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A Struggle Continues: VVAW Turns 40

By Barry Romo

An empire makes a wasteland and calls it peace… and the struggle continues.

This year Vietnam Veterans Against the War is going to celebrate forty years of struggle and triumphs. Quite an achievement considering most of us did not believe we would make it through our tours in Vietnam, through our nightmares, through the fight to stop the war, and through Agent Orange. And yet, here we stand together as a family after 40 years.

No one could predict that when the first group of veterans got together in 1967 to march through the streets of New York in protest of the war in Vietnam that a national organization of over 30,000 members would be fostered. We not only grew, we sustained. Vietnam Veterans Against the War is one of the few organizations founded to oppose the war to survive and continue to thrive.

No one could have guessed that what we called Post Vietnam Syndrome would become recognized as a service connected disability in 1979 called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Some older veterans mocked PTSD and thought that we were weak and that was why we could not "win" our war. After all their war was, according to them, worse than what we had seen. Yet today the VA and army are admitting that one third of service men and women coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer from PTSD.

We led the protests against the use of Agent Orange because we had seen its results in deformed Vietnamese infants. Little did we know that our own government was killing us as well. When we brought this up, traditional veterans organizations accused us of perpetuating communist lies about chemical weapons. Yet we did not give up the fight. We continue to focus on the effects of Agent Orange. The same judge that gave us a settlement against the chemical companies for these deadly defoliants has refused to recognize that the Vietnamese living in it for more then forty years deserve compensation also. The Vietnamese Agent Orange Campaign is one way we are working to help.

After the Winter Soldier Investigations exposed war crimes…

After Dewey Canyon III and throwing our medals back…

After overruling the Supreme Court…

After our continued use of guerilla theater…

After fighting to normalize relations with the people of Vietnam and Cambodia . . .

It must be recognized that we not only challenged the political establishment but we challenged the culture of war that our nation is rooted in.

But the struggle continued. The Reagan era was not a restful era for us. While fighting for decent benefits for all veterans, we had to oppose death squads, contras, and torture training camps in Central and Latin America. The history books may act like these were small "wars" or "conflicts" but who knows how big they may have been if we did not keep Reagan's feet to the fire.

Has anyone really figured out why we had to invade Panama? In that invasion we made tens of thousands homeless, wounded thousands, and killed hundreds? Was Noriega a real threat to our national security or were there other interests? As for the first Gulf War, don't forget how the peace movement and VVAW protested against Saddam Hussein throughout the eighties and early nineties as the United States backed Saddam's ruthless activities.

After the first Gulf War, we fought the embargo and demanded normalized relations with the Iraqi people. We started our homeless stand-downs …feeding homeless veterans. We celebrated the victories in Africa over colonialism, racism, and apartheid.

But the struggle continues. We may be older but these last six years have been one heavy roller coaster ride and we're still here. We've seen a lot of old-timers come back and a lot of new people come forward to protest the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not because any of us has any illusion about the Baath Party or the Taliban but because we know the lies our government is capable of.

Approximately 300,000 young men and women will be faced with the nightmares, guilt, anger, loss of family ties, loss of significant others, and the likes, due to the current wars. There are not enough facilities or personnel to treat them and we must demand decent benefits for this younger generation.

In 1975 when the Vietnam War came to an end we vowed to rise up to stop such types of war from ever happening again, and so we fight the current wars. Unfortunately, no one could control the neo-conservative draft-dodging right-wing pseudo-intellectuals that actually believed they could "right" all the supposed liberal wrongs which "lost Vietnam." Naïve and with no experience of combat they thought it would be a cakewalk in Iraq and Afghanistan but we knew better. So we struggle.

These conflicts are worse than Vietnam simply because we went through Vietnam. We know the truth yet we find ourselves in a strikingly familiar situation. Has America not learned? This administration is doing precisely what they did in Vietnam. Destroying people, culture, and land, in the hell of war. From the effects of Agent Orange to depleted uranium the lies are the same. We are told if we pull out of "the war on terror," terrorism will be on our front door just as communism will take over the world. Lies. All lies.

Vietnam was our nations' longest war but there is a good chance Iraq will top that. So we struggle.

We welcome participation and recognition of our younger counterparts in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Vietnam Veterans Against the War's 40th anniversary is not just a chance to celebrate the last 40 years … it is a time to rededicate ourselves to the fight for peace, justice, humanity, and veterans rights. We are ready for forty more years of struggle if, needed.

Register to attend the 40th Anniversary celebration as soon as possible! We need an estimate of how many folks to expect.