Veterans’ Day
For some veterans, every day is
Veterans’ Day.
By Jan Barry
Veterans Day sales, speeches, salutes. The November 11 holiday carved out of World War I's Armistice Day has become a hollow cliche, a platform for politicians to wax patriotic far from any battlefield. Wouldn't it be grand if politicians spent the day listening to veterans.
"They're no good, these wars," Roy Longmere, an Australian veteran of the Gallipoli campaign who miraculously lived to be 107, once said in memory of 60,000 countrymen killed in World War I. "A lot of lives lost, no use at all. There's got to be another way of fixing up these rows without killing each other."
"There wouldn't have been a war if it had been left to the public," said Bertie Felstead, who lived to be 106, the last surviving member of a British battalion in WWI that struck a spontaneous truce with Germans on Christmas Day 1915. When fighting resumed, it lasted nearly three more years and killed millions of people until an armistice was signed.
Fast forward to 2003. At a forum on art by Vietnam veterans in October at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and Vietnam Era Educational Center, it was hard to tell where the war ended and the art began.
"Our family sustained six continuous years of incredible fear and threats of death," photographer Tony Velez wrote in a statement about his exhibit that interspersed snapshots of GI's in Vietnam with head-snapping scenes of an antiwar march by Vietnam veterans. Velez and a brother served back-to-back tours in the war, another brother was drafted, a cousin was killed, another lost an arm, and haunting memories of dead GI's and Vietnamese came home with him and refused to go away.
"Images of my experience in the war can still provoke a deep rage within me of the injustices, lies, the horrors and terrors of war, as well as nightmares, a sense of guilt, loss and sadness," Velez, a professor of fine arts at Kean University, wrote.
A nearby exhibit assembled by artist Frank Romeo presented a gallery of veterans' nightmares: skulls in the place of soldiers' faces, a grim reaper Death posing with an arm around a spit-and-polish general, a trussed-up enemy prisoner who looks like an African-American.
"My paintings are of the horror show that was Vietnam: butchery carried out for politicians, bureaucrats, and ambitious generals whose egos would not let them say "enough"; art for an indifferent public; art to honor those who lived and died there, and earned only a few hundred dollars a month. It would take a lifetime to paint it all," said a statement by Charlie Shobe, whose painting, "Waiting for Henry Kissinger," shows a grinning dead GI sitting under a tree.
At a panel on poetry, Charles H. Johnson, a newspaper editor, read a poem on an unforgettable experience as an infantry platoon leader. In the midst of a monsoon, he has to pull guard duty:
On Veterans Day, politicians will muster at war memorials as usual and spout red-white-and-blue rhetoric and swear that the misbegotten war in Iraq is not a quagmire. Any of them who say that have never been with the troops trying to survive in deep doo-doo.So I trudge through the muck,
each step sucked deeper into the stuff
until (madly trying to free myself)
I trip and fall face first.Not only must I fight in a cesspool.
Now I have become part of it.
Jan Barry is
a New Jersey-based journalist, poet, and Vietnam veteran.
Your Tax Dollars!
Cost of the War in Iraq
http://costofwar.com
Articles
Heroes Ask Hard Questions
By Paul Bucha
Congressional
Medal of Honor recipient tells vets: “We fought for the right to
question."
Vietnam In Iraq
By Max Cleland
Combat
veteran and former US Senator says those who have made the Iraq War
avoided the Vietnam War, and are now making the mistakes of Vietnam in
Iraq.
Letter To President Bush
A
Vietnam combat veteran with a son now in Iraq writes a letter to
President Bush
Letters
To VAIW
To read the letters
Discussion Forum & Sound Off Board
To post a comment or read other
veterans' comments, go to the Discussion Forum:
To read why veterans
and their families oppose a war, go to the Sound
Off Board:
Chickenhawk
Database
In their youth Chickenhawks were extremely skillful at evading
the military, while today they are fervent advocates for war.
http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
There has always been a
higher percentage of veterans in Congress
than in society as a whole, but not today.
http://www.vaiw.org/vet/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=43
http://www.veteransday-ecards.com/
also visit
http://www.123greetings.com/events/veterans_day/
A MUST VISIT SITE!
Excellent Veteran Support site and blog
Kathie Costos, veteran advocate and support (added November 1, 2006)
www.Namguardianangel.org
http://Namguardianangel.blogspot.com
http://Bustingbalderdash.blogspot.com
videos
http://kathiecostos.neptune.com
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=namguardianangel
Bring
Them Home Now
http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
Center
for Defense Information
http://www.cdi.org/
Cpeace.com
http://www.cpeace.com/
Military Families Speak Out
http://www.mfso.org/
Soldiers For The Truth
http://www.sftt.org/
Veterans For Common Sense
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/
Veterans For Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
Vietnam Veterans Against The War
http://www.vvaw.org/
Vietnam Veterans Of America
http://www.vva.org/
Vietnam Veterans Of America Foundation
http://www.vvaf.org/
