War Is Not a Game

Prologue to War Is Not a Game
forthcoming book by Nan Levinson

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

(Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy)

“We’re going over now. You ready?” A young veteran with a quicksilver smile and a soul patch asks a fellow vet grabbing a smoke outside the Holiday Inn in downtown St. Louis. They nod. The August heat wave, close to one-hundred degrees all week, has finally broken so that it’s no longer punishing to venture beyond air conditioning. The two veterans, one lanky, one solid as a door jamb, climb into a car where a few others wait and they all head down the street to the America’s Center and the Missouri Black Expo job fair, now in full swing.

The convention hall is big, echoing, over-lit and packed with job recruiters and seekers, but the clump of young men and women in black T-shirts with “Iraq Veterans Against the War” stenciled on the front are hard to miss as they make their way to a booth with “Go Army!” splayed across its canopy. Army recruiters and civilian employees stand behind a table laden with brochures and sign-up sheets, while teens and young men take turns playing America’s Army, a simulation game whose website proclaims it to be “The Only Game Based on the Experience of Real U.S. Army Soldiers.”

The buzz began the day before, when a handful of IVAW vets were hanging around the hotel lobby on a break from the panel sessions of their third annual meeting. There’s a job fair going on across the street, someone said, the Army’s got a recruiting booth, I saw them unloading a truck, we need to do something. They batted around ideas until someone, probably Steve Mortillo or Jabbar Magruder, suggested a sound off and it clicked. Quickly, the plan spread, a quiet signaling among the veterans. Now at the expo, they’re ready to act.

“Fall in,” comes the command, and the veterans do. Ninety people with real U.S. Army and Marine experience stand at attention in mass company formation four rows deep, their arms rigid at their sides. There’s Camilo Mejia, the first soldier to be court-martialed for refusing to return to Iraq, and Kelly Dougherty, one of IVAW’s founders and now its executive director. Liam Madden, who launched an Appeal for Redress to Congress and in three months got over 1,000 active-duty personnel to sign it, is there. So are Garret Reppenhagen, a former sniper, who helped create the first antiwar blog by an active-duty soldier, and Aaron Hughes, an artist-activist-vet, who’s about to spearhead IVAW’s most ambitious project, the Winter Soldier investigation, which will offer grunt-level testimony about the war the following March.

Magruder takes his stance at the head of the formation and shouts, “Iraq veterans against the war, what have you learned?”

“War is not a game!” the vets respond in unison.

Again comes the call and the response, “War is not a game.”

Then a third exchange, and “War is not a game!” even louder now, caroms around the trusses of the ceiling.

Fernando Suarez, whose son Jesus had the dubious honor of being the first Mexican-American to die in Iraq, stands in front, snapping photos and pumping his fist in the air while the vets applaud and cheer, high-five one another, then disperse. A few police officers arrive. It’s unclear who called them, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The veterans did their action and they are stoked.

IVAW likes to talk about a “consent theory of power,” in which the war in Iraq is depicted as an upside-down triangle balanced precariously on its tip and shored up by “pillars,” which include the military, the government, the education system, and public opinion. The goal is to topple the triangle by eroding the most vulnerable pillar, and that, the vets have decided, is the military. Today wasn’t about theory, though. They saw an opportunity, they were nimble enough to seize it, they did something new, something big, and they didn’t need anyone else to help them do it.

“This is a new era of what action is and what protest is,” Steve Mortillo, who served as an Army cavalry scout near Samarra, announces that evening. He is introducing a video of the protest to the older veterans and their allies attending the Veterans for Peace convention, which is hosting IVAW. “With a small amount of people you can be so powerful to stop something like the U.S. recruiting machine in its tracks.”

There is a golden moment in the life of a political movement when it is poised between obscurity and banality, inchoate impulse and ossified routine. War Is Not a Game is the story of that time.