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.