Transcript

Mike Hastie:

You know, and you just continue to put more and more of the puzzle pieces together, and then you realize that you’ve got to bear witness. You’ve got to tell the truth about the entire war being a total, complete lie.

Matthew Breems:

This is the Courage to Resist podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace. On this Courage to Resist podcast, army medic and veteran Mike Hastie. Mike gained recent notoriety when a video of him being pepper sprayed by police at a Portland protest went viral on social media. Mike has been a long-time anti-war activist and photographer. He shares his story of activism with us today.

Hello, Mike. Great to have you on the podcast today. With all of our guests, we like to get some background information on them. Why don’t you start off telling us about where you grew up and your time leading up to your military service?

Mike Hastie:

Okay. Well, my father was a career military officer and combat veteran in World War II, so I was born in the military and so I spent the first 11 years in the military. We traveled to Japan in 1947, and we were the first dependents to arrive in Japan after the war. So, my father retired in June of 1956 after 20 years of military service. He retired as a major. And so my story’s a little bit different, and I’ll tell you what it was. I was going to a community college. As long as you took 12 hours and maintained a C average, you could stay in school. I had what they called a 2-S classification as a student. What would have happened is I dropped a class and so I was down to nine hours. So, I got my notice to appear in Spokane to take a physical for possible introduction into the military.

Matthew Breems:

So, growing up in a military family, what were your thoughts about the Vietnam conflict and possibly being drafted?

Mike Hastie:

Well, I have to say that I wasn’t very politicized at that point. I was around 21. I had been in the college for a couple of years, community college. I’d played in a rock and roll band. I was a lead singer in a rock and roll band. So, I was watching the Vietnam War on television, but I was still sketchy about what the war was about. Obviously my father was a military officer and I grew up in a very conservative family, so I think in the back of my mind, I was probably thinking that there was probably a reason for us to be over there. And I’m sure I believed, to a certain degree, about the domino theory, that communism had to be stopped in Vietnam, or that it would eventually permeate all of Southeast Asia. So, in a way I think I probably believed that, but I wasn’t an adamant supporter of the war.

And then what happened when I took my draft physical in 1966, I had had a history of asthma as a child, and I almost died when I was in Japan. I was in an oxygen tent for about a week. And so I told the doctor, I said, “Listen, I have a long history of being an asthmatic.” They gave me a deferment, a 1-Y deferment, which meant that I didn’t have to go into the military unless the Viet Cong landed on the Oregon coast. So, fast forward a few years, and for some reason I decided that maybe I should… I was at a point where I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So, I called a recruiter and told him that I had failed the guidelines for going in, but I felt like that I had outgrown my asthma. So, that’s all. I was cleared to go in the military. So, I went into the military in March of 1969.

Matthew Breems:

Which unit and service did you end up in?

Mike Hastie:

Well, the unit that I wound up in in Vietnam was, I was with the 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry, and I was attached to the 4th Infantry Division, and I was in An Khe in the Central Highlands, and I spent a year in there. We had 155 mm howitzers, eight-inch guns. We had the M48 tanks with 90 mm guns, armored personnel carriers. We had a lot of firepower on those bases. So, as a medic, I spent time on those bases. I would travel back and forth on a highway and would do some resupplying and that kind of thing.

Matthew Breems:

And how did you end up becoming a medic instead of just a regular GI?

Mike Hastie:

Well, I’ll tell you the reason why, I think, was because my sister was a registered nurse. She was about three years older than me, and I thought maybe that would be a good thing for me. I wasn’t crazy about going into villages with the M16s and possibly killing people. One of the things was, was that I was older. I was more mature. I wasn’t an 18, 19, 20-year-old. I turned 25 in Vietnam. Okay? So, that’s one of the reasons why I thought that from a humanitarian standpoint, I could treat the wounded. And so that was the main reason why I decided to become a medic, and then when I finished my medic school, I applied for an advanced medic school, which was a 41-week course in Denver, Colorado.

Matthew Breems:

Okay. So, you find yourself in Vietnam as a medic. What begins to happen that changes your view or shapes your view of the war there?

Mike Hastie:

I’ll tell you what was happening. I was involved in Vietnam during the rapid disintegration of American involvement in Vietnam. So, we would typically, like a lot of bases, we’d get hit with incoming, maybe a rocket or a border attack or a sapper attack. Those kinds of things, and we were getting a few casualties in from the field, and we would do as much as we could to stabilize them, and then we would send them to a facility that had a hospital. I was seeing homicides, suicides, rampant heroin addiction. I was seeing some racial violence. I was seeing accidents. And it just seemed like everything was falling apart around us. I had only been in my unit a short period of time, and a soldier walked up to a captain who was the captain of one of our firebases and he shot and killed him with his M16. And another time, we unzipped the body bag and another soldier had taken a pistol and he shot himself in the head.

So, we never knew what was going to happen within our own ranks. That was the main thing. There was just a lot of internal stuff going on. We all had our M16s, and I think after a while, the officers began to be a little suspicious as to whether those weapons might be turned on them. So, things were pretty intense about that, because people started to see through the war and started to see through the lie of the war, especially the black soldiers. I think the black soldiers really educated me about racism and those kind of things.

Matthew Breems:

So, this was a gradual process for you as you were in Vietnam for the weeks and months.

Mike Hastie:

Yes. Yeah.

Matthew Breems:

And when did you start actively resisting the war? While you were still in Vietnam, or did that begin later on for you?

Mike Hastie:

I didn’t actively resist the war while I was there, and I think the main reason was that I had a lot of responsibility. I was the chief medic in my unit. We had about 1200 people in my unit. So, I stayed really busy. I felt I had a deep compassion for them, and so that was my goal, was to meet the needs of all of the people that I was around.

Matthew Breems:

Oh. Your time in Vietnam is coming to an end and you end up back in the States. What does the next leg of your journey look like for you?

Mike Hastie:

Well, I returned in September of 1971, and I got orders for Fort Hood, Texas, and I still had almost a year left… I think I had under a year left of service. So, I get into Fort Hood, and so I was assigned to a unit, and I wound up working at Darnall army hospital in the emergency department, because I felt comfortable with that. So, we’d get people in that were involved in accidents, those kinds of things. Some people were injured, and all that, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to take my training that I had won, and especially in Vietnam, and put it to use. And then what happened was that I got an early out. I got a six-month early out, and so I was discharged from the service, and I think on March the 2nd, 1972. So, I had been in the military just under three years.

Mike Hastie:

And so I left there and then I wound up moving to Eugene, Oregon, and so we wound up moving to Eugene in ’72. I went to a community college there, Lane Community College, for a couple of years, and so in the back of my mind, I dealt with the question of, why was I in Vietnam? Why was I there? What was the purpose? And then, as I did more in-depth reading about what was going on in Nicaragua, I thought to myself, “My God, this is exactly the same thing that we were dealing with in Vietnam,” and that’s when I woke up. I felt like I was a fish under water. My whole world was under water, and all of the sudden, I jumped out of the water and I said to myself, “Wow. There’s another world up here other than the water I was swimming in.” And that’s when I had my epiphany, and that’s when I began to realize that the United States government was a global empire, and that’s when I began to realize that lying is the most powerful weapon of war.

Matthew Breems:

So, with this new epiphany, what did you decide that you, as one individual, could or should do about it? What actions did you start to take then?

Mike Hastie:

Well, I think that’s when I got involved in some of the things that was going on in Central America. I was meeting other Vietnam vets in Portland, and I was starting to dialogue with them, and then that’s when I simply began to realize that I was the enemy in Vietnam, and it was just that simple. What happened when I realized that and had that powerful epiphany is that it dismantled my core belief system, because I was raised in the military. I believed that the United States had a right to be anywhere in the world, that we are spreading freedom and democracy around the world, and all of the sudden, I realized that is an entire lie. And I just felt like a stranger in a strange land.

I became very afraid of the United States. I felt like I was in enemy territory living in my own country. So, I got involved with people that were involved in what was going on in Central America, certainly in Nicaragua, and you just continue to put more and more of the puzzle pieces together, and then you realize that you’ve got to bear witness. You’ve got to tell the truth about the entire war being a total, complete lie. And so I became obsessed with trying to educate the next generation of soldiers, and so I got heavily involved in the anti-war movement, especially around 1990, when the US got involved in Iraq, and so I joined a group in Portland called Northwest Veterans for Peace.

Matthew Breems:

Can you share some of the ways your group was able to protest or educate, especially during the Iraq War that started in the early ’90s?

Mike Hastie:

We started speaking out a lot. We were involved in demonstrations. Some of us were invited to speak at major rallies. And, I mean, I was one of them. And the other thing we did, which was so important to me, is that we started to go into the schools and educating the high school students. And there was some pictures certainly that I took in Vietnam and other anti-war art that I created when I got back. So, I’d go into those schools and I would put all of those pictures on the lip of the blackboard. And when I got up to speak, I was prompted by, when I was talking, by the photographs. And then, so I had some really powerful photographs. So, I started telling stories about things that I experienced in Vietnam, and the other thing I started doing is I started telling stories of other vets that had revealed to me things that they were involved in, and that’s when I finally realized that there is no rest for the messenger until the message has been delivered. So, it became an obsession for me to convey to these high school students the truth.

Matthew Breems:

And for our listeners, you’re able to view your photo essay on vietnamfulldisclosure.org. There is a tab there under media of photography, and your photos are on there.

Mike Hastie:

I try to use almost sound-bite stuff, like, “Lying is the most powerful weapon of war,” and the other thing I came up was, which this seemed to get a reasonable amount of notoriety because it was simple, I looked at the word war one day, W-A-R, and all of the sudden, I [inaudible 00:16:44] that war, W-A-R, stood for “wealthy are richer.” And that’s what these wars are about. These wars are about United States going into third-world countries and stealing their natural resources. And that’s what it’s about. And a lot of people have come up to me and they look at that and they go, “Wow, I get it. I understand it,” because I said it. These wars have nothing to do with freedom and democracy. We’re going in and stealing national resources and we’re murdering people and we’ve done it all over the world.

Matthew Breems:

Let’s jump ahead to the last few weeks here and the protests going on in Portland, Oregon, your home city, right now. And Mike, you’ve gained some unwelcome notoriety during those protests because of a viral video of you. Why don’t you go ahead and give our listeners an idea of what’s happening at these protests, why people are protesting? And then we can talk a little bit about the incident that has been just blowing up on the internet right now.

Mike Hastie:

Well, the main thing, as you know, is everything broke loose, obviously, when George Floyd was murdered. It just broke my heart when I saw that, because I served with black soldiers in Vietnam. I knew many of them well. One of my best friends was a black medic, and of course, when George Floyd was murdered, then of course we all know what happened in every major city across the United States. But for some reason, Portland decided that they were going to continue those protests week after week after week, because we have a lot of progressive people that live in Portland and a lot of young youth. And so we started demonstrating down at the Mark Hatfield Courthouse, which was right across the street from a couple of parks.

Matthew Breems:

And that’s a federal courthouse in Portland.

Mike Hastie:

Yeah. It’s the Mark Hatfield courthouse, federal courthouse. And so people would gather in that park and then we were protesting. And so every night there was people showing up that were demonstrating, and we were involved with Black Lives Matter, and so we went at it. And then of course there were some people that were there that were a little bit more aggressive than others, and that’s going to happen. That’s when fences were torn down, and it just got heated, and granted, there was some [inaudible 00:19:38] the protest side. They were trying to tear down a fence that went around the courthouse and that fence would be torn down and then the police reinforced it, and then there were things that were thrown at the police, things like water bottles.

And so the police came out in full force and they were tear gassing us. They were firing their projectiles at us. They were taking people down. They were arresting people, and I had a projectile that was fired at me and I just got out of the way as it went whizzing by me. The more aggressive the police became, then sometimes the more aggressive the protestors became. There was about, sometimes, 2000 to 3000 people that would show up, and they were at all different levels of political awareness, okay? And the night that that Navy veteran… I think his name was Chris David. 53-year-old man. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and that was his first demonstration. So, he was down there and he wanted to dialogue with police officers. He had a mask on and he just wanted to talk to them about what they were doing. And what happened is he got directly pepper sprayed in the face, and then another officer took a baton and started beating on him. He hit him at least four or five times.

And so, and I was in a situation where I could photograph that, when he was being pepper sprayed and beaten, and I’m down there, and I decided to give the cops a lecture as far as to why I was down there, what was the reason I was involved, because they were demonizing us. So, I was educating the police about what I did in Vietnam, that I was over there, and I finally realized that the United States was committing atrocities every single day.

Matthew Breems:

And how long were you talking? How long were you talking to these officers, educating these officers?

Mike Hastie:

I think I was on tape for about a minute and a half, which is quite a long time. And so, I was just talking to them about what we did in Vietnam. When you take into consideration-

Matthew Breems:

And they were just listening to you talk?

Mike Hastie:

They were listening at an at-ease position. They were staring at me. Nobody was saying anything. They weren’t making any gestures to come at me. They were listening. At least I assume they were, because I was pretty loud. And then all of the sudden, a cop comes from the side. He’s walking along the line of the other cops, and he takes a can of pepper spray and sprays me directly into my eyes. And at that point I had to decide, am I going to stop speaking? Am I going to just go off to the periphery and just kind of lick my wounds? And I said to myself, “No, I cannot do that,” because not only did Mike Hastie speak, but thousands of people that I know, their voices were inside of me, and so that’s when I regrouped and I went back at it and continued with my lecture, talking about the United States government committing atrocities every day in Vietnam.

Matthew Breems:

Well, you’ve been given a pretty powerful platform… unlooked for, of course… with this viral video to speak that truth. Any thoughts on the next phase of your activism?

Mike Hastie:

I’m going to continue to be involved in the protests, but I always have to say that things have changed a bit. A lot of people have dropped away from the protests because… We’re not seeing the same intensity that we saw down at the Mark Hatfield Federal Courthouse. There are some demonstrators down there, but it’s more of the younger generation that are down there. I mean, I’m 75 years old. If I were 25 and knowing what’s going on in this world right now, it’s overwhelming. I can’t imagine what these 20-some-year-olds are thinking. What kind of a future do I have? And so they’re adamant about going at the federal government. They’re pretty aggressive because I don’t know if we can stop the American empire with a peace sign. And I’m not saying that we’ve got to use violence against our country, but I know one thing, and this is important. There needs to be more people show up at these demonstrations, and I don’t care whether they’re in Portland or whether in Washington, DC, or whatever, but this empire has to be confronted.

Matthew Breems:

Well, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your story, for being so vocal in speaking truth to the lies in our nation. Wish you safety and health as you continue to protest in Portland there. Keep it up.

Mike Hastie:

Well, I just appreciate you taking what you heard today and taking it to the next level because that’s what has to be done, and thank you very much.

Matthew Breems:

This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace. This year marks 50 years of GI resistance to the US war in Vietnam, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured. This episode was recorded and edited by Matthew Breems. Special thanks to executive producer Jeff Paterson. Visit vietnamfulldisclosure.org and couragetoresist.org for past episodes, more information, and to offer your support.