A mean machine

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent Weekly / Sept. 10, 2008


The veterans marched in lockstep as they approached the Minneapolis State Capitol, which sits on a hill overlooking downtown St. Paul. Some wore Army greens. Others wore camouflage or pressed black T-shirts. "It's all right, it's OK," they chanted in a call-and-response. "Remember MLK/ tried to lead the way/ but he was shot one day/ in the early morning." They turned a corner, climbed the domed building's wide stairs, and for a few moments stood silently at attention.

It was 10 a.m. on Labor Day. In a few hours, the Republican National Convention would convene at the Xcel Energy Center a mile away. Here on the Capitol grounds, anti-war activists were gearing up for a demonstration that would draw some 10,000 people. There would be anarchists and puppeteers, grandparents and students. None would possess the discipline, or the dignity, of these 60 members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).

Earlier that morning, IVAW had marched to the Xcel Center. There, they say, police agreed to escort 1st Sgt. Wes Davey, a 28-year Army veteran, inside the perimeter with a letter addressed to Sen. John McCain. The letter asked the GOP presidential nominee to support better treatment for returning warriors, especially those with brain injuries and post-traumatic stress. Once Davey was inside, though, no one from McCain's campaign would speak with him or even accept the document.

"We would have taken just about any staff member," said Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, a former Army photojournalist who served in Afghanistan but refused deployment to Iraq after his honorable discharge. "They weren't willing to send the lowliest intern out to meet with combat veterans." This was a stark contrast, Chiroux said, to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Sen. Barack Obama's campaign agreed to work with IVAW on improving veterans' care.

On the Capitol steps, Army Spc. Benjamin Thompson, a young man with a ruddy face and a buzz cut, rolled up his T-shirt sleeve to reveal an Arabic tattoo. "I made a promise to someone who drew this for me," he said. "Can you take a picture?" The artist, he said, was "one of my prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a place where you saw all those photographs. But you didn't know the half of it." He twisted his arm toward the cameras. "This means 'God hopes for peace,'" he said. Then he began sobbing.

"We had 10-year-old boys in my camp," he finally continued. "We had an 80-year-old blind man." Thompson was panting as he spoke, trying to hold back tears. "They were killed by enemy fire because we did not protect them when they were in our custody." Not only that: "We were giving them food that made them sick. We were giving them water that gave them kidney stones. They were dying from lack of heart medication that they had been on for 20 years."

Next to Thompson stood Marine Cpl. James Gilligan, who in 2004 made a compass-reading error that led to a fatal assault on an Afghani village. Today he held the photo of a fellow Marine killed in action. "It's a fucking shame that young men and women like this have to die for a lie," he said.

I asked Gilligan where he was from.

"I'm right now living in Philadelphia," the lanky Marine said. "I just came off of being homeless for the past two years."

"How are you doing?"

"I had a suicide attempt in 2007. I've been to at least seven VA hospitals. I'm not finding help. I'm not finding any kind of solace."

Click here for this week's feature story.

Palin, creationism and other red meat

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent / Sept. 4, 2008

As the owner of a friendly pit-bull mix, I wasn't quite sure what to make of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's off-script line last night at the Republican National Convention: "Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!" Did the vice presidential nominee mean that hockey mothers are smart and loyal but bred for the wrong reasons?

I admit: She delivered the line well. She delivered many of her lines—described by Slate magazine as a "succession of happy little kicks in the groin"—in a fashion that was simultaneously homespun and forceful. Her criticism of Sen. Barack Obama was the type of "red meat" (a favorite Republican phrase) that delegates here in St. Paul, Minn., have been craving. When she said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities," the crowd broke into a frenzy. Her attack on the news media was the most cathartic moment of the convention so far: The entire arena turned to the press section and booed.

"My voice was almost completely hoarse from yelling, and my hands hurt from clapping, and you could see the tears in people's eyes," said Justin Burr of Albemarle, N.C., who is running for the state House, after the speech. "I'm energized. I'm ready to go home now and put up 10,000 signs."

Besides her compelling "hockey mom" narrative, Palin energizes the Republican base with her conservative issue stands. She favors oil drilling both off the Alaska coast and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She sued the federal government to remove the polar bear from the endangered species list. She opposes all non-lifesaving abortions, even for women who have been raped. She's against the type of sex education that might have kept her 17-year-old daughter unpregnant. She doesn't believe global warming is a manmade problem.

Oh, and she appears to be a creationist.

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Youth and promise at the DNC

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent Weekly / Sept. 3, 2008

Until his plane touched down in Denver for the Democratic National Convention, John Verdejo had never in his life reset his watch. The 29-year-old's personal history was contained entirely within the Eastern time zone: the South Bronx, where he spent his childhood in an apartment without reliable heating; Greensboro, where his mother tried to give him a healthier adolescence; Raleigh, where he works now for a state agency that collects civil penalties from polluters; and Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, where he occasionally visits the extended family his mother left behind.

When he was chosen as an Obama delegate representing North Carolina's 13th Congressional District last May, Verdejo could hardly believe his luck. Many of the candidates vying for that slot were accomplished professionals who had worked for years inside Democratic campaigns. Verdejo's recent political experience totaled three months. "Compared to them," he blogged at the time, "I have not done much of anything to warrant their attention."

But Verdejo's impromptu speech at a district-wide meeting stirred his fellow Democrats, who voted to send him to Denver as one of 134 North Carolina delegates. It's easy to understand why: Verdejo has a direct gaze and an exuberant smile, and when he speaks he combines sharp analysis with an almost wide-eyed earnestness. As a young man who was raised by a devoted single mother, then got an education while struggling with his place in society, Verdejo also has threads of Sen. Barack Obama's narrative embedded into his own.

As I covered last week's Democratic National Convention—the proceedings, the protests, the North Carolina delegation breakfasts—I didn't exactly follow Verdejo, who would have proven too swift to keep up with. But he did become my touchstone. We talked every day about what energized him and what alienated him, and I watched as good luck singled him out twice.

I chose him for several reasons. First, Verdejo represents an emerging generation of political activists who grew up under Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. and witnessed cuts in domestic programs and widening economic disparities. Second, as a Latino, he belongs to a demographic that Obama needs to inspire in order to win this November's election. Finally, Verdejo takes to heart, in a very personal way, the community-empowerment message at the root of Obama's success—a theme the Illinois senator echoed in last Thursday's acceptance speech: "What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you."

Click here for this week's cover story.

Young, but not for Obama

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent / Sept. 3, 2008

This week, as Nick Ochsner attends the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., the Elon University sophomore can’t listen to all the pro-military speeches without thinking about his father. Sgt. 1st Class Jim Ochsner, a special forces intelligence specialist stationed at Fort Bragg, died in November 2005 in Afghanistan. He was 36, and it was his fourth tour of duty in the country.

The elder Ochsner was on a mission to distribute supplies to Afghanis in Paktika Province near Pakistani border. Ochsner normally drove the Humvee, but on that day, his son says, “he threw the keys at someone else and they switched seats.” As the vehicle headed off, a roadside bomb detonated under the left rear tire, delivering a massive head injury to Ochsner, who died instantly. Everyone else in the vehicle survived.

Before his father’s death, Nick Ochsner enthusiastically favored the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Supporting U.S. military missions was an article of faith in his childhood home outside Fayetteville. Losing his father, he says, only deepened that conviction. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, Nick, your father was killed. Surely you’re against the war.’ It’s absolutely the opposite,” he says. “We have men and women who knew what they were doing when they volunteered for the service, and who have now sacrificed for your and [my] freedom. To withdraw without completing the mission would be a disgrace to them and a slap in the face of their families.”

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GOP convention photos

I've started posting photos from the Republican National Convention and the surrounding protests. You can see them by clicking here.

Anti-war protesters descend

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent Weekly / Sept. 2, 2008


Growing up in Mount Airy, N.C., 26-year-old Jeremy Miller was a preacher's son for whom "standing up for what is right" meant voting for Republican candidates. He supported President Bush and shared his parents' belief, he says, that "America is based on Christianity and the war is just."

At 22, Miller started working at a Greensboro factory, loading boxes onto trucks. When he moved into a supervisory position, he says, he heard other managers discuss speeding up the line, or penalizing employees for not making production quotas. "They were talking about how we could squeeze every little bit out of the workers," he says. "Like they were animals."

That was the beginning of Miller's political transformation. He started reading Lenin and Marx, then realized he needed to do more. "As soon as you make that break, you want to fight for what you understand is right," he says. "Immediately, I wanted to get on the horse and do as much as I could." He got involved with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a campus-based organization that calls for "revolutionary transformation" and takes its name from the group founded by Tom Hayden in the 1960s. Miller worked with the SDS chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill before moving to the mountains and becoming the regional coordinator at UNC-Asheville. Last month he helped organize a rally after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Mills Manufacturing, an Asheville-area defense contractor that makes parachutes, and arrested 57 immigrants on charges of using falsified IDs.

This weekend, Miller and 17 others from Asheville drove to St. Paul, Minn., for an anti-war demonstration coinciding with the first day of the Republican National Convention. They joined a crowd estimated by the media at 10,000 people, who marched spiritedly from the Minnesota State Capitol to the Xcel Energy Center, where the GOP was getting ready to hear from Laura Bush and Cindy McCain.

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Big Hurricane, Big Bash

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent Weekly / Sept. 1, 2008


With Hurricane Gustav poised to hit the Gulf Coast today, Sen. John McCain has announced that this week's Republican National Convention would be a scaled-back affair without the usual troop-rousing speeches or over-the-top parties. "This is not a time for politics or celebration," said McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, yesterday. "It is a time for us to come together as Americans."

Which doesn't quite explain the last night's welcome party at the Minneapolis Convention Center, where delegates from all 50 states wandered among a huge interactive history exhibit. They were photographed stepping off a life-size replica of an Air Force One fuselage. They pretended to get sworn in as president of the United States. Mostly, they ate: tataki salmon; duck spring rolls; platters of antipasto; brie, pear and almond phyllo pastries; homemade walleye cakes with lemon aioli; and carved steamship of beef with wild rice. They washed their meals down with Tanqueray gin, Crown Royal whisky, and Smirnoff vodka (thanks to one of the sponsors, the liquor giant Diageo). Desserts included espresso-chocolate and crème brouleé cheesecake; passionfruit and raspberry mascarpone tartlets; and praline and opera finger cakes. It was all free.

I rode a shuttle bus with the North Carolina delegation. The conversation en route centered around two topics: Sarah Palin and hurricane preparedness. The consensus among delegates: Palin was an inspired choice for vice president ("I was jumping up and down like Snoopy dog," said Jackie Wieland, an investment adviser from Greensboro); her six years as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and 21 months as the state's governor prepare her to lead the free world; and Trig, her 4-month-old son with Down Syndrome, will do fine on the campaign trail. (To imply otherwise, said state party chair Linda Daves, is "an insult to American women.")

As for hurricanes: Most of the of the delegates I interviewed cut President Bush slack for his performance after Hurricane Katrina, saying that disaster management isn't really the federal government's job.

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