For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
You ever heard of something called March Forward?
Not me either.
Well, now I have.
Now you have too.
MarchForward.org is the website.
And waiting on hold right now on the telephone is James Circello and Michael Preissner, I believe is how you say these names.
Welcome to the show, guys.
Did I get it right?
Yep.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, it's pretty close.
And I'm sorry, which one's which here?
I'm James.
This is Mike.
Okay.
And James, I got your name wrong.
I'm sorry.
No, it's not too bad.
That's what I get a lot of the time.
It's actually Circello, but Circello works.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
I just have to, you know, put little H's in parentheses here and then maybe I can remember.
All right.
Well, so, all right.
Now, James, you were a sergeant in the Army.
Michael, it says here that you were a corporal in the Army.
And James, you're absent without leave right now?
AWOL, on the run, fugitive from justice?
No, not currently.
That was April 2007.
I left my unit while they were deploying, well, preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.
Wow.
And so where did this March Forward organization come from?
You made it yourself or you luckily found it and joined up?
Or what's going on here?
Well, March Forward, all the members in March Forward or all the founders of March Forward are veterans and some active duty service members who had been active in the anti-war movement for a few years.
Most of us had been organizing together in the Answer Coalition, and others were already active in the anti-war movement.
In January of last year, many of us were in Washington, D.C., to protest the Israeli siege on Gaza, the horrible massacre that occurred a year ago.
So many of us were in D.C. organizing and taking part in that protest, and that's when we were all kind of together in one location, those of us who had been working together.
And we realized that there was a need for this type of organization.
Many of us were active in other veterans groups as well.
But we were together with the understanding that if any real change was going to happen, if there's any change, the vast amount of change that we need, it was only going to come through a struggle.
It was only going to come through a people's movement, of which veterans and active duty service members are a vital part of.
So we joined together not just to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to organize against those, but to organize for the rights of soldiers in the military, for care for veterans when they get home, for reparations for the people of the countries that we've destroyed, but also for social justice issues here at home, issues that push people into the military, things that veterans face when they get home, and also combating racism and all forms of bigotry as well.
Right on.
Well, you know, you can't have empire without racism and bigotry.
And we see this all over the place.
Of course, I kind of got it on the brain this week because I watched a great documentary called The American Holocaust about the Vietnam War.
And, you know, of course, Vietnamese people or I guess anyone from the eastern side of the old world is a gook, and it's okay to kill them.
Whereas in Iraq, and I guess to some degree in Afghanistan, the terminology is a bit different, but the theory seems to be the same, that if someone is a haji or whatever different smear or slur is come up with, then that denies them their humanity and really that that's necessary in order to get soldiers to go out on search and destroy missions against civilians.
I mean, you have to dehumanize them in order to get that job done, right?
Absolutely.
And that's a great film by Clay Claiborne, who's a veteran as well.
And, you know, it really exposes the true brutality of U.S. imperialism.
But, yeah, you make an excellent point.
And the use of racism was used, I mean, since, you know, expansion in the U.S. where the Native Americans were called savages and it was used as a justification to commit that genocide.
It's been used in every single U.S. military engagement since then.
So, of course, and the reason that it's such a vital part of convincing soldiers to go kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan is because the Pentagon doesn't want soldiers to realize that they have much more in common with the people of Iraq and with the people of Afghanistan than the politicians and the generals that are deciding that we have to go to war.
Yeah.
Well, and now I think there's a lot to that.
I'm not a leftist, but I think there's a lot of value in, you know, class warfare theory.
And you guys even have in your 10-point program here a little bit of class war in the sense of enlisted versus officers.
I'm not exactly sure the terms you guys define it.
You can define it however you like, but I'll tell you what it reminds me of is Colonel Hackworth.
And he was, you know, right wing and anti-war, I guess you could say, before the second Iraq war.
And I guess he was the only guy who could tell Sean Hannity, no, you shut up and listen to me, boy, and say what he wanted to say without Sean Hannity, you know, shouting him down.
And that was always his thing was protecting, trying to protect the enlisted guys who, as he defined them, they were the Americans.
And then protect them from the officers who, as he defined it, they were the government.
And so I guess I'd like to let either or both of you address that, exactly how that works.
Yeah, well, March Forward's position on the officer corps, or we refer to them as the officer class, it's pretty straightforward.
The officers, they do little suffering in times of war.
They merely put forth the line by Washington.
And the enlisted members of the military, who we view as workers, are made to carry out these orders.
They're made to follow these orders without question, or you become slandered with the un-American, and even, you know, jailed for disobeying orders that are obviously illegal.
But our line is pretty simple in the fact that the officer class, once they retire, they go straight into the Pentagon, and right into the war profiteers, right across the street.
And the enlisted, obviously, were cast out onto the street.
There's a million homeless enlisted, or veterans, I should say, on the street tonight, and two million will be on the street homeless sometime this year.
So there's a real class struggle within the military.
And the enlisted soldiers are doing all the suffering, all the dying, all the killing.
We're coming home with PTSD and missing limbs while the officers are celebrating and stacking their resumes for their future jobs.
Yeah, it's almost like all the commercials about be all you can be, and how once you get out, then you'll be guaranteed a great job and all that.
All that's really true for the officers, basically.
But they're selling that to the masses out there.
Right, and it's interesting, because actually, if you look at the statistics, you're actually less likely to get hired if you're a veteran, because it's somewhat of a liability for employers.
But, you know, just to clarify a little more about, you know, why our view on the officer corps, you know, myself and in my personal experience, and this is an all too common story in Iraq and Afghanistan, and James has similar experience, and it's a story that you hear much too often, where, you know, for example, myself, you know, officers join the military because they're trying to be successful in a career, right?
Most people become enlisted soldiers because they're pushed in for economic reasons, because they need access to health care for their family, because they want a college education, because they want job training, because they want a place to live, things that all people need and deserve, which I think are basic human rights.
But that's what pushes most enlisted soldiers into the military.
Officers join for a very different reason.
And what results in that is officers generally, you know, do very little time in combat, but what they do is they want their units to get attacked.
I mean, they want to take fire.
And I know myself personally, I went on missions called, which we called draw fire missions, where there would be an officer who knew that, you know, a certain vehicle had a ransom on it if the vehicle was destroyed.
So he knew that it was a target.
So he'd say, hey, go get so-and-so and let's go drive around town and see if we can get shot at.
This is because if his unit gets in combat or if he gets in combat, it's good for his career.
It's good for his promotion.
He'll get a bronze star and he'll get all these things.
So there's many, many soldiers who have died, who have had life-changing injuries, whose lives are destroyed because they had an officer who's going to do one tour in combat who wants to help his career and wants to move up in the ranks.
And people have died because of this.
Now, Michael, that's Michael, right?
Yes.
Now, Michael, you're basically talking about the satire, Joseph Heller's satire, Catch-22.
You're telling me and you're telling my audience that that is truly and really and literally the operational incentive in a war like Iraq is for officers to get the people under them killed for points.
It's something that is very frequent.
And it's something that was very frequent in the Vietnam War, too, and that's why there was such a massive GI rebellion against the officer corps in Vietnam as well.
And as James mentioned, it's very obvious to see the different interests that the officer corps has because two years ago there was a study release that showed there was over 2,000 retired generals and colonels that now are employed by defense contractors.
It's kind of the most common retirement path is either you're a lobbyist for defense contractors, you're sitting on corporate boards for defense contractors and oil companies while at the same time still being paid by the Pentagon as consultants.
So all this team of generals right now that's telling us that we have to be in Afghanistan, that we can't leave, this team of generals, this team of officers that's telling us that are people that are actually on the payroll of companies like Chevron and some of the largest defense contractors in the world.
So we say that we have very different interests, the enlisted and the officers, and it's very obvious what their interests are.
So we think that we shouldn't be ordered into combat by officers that are trying to build their careers.
We think that officers should be democratically elected by enlisted soldiers in the unit, and I think that's something that most enlisted soldiers would agree with.
Hey, well, tell me about how that's supposed to work because I think you're going to lose some people with that.
Like, hey, in the real world, in a military situation, in a firefight, this is not a democracy.
You don't get to have the soldiers vote.
If you guys can elect your leaders, can't you unelect them right in the middle of a battle and then wouldn't everything fall apart?
Well, I mean, I can attest to that.
And during a firefight, I mean, the officers are the people that are in the back.
They aren't even doing anything.
Yeah, they're sitting at a computer at a headquarters somewhere, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
You have one officer per platoon versus nearly 30, 35 enlisted individuals that have more time and more experience in the military than this officer ever had.
So, I mean, in sheer just that fact alone, based on experience, there are privates that have more experience in the military than a new lieutenant that comes to your unit.
So, I mean, if we want to talk about in the heat of a firefight, I certainly trust a lot more, obviously, the noncommissioned officers and the lower enlisted than I would ever trust an officer.
Yeah, wow.
So you guys are basically painting this situation almost like Monty Python, where the officers are there shaving in their tent in the middle of the battle, right?
Exactly.
It's where the whole thing is farcical?
I mean, except for all the people dying everywhere, I don't mean to play down that part of it, but is it really like the way the Army works is that much of a parody of itself?
Well, I mean, that divide is definitely there, and it takes a strong voice, and that's what March 4 is trying to become, to tell the enlisted soldiers exactly what is happening.
We all understand what is happening.
There's definitely dissent in the military ranks.
Thousands of men and women have deserted the military in the last decade.
The last time I checked, the statistic was upwards to 50,000, and that isn't shown.
A lot of the times it's not a political stance.
A lot of times it's just the fact that these soldiers miss their families, that they've been deployed three or four times and don't want to go back to a war zone.
Or a lot of the times it's these soldiers are suffering through PTSD and no one is listening to them.
No one, the VA, the bases, the medical stations on the bases, they won't diagnose them for fear that they won't be able to deploy them when the time comes.
So soldiers have taken it upon themselves to stand up and to leave the military, and a lot of the times they're quiet about it, and March 4 is calling for that in a wider scope for all soldiers that are being told to deploy to refuse that.
Because Afghanistan and Iraq, not only are they illegal and immoral, but they're against our interests as workers in the United States.
All right, everybody.
I'm talking with James Trichello and Mike Preissner, Michael Preissner, from March forward.
They're soldiers.
Basically telling the rest of the soldiers to quit, to refuse to participate in this, well, I call it madness.
You call it what you want anymore.
And, in fact, let me ask you guys about that.
It seems like things are changing a little bit, and I'm sorry to use this example, but it does illustrate the point.
Ben Stein, of all people, anyway, last night he was on Larry King, and he didn't want Ben Bernanke to get the Man of the Year award from Time magazine.
He thought that every single American soldier out there deserves the Man of the Year award, and he even worked into his argument, eh, no matter what you think about the wars.
Like, all of a sudden, at the end of 2009, according to the neoconservative right that Ben Stein wishes he represented, he sort of does, oh, now all of a sudden these wars are debatable, you know, by reasonable people.
They might disagree.
Rather than anybody who opposes them hates soldiers and is pro-terrorist and pro-Saddam Hussein and hates America and all these things, all those people who said all those things for all those years, now all of a sudden, eh, shrug, soldiers, you might all get killed tomorrow fighting this war that is apparently now debatable, even by the people who are its biggest proponents.
You know, how does that, does that bother you guys at all?
I mean, you talked about being sent out there by your officer as bait.
That's what's happening to our guys out there in Afghanistan, to a degree, still in Iraq right now, right?
Absolutely, and apparently Ben Stein didn't read the Time Magazine Man of the Year in 2003 when it was all U.S. soldiers who got the Man of the Year.
But, you know, you're absolutely right that these wars are not about what Washington and what the Pentagon are telling us.
They have absolutely nothing to do with national security.
They have absolutely nothing to do with helping the people of those countries.
This is a war for empire, and I think we all need to be very clear about this.
And we have to remember that Washington had its sights set on Afghanistan for decades before 9-11.
It was considered a prize far before 9-11, and 9-11 really just provided the pretext, right?
And Bush and Cheney and the high command and the Pentagon thought that Afghanistan was going to fall quickly, right, and serve as a permanent U.S. military and political base.
And really, you know, the crux of this is that from there, Washington could exercise dominance over all of Central Asia, which is something of value that really can't be overstated.
All these former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, all these countries have vast oil resources, are in very strategic locations.
So this really is a prize for Wall Street, and that's really what's behind these wars.
And it's very obvious every step of the way, and there's really no clearly articulated reason for going.
But if people knew this, right, if soldiers knew and if the people in the United States knew that this is the real reason behind the war, that it's a war for corporate interests, no one would support it, and there'd be a mass uprising.
And that's why there's very much effort put in to distorting the situation, just like every U.S. war has been distorted, the real motives.
And so this is what, you know, our task is, is to let people know exactly what's going on and what you're a part of.
But if you're ordered to go kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're doing that for empire.
You're doing that for corporate interests.
You're doing that for someone else's profit.
Nothing that's going to help you, nothing that's going to help your family, and nothing that's going to help the people in the United States.
So that's what we're trying to tell soldiers, to educate people about what they're a part of and that there's absolutely no reason to be a part of these wars.
And that's why we demand, we have a 10-point program on our website, but first and foremost we demand that it's every service member's right to refuse to take part in these wars.
So that's why we're calling on all soldiers, when they get those orders to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq, which they no doubt will, many for the fourth and fifth time, that they should absolutely not obey those orders.
They have every right to refuse them.
Well, but now in reality, once you sign the contract, at least according to the law of the country, right, you don't have the right to quit your job when you're in the military, unlike any other job in this society, and you can go to jail for refusing to go fight, right?
Well, April 10, 2007, I quit my job in the U.S. military.
I was a combat infantryman, a member of the U.S. Airborne, deployed along with Michael Prizer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the invasion, March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a few years later I quit my job.
I've never gone to jail for it.
There's been plenty of things kind of like you're saying, you know, your life will be ruined, you'll have a bad conduct discharge, all these things.
I don't have a bad conduct discharge.
It's very important to understand that these are all things that are thrown out there to intimidate soldiers, to scare us, even from basic training.
You're told all of these things to make sure that you stay in line and that you don't question the orders.
But we have every right to question the orders when not only does obeying the orders to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan mean that we will go kill Afghans and Iraqis that are innocent, that were not on the planes that hit the World Trade Center, they were not on the planes that went into the Pentagon, there were no Iraqis and no Afghans on those planes.
So to go over there and to obey those orders and kill innocent people, I mean, you know, and not only that, but to yourself be maimed, scarred psychologically, physically, you know, it's almost common sense.
So I would encourage everyone to repeat what March Forward is saying and to encourage soldiers to refuse these orders to deploy, because like Michael said, they will get these orders.
How many people have deserted so far?
Do you guys know?
Are there even good estimates, do you think?
I think the most recent thing is since the start of the war in Afghanistan, more than 50,000 have abandoned the military.
And James said something very interesting.
He pointed out how the U.S. military really tries to strike fear into soldiers, that they can't disobey orders, that they're bound to this contract, and they really use all these fear tactics.
Well, that's the most important part of that 50,000 is that, look, everybody, 50,000 people have quit so far.
There certainly haven't been 50,000 prosecutions for quitting.
Absolutely.
And the reality is it's the generals, it's the Pentagon brass, and it's the politicians who are afraid, because they fear a GI rebellion.
Just in the Vietnam War, there was such widespread dissent.
There was GI groups organizing the military, desertion was skyrocketing, and there were soldiers who were actively fighting against the wars.
And it crippled the military.
It shook the military to its core.
And the Vietnam War ended because there was a mass movement in the military and because there was a mass movement in the United States, as well as, of course, the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people.
And they know that very well.
And they're in a very similar situation where they're losing the war in Afghanistan, and they know that the reasons they're giving for this war are illegitimate reasons that soldiers have no reason to be a part of.
So they very much fear a GI rebellion.
They very much fear a mass movement of soldiers refusing to go.
And that is absolutely why they use those fear tactics.
So in reality, we are the ones that are in the advantage.
So if there's a soldier that is refusing, any soldier who's listening, who feels that they do not want to go to Afghanistan, that they don't want to have to deal with the horror of that war, and Iraq for that matter as well, that if you take a political stand, if you say that I'm not going to be a part of this war, you're going to have a movement behind you.
You're not going to be alone.
You're going to have a movement behind you that supports you, and that the military is scared of that happening.
Generally, some soldiers do a little bit of jail time, but for the most part it seems that the military doesn't want to deal with these cases because they don't want it to be something that's getting attention, so they try to deal with it as quickly and quietly as possible.
And like James experienced, he was discharged not with a bad conduct or a dishonorable discharge or anything because they just wanted to get rid of him.
Yeah.
Well, that's absolutely great news that it's 50,000 so far, and you guys serve as a good example.
And I think one of the most important parts of this story is just how the media doesn't talk about this at all.
Have you ever seen Wolf Blitzer do a show about 50,000 soldiers have said nuts to this, and they call it empire and refuse to take part?
And if that story did get around, 50,000 so far have said no and quit, as you two have done.
How many more would follow from that if that really became the big headline in the news?
That's really something to think about.
Right, and that's a challenge for us is getting the word out, right?
Because obviously the mainstream media is owned by the same corporations that are profiting from these wars, so we're really not going to get a clear story there.
Well, and they're regulated from top to bottom and front to back by the state that operates these wars too, you know?
Absolutely.
So that's why we understand that the way that we're going to end this war and the way that we're going to stop this atrocity that's happening, the death of thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of soldiers, which are no doubt going to increase as this war rages on, is we need to build a movement.
We need to build a mass people's movement, which is what we're doing.
So I encourage everyone to pay attention to a national march on Washington, D.C. that's going to happen on March 20th.
There's also going to be coinciding marches in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
But a large organization of anti-war groups have come together.
It was initiated by the Answer Coalition.
You can go to answercoalition.org for information about the march.
But we're calling on everyone to be a part of this action.
We want soldiers, we want veterans, we want military families, and we want all people in the United States who are suffering because of these wars.
We're in the middle of a depression where every month more and more jobs are being lost.
There's this health care debate going on.
We're seeing that there's people that are not going to have access to quality health care.
We're seeing that education, tuition is skyrocketing.
We need money so bad in this country, most people, yet we're spending over $500 million a day to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
So if you're angry about this war, which everyone should be, there is something you can do, and that's become active in the movement.
The first thing you can do is become involved in the organizing for March 20th and, of course, participate in that demonstration as well.
We need as many people as possible to send a message that the people are not in support of this war, and we're going to fight until it's over.
Right on.
Hey, now before I let you go, and that would be a great place to stop, but this is really important and I'd like to let either or both of you address this if you could, and that is that I went and saw Scott Ritter and a couple of others give a talk about the soldiers coming home with what they call post-traumatic stress disorder.
I hope everybody is familiar with the George Carlin where he explains this.
This used to be called shell shock back in the days of World War I, but anyway, the pain is all buried under jargon now.
But the point is that these guys were making was that this post-traumatic stress disorder is not a mental syndrome or mental illness of any kind, and it does not deserve, not that really mental illness deserves all the stigma associated with that, but PTSD certainly does not deserve any of the stigma, because in the way that they phrase the question, this is simply an injury.
This is what happens when you take a normal psyche and you put it through a war.
It's really hard on it, and these guys need, you know, maybe it's somebody to talk to, but it's not a mental illness that they have.
It's an injury that they have, and that they need access to the right kinds of therapy and whatever to figure out ways to go on with their life when they've been through hell and back.
And so if either or both of you guys would like to speak to that, it seems like it's pretty important.
Yeah, well, I'll start, I guess.
I mean, I agree with that line that it's not just a psychological phenomenon.
It's physical.
It manifests itself in very physical forms, whether it's, you know, when I returned from Iraq, there were a lot of my fellow soldiers that had found it difficult to drive.
They feared that there were explosive devices on the highways and things like that, and so it actually can take over your life.
And the real problem is that the VA is so underfunded, and even with the funding, it's been pushed to the background.
The United States, it talks a lot about, you know, the administrations, the Bush administrations, the Obama administrations, all the way back to George Washington, I can assume, always talk about supporting the soldiers and that, you know, the same thing, that the soldiers should be time man of the year, you know.
But that isn't really what happened.
And these soldiers are being pushed to the breaking point with multiple deployments.
And, I mean, I feel that the reason that it's not being categorized as a physical injury and, you know, something even worthy of a Purple Heart is because these soldiers won't be deployable under Army standards.
Yeah, they need to be able to use the soldiers up all the way before they throw them away.
Yeah.
Right, and really, I mean, it's great that you brought that up, because there really is a crisis in the military right now with suicide, where active soldiers who are committing suicide is actually beginning to outnumber the number of soldiers killed in combat.
And this is because of the grossly inadequate care that veterans get when they get home, and knowing that the military, that such a large number of soldiers experience PTSD, because this is a very natural reaction to being in combat, if the military would not deploy everyone who had PTSD, they wouldn't have a military anymore after someone went on the first deployment.
So they're deploying people with these problems over and over again, and when they get home, they get nowhere near the adequate care.
So we have to look at the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, not just in terms of who's killed in those countries, but who comes home and takes their own life because of what we've been through.
And that just more and more speaks to the point that the U.S. military doesn't care about the soldiers that it's sending to go fight and die.
The U.S. government doesn't care about those soldiers.
They care about one thing, and they care about expanding empire.
And that's why every single soldier has the right to refuse those orders, and no one should be a part of these wars anymore because there's a vast number of reasons.
If we want to fight for real freedom, if we want to fight for real justice and equality, all these things that many of us join the military for, we're going to fight for those things by fighting against these wars and by fighting against the actions of the U.S. government.
So hopefully everyone listening, hopefully there's soldiers listening who take this message to heart and realize that there is a growing movement of people all over the country and veterans and people in the military who are taking a stand against this injustice.
All right, everybody, that's March Forward.
And I guess D.C., L.A., wherever we can, March 20th, see there?
Is that it, guys?
That's right, March 20th.
Answercoalition.org has all the information.
And again, our website is MarchForward.org where you can sign up and join and read out the literature we've put out.
Right on.
Hey, thanks very much, both of you, for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all, that was James Triciello and Michael Prisner from MarchForward, again, MarchForward.org.
