Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement [Hardcover]

Maybe in his next edition, he will include some of the findings from the extensive files the FBI kept on VVAW, and lay to rest some of the urban legends being spread even by at least one reviewer here.

For instance, the VVAW "meeting" in Kansas City was actually a series of meetings over a four day period. Neither the participants nor the FBI files show Kerry present at any meeting where "assassinations" were discussed in any form. In fact, the FBI informants do not mention any such discussion at all, much less a vote. By all accounts of those there, one individual stood up and started riffing, and once people realized he wasn't joking, he was shouted down. As Nicosia points out time and again, nonviolence was an underlying principle of VVAW.

Even the FBI concluded that Kerry was in no way associated with any sort of violent activity or discussion, ever.

Nicosia is a myth-buster. He has his hands full in this election year.

Politically, the guys that this book is about weren't accomplishing much on their own, so they tried to support Senator Eugene McCarthy in his run for president early in 1968. At least McCarthy wanted an end to the war in Vietnam, and that's what they wanted. "On March 12, McCarthy stunned the nation by winning 20 of New Hampshire's 24 convention delegates." (p. 30). That month, Larry Rottmann, who had been wounded in the Tet offensive, was discharged from the Army. Then he spent a week in Wisconsin working for McCarthy. When they went to Indiana, "Rottman was in charge of a group of vets that followed Kennedy around in order to wave their McCarthy placards in his face every time he spoke to the media." (p. 30). Robert Kennedy was then a Senator from New York, formerly Attorney General of the United States and popular enough to get "42 percent of the vote in Indiana, compared to McCarthy's 27 percent. Rottmann took his group of vets to the airport in Lincoln, Nebraska, to await Kennedy's arrival for the primary there. Exasperated to see the same guys in his face once again, Kennedy confronted Rottmann and demanded, `Why are you working against me?' Rottmann replied that they weren't . . ." (p. 30). They were just trying to remind him that some people "simply found McCarthy `more down-to-earth and more sincere, both in his politics and in his lifestyle.' Kennedy evidently failed to appreciate Rottmann's point of view; he restated his dismay that Vietnam veterans weren't campaigning on his behalf instead of McCarthy's." (p. 30). It can be embarrassing to try to tell a frontrunner what the multitude of radicals really think, when the idea that they all think gets this fuzzy. Elections are too important to let the candidates who are best politically, with their illusion that they agree with everybody, think that anyone really cares about them. Another President Kennedy might have been able to end the Vietnam war at that time by letting the Pope tell him how, and a lot of people thought that he would, until "... Sirhan Sirhan aimed a pistol at his head, taking him out of politics forever and enshrining him as one more dead American hero." (p. 31). I'm not sure that the bullet in Robert Kennedy's head came from Sirhan Sirhan, since a security guard was behind Kennedy and a lot more shots were fired than Sirhan Sirhan's pistol could manage, but this book is more about perceptions than about what was actually going on, and the police in Los Angeles, California, typically take a pretty simple view of what was going on, as well as taking as much of the evidence as they could get their hands on. HOME TO WAR isn't supposed to be about a war in the United States between the police and people who are politically active, but pages 33 on to 36, about "what a battlefield Chicago was destined to become that August," show how much it helped veterans realize "that lying on a big scale had become the American way of life, and it was just such lying that had kept the war going, and going nowhere, for so many years."

Finally, on page 59, "VVAW was just beginning to initiate the `rap groups,' which were groups of veterans sitting around in a room and confiding to one another the most troubling aspects of both their military service and their experiences in coming home from the war. Toward the end of 1970, Al Hubbard would bring in two psychiatrists, Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, to guide the discussions." (p. 59). It isn't too surprising that, with all this introspection, the political situation came to reflect a deeper shudder, with the participation of guys who had served in graves registration, who "naturally gravitated toward the crazies." (p. 120). I believe in the reality of this kind of book.