BANGOR – Seeing war up close may make one its harshest critic.

That’s the explanation many former combatants give for joining the Veterans for Peace group. A Bangor chapter was launched Friday, with an announcement made at the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine.

Ron Gillis, 63, of Bangor said he began making telephone calls last week to veterans who oppose the U.S. war with Iraq and quickly found several who agreed to form a local chapter of the international anti-war group.

“We feel that as veterans, we can speak,” and say that “supporting the troops does not mean supporting a war,” Gillis said.

The veterans support those U.S. forces in harm’s way, he said, “and we want them to come home, without artificial limbs, without Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

Increasingly in recent wars, Gillis argued, casualties are more likely to be civilians. He cited a Scientific American report that estimated civilian casualties in World War I at 15 percent, in World War II at 65 percent, while wars in the last decade see civilian casualty rates of 90 percent.

“We may be able to slide away with a euphemism like ‘collateral damage,'” he said, “but this affects the young people who see it.”

On Friday, eight veterans were in attendance at the Bangor center to announce the new chapter.

Gillis served in the Army and then the Air Force from 1956 to 1964. He wanted out of the military, he said, after seeing planes taking off loaded with hydrogen bombs at an air base in England.

“This doesn’t work,” he remembers thinking, and then sought and won conscientious objector status and was discharged.

Gillis, who recently took part in a protest at U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s office in Bangor, also said he objects to the $80 billion cost estimate for the war with Iraq, “all the while reducing veterans benefits.”

Veterans for Peace includes those who fought in the Spanish Civil War, right up to those who fought in the first Gulf War, he said.

The Peace and Justice Center is organizing a “human chain of concern” for Bangor today, beginning at noon. Those who oppose the war in Iraq are asked to form a line along U.S. Route 2 from Eastern Maine Medical Center to Cascade Park toward Mount Hope Cemetery and hold photos of friends and relatives in military service or photos of Iraqi civilians.

A rally against the war scheduled for today in Augusta has been rescheduled for April 19.