‘What comes first, it seems to me, is Veterans for Peace saying, no matter how you look at it, we oppose killing other people.’
SANTA CRUZ, CA – Stephen Bare, a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran, is a coordinator of Veterans for Peace (VFP) Chapter 11 in Santa Cruz. When he talks about the roots of the original VFP chapter here, he recalls the Bill Motto post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Post 5888 in Santa Cruz, founded in 1983.
“We [in Post 5888 at that time] were the ones who stood up and said ‘no’ during the Nicaragua invasion and during Reagan’s time in office,” Bare told the People’s Tribune in a recent interview. “We were in that big Veterans Memorial Building downtown. We were crazy Vietnam vets who decided that we’re going to buck the VFW and do what we want to do, and we became the Post for Peace.” The post passed a resolution in 1984 calling for non-intervention in Central America, attracting national media attention and embroiling it in a dispute with the national VFW, which threatened to yank the local post’s charter in December 1984. That dispute was settled in May of 1985. Bare said the experience gave rise to the Santa Cruz chapter of Veterans for Peace – Chapter 11 – founded in 1987 by VFW Post 5888 members. (The national Veterans for Peace organization was founded in 1985 in Portland, Maine.)
The local VFP chapter “eventually kind of folded,” said Bare, but recent events caused some of the members to want to rejuvenate the chapter. “Now that these wars have started and we started bombing boats in the Caribbean, and we started this war with Iran, it struck a lot of our PTSD pretty deeply,” Bare said. “I remembered things in Vietnam that I had never even thought about, that I had put out of my mind…. There is a pall of fear and hopelessness that’s over this country….And so some of us got together and said, you know, there’s such a peace movement here in progressive Santa Cruz, and yet our voice is not a part of it anymore, and let’s make our voice a part of it. Let’s chip in. So we are just trying to revive the 11th chapter of VFP. We think our voice is much needed right now, and we want to participate.”
“Very few of my buddies from back in the early eighties are not still around,” Bare observed. “A lot of them are still around, and a lot of us are still trying to wage peace. That was our motto, Wage Peace.”
There are about 10 people in the Santa Cruz VFP chapter now, which Bare described as “a bunch of diehard peaceniks, intellectuals, and grumpy old men. We get together to give each other ideas as much as anything else.” He added that “people are stepping up. We have two new members, as a matter of fact, and they are butt-kickers.”
Bare noted that, “We see more and more that aligning with other, similar groups is necessary in this day and time” in order to have an impact. “You have to take things for what they are and quit being so critical of everything that differs from your own perspective. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Right now, he said, “Our central focus is slowing down armed conflict, and making sure that young people understand that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Matter of fact, you’re instructed not to. We promote the idea that unless conflict is legal and, and moral…and how can it be moral? I don’t know. But unless it’s legal, that you have a right not to participate in it. But that’s extremely difficult for people to do. We’re also concerned with the ICE, the conflation of ICE in the minds of most citizens with sincere, well-trained service members, and the misuse of that militarized organization. And if we can make the military more aware of their moral obligation to international law and to a general sense of ethics and procedure, then that’s something important we need to do. What comes first, it seems to me, is Veterans for Peace saying, no matter how you look at it, we oppose killing other people. You know, it’s just that simple. ”
He added: “I try to combine my spirituality, my church, for example, with Jesus or Buddha’s particular spirituality approach, the spiritual approach to healing ourselves. But not everybody does that. Not everybody will necessarily agree with the thrust I’ve tried to establish and have successfully established with about 10 other people.
“But, as far as being a war veteran and an activist for peace, I have some rather strident opinions about it, I guess they would be called strident. That is, that there’s not a right or wrong; I’m Buddhist in that sense that there’s not a right or wrong. It’s a matter of are you going toward the light or are you going toward the darkness? Do you want more killing and destruction, or do you want less killing and more construction? More compassion and generosity, or less compassion and generosity? There’s not an either or there, it’s which direction are you going in? And I hope that the new members of VFP will see things that way. At any rate, spirituality is an important part of the movement.”
He noted that Veterans for Peace has not met in the Veterans Memorial Building in downtown Santa Cruz in years, “but I’m trying to get us back in there with the idea that ‘we respect you guys, your American Legion or whatever you might be, and you’ve got to accept us.’ That’s part of my mission, is to show people that we can all get along and respect each other despite our differences and love each other despite our differences, instead of polarizing. If indeed we’re not welcome, we’ll go on, but I think we’ll be welcomed.”
Asked about any efforts to support people currently serving in the military who are objecting to the war, Bare said a new member of the local VFP chapter is “very involved with counseling people how to be conscientious objectors and very involved with young people. He attends the local Unitarian Universalist Church. They are very active in protecting immigrant rights and service members’ rights to not serve in an illegal war. So that’s a part of the agenda. Part of our purpose is to go ahead with every ounce of energy we want to put into it with keeping young people from fighting in illegal wars. And for me, for example, I carried so many dead bodies, and I saw so much crazy stuff that I don’t want others to have to go through that, to go through the hours of psychological work and the stress and the pain that war can cause as one of these unseen consequences of war.”
Bare said further, “We know that Mr. Trump has now told all the states they can take care of their own selves, that our number one priority is the war. You know, ‘we fight wars.’ That’s the federal government’s role, he said. So we are very involved in what is legal and what is not legal. What got us going is again, or cranked me up to renew Chapter 11, was our government’s attitude about war.”
There are various roots of the current wars, he said, but he feels the primary ones are spiritual and economic – “the lack of spirituality, the lack of compassion, the lack of knowing that we are all connected in one way or another,” and the “lust for money, control and power.” He said Trump appears to “want to control the whole world.” But, he added, “There’s no them and us. We’re all part of this problem… to some degree or another, we’re all killing the planet and killing humanity.”
Pointing to certain cuts in Veterans Administration health services and the effort to privatize services for veterans, as well as planned cuts to the Santa Cruz County Veterans Services Office, Bare said it’s “ironically tragic” that “we become the warring, imperialistic state, and yet cut back on veteran services when they’re finished.”
Bare added that, “Essentially, we’ve become militarized bullies. The VFP national organization is not afraid to use words like bullying, not afraid to use words like misogynistic, not afraid to use words like imperialism. Like, we’re becoming imperialists, we’re becoming conquerors for that matter. And the VFP finds that oppressive and resists as best it can. I’m proud to be a VFP member. Locally, we’re planning on events and, you know, more interviews and this type of thing, but most of us are involved in lots of endeavors, from the progressive side usually. But my progressive endeavor is to be less progressive, you know, [in the sense of] to figure out what we have in common rather than what we have separating us.”
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
