Howard Zinn Quote

In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, It’s the first time in this country’s history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on. In the final event of the veterans’ Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police had built around the Capitol steps to keep them away. As they did so, one by one, they made personal statements. One of them said, I’m not proud of these medals. I’m not proud of what I did to receive them. I was in Vietnam for a year and … we never took one prisoner alive. An Air Force man said that what he had done was a disservice to his country. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now serving my country.

Howard Zinn

In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, It’s the first time in this country’s history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on. In the final event of the veterans’ Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police had built around the Capitol steps to keep them away. As they did so, one by one, they made personal statements. One of them said, I’m not proud of these medals. I’m not proud of what I did to receive them. I was in Vietnam for a year and … we never took one prisoner alive. An Air Force man said that what he had done was a disservice to his country. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now serving my country.

Related Quotes

About Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian and a veteran of World War II. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Zinn described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist." He wrote extensively about the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at the age of 87.