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30 YEARS!

By Annie Hirschman

If we all recorded all we remember we'd be in DEEP kimchee big time. This beaucoup dinky-dao group is still crazy after thirty big ones.

I remember the first time I met VVAW in 1967, and it was Shelly who gently explained what they were doing on the line of march. I think I fell in love with vets then. Then there was Hubbard. It took work to realize that the huge load of anger he carried was not directed at any one person. More than anything I thank Al for showing me what we now call PTSD. I remember these two from the early days because they seemed such polar opposites and yet were so related.

Jim Duffy showed up at the Vietnam Peace Parade Committee one day and scared the wits out of Norma Becker and the mostly pacifist organizers. He was instrumental in waking us to reality and sparked even greater urgency (and confusion, and fights, and parties).

I remember our poets and bards: Jan, Bill (Ehrhart), Pete,...etc.

Then there was 26th Street. The New York office and the place I met Danny Friedman, Brian Matarese, Mark O' Connor and Pete Mahoney (and lots of others but they're not in this part of the story). George Bush was UN ambassador and the UN was to discuss the Vietnam situation. We decided that he should hear from vets. He refused. We were undeterred. I was included for three reasons: I was VVAW all the way, I'd worked at the UN in high school and I worked at a blood bank. The UN Association dinner was to be at a Bronx private school. We scouted the place and were already there when the guests arrived. There was a demo outside, but we were inside. "If you won't talk to us veterans, then the blood of Vietnam be on your head." Then the guys hit him with the "blood" and we bailed out of there. It was GREAT!

In the summer of 1972 we decided to go to Miami (for the convention demos). I got in a van with Pete Mahoney and we drove south. The stop at Gainesville might have been a mistake. Pete was arrested, the van disappeared (I was a New Yorker and didn't drive anyway), and I was in nowhere Florida knowing nobody. A HUGE vet named Sugar Bear offered me a ride to Miami. I didn't know that a large car could remain airborne that long.

South Beach was a working man's retirement enclave and very quiet so the Miami Beach authorities set the demonstrators' campground there. When we arrived we found the surrounding neighborhood practically boarded up. They'd been told to especially fear the "drug-crazed veterans." The Nazis arrived at mid-week. In a community that included many Holocaust survivors and that was already edgy this was a lit fuse. One of the Nazis hit a guy named Steve with a chair (Jack put in a stitch or two), Danny Friedman hit the Nazi, and we all surrounded the fifty or so idiots to prevent further bleeding. Each Nazi was carried out of the area by three or four veterans. All of a sudden the South Beach folks were not scared of us. They adopted the VVAW and opened their homes for showers, their kitchens for food and even sent chicken soup. One asked me if there was "something these boys want." I mentioned that they like beer (OK -- there's no cure for stupidity).

I met many people at the Miami action. Barry gave a particularly California twist to VVAW, along with Rusty, Tim Teater, Steve and many others.

This year has been a hard one as we've lost Jack McCloskey and Shelly Ramsdell. I've been glad that we "honor the dead and fight like hell for the living" but I'm pissed that there is no email where they are now. If you can sense this guys -- this memory is for you.

Annie Hirschman is in the Clarence Fitch Chapter of VVAW. She works as a nurse and lives in New Jersey. She's a long time civil rights activist and served as a nurse at Wounded Knee.

VVAW Detroit VA Patient Walkout for Better Treatment, 1975