Camp Casey Ft. Wayne Highlights
December 4, 2005
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October 1, Saturday - Midmorning, a Camp Casey participant started the 35 mile walk from home to the site for Camp Casey, Ft Wayne, Indiana. The NAACP invited the Camp to use their office on East Pontiac as home base for Camp Casey. Some say it is the most dangerous location in the city because of shootings, drug activity, and gangs.
October 2, Sunday - 2:00PM press conference and kickoff for this Camp Casey, one of seventy across the US, was a step in a nonviolent campaign to end the war in Iraq. TV channels 21 and 15, Ft Wayne's two daily newspapers, and a weekly Afro-American paper all gave prominent coverage to the event. That evening three campers set up in two tents.
Dave Lambert and Tim Tiernon, both from Veterans for Peace (VfP), began their daily stops to offer logistical support for the effort. The Camp eventually passed out over two dozen VfP applications to veterans who stopped at the Camp to offer support.
October 3, Monday - Neighborhood Enforcement from the city
stopped to encourage the group and, with two phone calls, got permission to
use six abandoned city lots across Pontiac for the Camp. Conservative WOWO
talk radio taped an interview that aired several times. Robert Rouse
October 4, Tuesday - Several members of the Unitarian Church stopped to sing a lullaby to the campers and brought the number around the evening campfire to twelve.
October 5, Wednesday - Five campers stayed overnight for the second night in a row. Camp Casey sent out a satellite camp to one of the busiest streets in Ft Wayne, near St Mary's Catholic Church and Burger King. Tom Benevento commented, "All this support is amazing. I thought Ft Wayne was a conservative community!"
The Camp invited Air Force Reserve recruiter Dave Kirk to visit. He regularly meets his quota, hasn't been in combat settings, and knew little about Iraq or Islam. Two more tents popped up across the street and 13 small white crosses went up by the tents. The crosses represent the Indiana military persons who have been killed in Iraq in 2005. Youth from Beacon Heights Church of the Brethren and the six-member Rich family from North Manchester came for the evening. The youth worked at plans for raising awareness of the "Opt Out Option" (students can choose not to allow recruiters access to their names and contact information for recruiting purposes) and develop counter recruiting in area high schools.
October 6, Thursday - A Vietnam veteran, Butch, visited in the afternoon. "Six of us are very supportive of this witness. I started out this morning, but only arrived now. 'Nam messed with our minds. It can take us a long time to be fit to be in public."
Cliff Kindy, Lambert, and Tiernon took Camp Casey to the Veterans Hospital. They met with one of the administrators to talk about the use of depleted uranium weaponry (DU) in the Iraq wars and the impact of DU on Iraqis, US soldiers, and their offspring.
Gary McClelland visited the evening campfire. "I was born on the day Gandhi was assassinated. This Camp Casey started on Gandhi's birthday. A friend from high school who went to Vietnam with me lived in that white house over there (half a block down the street) and Camp Casey was planted right here at 1521 East Pontiac! I have a story to tell." He spoke about being injured in the Vietnam War and recommended reading They Marched into Sunlight and Born on the Fourth of July.
October 7, Friday - Satellite Camp Casey traveled to Southside High School, one of the most culturally diverse schools in the nation. Recruiters visit daily in the lunchroom, according to some students. Campers passed out fliers about Casey and sheets with questions to ask recruiters. Campers pounded more white crosses into the ground across the street. Fifty-eight military personnel from Indiana have been killed since the March, 2003 invasion of Iraq. Someone just out of the Marine Corps stopped to give strong support to Camp Casey's campaign to end the war in Iraq. At 10:30PM Benevento, Kindy, and Rouse were guests on a supportive Hispanic radio talk show.
October 8, Saturday - Benevento's young sons, Zach and Silas, joined three other campers for the night. One of the campers spoke at a men's meeting at the Center for Nonviolence. A flush of visitors in the afternoon included a Black grandmother from the community, an Anglo college professor, two young Black children from nearby, a very interested Buddhist high schooler with her grandmother from Richmond, the Ink (a Black weekly newspaper) photographer, and a local black father who wanted to take a Camp Casey sign for his front yard. Everyone was grappling with the question - What steps must we take to end the war in Iraq? At the evening campfire, one of the neighborhood youth, Xavier, asked, "Why don't you take Camp Casey to the army?"
October 9, Sunday - A satellite Camp Casey went to The Chapel, a large church in the western suburbs. Twenty minutes after the campers set up their base (a camp chair, a Camp Casey sign, and white crosses) and started distributing leaflets encouraging a dialogue on the war in Iraq, security from the church, accompanied by a county sheriff, asked them to leave because they had not asked for permission. In the evening a car stopped part way into the lot where the tents stood and a tall man strode toward the fire. "I am from the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and ...this killing has got to stop! Sign me up!" At the same time another veteran who was in the first Gulf War was in the talking circle around the fire. They were among the more than fifty veterans who visited Camp Casey at the base or one of the satellite locations. Most spoke out against the present war in Iraq.
October 10, Monday - Lambert's daughter, Mary, visited. Her son was in Iraq, is now a recruiter, and is having a difficult time meeting quotas. Albert Short stopped by the evening fire for some food and to dry his socks after being on the rainy streets all day collecting scrap metal. Earlier, Curtis Bennett, a veteran and retired trucker, had reflected on the local impact of the war.
October 11, Tuesday - One of the regular campers, Amy Fry-Miller, Lambert, and Kindy took DU documentation to the Veterans Hospital because of the lack of awareness by some of the staff. One of the staff asked to copy all of the notebook of material Lambert had collected and a cd of an interview with Doug Rokke, Gulf War veteran and outspoken critic of the use of DU.
Jenbe (a multi cultural drumming group) apprentices and their teacher, Ketu Oladuwa, met at Casey to share about community and how it is affected by and affects war.
October 12, Wednesday - At noon satellite Camp Casey went to the Indiana/Purdue, Ft Wayne campus of 12,000 students. A female veteran from the Iraq War told Fry-Miller, "I was just over in Iraq. You're not helping." She shook her head and was quite upset. A special operations veteran from the first Gulf War talked with Kindy about his three cancer surgeries and upcoming leg amputation to halt the cancer spread. He did not know about the dangers of DU. He said, "We need to get out fast." Overall there seemed to be more support for the war on campus than at other settings Casey had been. The campers passed out all the fliers they had brought in an hour.
Satellite Camp Casey traveled to the Indiana Air National Guard base, home of the 122nd Fighter Wing. Although two campers had explained their simple witness and leafleting plans at the entrance gate, twenty minutes later three Ft Wayne police squad cars and two security vehicles from the base had gathered to tell the leafletters they must leave because the commander said they were on private property, even though they were on the right-of-way of the road that passed the base. One of the campers noted that the military response seemed out of proportion to the simplicity and seeming ineffectiveness of the witness.
October 14, Friday - Thursday and Friday had slower activity during the days. Friday evening forty people gathered at the NAACP office to give wings to Camp Casey. Many youth made posters and signs to take to the front lawns of their homes and their lockers and dorm doors at school. They talked of how the energy of Camp Casey can spread wider and wider to strengthen the broad base of the US population that is against the war in Iraq. Public opinion is one of the props that has allowed the war to continue and which a strategic nonviolent campaign to stop the war must remove or weaken. Lambert encouraged Butch to appeal the decision denying him Agent Orange disability and offered to accompany him.
October 15, Saturday - A couple dozen people gathered at Camp Casey for a final celebration at noon. Jan and John Long played music as people removed crosses and read the names of Hoosiers killed in the war while Benevento alternated the reading with the names of Iraqis killed in the war.
Camp Casey is no longer situated just on East Pontiac Street. It is mobile. Organizer Tom Benevento said, "Camp Casey is one of the tools of nonviolence that we can use in the movement to end the war in Iraq. As seen from our time at the Camp in Ft Wayne, support to end the war is spreading and growing through diverse people everywhere."
If you have a high traffic/high profile space in South Bend and would
be willing to let Camp Casey use it for 2 weeks sometime between Jan. 9-31,
please contact Ellyn Stecker at 574-289-2126 or
St. Joe Valley Greens, South Bend, IN