Susan Schnall and Bryson Ripley discuss Veterans for Peace including their 2026 annual convention, August 6-9, in the UMKC student union. Schnall and Ripley are Presidents of the national Veterans for Peace organization and their Kansas City chapter, respectively. They are interviewed by Spencer Graves. You do not have to be a veteran to join Veterans for Peace. They accept allies. The website of the national Veterans for Peace organization is veteransforpeace.org. That of the Kansas City chapter is vfpkc.org. The local has a hybrid meeting the first Saturday of each month at noon, currently at the Vietnam Veterans of America Hall, 3027 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO. For the Zoom link or with any questions, email kcvetsforpeace@gmail.com. Anyone is welcome to visit these meetings and decide later if they would like to join. More information about this convention is available at the convention website vfpconvention.org, which can also be reached from veteransforpeace.org by clicking "Convention" (top right). Or email kcvetsforpeace@gmail.com. Susan Schnall was court-martialed in 1969 for having had a leadership role in an antiwar demonstration while in uniform as a US Navy Lieutenant JG. She was convicted and sentenced to six months of hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and dismissal from the Navy. Bryson Ripley joined the US Marine Corps in 2014 and spent five years as a "correction specialist" -- a military prison guard. He saw military personnel incarcerated for offenses he thought should not have resulted in prison time. His military experience contributed to a major change in worldview. Ripley said he has suffered from "moral injury", from feeling extreme guilt from having done things that violate one's moral code. Some victims of moral injury suffer homelessness, addiction and domestic violence, though perhaps not at the same rates as those with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Schnall said that post-traumatic stress is real, but the disorder is with the society that send humans to war, not with the humans who suffer from post-traumatic stress. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress include recurring nightmares about where they've been, the fact that they have faced life or death situations, or the harm that they perpetrated on other individuals, drug addiction, alcoholism, social violence, suicide, etc. Shnall said that Veterans for Peace recently published a report1 on Agent Orange, a defoliant used to clear the jungle in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 that is still contributing to birth defects today from residues sprayed over half a century ago. She also noted that humans are still killed today from bombs dropped sixty years ago that only now get detonated. _______ VeteransForPeace.org > "Our Work" > "National Projects" > "Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign". Copyright 2026 Susan Schnall, Bryson Ripley, Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.
