Brown Bag Biography: How I Protested the Vietnam War as a Soldier in the Army

February 14, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 409A

I will tell the the story of how I was drafted in the military in 1968, reluctantly volunteered for stateside duty in the Army hoping to skate by, but then learned about the horrors of the war and felt that I had to speak out for peace--even though I was still in the Army. I will describe my participation in the GI antiwar movement, how we attended antiwar rallies and signed petitions to end the war and were punished by our commanders, and how we fought back by filing a law suit against the Army in federal court arguing that the military was suppressing our First Amendment right to dissent against the war. I will conclude by describing how those experiences in the Vietnam antiwar movement gave meaning and purpose to my life and set me on a path of studying and working for peace from which I have not veered in all the years since.

David Cortright is the Director of the Peace Accords Matrix and Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author or co-editor of 20 books, including Governance for Peace (2017) and Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (2008), both from Cambridge University Press. He has written widely on issues related to nonviolent social change, peace movements, and governance for peace.


Ticket Information
Free and Open to the Public

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Janet Graham, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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