Joins Vietnam Vet at
Bay Ridge Peace Event
By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BAY RIDGE – Two Brooklyn veterans who fought in wars 40 years apart came together to tell a friendly audience about the terrible costs of war and how much better it is to “give peace a chance” at an event in Bay Ridge.
“I was stationed in Afghanistan in 2005. In 2008 they tried to send me to Iraq. I refused!” said Matthius Chiroux who was a sergeant in the Army Individual Ready Reserves and now serves on the Iraq Veterans Against War board of directors.
The young Brooklyn College political science student, standing with a cane for his slowly mending broken leg, held his audience spellbound at a Bay Ridge Interfaith Peace Coalition fundraiser buffet at Circle’s Canteena Restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge on Thursday evening.
“I refused a forced reactivation order for deployment to Iraq in May 2008,” said Chiroux, who signed up for the Army Reserves at age 19 nearly five years ago and who was stationed in Japan, the Philippines and Afghanistan. He made his declaration at a “Winter Soldier on the Hill” hearing that May, a statement that resulted in a formal Army Reserves hearing.
This past April, he said, he won his case with a general discharge under honorable conditions after taking a stand against “an immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war,” which he talks about his experiences on his blog. “I was a journalist and [in the Army] my writing was used in the worst way for bloody causes in support of the U.S. war machine,” he says.
Chiroux, who lives in Brooklyn’s Little Pakistan neighborhood in Midwood along Coney Island Avenue, spoke of the tragic murders recently at Fort Hood, saying they were not surprising. He referred to other similar incidents fueled by war’s stress and emotional toll at Fort Bragg and Fort Carson.
“It was a direct result of being taught gun violence. If he did the same thing in Iraq, he would have gotten a medal,” Chiroux said about the “illogic of war.” He referenced the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which a soldier is told to stand atop a building and kill whoever passes by below. “In Afghanistan I saw a soldier wear a hat that had the words ‘God’s Army.’ It’s an Army logo.”
Another Brooklyn veteran, Hugh Bruce, the webmaster of the city’s Veterans for Peace chapter, served in the wartime Army from 1966 to 1969. “After the Vietnam War I became a peacenik,” he told the group in the backroom of Canteena, soon to be renamed Thai Dye Cowboy.
Citing his own later experiences with a gay Catholic group called Dignity in the 1980s, he talked about maintaining a spiritual focus in life. He called Chiroux a representative of humanity’s “future,” and no matter how peace advocates are “degraded and denounced” they should “do the morally right thing.”
“If the people lead, the leaders will follow,” said Sister Jean Brown of the peace coalition, quoting President Eisenhower. The coalition joined forces with Bay Ridge Peace Action, a chapter of national Peace Action, with its state director, Cheryl Wertz present.
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