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19th National VVAW Meeting Held

By VVAW

The 19th National Meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War opened on an upbeat note as we welcomed new chapters in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Flint, Michigan, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St Louis, Missouri, and the revival of a VVAW chapter in New York City.

Interest and activity has picked up, in part because of the combination of an approaching economic disaster and an increasing threat of war, and because VVAW chapters are getting more and more involved with issues crucial to veterans. As the representative from New York City put it, "A group of us looked at the world and decided we just couldn't sit around any more. Some of us went to an anti-draft rally and met high school students who came up to us, saying, 'Where have you been? We need you!"

Both anti-draft activities and our growing efforts to win testing, treatment and compensation for victims of Agent Orange bring us into contact with vets, often past members of VVAW. Work in various veterans coalitions has publicized our work and our political positions, often leading to workable alliances and coalitions around specific issues, and growing participation in VVAW events. Our discussion of work in coalitions brought out the conclusion that we can function well with groups whose politics we don't support, so long as the coalition has a well-defined focus—no registration, no draft, for instance. We still can't work with nuts, whose only purpose is to disrupt, like the Revolutionary Communist Party and its various offshoots or groups like the Young Sparticist League.

The meeting ended with our determination to build activities for Memorial Day, Vietnam Vets Week and May 4th at Kent State. Each of these high points on the VVAW calendar has been a time of struggle in the past, and, based on the experiences of this National Meeting, each event will be bigger and better in 1980.

To provide better communications and input into the National Office, the meeting re-instituted the National Sterring Committee to consist of the N.O. and one representative chosen by each chapter, regardless of size, who would be responsible for communicating with the N.O. The Sterring Committee will meet periodically, in between our yearly national meetings. The meeting also unanimously re-elected John Lindquist of Milwaukee and Barry Romo, Bill Davis and Peter Zastrow of Chicago as VVAW's National Coordinators.

Much of the meeting was spent in learning from others; since most chapters of VVAW are involved in similar struggles, there is much to learn form each other. Agent orange outreach, to which 9,000 Vietnam vets in Minnesota have responded to get check-ups at the VA, a plan in which VVAW played a key role, gave all chapters some sense of how working through the state veterans bureaucracy can be useful. Milwaukee's work with lawyers and the class action suit for Agent Orange victims chapters another approach to the problem. And, information concerning medical care, still in its infancy but growing, was good information for all chapters to get out to both their members, potential members, and veterans at large.

There was heated struggle, most notably around the by-laws of the Minneapolis chapter, which gives non-vets only a non-voting membership in the chapter, and which said that veterans with less than honorable discharges had to be "approved" by the chapter before they could assume full voting membership. The meeting clearly pointed to VVAW's long-standing policy that membership belonged to those who "want to join in to build a fighting veterans, organization". Particularly with an issue such as Agent Orange, wives of vets, and the mothers of vets children are playing a vital role in pushing our work forward. And bad discharges, the meeting pointed out, have to be seen in their context who gave them and for what. VVAW has a clear and lengthy history of having seen discharges for what they are; a tool by which the military brass attempts to control the troops. And bad discharges were handed out wholesale for years, for reasons ranging from on officer who didn't like a particular GI, to refusal to obey some of the stupid orders which troops were given in Vietnam.

There was also sharp struggle around the VVAW position, as stated in THE VETERAN, concerning the demand for aid, without strings, by the U.S. government for the Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviet invasion. VVAW has consistently opposed aggression, whether it was the U.S. aggression in Vietnam, or Vietnam's aggression against Cambodia. More than that, we have actively supported the side we saw was fighting justly as in our campaign too get Fatigues for Freedom Fighters who were dealing with white domination and aggression against the Black majority in South Africa. Our call for aid to the rebels in Afghanistan is a part of that tradition.

No one at the meeting disagreed with opposition to Soviet aggression against the people of Afghanistan. Discussion centered on aid "without strings", with some people pointing out that the U.S. government just simply doesn't give aid without conditions; that aid leads to advisors which leads to troops, which leads, as we've all seen before, to full-scale involvement. Further, we do not have the ability, at this time, to know much about the Afghan rebels. It's possible that, should they control the country, it might be worse than the situation the Afghanis now find themselves in. At least, under those circumstances, the people of Afghanistan would control their own country, instead of being controlled from outside.

Despite these sharp, and sometimes heated, areas of struggle, the meeting united around the primary points of VVAW's program: the issues of Agent Orange, opposition to registration and the draft; with actions to take place on May 4th, Memorial Day, and during Vietnam Veterans Week. The absolute need to do all we can to build a decent life for vets far out-weighs points of debate and disagreement.

Fuller discussions of many of the projects and plans discussed at the meeting appear elsewhere in the paper. The main sense throughout the meeting was that, despite working in different areas with differing circumstances, we are all working toward the same goals, and the future looks good. It's clear that, once again, VVAW is on the move, and we won't stop growing or struggling until our aims are accomplished.