Select this to read [the Whole Story]."Joined" the antiwar movement... I think that is a very strange term. We didn't have to enlist or enroll or anything. If the antiwar movement wasn't "joined," one merely "became" a part of it. Do you agree? How did it happen for you?
What I meant by "joined" is that I became a part of the people that did something. Being angry over having my friends drafted and being subject to the draft went nowhere. But getting out in the streets to demonstrate that anger was the first "activist" thing I'd ever done. After going through the pain of the Kennedys and [Martin Luther King] being shot, after watching the obscenity of the anti-integration abuses in the South, just getting out on the street with thousands of others to express my outrage was a great release. To me, that meant "joining" the movement in a very literal sense. "Movement" means that we got off our butts and "moved." Seeing the war displayed on TV, knowing that the [Viet Cong] and the [North Vietnamese Army] were fighting for their country and we weren't, realizing that I might have to go to jail rather than let myself be drafted all knawed away at me for the four years I was in college. Then having most of my professors honor the strike in my final semester seemed to vindicate what I'd been feeling all along. If even the U of Maryland profs would strike, it had to be significant...
Although you were "just one of the troops," you were an active participant at the big antiwar rallies, such as the large marches in DC including the Moratorium and the post-Cambodian invasion gathering. What did you see and how did you feel during those marches?
It was inspiring to the point of tears to join so many people for a just cause. At that point, all I had was contempt for Nixon. That contempt had carried over from, I think, his opposing Kennedy in 1960. My parents had loved JFK and it had rubbed off on me when I was in my early teens. I heard of abuses by the police and the military, but I did not witness them. Instead, I witnessed provocation of the police by some of us. I was in a tree on the corner of the Elipse when some folks began throwing rocks and bottles at a phalanx of cops across the intersection. Suddenly the police charged and tear gas canisters started hitting the ground around my perch. I risked injury by jumping about 15 feet to the ground in the middle of a stampede to get outta there.
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We sent a caravan of vehicles to the Nov. 69 demonstration in DC. My parents for some strange reason agreed to let me and my friends occupy our suburban Maryland house for the duration. We took turns going out and getting tear-gassed and returning home to the suburbs for sustenance.
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I participated in a number of the actions you mention including the November 15, 1969 march in Washington. It was very cold and the wind went right through us.
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