Some news, and an Appeal for Redress
Can’t believe it’s been almost three months since I last posted here. I knew I was depressed, my disability woes distracting from my ability to focus, while the news spins all around us. I did manage to revise and expand that piece for Peace and Change, based on the talk I gave last October at the Peace History conference; link is to my November post about it). I ran it by my writers’ group, all fellow alums of the Columbia Book Seminar; they encouraged me to broaden its reach beyond the book, to encompass some of what I’ve been discussing here. Submitting it turned out to be its own project, since I’m new to academic publishing (who here knows what an ORCID number is?) But yesterday I was informed that the piece had been accepted, as part of its special issue, “Multidimensional Perspectives Addressing the Struggle for Peace and Justice.” I’m a Wiley author of sorts now, which abated some of my depression, fear that none of my words matter.
Started this on Wednesday, abt 48 hours before the two-round damage of the Presidential Debate (featuring Trump’s masterful gaslighting known as Gish Galloping) and the 6–3 SCOTUS assault on everything we hold dear. I’ll leave it to my betters to parse that damage -
among others. But I still wanted to share something more in my wheelhouse: the Appeal for Redress, a campaign organizing active-duty military personnel to speak out on Gaza. The Peace+Change news came as I was on deadline for a piece about the Appeal for and I thought I’d share a draft of the piece. I ended with my favorite Howard Zinn quote, and footnotes instead of links because the mag does have a print version. Talking to a few Appeal participants made me exercise the hope muscle, which feels mandatory.
Appeal For Redress v.2: Servicemembers, Vets Weave a Ribbon of Hope
“Morale is being affected,” airman Juan Bettancourt told me on June 22, 2024. He was talking about the as images and videos from Gaza that flood social media, after the Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Israel’s bombing campaign has so far flattened much of Gaza, killing 40,00, dispolacing 150,000, and leaving half a million subject to famine. “By wearing the uniform of a nation whose government is complicit in the brutal slaughter of innocent lives, I feel an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and despair,” Bettancourt said. And those images and realities have spurred many military members to question their involvement in an institution that is actively supporting Israel’s war.
Bettancourt and I were talking just after the launch of Appeal for Redress #2, a campaign to mobilize active-duty and reserve troops tell their members of Congress that they oppose U.S. support of Israel’s current war in Gaza. At the Zoom launch on June 4, https://nlgmltf.org/military-law/2024/video-joint-press-conference-to-launch-appeal-for-redress-v2-for-gaza/, hosted by MLTF’s own James Branum, Bettancourt announced that he is in the process of applying for discharge as a conscientious objector. Joining Branum and Bettancourt that day was fellow airman Larry Hebert, also pursuing a CO discharge, and the organizations s supporting them: MLTF, the Center for Conscience and War (CCW), Veterans For Peace (VFP), and About Face/Veterans Against War. Together they were taking part in peace history.
The first Appeal for Redress, in 2006, was a brainstorm of former CCW director J.E. McNeil, after she was approached by then-Navy seaman (and current On Watch contributor) Jonathan Wesley Hutto, joined by Army helicopter mechanic Jabbar Magruder and Liam Madden, a Marine Corps communication-specialist who’d served in Fallujah just as the United States was about to pulverize it. As they brainstormed what might a 21st-century movement look like, the three highlighted DoD Directive 1325.6 Section 3.5.1.2. That directive, “Guidelines for Handling Dissident and Protest Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces,” declared th’at troops could participate in off-base demonstrations, although not in uniform; group organizing and petitioning were still proscribed. Hutto, Madden and Magruder then met with CCW’s McNeil, an attorney and MLTF member who spent her days with GI Rights Hotline calls. “How could they mobilize all the troops afraid to speak out publicly? The answer was in the Military Whistleblower Protection Act,” she told me years later.
They chose the most 21st-century organizing mode then possible, an online campaign at AppealForRedress.org. The text of the Appeal was simple: “As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all-American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.”
The current campaign offers servicemembers a choice of letters, all of which begin; “I am writing with deep concern regarding the escalating violence in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the West Bank and especially Gaza,” and end with “As a member of the US Armed Forces, I stand firm in my commitment to upholding the values of justice, integrity, and respect for human rights. I urge you to stand with me in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and a renewed commitment to peace, justice, and equality for all.” In between, the servicemember can choose a simple, informal approach (#1); a more formal military communication (#2); a more emotional testimony (#3), or a legal focus (#4) which goes into detail about the international-law aspects of U.S. involvement. Whatever the member chooses, they’re free to embellish or cut it down. The site ( https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/redressv2) then matches the member’s address to the appropriate Congressional representative.
The hope of Appeal organizers is to build a bridge among servicemenbers and join their struggle to other recent resignations, including two from the State Department and Army Major Harrison Mann, the latter of whom who will be a keynote speaker at the Veterans For Peace conference in August. The more public servants refuse to be complicit in what many consider war crimes, the stronger the effort.
“There is so much resistance inside so many who serve,” Bettancourt told me. “So much potential.”
Both Bettancourt and Larry Hebert, both of whose pursuit of CO was featured on Al-Jazeera last week, told me they joined the Air Force intrigued by its official values: Integrity. Service before self, Excellence in all you do. Otherwise, the two couldn’t appear more different on the surface. Hebert enlisted in 2019 to find financial security for his growing family; with the Afghanistan war winding down, he was happy to become trained in avionics, maintaining airplanes on a team that was, he thought, focused on defensive technologies.
Bettancourt, a Ph.D. candidate in history from Brown University, decided to enlist in 2019, to serve the country where his parents brought him when he was 10, fleeing Colombia’s then-horrific violence. After he completed his coursework, at the stage when doctoral students travel, he took a leave of absence — and joined the Air Force. “I had ideas for public service, where I’d learn the ins and outs of government,” he told me. “The idea of a true democracy, where progressive ideas like mine fit in every sect of society.” The latter idea met reality during basic training at Lackland Air Force Base; then his desire to be a medic was squashed, shifting Betancourt into intelligence. (Like others in his specialty, he couldn’t say much about his duties, but emphasized that none of it had to do with the Middle East.) Hebert’s aircraft-maintenance specialty, on the other hand, included aircraft bound for Qatar.
Then came October 7, 2023, and the ensuing warfare that burst the blister of the status quo. “Everyone here is pretty plugged in,” Bettancourt said. The constant stream of images and videos of the devastation snapped both into action; Bettancourt submitted paperwork to his command that if he was told to work in support of Israel, he would refuse: “I would consider it an illegal order” under international law. For Hebert, the turning point came in January, when the world heard the voice of six-year-old Hind Rajab begging the Red Crescent for help only to be stilled by a barrage of gunfire from an Israeli tank. “She looks almost just like my daughter, and that was something that was extremely hard to grasp, is that all these children that have aspirations and dreams and lives that many of us are living and want, and it’s wholly unjustified to support what’s happening,” Hebert told NBC News in June.
A month after the child’s death came that of Aaron Bushnell, which On Watch readers read about in our Spring issue. Both Hebert and Bettancourt were shocked by the lack of official response from the Air Force in the days that followed; “disgraceful,” said Hebert. At the time, Hebert was 5000 miles away from Bushnell’s Texas command, stationed in Rota, Spain as he is now. He couldn’t even think about flying to Lackland AFB for the memorial service.
But Bettancourt is right there, and did attend-which only made him angrier. “There were about 100 people there-his family came, and most of his unit.” But the session itself, according to Bettancourt, was a quiet PowerPoint presentation, mostly focused on suicide prevention (a crisis-level concern throughout the military, including the Air Force. [i]) “There was no mention of screens and hearts. Bettancourt then did the only thing he felt he could do — place a small Palestine flag at the room’s vigil table.
Hebert then booked a flight for his next leave — to Washington, D.C. For much of April, he stood in front of the White House, with a sign: “Active-Duty Airman Will Not Eat While Gaza Starves.” His hunger strike lasted three weeks, celebrated by Code Pink and Veterans For Peace. His command’s first response was to cut short his leave and recall him to Spain. By then, however, Hebert had given notice that he was a conscientious objector.
The Center for Conscience and War has received more than 40 inquiries about applying for CO based on agony about Gaza; many have initiated the process. As is protocol under AFI 36–3203, Hebert’s command immediately deactivated him from active avionics, putting him on “floater” status with minor administrative tasks that can be considered “noncombatant.” His application — answers to required questions, with attached testimonials from peers — was submitted in mid-June, and he’s still awaiting what comes next: the required interviews with an investigating officer, a psychiatrist, and a chaplain, all of whom will assess his stability and the sincerity of his beliefs. For Bettancourt, his command in Spain is allowing him to make compiling his CO claim his main job for a while. Overall, the whole process can take more than a year.
Other service members and veterans, eschewing the DOD-approved processes, expressed their concerns about Gaza by joining VFP or About Face. “Since October 7, 2023, over 250 veterans and active-duty members have applied to become members of About Face: Veterans Against the War,” said AF operations coordinator Shiloh Emlein. Another 100 joined after the death of Aaron Bushnell: “The whole veteran and military community was impacted by Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation, and that was reflected in our increased membership applications,” Emlein wrote over email.
I asked Emlein, a former Marine who served in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, what feels different about the newest war. They replied that the war’s ubiquity has made its enormity clear. “The world is waking up to a first-hand account of the horrors and violence of occupying forces in a way that wasn’t always accessible before. It is no longer just the accounts of survivors of war and returning, dissenting soldiers that are speaking the truth; the real-time atrocities are in the palm of your hand if you are willing to bear witness. Because of this, we are seeing droves of US servicemembers also waking up to their complicity and/or direct contributions to the genocide and violence in Gaza and around the globe.”
Thus the Appeal for Redress, a way to go beyond individual CO and try to impact the decision-makers. “Too often lawmakers make war policies without hearing from the people who have to implement them,” MLTF’s James Branum points out. “This is what makes the Appeal for Redress v2 so important.” I spoke briefly to Jon Hutto, who started the first Appeal, who emphasized that organizing those currently in uniform is crucial. After Hebert went public, Hutto wroteHHH on Facebook: “I’m beyond moved and inspired by this current Generation of Active-Duty being Tip of the Spear in the Struggle against the ongoing Genocide of the Palestinian People.”
At press time, the Appeal’s constituent groups are brainstorming about how to spread the word. They might look to meet the benchmarks of the first: Started in October 2006, within weeks the appeal had 65 signatories; it was soon a topic in the White House briefing room.
The Appeal’s first official press conference was on Martin Luther King Day 2007, a date chosen to highlight the neglect of Katrina communities and the billions wasted on the wars. “For Dr. King, the plight of African Americans in America was tied to the plight of the peasant in Vietnam.” [ii] By then, the signature count exceeded 1,000, and thirteen of the signatories had appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes, emphasizing that most of their critics had never been in uniform. [iii]
The next morning, Hutto and co-founders traveled to D.C. to deliver those 1,000+ appeals in person. It was unseasonably warm that day, challenging for the suit-clad journalists and the wired veterans. After statements by Hutto, Appeal co-founder Liam Madden, and VFP’s David Cline, the assembled vets streamed into the House and Senate offices to deliver their message. [iv] “I am here as a citizen,” Magruder said into the microphone, ensuring that that word carried the appropriate weight. “I want the Congress to understand that as a citizen soldier that I have the right to [appeal] and speak out against an unjust war.”
Were there any results? A week after that press conference, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama introduced the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007 ( S. 433). The plan would have stopped the 2007 U.S. Troop Surge of 21,500 in Iraq, and would also have begun a phased redeployment of troops from Iraq with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 312008. The bill was referred to committee and failed to become law in the 110th Congress. But the Appeal had made itself felt, not for the first time. With V2, it may become a real force.
Like the Vietnam resistance that inspired Hutto, anti-war activism’s effect is sometimes hard to track. As the great Howard Zinn wrote in 1999: “Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” In the case of the Appeal, MLTF can work to help reassure signatories that they’re protected from retaliation; the NLG can spread the word to their communities, where reservists and ROTC students may welcome the opportunity.
Together, maybe, we can move zigzag toward a more decent society.
[i] Courtney Mabeus Brown, “New analysis of Air Force suicides explores contributing factors.’ Air Force Times, March 24, 2024. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2024/03/27/new-analysis-of-air-force-suicides-explores-contributing-factors/
[ii] Hutto, Antiwar Soldier: How to Dissent Within the U.S. Military (Nation Books, 2008),
[iii] “GIs Petition Congress to End Iraq War: More Than 1,000 Military Personnel Sign Petition Urging Withdrawal.” 60 Minutes, February 22, 2006.
Originally published at https://chrislombardi.substack.com.
