Two WWII soldiers enlist in fight against this war

Two WWII soldiers enlist in fight against this war
by Michael Hill

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — In 1945, Jay Wenk was a shy Brooklyn boy puffed up with can-do patriotism fed by Life magazine and World War II movies. He signed up and was shipped off at age 18 to fight in Europe.

“I remember riding the first time up to the front and hearing the guns and saying, `This is exciting!”‘

Six decades later, Wenk is long over the thrill of combat and now fights to stop young people from doing what he did a lifetime ago.

Wenk and another World War II era veteran, Joan Keefe, were arrested twice for distributing anti-enlistment fliers outside a military recruiting center in a Hudson Valley mall. With a round of trespassing charges dismissed this week on technical grounds, they say they will risk arrest again. At an age when many old soldiers fade away _ he’s 79 and she’s 84 _ they promise to keep up their anti-Iraq war leafletting.

“We’re not cowards,” Keefe said. “We’re not afraid to stand up.”…

Wenk, a longtime activist, started handing out fliers outside a recruiting center at the King’s Mall near Kingston in March. On days off from his cabinetmaking work, he’d make the short drive from his mountainside home in Woodstock and hand material to passers-by with anti-enlistment arguments like: “DO NOT ENLIST into Bush’s `Web of Lies and Deception!”‘

By August, others joined him, including Keefe, another longtime political activist from nearby Saugerties. Twice that month, Wenk and Keefe refused requests to leave the mall and were arrested on charges of trespassing, a violation that usually carries a fine.

The pair planned to argue during trial that they had a First Amendment right to protest outside a government office, even if it’s in a privately owned mall. But a town justice granted their lawyer’s motion to dismiss the violation Tuesday on the procedural ground that the complaint against them failed to state why the pair was asked to leave.

So it’s back to the mall this weekend where they plan to press the issue again.

“I have time to do what others can’t,” Keefe said. “I can get arrested, for instance.”

The pair has attracted support from local peace activists, many who braved frigid temperatures Tuesday to rally in their support outside of court. Like Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, Wenk and Keefe are potent symbols to the recently growing anti-war movement. In their case, their military service acts as a kind of a trump card for people who would call them unpatriotic.

Wenk was with the 90th Infantry Division and fought in the latter stages of the Battle of the Bulge. His initial flush of combat excitement was tempered by getting shot at by Germans and contracting pleurisy.

Keefe, meanwhile, signed up for the WACS with dreams of overseas adventure and ended up doing clerical duties for soldiers shipping out of California.

As each married and raised families in the postwar years, they drifted into activism amid the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Wenk even helped found Veterans for Peace in the early ’60s. Still, neither expresses regret for their service.

Before pamphleteering, Wenk pins to his chest a rectangular badge of a rifle that was given to infantrymen who saw combat. Keefe wears her service medals.

“I’m glad I did it,” Keefe said of joining the WACS. “It was the way I’d like to feel now about the country … but I can’t.”

It’s not clear if they would face arrest again. Mall officials who called police previously told a visiting reporter this week they had no comment on the case.

The free speech issue has similarities to a New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit about a man who was thrown out of a suburban Albany mall in 2003 with “Give Peace a Chance” T-shirt. The NYCLU argues that since Crossgates Mall receives tax incentives, it is a public area in which citizens’ free speech rights are guaranteed.

Still, a fight over pamphleteering on private property in a mall could be difficult. The state’s top court, the Court of Appeals, ruled in 1985 against an anti-nuclear group that argued they had the right to hand out pamphlets at a Long Island shopping mall.

But the lawyer representing the pair, Alan Sussman, said people have First Amendment rights to protest outside a government office, even if it’s in a mall. Otherwise any government agency could shield itself from protests simply by renting space in a private building, he said.

Wenk’s argument is simpler. As long as the war continues, he intends to keep up his fight.

“I’m going to keep going back,” he said.

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