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History 'R' Us

By Jan Barry Crumb

A truly different documentary on the choices made by Vietnam veterans and war protesters aired in January on the History Channel. At one point, an animated interview with a gray-bearded man reminiscing about being a 20-year-old grunt in-country in 1963 flashed on the screen. Stomping through the living room on his way to the kitchen, my 18-year-old son whirled around on hearing his father talking on TV, then grimaced at me on the couch, and groused: "You weren't really in Vietnam."

Later in the program, I was identified as a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "Oh, you organized something," said my son, suddenly impressed, plopping down in front of the tube to see what this was about.

If we aging peaceniks don't get much respect for that double-whammy war we participated in, some new purveyors of history may be coming to our aid. Thirty years after it was founded by a few angry survivors of our military misadventure in Southeast Asia, VVAW has become a respected touchstone of history.

Shortly before the History Channel aired "Choosing Sides: I Remember Vietnam," which prominently featured VVAW as a key bridge between once gung-ho GIs and the antiwar movement, Twayne Publishers issued Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as part of an oral history series on social movements. Earlier in 1997, a detailed retrospective on VVAW's 1971 "Dewey Canyon III" encampment in the Capitol appeared in the mainstream Vietnam Veterans of America magazine.

In 1996, Rutgers University Press published a pair of academic works examining aspects of VVAW's legacy: The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era and Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. For years, on campuses across the country, VVAW's revolt against the Vietnam War has been the subject of Ph.D., master's, and senior honors theses. Many VVAW alumni have been repeatedly invited to speak to college and high school classes. Virtually every year for the past decade, I've been interviewed by college students, from Harvard to working class state colleges, who want to write a history project about VVAW and its legacy.

This is an incredible outcome, given the fact that the repressive powers of five presidents - LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush - were dedicated to destroying the credibility of antiwar organizations. That an officially blacklisted organization, hounded for years by the FBI and targeted for destruction by the Nixon White House, has such staying power is testimony to the integrity of its members and what they did and had to say.

Paying the highest compliment a writer can to people he has interviewed, Winter Soldiers author Richard Stacewicz noted in his preface: "Before conducting the interviews, I had gone through the VVAW archives, and through FBI files and the records of the Nixon administration that referred to VVAW, and I found that the speakers' narratives correlated well with the surviving written records - and with each other."

Imagine that! War veterans who tell war stories that aren't tall tales. Listening to what VVAW members had to say, Stacewicz dropped his idea of writing a book largely based on archive documents seasoned with some veterans' quotes. "My initial plan was simply to use bits and pieces of the interviews to construct my own interpretation of the history of VVAW. As I transcribed the interviews, however, I realized that these veterans and their supporters had eloquent and powerful voices, and that they should speak for themselves. I therefore decided to develop an oral history in which the story of VVAW would be told primarily through their narratives."

Stacewicz was inspired to do a book on VVAW after witnessing Chicago police arrest Barry Romo at a January 1991 rally against the Persian Gulf war. Learning that Romo was a VVAW national coordinator, Stacewicz was astounded to realize that although he was a graduate student in American history he knew very little about VVAW. Who were these people, some of whom were still protesting wars, he wondered.

Meanwhile, Richard Moser, a doctoral candidate in American history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, was working on his book project on antiwar Vietnam vets. Like Stacewicz, Moser was fascinated by VVAW's creative twists on traditional American historic icons, especially the Winter Soldier idea derived from a radical rereading of Thomas Paine's Revolutionary War challenge to the "summer soldier and sunshine patriot."

"The New Winter Soldiers seeks to understand how thousands of American soldiers and veterans created something good from what was one of the worst experiences of their lives," he wrote. "We need to reckon with the militia movement's claim that they are the inheritors of the citizen-soldier legacy. The New Winter Soldiers presents the history of a vastly different development in American soldier traditions - one that turned paranoia, hate, and the glorification of weapons and war into citizen activism for social justice and peace."

Over at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, English professor Michael Bibby spent the early 90s reading poetry of the 60s. Political poetry made him uncomfortable, but he became fascinated with "Vietnam-era activist-poets." Inspired by Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, "the first collection of dissident poems in US history produced by soldiers during wartime," published by 1st Casualty Press, formed by VVAW members, Bibby titled his book Hearts and Minds.

Initially, Bibby had aimed "to examine the canonized poetry of the 60s" - until he discovered the "poetry of activists," such as that published in alternative press, black liberation, women's liberation, and underground GI publications. In his research, he found that academic and commercial publishers had banned antiwar poetry from mainstream literary anthologies not only in the 60s but into the 90s. The more he read, Michael Bibby wrote, the more impressed he was with "activist poets" who "sought to bridge the gap between public and private, heart and mind, and bring the war home."

Despite cringing sometimes over how interviews turn out, I'm delighted that writers and documentary makers have been drawn to investigate why and how we protested the war. One pleasure in reading these books has been learning about other VVAW activists, many of whom I never met or only knew as another participant in what had long ago become a hazy maze of antiwar actions. These books convey the spitfire eloquence and creativity of men and women who chose VVAW as their forum on Vietnam, war and peace, and other issues. I also frankly enjoyed the way VVAWers bluntly discussed internal disagreements - over tactics, politics, leadership. This is the way VVAW was, from day one.

To Richard Moser, the challenge that GI and veteran antiwar raised "radically remade the idea of American history itself." Among other things, he argues: "Perhaps the most dramatic and influential moment of the antiwar movement came when two thousand veterans collectively returned their war regalia on the steps of the United States Capitol during Dewey Canyon III." Like the changes wrought by the first citizen-soldiers, the new winter soldiers also unleashed a "shot heard 'round the world." But, VVAW did what it did without firing a shot.

What is remarkable in reading these two "winter soldier" studies of VVAW is how vets who had just come home from an orgy of violence insisted that what VVAW was about was finding nonviolent ways to end the war and promote social change.

When six of us sat down to formally found VVAW on June 1, 1967, just as the Six-Day War broke out in the Mideast, we had no way to enforce that shared belief. We had no notion of the concept of conflict resolution. We only knew that military actions we had been a part of had not worked, indeed had backfired. Living in New York City, we experienced the smoldering violence in urban neighborhoods treated by police as though they were Viet Cong villages. We knew we had to address and challenge the root causes of war in Vietnam and government-sponsored violence at home. We set out to find effective ways to fight for our sense that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" included Vietnamese and Americans, friends and foes. It was a radical idea, one that shook up the federal government, traditional American society, and leftist partisans in the peace movement.

"This is a book about ideas-in-action," Richard Moser wrote, after interviewing some 75 antiwar Vietnam veterans, whose accounts excited him to investigate a phenomenon that he felt stood the traditional notion of history on its head. "Free from military restraints, [war] veterans articulated a broad and mature vision of peace and social justice. "

Independently examining myriad actions by VVAW members and former members in communities across America, Richard Stacewicz came to a similar perspective. "VVAW was plagued by internal dissension. But many veterans saw that as part of their commitment not only to ending the war but also to what they considered true democracy," he wrote. "In addition to veterans' causes, antiwar veterans who became affiliated with VVAW branched out to address many other national and community issues. Indeed, this is perhaps the greatest legacy of the VVAW," Stacewicz stated in his summary.

I'm looking forward to some new book or video examining VVAW's continuing work-in-progress.

Jan Barry Crumb was VVAW's founding national president, 1967-71. A coeditor of Winning Hearts & Minds, he is a journalist based in New Jersey.