Dawn Morgan reports: Yesterday, as protests occurred throughout the U.S. on the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq, 13 people gathered by the Java Junction parking lot at Kennedy and Sterling at the height of rush hour. They were volunteers with Veterans for Peace, Code Pink and MoveOn.org. One older gentleman said he was a member of the White Rose Society, which was a WWII-era student organization formed in Germany to protest Nazi rule.
They held banners and called out for an end to the war. Many drivers honked in agreement; some flipped the bird, which only made a couple of the chatty Code Pink ralliers laugh. “I just wave,” Celeste Almerico said, waving her two fingers symbolizing peaceCelestegabriellaet_al

. “And then I ask if that’s their I.Q.”
Barb and Bud Holle Bud_holle_2

of Tampa are new members of Vets for Peace, which will be launching its new Tampa branch soon. The retired couple are regulars at the monthly protest every first Saturday at Dale Mabry and Gandy, and went to both St. Pete and Sarasota this weekend for rallies condemning the last 4 years of overseas action. Bud went as far as D.C. for protests, but his wife let him do that on his own. They still mourn the son they lost 30-plus years ago in Viet Nam.
The protest outside Java Junction was organized by retired Air Force Major Debra Kay Hedding, a volunteer with both MoveOn.org and Vets for Peace.Debrachris

Dressed in a beige camo jacket, she told me she was from a “poor rust-belt town in Ohio” and joined the armed forces for money to go to school. She was in Vietnam near the end of the war, shocked by what she saw, not particularly because of wartime atrocities but because it was nothing like what she had been hearing about back in the States. “The public would be upset if they saw the real war,” she said. “It was the protesters who gave us hope, not the government.” Debra says she stayed in the military for a 25-year career to protect younger women from the harassment she endured. She says the recent stories of harassment from female soldiers in Iraq are not a surprise. “Stories have been trickling out in the last 30 to 40 years, but no progress has been made.” 

This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.