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THE VETERAN

Page 44
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Letter to the Editor

By Jim Walters

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June 29, 2024 Dear Friends,

It's been a while since I contributed to VVAW, so thank you for keeping me on your mailing list. I finally got a chance to sit down and read the Spring 2024 issue of The Veteran and was deeply impressed by the essays, obituaries, poetry, book reviews, and the wonderful photo journal of your library work in Vietnam.

I'm not a veteran, but my anti-war activism goes long and deep. I graduated from high school in 1965, where I wrote my social studies essay to refute the US State Department's "White Paper" defending US involvement in SE Asia. In the summer of 1965, I joined a small group of protesters at the dedication of the Hoover Library (in West Branch, IA) when President Johnson came to speak. His motorcade had to pass right by us.

Four of my high school classmates (and friends, I should add since our class consisted of sixty students) entered military service voluntarily and served in Vietnam, where one of them was killed in combat. In an attempt to serve my country in other ways, I joined the Peace Corps and spent two years doing agricultural extension work in India. Returning to the US in the winter of 1969, I was immediately thrust back into the anti-war movement that roiled campuses, including ours at the University of Iowa. I should add that one of my co-volunteers in our Peace Corps group volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was killed in combat.

Since then, I've stood against all our overseas military interventions, from Nicaragua to the first Gulf War, to Desert Storm, to Afghanistan, and now in Gaza. Whenever I can, I join the lowa City/Cedar Rapids chapter of Veterans for Peace in their demonstrations of educational events.

I believe we're now (again) at a perilous point in our history—similar to what took place in Germany in the 1930s, where fascism came to be accepted. We must redouble our efforts to prevent this from happening again.

In Solidarity,
Jim Walters


Dewey Canyon IV, Washington, DC, May 1982.

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