COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Duty to Tour Against War after Tour of Duty, Say Vets
MARTY LEVINE, pittsburgh city paper
10/12/2006
When Toby Hartbarger was an Army Specialist in Iraq, he says he wenton patrol looking for bombs, manned checkpoints and conducted raids
in Baghdad and other cities for 15 months ending in August 2004. The
Muncie, Ind., resident observed the conditions of the Iraqi people he
fought among while "looking at who was profiting from the war while
[my] friends were dying.
"I lost my soul for the war and I'm trying to regain it," he said as
he stood to protest in front of the military recruiting station on
Forbes Avenue in Oakland on Oct. 7. He was one of a dozen people on a
24-city, two-month UPRISE counter-recruitment tour, which began Sept.
23, who joined the bi-weekly picket run by Pittsburgh Organizing
Group (POG).
Hartbarger, 22, is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He
entered the Army in July 2002, after meeting a recruiter in high
school. Why did he join? "Money for college. Get out of the house,"
he said. "It all happened pretty quickly."
Now he is traveling to colleges and high schools, concerts and
rallies, to urge others to come out against the war — without having
to engage in firefights first.
"We had a lot of great responses with youth in particular," says
Steve Mortillo of Pennington, N.J., another former Army Specialist,
Iraq veteran and UPRISE tour member. "We're trying to link up groups
and make connections."
Many of the groups are already connected to POG. "We actually draw a
lot of inspiration from POG in their tactics," says a Cleveland
counter-recruitment activist who goes by the nom de guerre of Tom
Nomad. He says his group spent summer weekends picketing Cleveland
recruiting centers in a similar fashion.
The next frontier in anti-war protests, says Local UPRISE participant
David Meieran, is to counter corporate recruitment that serves the
military-industrial complex, in Dwight Eisenhower's famous
formulation. That goal is especially important for the Iraq War, in
which many tasks usually undertaken by the military have been
privatized.
But the movement continues to focus on the audience on which it can
have the most direct influence: young people. UPRISE organizer Ryan
Harvey, of Baltimore, writes protest songs with the Riot-Folk
Collective and plays them on the tour. "You'll get people to come out
to hear some music more than they'll come out to hear speakers,"
Harvey says.
Chad Rosenbloom, a 15-year-old freshman at Shadyside Academy in Fox
Chapel, didn't come for the music.
"I read a lot of Noam Chomsky, but I've never really done anything,
never really taken direct action," Rosenbloom said. After discovering
POG on the Web, he found himself standing on the curb with a sign
saying "Honk for Peace."
Protestors built a wall of boxes — plastered with photos of the war
and names of American war dead — in front of the locked recruitment-
center door. After the group began marching through Oakland, the door
was once again spray-painted and smashed.
"People have been coming to me and saying they are against the war,"
said UPRISE member Toby Hartbarger. "That means nothing to me,
because they'll go home and turn the TV on. The question we get a lot
is, 'What can I do?' And they want something easy, like 'sign a
petition' or 'go out and vote.' That's not what we need. We need a
movement."
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