10/24/12 – Joey King – The Scott Horton Show

Hey folks, Scott Horton here for Veterans for Peace at VeteransForPeace.org.
I'm not a vet, but if you are, I'd like to ask you to consider joining Veterans for Peace.
As you know, in matters of foreign wars, a veteran's voice is given much more weight.
Well, Veterans for Peace is making veterans' voices heard in ways and places where they can really make a difference.
There are more than 175 chapters of Veterans for Peace in all 50 states, working hard to eliminate nuclear weapons, seek justice for veterans and victims of war, and abolish war as an instrument of American national policy.
It's the peace vets versus the chicken hawks.
Join up the good fight at VeteransForPeace.org.
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All right, so there you go, everybody.
This show is now brought to you in part by Veterans for Peace.
Thanks mostly to the efforts of our first guest on the show today, Joey King, who is a former Army Ranger and sits on the National Board of Directors of Veterans for Peace.
You can also find a chapter that he wrote in Mark Guttman's great compendium, Why Peace?
Welcome to the show, Joey.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
That's good.
Well, thank you for being here, and thank you for convincing the rest of the board up there at Veterans for Peace that sponsoring this show was a worthwhile endeavor.
It's our pleasure.
Definitely our pleasure.
I will try to make sure the show continues to exist so that you have a thing to sponsor here.
Great, great.
All right, so now I guess I'm under the impression that you were listening to the show earlier when I was making my case, and not very well, but it was a good case.
I just didn't make it, right?
About how powerful an anti-war veteran's voice can be, especially compared to a run-of-the-mill, lifelong civilian like myself.
People just don't take me as seriously as they take you when it comes to opposition to America's foreign policies.
Would you basically agree with that assessment?
That's just the way it is in American society even still, right?
I would definitely agree with you on that.
It's like a friend of mine who's a recovering alcoholic told me one time.
He said, a drunk will only listen to another drunk.
And in some cases, it's a similar mechanism within the American psyche or something like that that they do tend to listen to us where they may not listen to you or may not listen to a Quaker or a Mennonite or something like that.
And you know what it is.
It's because they brainwash us from such a young age that anything that our government does to a foreigner is good and true and justified and on your behalf.
And if you're against it, then you've got a problem.
And so you are basically buried.
Everything is basically buried under all of that mind frame and accusation before they even get a word out.
And that's why it's so important that your first words are, hey, look, I was in the Army.
Because then that means, oh, well, maybe he doesn't hate America.
Maybe he thinks he's a patriot.
Geez, he is wearing camouflage and has a flag on his arm and whatever.
Maybe I should shut up and listen for a minute.
You're able to deflect all of those presumptions and prejudices, really, is what it is.
That's a very good point.
I was listening to ñ I don't watch a lot of news around presidential elections because it drives me insane, frankly.
But I was listening to NPR a couple of days ago, and one of the commentators was talking about Mitt Romney, who never joined the military, nor did either of his five sons.
And, you know, he doesn't have a lot of street cred when he starts talking about more intervention in Afghanistan or whatever the country of the week is.
Right.
And, you know, I always thought that somebody, I mean, who knows what answer he would give or what difference it would really make.
But I think it's a serious question from a pro-war point of view or from even like an objective reporter point of view that, you know, you say, Mr. Romney, that this war on terrorism is so end-all important that we've got to kill people every day in order to continue it.
And yet, apparently, you have been unable to persuasively make that case to your own five sons.
They have not been made to believe how vitally important these missions are, or else why aren't they part of them?
So if it's really right that we need to have, you know, fulfilled Cheney's grim vision of endless warfare, then are you really the best guy to convince the American people that they need to continue sacrificing their sons for these things, for these missions?
Very good point.
Very good point.
You know, at least Teddy Roosevelt wasn't hypocritical on this.
You know, he had a son die in World War I, and he said, I'd gladly give up all my sons for it.
And at least on that one issue, he wasn't a hypocrite.
But our politicians in Vietnam especially have certainly been hypocritical on a lot of these interventions because their sons and daughters aren't serving in the military for the most part.
Right.
Yeah, and I'm not sure it's really to their credit, right, when Joe Kennedy or Prescott Bush sent their kids to go and fight in the war.
But hey, at least if they were for war, they were, you know, giving up something, you know.
I don't know if it was really fair for Joe to make Joe Jr. go die in that thing, but anyway.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But yeah, you know, the whole Romney thing, it's quite ironical in a lot of ways.
But so anyway, here's my thing.
I guess I want to give you a chance to pitch to people here, and there's a whole bunch of things we can talk about for the next 15 minutes or so.
But I wanted to give you a chance to sort of make your pitch to veterans in the audience.
And I know from the e-mails that there are veterans in this audience and people who are veterans and not active duty because of this show.
But so, you know, I'd like for you to tell them, you know, try at least give you a chance to try to get them to join you.
And, you know, what's in it for them?
Why is it worth it to join?
Because, you know, you can join and be a card-carrying member of this, that, or the other thing.
What's so important about Vets for Peace?
You know, why is it worth their time to choose this avenue for their activism, Joey?
Well, activism is the right word.
Throughout the country, we do activism, both national actions and local actions.
You know, we may be doing anything from, for instance, here in Middle Tennessee, we go to a lot of high schools, talk to kids who, you know, are contemplating joining the military.
I did that on Thursday, for example, you know, talk to them about, you know, other options besides the military.
We work with a Peace Corps volunteer at a local high school, and they, you know, talk to her about maybe joining the Peace Corps rather than, you know, joining the military.
You know, a couple of events that we have coming up that we, you know, participate heavily in, on November the 11th is Veterans Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, when World War I ended, since we're on a little bit of a World War I rant here.
At 11 o'clock throughout the country, most of the Veterans Day parade starts, and many of our chapters march right along with, you know, the National Guard or some of the Confederate veterans or whoever's in the parade and, you know, present a voice of peace.
And I've done this probably three or four years here in Tennessee, and as we pass the reviewing stand, we're always getting a very loud ovation, and, you know, the person on the microphone will say something to the effect of, well, nobody wants peace more than a veteran because they know what war is, and war is hell.
That's just all there is to it.
Another thing that we are very active in is every November in Columbus, Georgia, outside the gates of Fort Benning, is the School of the America's Watch vigil, and it's always the weekend before Thanksgiving, and we do a lot of, it's probably our second biggest gathering with, you know, several veterans usually go to this event.
It's probably somewhere around 100 of us.
All right, now tell the newbies what the School of the America's is, because they might not know.
That's a good point.
The School of the America's started in Panama just after World War II, and it was designed to train Latin American armies in anti-communist tactics, and unfortunately it's been used since that time to basically spread terrorism throughout Latin America.
Every coup that has happened in Latin America since World War II has been affiliated with the School of the America's graduate, so they've really been a sad part of the history of all the turmoil and violence in Latin America, and that includes the 2009 coup in Honduras.
Yeah, I was just going to ask you that.
All the way right up until the last one, huh?
Yeah, absolutely.
Every single one of them has had an SOA graduate that's been there.
In 1984, it moved to Columbus, Georgia, and that's why we have the vigil at Fort Benning.
So those are kind of two events that are coming up that folks could participate in.
If they're interested in learning a little more about Veterans for Peace, they could go to veteransforpeace.org and join us or find out where a chapter meeting is and maybe go to a couple of them and see what they like about the local chapter because each chapter will have a little bit different focus.
It's more of a confederacy rather than a federal organization.
There's a lot of power at the bottom, and so the chapters will take on something that maybe a local chapter in one state might have a little different focus than another chapter in another state just depending on what the circumstances are.
So those are two events that I would highly encourage people listening to this to check out and maybe get involved in some Veterans Day activities or some activities at the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia.
We'll be at both.
All right, and now that's, again, the School of the Americas thing is November 16th through 18th.
I'd say anybody anywhere near Georgia could get there cheap enough, got miles saved up or whatever it is.
That's certainly worth showing up for.
In fact, tell us a little bit more about that because you sent me a little thing about that and it had a massive list of guests, speakers, and this is going to be a really big deal.
I guess it always is every year.
Yes.
Colonel Anne Wright, who is a Veterans for Peace member, I think you've interviewed her a couple of times if I remember correctly.
I think so.
She's going to be one of the speakers.
We've got all kinds of music.
We've got different Latin American groups both here in the U.S. and throughout Latin America who come in for this event and honor those thousands of people over the last 60, 65 years that have been harmed by militaries and actions that a lot of times the U.S. instigated in many cases, unfortunately.
All right.
Now, what about counterrecruitment?
Because this always seemed like a really big deal to me, and, again, it's the kind of thing where you've pretty much got to be a veteran to do it, right?
Don't listen to that guy.
I've actually been there.
He's paid to lie to you.
I'm volunteering to tell you the truth.
You know, that's true.
We do a lot of that, again, kind of depending on the chapter focus, but we do here at our local chapter a lot of it.
We've been doing it for eight years every month during the school year, and we've got one guy that's a World War II era veteran that goes to these things, and you'd be surprised how much the kids will listen to an old man in overalls who fought in World War II, and he's now a Quaker and probably the best Christian you'd ever meet in your entire life.
And when you do that, and there's lots of different ways you can do it.
You can do it at a table event, or you can make friends with a history teacher maybe and get invited in to be a guest speaker at one of his classes or something along those lines.
But when you actually talk to these kids, it's a very, very moving experience, and it's like a friend of mine that does this with me a lot.
He's a Vietnam veteran.
He says that if you change one kid's decision to join the military, and you may not ever know that you actually changed that kid's mind, the work is worth its while, even if it's just one kid and even if you don't know.
But it really is some great work, and when you tell people that you're doing that and they have to let us in to the schools to talk, it also, I think, lets you reach out to the community and lets the principals and the vice principals and the teachers know that maybe there's something to these guys.
They're not a bunch of bomb-throwing radicals.
They're just sitting there talking to kids, and they're telling them, Hey, war is hell, and we need to put an end to it now, and what you can do is start by not joining the military and starve the beast.
I think that's a very powerful voice that Veterans for Peace can offer in the peace movement.
Yeah, I mean, I always think back to my teen years, and I just figure I was really lucky because I learned, well, about these School of the America graduate death squad torturers down there in Latin America and how the Reagan people, they will sell you cocaine, and then they'll lock you in prison for decades for using it.
And what a bunch of bastards they are, them and their death squads.
And so I just, there's no way, by the time of Bill Clinton even, I was already way too cynical from the Reagan-Bush years.
There was no way that I was going to join the military when I turned 18, and Clinton was still in power then.
But I just got lucky, right?
I just happened to be in the right place at the right time where someone said, Yeah, well, every idiot knows that the Republicans sell drugs.
Don't be foolish, you know, kind of thing.
And so I was cynical enough, I was inoculated from the idea that, Oh, yeah, they're going to take good, good care of you, and they'll only risk your life for a really good reason, and all these kinds of things, like the average recruit believes.
So I think that's really the most important thing that can be gotten across to these kids, is that, Hey, they're liars, man.
You can't believe anything they say about why you need to kill who they say you need to kill.
They just lied too many times.
That's exactly right.
I joined, in 1979, the Iranian embassy was taken over, and I graduated high school in 1980, which was the first year that they reinstituted the Selective Service.
And my mother said, You know, we're probably going to war with Iran, and it'd be better for you to go in as an officer than enlisted.
And then, you know, that fizzled out as soon as Reagan took office.
And, you know, I was in college ROTC, and then about that time all the El Salvadoran communists were taken over, you know, El Salvador, blah, blah, blah.
And like you say, all those Central American atrocities that was committed under the Reagan administration.
And it just drives me crazy when people talk about how good a president Ronald Reagan was.
And he was responsible for 400,000 deaths in Central America.
Now, once you get past that, you might be able to say he was a good president or a bad president.
But that's where you have to start the conversation with him.
But I believed him, and, you know, I fell out fairly quickly with the military and just did one tour and thought pretty quickly that it wasn't going to be for me for a lifetime career and got out after one tour.
But, you know, Reagan won't get killed.
You know what, you're reminding me right now, Joey, that it was a guy like you who taught me this thing.
Like a few different things, right?
That's how I learned, though, that, hey, you know, I was down there in El Salvador, and let me tell you something about, you know, and you talk to a real Army vet, you might find a real cynical guy who, you know, has nothing good to say about the people who sent him off to do what he did.
And I guess I just got lucky and was exposed to people like that.
You know, veterans who said, you know, you might not have ever heard of this thing, but I was in this thing, and it was messed up.
Yep, that's exactly right.
And we were trying to, and of course the process is still in play to rewrite the Vietnam War history to, you know, that it was the Great War.
And, you know, if we had just stayed a little longer and stopped listening to all those people.
It's just all imperialism.
And, you know, you wanted to say it started with Wilson.
I personally think it started with Christopher Columbus.
Well, you can go all the way back to whatever you want.
That's sort of splitting hairs a little bit, but imperialism is imperialism, and we're just as guilty of it as anybody.
Yeah.
In fact, I read, I don't know if I could quite put it together, which Joey's referring to the rant that came before this interview was me blaming Wilson for everything bad in the world.
But I read something great that said, oh, no, this is all McKinley's fault, because the direct line from McKinley to Wilson is, you know, this, that, whatever.
And it all had to do with Japan and Russia and breaking off Japan from the alliance with Britain or something.
I don't remember exactly how it went, but, you know, the point being you can draw your line wherever you want.
I can't remember the name of this book, but it came out about three years ago that McKinley did set the modern blueprint of how to do it.
You know, in the Spanish-American War when we took Cuba and Puerto Rico and Guam and the Philippines, you know, from Spain.
That was sort of a blueprint.
It's changed a little here and there.
And, you know, we mentioned Honduras a few minutes ago.
That's sort of a newer version of it where you get a friendly judge in the Banana Republic to declare the president to be in violation.
And then, you know, the generals come and pick him up in his pajamas and fly him into Costa Rica.
So, you know, it's a little modern version of it, but McKinley did start that blueprint of how to do it.
And we have him to thank for the modern version of it, I think.
Yeah.
Well, certainly a lot of that.
All right.
Now I kind of wanted to go a direction, something about showing up at anti-war protests, you know, all in camouflage and with flags and being all very patriotic and anti-war and basically outflanking the war party on the right big time.
Right.
But there's no protest for you to show up at, right?
I mean, that's the problem.
Well, you know, we do a lot of it depending.
We had, for example, October 7th, I think some of our folks in New York and in Washington, D.C. had some pretty big rallies there.
I know a few people on our board of directors got arrested in New York because they stayed out to 10.01 on a curfew at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York, honoring New York veterans who died there.
And they were, I think they were reading the names of the veterans who died in Vietnam at 10.01 in the evening and got arrested for curfew violation or something like that.
So, you know, we do a lot of those.
You know, that was actually to mark the Afghanistan war, which was October 7th, I think.
And, you know, different events come out during the year.
You know, we try to be a part of those.
And, you know, like I say, the next two that are sort of on our radar locally and nationally are the Veterans Day Parades on November the 11th and School of the Americas.
Those are the two big ones in the immediate future, which is the next four to five weeks or so.
Yeah.
But, you know, I wanted to touch on something that you said.
You know, a lot of us do show up, you know, wearing our old uniforms with the flags on them.
And, you know, a lot of us show up in these T-shirts.
And a lot of us show up business casual.
So it really is sort of the way you want to come with what you bring type of thing.
Personally, I show up with one of my old uniform tops.
I guess I'm just trying to, you know, the whole point of these big protests, right, is to try to get on the local news and show people who didn't know that, wow, look, there's more than five people coming together.
Agreeing about this at the same time because they might not have known it.
But then.
Yeah.
So that's what I'm getting at is how do you get the local news to put the camera on you for a minute.
But really there's probably nothing you can do to get them to pay attention at a Veterans Day Parade because that's why they changed it from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
So you won't be celebrating peace.
You really never know when these things are going to come up.
About two months ago we got notice that a local Muslim youth group here in Tennessee had called for a unity, a peace and unity vigil at a park and, you know, bring candles at night and so forth.
And, you know, had a great turnout.
I think 100, 150 people were there.
Probably half were Muslim and half were, you know, people who believe that we shouldn't kill Muslims.
And it was very nice.
Got a lot of news coverage on that locally.
And, you know, to see that Muslims aren't all that much different than us.
They worship a little different.
But I think if you leave them alone the way you want to be left alone, they'll pretty much do the right thing.
They want to raise their children in peace and don't really like walking on landmines or being struck by a drone attack somewhere in Afghanistan or Waziristan or wherever.
Well, that's great to hear.
You know, that kind of thing is so important that there's, you know, obvious visual pushback on all this anti-Muslim bigotry in this country, especially.
Not just, you know, anti-war in general, but specifically on the sort of pseudo-racism, you know, anti-religious bigotry that backs it all up.
There's a lot of work to be done on that.
I agree.
And, you know, anytime someone can hear of a local event that a Muslim group sponsors or, you know, calls for support on, I would recommend that they do it.
You know, because we build these bridges one at a time, and as long as we're not blowing up the bridges, we can keep building more bridges.
And when we stop viewing as the other, that's when we have peace.
You know, as soon as you start, you know, viewing those Japanese or those Muslims or those communists, whatever, whatever that other is, when we eliminate that barrier of the other, that's when we experience peace.
Right.
Well, and when American society doesn't think of the Vets for Peace as the other, but the Vets for Peace are just, you know, guys from the neighborhood, every man, the true representative, the conventional wisdom, what everybody thinks, the mainstreaming of Veterans for Peace, when that really happens, when people in general consider you to be the great, you know, representatives of the great silent majority of what everybody really thinks out there, even though they're too busy to say it or whatever, that's when we win.
Right.
That's what it takes is for the Veterans for Peace position to always be the default.
You know.
I agree.
And, you know, if you look at...
That's doable, too.
I don't think that's impossible at all.
Well, if you look at the opinion polls, you know, in the Afghanistan war, I know that's just one of many wars, but if you look at the American opinion, it has steadily in the last few years come to our position that we've had all along, that, you know, you can't really occupy any place.
As soon as you leave, it's going to go right back to the way it was because you haven't solved the problems, and you can't solve the problems at the point of a gun.
Right.
Well, and especially when whatever land you're occupying is the size of Texas around, you know, from the bird's eye point of view, but it's shaped like Colorado if you're standing there.
You sure as hell can't occupy that.
Yep.
Too many mountains, man.
Too many mountains.
Oh, man.
All right.
Listen.
I am determined to do my very best from now on to work with you guys to promote everything that I can that you guys are doing, all your different working groups to encourage people to join up the Veterans for Peace.
I think it's such an important mission, and it's so great that you guys have taken it on.
Sorry, I didn't mean to militarize it like that.
That's okay.
They did that to me, man.
I think that way.
I'm an American.
What can I say?
Anyway, thank you, Joey, for everything, for your time on the show, for your efforts to get the VFP to sponsor me, and then for all your great work that you do.
I sure hope that people turn out, especially on Veterans Day and at Fort Benning for the School of the America's Watch.
That's November 16th through 18th.
Yeah, on Sunday the 18th, we traditionally open the events that morning with a march.
So we're singing cadences down the sidewalk for about a mile, and you can hear us coming into the vigil for about half a mile away.
You can hear us, and some of us are pushing the wheelchairs, and some of us have just gotten out of some of the more recent wars.
But it's a very emotional opening to the Sunday ceremonies there in Columbus, Georgia.
So we urge everybody that can to come on out and join us.
Great.
Hey, thanks so much again.
Appreciate it.
We'll chat soon, my friend.
All right, everybody, that's Joey King from the Veterans for Peace, veteransforpeace.org.
We'll be right back.
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