Kovic refused to leave, and was taken away by police. Based on their racial profile, over 1500 have been rounded up and the government refuses to say who they are, where they are jailed and what the charges are!!! VVAW members defied a Justice Department-ordered injunction against camping on the Mall and set up an installation. It is a blessing to speak on behalf of peace, to be able to reach such a great number of people.". Juli 1946 geboren . At Valley Forge, Kerry came into contact with VVAW’s most prominent promoter, actress Jane Fonda, who told those in attendance: “My Lai [a 1968 massacre by U.S. soldiers against unarmed Vietnamese civilians] was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.”. In 1989, on the last day of filming Born On The Fourth of July, Kovic presented actor Tom Cruise, who portrayed him in the movie, the original Bronze Star he had received,[13] explaining to Cruise that he was giving him the medal as a gift [14] "for his heroic performance. Ron Kovic. Later that evening, Democratic Senators Claiborne Pell and Philip Hart held a fund-raising party for the veterans. [2] About 20 veterans of the Vietnam War gathered under that impromptu banner, including Jan Barry Crumb, a West Point dropout who had served in the war as a radio specialist in an Army unit of a fixed-wing supply aircraft. VVAW members in California also briefly occupied the South Vietnam Government consulate in San Francisco. Between April 19–26, he attended meetings at Rome's City Hall with other international peace activists, diplomats and academics, to discuss the need for conflict resolution and other more peaceful, nonviolent alternatives to war as a way of solving the world's many conflicts. FBI File 100-HQ-448092 - Section 2, Declassified through FOIA; Page 106. We had been told that on the balance the war was a good thing and we tried to make it a good thing; all of us can tell of somebody who helped out an orphanage, or of men like one sergeant who adopted a crippled Vietnamese child; and even at My Lai the grief of one of the survivors was mixed with bewilderment as he told a reporter, "I just don't understand it ... always before, the Americans brought medicine and candy." "It's All Coming Together For Ron Kovic", S.F. Milliarium Zero/Winterfilm Collective; VVAW Historical Archive Docs. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) is an American tax-exempt non-profit organization and corporation founded in 1967 to oppose the United States policy and participation in the Vietnam War.VVAW says it is a national veterans' organization that campaigns for peace, justice, and the rights of all United States military veterans. In 1978, these factions split off from the existing organization and formed their own group, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War – Anti-Imperialist” (VVAW-AI). Dubbed "Operation Dewey Canyon III," it took place in Washington, D.C, April 19–23, 1971. WSI featured some 125 self-identified Vietnam veterans who gave testimony about gruesome atrocities which they claimed to have perpetrated or witnessed in Vietnam, where rape, torture and murder were allegedly standard practices for the American military. VVAW has survived the conflict with RCP and changes after the end of the war. In 1971, VVAW executive secretary Al Hubbard signed – on his organization’s behalf – a “People’s Peace Treaty” aligning the group with the Viet Cong’s conditions for ending the Vietnam War. Such discussion groups are often used in the VVAW "rap group" treatment methods are the basis for treating PTSD today. Participants said it was "a limited incursion into the country of Congress." ... VVAW never ceased to exist. President Jimmy Carter eventually granted an amnesty in 1980. In March 2007, Kovic checked into the Ernest Bors Spinal Cord Injury ward of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach, California, for an undisclosed illness. Latest Commentary: From the National Office A large percentage of us volunteered for service in Vietnam. The seeds of this anger and hatred were sown over many years.”, “For over a century, Western corporations have dominated the Middle East to profit from its oil. But ultimately, of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam during the ’60s and ’70s, just 30,000 became members of VVAW. Membership has varied greatly, from almost 25,000 veterans during the height of the war to fewer than 2,000 since the late 20th century. He returned home to Massapequa in December, just before Christmas. On December 6, 2009 Kovic spoke honoring Bruce Springsteen at the 32nd annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. On December 22, 2009, Kovic, Oliver Stone, and friends celebrated the 20th anniversary of the filming of Born on the Fourth of July at a dinner party in Torrance, California. McCloskey and fellow Representatives Bella Abzug, Don Edwards, Shirley Chisholm, Edmund Muskie and Ogden Reid addressed the large crowd and expressed support. The strike continued to escalate until Johnson finally agreed to fly out from Washington, D.C., and meet with the veterans. She was of Irish ancestry, and a housewife. Asserting that “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia [are] not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command,” Kerry said that American soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” As to what forces might actually endanger the United States, Kerry said that “the crimes threaten it, not Reds.”. Instead, PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government) and DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) ‘are to be used by us [VVAW] to reflect our acceptance of their designations.’ And the VVAW’s unremitting insistence that American forces were mass-murdering Vietnamese civilians perfectly echoed the primary propaganda theme put forth by the Vietnamese communists, their international communist allies, and their Soviet sponsors.”. [14], Veterans applying to participate in the investigation were asked if they had witnessed or participated in any of the following: search and destroy missions, crop destruction, and POW mistreatment.[15]. On January 20, 1968, while leading a reconnaissance force of battalion scouts[9] from the 1st Amtrac Battalion just north of the Cửa Việt River in the vicinity of the village of My Loc, in the Demilitarized Zone, Kovic's squad came into contact with the NVA 803rd Regiment and elements of a Viet Cong battalion that was besieging the village; he was shot by NVA soldiers while leading his rifle squad across an open area, attempting to aid the South Vietnamese Popular Force unit in the village. This week of protest events gained much greater media publicity and Vietnam veterans participation than earlier events.[18][19]. [35][36] Kerry's campaign said he was not there and had already resigned from VVAW. I had been called a Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated." ...[3], According to VVAW, its founders organized discussions for veterans on readjustment issues in 1970. [2] Beginning with a desk and a telephone in the office of the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee in New York City, the formal VVAW organization was formed.[2]. [35] It is not known if John Kerry, a 2004 presidential candidate who was Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, attended this meeting. One of VVAW’s most famous new members in the late Sixties was Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran who authored Born on the Fourth of July, a book that later served as the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1989 film of the same name. They gained the aid of prominent psychiatrists Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and Dr. Chaim F. Shatan to direct their sessions. Julian Soshnick, an attorney who represented the Boston Strangler, was among those who volunteered to represent the demonstrators. “They eventually took it over around ’73 and basically pushed out all the real veterans and brought in all the RCP functionaries and destroyed the organization,” adds Nicosia. The following day, he led a march of several hundred thousand demonstrators on Trafalgar Square, where a huge rally was held protesting the visit of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. [4] He was raised in Massapequa, New York, in a Catholic household. Operation POW, organized by the VVAW in Massachusetts, expressed the imprisonment of Americans by the war years and honor for American POWs held captive by North Vietnam. [8] The first Marine that tried to save him was shot through the heart and killed, before a second Marine carried Kovic to safety through heavy enemy fire. Simultaneous protests took place at other sites across the country, such as the historic Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia (for 45 minutes) and Travis Air Force Base in California (for 12 hours). Some members visited their Congressmen to lobby against the U.S. participation in the war. He said: Maybe there are some others here like me—who wanted desperately to believe that what we were doing was acceptable, who hung on the words of "revolutionary development" and "winning the hearts and minds of the people." Dewey Canyon III – Washington, D.C., April 1971, Art Goldberg, "Vietnam Vets: The Anti-War Army,". Upon entering each town along the march, the group made sweeps, took and interrogated prisoners, seized property and cleared homes with the aid of previously planted "guerrilla theater" actors portraying civilians. [28][29][30], On December 26, 1971, fifteen VVAW activists barricaded and occupied the Statue of Liberty for two days to bring attention to their cause.
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