Moment totake a mention a couple of additional arele who are here they three who came from vietnam who will be participating this afternoon and i think that for a number of reasons i want to introduce them including in reference to the past discussion, one of the key ways of talking about what has gone on, what is the harm of the war, is to have the faces and the voices of individual people and tran teortunate to have wan was an agent or an survivor will be part of agent orange survivor who will be on the panel this afternoon. Will beguyen fu talking about an effort to clear landmines and unexploded ordnance. Lai who is ao van victim of exploded and unexploded ordnance. I also want to mention two people who are not part of the book but who played a key role in helping to organize this panelence and the wednesday afternoon. That is terry province and John Mcauliffe from that vietnam peace memory she committee. We out peace commemoration committee. [applause] a great pleasure to chris appy. He is a professor, historian at the university of professor of massachusetts amherst. He is best known for through his books on vietnam, american reckoning, the vietnam war and our national identity. Patriots, the vietnam war remembered from all sides. War, americanass combat soldiers in vietnam. Has made a great contribution for having organized events such as this was a three week display of the waging peace in vietnam exhibit at the university of massachusetts involving folks from the five colleges there and large numbers of students and my hat is off to him. [applause] thank you very much. It is a great honor to speak to you today. Want to thank everyone involved in putting this exhibit together and hosting these events. I think it documents the dramatic and inspiring story of the greatest movement of antiwar gis and veterans in u. S. History. Recover so, it helps virtually secret history. Wyatt is the secret is an important problem. Why it is a secret is an important problem. Michael gave a good brief explanation for that. The short answer is that in the decades after the war but beginning during the war, richardy by people like nixons Vice President , spiro agnew, theres a quite successful effort to demonize the Antiwar Movement. And to reduce the most vibrant and diverse movement, Antiwar Movement in our history to this very nasty and reductive stereotype of a bunch of arrogant elitist, unpatriotic cowardly campusbased draft dodgers who undermines the heroic and brave efforts of u. S. Soldiers. Imagery, im afraid, has powerfully endured. And has served not only to stigmatize future antiwar struggles but has produced in us a kind of reflexive obligation to express our abiding gratitude for those who serve in the military that actually discourages all of us as citizens to asking the kind of critical questions about the wars they are being deployed to fight. What i most want to talk about today is a lesson or an example we can find in the g. I. Movement. That is perhaps most relevant to our own time. It is simply this. We need to remember people are capable of changing their mind. On issues of fundamental importance. Not only that, but acting on their new convictions, boldly and at great risk. Aere is, im afraid, conventional wisdom today that we are rigidly and permanently divided into these entrenched camps, and that no one is capable of changing their mind. I have to admit, it does feel a bit that that may be the case when we thing about certain elected public officials. [laughter] but i think we should be deeply skeptical of this conventional wisdom. In our owneven century, millions of americans have changed their minds about the wars that seemed to be endless. Pollsg ago as 2006, indicate a majority of americans had concluded that our wars in iraq and afghanistan had been mistaken. Public iseve that the often more willing to change its mind, and more progressive, actually, that our elected leaders. Now, belowhaps even the radar of the media, there are, in fact, for example, many devout christians, who are concluding that they can no longer support such an utterly profane president. Certain, thatis if you go back to the early 1960s, i do nothing anyone would have predicted the g. I. And to our movement that began to arise the g. I. Antiwar movement that began to arise by the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time when millions of activeduty soldiers engaged in every imaginable form of dissent and defiance and resistance to military authority in vietnam. And they did so at enormous risk of harassment, demotion, punitive reassignment, physical punishment, courtmartial, impressment, and in many stockades, they were subjected to what can only be called torture. And in many as well were subjected to a lifetime, lifetime of bad paper dishonorable discharges. The other thing to really remember is the great majority of gis who protested the vietnam militarynot enter the with antiwar politics. Movement,orkingclass by and large. Most of them came from communities where there was deep support, at least for the military. And, as with most of the country, a deep trust that the government could be relied upon only to send its troops overseas and support of democracy and freedom and human rights. I believe, in other words, that butbrought in the culture, perhaps especially in many of the communities from which american soldiers were recruited and volunteered. A deep believe in american exceptionalism, at the core of which was the idea that the United States has always been and will remain the greatest force for good in the world. Always the good guys in history. When one of the most remarkable things that happens in vietnam, not just among those who are removed who were moved to engage in into our politics in the g. I. Movement, but a major shattering of faith, a sense of betrayal, by the government and military. It is really not too hard to understand why. Soldiers in vietnam experienced, sometimes with an hours of arrival, is that they were arriving in country not as andrators, to save a people to defend freedom and democracy. They quickly understood that they were there to support a government that was Something Like a police state. And the people they were engaged with, particularly in the countryside, did not regard them as liberators, but as hostile invaders and occupiers. And they clearly were not there to protect them from external aggression, but were themselves doing the lions share of aggression. Not saving them, but destroying their villages and, often enough, the civilians who populated them. Because, as you know, the chief measure of success in vietnam was not the territory secured, or the people protected, but the amount of bodies amassed that could be labeled killed. The other thing they noticed, adversariesthat the were far more successful than they were at gaining the fervent dedication and support of the population. That they, in other words, were engaged not just in a bloody military endeavor, but one that ultimately depended entirely on the Political Support of the people. And that the government they were charged with bolstering and supporting never succeeded in winning the sufficient support of its own population. Experiencensider the of one veteran. , who named george evans served as an air force medic at a hospital in cameron bay in the late 1960s. He grew up in pittsburgh. At the age of six, before and after school, he helped his ice todeliver blocks of his poor and workingclass neighbors. Earlyas in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when if you watch television or magazine ads, you would have thought every american owned a shiny new refrigerator. And they in pittsburgh were delivering blocks of ice. So, george was a savvy and streetwise kid. He understood that the american was beyond the grasp of most other people that he knew in his neighborhood. Time,it so in that sense he could be very critical he knew of life in these neighborhoods. He knew that employers and and thatuld screw you the future was not sort of set before him as something that would inevitably lead to a better life. But when it comes to the military and foreign policy, as he later came to realize, he was a complete believer. I did not know there was a bad , he he bad war concluded sometime later. He said, i was raised in a family and neighborhood of extreme patriots. My father was a commander of the vfw post and i got to go to the club and hang out with the veterans. I was there little mascot. He especially loves flag day and also veterans day, when they would all go out to the military setteries and he would help the flags and the plaques. Imagine how beautiful it looked to a kid to see hundreds of graves in a geometric pattern, all with shining bronze plates and flags waving in the wind. You just cannot imagine or exaggerate the pole of the military on kids from neighborhoods like mine. Military. Of the everything you had seen or heard her whole life made it seem inevitable and right. All of that faith was shattered when he went to vietnam. He very soon came to realize that the country i was from was not the country i thought i thought it was. There were a number of experiences, but the note the one most decisive and changing day he wass a working in the hospital. A senior nco said, go clean up the gook behind the curtain. George was a medic so he opened up the curtain and saw on the table the body of an eightyearold or nineyearold viennese boy. His job was to sponge him down. While he was at it, a vietnamese curtain,st through the hysterical in grief, clearly the mother, at least as george perceived it, and began to pound him on the chest in her grief. He quickly realized there was another body one curtain over he had to clean, the brother. Job and soon after realized these two viennese boys had been run over by vietnamese boys had been run over by an American Military truck driver. Worse than that, they had been playing a kind of game, gambling on who could kill a viennese kid. Hockey. Y called it gook moments obviously a key in his political development. Betrayed andlt really angry. That sense of betrayal is pervasive in these accounts. But, you know, just because your faith is shattered, does not mean that you will come up with a new faith. It is not this is charlie mean you will engage in Political Action it does not necessarily mean you will engage in Political Action, that you will develop new convictions to try and struggle for a new world. He was a victim of what some psychologist would call moral injury, which is a deep wound to the conscience. A wound to your sense of what is right, to your morality. More technically as defined by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shea in the book, achilles in vietnam, it is a deep moral sense of betrayal, caused by authorities considered or once considered legitimate. And that certainly characterized georges sense. Toyoun, it also has have to move beyond that sense of betrayal to have confidence that it is worth moving in a new direction. Even if you do not think it may affect change. That youre going to act to try to recover from that oral wound by acting on your strongest moral convictions. In that sense, rebellion and activism can be a way of healing conscience, both in a political sense but also in a psychological and theoretical sense. Among the first people to recognize this was the psychiatrist robert j lifton. Back in the early 70s he worked with a lot of antivietnam veterans and purchase grated participated in rap groups and wrote a book called, home from the war. He observes that these veterans, although they clearly suffered a deep sense of moral injury, and even guilt, deep guilt about the make complicit in wrongdoing, that they were able to get beyond that, in large part, because of their pledge go activism, to try to because of their political activism, to try to reconstitute a morally centered life. So george evans was one who did move in that traction. Heat in that direction. First he did bleeding he was only acting by himself. Believing he was acting only by himself. He stopped cutting his hair and shaving and started making antiwar posters that he would put up in the Bulletin Board in the hospital. He eventually defied a direct order which got him threatened with a courtmartial. It was as if i had become a different person, here a member. He remembered. I was saying these things i never would have said before. At the time, i thought my small defiance was isolated. I do not realize it was a tiny splintered amid an uprising among soldiers. Eventually, he did get a sense he was part of a much bigger movement. Make ispoint i would there is in all movements, especially this one, a ripple effect. One act is a rock in the middle of a pond that spreads out. Other people hear about it. , not the sallyt right away, but not necessarily right away, but years later. There were many veterans who share georges feeling but did not join in that and there. But they felt the same convictions. Think of many those in this room know, brian wilson. He wrote a memoir called blood on the tracks. He developed into her conviction while in vietnam did not get engage nose politics then. Engaged in those politics then. But years later in Central America sat down on the tracks in the Concord Naval weapons station in the bay area to block a munitions train from sending its lethal weapons to Central America when the u. S. Was involved. Protests on tracks dated back to the vietnam war. The train would stop. There would be interest. There would be an arrest. The train did not stop. He lost both legs and 19 bones were broken. He managed to lived and is still a lifelong peace activist. There were millions of minds changed during the 1960s. Most americans supported the war in the 1960s. 1971, 70 1 of americans thought it was a mistake. Thought it was a mistake and a majority thought it was immoral. Because we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the events of the fall, 1969, i did want to say a bit about a man whose testimony as part of the exhibit. He was interviewed and photographed and has a long, interesting story. I will tell the part that involved the moratoriums of the fall of 1969. Base sometimes known as bearcat, in a small can occasions unit small commute smallions Unit Communications unit. One guy came back from r r in hawaii and shows a big cut out from that new york times. It was the petition that had been signed by 1300 activeduty gis protesting the war and calling for participation in the moratorium. The name of Dave Cartwright and 30 of his colleagues. They got together and said we should do something here, in vietnam. At the very least we will take our black boot strengths and tie them around our arms as a black armband and get the word out to some of these other units. They said, lets not bother the mps. They will not be affected. So we do not tell them. Ofthat base, the mps, one the response builds was to control the pa system, the sound system. They would turn on recording of reveille in the morning. Without telling the mps, ever but he wakes up on this base and the mps had put on recording of jimi hendrix playing the starspangled banner. [laughter] as you know, this is that subversive version of the starspangled banner. Then they started driving around the base figuring out how any people were participating. Participation in his unit and in another unit 100 participation. There was half participation among the engineers because there co threatened them at gunpoint literally, if they do not do their job. So everyday got the day off except for the engineers. But the engineers got the day off because somebody sabotaged the bulldozers. So that whole base had shut down. There is one other thing that inspired him. Him that maybe i will sort of, i almost closed with. 1969 ho chi minh died in 1969, and one thing that changed his mind is he came back from an the youngduty, and vietnamese women were hired in most military bases to shine boots and make beds and that sort of thing. I came in the night patrol, hooch, i noticed the house girls were unusually quiet, and one was crying. I thought one of the men had given one of them at bedtime or something, and i kept asking them, what is wrong, what is wrong . Died. , ho chi minh so what . He is a communist. Duringw the whole rap, the earlier period onethird was for the revolution, onethird did not care, and onethird supported the british. In vietnam, 70 supported him. Everyone loved ho chi minh. She compared the vietnamese war against what had gone against the british. That conversation shocked me. There she was in our barracks, so that it to the revolution. Until then, i had not known the vc firsthand. Here was a woman who shined our booths and that our laundry, and all of a sudden, i realize she was he we were supposed to be fighting against. I realized right then that the u. S. Was on the wrong side of a terrible, of a terrible war. So i take great inspiration from these stories, because i think it does demonstrate that people are capable of changing their mind, and it may yet happen where none of us could predict it. So thank you very much. [applause] prof. Appy when preparing the alsoit and the book, i came across the interview and the photograph of dave blalock, rt, and i wasl sho astounded, because i had worked for a year atock the g. I. Coffeehouse in anniston, alabama, 1970, and he never told me that story. And the reason he never told me that story is because there were so many incidents while he was resistance,tnam of that to him, it was just another one, but still short and his wife, lois, set dave blalock interview,fourhour and they were able to elicit some of these stories. The advantages of being a person of my age is that over the years, i have gotten to meet so many terrific folks involved in the social justice movement, and i think of three of them, who particularly meant something to me as i was growing up. One of them is someone i worked with in mississippi. Fannie lou hamer. A lot of you heard of her. I was fortunate to work with her. There was another one who, there was no way for me to meet, because she was in vietnam and then in paris paris. And i was in mississippi, new york, alabama, i was in massachusetts, and that was who was a great hero of mine, and fortunately, three years ago, when i went to received the assignment to make this exhibit, and turn it into a book, i was her, a photograph portrait, part of a series i had been doing. Who meant third woman so much to me during the 1960s and 1970s, and i always regretted never having met her, and that is cora weiss. I had something to do with inviting her here today, was taught a lot on the phone we have talked a lot on the phone the past couple of months, and i am so pleased that cora is here. Woman among only the eighth National Organizers of the moratorium demonstrations of