Rory Fanning
Rory Fanning, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion, became one of the first U.S. Army Rangers to resist the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror. In 2008–2009 he walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation. Rory is the author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America and co-author of Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter. He has bylines at Common Dreams, The Guardian, The Nation, and TomDispatch. In 2015 he was awarded a grant from the Chicago Teachers Union to speak to CPS students about America’s endless wars and to fill in some of the blanks military recruiters often ignore about America’s endless wars. As a sponsored lifetime member of Veterans for Peace, Rory has traveled multiple times to Japan on speaking tours to express solidarity with those seeking to abolish nuclear weapons and close U.S. military bases around the world. Rory currently lives in Chicago and works for Haymarket Books.
Articles by this author
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Views Monday, February 25, 2019 A Teenage War Resister in Israel Hilel Garmi’s phone is going straight to voicemail and all I’m hoping is that he’s not back in prison. I’ll soon learn that he is. Prison 6 is a military prison. It’s situated in the Israeli coastal town of Atlit, a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea and less than an hour’s drive from Hilel’s... Read more |
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Views Monday, November 12, 2018 The Stories War Tells Me I’m here in Chicago, 7,000 miles and 15 years away from Jalalabad, a desolate town in southwestern Afghanistan. Yet sometimes it seems to me as if it were yesterday, or even tomorrow, and anything but thousands of miles distant. There are moments when it feels like I never left -- or maybe I mean,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 01, 2018 Your Commander-in-Chief Is Lying to You: Veterans Issue Open Letter to Active Duty US Soldiers To All Active Duty Soldiers: Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat . These small... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 08, 2016 The Antiwar Tour A vibrant antiwar movement is blooming in Japan right now. Trade unions, civic groups, and an overwhelming number of young people are galvanizing the country around Article 9 of the Japanese constitution — the article that has kept Japan out of war for the last seventy years. Each weekend since... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 07, 2016 The Wars in Our Schools Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 13, 2015 Letter to a Young Army Ranger (From an Old One): 'Why the War on Terror Shouldn’t Be Your Battle' Dear Aspiring Ranger, You’ve probably just graduated from high school and you’ve undoubtedly already signed an Option 40 contract guaranteeing you a shot at the Ranger indoctrination program (R.I.P.). If you make it through R.I.P. you’ll surely be sent off to fight in the Global War on Terror. You’... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 27, 2014 Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops? Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it... Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 12, 2014 Friendly? All Deaths Are Shameful in a War That Shouldn't Be Twenty-four hours after reading the news that five U.S. soldiers were killed in yet another friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, I fear this response is already old news. And it is old news, Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire 10 years ago last April. It has been 12-years since the first... Read more |