As a corporal in the Marines, Sean Huze participated in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq with the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. Huze was awarded a Certificate of Commendation citing his “courage and self-sacrifice throughout sustained combat operations” while in Iraq. After returning to the United States, he starred in his debut as a playwright, “The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front.” His third play, “The Dragon Slayer,” which focuses on PTSD, will premiere in Los Angeles in March.

Paul Rieckhoff enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves on Sept. 15, 1998. In early 2003, he was assigned as platoon leader for the 3rd Platoon, B Company, 3/124th INF (Air Assault) FLNG, and spent approximately 10 months in Iraq. Third Platoon conducted over 1,000 combat patrols; all 38 men in Rieckhoff’s platoon returned home alive. In June 2004, Rieckhoff founded Operation Truth — now called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) — along with a couple of other veterans, some volunteers and massive credit-card debt.

Jimmy Massey, a co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, is a former staff sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. He was a boot camp instructor at Parris Island, S.C., and a Marine recruiter before fighting in the Iraq war and was honorably discharged in December 2003 after 12 years of service. His autobiography, “Kill, Kill, Kill,” was recently published in France. Ron Harris, a reporter for the St. Louis Dispatch, once embedded with the Marines in Iraq, claims Massey has lied or exaggerated his accounts of atrocities in Iraq. The controversy was recently a cover story in Marine Corps Times.

Continue reading “Battlefield Iraq”

 In her new book about Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin reveals the quality that makes a president great — his capacity for empathy.

With over 1,000 books about Lincoln in print, what remains to be said? In Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin approaches this well-known history through the lives of four men and their families. It was Lincoln’s extraordinary empathy, she asserts, that enabled him to bring his opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

Continue reading “Real Leaders Have Heart”

At 24, I worked for George McGovern’s 1972 Presidential campaign. In 2005, I had the opportunity to interview him for an hour with the release of the documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. Robert Kennedy described him as the most decent man he’d ever met in politics. I agree. This interview was originally published at Alternet November 21, 2005.

The author of ‘A People’s History of the United States’ talks about falling into academia, his new book and the people making tomorrow’s history today.

Of his newest book, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (co-edited with Anthony Arnove), Zinn has said, “Educators and politicians may say that students ought to learn pure facts, innocent of interpretation, but there’s no such thing! Long before I decided to write A People’s History, which came out in 1980, my partisanship was shaped by my upbringing in a working-class immigrant family, by my three years as a shipyard worker, by my experience as a bombardier in World War II, and by the civil rights movement in the South and the movement against the war in Vietnam. So I’ve chosen to emphasize voices of resistance — to class oppression, racial injustice, sexual inequality, nationalist arrogance — left out of the orthodox histories.”

Continue reading “Howard Zinn: Vision and Voice”

This worldview — shared by indigenous peoples for millennia, revealed by science since early in the 20th century, and obvious every time we walk outside or look into the eyes of another living creature — is disavowed in practice by almost every powerful institution in American society. It thrives, however, at the annual Bioneers conference, held each fall in the San Francisco Bay area.

In addition to founding and co-directing Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel co-founded the organic seed company Seeds of Change. He is the author of Seeds of Change; Restoring the Earth and When Healing Becomes a Crime. His wife, Nina Simons, is co-executive director of Bioneers and co-producer of the Bioneers Conference since 1990. In 2002, she produced a retreat called UnReasonable Women for the Earth, out of which grew the women’s activist group, CodePink.

AlterNet spoke to the two just in advance of this year’s Bioneers conference.

Continue reading “The Evolution of Environmental Activism”