[In honor of Veterans’
Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important
American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and
contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the longstanding veterans’ communities that we hardly ever recognize—and
my personal connection to them.
Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW) has been around for forty-six years,
almost exactly as long as the National Organization for Women (NOW). But for one reason or another—perhaps the specificity of its name,
perhaps the controversies and critiques that surrounded
and still surround the organizaton—VVAW is not, to
my mind, generally recognized as a contemporary American activist organization.
Instead, VVAW tends to be treated as a part of history, a reflection of the growing 1960s divisions in American culture and
society over the Vietnam War and related issues. Those historical questions
certainly contributed to the organization’s founding—but just as NOW has existed long past the specific women’s movement issues
and debates that prompted its 1966 founding, so too has VVAW
extended its efforts and reach well beyond the end of the Vietnam War and its
era.
Recognizing VVAW’s ongoing presence and activism would be important on its
own terms, but it would also help us to better engage with the similar
organizations that have become increasingly prevalent in late 20th
and early 21st century America. I’m thinking specifically of two
very distinct but equally influential groups: Iraq Veterans Against the
War, which focused its initial efforts on that
particular recent conflict but has gradually broadened its scope, just as VVAW
did; and Veterans for Peace, which was
founded in 1985 and has opposed militarism and conflict more broadly from the
outset. Among the many reasons why these organizations deserve our fuller
recognition, I would argue that such awareness would significantly challenge
one of our most persistent recent narratives: that each American must choose
whether to “support the troops” or oppose war. These anti-war veterans’ organizations
reveal that schism as a false dichotomy, one that masks the possibility—the
increasingly prominent possibility—that troops themselves can oppose wars.
While such anti-war veterans’ organizations seem to be a relatively recent
American phenomenon, my own family history indicates that there is nothing new
about wartime service producing anti-war sentiments. My paternal grandfather, Arthur Railton, was a World War II veteran and a committed pacifist,
and he consistently credited his war experiences as the source of that
subsequent and vociferous opposition to war. In the absence of organized
anti-war veteran activism in prior generations, it might be easy to develop
narratives that would (for example) contrast Greatest Generation vets with
Vietnam-era ones—but such contrasts would, as my grandfather proves, be no more
necessarily accurate than a purely historical understanding of VVAW. The truth
is that anti-war veterans are not a product of any one moment or debate, but
rather comprise a longstanding, ongoing, and significant American community.
Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. So what do you think? Last
chance to share texts and contexts for that weekend post!
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