The War Is Over: Reflections on Protest |
The March on the Pentagon, 21 October 1967, an anti-war demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam – Public Domain
The Vietnam War (which ended 50 years ago on April 30, 1975) era caused so many powerful feelings and substantive actions that an alphabetized list might be helpful in sorting some of those issues out. When I registered for the military draft in my small hometown in Rhode Island, I had been in the ROTC brigade for several months at the college I attended. I had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, so the Cold War and conservatism called the tune in national and international politics. I don’t think I would have known much about Vietnam had it not been for the fact that the ROTC brigade had members who went to Vietnam after graduation. I knew of no one who questioned war in general and the Vietnam War in particular. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a small footnote in memory, and in 1964, when my best friend and I cut chemistry class, we accepted the punishment for having done something we considered patriotic. We had gone off to the airport in Warwick to greet Lyndon Johnson when he arrived to give the keynote speech to open the academic year at Brown University in Providence. Lyndon Johnson carried the mantle of John Kennedy, and that was good enough for us. He would now carry the mantle of expanding the war in Vietnam at levels of violence against agrarian economies that were incredibly weak.
Very slowly, and after completing two years in ROTC, a small contingent of antiwar activists emerged on my campus. Its leader, Joe, would become my best friend in both college and graduate school. Joe was held up for ridicule on campus among other friends. By my senior year, the pointed insults about Joe, in retrospect, may have been a reminder of the conservatism on campus and the school’s traditional support for war.
Graduation weekend saw our group hold an antiwar demonstration during ROTC commissioning ceremonies. Joe had been called into the director of student affairs’ office a few weeks earlier about the planned demonstration and asked about his and our peace group’s motives. I didn’t realize at the time of........