Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Battle Green Vietnam

Insofar as “reverence” for the Green is stipulated by the town bylaw, the fact that the veterans were, in the Selectmen’s words, asking to “use the Green as a hotel” and a “campground,” and further that there might be “drugs and liquor involved,” immediately disqualified them. Anything but orthodox usage of the Green, the Selectmen ruled, would be “inappropriate.” They decided at the first meeting and confirmed at the second that the veterans could march through town on the sidewalk and distribute leaflets but could not camp either on the Battle Green or in Tower Park, nor could they perform mock search-and-destroy missions anywhere within the town’s borders.

Apart from their concern about the cost of police protection, litter, and toilet facilities, each of which the town readily handled on other occasions, the Lexington Selectmen’s refusal to allow the antiwar veterans to stay overnight or reenact the violence of the Vietnam War seems to have stemmed from their fear that VVAW-NE would use their storied town as a site to undermine Longfellow’s and other mythicized accounts of American values. “Paul Revere’s Ride” insists that the colonists prevailed through creativity and alacrity rather than their willingness to fight and use violence. Indeed, Longfellow preferred to insist that the day the nation should forevermore celebrate is “the eighteenth of April,” the day of Revere’s ingenious signaling and his heroic ride, and not the next day of fighting, which in 1894 became an official state holiday in Massachusetts to honor the forty-nine colonists who gave their lives in defense of the people’s natural rights. Longfellow goes so far as to obfuscate the call to violence issued by Revere as he rode through the night. The poem only refers obliquely to “a word that shall echo forever[1]more,” even as the narrative requires Revere to explain that he will be “Ready to ride and spread the alarm. . . . For the country folk to be up and to arm” (emphasis added). The point of VVAW-NE’s march, in contrast, was to insist that the United States is a militaristic and violent country. Rather than show what the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front do “to our boys,” the veterans would be illustrating how the United States had become the same kind of imperialist aggressor the British had once been in Lexington.

The veterans responded to the Selectmen barring them from camping and performing mock search-and-destroy missions by informing the press that they might camp on the Lexington Green despite the ruling. As veterans, they felt entitled to visit the sites where fellow soldiers had lost their lives. Then, too, they were beginning to think tactically about what their staging on the Green would allow them to say and the interest the public would have as a result. Just two months earlier, in March 1971, when members of VVAW-NE had visited the Massachusetts State House to kick off the regional tour of a semitrailer truck they had filled with informational materials about the war, the lone article about it in the Boston Globe had been buried on page 18, even though the governor came down from his office to speak with the dozen veterans on hand and to be photographed with VVAW-NE leaders. But, on the Friday morning of the march, when the Boston Globe learned of the possibility of another showdown exactly like the one that took place between the federal government and VVAW the month before in Washington, DC, its editorial board promised to cover Operation POW over the course of the entire holiday weekend.

Hart Perry’s 1971 unreleased film of the march