John Bruhns grew up in blue-collar Philadelphia and was leaning toward a career as a police officer before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Inspired and outraged, he tried to sign up for the fight in Afghanistan. Instead, his military service put him at the forefront of an Iraq invasion he didn’t support. He was promoted during his tour, but says he felt more like an occupier than a liberator.
Now Bruhns, 29, is leading the fight in Washington against the Iraq war. As the legislative representative for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), he is putting his experience in Iraq to use in the anti-war coalition’s “Iraq Summer” campaign.
“Members of Congress can’t look at you and say, ‘What do you know? You haven’t been there.’ I do know. I have been there,” Bruhns said.
The AAEI coalition includes MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union, VoteVets.org and others. The coalition’s campaign, launched over the Independence Day holiday, targets about 50 Republican members of Congress who have criticized the war but also voted with GOP leadership and President Bush.
The strategy is quite different from that of other anti-war groups, which have camped out in front of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) house in San Francisco, picketed in front of the offices of Democratic House members and heckled Democratic leaders in Capitol Hill hallways. Rather than criticize Democratic leaders, the coalition plan is to help them by pressuring more Republicans to vote against the war.
“When I speak with these members, they agree with me that Bush is wrong and the war is a disaster,” Bruhns said. “But for some reason, they won’t switch their vote.”
The coalition proudly notes that two of its targets, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), last week voted for withdrawal by April.
There’s been less progress in the House, where a vote earlier this month to withdraw from Iraq by April passed but yielded only two new Republican defectors. Bruhns notes that Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) has said he would support a timeline for withdrawal of combat troops by December 2008.
“For all of their efforts and millions of dollars in robo-calls and television ads, they’ve failed, because Americans overwhelmingly believe that the generals on the ground should be making the calls, not activists,” said Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).
Bruhns, like many of those he is lobbying, has set his sights on September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is to issue a report on President Bush’s “surge.”
“If they turn in September, that will mean we ran a successful campaign,” Bruhns said, adding that he thinks many Republican members are ready to make the break then as well, no matter what the report says.
“I had a Republican member tell me that if Petraeus says the surge is working in September, that’s a reason to bring the troops home. And if he says, ‘It’s not working,’ then the war is a failure and we should bring them home,” Bruhns recalled.
It’s his job to push members in that direction by lobbying them and their staffs and helping incite voters in the fence-sitters’ districts to push their lawmakers toward withdrawal.
He knocks on doors on Capitol Hill and has recorded “robo-calls” that pour into the telephones of voters in the districts of vulnerable Republicans.
With his cropped hair, barrel chest and blunt-spoken demeanor, Bruhns says being an Iraq war vet gives him an advantage when he goes in to make his case.
Bruhns was a Marine Corps reservist in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. After the attacks, he learned his unit wasn’t heading to Afghanistan, so he switched to the Army infantry.
“It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” he said. “As an able-bodied male, I felt like I should be over there.”
Instead, he found himself training for Iraq in June 2002, nearly a year before the invasion. He wasn’t political before the war, but followed the news and didn’t like what it told him.
It didn’t get better on the ground. Stationed in a Baghdad neighborhood near the Abu Ghraib prison, he remembers a riot that broke out in October 2003. Though the official line was that attacks came from foreign fighters, he saw Iraqis taking shots at Americans.
“You’re told you’re there to liberate the Iraqi people, and they’re trying to kill us,” Bruhns said.
Bruhns left the Army with an honorable discharge in 2005. He got a job in northern Virginia, where he pursued anti-war activism in his spare time.
In 2005, he got noticed by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who read into the Congressional Record parts of a letter he had written criticizing the war.
His profile as an anti-war vet grew in April when he created a video that won MoveOn.org’s VideoVets contest and joined an anti-war press conference with Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Two months ago, Bruhns joined the AAEI coalition, just in time for the Iraq Summer initiative, making his passion his full-time job.
“The Iraq war turned me political,” he said. |
