Luis Carlos Montalvan: July 2008

Thursday, July 31, 2008

A priest for peace goes to war...

July 31, 2008

A priest for peace goes to war
By Luis Carlos Montalvan
CORRESPONDENT

Jesuit priest the Rev. Timothy Meier does not exactly fit the typical profile of a soldier serving in a war zone. And yet Meier, director of the Honors Program in Biology at Stanford University, was mobilized to go to Iraq on June 30.

'I never dreamed of being a soldier,' said Meier, 52. 'I never, ever dreamt it. I was a kid during Vietnam and felt it a mistake for us to be there. I saw people mutilated from the war. My cousin, George, was severely wounded, his right arm damaged along with other wounds, and still walks with a perpetual limp.'

Meier never thought he would become a Jesuit priest, either.

'Who wants to not be married and vow to a life of poverty?' Meier said with a chuckle.

Born in Detroit and raised in Farmington Hills, Meier worked seven days a week at his local parish and at a raquet club doing administrative work to help pay his tuition to University of Detroit High School, where he graduated as class valedictorian.

It was after completing bachelor of arts degrees in biology and music with honors from Kalamazoo College that Meier decided to become a priest. And it was while on foreign study in Spain that he felt compelled to become a Jesuit. From 1978-80, he was a Jesuit Novice. In 1982, Meier received a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago. He was then sent to La Speccola Vaticana, the Vatican Astronomical Observatory, in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, where the pope has his summer residence.

While there, Meier identified 700 late-type red giant stars near the center of the galaxy. He also had the privilege of singing an a capella solo for Pope John Paul II at a Mass in his private chapel at the 17th-century Castel Gandolfo near Rome. The pope was still recovering from gunshot wounds he sustained in an assassination attempt the previous year.

'Every night I would walk to the heights of a spiral staircase of the medieval castle because I learned the acoustics were incredible. One day, some Polish children, who were visiting Pope John Paul II, heard me singing. For a few weeks we got to know one another and would sing together,' said Meier.

One day, Meier was summoned to the Pope's private residence in the castle where he celebrated Mass. The pontiff had heard Meier's mellifluous tenor voice and the then 26-year-old was asked to sing at a Mass celebrated by John Paul II for a group of Canadian pilgrims. Afterwards, the pope gave him a modest pen and a photograph of Meier with the pontiff.

In 1984, Meier attended Georgetown University and earned a master's of science in Biology (immunology), graduating again with distinction.

From 1984 to 2004, Meier vigorously pursued his studies. He was a Jesuit Fellow in Biology at John Carroll University in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

From 1990-91, he attended the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., earning masters' degrees in divinity and theology. In 1998 and 1999, Meier received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences (molecular neurobiology) and a post-doctoral degree in molecular virology from Stanford University. From 2002-04, Meier earned his post-doc in molecular neurobiology from Stanford, where he has been undergraduate research coordinator and director of the biology department's honors program since 2004.

'It is a joy to mentor students who are so dedicated to the pursuit of scientific research and advancement. They challenge me and I them. It is such a privilege,' Meier said.

In 2006, Meier was commissioned a captain in the Chaplain Corps of United States Army Reserve. Later that year, he was transferred into the California Army National Guard. While at Stanford, Meier taught, coached and mentored R.O.T.C. cadets who studied there but travelled to train in military science elsewhere.

The kind of help that cadets and soldiers want and need of chaplains these days is rare.

A shortage of chaplains, who give invaluable counsel to soldiers in times of stress and personal hardship, comes at a time when the number of suicides among active-duty U.S. soldiers has seen a sharp increase.

According to a statement given at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington on May 5, Thomas Insel, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher and director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., said, 'The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care.'

Army Capt. Meier knows he is unarmed in a dangerous place where his entire life's experiences will be put to the test.

'My goal in Iraq is to provide spiritual comfort to women and men who place themselves in harm's way,' Meier said.

Meier is the son of Tom and Nancy Meier of Northville.

Luis Carlos Montalvan is a former Army cavalry captain who served two tours in Iraq and is recovering in New York from various wounds sustained in combat. Meier is his Catholic priest and spiritual counselor.
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What wasn't included in the piece are the following facts:

The kind of help that cadets and soldiers want and need of chaplains these days is rare. If the ranks of the U.S. military are short on regular manpower, the chaplain corps is in dire straits.

“We do not have enough chaplains. We need 1,700 more chaplains to provide the spiritual needs and welfare of soldiers in training and in combat,” said Timothy Taylor, the Chaplain Corps museum technician at the U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School located a Ft. Jackson, South Carolina.

Sister Mary Elizabeth Ann, secretary to Archbishop Timothy Paul Broglio, in charge of the Archdiocese for the US Military Services said, “According to our Vocations Director, we presently have 92 (Catholic) priests. We could use another 150-plus.” ~Luis

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Promoting Incompetence in Iraq...

Promoting Incompetence In Iraq
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 by RLR
From In These Times
By Luis Carlos Montalvan

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gens. George Casey, David Petraeus and Ricardo Sanchez have not heeded the requests of their subordinate officers for more resources and more troops.

Instead, these top commanders have consistently misrepresented to Congress the strength and number of Iraqi Security Forces as Iraq falls deeper into civil war. Their misrepresentations should be grounds for criminal indictments and courts-martial.

During my tours of duty in Iraq in 2003 and 2005, I witnessed and participated in American military operations whose metrics for success were the numbers of detainees apprehended — without regard to the tribal, ethnic and sectarian strife they caused.

Sadly, since returning home in 2006 and departing the Army on Sept. 11, 2007, I’ve noticed a lack of scrutiny of our top commanders.

In September 2003, I was put in charge of 80 soldiers who entered Iraq without any weapons or ammunition. We were mortared for three days in Balad, north of Baghdad, before arriving in Al Anbar province to link up with our unit. We were unable to return fire.

Later that month, we had to secure the five-kilometer border crossing at Al Waleed, the largest crossing point between Syria and Iraq, with a mere 30 to 40 troops. We were also in charge of recruiting, training and equipping Iraqi Security Forces — uniformed and equipped militias — and redeveloping the local infrastructure and economy. I wrote countless memoranda to my superiors requesting more resources and personnel, but they went unanswered.

I asked myself then as I ask myself now: How could the commanders of the greatest Army in the world send soldiers into battle without the weapons and resources to accomplish their mission?

Also at Al Waleed, I witnessed American counterintelligence soldiers waterboard a prisoner. It was disturbing and wrong. Nonetheless, I was unable to intervene.

On another occasion, my higher headquarters ordered me (unlawfully) not to offer humanitarian assistance to refugees caught between the Syrian and Iraqi borders. Dozens would have died had we not disobeyed those orders.

I lost many friends in Iraq — American and Iraqi. The death toll of U.S. soldiers ticks on above 4,000, as the deaths of innocent Iraqis number in the hundreds of thousands, with millions more displaced and suffering.

In 2005, I was assigned to oversee the security of the northern half of the Syrian-Iraqi border and the port of entry at Rabiya. For that we needed an automated computer tracking system for immigration and emigration, known as a Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System, or PISCES.

At a high-level conference in Baghdad’s “Red Zone” in June 2005, I was told that Coalition Forces possessed a dozen PISCES and that they would soon be installed at the ports of entry. But as of March 2006, when the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment departed western Nineveh province, no PISCES — or equivalent tracking system — had been installed at Rabiya.

The PISCES system has proven effective abroad. British authorities were able to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the London subway bombing in 2005 after PISCES tracked their movements from the Middle East to Europe.

The lack of sufficient equipment along Iraq’s borders contributed to the country’s instability. For four years after the invasion, foreign fighters were free to move transnationally without fear of apprehension. Many Americans and Iraqis were wounded or killed as a result.

Petraeus, for one, has been nearly impervious to scrutiny for failures in Iraq under his command. Despite those failures, many senior leaders have been promoted again and again.

More than one year after the “surge” strategy was announced, credible voices charge that Iraq today is no better off than before. Petraeus and his “brain trust” of officers and diplomats have made every effort to convince the American and Iraqi people that progress has been made, but the reality is that their measures of success are fraught with fallacious assumptions and offer skewed perspectives.

Members of this administration, diplomats and high-level military leaders got us into this Iraq disaster. And they continue to proctor it with arrogant obstinacy and incredible incompetence. They must be held accountable.

Luis Carlos Montalvan, a former captain in the U.S. Army, is the highest-ranking member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. His work has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Support Iraq Veterans' Refugee Aid Association

Dear Friends,

Please visit a new site that former Marine Capt. Tyler Boudreau and I created outlining a new organization we formed called Iraq Veterans Refugee Aid Association (IVRAA).

http://www.firstgiving.com/iraqveteransrefugeeaidassociation

As you can see, we have set the bar fairly high and hope to collect $50,000 during our first fundraising drive. The Nobel Peace prize winning non-profit organization Physicians for Social Responsibility is our non-profit sponsor which will be handling donations to our organization.

The monies collected (are tax-deductible) will be used not only to fund IVRAA's first humanitarian mission in August, to assess the situation faced by nearly one million Iraqi refugees in Jordan, but also to lay a solid foundation for future missions.

In Jordan, IVRAA will:

-Assess the situation faced by Iraqi refugees;
-Educate the public as to the urgency of the humanitarian crisis;
-Establish workshops for Iraqis seeking asylum in the United States;
-Render assistance to Ali, an Iraqi refugee who has languished in Jordan for two years after aiding the US military as an interpreter;
-Report the findings of the mission to heighten awareness to develop new relief strategies.

To reach our fundraising target, we need your help.

We need you to tell all your friends and contacts about IVRAA and its mission.

Our sincerest thanks again,

Tyler Boudreau and Luis Carlos Montalvan

Co-founders, Iraq Veterans' Refugee Aid Association

Iraq Veterans' Refugee Aid Association Kicks off...

Seeing a duty to the displaced
The Daily Hampshire Gazette
July 10, 2008

Former-Marine enlists help in alleviating Iraqi refugee problem

By JAMES F. LOWE
Staff Writer

NORTHAMPTON - In April 2004, Marine Capt. Tyler E. Boudreau watched the exodus of Fallujah's residents in the days before American forces laid siege to the Iraqi city.

Four years later, Boudreau, who has since resigned from the military and settled with his family in Leeds, says he's driven to help find ways to help Iraqis displaced during the war.

"We were in the position of creating displaced people," Boudreau said of his battalion and other units, who warned the people of Fallujah to clear out before an impending battle with insurgents in the city.

"Here are the very same people we had been sent to Iraq to liberate - in other words to help and get out of a bad situation."

An estimated 4.7 million Iraqis have been forced out of their homes due to violence since the American invasion in 2003. About 2 million Iraqis have fled the country altogether.

Next month, Boudreau plans to visit Jordan, where some 750,000 Iraqi refugees live in poverty and fear of deportation because they are barred from employment as illegal immigrants.

The weeklong fact-finding trip is the first step in an initiative by the Iraq Veterans Refugees Aid Association, a group Boudreau recently founded with former Army Capt. Luis C. Montalvan.

Boudreau acknowledges many other groups are already doing a lot to aid the refugees. He and Montalvan, though, hope to form their own firsthand view of the refugee situation, and to help raise awareness of it back home.

"We feel like our identity as former military persons will help bring that awareness," Boudreau said. "What we can do is perhaps capture a new audience."

July 24 at First Churches in Northampton, Boudreau will outline the aid association's mission. He'll also speak about his forthcoming book, "Packing Inferno," which follows his experiences and personal struggles during the eight months he patrolled Iraq's treacherous Sunni Triangle.

The event is sponsored by the Amherst-based Veterans Education Project and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Jordan, which borders Iraq to the west, has the second-highest concentration of Iraqi war refugees, according to Boudreau, while Syria has the highest concentration.

Already well versed in the documented plight of Iraqis refugees in Jordan, Boudreau said he wants to see their situation for himself. The stories he's read reflect that many are forced to drain their savings or take under-the-table jobs in order to survive. This sets them up for poverty and exploitation, he said.

Another Northampton resident already has a firsthand perspective on the refugee experience in Jordan. Claudia Lefko has been to the country four times since 2006 as part of her Iraqi Children's Art Exchange Project.

Lefko said the living conditions of the displaced in Amman, Jordan's capital, vary widely depending on how much money they brought when they fled Iraq. What they have in common, she said, is loss and a surprising resilience.

"The people who are there are exhausted, bereft," she said. "They've left behind their families, dead and alive. People manage amazingly, actually, but it's a terrible, terrible situation."

Native Jordanians also resent the refugees, whose influx is sometimes blamed for rising food and gas prices, Lefko said.

On a trip to Amman last September, Lefko said, the city seemed flooded with humanitarian groups and journalists focused on refugees. Still, she said Boudreau's upcoming trip to Jordan will be worthwhile.

And unique, given that he's a former Marine. Lefko likened Boudreau to veterans of the Vietnam War, who returned to that country after they'd laid down their arms.

"You want to connect with the source of the trauma," she said.

Boudreau said he began thinking seriously about the displacement and refugee crisis within the last year.

In March, while attending a gathering of Iraq veterans in Washington called Winter Soldier, he crossed paths with Montalvan.

Montalvan, of Brooklyn, N.Y., a 17-year Army veteran, served two tours in Iraq from 2003 to 2006. Since leaving the military last year, he has advocated for an end to the war. Montalvan is now a graduate student of journalism and strategic communications at Columbia University.

Boudreau and Montalvan formed the Iraq Veterans Refugees Aid Association soon after Winter Soldier. They share the belief, Boudreau said, that the U.S. has an obligation to assist displaced Iraqis.

"The follow-up is, Let's take care of these people," he said.

Rob Wilson, director the Veterans Education Project, said he's excited to hear what Boudreau and Montalvan have to say after their trip.

"This is an opportunity to educate people about the impact the war is having on civilians in Iraq," Wilson said. "These are stories the public needs to hear."

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The Peace Boat & Cost of War Panel - July 13, 2008

Dear all,

The Peace Boat event, Cost of War Panel and the 4th Annual People Building Peace Concert is happening on July 13, 2008 in NYC. Please see the above flyer for event information.

I will be joining a few experts on military and foreign policy issues during the Cost of War panel. It will be a very interesting panel and discussion.

Overall, the event will be fun, fascinating and festive. You will have an opportunity to meet and make friends with many people from across the globe. And, I would love to see some of you there in support of Peace and Prosperity in our time.

Warmest regards and Peace,
Luis