Exhibit Tells Story of Vietnam War Resistors in the Military

The little-known story of resistance by active-duty members of the military and veterans during the Vietnam war, and the important role the movement played in ending it, will be highlighted in an exhibit and programs at Marquette University April 1-17.

The exhibit, “Waging Peace in Vietnam,” sponsored by the Marquette Center for Peacemaking, will be on display in the lobby of Raynor Memorial Libraries. It features the stories of 10 service members who spoke out, in many cases at great personal risk, to protest and call for an end to the war.

Three public events, featuring prominent activists with compelling stories and testimony, plus three online films and a musical performance, expand and humanize the exhibit. All events are free.

An opening panel on April 3 will feature Ron Haeberle, the Army photographer who released his photos of the My Lai massacre; Susan Schnall, president of Veterans For Peace, who as a Navy nurse dropped anti-war leaflets from a plane onto San Francisco area military bases and led an antiwar march in uniform, for which she was court-martialed; and David Cortright, professor emeritus at Notre Dame, author of 20 books, longtime antiwar activist and leading authority on the peace movement.

Chuck Searcy, an American veteran who has lived in Vietnam since 1995, co-founded Project RENEW, which has located and destroyed 815,952 explosive landmines and bombs discovered in Quang Tri Province. He calls it “the most bombed place on earth.” He will be part of an April 4 panel, “Healing Wars Legacies. Ngo Xuan Hien, the project’s communications manager, and Heather Bowser, Agent Orange survivor, whose father was exposed to American chemical weapons, will also be panelists. Searcy was featured in a recent New York Times article about his work.

It was a visit in 2016 to Project RENEW by Ron Carver, a photographer and longtime social justice advocate, that led to the exhibit’s creation. Carver visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, where the director asked him to guest-curate an exhibit on the antiwar movement in the US. That opened in 2018, and a US exhibit and companion book followed in 2019. It has been displayed on 24 campuses in the US and Vietnam.

“Very little of the scholarship concerning the war includes the role of the men and women who created a peace movement within the American military machine. But without understanding the role of the soldiers and sailors who opposed the war, it is impossible to understand why our leaders decided to withdraw our troops starting in 1971,” Carver said.

“Today as we face such daunting problems such as climate change, the rollback of voting rights and other progressive social justice gains, it is important for young people to have hope. This exhibit and the speakers have an important message for young people today. Soldiers in the midst of a war, while in uniform and operating within the repressive military legal system were still able to build a peace movement robust enough to help bring the war to an end. In spite of the many horrors of the Vietnam war, we want students to find inspiration in the soldiers who resisted, saved millions of lives and saved America’s soul.”

The final program, on April 15, will feature a reading and talk by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese-American who grew up in a small village near DaNang, where the villagers were forced on a daily basis to balance relations with Viet Cong, Vietnamese Army, and American troops to stay alive. An author, philanthropist, and peace activist, her memoir, “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places,” was the basis for the Oliver Stone film, “Heaven and Earth.” The Center for Peacemaking is honoring her as its Peacemaker in Residence during her time at Marquette.

Online streaming events will include three films – Sir, No Sir!, The Whistleblower of My Lai, and Hunting in Vietnam – to be shown online with presentations by their directors afterward. On April 14, world-famous Kronos Quartet soloist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, will play a live streaming event from the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison on the đàn tranh, a traditional 17-string Vietnamese instrument.

All events are free and open to the public.  A full schedule and registration information is available at the Center for Peacemaking website.  Milwaukee Veterans For Peace, Peace Action of Wisconsin, United Nations Association of Greater Milwaukee, and the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice are community sponsors of the exhibit.

Related exhibits will simultaneously be on display at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison and Polk Library on the UW-Oshkosh campus.

Bill Christofferson, a Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace, is a former journalist who has served in state and local government and as a political campaign consultant. He is retired and lives in Milwaukee.