Our first presentation of the 2021/2022 school year was a visit to a high school class in Oregon. The students were about to start reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien which deals with his personal conflict about whether or not to accept being drafted or to escape to Canada and his subsequent experiences in the U.S. military occupying Vietnam. Speaking for We Are Not Your Soldiers was Vietnam veteran Joe Urgo who told how his time in Vietnam changed his life completely leading to his involvement upon his return in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and lifelong activism against U.S. imperialism.

We then headed off, remotely, as always this semester, to a North Carolina community college where Miles Megaciph spoke with students in three social psychology classes who had been studying the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, students with many family members currently or previously in the military. As one student wrote in a paper after, “Miles himself mentioned how he was following blind orders and not his actual inner morals and how much he regrets it. Witnessing him actually talk about his experience shows how traumatic it can be to just follow blindly.”

Joy Damiani spoke to NYC high school students right before Veterans’ Day.

With Will Griffin we visited community college classes in NYC and on Long Island and a university class in Philadelphia. Students commented in the chat, “It’s unfair how million/billion dollar companies profit off of wars while people who are fighting are traumatized, suicidal or develop mental health issues. It makes me so angry. I didn’t even know they profited off of war” and “Thank you so much for the presentation today. It gave a real shock about how it feels being in military.”

We finished November with visits to NYC college philosophy classes made by John Burns and Rosa del Duca. You can watch parts of their presentations here in this three-minute video.