Camilo Mejía - Resisting War and Injustice, Speaking the Truth, Paying the Price - a program presented by Lehigh Valley Veterans for Peace

Louise Legun of Lehigh Valley Veterans for Peace introducing Mike Hoffman and Camilo Mejía on November 10, 2008, in the United Wesleyan Methodist Church in Bethlehem.  Her remarks are below: 

Hello, my name is Louise Legun, I’m with the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Veterans for Peace…I want to welcome you here tonight and thank you for coming out.  Tonight we’re going to have an inspiring talk and I hope that all of us inspired to go out and commit acts of individual and corporate courage.  I want to thank LEPOCO for helping us organize this event and I’d also like to thank LEPOCO for inspiring us and me to get Veterans for Peace together.  We’ve actually been together for about a year and a half now, not quite two years, and we meet once a month at the LEPOCO in the southside of Bethlehem.

How many veterans do we have in the audience tonight? (show of hands)  So, there is a goodly number here…it’s the second Thursday of every month.  We’ll have our monthly meeting this week on the 13th of November, on the southside of Bethlehem, 7 o’clock on Thursday night…

This week I received an email from one of the other Veterans for Peace, which said that we need to remind President-elect Obama immediately that it was the anti-war movement that changed the attitude of the country, which is what allowed Mr. Obama to be elected.  So while the election of an African-American to the presidency is an historic event, we are already hearing rumors about possibly back-pedalling on promises.  I realize it is early, but we still need to be prepared just in case.  At this point we have no firm guarantees that our troops are going to be pulled out of Iraq.  Colonel Andrew Basovich, who is a West Point grad, and currently teaches political science at Boston University, and is a Vietnam veteran, just recently had a conversation with a 4-star General who plays a central role in the War on Terror.  What this 4-star General responded when Colonel Basovich asked what the current administration’s strategy is, that guides the conduct of the War on Terror, the General replied, “There is none.”  Basovich went on to say, “Declaring a state of permanent war sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a serious problem, even as policy makers pay lip service to the policy’s actual sources.”  He concluded, “Like the so-called War on Drugs, the War on Terror is a fraud.” 

So, I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t always believe what I am told by the administrations in Washington.  Just in case Mr. Obama fails to honor his promise to bring our troops home, we need to let Washington know that we are resolved to bring them home, no matter what the cost, no matter what it takes, and we are gong to have to organize in a grassroots effort like we’ve never organized before.  We’re going to have to reach out to other veterans, we’re going to have to reach out to labor unions, to teachers, professors, everybody in our community, and I think that the best way to do that, initially, is to meet people face to face and talk to them.  I was hoping to see some people here from the Latino community, and I know that we’re on the other side of town from the southside of Bethlehem, but if the Latinos won’t come here, then we will go there, and I’m going to take the information that is available in Spanish over to the south side of Bethehem, back over to Allentown, and back to Easton and meet with people and get that information out.  One of the pieces of information we have out there comes from the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina…just last week or two weeks ago we met with Chuck Fager over at Lehigh.  He gave a wonderful talk about the peace movement and how we have such a far way to go, which is true, but some of the literature out on the table he mailed to me and one of the pieces is an enlistment agreement, in English and Spanish that’s easy to understand, but I think that young people don’t realize is that the agreement says is that enlistment is for the duration of the war and may be extended for six months after the war without his or her consent at the discretion of the President.

When they say “for the duration of the war”,  if the war is the never-ending war on terror what that means is the military can keep the enlistees for as long as it wants and they can send them back to war zones over and over and over again. 

So, it’s important for all of us, because I can see that we have a lot of friendly faces here, it’s important, it’s critical, for all of us, as we chip away at the pillar of this war machine, to get that information out.  As you are well aware, this is really a poverty draft.  There’s no place for people who don’t have resources to go other than to sign up for the military.  There aren’t jobss, there’s no money to fund their education beyond high school.  To me, this is critical too, that we get out there and meet with young people and let them know we’re going to do whatever we can to help them to figure out how to get by without having to sign up for the military…

The other thing that I wanted to say was that it was John Kennedy who said “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.  War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.” 

At this time, I want to introduce you to one of the veterans of the Iraq War who was one of the original founders of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, Mike Hoffman.  I first hearch him speak over at Lehigh several years ago when he was there with Michael Berg.  Michael Berg, by the way, is, I believe, working with the Quaker H ouse down in Fayetteville with Chuck Fager…Mike is a native of Emmaus…he served with the Marine Corps in the initial invasion of Iraq, and he, along with six other veterans, was the founder of IVAW…in July of 2004 at the Boston national convention of Veterans for Peace.  Mike is currently a communications major at Muhlenberg College.  Let’s give him a warm welcome, Mike Hoffman, co-founder of Iraq Vets against the War. - Louise Legun, 11-10-2008

Mike Hoffman, of IVAW, on November 10, 2008:  His remarks are below - 

A lot of people don’t realize that Camilo was actually one of the unofficial founders of Iraq Veterans Against the War.  He was actually one of my people on my list to call when we were forming the organization.  I called him and he had no idea who I was at this point.  I’d heard about him from some mutual friends in the veterans’ movement who were actually with him when he turned himself in to the military authorities.  I called him, and, through it all, the point he got across was, “I support you, I think what you are doing is great, but I’m under house arrest right now, and kind of busy.”  But besides that, what he did was amazing, it truly was.  I had some reporters ask me about what was going on with him legally, and what I thought about, there being a war resister, someone who was opposing the war in Iraq, And they asked me, “Are you surprised that there are people refusing to be deployed?”  And I said, “I’m not surprised that there are servicemen who refuse to deploy.  I’m surprised by how early this is happening.”  That is really what makes Camilo’s story so amazing.  He was willing to step forward so early, before anyone else was thinking about it and say, “No, I refuse to go back.”  It makes me think of Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things We Carry”, where he talks about his decision to go to Vietnam, and he says, “I was a coward, I went to Vietnam.”  My own opinion, I look at my own story, and I say,”I was a coward, I went to Iraq.  I was opposed to the war, and I still went.”  I look at somebody like Camilo, and he went there and was supposed to go back, and he stood up, and took a proud stance, a courageous stance, and he said, “No, I refuse to go.”, before anyone was willing to make that commitment and put themselves on the line like that, which is just such an incredible position to take.  Hopefully, tonight he will share some of that courage that he showed in refusing to go to Iraq, and standing up to our country’s policies, and with that said, I would like to introduce my very good friend Camilo Mejía. -Mike Hoffman, 11-10-2008

Camilo Mejía at the microphone at the United Wesleyan Methodist Church on November 10, 2008 - his remarks are below:

I actually don’t remember that conversation that Mike and I had, but I do remember something that Michael may not know.  When I was in jail, in Fort Sill, Oregon, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers came to testify during my conscientious objector hearing.  And while he was there, he told me that he had met Michael, and Michael had told him he wanted to start an organization of recent veterans who opposed the Iraq War, and he had actually told Michael that there is this other organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, maybe you should call your organization Iraq Veterans Against the War, and that’s how the conversation first took place, at least according to Daniel Ellsberg, I’m not sure, and then he asked me if I wanted to be there for the founding and I told him “Look, I’m here for about a year and this is like, just a month after I got to jail.  But I told him I would love to join as soon as I got out.  As soon as I got out, another co-founder, Jim Goodrich, travelled to Florida and he recruited me and then I officially became one of the members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

But another thing worth ponting out is that while there were seven co-founders, Michael for some time was the engine behind the organization.  It was basically one person running it with a civilian ally in a very tiny office in Philadelphia at the AFSC headquarters.  So, lots of respect for Michael, thanks, we have grown from those seven people to over 1500.  We have 50 chapters all over the United States, in Germany, with people in Iraq, people in Canada.  We have people in Afghanistan right now.  We have two GI coffee houses, I mean we’ve grown enormously, and it all started with this person sitting here, so thank you so much, Michael.

Another thing I want to say is that I am not the only war resister here.  We have a sister sitting in the back who went through a similar process as me…she served in Iraq twice and then she came back and said, “No, I’m not going to do this anymore.”  And she paid the price.  She went to jail, and she recently got out of jail.  Her name’s Monica and she is sitting right there, and thank you.

When I first heard the news that we were going to go to Iraq, I had already been in the military for close to eight years, very near the completion of my eight year military contract.  And I was also very close to graduating from school.  I was a psychology and Spanish major at the University of Miami, and I had up until that point formed an opinion about the Iraq War based on newspaper articles, CNN, basic news media reports.  My opinion was that the United States government had not justified an invasion of Iraq because we didn’t have any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda or the 9-11 attacks because there was no evidence that he was trying to purchase enriched uranium from Niger, because the UN Security Council was not approving the invasion and all these other political reasons that told me that we had not really made a case, but at the time I was also very afraid to stand up.  Like Michael said, we were cowards, because we really opposed the war.  We understood that the war was wrong.  We understood that the war was immoral and illegal, and yet I had an impeccable military career up to that point.  I was an 11 Bravo, an infantry soldier, first in active duty and then in the National Guard, and I didn’t want to put my record in jeopardy.  I also didn’t want to be called a coward or traitor, so out of fear of all these negative consequences, I decided to deploy. 

Now, I have to say that part of me was also very naïve, in that I believed that in the face of such opposition to the war and taking into account that the UN Security Council was not approving the war and since we were signatories to the UN Geneva Conventions, that also makes it a violation of the supreme law of the land of the United States.  So in my mind, although I had been questioning the military for a long time, in my mind we were still a good institution.  We were agents of good.  And part of me told me that this was not going to happen, we were going to deploy to Iraq and we were going to have this huge show of force and we were going to scare Saddam Hussein out of power and then we were going to let the Iraqis run their own country.  We would come back and everything would be fine again.  I would graduate and I’ll go on with my happy life.

Things changed when we got to Iraq because my opposition to the Iraq War was no longer merely political.  Our first mission when we got there was at a place called Al Assad, it was an old air force base, an Iraqi air force base, and it had a series of jet bunkers, and one of these jet bunkers, which is a huge concrete structure, had been turned into a prisoner of war camp, which they did not want us to call a prisoner of war camp because it did not comply with international standards.  It did not have a medical facility.  It did not have any place for someone who got really sick or injured.  There were no intelligence or military prison guards on site.  It was in violation of many rules according to American law, but also international law and international Red Cross standards.  Somebody said, “Call this a detention camp, not a POW camp.”

So we get to this detention camp and the people running the show are these people who in the military are known as spooks.  A spook is someone who will not use his real name, who will not wear a uniform.  You don’t know if they’re CIA or private contractors or special forces.  They’re like ghost agents and they have top secret clearance and they’re highly trained in things like weapons systems, and interrogation tactics and linguistics and things like that.  They operate with absolute impunity, and these are the people behind scandals such as the one at Abu Ghraib and the people running places like where I was, and in the end, they’re not the ones who take the fall.  The ones who take the fall are people like Lyndie England and Charles Graner, but the ghost agents who have top secret clearance, they get away.

So we had these three spooks, their names obviously were not their real names.  Their names were Artie, Bear and Scooter, I think, or maybe one of them was Rabbit, I’m not sure.  But they were basically the ones saying, “These guys here, are enemy combatants, these guys here are not enemy combatants.”  They made that determination and the reasons why some of these people were considered to be enemy combatants included things like, for instance, this guy was caught with a rifle and his explanation for having a rifle was that he was a sheepherder and he had the rifle to protect his animals from predators and from thieves.  Another guy was caught with a wooden crate that had explosives in it, at one point.  It was empty when he was caught with it, but because it was an explosives crate, that was enough to say that he was an enemy combatant.

Our job was to keep people like them sleep deprived, in order for them to be interrogated once they got transferred to a more permanent facility.  So we go inside this bunker and

we see that they have this area where they are holding detainees and the way they made up this area was they made a circle with concertina wire which is very sharp, very destructive wire.  You can’t touch it without cutting yourself.  They were being held within this circle and their heads were hooded with sandbags, their hands were tied, they were barefoot and the way that we kept them awake was by yelling at them:  telling them to get up, to get down, to move forward, to move back.  So my first question was, “How come they understand the commands when they don’t speak any English?”  And they said, “These guys, they’re just like animals, like dogs.  You tell a dog to get down, the dog will get down.  You tell a dog to roll, the dog will roll.  These guys have been awake for three days, we’ve been yelling the same commands at them for three days, so they’ll know what you mean.  And they said, “But after a while, that won’t work, because they’re so tired that they won’t obey.  So what you do is take a sledge hammer…”  As they’re explaining this, somebody’s demonstrating.  So you take a sledge hammer and you walk around the area where we are holding the detainees and you hit the wall next to them.  Obviously, they can’t see what is happening because they have sandbags over their heads, and when you hit the wall inside one of these bunkers with a sledge hammer, because of the echo, the sound is much like an explosion.  It scares them to the point that they believe they are going to be killed or that they almost got killed with an explosive device…when that doesn’t work, the next step was to take a 9 mm pistol and put it to the head of the detainee and perform a mock execution and that will do the trick, it will get them to obey your commands, however tired they are.

There was one detainee who still would not comply, so what they did is they put him inside this chamber, still inside the bunker, and the chamber was narrow enough for this person to stand, but not sit down or lay down and they posted a soldier with a metal stick to bang the wall next to this person repetitively creating this very repetitive clanking…noise to basically drive this person insane, make him into an example so that others would obey everything that we said.

After this was done for many hours, we were supposed to let them sleep for 30 to 45 seconds.  What that does is when you let somebody who has been awake for three days sleep for 30 seconds, when they wake up to another explosion-like sound, screams, or something like that, they’ll wake up not knowing if they just slept for 20 hours, or five hours or 30 minutes, or a second, so any remaining psychology notion that they may have, whether it’s a sense of light, a sense of space, or a sense of time is completely destroyed.  That’s how you soften them up for interrogation.

This was the first mission that I encountered in Iraq.  So, obviously the opposition begins to transform into something way more personal, and more heartfelt, because it is something that we’re doing, not that we were reading about it in the newspaper. 

But this mission was not dangerous enough for our commander.  Our commander had been in the military more than 20 years and as an infantry soldier he had no combat experience, so he needed to fish out more combat missions to get promoted and get medals and things like that, so we get fishing permissions and we ended up in this place called Ramadi, which is in what we call the Sunni triangle.  There is no such thing as the Sunni triangle in Iraq.  There never has been a Sunni triangle in Iraq.  It is part of the whole divide and conquer strategy that we have there.  But this place was certainly mostly Sunni, and there was a lot of development there.  There were two presidential houses, many government buildings, schools, universities, factories, Republic Guard bases and things like that.  Saddam Hussein enjoyed widespread support in this area.  And yet, when we first arrived, the people were kind of skeptical of our presence there.  They were just trying to figure out how long we were going to stay, if things were going to improve.

Soon enough, they realized that we were not there to be their friend.  There was no rebuilding.  The only rebuilding that was taking place was the rebuilding of our bases, the places where we were living.  The way we were interacting with the population was rather brutal and cruel.  So the resistance got organized pretty quickly, and they began to attack our units and these attacks became more frequent and intense, until it turned into full-blown guerrilla warfare, with mostly hit and run tactics.  At this point I remembered a promise our commander had made to our units, that we would not return home without the combat infantry badge, which is an award you can get as an infantry soldier when you have engaged the enemy in open battle.

So, basically the problem is we were going to do everything in our power to instigate firefights and to go to battle.  That was the purpose for being there – without fulfilling that purpose, we would not return. So this promise became pretty offensive, as we realized that we were doing everything completely opposite of what we had learned up to that point.  For instance, when you are in the military they teach you that when you are going to encounter the enemy, you make yourself unpredictable.  You don’t assemble in one place over and over and over and over at the same time and that you don’t follow the same road over and over and over at the same time.  You don’t stay in one place too long, and you don’t do anything that will give the enemy the ability to predict your movements and that’s exactly what we were doing, we were making ourselves predictable and we were also doing missions in a place where we knew if there was an attack that high numbers of civilians would get killed.  That’s exactly what began to take place.

We got to do missions by mosques, hospitals, by schools, marketplaces, and places like that…and, obviously, we began to kill a lot of civilians.  The only way you could tell the difference between a civilian and a combatant was that the combatant had a weapon and a civilian didn’t.  So by the time I got out of Iraq, my unit alone had killed 33 people.  Of those 33 people, only three had weapons.  Everybody else was caught in the crossfire.

I’ll tell of just one incident.  We had gone out to set up a Traffic Control Point, a TCP, by Ramadi’s biggest mosque and the way you set up a traffic control point is you organize your unit, whatever kind of unit you have, whether it’s a squad or two squads or a platoon, and you have security and you have somebody stopping the people and then you have a search team, and if you start detaining people, you have a detention team, until you go back to base and you transport the detainees. 

But this time, we were searching people, and when we cleared the people and the occupants of the vehicle, instead of letting them go, we would keep them with us, and we were running sort of a combat – valet parking service, because we had in addition to the security perimeter and the surge and all the other things, we had people from our unit who had to be getting these civilian people and driving them into another area where we were keeping them in the vehicles and the civilians were essentially bunched in the heart of the perimeter.  We did that for about an hour and it was pretty obvious that we were going to get attacked.  I expressed concern to my platoon sergeant and my platoon leader.  They said, “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen.”

We already had been told not to stay in one place for more than half an hour.  This is already an hour, over an hour.  At this point, a man failed to stop when told to do so.  Maybe he had bad brakes, I don’t know, and we started firing at him.  Actually, I remember at that time I was standing with a friend between two trucks.  I remember hearing the gunfire and suddenly this car rolled next to me and stopped next to me and I saw, I remember this car and it had sort of a glow around it because so many bullets were hitting the metal surface of the vehicle and I remember seeing inside there was a human being that was twitching with every bullet that hit it.  This must have been a shorter distance than between Michael and me right now, maybe a meter or meter and a half, and I remember seeing this, what used to be a human being, it was just a bundle of flesh and blood and the sight was really hard to endure because we knew that seconds ago this had been a person with all the factions of a human face and no longer was that the case and when that happened I remember that I did not ask any questions, I didn’t know what was happening, I just knew that we were shooting up this guy, so my weapon almost automatically raised to the level of this person and I began squeezing the trigger.  Then I realized that there were people who were shooting, not at people anymore, but at the field…across from the mosque.  And then I asked my friend, he said, “We’re under attack.”

Apparently, when we opened fire on this man, the people who had been setting up an attack thought that we were attacking them.  So then they opened fire, and the next thing I know we were in the middle of a firefight.  I remember seeing all these cars and all these civilian people in between the fire we are taking and our position and that really didn’t cross my mind, I didn’t think about it at the time, I just remember seeing it and then the firefight stopped and then we thought it was over because up until then whenever they would attack us, they would attack us and then leave through the neighborhoods and the alleyways but this time they came back again.  So, there was a second interaction and then we returned fire with everything that we had.  They hit us with grenades, with rifles, and with automatic rifles and we hit them back also with automatic rifles and with machine guns and grenades and with grenade launchers and then there was another ceasefire and I remember at the time my squad was pulling a perimeter for security and my job as squad leader was to walk up and down the line to make sure that everything was OK, that we had security integrity, that we still had our men where they were supposed to be, but I couldn’t do that.  The whole area where we were supposed to walk was maybe 50 or 60 meters.  Because as soon as I would start walking to look for my men, I would get stopped by someone who would say, “Look, someone just got shot.” People asking for a field dressing, it was like this place that had been a normal street was full of wounded and dead people. 

And then we got attacked again, and we returned fire, and then there was another ceasefire and then we were relieved by the Quick Reaction Force platoon.  So we left and by the time we left two soldiers had been injured.  They had taken shots to the legs, and seven civilian were dead and a still undetermined number of civilians were wounded.  When the platoon that relieved us searched the area, they found absolutely nothing.  They didn’t even find the empty cases of the bullets.  They didn’t find any blood, they found absolutely nothing.

This is an example of how you did not really need to be told to go out there and kill civilians.  You don’t get told to kill children, to kill unarmed people.  The way we were doing things, the way we carried ourselves over there, with complete disregard for the lives of not only civilians, but also American troops.  We are creating a situation which is just unforgivable.  It’s just an absolute crime to be a part of that. 

It’s really hard when you are a part of that situation, when you are being attacked constantly, when any piece of garbage by the road could be an improved explosive device, or you could get killed by a mortar on the way to the bathroom to take a shower, or you could get ambushed, or you could hear an explosion and wonder, “Who do I know just got killed?”  Or, “where do we have to go to respond to this attack?”

Instead of thinking about the morality of the war and the immorality of killing people, you think about, “Where’s the next attack going to come from and how is it going to happen and how are we going to protect ourselves from it?”  So the will to survive kicks in and everything else gets pushed aside.  I guess people just hope we can get it over with and came home and put it all behind and just move on with our leaves, but we can’t.  You can leave the country but you take the war with you.  It’s something to realize.  I remember I was given a two week furlough to come home and people began asking me questions about my service in Iraq.  The first person was my stepsister.  She asked me if I had ever gotten ambushed and I remember telling her the story about how we got ambushed halfway through telling her the story my voice began to break and I realized for the first time I was talking about this incident.  Even in Iraq, I didn’t talk about it, because it was really intense and also because right after we got ambushed we got attacked again, and again and there was a period of close to 40 hours when we didn’t sleep at all because we were under attack.  So, you don’t really go back to thinking about what just happened.  You don’t think about the morality of it, whether it was right or wrong, you just concentrate on staying alive. 

But when you come home and you’re not under constant attack, and when you’re not facing the possibility of getting killed on your way to take a shower, you for the first time have the possibility to go back to those questions of the politics or the legal justification of the war and now you have to add your own personal experience and the killing and the death, the destruction and the torture.  For me, personally, it became a question of whether I would answer to my conscience or whether I would answer to my military leaders and I realized I had to choose.  I could not do both at the same time.  My conscience was telling me that I could not go back and in good conscience continue doing what we were being told to do. 

But it was a decision that was very hard to make, because again I was afraid about what the military would do to me.  I was afraid of being rejected by my peers.  I was afraid of being called a traitor.  I was afraid of being killed by the military, because the death penalty was still there for desertion in a time of war. 

So, when I was supposed to get back on the plane to go back to Iraq, I simply did not get back in the plane.  I overslept that day, and I said to myself , “I will go back the next day.”  And then when the next day came, I did not get on the plane and I said, “I will just go tomorrow, then when tomorrow came, I’ll go back the next day.”  I simply did not have the moral strength to say, “This is the right thing to do.”  I had intellectual clarity that it was the right thing to do.  I knew I had to stay back and speak out, but the fear was just too overwhelming, so I just simply realized one day that I was not going back and I had to speak out.  So I began to speak out, at first clandestinely I began to speak with the media and then I began to put together a conscientious objector claim, and to prepare for a court martial.

And then I went public with my opposition to the war.  I said, “I served in Iraq and this is what we’re doing, and this is why I am not going back.  This war is illegal, it’s criminal, it’s oil-driven and no one in the military signed to do these things so I am not doing it anymore.”

Then following that, I surrendered to the nearest military base, an Army Air Force base in Massachusetts and at that point the case got a lot of attention because I was the first combat veteran to speak out against the war publicly and to publicly refuse to go back to it.  So it became a PR question for the military.  What are you going to do with this guy from within your own ranks?  Are you going to let him out or are you going to put him in jail?  They responded politically and they denied me a defense.  All my claims of war crimes and things like that would not be corroborated and they wouldn’t allow witnesses to testify.  Key pieces of evidence were kept from the jury.  After three days of court martial, the jury deliberated for 20 minutes, before giving me the maximum sentence given by a Special Court Martial, which was a year in jail, demotion from staff sergeant to private and a bad conduct discharge with forfeiture of my pay.

I was immediately adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience, so when I went to jail I had a lot of support.  People from every continent on Earth and from all over the United States were writing me, telling me, “You did the right thing, and we stand behind you.”  So I didn’t really feel alone and given my experience in Iraq, the time that I was underground there was so much fear, I must confess that I had a wonderful time in jail…I was telling Monica that the food was great and I got a lot of time to read and to write and I got out pretty buffed because there was a gym and, it’s true, you do get to work out a lot…I don’t know if you got to work out a lot, but I got to work out a lot, and then in February of 05, I got out and met with Tim Goodrich who came to Florida and a month after that I met Michael in Fayetteville, and we had a march – we were protesting the second anniversary of the war and that’s when we held our first national meeting and we’ve been at it ever since.  We’ve grown from seven people to over 1500 in 50 chapters.  We have two GI coffeehouses and we have people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and we are not waiting a year, we are not waiting a hundred days, we’re not waiting a minute.  We are going to continue organizing because we understand that change comes from the bottom up and unless we make that change happen, no President, no politician is going to make it happen for us.  The time is now, the ball is in the people’s court, so let’s make our move.  Thank you. -Camilo Mejía

All transcriptions by Joe DeRaymond, jderaymond@rcn.com