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Today's
Stories
September 18
/ 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Septemeber
17, 2004
Ray McGovern
Gossing
Over the Record
Patrick Cockburn
The New Iraqi Economy: Baghdad's Thriving Kidnapping Industry
Lee Sustar
The State of Working America: an Autopsy of the American Dream
Mike Whitney
John Kerry: 195 Lbs. of Political Helium, Not an Ounce of Sincerity
Victor Kattan
Black September
Ray Hanania
Israel's Demographics
Greg Bates
Nader's Victories: a Mid-Campaign Assessment
Website of
the Day
The Road to Hell
September 16,
2004
Landau / Hassen
Meet
the New Villain: Syria
Joanne Mariner
Inside
Darfur: a Photo Essay
Patrick Cockburn
US
Offers Conflicting Accounts of Baghdad Bloodbath
Greg Moses
Four Million Children Might Be News
Joshua Frank
Nader in the Battleground States
Christopher Brauchli
The Bush Drug Lottery Flops
David Himmelstein
Folke Bernadotte: a Rosh Hashonah Remembrance
Website of the Day
The Abu Ghraib Index
September 15,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Hell
on Haifa Street
Ron Jacobs
Oppose War, Not Just Bush
David Lindorff
Blanking Out Dissent
Joanne Mariner
Talking About Darfur: Is Genocide Just a Word?
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
An Open Letter to Madonna: Please Don't Support Israeli Apartheid
Dave Zirin
Is the NFL Ready for Us?
Yigal Bronner
"They
Are Building Walls Around Us"
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 14,
2004
Gary Leupp
The
Problem of Chechnya
Jennifer van
Bergen
What's
Wrong with Torture?
Stan Goff
Wake Up and Smell the Jungle Rot
Patrick Cockburn
The
Punishment of Fallujah: US Precision Strickes...on Ambulances
Anis Memon
Nader
in Michigan
Michael Donnelly
The Nuance Comes Off: Former Naderites Beg for Kerry Votes
Werther
Zell Miller: the Peckerwood Pericles
Website of
the Day
Osama Bin Forgotten?
September 13,
2004
Gabriel Kolko
Elections,
Alliances and the American Empire
Phillip Cryan
How Do You Say "Death Squad?": Language in Colombia's
War
Patrick Cockburn
One of Baghdad's Bloodiest Days: "I'm a Journalist! I'm
Dying! I'm Dying"
Noah Leavitt
The War on Civil Liberties
Robert Jensen
Highjacking Catastrophe: Bush, the Neo-Cons and 9/11
Mike Whitney
Alan Greenspan: Fed-Master to the Wealthy
John Chuckman
Stop Talking About the "Election"
Mike Burke
Kerry/Edwards Website Censors Discussion of Israel/Palestine
Issues
CounterPunch
Wire
The Quotations of David Cobb: "I Don't Care How Many Votes
I Get"
Website of the Day
Keep It In Your Pants: the Bush Plan to Combat Teen Promiscuity
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
Fred Gardner
Yet Another Prozac Scandal
Saul Landau
When Our Assassins Go Free
Jennifer Van Bergen
How to Beat Bush: a Simple Strategy for the Average American
Roger Burbach
/ Jim Tarbell
The Real Dead Enders: Iraq and the Crisis of Empire
Christopher Reed
9/11 in an Historical Context: a Minor Event When Compared to
Worldwide War Casualties
Francisc Catalin
An ABC of American Interventions
Carl Estabrook
Big Science and Government Terror
Bernard Chazelle
Anti-Americanism: a Clinical Study
Sharon Smith
Third Party Blues
Dave Lindorff
Perhaps This Time We're the Silent Majority
Mike Whitney
Fallujah: an Iraqi Beslan?
Frederick B.
Hudson
Their Sons Perished in the Flames, But Not Their Faith
Mickey Z.
Round Up the Usual Suspects: a Look Back at 9/11
Ron Jacobs
Redneck Music for the New Century
Greg Moses
Soap Opera Moments in Texas School Funding Trial
Benjamin Dangl
/ Andrew Kennis
An Interview with Leslie Cagan
Poets Basement
Del Papa, Albert, Gelman
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
September 18 / 19, 2004
The Comrades
Kerry Abandoned
The
Real Story of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
By
JOE ALLEN
Vietnam Veterans are "quite different
from veterans of earlier wars," observed Ralph Nader in
1973--then at the height of his fame as a consumer advocate.
No prior war, Nader pointed out, had "witnessed such a moral
dissent by soldiers and new veterans." What was it about
the Vietnam War that produced this high level of opposition within
the military? And what role did this resistance and organizations
like VVAW play in ending the war in Vietnam?
The war that the U.S. fought
in Vietnam was a war against a people who had been trying to
free their country from foreign domination for many decades.
A powerful movement--known as the Vietminh and led by Ho Chi
Minh--defeated the Japanese occupation of Vietnam during the
Second World War.
In 1945, the Vietminh declared
Vietnam independent from its colonial master France. The French
tried to re-colonize Vietnam, but they were defeated by the Vietminh
movement after a nine-year war.
By the time large numbers of
U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam, the country had been partitioned,
and in South Vietnam, a new revolutionary nationalist movement
had arisen called the National Liberation Front (NLF)--known
to the Americans as the "Viet Cong." By 1965, the NLF
had been waging a war for several years against the corrupt,
dictatorial South Vietnamese government in the southern capital
of Saigon.
The U.S. invaded to prevent
the NLF from coming to power. Washington sent a huge army, eventually
reaching more than 500,000 troops, and it employed the most destructive
weapons to destroy the bases of the NLF in the countryside.
For the mainly working-class
soldiers who the U.S. sent to fight the Vietnamese people, the
war was a huge shock. The young troops had been told that all
"struggles for national liberation" were Communist
conspiracies, emanating from the ex-USSR or China. They were
trained for a war like the Second World War, involving set-piece
battles between great armies.
Instead, U.S. GIs found themselves
fighting a peasant guerrilla army of young men and women. Washington's
strategy was for a "total war"--so soldiers were ordered
to burn down villages, destroy large areas of the countryside
and kill as many NLF fighters as possible. The war sickened many
U.S. soldiers, seeming to be a pointless exercise in destruction.
Others began to realize that
they were fighting on the wrong side. Bill Ehrhardt, a Marine
in Vietnam, said the reality of the war produced a "staggering
realization." "In grade school, we learned about the
redcoats, the nasty British soldiers that tried to stifle our
freedom," he wrote. "Subconsciously, but not very subconsciously,
I began increasingly to have the feeling that I was a redcoat."
* *
*
GI RESISTANCE to the war began
much earlier than people realize today. In June 1965, Capt. Richard
Steinke, a West Point graduate stationed in Vietnam refused to
board an aircraft that was supposed to take him to a remote Vietnamese
village. "The Vietnamese war," Steinke said, "is
not worth a single American life." He was court-martialed
and dismissed from the Army.
In February 1966, ex-Green
Beret Master Sgt. Donald Duncan, who had served in Vietnam, published
a powerful indictment of the war titled "The whole thing
was a lie!" in the left-wing Ramparts magazine. Duncan
was a militant anti-Communist, but his experience in Vietnam
transformed his view of the war. Duncan became convinced that
the majority of the South Vietnamese were "either anti-Saigon
or pro-Viet Cong or both."
The Fort Hood Three, a trio
of U.S. Army privates--James Johnson, Dennis Mora, and David
Samas, all members of the 2nd Armored Division stationed at Fort
Hood, Texas--refused to serve in Vietnam. The three were from
working-class families, and they denounced the war as "immoral,
illegal and unjust." They were arrested, court-martialed
and imprisoned.
In 1967, U.S. Army Dr. Howard
Levy refused to train Green Berets at Fort Jackson, S.C. Levy
argued that the Green Berets were "murderers of women and
children" and "killers of peasants." He was court-martialed
and sentenced to 27 months in a military prison. The colonel
who presided at Levy's court-martial said: "The truth of
the statements is not an issue in this case."
As left-wing historian Howard
Zinn wrote, "The individual acts multiplied. A Black private
in Oakland refused to board a troop plane to Vietnam, although
he faced 11 years at hard labor. A navy nurse, Lt. Susan Schnall,
was court-martialed for marching in a peace demonstration while
in uniform, and for dropping antiwar leaflets from a plane on
navy installations."
These individual examples of
resistance would crescendo into mutinies and desertion, as whole
groups of soldiers, sailors and pilots refused to fight the war.
One U.S. colonel described the collapse of U.S. forces as equivalent
"to the breakdown of [Russia's] Tsarist armies during World
War I."
In 1967, the growing antiwar
movement at home led to the founding of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW) by Jan Barry. Barry was an army veteran who had
been stationed in Vietnam in 1963. He was disturbed by what he
saw there and later dropped out of West Point to pursue a writing
career.
During 1967 and 1968, hundreds
of veterans joined the VVAW, but the organization virtually disappeared
into Eugene McCarthy's campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential
nomination in 1968. The group revived over the next two years
as a result of a political awakening of Vietnam veterans--around
such issues as their ill treatment at Veterans Administration
hospitals, public exposure of the war crimes committed at My
Lai, and the killing of student antiwar demonstrators at Kent
State University following Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia
in 1970.
This revival brought new members
who came from mostly working-class families--and who had witnessed
some of the worst combat of the war. The most famous was Ron
Kovic, whose life was depicted in the film Born on the Fourth
of July. Al Hubbard, a Black veteran, raised the need to
address the racist treatment of African American soldiers and
veterans.
John Kerry also joined at this
time. But what made him so different was that he was from a wealthy
background and had political connections at the upper levels
of the Democratic Party.
* *
*
THE TWO historic events organized
by the VVAW that would catapult the organization into the leadership
of the antiwar movement were the Winter Soldier Investigation
and protests in Washington, D.C., called Dewey Canyon III.
The VVAW gave the name "Winter
Soldier" to its war crimes investigation as a reference
to Tom Paine's tribute to the soldiers who stayed the course
during the darkest days of the American Revolution in the 18th
century. The "new winter soldiers," as they saw themselves,
hoped to end the Vietnam War by exposing U.S. war crimes. Al
Hubbard said that the purpose of the investigation was to show
that "My Lai was not an isolated incident," but "only
a minor step beyond the standard official United States policy
in Indochina."
The Winter Soldier Investigation
(the full transcript of testimony is available online) took place
in Detroit in January and February of 1971. During that weekend,
more than 100 veterans from Vietnam testified about the atrocities
that they participated in or witnessed. Another 500 to 700 veterans
came from across the country to listen.
The statements of the vets
were painful, gut wrenching and tear-filled, riveting and shocking
everyone present. Sgt. Jamie Henry said that he witnessed the
murder of 19 women and children during his tour of duty, which
he reported to superiors, but got no response.
Henry explained how the racism
ingrained in soldiers made such atrocities possible. "You
are trained 'gook, gook, gook,' and once the military has got
the idea implanted in you that these people are not humans...it
makes it a little bit easier to kill 'em," he said.
Hundreds of veterans flooded
into the VVAW after the hearings--a sign of how dramatically
the Winter Soldier Investigation spoke to their own experiences.
Other hearings modeled on the ones in Detroit were held across
the country, and members of Congress publicly called for official
investigations into the charges that the Winter Soldiers raised.
Next came Dewey Canyon III.
The five days of protest in April 1971 were named after Dewey
Canyons I and II, Pentagon code names for two "limited incursions"--translation:
invasions--of the country of Laos, which bordered Vietnam. The
VVAW described the demonstrations as a "limited incursion
into the country of Congress."
As many as 2,000 Vietnam veterans
came to Washington to protest the war and the treatment they
received from the government that sent them to fight. The protesters
mercilessly harassed the political establishment in Washington.
They sat in at the U.S. Supreme Court to protest the illegality
of the war. They humiliated Strom Thurmond, the racist bigot
and pro-war senator.
Veterans and Gold Star mothers
who had lost a child in the war succeeded on a second attempt
to make their way into Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath
for the U.S. dead in Vietnam. Jan Barry presented a Congressional
delegation with a list of 16 demands from the VVAW, which included:
"immediate, unilateral, unconditional withdrawal" of
all U.S. forces from Indochina; amnesty for all Americans who
refused to fight in Vietnam; a formal inquiry into war crimes;
and improved veterans benefits.
There were two high points
to Dewey Canyon III. One was Kerry's powerful speech before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he asked, "How
can you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How can
you ask a man to die for a mistake?" The moment made Kerry
into one of the most recognized figures in the antiwar movement.
The second--and far more important--was
a ceremony in which veterans "returned" their medals
to the U.S. government, by throwing them over a fence in front
of the U.S. Capitol building. Jack Smith, a highly decorated
ex-Marine sergeant, was the first to go. He said that his medals
were a "symbol of dishonor, shame and inhumanity."
Smith offered an apology to
the Vietnamese people "whose hearts were broken, not won,"
because of "genocide, racism and atrocity." Hundreds
of veterans followed him.
The Dewey Canyon III demonstrations
were the lead story every night on the television news--and on
the front page of newspapers across the country. The face of
the antiwar movement--until then associated mainly with college
students--had changed for millions of people.
The Vietnam War ended for most
Americans in January 1973, when Richard Nixon announced a peace
settlement--though, in fact, the fall of Saigon, which marked
Washington's final defeat, was still two years away. The VVAW
played an important role in bringing about the end of that war--and
to this day, the organization continues, having joined the protest
against Bush's latest invasion of Iraq.
The struggle of U.S. soldiers
against the war--and their organization, the VVAW--should be
remembered, celebrated and defended. That means challenging the
Swift Boat Veterans' version of history. And it also means challenging
the John Kerry of today, who wants to run away from this antiwar
legacy.
Joe Allen writes for the Socialist
Worker.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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