Veteran's Day "Celebration and Honoring of Veterans Event"
At Fielding Graduate University on Nov 10, 2022
A 5- minute speech- by Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), aka Don Trent Jacobs
First Prompt, Connection to Fielding and the Military:
I have been a full-time scholar-activist for Fielding's Ed.D. program for over 20 years and continue to enjoy the amazing Fielding community.
I sum up my military connection as follows. My dad did 36 bombing flights in WWII. My namesake died on VJ day in the Navy. While a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, I got drunk with a South Vietnamese officer in Pensacola. He told me the truth about the war. At the time a gung-ho Marine, I almost hit him until I saw the truth in his eyes. I refused a subsequent set of orders. Then I wrote a robust anti-war letter to U.S. Senator Tom Eagleton that made it to the Commandant of the Marine Corps. It led to my honorable discharge on October 10, 1969. An accidental attachment to my DD-214 is a handwritten note from the the Marine Corp's Administration and Resource Management's Information Security Program. It is from First Lieutenant H.B. Jensen, Jr. to Staff Sgt. Freshour sand says:
"By Direction: One for case file,: lesson is only talk to head honcho (Commandant). This Lieutenant is one dangerous short-timer."
In 2001, I co-founded chapter 108 of the Veterans for Peace with Tony Van Renterghem, a friend who spent 7 years in the Dutch underground during WWII. I am now working with a group of distinguished VFP members on ways to Indigenize and decolonize three of their current programs.
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