Veterans For Peace, the largest and most active peace veterans organization in the country recently elected five board members to its national board.
- United States Marine Corps Combat Engineer veteran Willie Hager who served two tours in Vietnam, 1965-66 and 1968.
- Barry Ladendorf, commissioned United States Navy officer 1965-1968 and graduate of University of San Diego Law School.
- United States Army Veteran Tom Palumbo who served thirteen years as an Active Duty Reserve Behavioral Science Specialist.
- Joey King a United States Army officer veteran and Distinguished Military Graduate from Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville.
- United States Army veteran Gerry Condon was reelected. In 1969 Gerry refused orders to deploy to Vietnam, fleeing the U.S. to Canada for six years.
Each of these board members are very active in Veterans For Peace and the wider struggle for peace and justice in their respective communities.
Veterans For Peace elections are held each year, electing a third of a thirteen person board for three year terms.
Members also passed eight resolutions. The resolutions include one urging the release ofOscar Lopez-Rivera, Vietnam War draftee, Bronze Star recipient and a Life Member of Veterans For Peace. Lopez Rivera is Puerto Rican Nationalist political prisoner is has been in prison for 32 years of a seventy year term. He has spent twelve years in solitary confinement. He was tried and convicted for various crimes including use of force to commit robbery and interstate transportation of firearms and ammunition to aid in the commission of a felony. However, he was among 16 Puerto Rican nationalists offered conditional clemency by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1999. Lopez Rivera rejected the offer because it had not also been extended to fellow independence prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres (who was subsequently released from prison in July 2010). Rivera is among the longest held political prisoners in the history of Puerto Rico and the world. Lopez-Rivera was a community organizer in Chicago cofounding educational and rehabilitation centers. While in prison has helped inmates read and write.
Another resolution issues a call to work with organizations like the Brady Campaign, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (the multi-faith Heeding God's Call and Mayors Against Illegal Guns) to end gun violence.
Also approved was a declaration of support for efforts to close the Y-12 Highly Enriched Uranium Manufacturing Facility in Oak Ridge, TN as well as other facilitates researching and producing nuclear weapons. The same resolution condemns the prosecution and conviction of peaceful protesters working to close nuclear weapon facilities, and urges individual VFP members and chapters to support and promote efforts to have nuclear weapon facility protest convictions overturned, reduced, commuted, pardoned and/or more lenient sentences imposed.
Two other VFP resolutions call on membership to challenge unlawful U.S. military actions – notably the action in Afghanistan -- and reiterated solidarity with the villagers of Gangjeong in their opposition to the construction of this Naval Base, urging the Obama Administration and Congress to stop construction of the Jeju Island Naval Base as a first step toward a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula and East Asia.
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