On April 24, 1971, thousands of Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched on the US capitol. Hundreds tossed their war medals on the steps of the Capitol in a climactic act of rejection of the war. One by one, each veteran called out their names, units, gave emotional speeches, and angrily threw their medals at the Capitol. Along with other Vietnam veterans, John Kerry testified to a Senate committee on the atrocities and war crimes in Vietnam.
"The country doesn’t know it yet, but it’s created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. . . .
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found that most people didn’t know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart."
The sheer violence Americans experienced in Vietnam turned thousands of veterans against the war.1 The antiwar movement is often misremembered as draft-dodging students at elite universities, but the most powerful leaders of the antiwar movement had actually fought in the Vietnam War and then used their voices to speak out against it.2 Many of them had volunteered to fight for the United States against the global spread of communism. In Vietnam, their actual experiences of violence contradicted their previous ideals and violated their sense of morality, justice, and patriotism, and thousands joined the antiwar movement.3 The stories of these veterans remind us that civil disobedience and protest are the duties of citizenship.
Learn about the stories of veterans against war below.
