"Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans For Peace"

Michael Messner graduated from Chico State University and is now Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In his undergraduate days at Chico State he "opposed the American War in Vietnam." His father, a veteran of World War II, had "no patience for the antiwar movement."

It was different for his grandfather, who served in World War I. Back in 1980 "I tried to cut through Gramps's cranky mood by wishing him a happy Veterans Day. Huge mistake. 'Veterans Day!' he barked.... It's not Veterans Day! It's Armistice Day.'" The politicians did this, he said: "'Buncha crooks! They don't fight the wars, ya know. Guys like me fight the wars.'"

Messner, though not himself a veteran, was drawn to those connected with an organization called Veterans for Peace. In a sobering new book he interviews some of the vets who were deeply troubled by what they had participated in and who found some measure of healing from PTSD and various addictions in challenging the Pentagon's version of the history of U.S. warfare.

The result is "Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans For Peace" ($24.95 in hardcover from Rutgers University Press; also for Amazon Kindle). Messner (guyslikemebook.com) writes an insightful essay on the roots of peace activism, and the interviews--including a World War II Army veteran and a Navy veteran of the Iraq War--are raw and deeply moving.

Included is Gulf War Army veteran Daniel Craig, pictured on the front cover in Santa Fe, New Mexico, amid crosses, displayed by Veterans for Peace, representing U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Activism and "spiritual healing" for Craig, Messner writes, is a way for him to overcome "his anger over having killed people for what he now sees as lies."

To those who thank these veterans for their service, Ken Mayers, a fellow vet and friend of Craig's, replies: "That was very nice of you. But you should know that the things we did when we were in the military, we did because we were told to. This work that we are doing right now--working for peace--this is our service."

Two long-time Chico residents remember World War II

Cecil and Margaret Quinley lived in Chico 57 years. Active in Veterans of Foreign Wars and known locally for creating Veterans Day and Memorial Day exhibits at the Chico Mall, the couple celebrated 70 years of marriage in a 2009 ceremony at St. Patrick’s Church in Fallon, Nevada, where they now live. They adopted three sons and one of them, Daniel J. Quinley, a graduate of Butte College and EMT-turned-writer, has published their story.

“Forever: A True Story of Love And War” ($19.95 in paperback from Feather Merchant Publishing/Booklocker.com; also for Amazon Kindle) integrates “creative non-fiction” first person accounts during the war years with many of the actual letters the couple wrote each other. “Every effort was made … to compile the most accurate account possible in the telling of their story.”

The couple married in 1939; “in 1943 2nd Lt. Cecil W. Quinley is the co-pilot of the ‘Feather Merchant,’ a B-17F bomber assigned to the 381st Bomb Group” operating out of Essex, England. A veteran of 14 combat missions, Cecil was “shot down and injured on the 14th mission and imprisoned in the infamous Stalag Luft III and Stalag VII-A. He survived a winter ‘death march’ when the Germans evacuated the former camp as the Russian Army neared.”

Margaret herself “survived the blues in Sacramento as depression over her imprisoned husband set in. She feared for Cecil’s life in a far-away land and became active with the American Red Cross to contribute to the war effort and stay busy.” The two reunited after the war and came to Chico for the next leg of their long journey together.

The book’s dozens of historical photographs and sweet love letters bring the reader into the lives of real people in a time seemingly so long ago. We are with Margaret in 1943 when she receives a notice that her husband is missing in action, and with Cecil on the forced march. It is an enduring tale of Margaret and her “honey-bun.”

Former Oroville resident remembers war in the Philippines

"My father was a Filipino," writes Helen Madamba Mossman, "and my mother an American. I was born in the Philippines in 1933 and lived there until I was twelve years old." Her family, including her younger brother, "spent World War II in hiding from the Japanese on the island of Negros." Helen's father, Jorge, "was a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve as well as a member of the Philippine defense force."

His actions in sheltering his family and directing the bands of "guerrilleros" on the island were heroic, but, when the family came to the US in 1945, Helen "abandoned my father emotionally when the war ended." Only with the passage of time has she come to make sense of her estrangement and embrace not only her mother's strength but her father's intelligence.

The story is called "A Letter To My Father: Growing Up Filipina and American" ($24.95 in hardcover from University of Oklahoma Press). Jorge attended Oklahoma A&M College where he met Iva Harrison. The two married in 1927. Jorge returned to Negros while his wife finished college and joined him in 1932.

Central chapters of the book recount four years of war. "In January 1942," she writes, "Japanese bombers sank a US Navy munitions ship that was hiding out during daylight hours in Miracalum Bay. My brother and I were building sand forts along the lagoon behind our house that morning. . ... We saw the propellers whirring and felt the vibration of their engines on the sand beneath us. The red circles on their wings left no doubt what country they represented. ... The planes buzzed low over our beach, then flew over the ridge in Miracalum and we heard the booms of exploding bombs."

The Philippines surrendered that year; "my father was one of the last officers in his unit to leave the northern Negros cadre. With many of his men, Dad took to the hills." Mossman's story of survival is harrowing. Much later, after living in Oroville during the Vietnam War, she came to terms with the memory of her father after "nearly a lifetime of locking him away behind an emotional door down a long-forgotten hallway of my mind." She could finally say, "Thank you, Dad."

The Book In Common: War's aftermath

An author's note says Kevin Powers "served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar." A Virginia native, he was the Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin.

His novel, "The Yellow Birds" ($14.99 in paperback from Little, Brown and Company/Back Bay Books; and in Amazon Kindle format), is the searing tale of John Bartle, fighting in Northern Iraq, pledged to help his buddy Daniel Murphy, just 18. Bartle was asked by Mrs. Murphy to keep her son safe. "I promise," he said. "I promise I'll bring him home to you."

It didn't work out that way.

Part of Bartle's story is what happened in Iraq, yet afterward, what does it mean? For him, life has only "an undetermined future, no destiny, no veined hand reaching into our lives, just what happened and our watching it."

Bartle, now in his thirties, is looking back. He was a 21-year-old going to war. Bart and Murph work closely together under the watchful eye of Sergeant Sterling, also young, and for a while, it seems, all three would survive. But it doesn't work out that way.

Bartle remembers Murph as still a kid, joking around. "I remember that part of him fondly, before he was lost, before he surrendered fully to the war, twisting through the air, perhaps one beat of his heart remaining as they threw his tortured body from the window of the minaret."

The great irony for Bartle is that he is welcomed home to high-fives from his friends. His words are laconic, but his thought-life troubled. "I feel like I'm being eaten from the inside out and I can't tell anyone what's going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I'll feel like I'm ungrateful or something. Or like I'll give away that I don't deserve anyone's gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I've done but everyone loves me for it and it's driving me crazy."

Butte College (butte.edu/bic) , Chico State University (csuchico.edu/bic), and various community groups are scheduling Book In Common events the next several months--discussing issues that require full measures of courage and grace.