Portland's KBOO Veterans' Voice show bonds two vets of different eras, same politics

Julie Sullivan
The Oregonian

Marv Simmons, left, and Bill Bires, leave KBOO
studio where they have hosted Veterans' Voice program
for 20 years. "If you're talking about the peace
movement, these particular people
have been to the limit and back.
They have ultimate crediblity on that issue,''
says morning KBOO news director Kathleen Stephenson.

By the time the Americans were captured, the young soldier badly burned in the helicopter crash was struggling. His eyes were swollen shut. As the bound men marched barefoot toward Hanoi, he fell further and further behind.

"I tried to stop, and wait and the guard would push me to keep going," the surviving prisoner of war recalled. "By the  time we stopped to rest, he wasn't with us.

"He's still MIA."

The words from the taped interview with the POW hang in the KBOO radio studio air. Hosts Marvin Simmons, 63, paces and Bill Bires, 82, covers his face. On Fridays, as they have every month for 20 years, they bring listeners a war experience that argues for peace.

In Portland, where progressive politics are measured by youth and social networking, they are radical elders on the radio. They began recording Veteran's Voice on reel-to-reel tapes. The first 10 recordings are out in Simmons' barn in the Coast Range. So are dozens of white crosses they fashioned for one demonstration against the Iraq war. And the wooden coffin they draped in a flag and carried downtown in 2005 for another.

But inside a small sound studio off east Burnside, the two repeatedly agitate. They interview women veterans about military sexual trauma, dissect U.S. policy on land mines, and trace cancer and birth defects due to Agent Orange in Vietnam and in the families of Americans who fought there.

Two years ago, station managers evaluated Veteran's Voice and agreed it told a critical story and that Simmons, Bires and their friends are the storytellers.

"KBOO is a place where things get said that don't get said anywhere else. And of all the places that happens on KBOO, these are the guys with no fear," says longtime engineer Tami  Dean.

She says their credibility comes from being both veterans and elders.

"I is an elder," agrees Bires with a snort.

OLDER AND WISER

Oregon's peace movement is dominated by people who lived through Vietnam.

Some have been activists since then, shifting attention to labor, immigration or U.S. policies in Central America, says Dan Goldrich, a retired political science professor at the University of Oregon. Others re-activated after the Iraq invasion in 2003 and stayed involved even as younger people drifted away with the threat of a possible draft. Older Oregonians say THEY are more active in part because they are beyond the mid-life pressures of raising children and their jobs.

"We have the time and we have the perspective," says Carol Van Houten, 73, of Eugene. "And one thing that keeps me working for change that is true for a lot of older people is that we owe it to our children and grandchildren."

After Vietnam, Marv Simmons drifted through a marriage and back to Oregon when he saw the televised air strikes in the first Gulf War. Outraged, he met a handful of other Vietnam vets at one of the first anti-war rallies at Pioneer Court House Square. He noticed an older man had joined.

Bires had worked as a copper miner and a Teamster, raised a family of six and was nearing retirement. He also survived atomic bomb testing in Nevada and a combat tour in Korea. Both became part of the Northwest Veterans for Peace. One day Simmons put his hand on Bires' shoulder as he was "espousing" a point, Bires says, and the two just bonded. For the first time Simmons could talk openly about Vietnam. It became a friendship of shared activism that has helped them face their diagnosed post traumatic stress and survivor guilt with a sense of purpose.

Simmons says, "He's the best friend I've ever had."

OLDER DOESN'T NECESSARILY MEAN MORE CONSERVATIVE

Last week, a British study showed liberals had more gray matter in the part of the brain that copes with empathy and managing conflicting information, while conservatives had more gray matter in the part that recognizes threats. Scientists say environment, self-interest and families help develop a person's politics. But experiences in young adulthood can also forge a lifelong political bent.

Bires and Simmons, drafted into different wars in different eras, describe an almost identical reaction to combat. "I looked at the Korean refugees streaming from the north, carrying everything they had," Bires recalls. "They were scared to death."

Simmons says: "I started looking around and thought, if we're here to protect these people why are we killing so many civilians? All the old people whose villages were burned and the little kids with no parents. There was so much suffering."

The radio hour gave them the perfect way to discuss such consequences, along with emerging controversies like Gulf War Syndrome, access to VA healthcare and women in the military.

John Timothy Hager, 66, a Keizer chaplain for Nursing Home Ministries and founding member of Northwest Veterans for Peace, has also appeared regularly on the program for 20 years to let "veterans know you are not alone." Simmons plans most of the programs, tracks down and arranges guests. Bires provides the color.

Once he connected with the Portland veterans, Bires traveled to the Nevada test sites, Washington, D.C., and Khazakstan to protest nuclear weapons. He spoke in Japan at the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. He believes people can change their minds because his own thinking has evolved about women's rights and minorities.

Simmons also talks about his changed thinking, and overcoming discomfort around Asians. Once he recognized those feelings as part of war trauma, he started going to Vietnamese businesses. And after his wife, Lorelle Browning, a professor of Shakespeare and peace and justice issues at Pacific University, won a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Vietnam, he moved there with her for a year. Bires joined them.

Next fall, with another teaching offer, they plan to return to Vietnam. Simmons is involved in an orphanage there. He and his wife help stage theater in Vietnam, and bring Vietnamese actors to the United States.

At age 82 and with congestive heart failure, Bires keeps almost as active. He attends a regular discussion group with Korean vets, and discussion groups at Portland Community College.

And every Friday, Bires and Simmons lunch other vets at a Vietnamese restaurant.

Simmons says, "I'm not sure in any other community that we'd fit in so well. Portland has so many liberal veterans."

The two hope to recruit at least one younger veteran, preferably a woman, to join them at the microphone.

"Until we can stop these guys from going to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya, all we can do," Simmons says, "is talk."