North Country Veterans for Peace - Chapter 121

Roland Van Deusen (vandeusenn@aol. com)
North Country Veterans for Peace, Chapter #121

Below is a description of a joint project with fellow Vietnam era veteran Nick Mottern, director of Consumers For Peace and contributor to TRUTHOUT (listed next to Bill Moyers). Nick can be reached at his website. This has been our local effort and your VFP chapter may quickly find better and faster ways of doing this in which case feel free to tell me how. Your chapter can try this with any nearby military facility, and with your House or Senate Representative, especially if they're in the House or Senate Armed Services Committees.

Paul Saint-Amand, past Chapter #121 President, had Nick look me up on his trip to Fort Drum in Northern NY, as I lived closest to the post, and, being retired with grown children, available to do so. Nick's articles in TRUTHOUT on the trans-Afghan pipeline ("Killing and Dying in the Great New Game") and the impact of multiple deployments on service families ("Less Than Citizens: the People of Fort Drum") are invaluable resources and great handout material here. Check w/Nick if you're concerned about copyrights.

Google trans-Afghan pipeline and among the hundreds of responses are a quote from Hamid Karzai, an oil magazine article, and some online encyclopedias. Good to know for doubters. Also w/Iraq, the oil companies jostle for rights but have signed almost no delivery contracts, not trusting Iraqi forces to make it safe enough to be profitable. Guess who's gonna be left holding the bag? The events below covered about three months.

We hit local places I knew would have Army wives, recent vets, and active GIs, handing out the pipeline article and GI Rights Hotline leaflets, probably over-using the punchline, "Shouldn't ExxonMobil hire its own army to secure the pipeline and let our guys come home sooner?" With about 300 interviews in four days, we had about 3 dissenters with our view. We asked folks to call their Congressman, writing the phone # on the back of the handout.

Nick ran ads containing his articles on a local news website, getting thousands of reads in a few weeks, prompting empty threats to ban the site on post. On the ads, Nick posted links to GI rights and peace groups, including our local chapter. I visited our Representative' s office w/my best suit, lapel flag and short haircut, saying my veterans' organization wanted assurance the pipeline would not be "mission creep" for our troops. Any documentation of your chapter's humanitarian work - homeless GIs, PTSD, Depleted Uranium, etc. - goes over big to get you in the door here.

We followed this w/three emails to the Congressman, two faxes to Armed Services Committee, two letters to local newspaper editors, asking chapter members to call, making a call to a local radio talk show. All these communiques ended with saying the lack of any response would lead our veterans' organization to conclude that those Washington entities have no problem with energy/economics being worth American GI blood. If your hometown politician responds with saying they'd try to help, VFP can take some credit, and we'd love the St. Louis office and our chapter 121 Northern NY to hear about it.

As nobody from Washington responded in over a month since our office visit, I've taken that evidence of Washington's callousness back for repeated rounds of canvassing and interviewing those connected to the military in this ongoing campaign for hearts and minds.

To learn more about this project please contact Roland Van Deusen, North Country VFP (Chap. 121) at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it