Welcome 10 years after

Press, 9 May 1985, Page 6

Welcome 10 years after

NZPA-NYT New York

Vietnam veterans accepted New York City’s thanks yesterday at a bittersweet ticker-tape parade through the canyons of lower Manhattan. The blizzard of confetti that greeted the - 25,000 marchers, all veterans of America’s most unpopular war, climaxed two days of celebration orchestrated by the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission.

The overdue welcome home from a war that ended 10 years ago began on Tuesday when the Mayor, Mr Edward Koch, inaugurated the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, adjacent to 55 Water Street.

It continued yesterday when a thunderously appreciative crowd, which the police estimated at one million, lined the parade route from Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn to the Battery.

“There was a time when it was difficult to accept the lack of recognition,” said John Behan, a Republican state assemblyman from Long Island who led yesterday’s march in a wheelchair pushed by Mr Koch. Mr Benan lost both legs in a land-mine explosion near Da Nang in 1966. “But the people on the side-lines say it all to me,” he said. “They are out there, welcoming us back home, and their enthusiasm should help the veterans realise what they did for their country. The war was bad, but the people who fought it were good.” The people who fought it were participants and spectators at the parade, thousands of them streaming down Broadway and thousands more on the footpaths, at impromptu reunions in parks and on street corners, or gathered by the nearby memorial, a glassblock wall that stands as a permanent reminder of their service and suffering.

“I want to see the whole parade, not just part of it,” said Frank Valentine, a former Army infantryman who stood on Broadway, his two-year-old son on his shoulder and a South Vietnamese flag in his hand, and shouted “Hey, grunts!” to the passing marchers.

The veterans came in tattered jungle fatigues and

pin-striped suits, wearing dog-tags and ribbons and black armbands in memory of their 2477 comrades still listed as missing in action.

“It’s the first time I took them out of the cupboard,” Mr Valentine, a court officer and aspiring lawyer from the Bronx, said of his decorations. “I was kind ol ashamed to wear them. But not today. Today I’m not ashamed.”

They came from across town, riding subway cars suddenly dominated by khaki and camouflage, or from across the country, crowding into vans with friends who shared the gas and tolls.

They came with buddies, splitting six-packs during the hazy morning wait for the parade to start. And they came alone, carrying signs identifying their old

outfits and scanning the gathering for a familiar face.

“Anybody who’s been in ’Nam is automatically accepted by anybody else who’s been in ’Nam,” said Larry Haupt, a Marine at Cam Ranh Bay in the late ’6os and now a furniture mover in Manhattan.

Far too many of them came in wheelchairs, or telling wrenching tales of neglect, unemployment, or

drug addiction. "My head, the drugs and stuff, I’m still fighting that,” said Jay Solomon, once a private on Hawk Hill and now an often-unemployed New Jersey labourer. “I take it one day at a time is all I do.” “We came home and we had to pin on our own medals,” said Julio Rivera, of the Bronx, wounded several times as an Army specialist at Cam Ranh Bay

and now unemployed because of his disabilities. “The people who greeted us were waving North Vietnam flags.”

“A lot of us are in jails. A lot of us are in psych wards. A lot of us are drug addicts, but that’s because they treated us like we were nothing. This is 10 years late, but it opened up my heart that people know a little bit what we went through.”