GIJustice Denied: Steve Hutchison
Ten years before Howard Zinn wrote “A People’s History of the United States,” he wrote an academic article that would later become “The Politics of History.” The history you inherit is not without bias, and Zinn pointed out the clash of democratic values with the tendency to reward coercion by privileging histories determined by those who gained power through violence. Bias is the invisible force that places the pen in the victor’s hand when the dust settles on the field of battle. Since the end of the draft, the victors haven’t even seen the field of battle, and civilian bias works to shield us from our own history.
Steve Hutchison first enlisted in the Army in 1966 and did two tours in Viet Nam with the 101st Airborne. He retired in 1988 to earn a PsyD and become a professor of Psychology. After teaching at Loyola Marymount University and Claremont McKenna College, he landed a job as a “lecturer” at Cal State Long Beach, his hometown. In 1995 Steve was one of several veterans, both students and faculty, to file a class complaint of employment discrimination under VEVRAA.
Like the vast majority of veterans who place their trust in the Department of Labor, Steve was told his claims lacked merit.
Though he was raised in Long Beach, in 1996 he left for Arizona to work as a healthcare researcher. Maybe the move was a result of meeting the love of his life, Candy. But the move could also have been the result of being denied civil rights despite their years of service. The CSULB veterans, meanwhile, decided to push back on the bullshit. In August 2000, the hot blooded students and cock-sure academics succeeded in vindicating themselves by forcing the OFCCP to reverse their decision. But Steve Hutchison had already moved on.
Candy had dissuaded Steve from reenlisting on 9/11, so when she died in 2006, he re-entered service under the Army’s Retiree Recall program at 57 years old. After some retraining, he was assigned to an armor regiment in the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, KS. His third deployment was to Afghanistan, and his fourth was to Iraq. On May 10, 2009, an Improvised Explosive Device detonated beside his track vehicle and he was fatally injured by shrapnel. He was 60 years old.
Now that the so-called Global War on Terror is …”over”(?), we can definitively say that “The Boss” was the oldest casualty of that war. His path to that noble title, however, was inexorably linked to the injustice of civilian bias. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not because he was making himself invisible. It’s because the victors writing America’s history no longer share in the service that makes democracy possible.
Would Steve describe his story the way I have? We’ll never know. In our age of information, it’s not what facts you can find, but how you interpret the ones you’ve found.
