Charlie's Articles

Déjà Vu All Over Again: Haditha and My Lai
The alleged war crimes committed at Haditha were not the misdeeds of defective warriors. Nor is it likely that they were committed by Marines suffering from "personality disorders." Their actions were the result of conditioning, on both the training field and the battlefield. ..

Open Letter to Bubba
I’ve seen you around. I’ve seen you driving your gas guzzling SUV with the “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back. I’ve seen you wearing your pro-war/pro-bush t-shirts as you walk right past me in my Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt as if I don’t exist. And I’ve seen you at anti-war rallies and meetings where I often speak, as you wave your American flag and call me a traitor. In this country we have freedom of speech. But you owe me and every other veteran of this war the respect of listening to our experience...

Can We Come Home Now?
As I write this from somewhere around 30,000 feet, I am terrified. Each time the engine changes from a steady hum to a whine and each patch of turbulence we hit, I am afraid we will fall out of the sky. My emotions run the gambit from simple anxiety to relative calm to sadness to mind numbing fear. I am bound for Seattle and the Veterans for Peace Convention. At this moment, I am acutely jealous of a good friend who was able to travel by train. I like the train, you meet interesting people, you get to walk around and as a bonus, I was never sent half-way around the world to a war based on lies on a train...

Why I'm a Prairie Dog
On the morning of November 23, 2005 I was sitting on a bench in the McLennan County Jail. I had been arrested with eleven of my fellow activists an hour or so earlier for protesting outside the Bush Ranch in Crawford Texas. We would later be called the Prairie Chapel 12, individually prairie dogs and at that moment we were listening to a Justice of the Peace read us our rights. As I heard him say “you have the right to remain silent,” it was suddenly clear to me that as Americans, all of us can remain silent about anything, but I ended up on the bench exercising my right and duty not to remain silent.

Truth Commission
As a young child I learned the importance of a college education at an early age by watching my mother work her way through college from the bachelor’s level all the way through a master’s and into a Ph.D. program. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework as my mother was doing hers. As a high school senior, I knew that I wanted to attend college and continue on to graduate school...