“You’ve got to do something radical”

The final chapter touches back on the stories of veteran activists Wendy Barranco, Phoenix Johnson, Monique Salhab, Monisha Ríos, Stephen Funk, and Brittany Ramos DeBarros to consider the future of Veterans For Peace and About Face within the larger field of national and international movements for peace and social justice. The chapter touches on the state of the current intergenerational dialogue taking place in these organizations, and ends with a critical analysis of how the intersectional praxis of a new generation of progressive activists holds the promise of bridging the struggle against militarism and war with other large issues of the day, including climate change, global pandemics, and the continuing violence of economic, racial, gender, and sexual injustice.

“I was in unconventional combat”

This chapter introduces six younger veterans active in Veterans For Peace and/or About Face: army veteran Wendy Barranco, air force veteran Phoenix Johnson, air force and army veteran Monique Salhab, army veteran Monisha Ríos, marine corps veteran Stephen Funk, and army veteran Brittany Ramos DeBarros. All six are people of color. Three of them are women, one is an Indigenous Two-Spirit person, one identifies as a genderqueer non-binary person, and three others as queer. Most come from poor or working-class backgrounds characterized by limited family resources, substandard schools, and racial marginalization, and they frequently grew up surrounded by parents and other adults who were veterans. Once in the military, they confronted some of the same experiences that straight men did, including absorbing the trauma of being in combat zones. But these six veterans’ military experiences—including being subjected to systemic racist, homophobic, gender and sexual indignities and violence—shaped the intersectional knowledge they subsequently carry to their peace and justice activism.

“Connecting the dots”

This chapter examines the “extension dilemma,” a quandary over how tightly activists should focus on the issue that defines their organization—in this case, peace and anti-militarism—versus how to build supportive links and coalitions with other progressive organizations. Veterans For Peace and About Face struggle with this dilemma as they forge coalitions with national and international organizations working for climate justice, decolonization and justice for Indigenous Peoples, and ending racial, gender, and sexual violence. The chapter focuses on veterans’ 2016–2017 participation in “Water Protectors’ ” mobilization at Standing Rock and VFP delegations in support of activists in Okinawa, revealing the tension between how to be supportive allies in decolonization movements, versus the dangers of imposing a “White Savior” approach to coalition work with Indigenous Peoples. This chapter shows that the younger generation of veterans has not invented coalition-building; rather, they bring an intersectional orientation to how to build bridges and forge coalitions within the larger ecology of movement organizations.

Action at intersections

Military veterans are popularly imagined to be men, but recent decades have seen an increase in the number of women in the military, including women of color and queer-identified people. This diversification of the military is increasingly reflected in veterans’ peace organizations like Veterans For Peace and About Face. This younger, diverse generation of veterans brings their multiple experiences of race, social class, and gender oppression—before, during, and after their military service—to their anti-war activism. Their collective intersectional knowledge in turn shapes their activism, as veterans. The chapter reviews the literature on women and LGBTQ people in the military; intersectionality as an academic field; and intersectional praxis as an emergent connective tissue in the broader field of progressive activism. The chapter poses a question grounded in the tensions and possibilities of the present historical moment: How will veterans’ peace organizations respond to the challenges introduced by a younger and far more diverse cohort of activist veterans?

“Rip off the band-aid”

Chapter 3 begins with an electric moment of group debate and conflict about gender, race and coalition politics at the 2019 Veterans For Peace (VFP) convention. This moment is a point of departure to analyze the often-painful clash between the older generation’s efforts to build organizational “diversity” with the younger veterans’ more expansive intersectionality. Here, the chapter zeroes in on the organizational processes in VFP and About Face that serve to limit or marginalize younger members, especially queer and women of color veterans: race and gender tokenism; assumptions—often imported from the routine masculinist values in the military—about what a proper “leader” should look like; routine microaggressions and gaslighting; and race/gender double-standards concerning expressions of emotions in social movement contexts. The chapter closes with a discussion of how tokenism, leadership assumptions, microaggressions, gaslighting, and emotional double-standards are problems being addressed across the field of social movement activism.