Spirit in Action
Face-to-face with the War Beast in Fayetteville
Chuck Fager has served 11 years with Quaker House, situated right next to Ft. Bragg, the largest army base in the USA, and dealing daily with soldiers & the war machine, They provide peace education, advocacy & counseling, both directly & through the GI Rights Hotline (call 877-447-4487 ).
- Broadcast on:
- 23 Dec 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - We've got a great worker for peace as today's Spirit in Action guest. His name is Chuck Fager, and he was on this show almost seven years ago, way back in the first year of this program. Because I'm Quaker, I have a lot of Quaker activist friends and acquaintances, so they are featured on this program, certainly more than the pitiful percentage that Quakers represent in the USA and in the world. As such, I'm hesitant to drag back Quaker guests at the risk of boring my non Quaker listeners, but I am very sure that what Chuck Fager has to say will be of great interest to everyone concerned about war, peace, and justice, which is why I figure you are listening to Spirit in Action. Chuck Fager has just completed a loving years of service at a place called Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of what I think is the US's largest army base, Fort Bragg. Back in 1969, a young soldier drafted for the Vietnam War showed up at a Quaker meeting 90 minutes north of Fayetteville asking for help in applying as a conscientious objector. The response was to set up Quaker House right next to the belly of the war beast, where those in the military could find a supportive and sympathetic ear and to provide peacemaking efforts through education, advocacy, and counseling. Chuck Fager has been doing the demanding and dedicated job of director of Quaker House for 11 years and is full of firsthand stories of facing the individuals in and the structure of the war machine. Chuck joins us by phone from North Carolina. Chuck, welcome back after all these years to Spirit in Action. - Thanks Mark, great to be here. - Have you found yourself changing in terms of your attitudes about the military because you've spent this 11 years right there in a military-based town where it pervades the entire atmosphere and you've worked with a lot of people in the service and out? - Well, I've certainly learned a lot. Now I was raised in the military family and I came pretty close to first going to the Air Force Academy and then later on being an Air Force officer from ROTC. So this atmosphere in many ways was not a stranger to me. At the same time over these years, it's been brought home to me pretty concretely what a heavy cost our wars have imposed on the soldiers and the families who are doing this stuff involved in making these wars. And the cost is really very high and there's all sorts of institutional forces that downplay it. Around here it's hard to downplay even though the Army works very hard at doing that but it's just burst out of their efforts to downplay it again and again such in terms of suicides and in terms of domestic violence and that sort of thing. Those things have come home to me in a way that I wasn't aware of when I got here and they're kind of a burden. The Bible is right, you reap what you sow and our military as an expression of the spirit that's in control of our country. It's not just a matter of some bloodthirsty men sitting around a table or in barracks at Fort Bragg or even around tables at the Pentagon. This is an expression of the spirit that really pervades our culture, the spirit of war. These people go out and carry out these fantasies of domination or whatever it is and they pay a terrible price. I mean, of course there are hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan whose lives have been shattered by what they've done but they have not escaped even if they have come back seemingly in one piece by Marx. And just how high that cost is is something that I'm much more aware of than I had. It's not like I was unaware of it but there's a difference between hearing about it on NPR and dealing with it here more concretely. And as this has happened, I've also become much more aware of how over the time I've been here, the American public at large has become more and more, I guess I just have to say oblivious to the whole thing. I realized recently there's two sets of 99%, 1% divisions in our society that I know of. One of them is the one that Occupy Wall Street raised up and which I completely agree with, not the 1% at the top of the 99% underneath that. But the other one is that 1% of our population about 3 million people is directly involved in the military. The other 99% to a pretty great degree to an almost completely total degree is culturally socially distanced from the military and what it does and the impact that what they're doing that has on the people in it. And that 90 to 99% is more and more oblivious as time goes on to see it to me. And that's problematic in all sorts of ways. - And this is true even if they count themselves as strong supporters in the military, right? - Yes, because it's very easy for people to be supportive at a great distance, supportive in the abstract. And we know plenty of politicians whose support for war-like policies does not include anything like direct involvement or direct involvement by people in their family. - I'll give you an example of this. We're talking in late 2012. So a new Congress has been elected, hasn't been shaken down yet. But in the current Congress, it's just wrapping up. My information is that there are 80 veterans in the House and the Senate. That's of 535 members, 80. And that's the lowest percentage of veterans since the four World War II. And what's the significance of that? There's probably a lot of significance. The one that leaves out of the media is that Congress and the White House too for that matter is the Board of Directors essentially for War America Incorporated. And the War America Incorporated is an outfit. It's an undertaking. It's an operation that has an annual budget of well over a trillion dollars. And if you imagine a trillion dollar corporation, the Board of Directors of that corporation had better know what the business is and know something about the business in order to do a responsible job of providing oversight and management. Well, when you've got only 80 out of 535 members of your board that have any direct connection with the business that your corporation is in, that board is going to probably give pretty lousy oversight and supervision of this big whatever business you're in. And that's my experience that the military largely gets what it wants out of Washington because there's fewer and fewer people there that know anything about what they're doing. And so they can pull a little over their eyes, they can go around them and they do all the time. They still get all this money. - Do you count it as true? The thing I heard recently was that the Republicans are trying to spend more on the military than the military wants than maybe the joint chiefs or whoever at that level has requested Congress, at least the Republican faction in Congress, is trying to spend more money in the military. Is that also a sign of being out of touch with the military? Is it throwing money where maybe it's not going to be particularly useful? - Well, that's sort of a complicated thing. And I'm hesitant to talk too much about particular political parties anymore than necessary because the disease of militarism, the spirit of war, that pervades it, it covers everybody and all the parties. The war budget is at its all time high this year under a democratic administration. And even though there were plans or voice plans anyway to add a whole lot of money to it by the groups that wanted to take over, even if that doesn't happen, the war budget is still going to grow. They say they're planning to make cuts, but what they were planning to cut is the rate of interest. And so I suppose that's a real thing. There are people around here and say though, the Chamber of Commerce as well as people directly involved in military contracting, they have been in a panic for months about the possibility that there might be some cuts at the end of 2012, some of the automatic cuts that those might actually happen and they've been lobbying feverishly along with big war contractors from all around the country to stop anything like that from happening. Usually these folks get what they want, so even with a democratic administration continuing, it's likely that there's not going to be much cuts. And the idea that the other folks wanted to spend a whole bunch of money if they are in military didn't really want, that's a little complicated because the White House can tell people, in the Pentagon, you're actually quiet. Yeah, how much they want. Really, the military and the corporations that supply them, they always want more. They get two trillion more, they'll take it. We had a governor's race here in North Carolina and one of the candidates came to town five or a couple months ago. And in the course of a discussion, he got to talking about the importance of military contracting in North Carolina. And he said in North Carolina, we have 100 counties. Of these 100 counties, he said that 87, this is from memory, so it might be off by one or two, but 87 counties had military contracts in them. And North Carolina is a pretty big status, more than 400 miles across. So 87 counties have a direct stake in terms of jobs and somebody's business in this war machine. North Carolina, as of my understanding, is relatively, it's like an awful lot of states, most of the states. So all this money that they're trying, that they shower on the military, it's spread around widely. This is not a new disclosure. This is spread around very widely. And so there's many, many members of Congress, there are many, many communities that have a direct stake in keeping this machine turning and well-oiled with enormous amounts of our tax payers money that could be going for lots of other things, like fixing those bridges so they don't fall into the Mississippi River and education and healthcare. So many things that are under very serious pressure and are regardless how the election turned out. In fact, one of my little hobby horses once I get retired here is going to be raising my voice. However, I'm able to try to protect what remains of our safety net, particularly in the social security. I mean, I'm old enough with social security now and the politicians tell me, "Don't worry, your social security is safe, figure." But having told you that, we want you to go along with screwing your kids and grandkids out of it. And in fact, I made a poster that I had on my Facebook page and I'm probably gonna be faxing through our senators pretty soon. So you tell me I can keep my social security as long as I go along with you guys screwing my kids and grandkids out of them. How big a scumbag do you think I am? Well, here's a clue, and not that big. I'm not that big a scumbag. - One of the things you've certainly run into because you've been involved with Quaker House, right by Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, working there for the 11 years. Number one, you've been in a tiny minority, I think, for the region and maybe I'm misestimating-- - Oh, that's about right. - Tiny minority, okay. Being that you're part of this tiny minority, I'm assuming that you see the vets who are coming out who are damaged, who aren't getting the support that they deserve after having served their country, after putting their lives on the line and having been promised. So at the same time that you're working for their welfare, the machine that they're part of, I think you'd like to see disassembled or reduced in spending or maybe very significantly reduced in size. Are you a total heretic as far as that area is concerned to people, stand with stones ready to stone you when you walked on the streets of Fayetteville? - Well, not entirely. We've had a motto slogan since I got here, and we've repeated it at every possible location, and it is yes to the troops and no to the wars. And there are people who always say, "Oh, but you can't say your support to troops unless you support what they're doing over there." Well, I'd say, "Oh, well, yes we can." We can certainly support the troops and not the wars. We do that every day. You want to see our track record? Here's our phone records and we talk to our counselors and tell you stories about the people we've worked with. We're supporting them in ways that we think of as moving them towards peaceful options. I mean, people come to us. We don't go out and propagandaize for them. And we give them good information. We don't tell them what to do, what kind of decisions to make, but we work with the soldiers and their families all the time in supportive ways. That's an important thing to say, which has gained a certain kind of respect. Nobody's going to vote for me to run for mayor, but in the sense of having kind of established a foothold in some way. Now there are still people who don't buy it. There are still people who get their heads full of crazy notions in fact. You know, just the other day. Phone rang here at Quaker House. I picked it up and a lady was, you know, I said, "This is Quaker House." And they said, "You all, you all are Quakers. "I got a question for you. "How come you scratch out in God we trust from your money?" And I said, "What? "I got a guy coming here." And he said, "You all scratch out in God "we trust off your money." (laughing) That's what you Quaker through. I just said, "Sorry, I don't know. "I think about what you're talking about." And for anybody who's out there listening today, Quaker House, we do not scratch and go, we trust off our money. Whether we would have put it on there, if it was up to us in the beginning, 50-some years ago, that's a different question, but we do not do that. Where does she get that idea? I have no idea. So there are crazy notions that can spread around. But still, we do what we can, and sometimes it gets a little paradoxical. An incident that sticks in my mind, I'm knocking the door one day here. I went to the door, and there was this guy standing there in his camouflage uniform. Several strides, sergeant, came in and sat down, and he looked kind of worried, and he looked very confused. And I had the feeling after we talked for a few minutes that maybe the longest march he was ever on was to come walk down Hillside Avenue for a couple of blocks and turn up our walk and go up our steps. I say that was a long walk because he'd been in the army for 10 years. He was a Latino, a background, and the army had worked for him, and he had been completely loyal to the army. So he would never have thought about having anything to do with dodgy, suspicious outfit like Quaker House. And he went to Iraq, like they told him to do. But while he was there, his Humvee got batted around by an IED or some kind of a bomb or something, and he suffered what they call a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. And most TBIs, they don't show visibly. There's no cuts, no scars, no visible wounds. And sometimes they take a while to manifest. He finished his tour in Iraq, came back to Fort Bragg and was assigned his unit. Well, I say he was halfway to being able to retire. And then TBI stuff started kicking in, and it started messing up his head. He couldn't think straight, and he couldn't visualize things very well, and he couldn't do his work well. He went to the periods about this, and I said, go see the army doctors, and the army doctors gave them pills, tranquilizers, and stuff like the antidepressants, and so on. Which, that wasn't really his problem, and they just made it worse. It made him more groggy and foggy, and evidently, a great many units in the army here have very short patience, very little patience, for people being unable to do what it's supposed to do. And before long, they had essentially turned on him. You're no good, you're a burden to us. They talk about the army family, we take care of our own, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of a sudden, this guy after 10 years completely loyal service, he's not only foggy in his head because of his injury, now he's being told that he's worthless and a burden to his unit by people that he had been loyal to. And what was he gonna do? He began to think that he was hurt so bad that he might need to look into, see if he could apply for a medical discharge and get some benefits. They tell him, you wouldn't qualify, don't even think about it. Well, he couldn't help think about it because he was hurting and disoriented and having a very hard time and getting badgered and pressured by his superiors. And so, where was he gonna get help that was outside of the army? Something that he felt he could trust, and eventually, I don't even know how, our name came up, and he came to see us, and it's interesting that when he came to see us, he wasn't really asking how he could get out of the army. He was more at it, how can I get the army to respond to my actual needs and problems? He knew that was probably gonna head in the direction of a medical discharge. But they were, again, they were fobbing him off and pushing him aside. And so, I worked with him to explain different ways he could put pressure on the army from inside to get some response. And finally, he left, and he was very grateful, and I don't know what happened because we have to let people take the initiative, and if he got what he needed from us and didn't call us back, we're not gonna chase people. We have to be cautious about that. But that was the one where here with somebody who had been in the army for 10 years, completely loyal productive soldier until he wasn't in the army, just wanted to discard him and push him out the door, not dealing with his disabilities or with any kind of responsibility they have to. That's happening all the time in the army nowadays, all the time, all the time. And it's easy to point at military higher ups and say you guys are insensitive or you're indifferent and arrogant or whatever, and those things are true enough sometimes. But really, this is an expression of attitudes that are culture-wide. Americans, as far as I know, this cuts across party lines, and most cultures, I know of subcultures. Americans like to have a very structured and limited relationship to our military, the 99% non-military types. We like parades, we like memorials, we like metals and bands and stuff like that, ceremonies. We don't wanna see these soldiers who are messed up, keep them away from us, and we don't where they wanna pay for them either. 'Cause if we did the budget for the Veterans Administration and related services would be several times larger than it is, there's just so many people who've been damaged by this. And the military is under pressure to cut their costs. And one way they do that institutionally is to push people out of the military in ways that deprive them of benefits that they would otherwise qualify for them. And it's not a fair fight because people who have been in the military for a long time and know the system, they know ways to do this, whereas soldiers, particularly soldiers who are hurt, a great many of them have an awful hard time figuring out how to defend themselves. We do a lot of work at Wagerhouse helping soldiers find ways to struggle more effectively for things that they should get on the way out of the military. And there's plenty of work even when people do get out of the military to try to gain some kind of benefits. The cost of our wars in that way has just been enormous and has been fobbed off on the people who are least able to bear it. I think that's a sign of a good capitalist society, right? - I'm afraid so. - If you can make it work for you, then whoever has to bear, it's survival of the fittest in some sense. - Yeah, I guess so. It's an awful thing to see up close. It wears at you over time. - Which is, of course, part of the reason why maybe you need to leave Fayetteville, North Carolina, the frontline contact with the military there. It's got a warrant on you. One of the things that maybe we can count as a victory is the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I'm pretty sure over the years, some of the people coming to Quaker House for advice, consultation, information, people calling the GI rights hotline. They're saying, okay, so my sexual orientation, what do I do about this? What are my legal rights? How has that changed in the years? Is that a ray of light in your experience there? Or how does that look to you? - The short answer is, oh yes, let me give you the background. I've lived in a number of different places, and I got to Fayetteville at the end of 2001. One of the many things that I noticed that was troublesome was that Fayetteville was the most closeted town I've ever lived at. Plenty of gay people here. In fact, on our street, there are a number of gay couples. And yet, there was a protocol. It was all hidden in plain sight. It was all invisible, but right there. There was never anything like gay pride, or there were hardly any mentions of it in our newspaper. I mean, it was just, gosh, it was like living in a solid fog all the time. And I didn't quite know how to navigate it myself, because you have to respect people's decisions that they make in that regard. And yet, well, in fact, I wrote an article for an op-ed for our local paper arguing for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and to my knowledge, that was the only article published in that paper, making that case. When it was a matter of intense debate within the military and in Congress, and yet this curtain wall of silence. So we were very glad to see it. And we have to, sometimes I've had to explain it with some care and say, look, I'm for peace. And yes, I would like to see the military steal back and even dismantle it if possible. But I'm also for equality and justice. And as long as we have a military, I'm in favor of equality and justice inside it as well as outside. And in the same way that if I'd been here 50 years ago with a supported desegregating the military, even though you could make the case, if you desegregate the military, you'll make the military stronger. Because there's lots of soldiers of color whose abilities are not being well used because of segregation. And that's true. Similarly, there's lots of gay and lesbian soldiers whose skills and abilities weren't being made good use of in the military because of being closeted or because of being pushed out because of who they were and so on. And so you let them be open about it the way the repeal don't ask don't tell made possible. Then the military will be a better military. And you know what? That's true. I can't get around it. I just said, well, I still would like to see the military reigned in and dismantle the possible. And so this is a quandary which is not to live with because I am not going to go along with keeping me from this closet. Well, when it was the repeal, since there were 20, 2011, once Congress acted, Congress passed a repeal, I think in December, November or December of 2010. And so it was coming for a number of months. And the Army had a very deliberate effort to make the repeal a nothing event. There were no ceremonies, there was no discussion. It was just, again, this kind of like hidden in plain sight. Here at Claykerhouse said, well, I'm sorry, but we're not going along with this. This is a big deal. So we organized a press conference and we had a celebration. Then we had a panel of some local clergy that were sympathetic and so on to mark this event. And I'm glad we did because it deserved to be marked because it doesn't, it's a big change in a lot of ways. I'll mention two. One is that within the military, there's been a very wide infiltration of a very hardcore fundamentalist kind of Christianity. And this hardcore fundamentalist Christianity is not only fire-breathingly war-mongering, but it's also heavy duty homophobic. And in fact, the chaplains and other religious people who were aligned with all this who were issuing dire prophecies about the repeal of Don't Ask No Tell was going to be in the end of the military. In fact, I wrote a blog post because the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on it again in 2009, 2010. And if you repeal Don't Ask No Tell, it'll lead to the collapse of the US military, all of God-loving Christians. We won't let our kids join up anymore and all the good Christian soldiers will leave and yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard a blog post that said, really? I mean, I've been working all this time to try to roll back the military and the militarism and you're telling me that all it will take is a repeal Don't Ask No Tell for the whole thing will collapse. Okay, I'll take it. But of course it did. - That's lapsed. - Of course it did. - Oh, no. - Oh, well. - But the significance of that though is that it was a big blow to that kind of religious sentiment within the military. A discrediting blow. They said the sky would fall, the sky hasn't fallen. It's not the end of the story. These folks are still around and still causing trouble, but in the same way that when the military turned against segregation in lots of places across the South, there were lots of preachers who had been preaching segregation as God's will who had to learn a new vocabulary. And it's gonna take some time, but there's a lot of Christian preachers in this town, still it's military town now. They're gonna have to learn a new vocabulary. So the impact on homophobic forces in the military was important. The other thing that Rapilo don't ask made possible, it opened closet doors in Fayetteville, the city and culture of Fayetteville. And one way this manifested, that was very concrete for me was that there is a small congregation of gay oriented Christians, many of whom had military connections that formed and kind of became visible in the wake of the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell. And we worked with him son, the Quaker House, try to help him get going. It's been a good experience getting to know them. And even though it was legal to have a gay oriented church before Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed, it wouldn't have happened and it didn't happen because this is an army town. And even people who are not in the army depend on lots of them depend on the army. And so the closet doors were nail shut and now they don't have to be anymore. And there were a significant number of folks who were either in or close to the military who even though they're gay as can be, they were devoted Christians. They wanted Jesus, they wanted church, they wanted to pray, they wanted to sing. And so they've got it now. And this is a change that has come in the wake of Don't Ask Don't Tell. And even though that church is small and still getting started, that's a significant evolution and opening in the larger religious setting of Seville. And I'm hoping that similar things are happening in other large, around other large places. And does this change in any way undercut, or shall we say the business that you do at Quaker House or the G.I. Rights Hotline? Does it diminish some of the imploring of people who need help? - It hasn't significantly. We didn't really get that many people calling about what to do about Don't Ask Don't Tell. And I'm not sure why, but the numbers were just pretty small. People I think were making their own accommodations as best they could. And lots of them were learning how to live in the closet. But our traffic has continued, 'cause we deal with a lot of different, what we call discharge issues. So that's held up pretty well. - If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit In Action. And I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet for this Northern Spirit Radio production website, nordenspiritradio.org. For seven years now, we've been producing these programs. And six and a half years ago, I spoke with Chuck Faker, who's ending his term of 11 years working at Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. You can find that interview and many more via my website, nordenspiritradio.org. You can go listen, you can download, you can find where to connect up with us on iTunes, et cetera. You can also find links to our guests like to Quaker House and to the GI Rights Hotline and so on via nordenspiritradio.org. There's also a place to leave comments. And we really like to have your feedback. You can also make a donation via our website. Again, nordenspiritradio.org. Go there and find all those resources. Again, Chuck Faker is our guest today. He's now finishing up 11 years of service in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Military town, Fort Braggs there. Quaker House has been a witness. I'll reach two soldiers for 44 years and counting. There's one thing I asked you earlier, and I don't know that I really heard the corner of the question that I wanted to answer is, have your attitudes towards military people changed? And this question comes from me because I'm not face to face. I'm part of that 99% that you mentioned that are not connected with military. I have strong pacifist leanings. I have strong anti-war leanings. That doesn't mean I don't respect people. I attempt to, but I think in some ways my attitudes are superficial. You've had to give up any superficiality of attitudes towards people in the military. There's a temptation perhaps. The same kind of thing that's done towards homosexuals. You can hate the sin, but love the sinner. So maybe I can love the soldier, but hate the sin of war. Has that changed where you are? Is that a dichotomy that you still carry within you? Has that been at all ameliorated or modified? - Maybe it has in some way, but here's the way that I would try to express it. In a lot of my presentations, I have a diagram that I use and it's a circle with a number of kind of spokes in it like a wheel and I call it the wheel of war. Only it's like a merry, like a playground, merry-go-round. It's got handles and people push on the handles and it builds up speed. And there are many hands pushing on these handles in our society, the wheel of war. People making money on it. People who believe in war-like solutions to problems in the world. People who are telling stories and doing entertainment business built around that. Universities making money, doing war research. This wheel goes round and round and it's developed over time an enormous moment. And if you were to get on a merry-go-round like that and it's spinning around and you let go of the bar, you fly off or if you were running around and pushing on it and then you decided you didn't want to make it go anymore but you didn't let go, you'd be dragged along. There's also a theological framework for this in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul talks about principalities and powers. It's kind of, it's like armies of demons that have gained influence and even control over visible parts of the world and groups of people. And even though that's an ancient metaphor from a long gone culture, that idea along with the momentum of this wheel of war has become very real to me. And the spirit of war on the wheel of war, it sweeps up people. It sucks them in and it uses them for its own purposes and it destroys men and destroys other people with them. While people are still responsible for their own actions, it's also, I mean, I see very well, how many pressures there are on people which push them in this direction. The people who are joining the army here or who come in having joined the army somewhere else, so many of them at the lower ranks, you see a combination of two forces and the combination, the balance of the forces varies with circumstances. And the two forces are on the one side, family and cultural imagery and inheritance. An awful lot of people who join the military and come here are children and close relatives of people who joined the military in previous generations. This is part of their family heritage. This is what we do across the street from me. We have an officer, special forces officer, who's now a general, he got a star, a year or two ago. He's got two sons that have grown up right across the street from Quaker House and one of them finished high school last spring and guess where he went? He went to West Point, easy enough to see why. And there's lots of people like that. Not everybody gets to go to West Point, most people go down to the recruitment office and sign up or they go off to college and get into ROTC. So that's one side. And then the other side is the army's a job in a time when jobs are scarce, for big chunks of the population. And that's still true, even though things have been getting slowly a little bit better than they were and the terrible crash. And even before the crash, back in 2007, 2008, even before the crash, there were big chunks of our population, especially people of color and immigrants for whom the crash had already happened. For those people, the military offers a way up. I kind of embodied both in some ways because my late father grew up on a little farm in southeastern Kansas and he told me about pushing a pile behind a mule at the end of the 30s, the beginning of the 40s. And he saw the occasional airplane flying over and he yearned after that airplane. And when World War II came along, that became his opportunity to escape from the farm. And he went and joined the Air Force and studied hard and got to be a pilot. And he was a pilot in the Air Force for 20 years now. And I grew up there in the Air Force setting. And I had an impulse, almost went to the Air Force Academy. And then I was in ROTC for a while in college. I'm not an example of the kind of, I mean, in the mid 60s when I was finishing college, I had lots of options. Peace Corps, VISTA, things like that. In fact, I wound up going off to the civil rights movement. So I didn't feel poor and without prospects. I got to feel poor later. Here at Fort Bragg over the last 10 years, I've seen so many people who have done terrible things in the military. And they've done terrible things for very familiar, easy to understand reasons that are easy, familiar to me and easy for me to understand. So that reigns in many tenets that I may have to judge them. I've been very lucky. I ran into Quaker. I got to work under Dr. King and learn about nonviolence, so on and so forth. But with a little roll of, I mean, a little bit different roll of the dice, who knows what it might have been like? So I've seen lots of people here who, I guess, I feel a certain kind of, I don't want to say exactly solidarity but connection. And yet at the same time, I'm still very strongly anti-war. But it makes it harder to stain simple notions, or at least what I think of as simple notions, that there's a few bad guys in Washington if we change the faces, then we could take care of this. If that worked, it would have worked. That doesn't mean I'm not against worrying about who's in Washington and what they're doing, but I think the number of hands that are pushing this wheel of war are pushing from many, many other places in Washington and the momentum that runs drives it, comes from many other places. And so to focus on one aspect of it like that, especially in aspect that we have much less leverage on than we think we do usually, I think makes us prime candidates for being frustrated. So I'm trying to circle back to your question. I feel a great sense of connection to these folks here. In fact, there was one time I sat in on a talk given by a fellow named Tony Loggeranus, who had been an interrogator in Iraq. He had been a torturer. He hadn't started out to be a torturer. He hadn't been trained at the interrogation school, and he had been taught how to interrogate people according to their rules and under international law. When he got to Iraq, he was told by his higher ups to do illegal things, and he did them, and it was kind of like smoke and crack, or taken heroin, it got to be sort of addictive. And as he talked, I watched him and listened to him, and I got this very unsettled feeling because he was so familiar. He said he joined the army for three reasons. One, to get some money to pay off his college loans. I could identify with that. He said he wanted to learn a foreign language, and even though I never did really learn a foreign language, I could relate to that, and he did. He taught in Arabic, and he wanted to sort of travel, and I was not sure, well, they set him to Iraq. And so he achieved all his objectives, but it cost him his mind. He had a metal break now. By the time he finished what he was doing there, ate away at him until it pretty much completely undermined his psychological stability, and he wound up getting a medical discharge from the army. And he was kind of trying to atone before the things he'd been involved in, and he was having a very hard time, and I sat there, and I said this was, he was the guy next door. He could have been me 27 years ago. And that was very hard for me, because I liked trying to, I don't know, I want to be different from the people who are doing the terrible things. One of the guys who really was pretty much a ringleader at Abu Ghraib, guy named Charles Greiner, who was maybe out of prison now, but he was sentenced to prison for a long time because of all the torturing he did, and he worked at state prisons before he joined the army, and evidently a pretty stone, sadist. I don't have any trouble distancing myself from him. I'm not like that. But this other guy, Tony Lagarinus, could have been me, or in lots of people I've known, and that was very unsettling, because that's what this war, this wheel of war, the spirit of war does. It takes people who are not bad people, who are no more bad than I am, no worse than I am, and it turns them into monsters. And there's been lots of people who have spoken about that kind of experience, having that kind of experience. We weren't like this before we came over here to Iraq and Afghanistan. I did want to ask you something about that, because I had a guest recently who has written a book about moral injury. It was only a couple years ago that I think the Veterans Administration started recognizing it as a particular diagnosis, moral injury. Have you seen much of that? It sounds like you're describing a case right there of moral injury, how widespread is it? People are used to thinking of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, as the thing that leads to violence and suicide, et cetera. - Well, we're talking about something that seems to me to be hard to measure, and so in our statistics of cis culture, they want numbers, and I don't know numbers, but I totally believe in this. I believe a great many people who have great difficulty readjusting, and this was true. I think, go back to Vietnam, go back to the Civil War. I read a book last year about the Civil War about how many people came home from the Civil War. They went off to the Civil War full of patriotic, women, bigger, and they came home a wreck. They had a phrase for it then, which has really stuck with me. They call it soldier's heart, and so and so was suffering from soldier's heart. I like that phrase because I think it goes beyond physical or just simply psychological. - I think I see a great deal of moral injury. Sometimes that's turned in on itself. We had a tough time at Quaker House a couple of years ago over a plan to have what they call the hero's homecoming for Vietnam veterans. The mayor decided to have a whole week long celebration for Vietnam veterans, and he made a big mistake. He invited us to be part of it. I actually was invited to have a private lunch with him, and he said, you know, you cut a piece of this story, and I said, yes, sir, Mr. Mayor, we do. We were here, not me personally at the Quaker House, but it's going to be tough, Mr. Mayor, and it'll be controversial because Jane Fonda came to town. And he said, don't worry about it. That's fine, that's part of the story. Well, that wasn't fine when I got up at a planning meeting and mentioned Jane Fonda, people went berserk, and Fox News picked it up, and before you know it, we're getting thousands of evil, awful, terrible comments. What that brought home to me was how many still, how many surviving Vietnam veterans are just eaten up with unfinished kind of moral business with regard to Vietnam? And then, of course, you've got the other war system, and now you've got Iraq and Afghanistan, and how do people cope with what was done in Iraq? Whether they did it personally themselves, or were behind the scenes, or just shooting back at somebody who was shooting at them, we went in there, we wrecked the country, killed all these people, and made millions more refugees, and loofed forces that are still wreaking havoc, like, for instance, on the Iraqi Christian community that's ancient, and has been decimated, and the ones who survived, or mostly getting out of the country as fast as they can, Saddam Hussein left them along. So, that adds up to what you could call moral injury. How do you come to terms with that? I don't know, but I think I see it around me a lot. Yes, I do. And I have had conversations with people in counseling to settings where I have said to them, you know, we don't tell people what to do here. You have to make your own decisions, 'cause it's your butt on the line, not mine. And yet I wanted to part from that a little bit to say that if your conscience tells you that you should do something, or that you really shouldn't do something else, I can tell you, you got to pay attention to your conscience, because you have to live with your conscience as long as your mind is still working. You'll be in the army for who knows? 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, maybe, but then you'll be out. But your conscience, you're going to carry that around with you as long as your sentience. And you better be careful about what you put on it, what you allow to get a burden with. And I think that lots of people accepted a rationale that the people in Washington sent us over here to do this and that, and the court, to follow a particular mission and follow particular orders. And if in the following of those orders, we do these terrible and speakable things. That's not our problem. It's all all the people in Washington who gave us the orders. Except it's not true. It is all the people in Washington, but it's not just on them. It's also all the people who pulled the triggers. - We're getting near the end of our time together, Chuck. I still want to step back and take an overview of this entity called Quaker House and what it's doing there in Fayetteville. And in particular, 11 years you're there. You went there shortly after 911. The Warren Afghanistan was going full tilt. You were there already in place before the Warren Iraq happened. Theoretically, the Warren Iraq has been ratcheted down. Theoretically, we have a time when we're going to be getting out of Afghanistan. What's your experience of the victories and maybe the losses that you've had? What has been the high points, low points maybe, of your experience there at Quaker House? - Well, as far as losses or defeats goes in the Alps of the victories, we're here to put an end to war and we have not succeeded and we haven't even come close. And I need to remind myself of that. On the other hand, the fact that we're still here is probably the most significant and that we're going to continue. And that's a success. I'm not sure about victory, but that's a success because that's what we're called to do. I think the Quaker House is really key. When we started in 1969, there were lots of similar kinds of organizing projects around military bases and they're all gone. And Quaker House is really the only one that survived over the long term. And I think that's because we were a Quaker project. We really are a manifestation, concrete manifestation of the peace witness on the part of a lot of individual friends and meetings around the country. If they didn't think we were related to what they understand the peace witness to be, we wouldn't be here. Small and relatively insignificant as Quakers are in a grand scheme of things, we have some work to do. And Quaker House is one of the pieces of that work. When I look at the situations we've been through, I think we had some special help getting through here. It's not an accident that it's the Quaker project that manages to survive so long. There are a lot of projects that get sort of secularized and they get their own, they can become their own thing. And if they had a host church or church community, they can get distanced from that. I don't think that's happened at Quaker House, not in my time. And I hope it doesn't, because Quakers are small and relatively insignificant group, but we've got our work to do, and this is a piece of it. And I think it's important in the grand scheme of things that we do our work, not to get puffed up about it, but not to let it go either, until it's done. And we're far from being done here. So as far as victory is and defeats, one thing we've done, we've been a voice here in this community, raising issues like the evil of torture. And Fort Bragg, or UNICEF, Fort Bragg, have a lot of involvement in what I call the torture industrial complex. We don't have time to go into detail about it, but a lot of the dots in the trail of torture connect here and around here. It wasn't on our agenda when we discovered that. We just couldn't keep quiet about it, and so we have become a voice for it. And this work for accountability for torture is a way of preventing its recurrence, is likely to take a long time. That's what's been true in other countries. Takes a long time to get accountability for torture. It's a long struggle. So we just gotta keep it up. And we have been keeping it up once we learned about it. So that's a success, that we have seen where we're at, discerned what's going on around us, and applied our values to it and kept it going. It's somewhat related to that. We've had to become aware of and kind of mindful of so much of what I call violence within the military. There's been a lot of publicity about the record breaking number of GI suicides that's happened here as well as other military bases. And along with that, you have sexual assaults, enormous number of sexual assaults against women soldiers, but also some against male soldiers. There's domestic violence, family members, and there's even a lot of violence among people who are not family members. And again, this is reaping what we saw as far as I'm concerned, the war coming home. But it is something which really wasn't on our agenda when I got here. But there was these terrible things that happened right here around Fort Prag, which put it on our agenda, and we've done a number of kinds of things to respond to that so far and we'll probably be doing some more. I guess what I'd say with regard to successes is to be aware of and discerning about the situation that we're in here and really taking fanfills, kind of a microcosm of a militarized society that we're in and being able to respond with what we've got. I mean, our budget is relatively small. Our staff is small. We're not trying to build an empire here, but here we are. We've got as much resources as staff as we have. Let's do as much as we can to respond to the things that we see going on, particularly around military stuff. And those are all in addition to our GI hotline, which started before I got here and is going great guns as I prepare to move on. That's kind of the steady state sort of thing that we've just kept on doing. But then we've had to deal with other things as well because of the way our wars have developed and as I'm preparing to leave now, just the last few months, we discovered, and actually Quaker House in our last news that we broke the story, we discovered that there's a drone base at Fort Bragg. So drone warfare, which is becoming more and more important here again, Fort Bragg is right in the middle of it. And so we're taking that off. Now, what we're going to do about that, besides reporting on it, I don't know because I'm probably not going to be here. But my successors, I'm sure, are going to have to pay attention to drone wars because it's really getting to be a bigger and bigger part of the war machine. And it's also drone warfare embodies the spirit of secrecy that goes with the spirit of war today. I'm worn out by 11 years here, but it's also been, I've felt well used. This is a place where Quaker, who's concerned about war and peace issues, well, plenty to do. Now, there's really plenty to do for war and peace in plenty of other places than most meetings, too, if you look around and really do some discernment. But I understand that up next door to a huge military base, these things are going to be more visible and in some ways more accessible. So where you go from here? I mean, are you just going to play around? Is it 24-hour partying? What's the plan? I feel like we can say it, though. Well, I'm not a senator. But one thing I found out about Carolina, I say that North Carolina is like mildew. It grows on you. That's a sad statement, OK? I also noticed after I was here for several years when after I got here, I'd say, in North Carolina, they do this and they do that. And then I began to notice-- I don't know exactly the date, but then I began to notice what I was saying. In North Carolina, we do this, and we do that. And I got to have this strange affinity for things like grits. In fact, I had some grits today. So I'm going to be staying in North Carolina. I'm going to move from Vanderbilt to the Durham, which is a really interesting town. I'll be settling there, but I'm going to be resuming full time, what is my overarching personal location, and that's being a writer. I mean, I'm a writer. I've had a writer's career. Most writers, most published writers, have done either one other thing to make a living or a variety of things to earn a living. And I've done a variety of things. Now I'm going to be succeeding, or I'll be appointed to, I like to call it, the first Tom Fox Memorial professorship of Quaker writing and agitating. You know it by another name. It's called Social Security. I'll be collecting Social Security, and I'm going to learn to live simply on it, and I want to be writing things. I've done plenty of writing here, but it's mostly been focused on piece issues and fun to peel letters and newsletters, and that sort of thing for Quaker House, and read from those tasks. I hope to write some-- I know maybe some more-- I've written two Quaker mystery novels. I'd like to write some more. There's some Quaker history stuff. I'm interested in. I want to explore and write about it. Go stories. So yeah, look at that. Yeah, I'm a study. I've done lots of-- I've got lots of things that I want to write about, so we'll see what comes to the top and has to-- I mean, I have to do some priorities. I expect one way or another to be expressed with myself and putting that in the mix among Quakers. I think there's lots of issues besides and lots of interesting things beyond focus, piece work Quakers could have a good time with and learn from and contribute to. So I want to be a writer. I have no doubt that you'll be contributing to the welfare of not only Quakers, but the larger society significantly. I can't imagine you sitting too still. I know you as a deep thinker for the 30 years or so that I followed your writings and your activism, your passionate nature, your humorous nature, and the fact that you're both devoted and a bit irreverent really makes it engaging to follow you. So-- Movie? I thank you so much for all of that work, and especially for these 11 years where you served at Quaker House there in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I really think you've made a tremendous difference on the side of good things. So thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thanks for every one of you. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.