CMCC Veterans Club to Hold Middle East Forum

March 24, 2016

The Central Maine Community College (CMCC) Veterans Club will hold a public forum on the Middle East on Wednesday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Jalbert Hall, Room J15. The public is invited to attend and admission is free of charge. The forum will discuss the current situation and to explore what course of action the United States might take in that conflicted region. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are encouraged to attend and offer their insights. The purpose is to generate insights into the conflicts in the region.

A panel of two CMCC faculty members, one of whom is a Vietnam veteran, and an Iraq War veterans will kick off the meeting with brief statements and solicit comments and questions from the audience.

The panel includes Chris Beam, Jared Golden and Karl Trautman.

Beam is an adjunct instructor in history at CMCC.  He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1967 to 1970, including a tour in Vietnam in 1968-1969, and is adviser to the CMCC Veterans Club.  He has taught numerous courses on the history of the Vietnam War at CMCC and other local institutions.  In addition, he pursued a career as an archivist, having worked at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where he worked for over four years on the Nixon White House tapes, and at Bates College.

Golden is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  He graduated from Bates College and has worked in logistics in the Middle East and on the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee. He currently represents Lewiston in the Maine House of Representatives.

Trautman is an instructor of political science at CMCC. His latest book is The Underdog in American Politics: The Democratic Party and Liberal Values. He has taught political science at various colleges and universities and has been a newspaper columnist, policy analyst for the Michigan State Senate and a research assistant for Meet the Press.