Tommy Franks

TOMMY FRANKS SPEAKS AT GRAMMAR SCHOOL;

MEDIA IN RECESS or just FLUNKY-ING OUT?

By Hank Rosenfeld

"The violence in Iraq seems to be getting worse."

The World, a public radio show on KPCC & KCRW.

"There's a lot of emotion going on here tonight," said Pablo Paredes. "It's amazing what's going on here." Looking out from the podium at the packed Venice United Methodist Church audience last Tuesday (April 19th a week after he was on the cover of LACITYBeat), he continued: "If half the military were exposed to this side of the planet, there wouldn't be one war."

The Bronx-born Petty Officer First Class still faces a Navy court-martial May 11th. But everything he's been through for not returning with his unit will have been worth it he said. "I never felt more free in my life!" Paredes said about his time in jail after deserting. He met the son of a Sandinista in there too, another resister.

"This isn't what I signed up for," the soft-spoken soldier continued. "All those yellow ribbons could be strangling us," he warned the US Tour of Duty gathering. At another point he said we're also in a war for taking back the language. Witness the sign seen at every rally: "BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!"

"Why is the word 'troops' in there?" Paredes asked. "Let's use the word 'children' or 'humanity.' Don't let our brothers and sisters die!"

His goals now? Being new to this activism thing, Paredes said, he really only wanted to be "a pebble in the brook that ripples really really far."

After the performances (Michelle Shocked and Suzy Williams), the teach-in type speeches by other Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Cindy Sheehan and Bill Mitchell, activist parents from Military Parents Speak Out, Paredes asked himself during a Q & A panel, what day did he become an activist: "My day was the day I was assigned to take Marines to Iraq."

Then Tim Goodrich of the IVAW and parent Mitchell screened a video of that same day's action at Logan Elementary School in Echo Park. There they were on screen, leaning against General Tommy Franks' massive black sedan. There too in the picture, a reporter from KNX(AM 1070).

Goodrich, who helped form IVAW in July of 2004, had already been to Culver City High School in the morning, where he found not ONE student there knew about the Afghanistan invasion or remembered Operation Enduring Freedom three years ago. But he did run into a recruiter. "It was nothing personal," Goodrich said. "I knew he was just doing his job. But I told him I can't support what he's doing: promoting an illegal, immoral war."

Then it was time to confront Tommy Franks at the site of a different campus, Logan Elementary. What the heck was the retired, book-pushing brass doing there? Goodrich said the Echo Park school is 89% Latino. Ripe for the No Child's Behind Left Alive propaganda parade?

On the video, Goodrich is seen stepping in front of Franks' S.U.V. He shows military ID and says: "This war is wrong and talking to elementary school kids about war is wrong and you don't belong here!"

Mitchell, with the Gold Star Families for Peace, also spoke to the general. The Inglewood-born, Atascadero veteran spends most of his days now speaking and meeting other parents who've had their lives terribly, "inalterably changed."

"That man murdered my son!" Mitchell screamed, staring at Franks. Mitchell and Cindy Sheehan both lost their boys in Iraq on April 4, 2004. ("Our sons were not lost," Sheehan said at the Venice church. "They were murdered by the policies of our government and Commander-in-Chief.")

The S.U.V. tries to muscle its way inch-by-inch up the street.

"I've been to the White House and the Pentagon," Mitchell, a lapsed-Methodist in ponytail and t-shirt said later in the church. "Nobody would speak to us. And now Tommy Franks won't talk to me."

Soon a police car is heard and then seen rolling up to the school. "You can't block traffic," the officer tells Goodrich and Mitchell, not that there are any other cars on the block at that moment.

The two men let General Franks pass. The KNX reporter, who set up an interview hours earlier, never gets to speak to him. What happened?

Franks, having spoken to fifth-graders under the sponsorship of U.S. Trust, an investment firm with 2300 employees and $102 billion in assets, was hustled out a back entrance to Logan Elementary. Frank's PR liaison, pleading ignorance, agreed to "text-message" the general for the radio reporter. A response to KNX's request came: Negatory. Pursuing the story further, the reporter found school officials inside hiding from his microphone. No report aired on KNX, because none was filed.

[Hank Rosenfeld wishes he had been able to air a radio piece about the Venice Methodist Church event or at least chase Tommy Franks down the block in Echo Park. USTOUROFDUTY.org]