Vets look back, critique big Washington rally

Here's the message Iraq troops can take from last weekend's patriotic rally in Washington: We've got your back.

"We were trashed when we came home after Vietnam. The 'Greatest Generation' didn't catch our backs," Mike Bradley, a Vietnam Navy veteran in Florida, said. "We took the brunt of the crap. Korean vets didn't help us. Nobody helped us. We were trashed in the press. We were looked upon as outcasts. That is what the press made us out to be -- just a bunch of drunken Vietnam vets."

Returning Vietnam veterans were spit upon, called baby-killers and reviled in ways American soldiers had never experienced before. These same veterans vow that Iraq vets never will face the same degradation.

No longer asleep

Thousands and thousands and thousands - maybe as many as 30,000 veterans and other supporters - came together near the Vietnam War Memorial to stand against a loud, ranting group of anti-war protesters who shouted obscenities and carried the flags of Iranian, Iraqi and Palestinian terrorists.

"Everywhere you went you saw veterans who came together to make a stand," Bradley said. "The thing that was amazing is that for years and years we, as veterans, had been asleep at the switch. We never got involved in anything like this, but we made this an extremely successful event."

Vietnam veterans are a unique group. For many of them, the war was traumatic - the stuff of which nightmares are made. The scorn and hatred they felt when they returned to America drove those memories deeper.

"Guys like me, up until eight, 10 years ago, had been in the closet [about Vietnam]," Bradley said. "They didn't want to talk about it, hear about it. I moved it out of my mind. Now, it all came back together for us as a brotherhood. We're at the point just now where we're starting to get over a lot of our ill feelings."

Jerry Milhollen served in the Navy in Vietnam. He agrees that Vietnam vets kept their experiences hidden.

A Fleetwood Mac encounter

"A lot of us never even admitted to having served until the '80s," Milhollen said. "I enlisted, did two tours. I came home and thought I was in a different country. They threw dog sh*t on us. It happened to quite a few of us. We were treated like second-class citizens. Now we tend to stick more together."

Mike Flick, a Marine veteran, was insulted by one of the most popular music groups of the time. He was on R&R in Hawaii in 1967, wearing a civilian T-shirt and a pair of civilian slacks, when he walked into a hotel elevator. Behind him was the famous Fleetwood Mac band. Popular singer Stevie Nix looked at Flick and said, "Baby-killer!"

"It must have been the haircut" that gave him away, Flick said.

But it was his final homecoming that caused him to leave his country. Anti-war protesters splashed him with chicken blood when he arrived in San Francisco.

"I made my decision then that I wasn't going to be an American any more," he said. "I took the migrant program and moved to Australia."

It would be years before he returned to the U.S.A. Today, he lives in Oklahoma.

Get yourself a handful

The rallying call for these veterans was the protesters' threat to damage the Wall. They have friends and relatives whose names are engraved in the black granite. It is sacred territory for many of them.

"All us guys will get up off the couch and come after you if you threaten that Wall," Bradley said. "I've got a lot of friends on that Wall that I can remember sitting and drinking a beer with. We laughed together. I can close my eyes and still see them. When you get anywhere near that Wall, start any crap, even say the 'Wall,' and you've got yourself a handful."

The anti-war, anti-American protesters made official denials of their unofficial threat to desecrate the monument, but police officials confiscated at least half-dozen cans of spray paint and, according to one report, a bottle of muriatric acid.

Veterans had good reason to believe the threats. The protesters were some of the same ones who spray-painted the Capitol steps in January.

So, vets formed a defensive perimeter. They held their ground in mud, in wind-chill temperatures that dipped into the teens, through moments of freezing rain and early spring snow, to guard against protesters who came with the same old propaganda they used in the '60s. This time, vets fought back.

Rolling Thunder rolls

"We had some confrontations," said Vietnam Special Forces veteran Ted Sampley, publisher of U.S. Veteran Dispatch and a Rolling Thunder founder. "Members of both groups began crossing the street with their signs. Some were either trying to walk through, or trying to taunt them. It's the first time the leftist run into this type of resistance. Some of our guys got physically involved. A large number of Rolling Thunder were crossing Henry Bacon Drive and entering the side [of the street] with the moonbats. There were scuffles. The Park police very quickly moved in and, in a professional way, separated the two sides without slapping anybody or arresting anybody."

Police arrested a few people later in the day, but none was a veteran.

"The hippies were just shocked that so many of us showed up," Millholen said. "All of us being ex-military, we were trained to kill. When they saw the numbers, they were shocked. That may have been why Jane Fonda didn't show up."

Then he laughed and added, "I don't know if that's really why, but it makes for a good news story."

Protesters were met by a phalanx of angry veterans waving American flags. The "moonbats" carried foreign flags, effigies of George Bush, U.S. flags held upside down or defaced with markings. They covered their faces with masks and bandanas. (Flick wonders how many of the girls who bared their midriffs in the freezing wind are suffering with colds or pneumonia today.)

"The moonbats were making a lot of noise and dancing," Sampley said. "They were outshining us. They looked a lot more interesting to the press than a bunch of vets standing across the street and singing "God Bless America." It was not until we crossed the street that we got any attention from the press."

High praise for police

Sampley is effusive in his praise for Park police and he has experience to back him up. The former Green Beret says he has been arrested many times during non-violent civil disobedience demonstrations for POW/MIA action in Washington. Veterans were "trying to push the envelope," he said, for no reason other than to cause an incident and capture the attention of the press. He believes that's what non-violence demonstration is all about.

"Every American should step back and be proud that our police force acted in a nonbiased and professional way, and handled it in a way that it didn't turn into a major riot," he said. "They did it by being as fair to one side as to the other. In my 15 years of experience with the Park Service police, I've found that they deal with it on a daily basis and they have learned to deal with it professionally."

One of the Gathering of Eagles leaders appointed marshals to control the veterans. Flick volunteered, but soon changed his mind.

"When I realized were going to have to rush around in orange shirts, scolding, correcting, managing our own people -- I didn't go up there to do that," he said.

Flick had no reservations or hesitation about confronting the protesters, and wasn't worried about the consequences.

"Many people had bail money with them, and a lawyer on standby in Oklahoma," Flick said. "We expected a full-blown blowout. The security people were panic-stricken by that. We had enough people that we could have used forces to be far more severe, to be effective. We were limited in our actions. You're all excited and energized to do something and nothing happens."

Opportunities missed

Despite the best efforts of Rolling Thunder and its supporters, most news outlets zeroed in on the protesters, and mostly ignored the veterans. Flick has spent the last few days thinking about how the mainstream media snubbed his group.

"We got played down by the media," he said. "They called us pro-war protesters. Nobody in their right mind is pro-war. Pro-national defense, pro for fighting the war on terror. But pro-war? Come on!"

Flick, a former newspaper reporter, advertising executive and political operative, was part of the Gathering of Eagles group. Looking back, he sees many things GOE should have done differently. He regrets the lack of planning and marketing.

"They should have had a team put together and been contacting the media, getting follow-up stories," he said. "We knew two weeks before [the rally] we'd have a monstrous turnout. If we knew that, why didn't we make a greater use of the forces we had there? We had every opportunity to have two and three times the number of people we had. We could have been at the Pentagon giving (the protesters) a lashing when they came off their imbecilic rant. The Rolling Thunder fellows turned out in mass. They made this thing a huge success. They gave us the numbers we needed to put this over the top."

Abandoned by the press

Veterans' are angered by the media's failure to present their side of the protest - but they aren't surprised. They believe most of the press is liberal in their thinking.

"Everything is slanted in their direction," Bradley said. "The only thing that guys like me are asking for is fair coverage. When you look back at World War Two and [German Gen. Heinrich] Himmler who said when we own the press we will own their minds, he was preaching that a propaganda campaign through newspapers could win the German people and they did it. That is the shame of all this."

Millholen sees the same attitude in the press that he saw when he came back from Vietnam.

"If anything, it's worse," he said. "I just know what I saw when I got out. We didn't lose Vietnam. The press lost it for us. Once politicians get into it, it's over."

But regardless of the problems, the men are glad they went. They experienced a solidarity they'd seldom, if ever, felt before, many said. They finally had the chance to face the people who showed them such contempt when they returned from Vietnam.

"They took us for granted," Bradley said. "They thought we were just a bunch of old guys, not too concerned about them, but they got their butts handed to them."

Visit the U.S. Veteran Dispatch Eagle message board.