"I was doing something in town and I learned about a protest march that was going on. So I went down and got a flier. It talked about Operation RAW. It was a march from Trenton to the Valley Forge. So, it was a bunch of Vietnam veterans [that] were going to march from Trenton to Valley Forge. And they would stop at various shopping centers along the way armed with tiny little plastic M16's.
And members of the Philadelphia Theater of some sort would, guerrilla theater of some sort, would come out and pretend to be villagers. We would go in — actually I was not in that. I was driving an MGB GT [car] and I was following the march, driving, and sleeping in that thing. But keeping up with it.
That was the thing — [they went] into the shopping center. Take the villagers, tie them up, shoot them, that kind of thing. It was just to bring attention to what we were doing [in Vietnam]."
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a very different veteran's organization from it's start — especially in terms of the veterans it represented. As the first organization of veterans who protested a war they had fought in — an ongoing war at that — it was also different in how the organization and its members were received by others: the American public, government entities (like the Veterans Administration), and even other veterans organizations such as American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). 