Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations urge troops to refuse deployment

KOMO News reports that some derelicts in Washington State are urging deploying troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord to ignore their deployment orders. they call themselves Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations. I’d never heard of them before, and looking for their presence online tells me why. They’re a coalition of organizations I’d never heard of before, well, except the 555th Parachute Infantry Association “Triple Nickle” which was an association of the Black paratroopers of WWII. The last I knew, they were pretty much defunct because of membership numbers or the lack thereof. It was a small group to begin with and time has taken a toll on membership around the country. I know that the Triplenickel in the DC area had folded themselves into the 82 Airborne Division Association a few years back.

In the article, they mention one member of the VCO, Gerry Condon.

Army veterans say going for conscientious objector status is a better way.

“There are actually some alternatives. They’re not necessarily easy ones; there’s no guarantees,” said Vietnam war resister Gerry Condon.

Condon was a special forces medic in the Vietnam era who fled the U.S.

Of course he was a special forces medic. Here’s his bio from another website where he’s advocating for Brianna Manning;

In 1968, Gerry Condon refused Army orders to deploy to Vietnam, for which he was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison and a Dishonorable Discharge. But Gerry was able to escape from Fort Bragg, North Carolina and leave the U.S. For six years he lived in Sweden and Canada, where he organized against the war and for amnesty for all war resisters. Gerry is an active member of Veterans For Peace and co-chair of its GI Resistance Working Group. He serves on the steering committee of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

He was probably a medic in the 82d, because 1968 was the year that the Golden Brigade deployed to Vietnam, but being “special” sounds cooler, I suppose. So he never really went to Vietnam, but tossing that in makes him sound more authoritative on the subject.

The article also mentions Mike Prysner who we’ve known for years here.

“We signed up to serve our country, but we didn’t sign up to have our lives thrown away in a political chess game,” Prysner said.

We? Prysner must have a mouse in his pocket because he had his life in danger. he wears his old uniform every chance he gets so we know he has no CAB (and we have his records at the link) and it’s a pretty good bet that he never left the wire as a radar operator. He founded ANSWER’s March Forward, their veterans arm, because Prysner didn’t think IVAW was radical enough. He also tried to run for the board of directors at IVAW in a failed attempted coup to turn the organization more radical.

So that “Coalition of Veterans’ Organizations” is nothing more than the usual suspects under a different banner.

Thanks to Kateser and CB for the link.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War, March Forward