Untitled Document

IVAW Benefit December 7, 2007

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IVAW National Website

IVAW Colorado Chapter website

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"Send Me On My Way" Michael Glabicki

Another song by Michael Glabicki

A compendium of 2 songs by Michael Glabicki

Garett Reppenhagen's poem, "Dirt"

Joe Hatcher recites "Manifesto"

Joseph Hatcher

Date unknown

"The manifesto"

"The Manifesto" isn't the name of the piece; it's just what my friends at home called it before I joined the Army. I wrote it while working graveyard in a 4-by-6-foot bulletproof kiosk in the deep valley industrial district of Oceanside, Calif., long before Sept. 11, back when I was considering the military as an escape from the poverty and debt cycle that Southern California is notorious for thriving on.

This is my analysis of the system, my consideration of what I would have to become in order to see the inside of a college classroom. Obviously, I knew what I was doing when I joined on Sept. 10, 2001. In basic, I received this poem with some of my other writing with a note to "never forget myself." Once Jeff and Garett heard it, they forcibly made me repeat it until it was memorized. It became my bedtime prayer. It's still a crowd-pleaser. Can it all be so simple, wrong, evil, corrupt, consume and waste, affiliate, hate, ostracize and merge? The world was balanced once and it will balance again but the ends of the extremes seem poised to clap like cymbals after this fuck all crescendo.

"Why me?" the conglomerates scream at the machine, with green greased palms and I'll fuck you last smiles. False idols, every one. Angry fathers. Man the son who created Him. And He begot the government and government begot business and business bought the government and He was replaced with the angry white Jesus and outer space exploration.

A nation deprived dives deeper in debt and waits for one third-world misstep to cue the waking of the wartime economy. Killing the poor and boosting the DOW. They sleep so well under the blanket of technology, on the pillow of progress.

We'll regress, dumb and lame. Grins and yellow ribbons. Sons in boxes priority mail home for Big Brother's burden of deception and deceit.

So: Stand on the sidelines or step in line to die. When the brainwashing's done no souls will survive. My dirty mind fears the brand name bleach clean that serves to set lead in brass shell casings.

Chain yourself to the trees and they'll nuke you up too. With TV dinner convenience. Two birds, one stone. Endangered species taste so great with mustard gas clouds. The man standing on your neck says "swallow it, and pay sixty percent off through six PM friday!" And you do it. It wasn't you who blew it. Through it all you knew if you did what they asked things would go back to normal. You folded to the bully.

He gets your lunch money on thirty-nine cent Wednesdays that pay for slash and burn third-world dreams of vaccines for the diseases we introduced, vomiting induced, we produced more waste than anyone. First again! Don't forget those vehicle emissions! Look at you with your Valdez SUVs. The Jones are jealous, I'm sure.

Missionaries praise television evangelists. "Eternal salvation for nineteen ninety-five or your money back!" And you're submerged in this shit, but your Lord will keep you sterile. He'll wash your sins away. One quick pass of the collection plate and then we'll start to pray. Not for peace in Israel, no. That's not a priority. Daddy's team needs to win the big game and Jenny needs a pony.

I hope you die the way you're killing the earth. A slow suffocation. Oil coated seas like the bloody afterbirth of industry. Choking black clouds of soot consume the sky. The phoenix was stillborn. From the ashes nothing rise. So get on your knees and pay. Redemption comes at a price. And they'll tell you what it is. It's your sacrifice; this world that was intended for your children ...

When mushrooms of radiation and light fill the sky, I've got a fallout shelter in my mind. When you die, you deal with God. But I will go in(to) Peace.

Amen.

Garett Reppenhagen reads his poem, "Dirt"

Hank sell another t-shirt

Boulder chapter president of IVAW, Jared Hood, sells a shirt

Jared Hood

July 2007

What was going through my head when I wrote it ... was recovery, plain and simple. I had just gone through quite an ordeal, as in June I had gone AWOL from my National Guard unit and been arrested at my work on June 23. I felt like they didn't care about me as a human being.

I had asked for a leave of absence from our two-week annual training due to the death of an immediate family member in June; I mean, I had broken down crying on the phone with my squad leader when I spoke with him about it. I gave four years of my life to the Army, one of which was spent on active duty. I had never been given a bad conduct discipline, and I was loyal.

Then, when something profoundly troubling had happened in my life that severely affected my mental state, they did not care one bit. In fact, they might as well have spit in my face.

So for me it felt as though I was just part of the machine, not a human, not a valued employee of the Army, just a piece of metal and gears that provided to a machine that carried out war. I have really never felt as humiliated, and humbled at the same time, as I did after that event. It was truly a moment of clarity and self-purification, and that's what the poem represents.

"Machine, Mechanism ...parts"

I am a hero if I kill other men. I am a coward if my conscience keeps me from killing other men. What sordid brutal excuse of a world is it that we live in when this WARPED version of reality is acceptable?

The machine runs with the sole purpose of inflicting destruction, death, racism and false authority. And when one mechanical part of the machine ceases to operate properly (as with myself) the machine does not care about the human value of that mechanical part (me). Nor does it care what human reason caused the part (me) to fail to operate any longer and contribute to the machine. I am that mechanical part, not a human. Bottom line ... that's all the Army has is a bottom line. There is no value for life in the Army. No one is equal. No one is free. No one has the right to think for themselves. Iraqi civilians are not people. They do not work to provide nourishment for their families like Americans. And when they strap a bomb to their chest or set off an IED they are terrorists, not humans that are defending their homeland to a brutal occupation force. Hajjis, camel-jockeys, towel heads and sand niggers — that's all they are; these names are used to measure their worth, to dehumanize.

The machine convinces me, so that I will shoot at them, kill them and then laugh at them as I walk past their mutilated corpse. Then there's the award ceremony, medals for killing. I return home a ... hero? This machine ... is nothing more than glorified organized crime. They used me, used me as a mechanism to contribute to a selfish machine of incomprehensible malice. I am not a mechanism ... parts. I am taking back those parts, all of them, the parts of my soul that contributed to the machine. I am leaving the family never to return. I have had enough of organized crime. Recovery and self-discovery are what I face. But slowly, steadily and hopefully I will be whole again. I will take back who I am at my core, a human being with a soul and I will stop acting for and thinking like the machine.

Boulder chapter prez, Jared Hood, and national chair of IVAW discuss the issues