Veteran puts Republicans on defensive about war

NEW YORK – Jon Soltz rapped his pen on a conference table as he ran through plans to take on politicians who back the war in Iraq. The former U.S. Army captain and Iraq war veteran was demanding television ads.

“I want a hit on Fox,” he barked into a speaker phone.

He wanted more e-mail blasts and more donors.

“Do we have a target list?” he asked of the team gathered for a Monday morning conference call. “Let’s go get those dollars.”

There isn’t much to the nerve center of his operation: three rooms on the seventh floor of a dingy Manhattan office building.

But in a little more than a year since he launched VoteVets.org, Soltz has helped transform the war debate in Washington by channeling the raw anger and frustration of many Iraq vets into a political campaign both sophisticated and visceral.

Soltz, 30, and his band of 20- and 30-something veterans have shaken the GOP’s claim to be the pro-military party. They accuse Republicans of recklessly sending troops to war without the right equipment and failing to care for thousands of wounded and traumatized war veterans.

During the 2006 elections, VoteVets’ stark attack ads featuring disillusioned veterans helped unseat Republican lawmakers in five states, including Virginia Sen. George Allen and Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, whose defeats gave Democrats an unexpected Senate majority.

Soltz works closely with MoveOn.org, as well as influential military officers such as retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark. He has become a celebrity, sought out by the media, consulted by senior Democratic lawmakers and mobbed by anti-war activists.

He is a regular on MSNBC-TV ‘s “Hardball W ith Chris Matthews ” and “Countdown W ith Keith Olbermann.”

With a database of more than 40,000 supporters and donors, Soltz is planning to take on GOP presidential candidates in 2008, targeting their claim that they are the better guardians of national security.

“Jon Soltz seems to be exactly what progressives need,” said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr.’s successful campaign against Santorum. “He has a pair of fists, and he knows how to use them.”

Soltz was getting ready to leave active duty in 2003 when President Bush began assembling an invasion force to oust Saddam Hussein. Ordered to stay in the Army and prepare for war, he was thrilled. He was certain American troops would quickly uncover chemical weapons stockpiles and silence the invasion’s critics.

His battalion crossed into Iraq from Kuwait in May 2003. Baghdad had fallen in April. On his first night in Iraq, an insurgent ambush rained rocket-propelled grenades on his unit. The attack did nothing to dim Soltz’s zeal. “It was a great day,” he recalled.

But as the battalion settled into a logistics base south of Baghdad, the allure of the mission began to fade. Despite the president’s announcement weeks earlier that major combat was over, the unit’s mostly unarmored trucks came under almost daily attack. As his battalion’s transportation officer, Soltz was responsible for organizing the convoys that ferried fuel and supplies to units in Baghdad. “They were getting lit up,” he said.

On June 22, 2003, a fuel convoy he had dispatched was ambushed in Baghdad. A few hours later, one of his comrades was killed when shrapnel sliced through the back of his head. He had been riding in an unarmored truck. As Soltz dwelt on it, shock gave way to anger.

“These people aren’t just like your friends,” he said. “They’re like your kids. You’re responsible for their safety. And this kid died because he didn’t have the right equipment. You think about these things, and they add up.”

That winter, back home in Pittsburgh, Soltz decided to transfer to the Army Reserve and to work on a master’s degree in international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. An encounter with a famous vet from another era set him on a new course.

In spring 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, made a presidential campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Soltz went, curious about the man who was one of his generation’s most famous opponents of the Vietnam War. He introduced himself, and the two men spoke briefly. Afterward, Kerry called Soltz at home.

“He said, ‘I just want you to know that when I came home from Vietnam, I was angry like you, and that’s OK,’ ” Soltz recalled. “Nobody in my life understood what was going on in my head at the time. Not my friends, not my family. But when someone like that says, ‘I was like you, I understand your anger and your pain, do something with that,’ that is speaking a language you can understand.”

Soltz volunteered for the Kerry campaign, organizing outreach to veterans in Pennsylvania. Afterward, he helped raise money for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans running for Congress. But he was frustrated by the inability of war critics to influence U.S. policy.

In early 2006, he and fellow vets founded VoteVets. Soltz set out to tap Americans’ respect for the armed forces by making his war experience and that of other veterans the foundation of the organization.

“From the get-go, he didn’t want to be ‘anti-war,’ ” said Ed Vick, a longtime Republican political consultant and Vietnam veteran who sits on the VoteVets board. “This would be a strictly pro-military, pro-soldier, pro-veteran organization.”

Soltz also drew on the political lessons he learned in 2004, when Republican attack ads challenged Kerry’s war record and combat medals.

“Every other old-school veterans organization wants to play nice guy. Well, playing nice guy didn’t get us enough body armor in Iraq,” Soltz said. “Playing nice guy got us escalation in Iraq.”

Working with grass-roots groups opposed to the war, Soltz and VoteVets took aim at Republican incumbents in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Montana and Missouri.

VoteVets’ breakthrough was a 30-second TV commercial, made for just $15,000 with help from Democratic ad consultants, that linked several GOP lawmakers to inadequate body armor.

Soltz sent two vets to an Arizona gun range to illustrate the differences between the old body armor troops were given and newer vests that could stop rounds from an assault rifle.

As the camera rolled, one of Soltz’s comrades fired an AK-47 at two mannequins wearing the vests. He pulled each open to reveal the difference: four holes in the abdomen of the mannequin wearing the old armor; none in the one with the new vest.

“Sen. George Allen voted against giving our troops this,” Iraq veteran Peter Granato said, holding up the new vest in the ad that ran in Virginia. “Now it’s time for us to vote against him.”

Republicans accused VoteVets of distorting lawmakers’ voting records. Allen and other GOP senators had opposed a 2003 amendment that would have increased funding for the National Guard and the Reserve, but would not have allocated money for body armor.

“It was just another example of the many efforts that the Democrats have set up that play very loose with the facts,” said Dick Wadhams, Allen’s campaign manager.

Wadhams dismissed VoteVets as a “partisan front group.”

VoteVets was also criticized by the nonpartisan Annenberg Political Fact Check for misleading advertising. Nonetheless, the ad became a sensation, thanks in part to exposure on YouTube.com. By Soltz’s estimate, the group raised $100,000 in the four days after the ad was posted online. More ads followed.

In one, a wheelchair-bound veteran asks how Congress could accept a pay raise and vote to cut health care benefits for veterans.

By the time the new Democratic congressional majority took over in January, Soltz had decided to take his campaign to the Capitol.

On one of his first lobbying trips, Soltz and his comrades, dressed in business suits rather than the jungle camouflage favored by an earlier generation of politically active vets, pressed lawmakers to oppose the president’s plan to send more troops to Baghdad. Rather than a “surge,” VoteVets wanted U.S. combat troops withdrawn from Iraq.

Sen. Jon Tester, a freshman Democrat from Montana, was receptive. So was Kerry. In Republican offices, the vets often had to settle for meetings with aides, who listened politely.

Soltz acknowledges he changed few minds. But he developed working relationships with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, who have increasingly looked to VoteVets to bolster their push for a withdrawal and to shield them from GOP rhetoric equating opposition to the war with selling out the troops.

Soltz was one of a handful of outsiders invited to address House Democrats at their annual retreat in February in Williamsburg, Va. He drew a standing ovation with a tearful appeal to lawmakers to help bring the war to an end.

Since then, VoteVets members have traveled to Capitol Hill to stand with Democrats at news conferences around nearly every major vote challenging Bush’s war strategy.

“They need to know we’ve got their backs,” Soltz said.

Soltz seems perpetually in campaign mode. He splits his time between a friend’s couch in Pittsburgh, his parents’ house in suburban Washington and a small room he sublets in New York.

Soltz smiled as he talked about his next project: the 2008 election. “Our goal is to be the No. 1 player on the No. 1 issue facing the country,” he said.