Harry Targ
Fighting
for Peace: Veterans and Military Families in the Anti-Iraq War Movement by
Lisa Leitz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. (306 pages;
paper)
One of the biggest scholarly secrets about social
movements since the Vietnam War is the magnitude and vibrancy of the anti-war
movement inside the military. “Sir! No Sir!” a 2005 film documented the
militant anti-war movement that spread throughout the United States military in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement included acts of civil
disobedience at military bases, networks of coffee houses near military
installations, anti-war newspapers targeted to military readers, and a
spreading network of anti-war families and loved-ones as the movement
percolated throughout U.S. society.
Fighting
for Peace by Lisa Leitz, Assistant Professor of Sociology and
Director of Project Pericles at Hendrix College, fast-forwards in a rigorous
way to the study of the military anti-war movement from 2005 to 2012; involving
veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, loved-ones of those serving, extended
families, and networks of military families. The volume uses a variety of
methods--questionnaires, extended interviews, archival materials, and ethnographies
of organizations and individual military anti-war activists and their families.
While surveying anti-war movements against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Professor Leitz concentrates on the participation, vision, rhetoric, activism, tactics,
and contradictory “identities” of five organizations: Veterans for Peace,
Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Families
for Peace, and Gold Star Families Speak Out.
The narrative begins with the formation of some of
these groups and growing tensions between them arising after the dramatic
anti-war protests initiated by Cindy Sheehan, mother of a son who was killed in
Iraq. The site of these demonstrations in Crawford, Texas was adjacent to the
summer residence of President George Walker Bush. For Leitz, the camp site that was created and
named after Sheehan’s deceased son, Camp Casey was “a watershed moment for this
movement.” In addition to inspiring the anti-war movement generally “…the vigil
brought together veterans of the current wars, veterans of past wars, families
of dead military service members, and families of current service members who
were all critical of the Iraq War” (3).
The volume presents in-depth research on each of the
anti-war military organizations. It addresses their composition: current
military and veterans; families of service members and those killed and
injured; and veterans of prior U.S. wars, particularly the Vietnam War. It
examines the collaborations and tensions between the veterans and military families
and the larger peace movement. It
describes policies, programs, and strategies. These involve anti-war positions and demands for increased services for
soldiers on the ground and those returning veterans with health needs. It
describes debates about how the military and military families should use their
special legitimacy, experiencing war directly or through loved ones, in the
mass movement. And the narrative describes how the military anti-war movement
(rather than the peace movement in general) became a platform for debate between
some socialist organization members who wished to incorporate it in a larger
campaign to radically transform society versus those who argued that the
military anti-war movement should concentrate on the more limited goal of
ending the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing adequate services
for returning veterans.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the study is
the portrait of the contradictions faced by the author herself and the five
organizations as they navigated through a hostile military environment. First,
Professor Leitz, a visible anti-war activist was married to a career military
officer. As a military spouse, she lived on military bases and carried out some
of her anti-war activism in a social milieu that was hostile. She frames much
of the study around how active military personnel, veterans, and military
families addressed these contradictions personally and politically.
The contradiction of being anti-war activists in
social networks of military personnel and families was replicated in the
tensions anti-war veterans and military families experienced working with the
larger, non-military peace movement. Many of the former opposed the two
twenty-first century wars but believed that the U.S. military was needed and,
on occasion, could engage in positive projects. This position put these
military activists at odds with peace movement ideology and sometimes peace
movement practice.
This portrait of the contradictions between the
military movements and the larger peace and anti-war movement provides useful
information for activists who ponder how to expand participation in campaigns
to promote a peace agenda. And, of course, the peace movement should appropriately
respect the special experience, legitimacy, policy preferences, and more
limited perspectives of those who actually have experienced war. In addition
Professor Leitz describes how the military activists reflected on how their
influence could be enlarged as they struggled to become part of a larger more
“generic” peace movement.
Fighting
for Peace can be a valuable tool for researchers as well as
activists. Despite the author’s abstract framing of her research as a study of
the military “insider-outsider” identity which sometimes interferes with the well-written
account it remains an important contribution to the scholarly study of social
movements. Furthermore the rigorous study demonstrates the issues and pitfalls
that peace activists must consider as they organize to create a more peaceful
world.
