The black-and-white footage shows a line of young men. Some are clean-cut and boyish, others have shaggy hair and dark glasses. One by one they step up to a microphone, say a few words, turn around, and hurl something over a fence.
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Chicagoan Barry Romo was there as a leader of the group. At its height the organization boasted 50,000 members who returned home to denounce the war, dealing a serious blow to the conflict’s political and moral legitimacy. “When we were at the front of the march and always there to speak at a rally, there was no question that this war was wrong.”
Romo’s feelings toward the war were already changing. “I went over right wing, and I came back confused,” he says. In early 1971 he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and helped organize the group’s Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit. The event was staged to let veterans set the record straight–many felt the media portrayed My Lai as an isolated incident. But this kind of intimate truth telling didn’t come easy. “It was possible to be antiwar and still not deal with your experiences,” Romo says. “VVAW meant that we had to actually use our experiences and bring them to the public. It meant taking all our anger and our pain and our sorrow and saying we can use this to save people’s lives.”
