All Charles Smith is saying is, give peace a chance
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
The day that Charles Smith realized he could kill a man was the day that he decided he had to dedicate the rest of his life to peace. Ever since he had that shoot-to-survive revelation as a 20-year-old soldier in the jungles of Vietnam, the retired McGrath Elementary schoolteacher and president of the St. Louis chapter of Veterans For Peace has been fighting the good fight—peacefully, of course—against aggression. His latest salvo in the war on war? Organizing VFP’s national convention here in St. Louis this month.
Do you have to have fought in a war to be an effective peace advocate? No, but those of us who have been directly affected by a war have a responsibility to tell our story wherever we can. Of course, if we made that a requirement to be an effective peace activist, that would guarantee that we would always have to have war.
But aren’t there some conflicts that just can’t be solved in peaceful ways? Saddam Hussein wasn’t exactly a guy you could settle things with over a cup of coffee. I don’t disagree with that. Saddam Hussein was a violent, despicable person in his actions and had far too much power. But I still believe that he could have been dealt with in a way that didn’t require us to devastate an entire 2,000-year-old civilization.
How could you have solved that one without combat? First of all, it should never have been a unilateral thing. But let me emphasize that we need to be thinking now about who the next Saddam Hussein will be. We need to be putting the same kind of resources into peace research that we put into military research.
So if it were up to you, would everyone lay down their guns right now and go home? Oh, I’d like that idea. But that’s such an oversimplification. Even a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist like myself realizes that can’t be done.
Is this month’s convention specifically a response to the Iraq War? Oh no—this has been going on every year since 1985, I believe. When this war is over, we’ll still be having conventions. In order to really bring peace, we should always be looking for events that are going on now that could lead to violence.
I saw that Cindy Sheehan is scheduled to speak. How will her resignation from the peace movement affect your efforts in the broader scope? Any time a movement like the peace movement ends up with a person who’s burned out, that hurts. But on the other hand, the work goes on. And maybe that’s a good indication that there are other people who should have been stepping up to relieve some of the burden.
If you had five minutes alone with the president, what would you say? Wow. The president says he’s a person of faith, and I take him at his word. I’m a person of faith as well. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is probably where I’d start.
