What works: Tower guard. Wearing IVAW T-shirts around town. Hanging out where active-duty soldiers congregate off-base.

What’s hardest: Speaking out in a conservative community. Expanding membership. Getting chapter’s own bank account to ease the flow of money.

How it gets paid for: Selling T-shirts. Holding benefit concerts. Passing the boot at events. Getting donations. Petitioning the national office for special projects.

Keeping watch
Tower GuardA dozen Iraq Veterans Against the War pulled tower guard in the center of Colorado Springs last November. “For three days, from 8 AM to 6 PM, we stood out there and looked over the city, as we would had we been in Iraq,” says Mark Wilkerson, president of the local IVAW chapter.

Amid shops, schools, churches, restaurants, and government buildings, members erected a scaffold 10 feet high and adorned it with camo netting, flags, banners, and signs. “We called it an observation, as opposed to a protest,” explains chapter treasurer Elizabeth Spradlin, “because some people hear ‘protest’ and they get very defensive.”

The primary goal was to engage soldiers from Fort Carson, which sits in the south of the city, but it didn’t hurt that the citizens of Colorado Springs had never seen anything quite like it. “I was incognito across the street at Starbucks getting coffee and I hear these two college age students say, ‘Wow, what’s a stop loss?’” Spradlin reports. “So I snuck over there and started talking to them about it. It’s amazing how little people truly know.”

Some people, of course, do know. Mike Flaherty, who joined IVAW officially that weekend, tells of an exchange with an ex-Marine who had served in Vietnam and stopped to talk on his way from church. “It was him and his wife, and another couple had come up. They assumed he was pissed off about what we were doing. [The other man] said, ‘I know it’s hard for you, we can go.’ But he was like, ‘No, no, I respect these young men for what they‘re doing right now.’”

Flaherty continues, “It really opened my eyes to see that there were not just veterans like myself, who know that what we say is true, but also that so many members of the community were supportive of our cause.”

The rising
Colorado Springs, a city of about 400,000, is home to seven military installations, a booming defense industry, and more evangelical churches than you can count. It’s the sort of place people return to, called back by its heart-stopping beauty – it nestles into the front range of the Rocky Mountains -- its increasing cosmopolitanism, and its robust outdoor life -- particularly if a marathon up and down the 14,000-foot Pikes Peak is your kind of challenge.

It is also a community that prides itself on being among the country’s most conservative, so the IVAW chapter has learned to pitch its message at a level where it will be heard. “The city has made up its mind that it wants this war in Iraq to continue,” Wilkerson says. Rather than confront that sentiment head-on, they try to challenge the assumptions behind it.

During the tower-guard weekend, IVAW focused on stop-loss and trained members on related talking points. “When a community like this that relies so heavily on veterans decides to send young men and women off to war, homelessness, alcoholism, divorce rates go up,” Wilkerson points out, and so do the costs of dealing with that dysfunction and upheaval. That was their message to the people of Colorado Springs: If you’re prepared to send soldiers to war, be prepared to care for them when they return.

The tower guard cost about $300 for permits from the city, rental of the scaffolding from a hardware supply store, and odds and ends. Three people were required to erect and dismantle it; the others leafleted and chatted with passers-by. It was so successful – as a symbol and in raising awareness of IVAW -- that the chapter is planning to stage others around the state this spring.

Alone no more
The Colorado Spring chapter was IVAW’s first. It formed early in 2005 when Wilkerson and Spradlin joined with Kelly Dougherty, Garett Reppenhagen, and Jeff Peskoff. Dougherty, then the Southwest Regional Coordinator, learned that the interim board was batting around the idea of organizing chapters. “I wanted to build membership,” she says. “And I wanted to be the first.”

At the time, Wilkerson, now 24, was AWOL from the Army, though he didn’t broadcast that fact. He had enlisted in June 2002 shortly after graduating from high school, in part because military service was a family tradition. “When I turned 18, I got a scrapbook with all our family military history, going back to the Revolutionary war,” he recalls.

He spent a year in Iraq at the beginning of the occupation, but balked at a second deployment. “I tried to justify what I was doing in every way I could, and then I could no longer justify it,” he says. “So I had to take my pride, everything I thought I knew about life and the war in Iraq and change it around to fit what I was seeing and what I was experiencing.” When he returned from leave, his squad leader mentioned Conscientious Objection to him, and as he looked into it, it began to make sense. Unfortunately, he had no help in writing his application – “a rant-filled, angry, scathing statement about everything,” he admits – nor guidance in navigating the long, complex process. When his CO application was denied in November 2004, he went AWOL for the next 18 months.

During that time, someone put him in touch with Dougherty, through her he met other IVAW members, and suddenly he didn’t feel alone anymore. When he decided to turn himself in, the members, now his close friends, gave him crucial support. He was sentenced to seven months in prison and released this past July.

Spradlin, 30, came to IVAW from a different direction, but echoes Wilkerson’s sentiments. She and Dougherty were friends since high school, had joined the Colorado National Guard on the buddy system, and served together in Iraq as MPs running convoy support and patrols. Spradlin had served in the Balkans and knew on some level that her unit could be deployed to Iraq, but when the order came, it was still a shock, in part because she had just gotten married. More disconcerting, her training as a medic was totally ignored. “I was more of a body, just to fill a slot, as opposed to what I could really offer to my fellow soldiers,” she says in frustration.

She returned to Colorado fed up. “My way of dealing with it was trying to make my life as normal as possible. I finished my degree [in nursing] and I had a garden in my backyard.” She tells about a conversation she had around then with a doctor at the intensive care unit of the hospital where she worked. “Don’t you feel that we should bomb that country and start from scratch?” he asked her almost casually. Horrified at his callousness, she didn’t reply. But as she saw what Dougherty was doing with IVAW, she realized that she could advocate for her fellow soldiers through the nascent organization. Now she says, “I feel like it’s my responsibility to educate others because I did serve and I feel like that holds some weight.”

Flaherty, 26, is one of the chapter’s newer members. Known as Hank to his pals (it’s a Karaoke thing), he grew up in Evansville, Indiana and spent a semester at Ball State University before enlisting in the Army reserves late in 2000. A recruiter called him at about the same time his college money ran out, so he signed up and trained as a fueller. Then came 9-11 and, eager to do something in response, he switched to active duty. “I joined the military because I wanted to defend the rights of the people of my country and to believe in what America should be,” he explains.

He heard of IVAW, probably on MySpace during his second deployment to Iraq; though he agreed with its goals, he didn’t pursue it until after he left the Army. He was back in school and organizing a panel on war, violence and terrorism, when he asked a teacher to suggest people to invite. “Basically her eyes lit up,” he reports, “And she said, ‘Oh, you must meet Garett. He’s great!’” They met, became friends, and Flaherty was increasingly drawn into chapter activities. Now he says matter-of-factly, “Of course I’m patriotic. Through being an active part of the organization, I’m still defending the rights of the American people, especially our service members. It’s to have a voice and to have a voice that’s listened to.”

Chapter and verse
Today, the Springs chapter has about 15 members. The faces change as people move in and out of the area, but the numbers, and the core group of about 10, have stayed pretty consistent. They meet formally once a month, informally more often. In fact, it’s that informal connection that keeps people involved. Several members share classes and activities at Pikes Peak Community College, others meet at concerts or bars or drive the 90 minutes to Denver, where they work closely with the IVAW chapter there. The two chapters are planning a major activity when the Democratic National Convention comes to Denver this summer.

They also host a variety of events, such as poetry readings, in Colorado Springs, and, thanks to a member with connections, they got Rusted Roots’ frontman, Michael Glabicki, to play a benefit concert for them. Music, says Reppenhagen, is a great way to get their message across. “Gotta look sexy, appeal to our generation,” he says with a knowing grin.

Along the way, they’ve become each other’s best friends. “I think it’s important for us to have a working relationship beyond that of just professional,” Wilkerson explains. “We’re able to share ideas and that helps give us a better understanding of our world at large. “

The chapter wasn’t always so successful. After Dougherty left to become executive director of IVAW, Reppenhagen moved to Washington, DC to work at Veterans for America, and Wilkerson turned himself in, the chapter went inactive for several months “It takes a certain type of personality to bring people together,” Wilkerson says. “Garett and Kelly were that for a long time.” He and Reppenhagen returned this past summer, bringing new organizing skills that reconnected old members and attracted new ones to take up the chapter’s projects.

In your face or at you side?
In what sounds like a work in progress, members try to recruit active-duty soldiers at Fort Carson. First, they did late-night raids on the base, slipping pamphlets under doors and sticking them on windshields. “Slightly invasive, I know,” Wilkerson admits.

Spradlin puts it differently: “Of course that’s gonna offend a lot of people because some of our flyers were pretty anti-war.”

Reppenhagen acknowledges the timing was off, since many soldiers on base hadn’t yet deployed to Iraq. Now that many of them are looking at fourth and fifth tours, he says, “The guys who bought into it are really pissed.”

The chapter is using a different flyer now, informing soldiers of their rights in straightforward language and encouraging them to contact IVAW. “[We] say, you know, if you’re unhappy about this, you have a right to be unhappy,” says Spradlin. Apparently, that’s had an effect. Today, about a third of the chapter’s members are active-duty soldiers.
Figuring out just how in-your-face IVAW can be in such a conservative community is a challenge. Reppenhagen returned to the city that’s been his home since he was a teenager because, he says, “It’s hard to just abandon those mountains. It makes the evangelicals and military bases tolerable.” But that friction also energizes him. “It gives me traction. It reminds me what I’m trying to change about America. It makes it fun.”

Like most everyone in IVAW, members of the Springs chapter are busy with their day-to-day lives – Spradlin has a 7-month-old daughter and a job, Wilkerson studies journalism, Reppenhagen is training to become a history teacher, Flaherty is considering a promising business opportunity – so finding time for chapter work can be taxing. Wilkerson explains, “We all have streaks we go through and we don’t want to do anything. A lot of times you’re speaking to soldiers telling you really depressing stuff and it takes you back there. We have members who, a week or two at a time, won’t answer their phone, their emails. Then they come right back in. Patience is definitely an underrated virtue.”

Spradlin, who works at a hospital with the biggest trauma unit in the area, sees really depressing stuff daily: soldiers critically injured through accidents, violence, suicide attempts, alcoholism. “I think that has a huge impact on my obligation,” she says of her commitment to IVAW. “I feel guilty if I’m not involved.”

For Flaherty, it’s what he learned in Iraq. “I mostly stayed on base. I never had to kill anybody, I never came under direct fire. I don’t have these horror stories,” he says, almost in apology. “But you can’t go over there and not see enough.” On his second tour, his work at the front gate of a base near Mosul brought him into frequent contact with Iraqis. “That, more than anything else, opened my eyes to the truth,” he says.

Along with truth-telling and guilt – two great motivating sources – obligation to each other is paramount. “The people who are in IVAW have become my friends,” says Wilkerson. “If you don’t follow through on something, you’re not just letting down your boss; you’re letting down your friends, your family.”

So they also help each other by sharing expertise -- Spradlin with medical care, for instance, or Wilkerson with resistance – and they share that knowledge across chapters. “Because we are all brothers and sisters, we’re not rivals,” he concludes. “We’re all working together on a common goal.”