Download PDF of this full issue: v40n1.pdf (10.4 MB)

Howard Zinn: Veteran, Teacher, Activist

By Joseph Miller

In January 2010, VVAW lost a longtime friend and consistent supporter when Howard Zinn passed away. It is fully in line with his commitment to activism that he passed away while on a speaking tour promoting the causes of peace and social justice. For the past five years, Zinn had been an active partner in VVAW fundraising efforts. The national office asked him back in 2005 if he would sign onto a fundraising letter, and he did not hesitate. Even though, as a committed pacifist, he may have had some disagreements with VVAW positions on some issues, he always saw the larger meaning and importance of VVAW's legacy and continued activism, locally, nationally and internationally.

I first became aware of Howard Zinn in late 1966, after I was assigned to Helicopter Training Squadron 8 (HELTRARON-8) at Ellyson Field just outside of Pensacola, Florida, following two years of sea duty off the coast of Vietnam. By early 1965, I had developed major questions about the Vietnam war and about American society, in general, and I wanted to get involved in the movement for change. With that in mind, I was reading everything I could get my hands on that might provide some critical perspectives. This search eventually brought me to Howard Zinn.

There was a great book and magazine shop in downtown Pensacola, and one of the first books I bought there was SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). Like many other vets, I eventually saw clear connections between the war and the civil rights struggles at home, and Professor Zinn's work helped to illuminate these connections. By the time I read his 1967 work Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, while still in uniform and looking forward to my discharge in 1968, it was clear that joining the peace movement was the logical next step. I am sure that Zinn's work had a similar effect on other veterans. When my family and I returned to Chicago, it was only a matter of weeks before my wife and I joined our first peace march. By 1970, I had connected with VVAW and joined the Chicago chapter. Thus, the scholar and activist Howard Zinn had brought me into activism.

As to Howard Zinn, the veteran and teacher, it was only much later that I became more aware of Zinn as a veteran of World War II, as is my father. By this time, I was also an academic, teaching politics at a state university, and it was clear that to properly teach about American politics, one must also teach American political history. Therefore, over the past twenty years, my students have been required to read Zinn's People's History of the United States in its successive editions. One of the central points to come out of their reading is the continuing thread of GI and veteran activism found in this work by a veteran of World War II. Students are always surprised to learn this hidden history of military dissent that Zinn takes back to the period of the Revolutionary War. For these students, then, it is not so surprising to learn of VVAW during Vietnam and GI opposition to the first Gulf War. From there, it is easy to expose them to the political importance of contemporary activism by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).

Zinn's work gives voice to many hidden aspects of US political history, but we must especially recognize the honor and legitimacy that his work gives to GI and veteran resistance. As IVAW's Geoff Millard has stated it:

"To me the lesson of Howard's life is greater than 'A' people's history but our history. We must write our history in the deeds that we chose every day...We must also record what we do. We must challenge the militarism of our society and never let the right re-write our war as they have with Vietnam." (from IVAW web site)

Howard Zinn's work and activism will be missed, but it shall continue in the work and activism of all of us in VVAW and in the new generation of activists in IVAW.

Joe Miller is one the national cooordinators of VVAW.