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We Made Some New Friends & That Never Hurts

By Annie Luginbill

NO DRAFT, NO WAR

I got to Washington on the evening of Wednesday, November 10th; I spent most of the next day on the phone, contacting the media about a forthcoming VVAW press conference on Saturday.

On Friday I went to the VVAW both in the hotel and count my time extremely well spent. Al though this was not an organizing venture, it was an excellent change to do outreach to many veterans.

Back when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) first started talking about the National Salute, our impression was that the only vets who were going to come were the straight "three-piece-suiters," those who had done well after returning home. Boy, was that wrong. There were tremendous numbers of long-haired, unemployed, guys with anti-military attitudes. On Thursday, I was told, about 700 vets signed up for the class action suite; unfortunately, the list was stolen overnight, along with a number of other items from the VVAW booth and from other displays in the area.

On Friday, I personally spoke with about 75 vets who had children with birth defects and a larger number who had skin rash and other Agent Orange manifestations. We were able to get an additional 50-75 names for the class action suite. Many vets came past and said, "hey, you mean you guys are still around.. I was a member back in '70/'71/'72; many still had their old membership cards. We passed out a lot of membership forms, class action information and copies of the paper. Very few people were anti-VVAW; on Friday, I had 3 negative or smart-ass remarks while I also had an overwhelming number of friendly and sympathetic responses.

Saturday was parade day. Our contingent, including people from Chicago, New York, DC, Maryland and Georgia was at the end of the parade. What that meant was that in reality we served as a kind of initial reviewing stand for all the participating vets' groups.

Our banners—No More Vietnams, Jobs for Vets, and Test, Treat & Compensate Agent Orange—were given the thumbs-up sign, the fist, smiles, waves, and cheers by a majority of the vets going past. When we started marching, we also chanted—most appropriately "Test, Treat, compensate Agent from the people lining the route and from the vets themselves. We reached the Memorial site and our VVAW group fell out in the rear of the dedication. Here too we were received very warmly with only two negative responses I noticed and literally hundreds of warm and friendly remarks.

Jack Mallory from Pennsylvania suggested that VVAW could have earned enough money to pay the rent of the National Office for a year if we had only charged $2 each for each photo of the No More Vietnams banner made especially for the event. More shots were taken of that banner than anything else except the Memorial Wall itself. And a number of media people, both freelance and affiliated, came and talked taking pictures of the banner and interviewing us.

Although the "vets" front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party was present and trying to pass themselves off as VVAW, they didn't' succeed; it was fairly clear that most of their people were too young to be vets and too loony to talk sense. Those folks they did manage to confuse almost invariably came to us and asked about them so we were able to set the record straight.

My summary of this event is that is was an excellent outreach opportunity. While we weren't there to accomplish a specific task but to provide information and make new contacts, I think we did quite well. For my part, I'm glad I went. There is a need for us to have at least a presence at something like this, even if we're not seizing the time to organize. I also think we've made some new friends, and that never hurts.

Annie Luginbill
Chicago VVAW