Category Archives: military

“The delicacy and fragility of life hit me”: Kyle Toon’s Journey to Conscientious Objection

It was the police murder of George Floyd, in mid-2020, that got Toon to identify as a conscientious objector.  “The delicacy and fragility of life hit me” after that May 25, he told me. With the national uprising all around him, he realized “I have to create change in myself.”

Soldier-dissent in real time

!– wp:code –> I started this week staring at the #WallofVets. The video above bears re-watching: for its diversity of ages, for the military branches represented, for the solidarity among the protesters, the “walls” of mothers, dads and veterans converged to face federal agents sent to suppress their node of the George Floyd uprising. TheContinue reading “Soldier-dissent in real time”

“Including the corpses, pal.” Notes from this week in soldier-dissent

A flyer/ad directed at troops concerned they’ll be deployed against protests in the wake of George Floyd. Of the 3 orgs in the caption, two are my former employers (sorta). Last year, I joined the board of the Center on Conscience And War, feeling the need to help the last org standing after the death ofContinue reading ““Including the corpses, pal.” Notes from this week in soldier-dissent”

Are lefty milpods the next whistleblowers, or “fortresses on a hill?”

(Photo, via Library of Congress; Some is of the “newsies,” the children peddling newspapers around city streets, when people still paid some money for words on paper.) Maybe both. As I write this I’m listening to Eyes Left, which explicitly IDs as a “Socialist Military Podcast.” Last night, I was catching up with Lions Led byContinue reading “Are lefty milpods the next whistleblowers, or “fortresses on a hill?””

Well, that felt like an episode of Law and Order. But #Justice4Reality?

In the courtroom, we all listened to bits of the audio of that day in June, and I could feel the tightness in her voice. She wasn’t about to show these strange men what she was thinking and feeling, really.

reality winner and the politics of grief

Veteran and Whistleblower.   That’s Winner in the spring of 2017, when she came across evidence (since publicly confirmed) that the Russian government had successfully hacked into some U.S. voter registration lists. She was spending her days, as an intelligence contractor, facilitating drone strikes in the Middle East, which under Trump have escalated the number of civilian casualties.

Groundhog Day for women in the military?

When anyone asks me how I got started with all this, I invariably mention CCCO and the G.I. Rights Hotline in the 1990s. But it’s not often that I wake up and feel such a strong echo of those years, as I did yesterday upon news of sexual assault of recruits at Fort Benning. BackContinue reading “Groundhog Day for women in the military?”

Who has Reality Winner’s back? We do.

I just got off the phone with Billie Winner-Davis, a clinical social worker in Texas who’s been in the press lately because of her daughter, Reality. Our chat was brief, and stayed away from the facts of Reality’s legal case. I still congratulated her on the support network she’d started in partnership with Courage toContinue reading “Who has Reality Winner’s back? We do.”

john huston, veteran for the 1st Amendment

In 1942, John Huston received a mysterious letter containing “names of military personnel and various American Army posts. I puzzled over it briefly and dropped it into the wastebasket. Later I discovered that this was the Army’s way of sending orders.”  He was then a  new director at Warner Brothers, who’d just finished his first soloContinue reading “john huston, veteran for the 1st Amendment”