Vietnam Vets Face Down The Moonbats

Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) mounted the March on the Pentagon yesterday, Saturday, March 17, a demonstration against the war in Iraq, hoping to appeal to the hippie nostalgia for the the march on the Pentagon forty years ago against the war in Vietnam. They also hope to defeat America at home, like they did in Vietnam. To drive the "Iraq is Vietnam" theme home, they planned to assemble their march next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. That was a mistake.

The malice and dishonesty of ANSWER begins with its poster. The Pentagon gear is driven by the Dollar gear, implying that the war in Iraq is driven by capitalism and the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately for that argument, the war in Iraq is a money-loser, costing more than $379 billion to date. As Sun Tzu stated 2500 years ago, no nation profits from a prolonged war. It's about the freedom, stupid. If you think war is expensive, try appeasement. Ask Neville Chamberlain how expensive that was.

The poster shows men, women, and children being tossed into the teeth of those evil Pentagon & Capitalism gears. ANSWER ignores the unpleasant fact that it was precisely the Pentagon that stopped Saddam from throwing innocent people into the plastic shredder, turning them into fish food, to maintain his reign of terror. ANSWER has never made posters condemning Saddam for feeding real people into real shredding machines. I have been to all the big anti-war marches here and I have yet to see Saddam mentioned on a protest sign. The protestors whitewash his crimes, consigning them to the memory hole. Saddam is the third rail of these anti-war protests. Mentioning him would kill the protest dead. So they don't. They prefer to ignore Saddam's real crimes while hyping Bush's imaginary ones.

The greatest irony of this "peace" march is that it was led by ANSWER Communists who promote an ideology which killed a hundred million people in the last century. If you're looking for peace, the commies will take you anywhere but there. How did the most murderous ideology in history come to lead the "peace" movement? Ignorance, that's how. Most of the clueless mopes who show up to protest have no idea who is organizing their protest party and don't care. They don't know that ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Worker's World Party who supports the most murderous dirtbag dictators in the world. ANSWER uses the anti-war movement as a pretext for luring a crew of useful idiots to man demonstrations to batter America, the true target of the sinister organizers of the radical Left.

If the clueless lefties really wanted peace, the first step is to visualize a peace march that is NOT led by the most murderous ideology in human history.

While the unwitting dopes of the Left flesh out ANSWER's demonstrations, the witting accomplices of ANSWER are the mainstream media, who turn a blind eye to ANSWER's Communist affiliations and leave the general public in the dark by maliciously neglecting to report on them for fear that revealing their true character would undermine the anti-war movement they support. That's how the mainstream media, which fancies itself a spokesman for the people and a watchdog of government, violates the public trust.

What ANSWER did not expect is that their choice of venue would inspire popular outrage, particularly from Vietnam vets. During the last jumbo anti-war movement in January, anarchists rushed the Capitol steps and spray-painted their nonsense on them. The police retreated from the onrushing Black Bloc mob, who perpetrated their vandalism hidden in the press of the crowd and then went on to smash the windows of a military recruiting center downtown. The police did not intervene in that incident, either. Nobody was arrested.

It did not take a crystal ball to predict what could happen if you parked thousands of radicals with utter contempt for the military next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, veterans which the moderate liberals regard as something akin to the rampaging hordes of Genghis Khan and the far leftists regard as baby-killers. Somebody in that mob would have done something stupid to express their contempt for the Vietnam war and the people who fought it. If the police would not stop them from vandalizing war memorials, there were plenty of vets who would.

That's how the Gathering of Eagles was born. The threat against the Wall was the break in the dam holding back a great lake of resentment against the anti-war radicals who so freely slandered the military with hardly any opposition. Protesting is alien to military people and the Right in general, who find it distasteful to demand other people do for them. Conservative types get up off their butts and do it themselves. However, the fear that the war in Iraq could be lost on the home front, just like Vietnam, filled vets with fury that it could happen again. They had to put a stop to that.

Note the "I" on the armband. This is meant to be the first big counter-protest of more to come.
Rolling Thunder, a veterans group who promotes MIA-POW issues, was the most noticeable contingent of vets in their motorcycle vests.


They had a rather fierce attitude on certain issues, born of grim experience.


Real Americans love the US flag.

And Jane's not fonda vets.

Point No. 2 of the Gathering of Eagles Mission Statement says, "We are a non-violent, non-confrontational group. We look to defend, not attack. Our focus is guarding our memorials and their grounds."

The GOE meant what it said and pulled it off, but I can't honestly say that deep down in the vet's hearts they didn't want to kick some hippy protestor ass, not that there's anything wrong with that. However, they were mature enough to chuckle at their own fantasy and limit their ass-kicking to sharp rhetoric, presenting themselves to the protestors, and looking them right in the eye. That was unsettling for many protestors, who have little tolerance for being counter-protested. They just don't like it at all. It just seems unfair to them. Heh, heh, heh.

John Pickett and his wife, Linda, came all the way from Colorado. John served in Company D, 2nd of 5th Division, 1st Cavalry in Vietnam. He was on patrol in 1966, searching villages which were mysteriously empty, when his unit came under fire. He hid behind a tree until the fire died down, then stepped out to be shot five times, knocking the M79 grenade launcher out of his hands. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale and retire from the Army after twenty-two years of service. He still wishes he had never stepped out from behind that tree, though.

This was their first protest. Says John, "We're here to defend the Wall." In John's case, the difference between being here to defend the Wall and being on the Wall is razor thin.

The Gathering of Eagles area was well-attended by patriots, but oddly neglected by the media, which preferred to cover the speakers at the ANSWER rally.


The vets objected to the relentlessly negative reporting of the war, a media strategy calculated to wear down the will of the American people.



The Gathering of Eagles area was a festival of American flags, which acted like wolfsbane to keep the lefties away.

This space next to the Wall was originally reserved by ANSWER to hold their protest, but they opted out the moment they were opposed. When the Gathering of Eagles came out of the blue to counter-protest them, ANSWER jumped to a space on the far side of the Wall, across Henry Bacon Drive, to a set of old baseball fields, out of sight of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As the counter-protest grew, the ANSWER commies went on the defensive, shrilly denying any intent to use the wall as their political prop. Panicked, they pushed their usual two hours of speechifying at the beginning of the march within shouting range of the Wall to the end of the march over in the Pentagon parking lot.

When the Gathering of Eagles confronted them, the ANSWER commies blinked.



This Vietnam vet worked for one of the firms in the World Trade Center and lost dozens of friends in the attack.


The Gathering of Eagles rally closed by playing taps for the the guys who fought in Vietnam but never came home, for lives unlived, dreams unrealized, grief that never fades.

"Stop The War On Troop Morale." Indeed.


The vets offered helpful suggestions for the protestors to redirect them to more worthy targets of their moralistic posturing. Unfortunately, condemnation of the real aggressors falls on deaf ears in the protesting set. You can go to a dozen anti-war protests and never see a complaint about the Muslim religious war on America and the world nor outrage at Baathists for filling mass graves full of Shiites in Iraq nor condemnation of Islamic snuff videos. Don't expect to see anyone bitching about train or disco bombings, either. Such crimes lie beyond the edge of the moral map of the Left, where all evil resides in America.



Many of the protestors walking down the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue had to pass the Gathering of Eagles rally and the many veterans gathered there. The vets thoughtfully cleared the sidewalk to form a channel to guide the protestors to their rally. A gauntlet, some called it. They also offered up some random thoughts for the protestors to chew on.

The gauntlet got a giggle out of this protesting bozo, taking photos of him like he was a zoo animal.



Bozo Boy didn't much care for the gauntlet. Nobody really insulted him, because they were too busy laughing and didn't catch their breath until he was past. He seemed kinda miffed that those right-wing nuts didn't respect the fact that he was making a serious statement. It's hard to parody the protestors when they are so busy beclowning themselves. Most of the goofballs who flit to these protests just aren't serious. For them, a protest is their Mardi Gras. The counter-protestors took the fun out of it, which is the main reason why they go.


Please click on Part Two to continue...