, who tells me he served in the Army National Guard in Iraq from 2009 until this February. His nickname is Crazy Craze. He says he has PTSD and is bipolar but won't "do pharmaceuticals." Then he told me I should look into the Illuminati since I'm writing an article. 

It was a surprise to meet Iraq war vets at these protests. There are only, after all, around a million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in what was once dubbed the War on Terror. 

Their presence became national news when Iraq vet and former Marine Scott Olsen's skull was fractured by a non-lethal round fired by police in Oakland in late-October. A week later in New York, around 30 vets held a solidarity march from Zuccotti Park to the Stock Exchange. They had a rally at the park afterward where Bordeleau spoke.

"This is the first major movement for social change we've seen in this country since the '70s," he said to me.

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He's become a symbol of the Occupation Movement ~ he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his "freedom" of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

"There's a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head," says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. "Because he was out front."

Patterson still sports a military haircut and a bit of the Army swagger. He also has a touch of that telling hyper-awareness war vets sometimes display; he's a little twitchy, a little intense. He tells me he has PTSD and has been self-medicating with weed. He says it helps. What's also helped is being a part of this protest movement.

"This is the only peaceful solution," he says. "If this movement doesn't work, our country is not going to make it ... We're just not going to make it."

 

Patterson became an interrogator in Iraq straight out of high school. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers. He turned 18 in Basic.

"We're an industrialized nation who's a third world country. The super wealthy elite pretty much control our democratic process and everyone here is pretty much fighting for scraps and that's not right," he says.

I ask him what was the switch for him and when. He explained that it was WikiLeaks. It was the footage of the Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqis released by WikiLeaks in April of 2010. 

Up to that point he had been interrogating Iraqis and using what he describes as psychological torture.

He was 10 years old when the World Trade Center was hit. He wanted to fight terrorism in Iraq. He bought into the whole thing, he tells me. He had been looking forward to signing up ever since the 5th grade and then, suddenly, last November, he found himself watching a video of his fellow soldiers gunning down Iraqis on the street and it all changed for him. 

The Apache video, to a civilian, makes war look like a video game, but to Patterson, it was the first time he saw Iraqis as real people. Random people, with children and families who care about them. 

He tried to get out of the military as a conscientious objector after that. He was told it wouldn't work because he's an atheist.

"So I just smoked a bunch of pot and got kicked out," he says.

He was officially discharged on June 7th of this year. He went back home to Alaska, where he read about Occupy Wall Street on Reddit. 

He then went to D.C. to sleep in a tent a block away from the White House. 

Patterson speaks in sound bites. He's had a conversion and like those who find religion, the awakening has given him fervor. He's witnessing:

"Combat at Arms and Military Intelligence all come to the same conclusion: War is a business!"

He interrogated people who were later put to death in Iraq with no appeals process, he says. It haunts him. He didn't fulfill his contract so he's not eligible for the GI Bill. Even if he were, he explains, he still couldn't afford to go to school without loans. He'd be wracked with debt just like so many other students who are down at their city's Occupations.

"I just want to go to college and teach high school," he says.

For Patterson, like the other vets I spoke to, the Occupy Movement has provided a way to channel their outrage and their energy. Their involvement has been a plus for the movement, too, because vets are extremely helpful if you are planning a tent city in a park ~ they can get things done, and they are used to living in tents.

 .

Dedication to seriously wounded Scott Olsen who will suffer for life from injuries received not abroad but on the streets of his own country.

It's worth noting the anti-war movement during Vietnam was given legitimacy after the vets became their voice. But the vets themselves take solace in the act of being useful. 

Or as Patterson puts it: 

"I haven't had one nightmare since I've been here."

OCCUPY VETERANS MOVEMENT GROWING ACROSS THE U.S.