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" WASHINGTON \u2014The hardest thing to do when you&amp;#039;re in the middle of something like the celebration of the re-installation of our current Kenyan Muslim overlord is to resist the overwhelming feeling that you&amp;#039;ve wandered into Versailles three steps ahead of the sans-culottes. The broad avenues, heavily bundled by security fencing and metal barriers, are in the process of being rendered into an impenetrable maze. The events surrounding the inauguration \u2014 most of them \u2014 are black-tie and expensive and fairly vibrating with the entwined currents of power and money that provide the life force in this place. It&amp;#039;s a weird, isolating experience, cut off from the concerns and the problems of the rest of the country that actually elected the guy. Personally, I think they ought to rotate the presidential inauguration, the way they do the Super Bowl or the Olympics. I mean, the president&amp;#039;s actually getting sworn in privately tomorrow anyway. What would be wrong with inaugurating a president in, say, New Orleans once a decade or so? Yesterday, preparations continued apace on the National Mall. Forklifts and small pick-up trucks and overladen golf carts tried to stay out of each other&amp;#039;s way, and also tried very hard not to create very bad footage on the video cameras of a couple of hundred tourists. In a couple of days, there will be some majesty but, Saturday afternoon, it looked like they were getting ready for a tractor-pull. Elsewhere on the mall, there was a large white tent wherein National Service Day was being held and, in a chaotic but enthusiastic way, celebrated as well. This is an innovation in brought to the weekend&amp;#039;s proceedings four years ago by this president and his wife. It has since grown into a kind of sprawling trade show for various service organizations, including everything from the National Parks and NASA \u2014 there were two actual astronauts on display \u2014 to the Jesuit Volunteer Missions. The organizations were ordered by the services they provide \u2014 environmental groups in one area, anti-hunger groups across the aisle and, every couple of hours, some famous people took the big stage at the front of the tent and gave speeches, and somebody equally famous got up and sang a song. Down in the heart of the activity, there was a long, right-angled table for the various veteran&amp;#039;s groups, and Rick Weidman was working a few degrees north of where the table elbowed toward the front of the tent. In 1969, after graduating from Colgate University, Rick gave back an occupational deferment, making himself eligible for the draft. He ended up as a medic with the Americal Division in the area around Chu Lai in Vietnam. Today, he was there representing the Vietnam Veterans of America, the legacy veteran&amp;#039;s advocacy group that was born out of the anger and frustration that Vietnam veterans felt toward the veterans of the wars that had come before theirs, and who often looked down upon them as losers, or worse. This resulted in a horrible general lassitude toward post-traumatic stress disorder, and the effects of the defoliant, Agent Orange, and all the other little nightmares unique to Vietnam that the people who fought there brought home with them. They had nobody but themselves \u2014 and, ironically, some support from the alternative press and those remnants of the antiwar movement that knew what they were doing \u2014 so they organized, and they set the template for a new kind of veteran&amp;#039;s supports organization. In fact, just around the bend in the table, the Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans Of America were taking questions. It&amp;#039;s unlikely that IAVA would exist had the Vietnam Veterans Of America not shown the way. &amp;quot;Had the traditional veterans organizations addressed Agent Orange and PTSD,&amp;quot; said Weidman, &amp;quot;there would have been no VVA. We organized because we couldn&amp;#039;t get them to listen on the seminal issues of our generation. When you&amp;#039;re getting shot at by hostiles, it&amp;#039;s a fricking war, and to pretend that it&amp;#039;s not is baloney, and many of us had the experience down through the years of being told by World War II vets or Korean vets, &amp;#039;Well, you weren&amp;#039;t really in a war.&amp;#039; My first reaction was unprintable, but you can figure out what it was. My second was, we did a pretty damn good job with the war your generation gave us. &amp;quot;It was the Class of &amp;#039;45 that created the policy so, if the policy was screwed up, it wasn&amp;#039;t our fault. We were 19-years old, for Christ&amp;#039;s sake. It was our father&amp;#039;s generation that made a muck of it.&amp;quot; The anger was so raw that, to this day, members of Seidman&amp;#039;s organization refuse to wear any kind of hat while working on the issues, or visiting Capitol Hill, because of the campaign caps that are sjuch a trademark of the old-line veterans organizations that were so deaf to their issues when they came home. When the Vietnam veterans came home and organized themselves around the unique circumstances and consequences of their war, they literally were organizing to save what was left of their lives. Agent Orange was killing them with liver cancer and a dozen other ways. And they showed how the calcified bureaucracy of the older organizations, and the completely petrified Office Of Veterans Affairs, could be outmaneuvered in the public mind. It was a kind of counterinsurgency politics, and they were good at it. And they&amp;#039;ve taught their lessons to the men and women who have gone to war in the decades after Vietnam, where the country was supposed to have learned some lessons, although subsequent history can make you wonder about that. &amp;quot;Our founding principle is never again shall one generation of American veterans abandon another one,&amp;quot; Weidman said. &amp;quot;We haven&amp;#039;t abandoned our fathers&amp;#039; generation in World War II, and we haven&amp;#039;t abandoned our uncles&amp;#039; generation in Korea, and certainly haven&amp;#039;t abandoned the young guys. We fight hard on education and employment issues, and not too many of our guys are going to be going to school, but we&amp;#039;re going to continue to fight for that to make sure that the younger guys have what we did not have.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s almost forty years since Rick Weidman&amp;#039;s war ended, but the tragedy and murderous disaster that it brought to so many people in so many places, most notably in Vietnam itself, lives like dark matter at the center of modern American history. People like Rick Weidman are sensitive to that dark matter when it begins to quiver and assert itself again. &amp;quot;You look at a lot of the nonsense, and I regard it as arrant nonsense, being kicked out at Chuck Hagel,&amp;quot; Weidman said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s all by guys our age who dodged the draft, who never heard a shot fired in anger. They&amp;#039;re blasting on Chuck for not being war-like enough? Give me a break. A bunch of wussies like Elliott Abrams and guys like that.&amp;quot; We are still, for the moment, a country at war, and they are gathering here to inaugurate a president who has committed himself to drawing down our remaining war, while fighting a private one himself, one that does not create any more combat veterans. There is nobody coming home with liver cancer from Agent Orange. The worst thing that can happen to American personnel in this president&amp;#039;s new war is that somebody forgets to use the hand sanitizer and somebody else sharing the console in Kansas from which they fly the drones gets the flu. But still the dark matter works its purposes beneath the shine they&amp;#039;ll be putting on the history this week, and you&amp;#039;re just old enough, you are, to remember something that Michael Herr wrote for this magazine long, long ago: Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we&amp;#039;ve all been there. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18231/saturday-on-the-mall/>