March-April 2002:
More for Pentagon
From Protest to Resistance
Where Does Iraq’s Money Go?
Lessons from Latvia
The Peaceful Legionnaire
Anti-War History Quiz
Letters
WRL News

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

The Peaceful Legionnaire

by Sachio Ko-Yin

he “Peace Alliance” coalition in our tiny rural town of Lewisburg, PA, includes a fine spectrum of ages and interests: dissident punks, community workers, students, professors—and an American Legionnaire who’s found himself in a unique position.

When 44-year-old Benjamin Mabus first came out to our peace vigils in September, he was the Commander of the Legion’s Kratzer-Dull Post #182. His friends were staunchly pro-war veterans. By publicly dissenting from George W. Bush’s war, he was risking those friendships—and, it turned out, his position as commander.

I had wondered what he was doing among us as early as October, when I found out who he was. At the time, some local people were reacting to our vigils and processions with screaming counter-demonstrations, hate mail and death threats. A group of WWII veterans claiming to represent the American Legion tried to get protesters fired from their jobs. One militant veteran wrote to my probation officer as well as threatening me at my workplace, where I was doing community service as the final part of my sentence for the Minuteman III Plowshares action. We didn’t know it at the time, but Mabus openly disapproved of the conduct of his fellow Legionnaires, telling them, “No one will take part in these knuckle-headed tactics on my watch!”

Then, on December 19, a headline in the village paper said, “Legion leader loses post over peace support.” Mabus had been forced on December 4 to resign as post commander.

The local paper had been less than sympathetic, but a group of us hailed him as a local hero of conscience. On January 8, I met with him and heard his story in his own words.

Joining our protest hadn’t been as radical a departure for Mabus as it may have appeared on the surface. It was only one more step on a path he’s been treading for years.

In high school he read books like Invisible Man, Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath. He says he “learned from [them] that there’s more going on than is readily acknowledged. If you are going to find things out, you are going to have to find things out for yourself. So I’ve spent the last 20-odd years in that search.”

He joined the Air Force in 1978— basically, he thinks, “because I wanted to get out of Lewisburg—back then there weren’t a whole lot of jobs, so going into the service made a lot of sense from an economic point of view.” He spent four years in the military, never getting further from home than Texas.

Back Home
In 1982 he came back to Lewisburg, only to discover that nothing the Air Force had taught him was usable in civilian life. He went to work in local factories, got married—and kept reading. He was developing his own, idiosyncratic left-opposition politics, but privately, without looking for or joining with activists of any stripe. When the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf, he opposed the war personally but didn’t protest it publicly; around the same time he began to identify himself—still privately—as a socialist.

He joined the American Legion post because “it was the only place in town where you could get a beer for a buck fifty.” He drank with his Legion buddies but didn’t talk politics with them. Eventually, they elected him president of the post.

But when he saw the Peace Alliance protesting the “war on terrorism,” he couldn’t stay away. He had too strong a critique of the war. “There’s a reason why September 11 happened. It’s not like 20 people woke up one morning and decided they were going to snatch a bunch of airplanes and smash them into buildings. Something leads people to that level of violence, and people have to confront the reality that there’s a possibility that our government has been pissing people off around the world. I think it’s important to look and find out what drives that anger.”

What does he think drives it? “It’s clearly tied up with economic issues and a wide range of [other] things: U.S. support for the Israeli apartheid state, in particular; [and] the subjecting of Third World countries to profit-driven governments rather than governments that have a representation of people’s wants and desires. This war on terrorism is shaping up an awful lot like the war on drugs, which turned out to be a war on people of color. Now, rather than predominantly African-American or Hispanic people we’re affecting, it’s people of Arab descent. I don’t think it’ll be any more effective than the war on drugs.”

The Other Legionnaires
Most of the members of the Kratzer-Dull Post didn’t agree with him. Mabus became aware that the pro-war Legionnaires were angry. “A couple of weeks before the December meeting [of the Legion], I saw some of the older members of the post across the street just staring unbelievingly that I was at the vigil. I knew something was in the wind.”

It came to a head at [the] December 4 meeting. “[When] we got to new business, apparently, the ‘new business’ was my peace activism. One individual had a letter he wrote to the district commander outlining my ‘crimes.’ [Another] individual did speak out and said that people are allowed to have their own opinions. He wasn’t exactly shouted down, but it wasn’t an idea that got a warm reception. Finally a motion was made that I resign. With only one dissenting vote, I didn’t see any point in bucking the trend. I didn’t need the aggravation. I enjoyed my time as commander, but it came and it went. That’s life.”

Sachio Ko-Yin is a founding member of the Peace Alliance of Lewisburg, PA, and a former member of WRL’s Executive Committee. He recently served a two-and-a-half-year prison term for the 1998 Minuteman III Plowshares action in Colorado (NVA, September-October 1998.)