Protest challenges “glorification of war” at home of world’s largest military base

By Beth Trigg and Brendan Conley

Fayetteville, NC, August 16— Early Wednesday morning, veterans, soldiers, citizens, and peace activists gathered to mark the opening of the new Airborne and Special Operations Museum in downtown Fayetteville. The $22 million dollar museum is a joint Army-private sector venture, and celebrates the US Army’s airborne and special operations forces, including “psychological operations,” counterinsurgency training of foreign troops, infiltration, counterrevolution, and other types of “unconventional warfare.” Fayetteville is home to Fort Bragg, the largest military base in the world, and a center for training foreign soldiers, many of whom have committed war crimes and human rights abuses in their own countries.

“Swords into plowshares”

While the crowd of about 2,500 participated in an opening ceremony complete with a military brass band, trick parachutists, and a speech from Ross Perot, a small group of protesters stood along the sidewalk leafleting, talking to passersby, and holding up signs noting the numbers of civilians killed in US military operations including Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf War. As the military ceremony unfolded, protesters disrupted the proceedings by reading a statement in unison mourning soldiers and civilians killed in US military endeavors and calling for “the turning of swords into plowshares.”

“We’re here to tell a different story,” said Francisco Risso of the Morganton Catholic Worker. “This museum is a glorification of war. We’re here to tell about the horrors of war.” Steve Woolford, of the Silk Hope Catholic Worker added, “If most people, soldiers and civilians, knew what happens in war, and the reasons why the US has gone to war, they wouldn’t want to be a part of it.” The protesters represented three Catholic Worker houses in North Carolina; the Catholic Worker is a faith-based pacifist social justice organization that seeks both to feed the hungry and to simultaneously work for systemic social change. Another activist, Bernadette Rider O’Neill, who is 12 years old, summarized the reason for the protest: “They’re here today celebrating war. Why would we want to celebrate something that kills millions of people all around the world? I don’t see how killing is right in any way — or how killing can be for God or for peace.”

The new museum, according to protesters, is an essential part of the military system, helping perpetuate unrealistic images of the military and of war. “In order to engage in a practice where the result of what you do is to kill, you’ve got to have people believe in it. You’ve got to have these big edifices,” said Patrick O’Neill. The new museum serves as a booster for the US Army, and particularly for special operations forces. But, according to protesters, it doesn’t tell the whole story. “Any museum about war that doesn’t leave you feeling sick to your stomach isn’t doing its job,” said Woolford.

“Special warfare” at Fort Bragg

Specifically, protesters sought to highlight the role of Special Forces in US interventions: according to Risso, “Special Forces have been the primary US interventionist force. And our interventions have not been for democracy.” Special forces units based at Fort Bragg have been at the forefront of US military interventions including those in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, and Guatemala, and El Salvador. Fort Bragg is the home of Delta Force, an elite “combat applications group,” the birthplace of the Green Berets, site of the JFK Special Warfare School and the headquarters for a host of other special operation troops referred to by the Army as “the point of the spear” in so-called unconventional warfare. These forces have led covert operations, often in partnership with the CIA, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Delta Force troops from Fort Bragg have even been used against here at home in operations against US civilians: in the assault on the branch Davidian community in Waco.

One of the functions of these special forces is the training of soldiers and officers from other nations with the goal of exerting US influence in these nations. In recent years, the issue of US training of foreign military personnel has been exposed by the movement to close the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has trained some of the most egregious human rights violators, torturers, and assassins in Latin American history. Opponents of the US Army School of the Americas have documented numerous direct links between training received in the US and the tactics of Latin American military regimes, including death squads, civilian massacres, torture, and other massive human rights violations. Training of soldiers from Latin America by the US military is not limited to the School of the Americas, however, and Latin America is not alone in having experienced the lethal application of US military training.

The special forces at Fort Bragg train foreign military personnel, both in North Carolina and abroad. In Africa, this training is conducted through the Joint Combined Exchange Program (JCET), through which US troops, primarily Green Berets from the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, have taught military tactics to troops in Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Mail, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In 1998, despite UN-documented crimes against humanity by the Rwandan military, the Pentagon embarked upon further training programs in Rwanda.

In Pakistan, the day before the nation’s first nuclear tests, the US Army was putting the finishing touches on an exercise bringing together US and Pakistani special forces for small unit training and mock scuba attacks. In Jakarta, Indonesia in 1997, the US Army special forces staged a training operation for 60 Indonesian special forces troops involving the invasion of an empty housing project. The objectives of the operation were to teach close-quarters combat and urban warfare, lessons which proved useful to the military in the brutal repression of students and other dissenters in Indonesia. In the Persian Gulf, a continuous JCET trained Kuwaiti soldiers that participated in military action against Iraq.

US special forces in Latin America

Closer to home, Central and South America have long been a major focus of US special forces activity, including on-site training of military personnel. The US military is currently conducting specialized training exercises, via the Green Berets and other special forces, with every army in Latin America. Almost 3000 US special operations troops are deployed every year to all 19 countries in Latin America, and there are at least 250 military trainers operating daily in 15 of these countries. These special forces operations are part of a quiet policy of re-engagement with Latin American military establishments.

Currently Mexican officers are being sent for training at Fort Bragg, and returning to Mexico as part of special air forces (GAFE) stationed all over Mexico. These units have been responsible for human rights violations in Mexico, including a notorious incident in Zapopan, Jalisco in 1997 in which eighteen young people were kidnapped and one young man, Salvador Lopez Jimenez was killed. According to Eric Olson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, “one of the GAFE units, created with US training, was apparently responsible for the events in Zapopan.” 11 officers and 15 soldiers from that GAFE unit were sentenced to prison for the incident. In addition, General Mario Renan Castillo, a commander of the military region that includes Chiapas, is a graduate of the Fort Bragg Special Operations and Special Forces program. Castillo learned from this program how to organize paramilitary groups to work with the army in suppressing insurgency in Chiapas.

In Colombia, Delta Force and other special forces have been conducting training missions on-site throughout the past decade. In 1991, Colombia’s high command issued a secret order, number 200-05/91, implementing recommendations from a US military intelligence team. The order created a covert intelligence network that was later accused by human rights organizations of organizing the killing of civilians. Delta Force accompanied Colombian troops on military operations aimed at drug traffickers and Marxist guerillas. Despite international agreements limiting US military assistance in Colombia to anti-narcotics efforts, the training and assistance has overtly supported counterinsurgency and efforts to quash nonviolent dissent in Colombia. In 1997, there were 29 JCET missions to Colombia, mostly conducted by Fort Bragg’s 7th Special Forces Group. Missions trained Colombian troops in hand-to-hand combat, urban warfare techniques, surveillance, and “counterterrorism.” The Colombian military, in turn, organized joint trainings with Colombian counterinsurgency troops and paramilitary forces, including groups connected with narcotrafficking.

US special forces have a long history of activity in Latin America. In 1967, a special forces mission to Bolivia trained and equipped a new battalion. Several days after the “training” exercise ended, the new Bolivian unit, with the help of the CIA, captured and executed Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, “putting an end to the insurgency and completing a classic example of a foreign internal defense mission,” according to a US special operations publication. Throughout the 1980s, US Special Forces participated both publicly and covertly in military action in Central America. Still today, special operations forces conduct nearly continuous training for the Salvadoran military. Though the government’s official reasoning for intervention in Latin America has switched from fighting communism to fighting drug trafficking, the reality is the same: violent suppression of internal dissent and rebellion.

These “foreign internal defense missions,” or “fids” have become a crucial tool of US intervention. The purpose of “fids,” according to an army field manual, is “to organize, train, advise, and assist” a foreign military so that it can “free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency.” Special forces, through “fids” and training operations, “are a direct instrument of US foreign policy. They may be the most direct and most involved, tangible physical part of US foreign policy in certain countries,” according to Wayne Downing, former commander of US Special Operations Command. Under a 1991 law, special forces training missions on-site with foreign military personnel are exempted from congressional oversight.

Just as citizens across the country are organizing to close the School of the Americas, people in North Carolina have maintained resistance to the military industry in the state, at Fort Bragg and elsewhere, through protests and citizen education. Activists like the Catholic Workers who protested in Fayetteville Wednesday will not let the rest of the war machine go unchallenged.

For more information: www.soaw.org; www.csn.org; www.wola.org