Reflections On Boston’s
Cancelled VFP-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Day 2015 -
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Frank Jackman would not be marching
this year on Saint Patrick’s Day, not at all. And he was mad as hell about the
matter, mad enough to call his old time high school friend from Carver, Sam
Lowell, and spill his guts about it, to try to make some sense of the situation
since toward the end, only a few days before he thought he would march, when things
had happened quickly that forced him not to march. I knew Frank only slightly
back in Carver during high school, enough to each give the other a passing nod,
the “nod” signifying in that schoolboy goodnight that while the parties did not
hang together everything between them was “cool” (remind me to tell you the
intricacies of the “nod” sometime but today we are concern with Frank’s anguish
not his coolness). I was closer to Sam back then since he had lived at the end
of my street, we had hung around together during junior high before he got into
the corner boy life in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner up on Main Street near the
Commons and had kept in touch since he had set up his law practice was in the
old town and I had worked on the Carver Democrat for a while after college
before moving on to Boston and elsewhere. He is the one who gave me the
“skinny” on what the recent events Frank had spoken to him about.
The pair had gotten back in touch
with each other after Frank had moved back east after many years on the West
Coast and after Sam’s older son Brad had been killed in Iraq on his second tour
of duty in 2005 and he had taken an interest what Frank, an active member of an
anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace (VFP), and his comrades were up to.
Sam had attended some of their activities and had previously marched in their
contingent at various parades. He had again planned to do so this year before
Frank called with his story. For those who failed to scan the title of this
piece what Frank Jackman was not marching in and what he was mad about at the
same time was that the fifth annual Veterans For Peace (VFP)-led Saint
Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston. He had, in accordance with the
publicity surrounding the event put out by VFP, expected to step off at noon on
Sunday March 15th an hour before the official “private” Saint
Patrick’s Parade sponsored by the Southie-centered Allied War Council (AWC)
stepped off at one o’clock. A last minute decision by a federal judge though
forced the peace parade to be cancelled by the VFP leadership.
(The time lag between the two events
is important since by local court decree reflecting a decision on the type of
parade AWC was sponsoring the two parades to be separated by one mile so as the
AWC desired no one would think the two parades were in any way together. The
reasons given for the peace parade cancellation for 2015, to be described in
more detail below, centered on legal advice not to do so in support of a civic
court action being pressed by VFP in federal court and that due to “the late in
the day” timing of the results of the legal wrangling a proper parade could not
be put together.)
Frank, of course, had not been mad
about not being able to march like he had been when he and Sam as kids were Boy
Scouts from Troop Twelve in Carver and they were thrilled with the idea that
they would go up to Boston some thirty miles away to strut their stuff. In
those days back in the 1960s the parade, then sponsored in toto by the City would
take place on March 17th no matter the day. (under an Evacuation Day
cover, you know, commemorating the day when the American revolutionaries kick
butt on the occupying British forces something every Irish person could cheer
as well as the “wink, wink” real purpose of the thing which is to celebrate
Irish freedom from those same Brits and also to acknowledge some tale about the
wicked old saint Pat kicking snakes out of the old sod when he got his dander
up). The year Troop Twelve had been invited to march since it was their turn in
the rotation of troops for Boy Scout Council Six wouldn’t you know that snow
postponed the event for a week and due to some unforeseen circumstances that he
never fully understood Troop Ten from Plymouth went instead. He had been
furious since he had cousins that he would have been strutting his stuff in
front of. The next year he having found himself a girlfriend or rather she
found him he had dropped out of the Scouts and that was that.
Frank had spent the many, many years
since that time going about the business of his life, some good some bad, not worrying
or thinking much one way or the other about the parade, although he was always
ready to sport the green come Saint Patrick’s Day wherever he was and whoever
he was with and to lift a glass to the memory of the boys of Easter 1916
reciting William Butler Yeats poem of the same name to allwho would listen. One
of the “some bad” parts of his life had been his service in the military during
his generation’s war, the war in Vietnam, which had torn the country asunder,
including in the military where those “cannon fodder” like him who were
supposed to fight for who knows what
reason were half in mutiny.
Frank always liked to make sure that
everybody, including Sam with whom he had many arguments about the question and
who had been 4-F (unfit for military duty) during that war due to a much
operated on left arm that was about ninety percent useless, knew that while he
had had some reservations about military service he had gone in with both eyes
open when he received his draft notice. He also made sure everybody knew that while
he was not by any means the best soldier in Vietnam he was not the worse. A few
guys in his unit had even paid him the compliment that they would have not
gotten out of a few messes alive in fire-fights with Charley if it had not been
for his coolness under fire. So during his time of service in order to keep
himself together he did not think about right or wrong on the war, on the war
policy or on anything but keeping low and keeping the damn bugs and sweat off.
After Frank had been discharged in
1971 that was a different story. Even after a few days at home in Carver
hanging around with Sam and the guys was too much after all he had been through
and so he pushed on up to Cambridge where he wound up meeting a young Quaker
woman whom he met at an anti-war rally who helped him sort things out, helped
him get over the horror of what he had seen and done in Vietnam. A little. Just
then lots of other veterans were also getting “religion” about the damn war and
were doing something about it, organizing themselves into Vietnam Veterans
Against the War (VVAW). For the next couple of years between that fetching
Quaker woman and his ex-military ant-war comrades in VVAW he felt he had washed
himself clean.
As the war petered out and as anti-war
activity declined in the mid-1970s Frank drifted away from the organization and
from that Quaker woman and headed west. Drifted west winding up in San
Francisco, stayed in the west for many years, got married a few times, got
divorced as many, had a few kids who all turned out pretty well considering,
and did a lot of ad hoc anti-war and
social concerns political work along the way. But Frank, as if those Vietnam
days or maybe earlier his growing up poor childhood have never really receded
to far from the horizon, also got caught up in some “wanting habits” (his term)
addictions like drugs and con artistry along the way. I don’t know a lot of the
details but some involved drug dealing connected with Mexico, some flim-flam
insurance scams and a couple of swindles from what Sam who also was hazy on the
same details told me Frank told him. After his last divorce in the mid-1990s he
headed back East figuring a change of scenery would help.
In the fall, October Sam thinks, of 2002
Frank had been in Boston on some unrelated business on a Saturday afternoon
when he heard a band playing I Ain’t
Going To Study War No More, the music coming from the Boston Common. This,
as it turned out, would be the first serious anti-war demonstration of a few
hundred people before the war drums of the 2003 Iraq war overtook all reason (and
despite all reason is still on the front-burner until this day). What drew
Frank’s attention though was a cluster of about forty flags, white flags
embossed with the words “Veterans For Peace” in black and a dove of peace also
outlined in black on each, being carried by older guys, guys from the look of
it who had served in Vietnam times, or earlier. As the march stepped off the
Common to walk up Tremont Street toward the Federal Building further up the
street he joined in their contingent. That was the real beginning of his story
to Sam.
Frank did not join VFP until several
years later since the anti-war efforts against the Iraq war in late 2002 and
early 3003 while intense before the war fell apart after the “shock and awe”
campaign began in March of that year. He did however whenever he was around
attend and march with the VFP. In November 2009 not having been doing much for
a couple of years he received a notification by an e-mail that the VFP was
attempting to march in the “official’ Veterans Day parade on the Common and he
decided to join in. That day was an eye-opener, a shock in a way, since the
“officials” were by might and main, mostly by having the police intercede and
arrest anti-war veterans who refused to “stand-down” refused to let fellow
veterans with a different message march in their precious parade. Frank and a
number of others were arrested that day for disorderly conduct, were fined, and
released. So maybe that, despite what Frank regarded as his start with VFP and
their struggles for recognition in 2002, was really the beginning. VFP would
continue without success to be part of the official Veterans Day Parade (a day
by the way which they called, correctly, by its right name Armistice Day a name
from the end of World War I).
For the next year or so Frank worked
closely with VFP on various projects (in the meantime he had retired and
therefore had some time to spent on such work), especially in 2011 when VFP got
seriously involved with the potentially exciting but short-lived Occupy
movement. He had also spent a great deal of his time, still does, after he
first heard about the case in September of 2010, in supporting the defense and
calls for freedom for heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea (then Bradley,
having subsequently revealed that she considered herself a woman a fact that
the Army has now acknowledged) Manning who the Army was keeping in solitary
down at the Quantico Marine Base outside of Washington, D.C. (In August of 2013 Manning was convicted of
about twenty of the charges against her and received an outrageous thirty-five
sentence now being served at Fort Leavenworth pending the appeals process). The
Manning case sparked something in him since here was a soldier, a soldier in
Iraq to boot, who despite all the hell that was being rained down on her from
top to bottom including torture had the courage to release important
information about war atrocities and
other nefarious acts of the American government in the Middle East and
elsewhere. Having not done his bit when he had the chance, his chance, Frank
was just trying to put paid to his own lack of courage through Chelsea.
In the spring of 2011 the leadership
of the Boston VFP decided to apply to the AWC that had been running the Saint
Patrick’s Day Parade for the previous twenty or so years. That request was
summarily rejected and a member of that organization was quoted at some point in
the process saying that he did not want the word “veteran” and the word “peace”
put together in the parade. (This AWC having solely taken over the city parade
had gone all the way up to the United States Supreme Court in order to have
their parade declared a private event and therefore they could invite or not
invite whoever they wanted. They had started out discriminating against the
GLBTQ community and had now extended it to the peace community as well.) As a
result of that exclusion the VFP put out a call for all the area peace, GLBTQ
groups, and social justice activists to march with them after the official
parade. And those five hundred or so who heeded the call marched through South
Boston that day to generally good effect.
VFP over the next three years
continued to attempt to enter the official parade, were summarily rebuffed or
ignored, and each year organized the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade that
increased in size and began to look like any regular parade in Boston with
floats, band, a trolley and the ubiquitous duck boat, all in the service of peace
and justice. As the organization prepared for the 2015 event they took a
different tack, decided not to waste any effort applying to the official parade
officials, but also decided that the late afternoon in March (usually starting
to march well after 3 o’clock) well after the crowds for the official parade
had left and therefore were walking down sullen streets interfered with their
right of effective free expression and applied to the City of Boston for a noon
start time.
That request was denied by the city
and VFP thereafter filed a law suit in federal district court charging
discrimination under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and
asked for injunctive relief requiring the city to grant the noon start time. A
week before the parade date the federal judge turned down the request (although
the legal civil case continues on). In response, as collectively agreed by the
membership before the start of litigation, the failure to get the noon start
time triggered the cancelling of the Peace Parade for 2015 (a stance which also
dovetailed with the lawyers’ concerns about the court case adding fuel to their
arguments about discrimination by the city).
A couple of days before the official
parade was to start the AWC granted a gay rights organization’s application (Boston
Pride) to march having previously granted the request of a group of gay
veterans, OutVets to march. VFP and other peace groups were thus the only ones
to have their parade rained on. Yeah, so Frank Jackman who over the previous
four years had spent much time helping organize each parade, raising money, and
a million other small tasks was not marching, and mad as hell about it. Do you
blame him.
