Veterans Occupy Wall Street

An article in the Nation on veterans participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement:

As a US Marine, Scott Olsen lived through “blood, sweat and tears.” Twice. After two tours of duty in Iraq, first from 2006 to 2007, then again from 2008 to 2009, he finally came home to Wisconsin. He then moved to the Golden State, rented a house with a friend and got a job as a systems network administrator in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

But on the night of October 25, Olsen, who had survived enemy fire as a member of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine regiment in Iraq, was hit by a projectile shot by a law enforcement officer as he joined a few hundred people protesting with Occupy Oakland that night. He was hospitalized for a skull fracture and brain swelling.

According to Olsen’s roommate, Keith Shannon, who was deployed in Iraq with him, Olsen was marching with the Occupy movement because he felt that “corporations and banks had too much control over our government, and that they weren’t being held accountable for their role in the economic downturn, which caused so many people to lose their jobs and their homes.”

Veterans have long been involved in American social movements and protests—particularly anti-war ones. Take, for example, the protests, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience organized, in the early 1970s, by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But veterans’ involvement in the Occupy movement went largely unnoticed by organizers and protesters alike until October 15, when a video of Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas went viral on the web. In the video, Thomas spontaneously addresses NYPD officers patrolling an Occupy Wall Street demonstration, passionately criticizing their crowd-control methods and brutality.

Click here to read the whole thing.