A Chorus of Defiance Fifty years after the Vietnam War’s end, lessons from the peace movement on mobilizing resistance.
David Cortright
hen news of the end of the Vietnam War arrived fifty years ago, immortalized in images of U.S. helicopters lifting off from the roofs of Saigon, many who had worked for years to end the carnage gathered spontaneously in public places. I had joined the movement in 1968 as an active-duty soldier, and spent my time in the army organizing protests and circulating petitions and underground newspapers among fellow GIs. In Washington, D.C., that day, hundreds of us—veterans, draft resisters, students, community activists—streamed into Lafayette Square in front of the White House, the park where the first protest against the war had occurred a decade earlier. There was no program or speech making. People just wandered about, in small groups or alone, speaking softly, averting eyes, holding back tears, in a collective mood of grief over the millions who had died but also relief that the slaughter, at last, was over. We hoped that our collective struggles had made a difference in ending a war that never should have been fought.
