‘I had to become somebody who speaks out against war’

By John Catalinotto
June 23, 2025

Interview with Dan Shea, president of the Portland, Oregon, chapter of Veterans For Peace and activist in solidarity work with migrants in the Northwest of the United States. I had three questions for Shea:

What life experiences turned him into a political activist and VFP organizer? What has VFP been doing recently? And has VFP or has he personally taken a position regarding President Donald Trump’s mobilization of National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles to support the roundups of workers suspected of being undocumented? This is how Shea answered:

It was 1968, and I had joined the Marines. After boot camp infantry training in weapons I was assigned the specialty of M60 machine gunner. We were in Okinawa for a while, and then I was sent to Vietnam, to Quang Tri Province near the border with what was then North Vietnam.

You should know that in Quang Tri Province, Agent Orange was used heavily. I didn’t know anything about Agent Orange then. We were dropped into Danang, when we were sent out into the jungle, me and a sergeant. I was always in the jungle.

The day I got off the plane, that airport and base were being showered with mortar rounds and everyone disappeared. The barrage of mortars ended quickly, but not before we all realized that we could be killed. It takes only one bomb or one bullet and you’re dead. It could be on the first day or on your last day in combat.

A typhoon hit then, and there was nothing to do until it ended. We were taken to a mountain where there were 50-gallon drums of what might have been just diesel but could have been Agent Orange. We figured we were exposed to Agent Orange, since we were drinking water right out of the river and streams when we were out on a “Search and Destroy” mission.

I was only in Vietnam for a few months when I wound up being transferred to the Philippines, which is another story.

When I got home I tried to put the war behind me. I never spoke about it. I fell in love, got married, my wife was pregnant, and we were doing everything you do to prepare for the child to be healthy.

‘Casey’s lips are blue’

We were at what was then Adventist Hospital. Our first child, my son Casey, was born, and the minute he was born the doctor and nurses put him off to the side and started whispering and called the pediatrician and then had a talk with us. “He might have a heart problem,” they said, “his lips are blue.”

And just then Casey had a seizure, which was an emergency, and they took him to the Intensive Care Unit up at another hospital, OHSU Doernbecher Pediatric Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Marquam Hill, which was about 10 miles away.

Casey had multiple birth anomalies, a cleft palate, prune belly — a rare congenital malformation that affects the abdominal wall and urogenital system — and a birth defect called Trilogy of Fallot, a rare congenital heart disease. For the first three years he got a lot of care — it was scary for us — and we had another child, a daughter Harmony born one year after Casey.

Then at age 3 in 1981 Casey had heart surgery that took 10 hours. He had an oxygen shock to the brain, went into a coma for seven weeks, and then when I was rocking him in my arms, he took one deep breath and died.

Then as I learned about Agent Orange and what was happening to people in Vietnam, combined with the grief I felt, I started to think: If I feel this bad, then what about all the Vietnamese who are going through this?

I see Casey’s face on all those children, on the Vietnamese children, on the children in Gaza. And that’s why I had to become somebody who speaks out against war.

I got to know about VFP through my work on art projects, working with GI resisters during the occupation of Iraq. Eventually I became president of VFP in Portland, PDX Chapter 072. I was also elected to the national board.

In 2006 Dave Cline, who was president of VFP, invited me on a delegation to Vietnam for an Agent Orange conference. We visited the Vietnam Friendship Village where some children born with birth defects were, and we met with Vietnamese doctors and children. We traveled from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, stopping in many places, and in each one we met children born with special problems.

Gaza

There were VFP members on the Freedom Flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza, including Colonel Ann Wright, who is one of our advisors and was about to board the Conscience earlier this year. The boat was bombed by Israeli drones and put out of commission.

VFP has been on a 40-day hunger strike for Gaza, going on across from the United Nations building in New York, and various chapters from around the country have been joining that fast. Some veterans do it for a day, some for longer, eating 250 calories a day, which is the equivalent of what the Israelis allow to get through for the Palestinians.

The Israelis are using the denial of food as a weapon, which is a war crime. We managed to reach Senator Jeff Merkley’s office. He’s the senator from Oregon, and at least he has declared for a ceasefire.

VFP members don’t have to wait for a decision by the national leadership to take action. They go to protests. They help veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are going through post-traumatic stress.

Immigration and Los Angeles

Before commenting on immigration and what’s happening in Los Angeles, I should tell you about my own background. My father was born in Panamá. His father was working on the canal and married my grandmother, Delores Castillo, a Panamanian of Indigenous, Spanish and Afro-Panamanian background. I’m just a generation away.

I worked in the 1980s with a task force for Central American refugees and got my synagogue to be a part of the Portland Sanctuary Coalition. At the time I took in two refugees, one from Guatemala and one from El Salvador. Now all the sanctuary cities are under attack, including Portland.

Regarding the administration’s earlier orders to use of National Guard and other troops on the U.S. border with Mexico, VFP issued a statement reaching out to the troops and asking them to disobey those orders. We provided the GI hotline where they can learn their rights. Basically, we’re asking them to disobey illegal orders.

It is illegal for the government to ask the U.S. military to attack U.S. citizens in the United States. It’s against the Constitution. Of course we also warn them that even though the orders are illegal, it’s no guarantee the troops won’t get in trouble for disobeying.

But if they decide to disobey, they can get in touch via the GI hotline at 1-877-447-4487 where there are lawyers to help them. They can claim conscientious objector status at any time in their service.

At a meeting today [June 12] the VFP discussed updating the earlier position paper to include something specific about what Trump did in Los Angeles.

In a June 13 position paper, the VFP condemned Israel’s attack on Iran, called on the Trump administration to refrain from participating in the attack and to withhold military assistance from Israel. The VFP also protested the deployment of National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles, as well as the ICE raids on migrant workers. (VFP-Jun13)