Essay by Deric Pamp
War – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY of America’s invasion of Iraq was March 19. Whatever its strengths may be, this Administration does not cheerfully seek out opinions that differ from Administration policies, so I would not expect our elected leaders to respond to protests against the war. I doubt that they even notice them: Bush is too busy boogying on some mental stage, Rummy is planning the bombing and subsequent invasion of Iran, and Cheney simply doesn’t care about the little people who protest the war or fight in it. Nevertheless, I joined the small group of people who met in Riverside Park in Salida on March 19 to mark the date and to state our upset and disagreement with the war.
It was a cold and cloudy day, appropriate for the grim occasion. As I walked up to the crowd, I noticed the usual signs, including one taped on a friendly dog which read, Doggone War. I had considered making a sign that I saw at another rally, a little over three years ago: Watch Out, Canada, We Need Water Too.
Instead I wore my Army field jacket, with the colorful Americal Division patch on my right shoulder, and my rack of ribbons. Ribbons are not proper for a field uniform even 35 years later, my OCS training is still with me and I am keenly aware of what is and is not proper uniform, but I wore them anyway because those ribbons are my own personal protest sign and there’s no way I can get into my dress greens.
The mood of the group was relaxed and friendly, and people greeted each other warmly. After some milling around, an organizer said it was time to start marching. The protesters distributed themselves along the sidewalk in an orderly manner and then walked off, chanting “Out of Iraq Now” in moderate tones. I chose to sit on a stump instead of joining the line because I tend to follow Bob Dylan’s admonition, “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.” Also, it seemed futile to walk in circles and chant, since there was no one in the park to witness the event other than fellow demonstrators.
Riverside Park is small, so the marchers soon came back past me and then did another partial lap before stopping at the band shell to make statements about the war, and I joined them again. Some speakers were appropriately impassioned, including a disabled vet, but most of them were calm, polite, and soft-spoken. They were careful to differentiate between bad policy and the people in the Armed Services who were required to carry out those bad policies, and several spoke of supporting our troops. There were some statements that were broadly pacifist, but two speakers mentioned that some wars were necessary, even if this Iraq war was both unnecessary and badly botched at the highest planning levels. I left when they started reading poetry.
I attended my first anti-war rally in 1966. I wonder if there were any such rallies in Salida forty years ago? I thought at the time that I was doing something useful and that protesting the Vietnam War might make a difference. It now appears that Lyndon Johnson was actually listening to the protesters, at least a little, but times change, as does the willingness of an administration to admit or even consider the outside chance that its policy might be unwise.
During the Christmas Bombing of Hanoi in 1971 (by then I’d spent twelve months in combat) I knew that Nixon and Kissinger were deaf to protests, so I crossed the picket lines to attend classes at my law school instead of joining the demonstrators. I wore my field jacket with bright shoulder patches back then, too, but not the ribbons.
SO WHY ATTEND THIS RALLY? A radio reporter at the event asked me that question, thrusting a microphone in my face. Without considering my answer, I said that I was there for myself, for my children, for the kids who were under fire, for the friends who had died in Vietnam, for personal reasons, not because I thought my being there would make a difference to anyone but me. Doing the right thing is worth doing, whether or not anyone else notices the act. I cannot do anything else for the kids being shot at over there, or to honor my old comrades in arms, other than spend an hour standing in the wind on a cold Sunday.
On my way home, I realized that I was probably not alone in this view, and that many of the people who attended the rally felt the same way: making the statement is worth the effort even if no one in power is listening. Marching and chanting without any witnesses, many of the demonstrators seemed to be participating in a stylized exercise, like a Noh play. Instead of traditional masks, we had standard signs and standard chants, performed in a ritual way by long-time veterans of many, many anti-war demonstrations. Some of the signs they carried were solidly constructed, lacquered and bolted to thick strips of well-painted wood, quite suitable for frequent use. Some of these signs may have been stored in hall closets for years, and are taken out now and again to be carried at another peace rally. I wondered how many wars these signs had protested. Some of them may date back to 1991 and the First Iraq War, which we did not know would come to be called First. That kind of name change has happened before,
NOW IT IS FIFTEEN YEARS after the first American war in Iraq, and we are again sending brave young men and women to be brutalized and traumatized, killed and wounded and maimed, never mind the civilian casualties or the violence done to the Constitution. Unlike the First Iraq War, however, this war is being conducted for reasons that have changed frequently but always seem wrong-headed or weak, and we are fighting it almost alone. Worst of all, we are thoroughly bogged down, with no end in sight. I did not care greatly for George Bush the Elder when he was President, but I miss him now. He knows, unlike his son, what it is like to have empty chairs at the dinner table because some of your friends did not return from the day’s mission. He knows, unlike almost anyone in the current administration, the harsh reality that underlies the cold, printed numbers on casualty reports. Cheney had other priorities when he was the right age to fight in Vietnam, while Dubyah and Rummy never heard a shot fired in anger.But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Congress dithers and blithers, just as it did during the long years of the Vietnam War, letting its constitutional powers dribble away like water through a hole in a bucket. Just as Nixon did, the President mouths platitudes when he is not speaking what seems like a foreign language (both to him and to me), while his press secretary speaks English but has strange new meanings for familiar words.
Kids come home in body bags while some patriots accuse those who exercise our basic right to free speech of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Same song, different tempo. We may have learned as a society not to blame the troops we send to fight a bad war, but what else have we learned?
It is probably a good idea to make your anti-war signs strong enough to withstand repeated use. It turns out that even Bush knows we can bring those signs out of storage again next year, and the year after, and the year after….
Deric Pamp is a Salida attorney specializing in non-profits. He was a forward artillery observer in Vietnam in 1969-70.