Veterans and local peace activists spoke at TVI on Wednesday about the horrors of war.
Tim Origer, a member of the Santa Fe chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, said his group protests the war in Iraq every Friday in Santa Fe. Origer, whose leg was blown off in the Vietnam War, set up a 168-foot banner adjacent to the food court. He said the banner, which displays names and photographs, was to honor the hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.
"People would tell us the war was over and to go back to Baghdad," he said of passing motorists critical of the group's protest.
He said supporters of the war in Iraq might reconsider their support if they were confronted with the faces and names of dead soldiers.
Origer said while he was compiling the names and photographs for the banner, he realized most of the fallen were minorities.
"It's disproportionately minority, because that's who's going in (the U.S. military)," he said. "But they're all poor - poor black, poor white, poor brown."
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A panel of veterans told the gathering of a few dozen people that veterans' struggles with war-related disorders should not be common. Many in the group said they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, sleeping disorders and illnesses related to contact with depleted uranium, a low-grade radioactive material used in military munitions, and Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed from airplanes during the Vietnam War.
"I saw a lot of death, and I did some killing myself," said Glen Giron, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from bouts of anger and fear for years after he was drafted.
"I don't like crowds, loud noises and stuff like that," he said.
Daniel Craig, a former field artillery officer during the Gulf War, said his child died before birth in 1992 because he came in contact with depleted uranium during the war. Many veterans lost children or had children born with deformities because of their contact with the substance, the existence of which the Defense Department denies, he said.
"The biggest thing I need to tell you today: Howard Zinn said 'Governments lie,'" Craig said. "I wish that was my quote, because it's a truth I live by."
Howard Zinn is an author and historian who wrote A People's History of the United States.
Craig said critics often tell him to leave the United States if he is against U.S. foreign policy.
"I did (leave), and killed people, and it didn't change anything," he said. "'Support the troops' isn't about (troops in Iraq). It's about when they come home."
Participants of the teach-in included TVI teachers, TVI's Student Socialist Coalition, Vietnam Veterans of America, the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center and Stop the War Machine.
