For Memorial Day, I’ve decided to rewrite and repost an item that was initially inspired by attacks from the self-righteous right on Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and Jane Fonda. This concerns the war. Which war? Well, pretty much any war. All wars are unjust, even the just ones. But mainly this is about the Viet Nam War.

This photo is a hoax

Where was I during the Viet Nam War? Too young to serve or not serve. I missed required registration by literally a few days, but the war was over by then anyway.

But from a very young age I was politically active. I worked for Ted Kennedy during one of his bids for president. I worked for both McGovern campaigns. I led an organization of high schoolers called “Impeach Nixon Now” (as well as the not very famous “Nature Conservation Club”…whose third member to join was Pete Seger! I wonder whether he still has his membership card).

There were a few reasons for my political activism (aside from the obvious need for political activism!). One was coming from a politically active family, both in traditional politics (my parents’ generation) and as anti-war activists (my older siblings, especially my sister Elizabeth). Also, I went to a school where the middle ground was fairly radical (Milne, now defunct) and from there transferred to a different school that was very very strict…in its sustained radicalism (The Albany Community School, one of the brainchildren of terrorist professor Bill Ayers).

I also had another kind of engagement with the war, besides the politics and activism against it. When I was just a teenager, I got a job that I kept for several years, working for a city agency funded entirely by the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. This was, at the time, a make-work federal program for returning Viet Nam-era vets. The agency I worked for was divided into two parts: the guys who “worked” in the attic of City Hall–they were mainly heroin addicts who slept most of the day except for the occasional trip to the hood to get a fix–and the rest of us, who had our own offices in a separate building. We were archaeologists and historians, and we were very productive and active.

So during much of my teenage years, I spent hours every day working with a group of people that included several vets. There was a core group that ran the place and a constant stream of vets who would come into the agency then move on. Our boss was a professional soldier who had been in Viet Nam at the very beginning…one of Kennedy’s “advisors”…and subsequently for a couple of tours of duty, as well as other parts of the world as a soldier of fortune. He and I became very good friends and remain so today. A few of these guys were “Viet Nam era” but had not been in combat, or even near Viet Nam, but most were wizened and wounded, both physically and mentally. It got crazy now and then (now and then meaning about once a week) and was an amazing learning experience for me.

I remember a few years after all of this watching the movie Platoon. Most likely I saw the movie a couple of years after it was out, because that has been my life-long pattern. I can count the number of movies I’ve seen on opening day on one hand. Anyway, Platoon as I remember it was a series of vignettes of bad things happening in Viet Nam, each and every one of which I had heard about already from the guys I worked with. Every one of them. In fact, one of the guys I worked with was at Khe Sanh with the Marines under siege, and another guy was with one of the relief and clean-up units. My point is, there was very little of what happened in Viet Nam and experienced by the US soldiers there that was not somehow connected to the many different men I met and sometimes got to know well during that period. I got to experience the Viet Nam war vicariously, which, I’m sure, was a LOT better than experiencing it in real life.

Some years later I was the editor of a monthly newspaper published by a vet (whom I had known for many years). His story was interesting. On his return to the US, getting off the bus at the local bus station, he found himself encountering a group of anti-war protesters. He went over to them, talked to them for a few minutes, took off his medals and joined them. He has been with them (in a certain sense) ever since.

What is the point of all of this? I am a person who was against the Viet Nam War but who during the last days of the war counted among my friends many Viet Nam War vets. I never for a moment considered the possibility of blaming these men for the war. I don’t recall anyone I knew at the time doing this. Sure, it may have happened, but I think this was probably a hyped-up media scam promoted by war hawks at the time, or a post hoc reconstruction fostered (festered?) by the right wing. Many, many of the people I worked with in various organizations against the war were vets, many former officers. This view that it was the protesters against the vets is nothing I ever saw or heard of at the time.

The question has been brought up, “What effect did the protests have on the execution of the war?” That is pretty clear. One president, who had been escalating involvement in the war, chose to not run again even though he was eligible to do so. Johnson bowed out of the election because of protests against him and his presidency due to his role in the war. Nixon was elected president under the pretense of having a “secret plan” to end the war, which was a position that was forced by the widespread (and getting more common) anti-war protests. When Nixon was president, he continued the war despite these protests, but there was de-escalation. Finally, in the the later parts of the war, the Nixon administration realized that they had to either win this war or get out. So they started to formulate plans to kick the shit out of the North Vietnamese, even considering nuclear weapons to do this.

In the end, the Nixon administration chose to not follow through with this large final push to win, and one of the main reasons they chose this course was because of the growing strength of the protest. This is well documented.

Forms of protest included things like what my father, a civil servant with a moderately high profile, did. He let his sideburns grow long. Other protests included peaceful marches and candlelight vigils. That was nice. The occasional one day student strike put an edge on it for the campuses. But the protests also included near riots, full-scale riots, occupation of college or government buildings, burning the occasional police car, and Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi.

It was this more extreme end that got Johnson and Nixon’s attention. Nixon was literally afraid of open revolution. It was not the fashion statements or the silent vigils that ended the war. It was burning flags, breaking some windows, and threatening to do more. That was what it required, that was what we did, and that was what worked. It was not the choice of the protesters to be “extreme.” It was the choice of the hawks in power to force the citizenry into something that verged on open revolt.

In this more genteel age of “code pink” and non-violent marches down at the college library, let us not forget that there have been times when our government needed to be threatened to do the right thing.

Go, Jane.

Every year the school-aged children of this country give their moms, or guardian moms, or dads, friends, aunts, etc.,  a plant, maybe planted in a milk carton, and maybe, hopefully, some homemade art for Mother’s Day, fostered by their wonderful (hopefully) teachers, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other grown-up helpers.  I’m not surprised at all to be getting a plant, wrapped in a crumpled, yet beautifully decorated with hearts and puppies, brown paper lunch bag.

He is so clearly thrilled to be giving me something that I get a little catch in my throat before I tell him that I will wait to open it until Sunday if he doesn’t mind. I hope my kid retains his enthusiasm for such things. I allow myself another moment of satisfaction too. I am delighted he is telling me. Early.

I, for one, am quite happy that my kid is unable to keep a secret.  Not just so I can learn what he and his father are giving me for birthdays and other me-oriented occasions. But also because I am banking on his enthusiasm, our incredible gift of the parent-child bond, and his inability to keep quiet to tell me if there are more serious things we need to know. I am banking on his need to verbalize his day, so in the future as he grows, he won’t feel he has to keep secrets. Sometimes I don’t hear that he’s had a tough day until right before bed, when he tells me that he didn’t like what one of his friends said or did, or that reading is hard. Reading is hard when you don’t know how to do it.

So far, it’s become pretty clear that the kid is a bad liar and will tell anyone and everyone what gifts he and his parents are giving out weeks before the big event. If we, his parents, have let him in on the deal of buying or making a gift for someone, we can basically guarantee that he will tell that person all about their art, or book, or gift card, given half a chance. He will make an announcement to the birthday kid upon our arrival at the party that we got him a bug-catching kit and please open it right now. And forget about his grandparents; they haven’t been surprised about anything we’ve given. He loves giving and he wants everyone to know it.

I don’t make it easy–this surprise-ruining. He tried blurting it out in the car after I picked him up from school on Tuesday. He tried convincing me on Wednesday that if he said it while he was brushing his teeth that I wouldn’t be able to guess because his mouth was full of toothpaste. He tried telling me when I dropped him off Thursday morning when the teacher shooed me out of the room. He almost blurted it out in his sleep too. He’s a big sleep talker. Each time, I have told him that he has to wait. It’s a surprise, after all.

We talk about what we will get his grandmothers and when we will see them and what I gave my mom when I was a kid. Plants, naturally. That’s what she’s getting this year too. Then we come to the moment of truth. “Mommy, do the Marines have Mother’s Day?”

I tell him wearily, “Yeeesss.”

He then tells me the same thing he’s been saying since last October, that when he grows up, AFTER college, he will be a Marine, but that he will still give me Mother’s Day flowers because Marines are nice. I try to tell him, with limited success, that the first Mother’s Day started as a proclamation and a demand for peace and an end to war.

“But, Mommy, Marines shoot guns to help people, don’t they?” He is practically jumping up and down just like he was when he revealed the surprise.

I say not always. Rarely do guns help people. I am not ready to give my sweet baby boy over to the military industrial complex just yet. I ain’t a liberal feminist for nothing.

We look up the origins of the day, and even though it was President Woodrow Wilson, after much hard work by Anna Jarvis, who proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, it was the great abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” who first came up with the idea in 1870 with her Mother’s Day Proclamation:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Right now, my son needs to tell me his secrets. And I will keep them and grow the good ones. I have a little bit of time to encourage him to seek other directions as an adult and to maybe teach him that while being a Marine sounds exciting now, waking up before the crack of dawn and doing everything he is told to do without question may not be his forte. Of course, he also wants to be an archaeologist, an animal doctor, and a filmmaker.

Monica Wittstock lives in Minneapolis and writes about food, family and feminism.