But Long Beach Veterans Day Parade doesn’t love everybody, especially if they’re against the war

PHOTO by DANIEL DE BOOM

There’s no way you’d confuse the Long Beach Veteran’s Day Parade with Mardi Gras—no nudity—or the Tournament of Roses—no adorable 18-foot, mum-covered penguins—but, in its 11th year, the parade proved it still has drawing power. Last week’s decision to bar anti-war veterans groups brought TV cameras hoping to capture lively protest footage.

No such luck. The parade went on as it always does—a few vets groups, and marchers and politicians in cars, some horse dung—and it looked as it always does, like a small-town parade on the streets of California’s fifth-largest city. Along with bored cameramen from ABC and Fox, young families lined the route. But after a few blocks, it was just lone men, some of them in museum-quality uniforms topped with unofficial headgear—“veteran,” said one, “Angels,” another.

The program, handed out free to attendees, read “A Salute To Those Who Served.” Beneath that—irony alert—was the enigmatic “One Team . . . One Mission.”

That last part sound familiar? Like maybe referring to a mission that was, I dunno, accomplished?

Days before the parade, organizers told Military Patriots—a coalition of Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and Iraq Veterans Against the War—they would not be allowed to march because their application wasn’t complete. Organizer Martha Thuente told The District’s Theo Douglas that when Jeff Merrick filled out the application, he should have listed the names of all the groups that make up Military Patriots in the space for the organization’s name. But as Merrick told Steve Lowery in an interview for dTV, The District’s online video feature, there wasn’t enough room in the space provided to write the names of all three groups (12 words, 64 letters). So he wrote “Military Patriots,” and explained who the group was in a narrative he attached to the application.

In a triumph of paperwork over commonsense familiar to veterans and fans of Joseph Heller, Merrick’s effort didn’t meet the exacting standards of the parade’s organizers.

But this was never about what name appeared on a parade application. It was about politics—or, as the organizers reportedly told Merrick, it was about whose group embodied “the spirit of the parade.”

The groups making up Military Patriots advocate an end to the war in Iraq; they lobby Congress to bring the troops home. Parade organizers said that makes their mere presence odiously political, and rendered them unfit to march in the Veterans Day Parade.

On the other hand, parade organizers welcomed the American Legion, a group up to its epaulettes in politics since its founding, in 1919. In July, the Legion, which has endorsed President Bush’s Iraq policy, sent an “Action Alert” to its members describing the defeat of the Iraq Troop Reduction Bill as “[a]nother legislative victory for the American Legion.”

So, if you’re a politician who never served in the military—say, Dick Cheney—you can march in our Veterans Day Parade. If, however, you’re a veteran who opposes the U.S. war in Iraq, buy your own parade.
But the anti-war vets say they never intended to protest anything.

“It’s ridiculous,” Pat Alviso of Military Families Speak Out told The District. “I’d be protesting my own son”—a combat engineer just back from Iraq.

Members of Military Patriots made one last effort Saturday morning to join the parade.
“[W]e decided to go up to the organizers and say, ‘My son is a veteran or I’m a veteran, can I march in your parade,” Pat Alviso explained.

Councilman Val Lerch, the person in charge of making such decisions, refused. There was no room in the parade for anyone else, he reportedly said.

And so the parade marched on, with a modest complement of marching bands, drill teams and veterans from organizations that have endorsed President Bush’s Iraq policies. And they marched under a single theme—“One Team . . . One Mission”—that echoed one of the president’s most famous photo ops.

And standing in the crowd were the members of Military Patriots, cheering loudly for the vets in the parade.

“We cheered like everyone else,” Alviso said. “Probably louder. In fact, a lot of groups would look over at us because we were so loud. A couple even flashed us the peace sign.”

Mission accomplished?

Edited by Paul Brennan from staff reports on thedistrictweekly.com.

Tags: anti-war, Long Beach, val lerch, Veterans Day Parade