Writing Shotgun

VETERANS SAY PARADE ORGANIZERS “… EMBARRASSED THE CITY IN THE EYES OF THE NATION.”

Theo DouglasTue. November 13
 

At the first Long Beach City Council meeting since Saturday’s 11th Annual Long Beach Veteran’s Day Parade, the council got an earful from members of three veterans groups which were denied the right to march in the parade.

The official reason parade organizers gave for denying the groups’ application was that none of the three groups–Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out–applied using their own names. That, and organizers were concerned that if these veterans groups marched, they’d be protesting the Iraq war: carrying signs and shouting slogans.

But aren’t veterans groups political by their very nature?

“All these groups are political to a certain extent,” veteran Dennis Berman said outside the council meeting Tuesday. “Everything is political.”

San Diego Realtor and Vietnam veteran  J. Allan Ruhman reiterated what veterans have been telling The District for nearly a week: that organizers’ reasons for barring them are a lot of claptrap dreamed up to keep an anti-Iraq message out of the parade–even if that message comes from fellow veterans with a deep respect for their brothers and sisters in uniform.

“I am appalled at the disrepect shown these American patriots,” said Ruhman, a Marine Corps veteran who served two back-to-back ground tours in Vietnam. “Let’s call it what it is. A clever but blatant attempt to marginalize” the nation’s veterans.

Ruhman and another Vietnam veteran, Frank H. Walker, said this is far from the first time veterans have found themselves pushed aside in a Long Beach Veterans Day parade.

The two men said a similar situation transpired when a number of newly-returned Vietnam veterans tried to march in a 1973 Veterans Day parade in Long Beach.

“Nineteen-seventy-three–I was there,” Walker, a former Marine, said softly from the audience as Ruhman mentioned the incident during his remarks to the council.

“They ended up letting us march behind the street sweepers,” Walker told The District outside council chambers. “[City officials] were frothing.”

Nearly 35 years later, not much has changed; members of veterans groups against the Iraq war were kept to the sidelines at Saturday’s parade, at a designated protest area in the 5800 block of Atlantic Avenue.

But the veterans who visited Tuesday’s council meeting say they’re determined to be heard this time.

“The eyes of the world are on Long Beach,” Walker said Tuesday night, as a television reporter set up a camera behind him. He said he’d seen news of this year’s Long Beach Veterans Day Parade confrontation on MSNBC, and it made him feel bad–for himself and for Long Beach.

“They embarrassed the city in the eyes of the nation,” Walker said.

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