Coffee Strong - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Coffee Strong is a GI coffeehouse based on the tradition of resistance coffee houses opened during the Vietnam war

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

by antiwar veterans and active duty soldiers. Based in Lakewood, WA it was founded in 2008 by veterans returning from the wars in Afghanistan

War in Afghanistan (2001–present)

The War in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, as the armed forces of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Afghan United Front launched Operation Enduring Freedom...

and Iraq. Its located within 300 meters of the gates at Joint Base Lewis-McChord

Joint Base Lewis-McChord

Joint Base Lewis-McChord is a United States military facility located south-southwest of Tacoma, Washington. The facility is under the jurisdiction of the United States Army Joint Base Garrison, Joint Base Lewis-McChord....

. It is one of three currently active GI resistance coffee houses along with Under the Hood Café

Under the Hood Café

Under the Hood Café is a coffee house located at 17 South College Street in Killeen, Texas. It provides services for soldiers located at Fort Hood, one of the largest American military installation in the world. Under the Hood Café is managed by Cynthia Thomas and is a project of the Fort Hood...

near Fort Hood in Texas & Off Base in Norfolk, Virginia

Norfolk, Virginia

Norfolk is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. With a population of 242,803 as of the 2010 Census, it is Virginia's second-largest city behind neighboring Virginia Beach....

. According to Coffee Strong board member Zoltan Grossman

The goal of the G.I. coffeehouse is to provide soldiers, their families and recent vets a place away from the base where they can learn about resources available to them, meet with G.I. rights counselors, and access alternative information. It holds weekly movie nights, and hosts speakers, hiphop, punk and folk concerts, and other events. The response from soldiers visiting the coffeehouse has so far been overwhelmingly positive.

The Coffee Strong advisory board includes linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

, Marjorie Cohn

Marjorie Cohn

Marjorie Cohn is a professor of law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, California, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild.In 1978 Cohn received a job in the International Association of Democratic Lawyers...

, Mike Ferner

Mike Ferner

Mike Ferner is a former Toledo, Ohio city council member, Vietnam era veteran, author, and peace activist. He is a member of the POCLAD collective. Toledo had the most active campaign in the country for municipal public power in the late 1980s and early '90s...

, Eva Golinger

Eva Golinger

Eva Golinger is a Venezuelan-American attorney and editor of the Correo del Orinoco International, a web- and print-based newspaper which is financially backed by the Venezuelan government....

, Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail is an American journalist who is best known as one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 Iraq invasion. He spent eight months in Iraq, between 2003 to 2005, and presented his stories on his website, entitled Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches....

, Antonia Juhasz

Antonia Juhasz

Antonia Juhasz is the Director of the Energy Program at Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights non-profit organization. She is a policy-analyst, author and activist....

, Col. Ann Wright (Ret.)

Ann Wright

Mary Ann Wright is a former United States Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She received the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in...

, and the late historian and author Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United...

. In 2011 filmmaker and professor of Folklore and English at the University of Oregon Lisa Gilman released the film Grounds for Resistance about Coffee Strong and featured interviews by some of its founders and reactions to it from Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers.

External Links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.