The Oregonian covered the Winter Soldier event in Portland. There were three panels, soldiers and Marines, family members and clinicians and supporters of war resisters. The soldiers gave heart wrenching testimony such as that of Chris Arendt.
Christopher Arendt said he joined the National Guard after hearing war stories from his grandfather, who had proudly counted the number of shells he’d fired during World War II.
In 2004, seven years after his grandfather’s death, he recalled forcibly extracting a Guantanamo Bay detainee from his cell and watching as the man’s head was smashed into a metal fence post. At that moment, he told a crowd of more than 100 at the First Unitarian Church in Portland on Saturday, Arendt couldn’t tell the difference between himself and the images he’d seen of Nazi soldiers. now living in Portland. “What I hate about myself over there was the callousness, the emptiness. I wish I was angrier while I was there.
“But it’s impossible to keep yourself — the sane, the normal, the feeling. You figure, ‘I’ll feel later.’ Three years later I’m still trying to do that.”
The Oregonian provides a link to my testimony here.
