R-E-S-P-E-C-T…But Only if You Agree with Me

Posted by Mary Mancini on November 12, 2007 under Uncategorized |

Psssst! I have a Veterans Day secret. It’s not really much of a secret, really, because if you think about it you’d naturally come to the same conclusion. Here it is: Not every veteran thinks alike. Much like the rest of the country, military personnel have different ideas and opinions on a variety of different subjects - including war.

So it should come as no shock when we read that Admiral William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, says that the saber-rattling of right-wing war hawks towards Iran is unhelpful:

None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go. Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.

Or when the group Veterans for Peace, a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization of vets dedicated to increasing public awareness of the costs of war, lead anti-war rallies across the country.

What does surprise, however, is the treatment that these men and women get from other Americans. Oh sure, we expect extreme levels of disgusting behavior and hypocrisy from someone like Rush Limbaugh, who loudly professes to “support the troops” while at the same time labeling any soldier who disagrees with the Republican Party’s stance on the war a “phony soldier.” But do we expect the organizers of a Long Beach, California Veterans Day parade to exclude the Iraq Veterans Against the War - a national organization that calls for immediate withdrawal of troops in Iraq - from marching with their fellow servicemen and women?

Iraq Veterans Against the War member Jason Lemieux, a Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq and is now against the war, as well as other veterans from both Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out, were excluded from the parade by the Veterans Day Parade Committee, a non-profit group that organizes the event. “I wanted to march like the rest of the Iraq veterans,” Lemieux said, “I served my country. I’m a veteran of a foreign war. I think I deserve that respect.”

Those that disagree with the organizers’ ruling call it a free speech issue. But it’s much more than that. It’s about honoring the service of veterans despite their beliefs and opinions. The American people learned a valuable lesson after the Vietnam war - you can hate the war but respect the warrior. Ironically, the very people who criticized the anti-war activists of the 60’s and 70’s for not supporting the troops are doing the same exact thing. Strange times, indeed.