Vietnam Moratorium Day was observed quietly in various parts of the Vineyard Wednesday - by children building peace symbols on the Menemsha sand; worshipers at a morning Eucharist service and an evening prayer service at Vineyard Haven’s Grace Episcopal Church; a solemn handful who listened to the names of Massachusetts’ war dead being read, high school students attentive to blues-rock music and a dozen who shivered after dark with candles in their hands outside the West Tisbury Congregational Church,
When it was announced by the military several days ago that it would accept messages from amateur radio operators to the boys in Vietnam, David Novel of Vineyard Haven, long a ham operator, decided to do something about it.
First he got a list from the Gazette of those Vineyard boys now serving in Vietnam and then telephoned their parents. Of the five boys now over there, Mr. Nobel has heard from the parents of three. Their messages are now on their long trip across the Pacific.
At a time when the expression of differing opinion on our foreign policy is being criticized as being disloyal it seems desirable to present the point of view of the loyal opposition to our present Vietnam policy: the point of view of those who believe that this policy is not in the best interest of the United States or mankind - indeed possibly harmful to both.
A wide spectrum of opinion on the knotty topic, Which Way in Vietnam?, was brought to light at a forum on Monday evening at the Tisbury town hall. The forum was sponsored by the Island Turn Toward Peace organization, and ws led by Robert Gussner, Unitarian-Universalist minister of Stoughton.
The Marthas’s Vineyard Seacoast Defence Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), sponsored the wreath-laying ceremony in front of the Edgartown courthouse Monday.
Jack O'Callaghan and Choey Ray were together for eight months in 1968, into 1969, in Thailand during the Viet Nam war. But when deployment orders came down they lost touch for nearly half a century.
Having been a female reporter in Vietnam, Denby Fawcett said, "We belong to an exclusive club that can accept no new members. Vietnam made me braver, it made me more skeptical. I went thinking it was all always going to be all right. I left knowing that was not always so."
"Every day was different, and there was always a wild card in the deck," reporter Laura Palmer said. "The truism was that nothing was ever as it seemed. Just when you thought you understood, everything shifted."
With Memorial Day ap proaching, I am recalling a visit to Viet Nam last fall on which two U.S. Navy veterans of the war in Viet Nam were among my companions. As we visited city and countryside, we met Vietnamese veterans on street corners and in rice fields. Amazingly, bygones seemed to be bygones among veterans on both sides. Though the war is keenly remembered — particularly by those who have been affected by the Agent Orange that we dropped in the war — stoic acceptance appeared to be the norm.
