Jack Day's Worlds: A Veteran's Experience

In March, 1971, I received a phone call. Vietnam Veterans against the War was organizing a protest against the war and they wanted someone who had been a chaplain to lead a memorial service at Arlington. Would I do it? It was not an easy decision, but it was something I could not say no to. Before the spring was over, I had resigned my membership in the National Guard.

That spring was troubling for everyone. The memories of the Kent State killings were fresh, and here I was, Chaplain for a National Guard unit, the 115th Evacuation Hospital of the D. C. National Guard. As the weeks of protests approached and contingency plans were made to call out the Guard, tension rose. One evening the unit leadership assembled for a briefing, given by the unit's intelligence officer, who was a young second lieutenant. He clearly did not know much about the protests and found it confusing. As he spoke, adding one piece of mis-information to another, you could feel the tension in the room rise. When he was finished, I raised my hand and asked if I could make a few comments. At that point I had only spoken with my anti-war friends once on the telephone; all the information I had came from following the planned events in the newspapers. Based on that information I outlined the different groups that were involved, where they were coming from, what their key issues and objectives were, what might be expected. You could feel the tension in the room relax as it appeared there were facts and people that could be understood. I thought to myself thinking about the tension that had been in the room, "My God, I'll bet this is how Kent State happened."

Later that evening the Hospital Commander called me up and asked if I would take on additional duties as unit Intelligence Officer--in addition to being Chaplain. It seemed like it might be a useful role. But I told him, "there is something you should know. I will be doing a Memorial Service for Vietnam Veterans Against the War on April 19th." That alone was not so much a problem, but it was important to me to be with the others I had been in Vietnam with, in the same uniform we had worn in Vietnam -- jungle fatigues. Unfortunately, jungle fatigues are a military uniform, and they were not the prescribed uniform for the Military District of Washington in April 1971. If I remained in the Guard, yet wore jungle fatigues, I would be representing not myself but the U. S. Army, and doing a poor job of it. I could not become unit Intelligence Officer; I resigned instead.

The week, called "Dewey Canyon III", began on Monday April 19, 1971. Assembling on the Washington side of the Memorial Bridge, we marched across to Arlington, where I conducted the Memorial service.

That week John Kerry, now Senator from Massachusetts, acted as VVAW's spokesman. There is a photo of him addressing the group. My friend Ed Chilton recalls that VVAW erected a wooden speakers platform on the mall, where Kerry is standing just before sundown; perhaps this was the speech concerning the park police initial refusal to let vets sleep on the Mall. The vets voted to sleep anyway and set guards out on a perimeter.

September 21, 1971. U.S. reveals eight unanswered 1945 letters from Ho Chi Minh seeking aid against French colonial rule.

<------ Back in the World| 1975: The Fall------>

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©1999-2004 Jackson H. Day. All photos taken by Jackson Day unless otherwise noted. All Rights Reserved. Updated June 26, 2004. In 2004, this page, its photographs, and the accompanying material Ed Chilton has put together based on The New Soldier have caught sufficient attention that they have been copied without any credit to the following sites: