Correspondence

Back from Iraq, Looking for the Truth

Dear Revolution,

I was selling Revolution recently in an affluent suburb of San Francisco. While talking to a young white couple at a sidewalk café table about the importance of the immigrants' struggle, featured on the front page, a young white guy, lean and muscular, tattoos and short hair, comes out of the café and assertively asks, “whatya got there?” I’m a bit leery, but I tell him, “Revolution newspaper, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party.” He’s checking out the great picture on the front page and reading the headlines about the immigrants and Bob Avakian’s article on the State. And he says, “I’m just back from Iraq. They don’t tell us shit. Nobody tells us the truth.” I tell him I’m a vet too, and as I’d just seen the movie Sir, No Sir!, I ask him if he’s heard about it. He says no, and I quickly run it down to him, about the GI resistance during the Vietnam war.

He tells me he just got done six years of active duty and he got the fuck out. I ask him what he thought about why he was there, did he and the guys he was with think they were fighting for the freedom of the Iraqi people. “Fuck no,” he replied. I told him about the war crimes tribunal that was written up in Revolution, and I have to admit that I was so excited about a recent vet from Iraq thirsting for truth that I forgot about the “Speaking the Unspeakable” article in the issue he was getting. But he wasn’t just looking for stuff about “his issue,” but as he said above, he wanted to know what was going on. He understood that this shit (that’s a sort of “vet-speak” for “the mission” you’re doing) was really foul, and that the basic-level troops need to hear the truth. So we agree to correspond, and I start to split. He says he’ll get the paper around to guys.

I get about five steps away and the light bulb goes on—he just told me that he’d get the paper to the guys he knows in Iraq. It hit me that I was seriously lagging—I should have brought that up to him! I did an about-face and went back into the café. I asked him if he did in fact mean he’d get the paper to guys in Iraq, and he said “yes.” I gave him a bundle and told him I’d definitely be in touch. Then his wife asks about the paper and I explain who and what the Party is, and I fish through my bag for a sampler of Bob Avakian’s DVD speech. I was out! I hustled down the street to one of my comrades and got one and got it to them, telling them they definitely have to check this out, too, that Bob Avakian is the most important leader we have today. They both said they would, and we agreed again to be in touch.

This brief experience told me a lot about what the state of mind of the troops is, and how they don’t think they need to be supported by telling them what they’re doing is good. Many of them know it isn’t. It also told me that we revolutionaries can’t be tailing after things—we have to anticipate that big things are up and be ready to seize on them. The advanced masses come in all sizes, shapes, genders, and colors, and they’re looking for the truth. When people go to see Sir, No Sir!, remember what Randy Rowland says—“we wanted to change the world!” This sentiment did not die with the ’60s!

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