Transcript edited by Pierce Butler
This is the 25th in a series of transcript excerpts from the collection of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Part 2 of this interview will follow in the next issue of the Iguana out April 8.
Medea Benjamin was interviewed by Derick Gomez [G] in 2014.
G: You’ve been an activist for several decades now, and it’s impossible not to admire your strong code of morality, your strong code of ethics. Can you tell me a little bit about where that came from?
B: It’s funny, just coming into here, I saw the students outside with the ROTC, and they were practicing their different maneuvers with guns. It made me very sad to see, and I just kind of flashed back to many decades ago when I was in school and there was a draft, and people didn’t have a choice. They were forced to go into the military and to be sent over to Vietnam to fight. My older sister had a boyfriend who was drafted into the military. And he would write her letters. The letters got more and more disturbing as the months went by. And then maybe six months into his deployment in Vietnam, he sent her back an ear of a Viet Cong, and he said that this was a souvenir that she could put around her neck and wear as a necklace. I was just so shocked by it, just the whole concept that this nice boy who six months earlier was just one of us, had suddenly turned into kind of a monster, who would think that another human being’s body part would be a souvenir.
I got involved then, started an anti-war group in my high school, started looking out to connect with tother grops. Got involved in politics ‘cause there was a acongressperson who was running for office on an anti-war ticket and I started volunteering on his campaign. So at the age of 16, I was suddenly an activist, and I guess I’ve been an activist ever since.
