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Long Acronym, Short Memory

By Bill Perry

VVAW contacts Ward Reilly (Baton Rouge), Patrick McCann (Miami), Tom Baxter (Tallahassee), and me, Wild Bill Perry (Philadelphia), all triangulated their way to the School of the Americas Watch three-day demo at the front gate of Fort Benning, Georgia in November 2004.

We linked up with more than a score of other VVAW members and nearly a hundred Veterans for Peace sisters and brothers.

Accompanying the Philadelphia delegation of vets, Michael Hoffman, cofounder of Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.net), led the proselytizing with Big Red One and Third ID troops, who were all over the main gate and in uptown night spots.

The School of the Americas Watch demo drew about 15,000 folks. It was a very eclectic bunch, with Franciscan friars and Jesuit dudes all robed out in their floor-length, rope-belted, hot-'n'-itchy-looking outerwear.

Lotsa nuns, all looking much sweeter than the evil bitches who beat the hell out of me until I got thrown out of their elementary schools, mixed with freshly scrubbed, apple-cheeked virgins from every major Catholic college imaginable.

Even though the local judges made it clear that first-time trespassers always get 90 days and a second conviction nets 180 days, many of the above Catholics were determined to get arrested, scaling the eight-foot temporary fencing and falling into the arms of MPs and deputized soldiers. The "lucky" ones would be those pulled off the fence by the consortium of Georgia state and local cops.

Plenty of your garden-variety "youth culture" types from AFSC (Quakers) and your local piercing-parlor franchise joined the Catholics in their weird self-flagellation ritual. Makes you wonder how many protective custody cells they have in the Chattahoochee County Jail and the local fed joint. You can bet eighty percent of these folks couldn't make it in "general population." They must get automatic 4.0s for the semester they're locked up for. I could understand a Gandhi/MLK/Mandela-type complex if they could get some kind of ink in AP or Reuters, but nobody outside of Columbus, Georgia ever even hears about them.

Hundreds of folks with origins in the same Central and South American nations that the SOA assassins operate in graced the main gate area, joined by union leaders and organizers and the legal assistance networks who work with witnesses of—and exiles from—the puppet nations.

These folks initially got all worked up when, in '89, a little girl, her mom, and six Jesuit priests were massacred in El Salvador. Nineteen of the twenty-six officers who were found guilty (by the UN) had attended Fort Benning's School of the Americas. This bad press caused the Department of Defense to change the SOA's name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), based on the Army principle: "Long Acronym, Short Memory."

Puppetistas, stilt-walkers, face-painters, and an amazing assortment of locals who set up unlicensed food kiosks and barbecues on their front lawns, (and sold at really competitive prices) made the SOA Watch visually appealing.

Some folks go for the star power of Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon, and maybe that'll get a People or maybe an Us blurb, but the local reaction is mixed.

The Right counters the SOA Watch with their "God Bless Fort Benning" rally, held in a stadium too big for their crowd of 7,500. In broad daylight, country cornball Lee Greenwood headlined this year. Hundreds and hundreds of Cub Scouts and Brownies joined five thousand E-2s and E-3s (who couldn't get weekend passes) and Greenwood in that great foot-stomper, "God Bless the USA."

Headline speakers at the God Bless Fort Benning rally included Brigadier General Ben Freakley (the Fort Benning commander) and the mayors of Phoenix, Alabama and Columbus, Georgia. All three of them thoroughly trashed the commie-pinko priests and nuns, but they failed to tell the Brownies and the Cubbies about the SOA. A Blackhawk helicopter landing and four hundred Harleys stimulated and excited the crowd.

I went to "jump school" at Benning thirty-seven years ago, so I had to take a cab to the on-post National Infantry Museum to pick up some curios, decals, and a mug. Post access and egress traffic was diverted to the south gate because of the three-day demonstration at the main gate. Vehicles were stacked up three and four deep at the four toll-booth-style checkpoints at the south gate, and MPs were checking IDs and occasionally searching trunks, as if looking for terrorists sneaking into the drive-in movies.

Although I had my black VVAW T-shirt on, complete with logo and large-print letters, the MPs were blinded by the flag in the background of my VA hospital ID card. They paid me no mind, but patted down my cab driver, and made him open the trunk. God bless Fort Benning.

While this VVAW contact prefers a sharp focus at demonstrations rather than the all-over-the-board ANSWER-style gatherings, all three of our Down South contacts went plumb crazy over the venue. Reilly, McCann and Baxter were really pumped, what with having so many VVAW—and vets in general—in one place, all at once, Down South. I'll bet that, as time passes, Fort Benning will become VVAW's southeastern regional meeting place.