“It’s not disrespectful to protest, Frankie. We had that wrong. It takes guts to stand up and demand a change. We’re vets. Shouldn’t our voices be heard in protest, too? Shouldn’t they be loud?”
Barb pulled a folded-up magazine page out of her back pocket, smoothed out the wrinkles, and laid it out on the table. It was a full-page ad in Playboy for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The picture was of a solitary coffin, draped in an American flag. The headline read IN THE LAST TEN YEARS, OVER 335,000 OF OUR BUDDIES HAVE BEEN KILLED OR WOUNDED IN VIETNAM, AND MORE ARE BEING KILLED EVERY DAY. WE DON’T THINK IT’S WORTH IT. In the bottom corner of the ad was a plea to JOIN US.
Frankie stared at the advertisement. Since the tide of public opinion had turned so clearly against the war, more and more numbers of the wounded and fallen were being reported. It was tough to see in print. So many young men killed, while others were still being shipped over, spun up.
The press wasn’t blindly reporting what Nixon wanted them to anymore. Journalists had been granted access to the troops; they witnessed the battles, reported on the dead. This week a female journalist from Australia had been among a group captured by the People’s Army of Vietnam and taken prisoner. Kate Webb. Everyone should now know that women were in Vietnam, too. Frankie took a deep breath, exhaled.
Barb said, “Slim told me once that the average life expectancy of a helicopter pilot in Vietnam is thirty days.”
“I know. I’ve heard that, too. I don’t know if it’s true.”
“We have to stop it,” Barb said. “Us. The ones who paid the price.”
It was wrong. Criminal, the way the U.S. government was failing the military. But what could a handful of veterans do to stop a war? People like Barb had been marching for years, and what good had it done?
Protest seemed futile. Maybe even unpatriotic.
But men were dying over there, crashing in helicopters and stepping on land mines and getting shot by an enemy they never saw.
How could she not protest that, at least?
“We could be arrested,” Frankie said.
“They could call in the National Guard. We could be tear-gassed or shot at,” Barb said solemnly, then added, “Like at Kent State and Jackson.”
“Way to look at the bright side.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Barb said. “The old white men who run this country are scared. And people do stupid, ugly things when they’re scared.” She leaned close. “But they’re counting on their power and our fear. And every minute, some woman’s son is being killed over there. Some girl’s brother.”
Frankie didn’t want to march. She didn’t want to think about Vietnam and what it had cost her. She wanted to do what she’d been trying to do for more than two years: forget.
It was dangerous, what Barb was asking of Frankie, an upsetting of an already precariously balanced peace in Frankie’s mind.
No fear, McGrath.
Jamie’s voice in her head.
Barb was right.
Frankie needed to do this. As a veteran of Vietnam, and for Finley and Jamie and Rye; she had to add her voice to the rising scream of dissent. She had to say: No more.
“Just this once,” Frankie said.
She regretted it almost instantly.
* * *
On the day before the march, Frankie had trouble concentrating at work. In between surgeries, she worried about what lay ahead, her mind obsessively scrolled through the violence that had marked so many rallies and protests. Nixon had sent the National Guard in to stop a peaceful protest at Kent State less than a year ago. When the smoke cleared, four students were dead and dozens wounded. Only eleven days later, the police had shot students at a Jackson State College war protest.
But the truth was that although she worried about violence at the march, she worried more about standing there with other veterans, saying, I was there. For the past two years, she’d hidden that fact at every opportunity, changed the conversation when Vietnam came up. Even Barb and Ethel rarely mentioned Vietnam; Frankie knew their silence was to protect her, and on good days, she knew it helped. On bad days, she worried that she couldn’t forget because there was something wrong with her, something broken. In time, hiding her service and not talking about it had allowed shame to take root. She was never exactly sure what she was ashamed of, just that she was weak, or had somehow done something bad, been a part of something bad, something no one wanted to talk about. Maybe it was simply being a part of the apparent breakdown of American honor. She didn’t know.
On the way home, she tried to figure out what the hell one should wear to a protest meeting. She decided on hip-hugger jeans with a wide western-style belt and a ribbed white turtleneck. She dried her hair down straight from a center part. At the last minute, she went in search of her ANC pin—a brass caduceus with its wings behind a bold N—and pinned it on her sweater.
Leaving her bedroom, she shut the door behind her.
In the kitchen, Barb and Ethel were talking quietly. Barb wore her old, stained fatigue pants with a black turtleneck and a Levi’s jacket with the sleeves cut off. Dozens of the pins and patches she’d collected from friends and patients in Vietnam decorated the front of the vest. She’d drawn a big black peace symbol on the back. She’d painted a BRING THEM HOME! sign and stapled it to a yardstick.
Ethel, wearing her blue lab coat, poured herself a cup of coffee. “I don’t know how Barb talked you into this, Frank. The VVAW is as sexist as the SDS,” she added. “If you girls show up, they’ll ask you to make coffee and do snack runs.”
“Those who stay behind don’t get to bitch,” Barb said.
“Disappointingly,” Frankie said glumly.
The three of them had spent at least an hour last night sitting around the firepit in the backyard, wrapped in woolen blankets, discussing today’s march. Barb had said that more than a dozen anti-war groups were scheduled to arrive in D.C. in the next few days. The VVAW wanted to separate themselves by marching first. They had big plans to draw attention to themselves. Make the news broadcasts.
“Just be careful,” Ethel said. “Be home on time, or I’m calling the police.”
Barb laughed. “If we get into trouble, it will be with the police.”
Frankie stared at her friend. “Comments like that are not helpful.”
“Come on, kid,” Barb said. “We’re making like the wind and blowing.”
Ethel hugged Frankie and said, “Go with God, girls. Change the world.”
Frankie followed Barb out to the car and got into the passenger seat.
Barb started the car and cranked up the music on Creedence.
Barb turned, smiling. “You ready?”
Frankie sighed. Her nerves were strung taut. This whole thing was a mistake. “Just drive, Barbara.”
* * *
It was nearing midnight when they pulled into D.C.
Their destination, Potomac Park, was a black expanse in the middle of the brightly lit city; in the darkness, Frankie could make out tents here and there. The VVAW had occupied the park, turned it into a campground.
“Let’s find a spot off to ourselves,” Frankie said.
Barb parked the car on the side of the street. “Get the tent out of the trunk.”
Across the street, a long line of policemen in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder.
“Don’t say anything,” Frankie warned as they passed the policemen on their way to the park. “I mean it. I am not getting arrested before the march.”
Barb gave a curt nod. They came to the edge of the large park. Saying nothing—not to each other and not to the other VVAW campers—they pitched their tent, then set up two chairs out front. As they sat in the dark, listening to the din of tent spikes being pounded into the ground, more and more cars drove up, headlights spearing through the night. They heard music in the distance and the quiet buzz of conversations.
“I wonder if we are the only women,” Frankie said, drinking coffee from a thermos.
Barb sighed. “Aren’t we always?”
* * *