War's dark toll caught in veterans' memorial in veterans' m

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Naomi Tutu-Seavers speaks

Naomi Tutu-Seavers and father, Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu. TutuSeavers will be one of featured speakers at Nov. 2 antiwar conference in San At a recent concert, Bruce Springsteen urged his fans to go to Washington, D.C., visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and read the names of the soldiers who died in that war. And then, the Boss told them, imagine your names on the next memorial, because you're the ones who will be dying in Central America if the U.S. government wages another war.

Springsteen's comments were sensational enough to be carried on the front pages of newspapers around the country. And they rang true enough to inspire me to pay a visit to the Memorial on a recent trip to Washington.

Although it was completed in late 1982, the Memorial endures as a moving reminder to us and to coming generations of the unbearably high price that the Vietnam War extracted.

The setting itself is historic. Located in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial, the site of so many anti-Vietnam War. demonstrations, it reminded me of our persevering movement to "bring the boys home." But more than 58,000 boys never came home alive, and their names are engraved on the walls of the Memorial.

With its two walls pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Washingcussing key questions of strategy in the fight against U.S. intervention in Central America and against U.S. support to the South African apartheid regime.

Unfortunately, the U.S. anti-intervention movement suffers from a great dispersion of energy and focus. The Oct. 11-12 anti-apartheid protests, while important contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle, were nevertheless narrowly conceived and therefore incapton Monument, the Vietnam Memorial symbolically binds the war into our nation's history and consciousness.

In comparison to the days when hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators rallied here, the Gardens seemed now so peaceful. But that peace was shattered as I stepped into the environment of the Memorial. Encountering first one name, then two and three and four, I was soon enveloped by a cascade of names of the dead. The descending paths of the Memorial lead its visitors into a dark confrontation with the toll of the war.

For the visitor who comes to locate the names of friends or loved ones, the Memorial invites participation. Did you know a war victim? What was his name? When did he die? Nearby are two large books that cross-reference the names by date of death, the order in which they are engraved on the panels.

Because the official guidelines stipulated that it was to make no political statement about the war, the Memorial does not preach. Instead, we are left to draw our own conclusions from the overwhelming statement of fact.

I came away from the Memorial moved and recommitted: No more cannon fodder for the war machine! No more Vietnam Wars!

able of involving large working people.

The Nov. 2 San Francisco antiwar conference organized by the Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice, on the other hand, has opened an important discussion on the key role U.S. unions can play in building peace, jobs, and justice coalitions.

While the AFL-CIO bureaucracy attacks all those who oppose their prowar policies, a number of key international and local union officials, along with prominent religious and community figures, will speak at the San Francisco conference against the policies of war and austerity.

In this sense, the San Francisco conference will serve as a repudiation of the top AFL-CIO leadership's attempt to impose a monolithic prowar stance upon the labor movement.

The organization of similar conferences and speakouts in cities across the country can serve as a launching pad for mass antiwar demonstrations in the spring.

The labor movement and its allies can play an essential role in convincing millions of people that the Reagan administration's war against the people of Central America, and its support for the employers anti-union drive here, are two sides of the same coin.

Forging this link remains a central strategic objective of the antiwar and labor movements. It will be the best guarantee that both those who fight for justice here and abroad will be victorious —The editors.

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tutu relugee Pund Courtesy Bishop