2 Notable VVAW Sponsored Events

2.1 Operation RAW

During September 4-7, 1970, Operation RAW ("Rapid American Withdrawal") involved an 86 mile march from Morristown, NJ, to Valley Forge State Park. Mock search and destroy missions were planned during the march. Members of the Youth International Party (YIP) were invited to participate as blindfolded "Vietcong" prisoners, but decided not to participate because such a passive role would be a "bore" and a "drag". More than 150 combat veterans gathered and began a long march through the countryside toward Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The veterans, who held 110 purple heart medals between them, had enlisted the help of the aptly named Philadelphia Guerrilla Theater Company and also volunteers from Nurses for Peace to go ahead of the march and plant themselves in the villages and towns along the march route. Sweeping through the rural back countries of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, the vets wore as much of their combat fatigues and battle gear as they had been able to scrape together. Their "infantry company" was realistically armed with toy rifles. As the column of veterans passed through the communities, they cordoned off the villages, "Interrogated," "tortured," and "shot" the actors posing as civilians, and in general tried to recreate the brutal realities of war. Leaflets were handed out to shocked onlookers, explaining that such events were regularily occurring for real in villages across Vietnam. The event culminated in a rally at Valley Forge, where speakers and sponsors of the event included Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie, Reps. John D. Conyers, Jr. , and Allard Lowenstein, Karen Burstein, Bella Abzug, Mike Lerner , Army First Lt. Louis Font, Paul O'Dwyer, John Kerry, Joe Kennedy, Rev. James Bevel, Jane Fonda, Mark Lane, Donald Sutherland.

2.2 Winter Soldier Investigation

In January 1971, VVAW sponsored The Winter Soldier Investigation to gather testimony from soldiers about war crimes being committed in Southeast Asia as a result of American war policies. Intended as a public event, it was boycotted by much of the mainstream media, although the Detroit Free Press covered it daily and immediately began investigating what was being said.

Veterans applying for participation in the investigation were asked if they witnessed or participated in:

• Search and Destroy Mission
• Burning of Village
• The destruction of crops or animals
• The killing of villagers
• Harassment & Interdiction Fire
• Pacification program
• Recon by fire
• "Rat patrols"
• Any chemical agents used
• Any contact with deformed babies
• Distribution of contaminated food
• POW treatment
• Medical treatment
• Any torture used
• Prisoners shot
• Prisoners thrown from helicopters
• Prisoners denied food, water, or medical treatment
• Orders to not take prisoners or dispose of prisoners
• Treatment of civilians and as prisoners

This event was financially supported by the efforts of several celebrity peace activists. Winter Soldier Investigation stories were read into the Congressional Record by Senator Hatfield. In 1972, VVAW continued antiwar protests, and released Winter Soldier, a 16mm black and white documentary movie showing participants giving testimony at the 1971 hearing, as well as footage of the Dewey Canyon III week of events. Membership in the VVAW was over 20,000 just after this WSI event.

2.3 Dewey Canyon III - Washington, D.C., April 1971

Operation Dewey Canyon 1 took place during January and February 1969. During a five-day period in February, elements of the Third Marine Division invaded Laos. Operation Dewey Canyon II was the name given to the first seven days of the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in February 1971. The peaceful anti-war protest organized by VVAW took its name from those military operations and was dubbed Operation Dewey Canyon III which took place in Washington, D.C, April 19 through April 23, 1971. It was referred to by the participants as "a limited incursion into the country of Congress."

In terms of media coverage and Vietnam veteran participation, Dewey Canyon III transcended the Winter Soldier Investigation and any previous VVAW event. Led by Gold Star Mothers (mothers of soldiers killed in Vietnam), more than 1100 veterans marched across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to the Arlington Cemetery gate, just beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A memorial service for their peers was conducted by Reverend Jackson H. Day, who had just a few days earlier resigned his military chaplainship. Included with his passages of scripture and citations of poetry was a personal statement, including the following:

Maybe there are some others here like me--who wanted desperately to believe that what we were doing was acceptable, who hung on the words of "revolutionary development" and "winning the hearts and minds of the people." We had been told that on the balance the war was a good thing and we tried to make it a good thing; all of us can tell of somebody who helped out an orphanage, or of men like one sergeant who adopted a crippled Vietnamese child; and even at My Lai the grief of one of the survivors was mixed with bewilderment as he told a reporter, "I just don't understand it ... always before, the Americans brought medicine and candy." I believe there is something in all of us that would wave a flag for the dream of an America that brings medicine and candy, but we are gathered here today, waving no flags, in the ruins of that dream. Some of you saw right away the evil of what was going on; others of us one by one, adding and re-adding the balance sheet of what was happening and what could possibly be accomplished finally saw that no goal could be so laudable, or defense so necessary, as to justify what we have visited upon the people of Indochina.

The Gold Star Mothers and a few others approached the cemetary gate to enter and lay wreaths, but the gate had been closed and locked upon word of their impending arrival. They placed the wreaths instead along the gate, and peacefully departed.

The march reformed and continued to the Capitol, with Congressman Paul McCloskey joining the procession enroute. McCloskey, and fellow Representatives Bella Abzug, Donald Edwards, Shirley Chisholm, Edmund Muskie and Ogden Reid addressed the large crowd in a show of support. VVAW members defied a Justice Department ordered injuction that they not camp on The Mall, and they set up camp anyway. Later that day, the District Court of Appeals lifted the injuction. Some members headed directly into the halls of Congress to lobby against the U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam. They presented Congress with their 16-point suggested resolution for ending the war in Vietnam.

On Tuesday, April 20, a couple hundred veterans listened to hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on proposals to end the war. Other veterans, still angry at the insult to the Gold Star Mothers when they were refused entry to Arlington Nat'l Cemetery the previous day, marched back to the front gate. After initial refusal of entry, the veterans were finally allowed in. That afternoon veterans perform guerrilla theater on the Capitol steps re-enacting fighting scenes from Vietnam. That evening, Senators Claiborne Pell and Philip Hart held a fund-raising party for the veterans. During the party it was announced that Chief Justice Warren Burger of the United States Supreme Court had reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals. The veterans were given until 4:30 the following afternoon to break camp and leave the National Mall. It was noted that this was the fastest reversal of an Appeals Court decision in recorded history.

On Wednesday, April 21, more than 50 veterans marched to the Pentagon and attempted to surrender and turn themselves in as war criminals. A Pentagon representative took their names and then turned them away. More veterans continued to meet with and lobby their representatives in Congress. The guerrilla theater re-enactments were moved to the steps of the Justice Department. Senator Edward Kennedy joins the veterans on the Mall. The veterans all expected to be arrested for continuing to camp on the National Mall, but no arrests occurred. Several of the patrolling park police officers reassured the veterans that arrests were not going to be made, despite orders to do so.

On Thursday, April 22, a large group of veterans demonstrated on the steps of the Supreme Court, and demanded to know why the Supreme Court had not ruled on the constitutionality of the war in Vietnam. The veterans sang "God Bless America" and 110 were arrested for disturbing the peace, and were later released. John Kerry, as VVAW spokesman, testified against the war for 2 hours in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before a packed room of observers and media. [1] Lobbying on Capitol Hill by the veterans continued all day. A Washington District Court judge angrily dissolved his injunction order, rebuking the Justice Department lawyers for requesting the court order and then not enforcing it. Veterans staged a candlelight march around the White House, while a huge American flag was carried upside down in the historic international signal of distress.

On Friday, April 23, more than 800 veterans, one by one, cast down their medals on the steps of the Capitol, repudiating the Vietnam war and the significance of those medals. Several important hearings in Congress and the Senate were held this day regarding the mass media?s dissemination of misinformation about the war, as well as on atrocities committed in Vietnam. The veterans planted a tree on the mall during a ceremony to symbolize their wish to preserve life and the environment.

Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield arranged at least $50,000 in funding during preparations for Dewey Canyon III. The VVAW paid $94,000 for an ad to advertise this event in the April 11, 1971 New York Times.

2.4 Walter Reed Memorial Service

In May 1971, the VVAW and former Army chaplain Reverend Jackson Day conducted a service for veterans. This service was held in the chapel at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Injured and disabled veterans who were inpatients at Walter Reed were brought into the chapel in wheelchairs. The service included a place for individual prayers or public confession, and many veterans took the floor to recount things they had done or seen for which they felt pain, sadness, guilt, remorse, and mostly anger. This would be the last service performed by Jackson Day for almost two decades.

2.5 Operation POW

Operation POW, organized by the VVAW in Massachusetts, got its name from the group's concern that Americans were prisoners of the Vietnam War, as well as to honor American POWs held captive by North Vietnam.

The event sought to tie antiwar activism to patriotic themes. Over the May, 1971 Memorial Day weekend, veterans and other participants marched from Concord to a rally on Boston Common. The plan was to invoke the spirit of the American Revolution and Paul Revere by spending successive nights at the sites of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill, culminating in a Memorial Day rally with a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

When the participants tried to camp on the village green in Lexington, at 2:30 a.m. on May 30, local and state police awoke and arrested 441 demonstrators for trespassing. All were given the Miranda Warning and were hauled away on school buses to spend the night at the Lexington Public Works Garage. The protestors later paid a $5 fine and were released. The mass arrests caused a community backlash and ended up giving positive coverage to the VVAW.

2.6 Kansas City meeting

During a meeting in Kansas City in mid November 1971, Scott Camil a radical leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War proposed the assassination of the most conservative members of Congress, as well as any other powerful opponents of the antiwar movement.

According to interviews with VVAW members who were present at the Kansas City meeting, Camil organized something he called ?The Phoenix Project,? named after the original Phoenix Program operations during the Vietnam War used to destroy the Viet Cong leadership by targeted assassination. Mr. Camil?s Phoenix Project plan was to execute the Southern senatorial leadership that was backing the war including John Tower, Strom Thurmond, and John Stennis. In Camil's words, "I was serious. I felt that I spent two years killing women and children in their own fucking homes. These are the guys that fucking made the policy, and these were the guys that were responsible for it, and these were the guys that were voting to continue the fucking war when the public was against it. I felt that if we really believed in what we were doing, and if we were willing to put our lives on the line for the country over there, we should be willing to put our lives on the line for the country over here." [2] The assassinations were to be executed during the Senate Christmas recess. The plan was overwhelmingly voted down.

3 Post Vietnam War Activities

By 1973, US combat involvement in Vietnam ended, and VVAW changed its emphasis to include advocating amnesty for draft resisters and dissenters. President Jimmy Carter eventually granted an amnesty in 1980. The VVAW also organizes several programs and fundraising events in support of veterans.

4 Similarly-named different group

The relatively small group Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist (VVAW-AI) is not a faction, caucus or part of VVAW. The VVAW web site describes VVAW-AI as "the creation of an obscure, ultra-left sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) ... designed to pimp off of VVAW's history of struggle." In the mid- 1970s, as VVAW membership severely dropped after the end of the war, members of Bob Avakian's militant RCP were able to gain influential positions in the VVAW, including the National Office. A rift in the remaining membership formed due to the opposed ideologies, and Avakian's group formed a separate organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist (VVAW-AI). VVAW filed and won a lawsuit prohibiting Avakian's group from using the VVAW name, logos and materials.

5 Further reading

• Kerry, John, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The New Soldier. MacMillan Publishing Company: October 1971. ASIN 002073610X

6 See also

• Going Upriver
• Fulbright Hearing
• Tiger Force (commandos)
• Winter Soldier Investigation

7 External links

• VVAW web site
• The Winter Soldier Investigation
• Internet Movie Database - Winter Soldier
• Freekerrybook.org - Partial online version of the VVAW book The New Soldier

Vietnam War Social Justice

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