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IVAW Field Organizing

By Aaron Hughes

The first time I visited Ft. Hood was Memorial Day weekend of 2008. It was shortly after Winter Soldier, which had helped lead to the formation of the new active duty chapter there. On that first visit in the heat of summer in Texas I found myself feeling deeply connected to the members and their very real and immediate struggles in this place of deployments, re-deployments, multiple deployments, cigarettes, fast food, painkillers, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, dreams, uniforms, red eyes, sunrise, paper work, heat, waiting, standing, and questioning.

Aaron Hughes in Madison, March 19, 2011. Photo by Andie Wood.

Questioning is often what concludes my thoughts about this space and drives me to return to dig deeper into the organizing work. These questions have brought me back to Ft. Hood and Under the Hood Café for short two to three week organizing stints multiple times since the beginning of my work as the field organizing team leader in 2009.

On a recent stint in January and February of this year, the previous visits and long distant phone calls really began to pay off. Kyle, the Ft. Hood IVAW chapter leader and recent Conscientious Objector, and I worked together on an outreach campaign on base. Having developed a relationship from previous visits and conference calls we were able dive right into the outreach. We talked to the soldiers daily coming in and out of the PX on post about the Operation Recovery Campaign to end the continued occupations and win service members' the right to heal by stopping the deployment of traumatized troops.

The soldiers' responses were positive — in fact, they wanted to know more about their rights and what they could do to prevent their own deployment while dealing with trauma or the deployment of their fellow soldiers.

Over the course of two weeks we collected over 300 active duty and military family pledges to Operation Recovery, over those two weeks the friendship between organizers grew deeper as we worked side by side. Kyle's confidence in his leadership and his ideas for future actions were strengthened by our success in outreach. Fort Hood and the leaders that have grown and continue to grow up out of this base town will be an integral part of our struggle for years to come.

Every day this work seems to get deeper and deeper. The struggle to bring my brothers and sisters home has transformed into an entire way of seeing, being, living and loving. This struggle has slowly shifted from symbolic and creative gestures to the slow patient listening, learning and relationship building that is the radical transformation in society we are struggling for.

Jane Stembridge of SNCC said in 1960:

Finally it all boils down to human relationships ...
It is the question of ...
Whether I shall go living in isolation or whether there shall be a "we" ...
Love alone is radical. Political statements are not; programs are not; even going to jail is not ...

This is a lesson the field organizers have learned and continue to learn. Working through our transformative organizing model, we have slowly pealed back layer upon layer of our socially constructed, military constructed community and selves to reveal our vulnerability. It is in this vulnerability, amongst the fears and anxieties of trauma, that we do most of our organizing. By recognizing our own trauma and building relationships around each of our struggles, the organizing has gotten deeper, more sophisticated and more honest. This vulnerability and the closeness that follows when trust is built transform our trauma into empowerment. We can see this power growing now at Fort Hood and it will continue to grow as we build the campaign out of the experiences and struggles of the soldiers there.

"We" are winning.

Aaron Hughes is the Field Organizing Team Leader for Iraq Veterans Against the War.