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VVAW Calls For Vets' Actions May 31: Memorial Day--"Forget the GI Bill"

By VVAW

In the Bicentennial year 1976, Memorial Day celebrations are scoring a comeback. For several years the holiday was downplayed, but this year, the marching bands, the fife and drum corps, the renditions of "Taps" and readings from the Gettysburg Address are with us once again. Once more we will hear the politicians quoting, We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom..."

But Memorial Day takes on added significance this year because this is the date when 3.7 million veterans, those who got out of the military between 1954 and 1966, are being slashed from the GI Bill. This outright attack on vets will be veiled under phoney attempts to honor those who died in wars fought by the US. Flowers will be laid on graves around the country to "honor" the dead, but as the politicians and their rich bosses bend over forward in prayer, they'll be kicking the living veterans with their feet. Flowers are cheaper than paying veterans enough money to get a decent education.

But the attack on veterans coming on Memorial Day is only part of what these memorials will be. The Legionnaires and the politicians will be saying how glorious it is to die fighting their wars of imperialism. There's no doubt about it, these ceremonies will be pockmarked with references to the current conflict between the US and the USSR, a bout how the US has to "honor" the dead by building a more powerful military so that it can protect the very thing that the dead soldiers fought for.

We in VVAW will honor our fallen brothers, not by jumping on the bandwagon of the ruling class, but by fighting like hell for the living. VVAW is calling for demonstrations by chapters around the country to demand "Extend and Expand the GI Bill" and to forcefully state, "We Won't Fight Another Rich Man's War."

Those of us who were sent to Vietnam to protect the profits of the rich are determined that the lessons we learned will be heard again on this Memorial Day, 1976. Whenever and wherever Memorial Day parades went on in this past several years, VVAW and Vietnam veterans were there to point, as best we could, to the real enemy--the class that sent us off to fight and die for their profits. VVAW in 1976 will once gain be exposing their lies as they attempt to peddle their message at the same time they are slicing the GI Bill, because we will be pointing to the reality behind their lies, the reality that many of us learned from fighting in their wars.

It may be that the people who run this country think that they're safe again to bring out the bands on Memorial Day; perhaps they think that the American people have forgotten Vietnam. And there's no doubt that they are going to be using Memorial Day just as they are using the whole Bicentennial year's celebration: to whip up support for another war.

The celebration of Memorial Day has its origins at the end of the Civil War. In scattered towns around the country, townspeople decorated the graves of the war dead with flowers. The most famous of these remembrances took place in Columbus, Mississippi where, in 1866, the women of the town--against the advice of the men--marched to a nearby cemetery which held the bodies of 1,500 Confederate and 100 Union casualties from the Battle of Shiloh. Soon, however, the band of rich hoodlums who controlled the country saw ways in which to turn this sincere celebration of grief and hope to their own purposes. In 1868, the Commander in Chief of the Grant Army of the Republic (the GAR was a national veterans organization which came out of the Civil War) issued an order setting May 30th as a National Memorial Day. And all the hullabullo which came to surround Memorial Day would, it was hoped, help turn peoples' attention away from the many problems that the Civil War did not solve--the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, the millions of Black people who were legally "emancipated" but were certainly not free, or the intensified exploitation of workers throughout the country.

As with other patriotic holidays, Memorial Day has been more and more used by the rich to glorify their wars, promote flag-waving nationalism, and to whip up enthusiasm for future wars. As always they have a message they want to get over--"Honor these brave men who died in defense of freedom; rededicate yourselves to the ideals for which they so gloriously gave their last full measure of devotion." No matter what the rhetorical flourishes happen to be, what they're saying is that we must all pull together, that all the wars the US has fought have been just and glorious ventures, and that the American people must be prepared to fight and die once again.

In the last five years, however, Memorial Day ceremonies have been canceled or at least played way down. The US ruling class realized that, while the Vietnam War was daily headlines, the American people were not going to stomach the message; in fact, millions were in the streets protesting against that rich man's war. To celebrate Memorial Day in a big way would have pointed o the thousands of Americans killed in Indochina; there would have been no way to avoid the question, Who is responsible for these deaths? The answer is clear: the responsibility rests with the rich who sent us to Indochina to fight a war which was not in the interests of working people in the US or anywhere else in the world, particularly in Indochina itself.

So, on this Memorial Day, VVAW will be saying "no way" to their rich man's wars and we'll be saying loud and clear, "Stop cutting back on the GI Bill." VVAW chapters will encourage veterans to speak out at the demonstrations about how they are getting screwed over by the VA, particularly around the GI Bill cut offs, and the general way that the GI Bill is inadequate.

How can the ruling class use this day to "honor" the dead when they are attacking the living? VVAW demonstrations will make the answer to this question ring clear in strong, militant actions which will unite with the needs of all vets.