At 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 13, three men left the entrance to Navy Pier and began moving west along Grand Avenue. The three were old soldiers, the point men leading tens of thousands of their comrades in Chicago`s belated parade to welcome home the Vietnam veterans. As grand marshal there was the general who had commanded more than half a million men in the war. As honorary parade marshal there was the paraplegic veteran in a wheelchair who at a suburban swimming pool just a week before the parade had again become a hero. As chairman of the parade organizers there was the much-decorated ex-platoon sergeant who was still fighting to survive the aftereffects of the war.
Gen. William Westmoreland, Jim Patridge and Tom Stack had started the parade a half hour early because far more men and women had turned out to march than they had expected. The trio hadn`t marched more than 25 yards when they had to stop. A car pulled up, and Bob Wieland emerged, fresh off an airplane, eager to join the parade.
Wieland was drafted in 1968 after attending the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse and just as he was going to sign a contract to play baseball with the Philadelphia Phillies. On June 14, 1969, two months after arriving in Vietnam as an Army medic, he stepped on a booby-trapped mortar round. When he woke up in a hospital five days later, the 6-foot 205-pound athlete discovered that both of his legs had been blown off almost at the hips. His new weight was 87 pounds.
Exactly a year after he lost his legs, Wieland won a gold medal in weight lifting in the middleweight division of the bench press in the National Wheelchair Olympics. Not satisfied with wheelchair competition, he competed for the next 10 years against able-bodied lifters. He did well, too, eventually establishing four bantamweight world records. The records never were recognized by the Amateur Athletic Union, however, for of a number of technical reasons revolving around his disability, one being that he was not wearing shoes.
Bob Wieland is an irrepressible sort, though. The 40-year-old Milwaukee native, who now lives in California, had arrived in Chicago that morning. He was determined that he would march and march his own way. That meant pulling himself along with his hands, dragging himself upright, the bottom of his torso fitted with a specially tailored pad. He had, in fact, just a month earlier finished a three-year walk from California to Washington, D.C., to raise money to fight world hunger.
The parade organizers were delighted that he had showed up, but they weren`t quite sure where to put him in the line of march.
”Would you mind walking at the head of the parade with Gen. Westmoreland?” somebody asked Wieland. Westmoreland, after all, had emerged from America`s most unpopular war as a controversial figure, even among the men who served under him. As leader of all United States military personnel in Vietnam at the height of the conflict, he is often used, fairly or unfairly, as a symbol of the failed leadership of the war. No matter. Wieland said he would be proud to march with Westmoreland.
”Would you mind if Bob Wieland marched with you?” somebody asked Westmoreland. After all, another legless vet, Jim Patridge, was to travel the parade route in his wheelchair alongside Westmoreland. Only seven days before the parade Patridge had dropped out of his chair and dragged himself through 60 feet of underbrush to reach and save a drowning 1-year-old from a swimming pool in west suburban Pleasant Hill. Because of his heroics, he was made honorary parade marshal. Officials weren`t sure if Westmoreland would want to be flanked by two paraplegic veterans.
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Westmoreland was resplendent in full uniform for the parade. That was unusual, as he has rarely appeared in uniform since he retired from the military. But the general had confided to a friend that morning that he wanted to be in uniform for the parade because ”somehow today it just feels right.” And, no, he wouldn`t mind at all if Bob Wieland joined him, Patridge and Stack at the head of the column.
It was a minor last-minute hitch, but Stack, 42, was relieved that it was resolved. For 13 months Stack, a professor of criminal justice at Richard J. Daley College, had been the driving force organizing the parade. As a sergeant he had led a combat platoon with the Army`s 9th Infantry Division through Vietnam`s Mekong Delta region in 1968 and 1969, winning Purple Hearts and Silver Stars along the way.
Indeed, he says he had dreamed of organizing an event such as the parade since he was called a ”baby killer” by an antiwar protester on the day he returned to the U.S. from the war in 1969. Too many men had gone to Vietnam, serving honorably and with valor, and too many had died to be dismissed by their own countrymen as unfortunate dupes caught up in an accident of history, collectively thought of as a bunch of baby killers and drug addicts.
For more than a year, then, Stack and a small group of fellow veterans had sweated, cajoled, begged and borrowed the Chicago parade into existence. The idea of seeing the day when he and his fellow veterans could look back with pride on their service and their sacrifice may have had a special urgency for Stack. He is battling lymph cancer, now in remission after a year and a half of chemotherapy. It is the type of cancer that many thousands of Vietnam veterans now are battling, linked to Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant widely used to uncover the jungle sanctuaries of the enemy.
And so it was that at 9:30 on this balmy Friday morning in the middle of June that four men, each wounded in his own way and still suffering from a war that ended 11 years earlier, led off a parade in its remembrance. And the collection of humanity they were leading was awesome.
Two hundred thousand men and women veterans from every state in the union had gathered patiently at Navy Pier. Each had come because he or she wanted to come, underscoring that each in some fashion or degree also felt wounded by the war. Some had come alone, some in twos and threes. Many came with large groups of fellow veterans. Thousands brought their wives and children to march with them. Some came with their fathers, veterans of earlier wars. A few mothers came alone, bearing photos of dead sons, yearning for a moment of public recognition of their sacrifice. They were white, black, Hispanic, Oriental and American Indian. They were shod in sturdy work boots and supple wingtips. They wore pinstriped suits and motorcycle jackets. Their mood was an almost eerie combination of jubilant pride and funereal solemnity.
And as the parade stepped off, nobody, including Tom Stack, knew what the reaction would be along its 2 1/2-mile route. Would there be a respectable crowd lining the sidewalks? Did enough people care to turn out for the march? Would they be respectful? Or would there be protesters and catcalls and ugly incidents reminiscent of the war years? Given that 200,000 veterans had gathered, however, it didn`t seem to matter how many people came to see their parade. This was the largest such gathering of veterans ever, and they, at least, understood each other and why they were there.
Just as the group was leaving Navy Pier, Bob Wieland said something that put just the right spin on the spirit that would pervade the city for the rest of the day. He began to pull himself along with his hands and, laughing, turned to Stack, Westmoreland and Patridge.
”If I go too fast for you fellas,” he told them, ”let me know, and I`ll slow up.”
”My God,” Westmoreland said to a friend marching behind him, his eyes brimming with tears, ”what guts. What guts.”
Westmoreland`s tears may have been among the earliest shed during the day, but they would not be the only ones. The spectacle of 200,000 veterans of an unpopular, unsuccessful war touched an emotional chord in the city that had not been touched since the last Americans escaped from Vietnam by way of the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975.
For the first few blocks along Grand Avenue the crowds were thin but enthusiastic. Scattered clumps of spectators cheered and clapped from the sidewalks, while construction workers perched high above the street yelled down encouragement and draped ”welcome home” signs from the skeletons of their buildings. As the marchers approached the bridge carrying Michigan Avenue over Grand, the crowds thickened, and so did the emotion.
Office workers from Michigan Avenue began pouring out of skyscrapers, joining the housewives, children and retirees who had come downtown early to line the route. Young women who must have been infants during the war, now in dressed-for-success suits and jogging shoes, were sobbing and yelling to the veterans. Middle-aged men, eyes red-rimmed, stood in business suits transfixed by the spectacle marching past.
At Michigan Avenue the veterans began craning their necks, wide-eyed in wonderment at the reception they were getting. The men marching with their old units, such as 3d Marine, 11th Airborne and 1st Cavalry divisions, for the most part were marching as strangers. It had been a long and widely scattered war, and it was hard to find anybody else who had served in the same company or regiment at the same time and place.
No matter. As the spectators swelled in number and support, the veterans spontaneously began chanting old marching cadences and singing service songs that most of them likely hadn`t sung in years. Good-natured rivalry began to break out between units marching in succession. ”Air Force! Air Force!” one group would begin to shout in unison. ”Marines! Marines!” would come the answer. ”Airborne! Airborne!” ”Air Cav! Air Cav!” Tears began to streak the battered faces of veterans who looked so hardened that they would rather die than show such emotion. Arms began to entwine in the ranks, to drape and hug shoulders. Wives marching with their men leaned into them, kissed them, adored them, while their children seemed bedazzled by it all.
The endless columns of marchers continued under Michigan Avenue along Grand, up to State Street, south across the river. The crowds continued to deepen along with the emotion. West along Wacker Drive, then south into La Salle Street, which was to be the focal point, the glory ground of the parade, billed by its promoters as the biggest ticker-tape welcome in the nation`s history.
As Westmoreland, Stack, Patridge and Wieland turned the corner, the sidewalks of La Salle Street were eight deep with people, and the air was a blizzard of shredded paper. It was a blizzard that would fall for five continuous hours, until the very last of the 200,000 veterans had marched down the street. As the ticker tape piled up on the ground, spectators picked it up and threw it again. Veterans standing on the sidewalks who had chosen not to march began to slip out of the crowd and into the stream of their comrades.
”Welcome,” the crowds shouted to the marchers. ”Welcome home. We love you.”
”Thank you, Chicago,” the marchers shouted back. ”Thank you. Thank you.”
With only eight bands and a few floats interspersed in the long lines of soldiers, it became less of a parade and more of a mass embrace. Women began rushing into the line of march, randomly hugging veterans. Veterans complied by surging out of the line of march and into the crowds, hugging the women and shaking every extended hand they encountered.
Westmoreland dropped out of the parade near City Hall to view the procession as it passed in front of the the official reviewing stand. Again, nobody knew what the reaction would be from his former troops as they passed him. Much of Westmoreland`s reputation is in tatters now, all the more so since he dropped a multimillion-dollar libel suit against the Columbia Broadcasting System in February of last year. He had charged that CBS falsely accused him of deliberately doctoring enemy troop strengths, but his case was irreparably damaged by testimony from his own wartime subordinates that supported the network.
Indeed, if there was any controversy at all about the Chicago parade, it came from honoring Westmoreland as parade marshal. Many veterans are at least ambiguous about Westmoreland`s role in the war and his style of leadership, which seemed more managerial to them than warriorlike.
No matter. Most of the veterans marching in the parade weren`t aware that Westmoreland was present until they reached the reviewing stand. And when they did, invariably there was an undercurrent of amazement that passed through their ranks.
”Hey! Westy`s here!” ”Look! It`s Westmoreland!” ”The old man came!” And invariably each unit, each clump of men and women, would stop in front of the reviewing stand to cheer the old general. Whatever their personal feelings about Westmoreland may have been, he has become such a lightning rod for criticism of his war–and their war–that a real sense of sympathy seems to have grown between him and his ex-troops.
Most of the units that stopped to salute Westmoreland lingered until the parade`s public-address announcer pleaded for them to move on, to keep the procession moving.
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Move on it did. To the end of La Salle Street and around the corner, east on Jackson Boulevard to Grant Park, ending with a concert at the Petrillo band shell. Ironically, the parade route passed sites of some of the most intense antiwar battles and demonstrations during the Vietnam years. It passed the Dirksen Federal Building, site of the infamous ”Chicago Seven” trial in which seven protest leaders stood accused in 1969 of conspiring to disrupt Chicago`s 1968 Democratic Convention. It ended in the park where protesters demanding an end to the war and expressing support for the communist Vietnamese cause fought pitched battles with Chicago police during the convention week in 1968.
No matter. A long time has passed since the streets of Chicago reverberated with the chant: ”Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Ho Chi Minh is going to win!” On parade day the streets reverberated only with welcome. The welcome followed the parade right into the park. The parade watchers, including thousands of office workers who gave up any pretense of returning to their jobs that day, stayed with the veterans, shaking their hands, buying them beers in the park.