Dewey Canyon III
By Ed Damato

I was one of those people who actually went to the
Woodstock music festival in August 1969. I mention this
because the experience was an important influence on me
at the time. The idea of a three-day rock concert in the
rolling hills of sunny, upstate New York instead of the
ugly confines of Fillmore East and Madison Square Garden
was very appealing. That it turned out to be a watershed
moment of the times was lost on us as we began the drive
that Friday morning. After three days of great delays,
torrential downpours, mud, scarcity of food, cut feet,
and loss of socks, shoes, shirt and wallet, I returned
home.

The music, however, was, to use a Sixties term,
"mindblowing." The indescribable bonding of the tens of
thousands of us bogged down in traffic, shoehorned on a
sloping hillside, sharing food, and smiling, smiling,
smiling at our discomfort took on a life equal to or
surpassing that on the stage. Woodstock showed the
possibilities of the new culture and politics, born out
of the tumultuous Sixties with the civil rights struggles,
assassinations, the Beatles and the interminable war in
Vietnam from which I had returned in February 1968. I felt
like a pioneer of a new age of politics and power. Did my
life peak just turning age 23?

One year later, in August 1970, 1 saw Jane Fonda on a late
night show talking about a march to Valley Forge by a group
called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Is it possible, I
thought, that there could be such a group? Jane Fonda is
merely one of us who spoke out against the war, and she
has suffered for it dearly at the hands of a conservative
campaign to denigrate anti-Vietnam War activism in general.

I tracked the group down and joined immediately. I marched
to Valley Forge and began a life of fighting against the
war that I thought was wrong. Up to this point my big anti-
war statement was giving the finger to President Richard
Nixon while he rounded 50th Street in his limousine on his
way to an event held at the Americana Hotel on 7th Avenue
in New York City.

Somehow I became VVAW's coordinator for New York and
Vermont. At its first National Steering Committee Meeting
held in New York in February 1971, the group voted to go
to Washington DC for Operation Dewey Canyon III in April,
not leaving much time to organize such a massive event.

I remember indexing names of upstate veterans who expressed
an interest in joining the group. I toured from Burlington,
near the Canadian border in the northwestern part of
Vermont to western New York. I hooked up with the Vets
Club at the University of Buffalo through Gail Graham in
Jamestown close to the Ohio border. Soon after DCIII they
officially joined VVAW as a chapter, one of the very nice
things that resulted from Dewey Canyon III.

In the meantime the chapters in Queens, Brooklyn and Long
Island were out asking veterans to enlist one more time.
Come dawn of the day we set out for the bus trip down to
DC; our eager veterans and friends boarded the two buses
awaiting us. The enthusiasm was palpable. The possibilities
were ripe.

The days in Washington flew by. As at the Woodstock concert
the events blur in my head in a sort of haze with certain
pictures frozen in my memory.

I remember the first day as I was helping myself to a cup
of coffee, one hand full, bumping into a vet also with one
hand full. He held the cups and I poured the sugar. As we
looked up at each other I recognized my friend Tim Donahue,
with whom I trained at Fort Ord and Fort Gordon!

I remember looking through a crowd filled with fatigue-
clad veterans and spotting a soon-to-be great friend and
political cohort, Barry Romo. We had met once before in
February in New York where, among other things, we
participated in the rolling of a cot on the sidewalks of
the upper West Side. It was like meeting an old friend.

I remember getting ready to go on a march of some kind and
having the distinct and humbling pleasure of meeting and
escorting Anne Pine, a gold star mother. I remember being
overwhelmed by her courage.

I remember seeing Jacob Javits, our US senator visiting the
campsite. Javits visiting us? I remember the secret thrill
of not going to meet or introduce him to our contingent
and sensing the rising power of our presence as a major
political force in the anti-war movement.

I remember dozens of New York veterans visiting the office
of James Buckley (brother of William), our carpetbagger
senator from Connecticut. (We have a long history of
welcoming "foreigners" to our state.) It was believed that
to avoid us he sneaked out a back door, leaving his staff
to answer to the angry veterans waiting to lobby our
elected representative.

But most of all, I remember the discussion at a steering
committee meeting as we debated how to end the
demonstration on its last day. Should we take all our
medals we wanted to return to the federal government and
put them in a body bag, or should we allow the vets to
physically throw them at the foot of the statue of John
Marshall that sits at the rear of the Capitol Building?
It is to our everlasting credit and to the democracy of
our organization that we chose the latter.

Returning our medals as we did allowed for two things. It
gave each and every veteran the center stage to express
his sadness and anger at having taken part in the Vietnam
War. It helped cleanse our consciences, and most
importantly, it made for a great, historic action of
veterans standing tall and true and expressing our deepest
sentiments at a war we believed to be unjust.

We aren't given a choice of wars to be called upon to
fight. We can't choose to be at Gettysburg to fight for
the union. We can't choose to be at Normandy to fight
against fascism and annihilation. Our time came during
the Vietnam War. At Dewey Canyon III we expressed ourselves
in just as honest and heartfelt a way as they did when
raising the flag at Iwo Jima. We were just as courageous
and patriotic as all our fellow veterans from all the wars
we are made to fight in.

I mention Woodstock and DCIII at the same time because,
as a young man coming of age in the 1960s, I was most
influenced by music and war. At each event I felt a part
of something much larger, something so important that they
created sea changes in the way America thinks and grows.
That events are always so defining is something I continue
to hope for.


Protest and the right to protest are both very important aspects of the American system and it's process.
Even for the military, and the ex-military among us.