In the morning, when Frankie stepped out of the tent, she found herself standing amid a veritable sea of male veterans—thousands—most of them about her age, wearing worn, stained fatigues and jeans and boonie hats; some wore peace symbols and carried flags from their states, their units. Hundreds of cars were parked near the park, their doors emblazoned with slogans, convoys from California and Colorado. More had parked on the grass.
As she stood there, a battered, beaten-up school bus drove up onto the grass, stopped, and opened its doors. Veterans exited the bus, singing, “What’s it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
In the center of the park, a bushy-haired man with a bullhorn jumped up into the back of a pickup truck onto which someone had spray-painted NO MORE! “My brothers-in-arms, it’s time. We’re marching to be heard today, we’re raising our voices—but not our fists, not our guns—to say, Enough. Bring our soldiers home! Line up behind Ron in the wheelchair. A single, unbroken column. Be peaceful. Don’t give the Man any reason to stop us. Let’s go!”
The men slowly formed a column, led by several veterans in wheelchairs who held flags. Behind them were men on crutches, men with burned faces and missing arms, blind men being led by their friends.
Barb and Frankie were the only two women in the park that they could see. They held hands and joined their brothers on the march across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge.
Vietnam veterans: a river of them, marching and chanting, holding signs in the air.
More men joined them, rushed forward, yelling out slogans, signs raised.
Someone bumped into Frankie so hard that she stumbled sideways, lost her hold on Barb’s hand, and fell to the ground. She yelled “Barb!” and heard “Frankie!” but men swarmed in between them.
Frankie couldn’t see her friend in the crowd. “Meet back at the tent!” she yelled, hoping Barb could hear.
“You okay, ma’am?” A man helped her to her feet.
He was young, blond, with a scraggly reddish-blond beard and mustache. He held on to her upper arm, steadied her. He wore torn, stained jungle fatigues, with the sleeves cut off. He’d drawn a huge peace symbol on his helmet. In his other hand, he held a sign that read VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR.
The protesters kept moving, shoving the two of them forward.
“Stop the war! Bring them home! Stop the war! Bring them home!”
“You should move to the side, ma’am,” he said.
Someone jostled Frankie again. She stumbled. “I’m here to march.”
“Sorry, lady. This march is for vets. We’re trying to make a statement. Hopefully that asshole in the White House will listen to us and stop lying to the country.”
“I’m a veteran,” she said.
“Of Vietnam,” he said impatiently, looking ahead.
“I was there.”
“There weren’t women in ’Nam.”
The chanting grew louder. “Stop the war! Bring them home.”
“If you didn’t meet someone like me, you were lucky. It means—”
“Just move to the side, ma’am. This is for the men who were fighting. In combat, you know?” He disappeared into the moving crowd full of military shirts and bare chests and fatigues. Long hair and Afros and helmets.
What the hell?
So she didn’t belong here, either? “I WAS THERE,” she screamed in frustration.
She muscled her way forward, melded into the throng of protesters as they crossed the bridge. “Stop the war!” she said, raising her fist. “Bring them home!” Her voice was nothing amid the yelling, but she kept shouting, saying it louder and louder until she was screaming it, screaming at Nixon, at the administration, at the North Vietnamese. The more she shouted, the angrier she became; by the time they reached Arlington National Cemetery with all those white crosses planted in the trimmed green grass, she was furious.
At Arlington Cemetery, policemen moved in to stop a group of black-clad women who carried wreaths.
“They’re Gold Star Mothers,” someone yelled. “Let them through.”
“Let them through, let them through, let them through,” the crowd chanted.
The Gold Star Mothers stood outside the entrance to the cemetery in a small clot, all in black, their movements blocked. It seemed they didn’t know where to go. None dropped their floral wreaths.
Gold Star Mothers, women who had lost their sons in Vietnam, being denied the opportunity to put wreaths on their sons’ graves. One of the mothers looked up, her cheeks lined with tears, and met Frankie’s gaze.
It made her think of her mother and the loss of her brother. Losing Finley had destroyed their family.
How dare the cops haul Gold Star Mothers away from their sons’ graves?
The mood of the marchers changed. Frankie felt the outrage, the anger. Frankie joined her voice in the chanting. “Let them in.”
“Hell, no, we don’t want your war!”
A helicopter flew threateningly over the crowd. Frankie heard the familiar thwop-thwop-thwop and thought of all the men who’d died. And she knew that helicopters had guns.
“Bring them home!” she screamed. “End the war!”
* * *
Two days later, Frankie and Barb were back in D.C. as hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the city, coming together from side streets, from parks, from across the bridge; not just veterans anymore. College kids, professors, men and women from all across the country. Women pushing strollers, men with small children on their shoulders.
The denial of the Gold Star Mothers to mourn their sons on the day of the VVAW march had been shown on every news show across America. It had become the perfect visual reminder of how far wrong America had gone on Vietnam: Mothers not allowed to visit their sons’ graves. Men decimated by the war, torn apart on the battlefield, and forgotten at home.
It was wrong.
Frankie had been told often enough by her girlfriends, by Finley, by Jamie, that she was unyielding in her morality, and it was true. Deep down, she was still the good Catholic girl she’d been in her youth. She believed in good and evil, right and wrong, the dream of America. Who would she be if she chose to look away from the wrongness of this war?
Today, she stood again with Barb on Constitution Avenue, a part of this larger, angrier crowd, two women in a vast sea of people carrying signs, veterans in wheelchairs, raising their fists in anger. This second march on Washington in a week had drawn dozens of anti-war groups; it was to be a massive protest, to last for days, a tidal wave of anti-war sentiment to flood the White House and the Capitol. All of it would be captured by news crews and broadcast into every living room in America.
Barb raised her sign. It read BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were easily recognizable in their fatigues and patched-up jean jackets and boonie hats, but there were thousands of other protesters: hippies and college kids stood with men in suits and women in dresses. Nuns, priests, doctors, teachers. Anyone with a voice who wanted to demand that Nixon stop the war.
Frankie and Barb held hands as they marched, but this time they understood the risks better and had agreed to meet at a local hotel if they got separated. Barb stuck her sign in the air, yelled, “Bring them home, bring them home!”
The marchers came to a stop at the Capitol steps, pressed in together, shoulder to shoulder. Men raised their voices and their signs, yelling, “Stop the war! Bring them home!” while television news crews filmed it all.
A man with long hair, wearing fatigues, stepped forward, stood alone for a moment. The crowd fell silent.
A wave of anticipation swept through the VVAW group, and then something flew through the air from the protest crowd, sailed over the barricade, and landed on the Capitol steps with a clink, glinted in a ray of sunlight.