Seoul - 1991
When I got out of the Navy, I had several weeks of vacation
time that I was never able to take. I
went on what the Navy calls “terminal leave”.
I processed out of the Navy but continued to get paid for several
weeks. I was technically still in the
Navy during this time and I was allowed to keep my ID card. I hopped on an Air Force cargo plane and
went to Korea.
At the time, there were videos on the news of large student
protests in Seoul. The students would
gather on a street at a time and place that was not announced to the
public. The Korean government responded
with tear gas and water cannons. By the
time I got there, the US military had banded its personnel from entering Seoul
but I went anyway.
I found the city mostly deserted that day. There were Korean soldiers at most
intersections and armored cars with water cannons at the larger
intersections. A few businessmen were
going to/from work. There were no
tourist, women, or children on the streets.
No shopping. The museums were
open and eerily empty.
For lunch, I bought a bowl of noodles from a street vender
and sat down at a picnic table in a park to eat it. A man dressed in a suit in his late 50’s sat down across from
me. He was friendly and spoke fluent
English. He told me he had been an
interpreter for the US Army during the Korean war. He asked me who I was and what I was doing there and I told him. He could tell I was military from my
haircut. We talked about politics and
Korean history and American culture. I
had a map of Seoul and had marked out several tourist places I wanted to
see. He studied my map carefully and
said he would go with me.
As we walked through Seoul, each time we passed a group of
soldiers, he would stop and talk to the squad leader. I could not tell what he was saying but I could tell he outranked
everyone we passed. I never saw any
protests that day. The whole city was
quite. At the end of the day, he rode
the bus with me halfway back to the air base I was stay at. He asked me to write down my name and
contact information for him, which I did.
I got the impression that he was grateful to the US military for saving
Korea. I enjoyed our conversations that
day and I never had any trouble with him or the Korean government.
Colombia - 1995
I went on a human rights fact finding mission to Colombia
with Witness for Peace. There were
seven of us, five Americans and two Colombians. There was widespread violence in Colombia and virtually no
foreigners. US embassy personnel were not
allowed to leave Bogotá.
Shortly after we arrived, we found out about a protest that
was going on in a small town named Castillo in the Colombian Amazon and decided
to go. It was an extremely remote. As we approached, we noticed the small farms
were abandoned. In the town we found
about a thousand people camped out in the plaza and the Colombian army
patrolling the parameter. We shocked
everyone when we showed up.
We had a letter from the president of Colombia explaining
who we were and granting us freedom to move around the country. We showed it to the Army officer in charge
and there was a tense moment where he decided what to do with us. He let us pass. He could just as easily arrested us. Inside the plaza, people were living in tents they constructed
out of plastic sheeting. They had been
there for a week. Sanitation was
poor. These people were substance
farmers, peasants, campasinos. The
campasinos had put up a rope around the plaza and asked the military to say out
of it, which they did. I videoed the
whole scene.
They had come in from the countryside because they were
being killed by a gang supported by the region's large cattle ranchers. The process was simple. The gang would put a notice on the door of
the farmer’s house telling him to get off his land. If he did not leave, he was killed. There was a communist rebel group in the area too that was
fighting the rancher’s gang. The
communist would take food and supplies from the campasinos but generally did
not kill them. The army actively fought
the communist rebels and allowed the rancher gangs to operate freely.
We met with the town’s elected communist mayor who was in
his early twenties. He was feeding his
baby Coca-cola while we talked to him.
Several previous majors had been assassinated. He struck me as a nice, honest, simple guy who was either very
brave or unaware of the danger he was in.
The campasenos could not hold out much longer. They needed to get back to their farms and
take care of their animals. An agreement
was reached in which the government promised to help protect the farmers and
they went home. We went back to Bogota
and debriefed the CIA at the US Embassy.
Then we went to Medellin.
The mayor of Castillo was assassinated shortly after our visit. A nun that had helped us get there was
threatened and had to leave the country.
In meeting with human rights activist throughout Colombia, I
always asked them what I could do, as an American, to help them. The US government had minimal influence in Colombia
so this was not an easy question to answer.
The answer I got was always the same – “close the School of the
Americas”.
School of the Americas - 1997
There was a big difference between the Colombian army and
the US Army. You could see it in the
eyes of the civilians. The Colombians
were terrified of their army.
The School of the Americas is a US Army school located at
Fort Benning, Georgia that trains soldiers from Latin American. The school has trained some of the world’s
worst thugs who have committed many massacres.
By 1997, documents had leaked showing that the school taught torture
techniques. This was before Guantanamo
and was a major scandal. Father Roy had
created and ran SOA Watch to shut down the school. I joined their protest at Fort Benning in the fall of 1997.
There were thousands of protesters at the gate to Fort
Benning and I was among 600 people who walked into the base. We were quickly arrested. We were taken to a fenced field. We were processed at a tent where our
pictures and fingerprints were taken.
We were treated well. We were
given hot soup and sandwiches. A school
bus was driven in so the elderly could get out of the cold. After about six hours, we were released.
The Army decided to prosecute 21 of the 600 of us. These were the people who had trespassed at
Fort Benning the previous year and I was not among them. I watched the trial. The Federal judge was demented and could not
stay awake during the trial. The only
thing he was capable of was declaring a guilty verdict and sentencing the
maximum. The 21 charged spent six
months in jail each. The judge had no
business being there and should have been forcibly retired. But the Army knew this would happen and did
it anyway.
The protests continued with thousands of people and hundreds
of arrests and prison sentences to people who were acting selflessly on their
consciences. The Army changed the name
of the school but nothing else about the school changed and it remains open
today. The protests continue.
Today
Today the US has Guantanamo and probably secret CIA prisons
were we torture suspected terrorists. I
would not have imagined this possible twenty years ago. We seem to have done a serious backslide on
human rights. I have kids now so I do
not do protests anymore. Maybe I will
do protests again when my kids are older.
