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Vets Demand Amnesty: It's Right To Resist Unjust Wars!

By VVAW

National Amnesty Week was held recently in states across the country. It was called and sponsored by many amnesty organizations and religious groups. Various activities occurred from community meetings to Congressional lobbying. The idea of this amnesty week was to attempt to focus attention on the fact that a total and universal amnesty has not been given for the approximately 2 million people who protested against the Indochina war in one way or another.

The amnesty week came approximately a month after the Presidential Clemency Board released its report on the program initiated by President Ford in September, 1974. This clemency program was put forward by the Ford administration in response to his pardon of Richard Nixon, the ousted bum who preceded him.

The Ford Program was a sham from the beginning to the end. Its provisions for who was to receive clemency excluded most of those who needed a full amnesty. The single largest group in need of amnesty are the approximately 580,000 Vietnam era vets who received less than honorable discharges for their opposition to the war in Indochina and to the military itself. The program also excluded those who were arrested for anti-war activities, numbering in the thousands.

For veterans, the bad discharges mean more than just a slap on the wrist from the military. If you've got one it means that you are marked for the rest of your life. Employers don't want a vet with a bad discharge; the VA doesn't care if you live or die and the GI Bill is out of reach. For the small handful of veterans who were included in the Clemency program they could exchange their undesirable discharge for a clemency discharge, which is comparable to moving from Sodom to Gomorrah.

The vast majority of those included in the clemency program avoided it like the Black Plague. The board stated in its report that about 82% of eligible enrollees didn't even bother to enter it. The program was a flop in every way. But it is clear that the program was never designed to give amnesty or even clemency with strings attached.

During the late 60s and early 70s, millions of Americans protested the war in Indochina. GIs refused to go out on patrols in Vietnam and veterans of the war joined with others to denounce it. Though protest to the war varied, sometimes muddled in moralism, and sometimes in acts of individual sabotage, the sense that US participation in the war in Vietnam was unjust became more and more clear to the vast majority of Americans. Opposing the war was absolutely correct, because it didn't serve our interests and it certainly didn't serve the interest of the Indochinese peoples. It was a war waged by the rulers of this country and the puppet governments in Indochina to try and stop the struggle for freedom and independence being waged by the Indochinese people. But the intervention didn't work--the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people won their struggle and are now on the road to rebuilding their nations free of US domination.

But for Americans who opposed the war, we haven't won our battle yet. While we rejoice in the victory of the Indochinese peoples we are saddled with bad discharges and criminal records. The fight for total, unconditional amnesty continues and this fight is closely linked to the fight for a single-type discharge for all veterans and the opposition to rich man's war that serves the interests of the ruling class.