Our Community is the Glue that Binds

Below you will find stories from a couple of our community members. Their experiences reinforce the fact that our community is the glue that binds us together and allows us to continue to do the work to resist militarism in its many forms.

Juan Michael Spinnato, U.S. Marine Corps, Med student

As I dove deeper into my first year of medical school, I had several moments of crisis. Inevitably, I arrived at a point where I felt like I had to remove myself from all levels of activism and advocacy. 

I would have to say goodbye to organizations that I had been a part of since I left the military 7 years earlier. 

I felt that I had to stop writing because it seemed to perpetuate a downward spiral of processing. Both with what was happening during my first year of medical school, and also what had happened during my childhood and my time in the Marine Corps. 

I have many friends in Boston and now Philadelphia, where I attend medical school, who are part of these organizations that have been such an integral part of my life.  Collectively they have shaped my identity and defined the type of person I strive to become. 

Iraq Veterans against the War is the home of the most important piece of activism and identity building that I am involved in. All my writing, processing, and envisioning of the type of world I want to be a part of comes from the daring critiques and standards we at IVAW have made of and for ourselves and the world.  

To walk away from this was a miserable idea that I had somehow allowed to become an option. 

I had become consumed by a process inherent at medical school that was convincing me that my weaknesses were a direct result of the "distractions" that I had set up for myself by always being partially occupied with social issues. Issues that seem to me to be of paramount importance to all of our experiences as United States citizens, and more so as citizens of a globalized world. 

I felt muzzled by the intensity of authority and credibility that define our experience as medical students. 

I became hesitant, and full of doubt. I felt that I had created enough evidence to tell myself that I no longer had anything to contribute to these movements. 

But I never came to a complete stop. Just close enough to stopping to be able to pause and reflect.  And then desperately look for moments when I could recommit and make my intentions and actions stronger and louder.  After every exam, I recommitted. After every clinical experience I recommitted. After every IVAW encounter or event I recommitted. 

The connections were coming from every direction of my life. I pulled myself out of the darkness of the winter of 2014-2015 and I was able to recommit to the work that defines who I am as a person in a way that I had not been able to do before. 

Part of my ability to do this was being able to spend a summer in Chiapas, Mexico, with an organization that is fighting the same fight, building the same movement that IVAW is trying to build, a Right To Heal movement, and a world without structural violence. 

Being in Chiapas, Mexico, seeing our allies in action, was a powerful antidote to the despair that had built within my life. 

Now I feel stronger and more connected to the movement and work that is happening than I have ever felt before. The doubt and weakness have dissipated through the power of partnerships and as a result of the strength of my convictions. Now with every meeting I am able to make, with every event I am able to help organize, with every piece I am able to write, I am able to convey the passion and urgency of the work and of the movement that needs to be built, allowing myself, in a perpetual state of self accountability, to recommit. Please recommit with me to the possibility of a world without militarism. 

Kelly Dougherty, CO National Guard, Co-Founder of IVAW, mother

I returned from Iraq in 2004 frustrated and angry. I struggled to reconcile my experience as a military police soldier in an occupied country with an atmosphere at home, as a civilian, where the war and its daily bloody realities didn’t seem to exist.   On Friday July 23, 2004, at the annual Veterans For Peace convention in Boston, I stood with five other Iraq-era veterans, Mike Hoffman, Alex Ryabov, Jimmy Massey, Tim Goodrich, and Dianna Morrison, as well as military families and vets from other eras.    I was nervous, proud, and excited to stand on that stage and announce the formation of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Now, ten years later, IVAW’s mission is to build a service member and veteran-led movement to end militarism by transforming ourselves, military culture, and American society. IVAW still adheres to the initial three points of unity we identified in 2004 as we look beyond the occupation of Iraq and toward broader systemic issues of militarism and violence.

Our progression from focusing on ending and opposing the occupation of Iraq to a broadened mission of ending militarism has been a long, ongoing journey spanning the past ten years. Along the way we’ve experienced love, friendship, victory, defeat, conflict, transformation, and loss. We’ve changed minds and lives, but with the bombing of Iraq and Syria, 10,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan, and the expanding drone wars, we know that stopping the violence and trauma of war and militarism isn’t work that’s done in a decade, but rather spans generations.

IVAW’s voice, perspective, and analysis doesn’t exist elsewhere. Veterans’ and service members’ voices are needed to challenge the dominant narrative of perpetual war and blind support of power. We need to maintain organizational opposition to this culture of death that grinds life, hope, love, and beauty to shreds in the quest for perpetual growth, greed, and accumulation of wealth, power, and objects. Being involved in activism and highlighting your personal story in an attempt to make positive change can be healing and empowering. It can also be re-traumatizing and destructive.  Coming face-to-face daily with the ongoing violence and horrors of humanity as well as your own personal trauma can easily wear you down.

In IVAW, we talk a lot about self-care, the right to heal, and creating a supportive community. This is often easier said than done and we struggle to foster an organizational community where members feel sustained and supported while also working on our own health and avoiding burn-out. For example, after I left IVAW’s Executive Director position in 2009 it took me seven months on a sailboat in Mexico before I felt ready to get involved, baby step by baby step, in organizing again. In spite of the hard times, my life has been infinitely enhanced and impacted by the amazing people I’ve met as a part of IVAW. I’m proud and humbled to be a part of a larger movement of people who continue to have the hope and love to plant little seeds of life-affirming change wherever and whenever possible.