Protest: A Week Against the War

THE Washington march for peace has become a highly ritualized affair --something that an anthropologist might call a "cultic in-gathering," an annual coming together that is part circus, part festival, part political mass meeting. Last week its time came round again, and in balmy spring weather a crowd estimated by police at 200,000 --one of Washington's largest ever --streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue to assemble before the west front of the U.S. Capitol. On the same day, in San Francisco, 125,000 demonstrators formed a six-mile parade down Geary Boulevard into Golden Gate Park; they were led by Bob Silva, a 21-year-old Viet Nam veteran, with medals dangling from his sports shirt, who rode in a wheelchair.

Layer of Despair. The Washington demonstration was the kind that the cops could have brought their children to; at least one policeman did. Unlike 1969, Government buildings were not guarded by visible contingents of troops last week.,The area around Lafayette Square and the White House was not closed off by bumper-to-bumper buses as it was in May 1970. College students, though still the largest single group, seemed proportionately fewer. Teeny-boppers abounded in the crowd. Organized labor took part in greater numbers than before; burly Teamsters acted as marshals around the speakers' platform. In San Francisco as in Washington, the mood of the marchers was discernibly different from the heady optimism of the 1969 Moratorium. Both demonstrations were happily free of violence. But under the spring-picnic good cheer last week was a layer of despair, and a distrust of all the considerable evidence that the Administration is winding down the war. In 1969, said David Ifshin, president of the National Student Association, "we came with the sense that the war might end tomorrow." He added: "That feeling isn't here today. We know it's going to go on and on."

First Objective. Washingtonians had long since become inured to peace demonstrations, but they had never seen anything quite like the week of antiwar guerrilla theater staged by Viet Nam veterans as a prelude to Saturday's march. The sponsors called it Operation Dewey Canyon III, "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," in mocking echo of official U.S. military jargon. They numbered as many as 1,500 veterans, wearing fatigues with the shoulder patches of the 1st Air Cav, the 101st Airborne, the 1st MarDiv, the 25th Infantry, the Big Red One. They wore long hair and beards and medals: Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts. Some were missing an arm or a leg; some got about in wheelchairs. They carried squirt guns, cap pistols, toy rifles made by Mattel.

The first objective was Arlington National Cemetery. After a brief memorial service outside the gates, a delegation of three gold star mothers and two veterans was formally denied entrance. One vet tried to charge the gates, shouting: "Those are my brothers in there." Another, furious, threw his plastic M-16 at the gates; it shattered into pieces. A later visit was more successful. Some 300 veterans marched to Arlington single file, five yards apart, dropping wreaths on a knoll inside the cemetery. As they knelt for a moment of silence, three memorial rifle shots rang out at a nearby funeral and a bugle sounded taps.

One platoon-strength group staged a "search and destroy" raid on the Capitol steps, rounding up a collection of girls in coolie hats, shouting, "Kill the gooks!" and splattering the scene with red paint. Congress was the veterans' chief target. As John Kerry, leader of Dewey Canyon III, won warm applause for his testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (see box, following page), knots of other veterans buttonholed Senators and Representatives. One constituent of Brooklyn Democrat John Rooney complained: "He gerrymandered me out of his district on the spot." Another group found itself riding the Senate subway with Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a "hot" hawk, in veterans' parlance. "Boys, we all want this war to end, but we want it to end in an honorable way," Thurmond told them. Chris Jiordano, a one-armed ex-Marine from Philadelphia, replied: "Senator, we ain't got any honor left."

Uncommon Deference. At the Pentagon, some 75 veterans showed up to turn themselves in for war crimes. "We all want to be arrested along with Lieut. Calley," said Samuel Schoor, 23, of Los Angeles. Three of them talked with Air Force Brigadier General Daniel ("Chappie") James, who told them: "We don't take American prisoners." Others were turned away from the National Press Building, where they sought to inquire about censorship of war news, and from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where they visited disabled vets in two wards before they were thrown out of a third.

The only arrests during Dewey Canyon III came at the Supreme Court building, where some of the veterans went to ask for a ruling on the constitutionality of the war. Eleven were arrested after one sit-in, though they were quickly freed on $10 bail each. Another 108 were busted following two hours of singing and chanting on the steps of the Supreme Court building; the charges were soon dropped. Two demonstrators were spared arrest on orders from Washington Police Chief Jerry Wilson, who was on hand. Bill Wyman, 20, who lost both legs when he stepped on a land mine last August, complained from his wheelchair: "I want to go with my brothers. If you are going to take them, take me." Jim Dehlin, another double amputee, likewise went free. "I just won't do it," Wilson said. "I just won't arrest him."

Convoluted Efforts. The veterans nearly did not make it to the Mall, owing to the convoluted legal efforts of the Justice Department, which wound up with egg on its face. The week before, department lawyers got a restraining order from U.S. District Court Judge George L. Hart Jr., which forbade the vets to camp out on the Mall. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals overruled Hart early last week, but at the Government's request, Chief Justice Warren Burger reinstated the restraining order a day later. Associates of Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, acting for the protest group, reached agreement with Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst: the veterans could stay--as long as they remained awake and did not set up camp, which the original injunction forbade. John Kerry polled the vets on whether they would defy the injunction by sleeping. "California--32 sleep, one awake . . . Virginia--49 awake." The total was 480 to sleep, 400 to stay awake.

The park police were indulgent. "Camping?" asked an officer at 1 o'clock one morning. "I don't see any camping." Finally Government lawyers, presumably having decided that arresting several hundred men who had fought in Viet Nam would be politically un wise, went back to Judge Hart and asked him to rescind the injunction. An indignant Hart did so, observing: "The judiciary has been degraded by this whole affair. I don't think it could have been handled worse." He added: "You have put the Viet Nam veterans in a situation of openly defying the courts of this country." Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, said that the President had not "specifically" asked that the camping ban be lifted--though Nixon had discussed it with his staff and now felt that "the matter has been handled appropriately."

Glass Eye. Few incidents during their week of demonstrations enraged the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War as much as did the rumor that President Nixon had said that only 30% of their number were really Viet Nam veterans. Though the White House was quick to deny any such statement, the angry veterans collected proof of service at their campsite on the Mall. Veterans turned in 900 DD-214 forms, which attested to their service in Viet Nam. One vet offered his glass eye as testimony, and another a used return ticket from Viet Nam. The evidence also included 200 piasters, a receipt from the Steam and Cream Massage Parlor in Bien Hoa, a membership card from Madame Binh's Hot Shop Parlor, a Chieu Hoi safe-conduct pass for Viet Cong defectors and, of all things, a membership card in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. One upset veteran pushed his way to the microphone to announce: "Only 30% of ^ us believe Richard Nixon is President."

Operation Dewey Canyon III ended with some 700 of the veterans pausing one by one before a statue of John Marshall in front of the Capitol and hurling at it medals won in Viet Nam. Some dedicated the medals to their dead friends, some to the Vietnamese who have been killed in the war. One said quietly: "I just want to ask for the war to end, please." The politicians had difficulty matching that kind of simple eloquence. Last week six Democratic presidential prospects--Senators Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Birch Bayh, Henry Jackson, Harold Hughes and Edmund Muskie--appeared on national television to answer President Nixon's April 7 Viet Nam speech on troop withdrawal; all but Jackson said they favored setting a fixed date for U.S. disengagement.

Revolutionary Spy. Before he choppered off to Camp David for the weekend, Nixon crossed 17th Street to Constitution Hall, where he addressed the 80th Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The President praised "two million brave and honorable American men who have fought in Viet Nam," and learned that D.A.R. genealogists had found him eligible for membership in their parallel organization, the Sons of the American Revolution. It seems that George Nixon, an ancestor born in 1752 at Brandywine Hundred in New Castle County, Del., served as a lieutenant in a company of Revolutionary spies.

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