Phil Esmonde - In Memoriam

Left: Phil Esmonde (at right) At Quaker House, with Thomas Mayfield, a military CO he worked with. Above right: a more recent photo of Phil.


Phil Esmonde, who served as Director of Quaker House from 1998 to 2000, died on December 27, 2011, after a struggle with esophageal cancer.  He left Quaker House to return to Sri Lanka, his wife's home country. There he worked for several years with Oxfam. Then in 2007 he was appointed Capacity Building Director for the relatively new group, Nonviolent Peaceforce. He was in charge of NP's recruitment and training of field staff. Alongside that work, he also more recently facilitated reconciliation sessions in a conflict-torn area of northeast India.

       Here is more biographical information about Phil, with special focus on his time in Fayetteville, edited from the Quaker House book, YES to the Troops, NO to the Wars:

       Phil Esmonde was born in England and spent part of his childhood in Canada, but enlisted in the US Air Force in 1968, at the age of 17, while living in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was naivete that led him to sign up, he said, so he wouldn’t get drafted.
    “Quaker House and its important work seems a natural cycle of return for me,” he told supporters in a 1998 letter. “I can very much relate to the young men and women who are struggling with deep questions concerning violence with little or no support.”
    “I went through a very lonely process with my [Conscientious Objector] application and had no outside counseling or other support,” he said. Before ultimately being denied conscientious objector status, Esmonde had letters of recommendation and support for him torn up by commanding officers and was refused access by the Air Force to certain documents that the lawyers from the ACLU who were helping him needed. He was told to state in writing why he wanted the documents so that the Air Force could decide whether or not to provide them. “That was a few days before I was slated to go to Vietnam,” he remembered. “I came very, very close to deserting, but instead felt compelled to go to Vietnam.”
    Once there, he refused to fight and was assigned to do maintenance on the Air Force telephone system. “The process of fighting the system before going (to Vietnam) as well as while there, turned me into an activist,” he explained in a letter to the QH Board.
    He first encountered Quakers while in college at the University of Victoria in Canada, meeting some British Quakers who gave a talk about their opposition to the war. “They were trying to go onto a base to prevent it from being bombed,” he explained. “I may or may not have agreed with what they were doing...but what struck me was their strong faith and inner conviction.” He didn’t feel that his own religion, Catholicism, supported his position on war and violence and eventually became a Quaker.
    One morning in late 1998, while Sandy Sweitzer was helping Phil Esmonde settle in at Quaker House, a letter arrived from Fort Benning, Georgia. It was from a soldier in basic training there, complaining of the harassment he was receiving as he awaited discharge. He felt so isolated he had even considered suicide, he wrote. Later they answered calls together on the GI Rights Hotline and within three hours they had spoken with three soldiers, including one who was preparing a conscientious objector application and an AWOL soldier looking for advice on turning himself in.
    “In that one day I was able to get a deeper glimpse of the need for Quaker House and also the deep gratitude with which GIs receive Quaker House’s work,” Esmonde recalled.
    By the time Esmonde arrived, most new counseling cases came in via the GI Rights Hotline. By 1998, total calls reached 2800. Of all the Hotline calls during this period, 45 per cent or 1,872 calls were channeled to Quaker House. That was an average of over five calls per day. Hotline phone charges for Quaker House that year totaled $2,100. This was a significant budget item, and represented a 52 per cent increase in call volume and cost over the previous year.
    Although Quaker House and other network groups continued to advertise the Hotline in military newspapers like Fort Bragg’s Paraglide , it was the Internet that facilitated the boom in calls. The new technology made the free, private counseling relatively easy to find.
    Esmonde answered calls coming into the Hotline from area codes in eleven states, providing coverage during daytime and early evening hours five to seven days a week. A message machine picked up calls at non-answering times and he would follow up with a phone call back or information through the mail.
    Gone were the days of fretting about whether there was still a need for the project. Instead, the rising tide of Hotline calls was by now beginning to swamp everything else. Esmonde found it increasingly difficult to maintain the diverse program Quaker House was accustomed to having. Of particular importance to Esmonde was visiting high risk prisoners in the brig at Camp Lejeune. As official visitors sanctioned by Prison Visitation and Support, he and his wife Kaushalia, whom he had met in Sri Lanka, relished their opportunities to relieve some of the isolation and loneliness the young men suffered.
    “The Board does not want the director to spend all of his or her time just on calls,” the Overseers instructed, “but to also respond to other leadings as able.” In hopes of giving Esmonde some space for other work, in early 1999 the Board put out a call, seeking Friends and others around the Southeast willing to be trained as volunteer Hotline counselors. Steve Woolford & Lenore Yarger answered the call and began training to take calls also.
    Doing military counseling on the phone began as part-time volunteer work for the couple, but in less than a year’s time they would come to play a much larger part in the work of Quaker House.
    “About half of the calls coming to Quaker House are from new recruits at Fort Benning, Georgia,” Esmonde reported in the Quaker House Newsletter in early 1999. “Our existence is one of the hottest topics and pieces of information in circulation.” The reports from Fort Benning, where many new recruits were in basic training, told of high levels of harassment, physical and mental abuse resulting in high numbers of AWOL soldiers. The parents of one soldier at Fort Benning who was a potential suicide asked Esmonde for help in contacting their congressman.
    “Quaker House is trying to get better documentation of the abuse that is taking place in hopes of passing it to those who can do something about it,” Esmonde wrote.
    The majority of new recruits that Esmonde spoke with entered through the Delayed Entry Program, or DEP, which was notorious for trapping young people, like Trey Rogers, before they had a chance to consider their options. One common problem with the DEP that counselors saw frequently involved recruits with identified prior health problems being told by recruiters not to say anything about them on enlistment forms. Once in the military, when such problems surfaced, the enlistee was subject to being court martialed for falsifying the enlistment application – and the recruiter would by then either be long gone, or would deny everything.
    Esmonde began checking with some of the counselees to see if they would be willing to speak to the media once they were discharged. With the help of the CCCO based in Oakland, California, Esmonde sent out a press release about the situation at Fort Benning and by that summer he was in touch with a producer from one of the national TV networks in Atlanta. The resulting media attention focused on the DEP. The two-part series, “GI Lies,” aired in early November, 1999 on Fox 5 in Atlanta, Georgia.
    Using stories from Esmonde’s counselees, the news programs showed how many young people were maneuvered into the DEP by recruiters’ promises. Discovering later that they’d been misled or lied to, many tried to drop out of DEP.
    Although it was in fact legal and easy to quit DEP, many were falsely told by recruiters that quitting was illegal and they would end up in jail. Thus many went on to boot camp, and once sworn in there, it was in fact a crime under military law to leave, or be Absent Without Official Leave (AWOL). Esmonde put the Fox News producers in touch with several individuals who had been falsely threatened with jail time, dishonorable discharges, and cutting off of scholarship money if they quit the DEP and failed to report to boot camp.
    The program also featured an ex-recruiter speaking out about the pressure tactics used to keep individuals in the DEP. He had concern for the legality of such tactics and noted for the need for groups like Quaker House to support these recruits.
    The program reached the conclusion that recruiters “intimidated, threatened and even outright lied to young people in an effort to bully them into enlisting.” Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a vet and member of Senate Armed Services Committee, publicized the report saying that he had sent copies of the program to the Pentagon. Esmonde remembered the expose as one of the highlights of his work at Quaker House.
    Abuse of the DEP by recruiters would be a continuing problem, which GI Hotline counselors still grapple with, more than a decade later.
    Over the next year, growth and change were rapid at Quaker House. Hotline calls continued to increase, taking up all the volunteer time Steve Woolford and Lenore Yarger could spare.
    Their involvement with GI counseling took an unexpected jump in late 2000. Early that year Phil Esmonde was offered a position with Oxfam. The London-based NGO asked him to direct their programs in Sri Lanka. Although he had signed up for a three-year stint at Quaker House, this was an offer he felt he could not refuse. It would allow him to get back to work he had grown to love while living in his wife’s home country. And though the work at Quaker House meant a lot to the couple, especially the counseling and the prison visitation, in truth Fayetteville seemed not to suit them. For one thing, the lack of public transportation frustrated Kaushaliya, who didn’t drive. Friends also noted that she was homesick. Here was a situation where the absence of Bruce Pulliam’s ability to smooth the adjustment was almost palpable. The Board accepted their sudden departure with regret, but recorded appreciation for their contributions to Quaker House.
     At the time, Quaker House was receiving close to 100 calls a month from the GI Rights Hotline. During one particular week in late July of 2000, Esmonde fielded 27 calls. The GI Rights Network web page was getting 75,000 hits per month.
      Steve and Lenore took over the Quaker House part of the GI Rights Hotline, a role they continue to fulfill. The Director's post was vacant for fourteen months, until Chuck Fager was appointed to the position.