Rudman's city: Fletcher's parade will pick national scab best forgotten

It looks like we old anti-Vietnam War protesters will be dusting off the duffel coats, pinning on the Mao badges and hitting the streets one last time, thanks to Auckland Mayor Christine Fletcher.

If ever a scab was best left unpicked, it's the one covering New Zealand's participation in the Vietnam conflict.

But Mrs Fletcher and city councillors, aided and abetted by the armed services and the Returned Services Association, have decided to give it a good old scratch and host a belated welcome-home parade for Vietnam War veterans.

It's as though the council expects us to agree that the passage of time - 26 years since the last defeated American troops fled from Saigon - has finally made a public welcome to our troops acceptable.

To me, the passage of time makes such a parade now even less welcome. At least a parade back in the 70s would have had the excuse of spontaneity.

To put one on now signals to the world that, after long consideration, we New Zealanders have decided we are proud of our part in the United States-led bid to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

Well, this New Zealander is not proud and doesn't want any parade up our main street suggesting he is.

In her Anzac Day dawn parade address, Mrs Fletcher said the thank-you parade for Vietnam veterans would be "a rare opportunity to revisit this part of our country's history, to set the record straight and record our appreciation of these men and women and their families."

Good-hearted as this sounds, what Mrs Fletcher's parade risks doing is rewriting history, not setting the record straight.

The record is already straight. New Zealand and our allies should not have been there.

Agreed, the war is long past and any anger I might have once directed towards these volunteer soldiers has gone. But they made their choices at the time and have to live with the consequences.

I've heard them argue they were young and didn't know what they were getting into.

All I can say to that is that if I was contemplating volunteering to take part in a shooting war, I'd have made sure I did know what I was getting into and whom I was expected to kill. I was of the same age and I found no shortage of literature at the time explaining exactly that.

I've also heard them say that if they hadn't "volunteered," their Army careers would have been over.

Maybe so, but it was a time of overfull employment. Plenty of jobs were going.

For years the vets have been nagging away about their need for a parade, as though they see it delivering them absolution. I fear all it will do is open old wounds.

The city council would have been kinder to them if it had said no. A parade is going to put them back in the firing line.

Muddying the waters is the nature of the parade. Working with RSA president Chris Yates, Colonel Graeme Wilson and Territorial Army officer Brigadier David McGregor (a Bell Gully lawyer in real life), Mrs Fletcher is planning a parade for late June that will combine the former annual charter parade of Army, Navy and Air Force with Vietnam vets and returning East Timor peacekeepers.

What a parade of mixed messages it promises to be. She's calling it "celebration of peace."

Councillor Maire Leadbeater, the only one to vote against the parade, makes more sense.

"Most people now concede this was an unjust war and that the Vietnamese people were defending both their country and their right to determine their own destiny. From 1954 to 1975 at least 3 million Vietnamese were killed. How are they to view this welcome parade? Who will remember their dead, their Agent Orange-deformed children and their devastated country?"

She rightly says that we should be apologising to the Vietnamese first.

"I mean no disrespect to the veterans, but this is a case of first things first and the scars of this war will not heal until the wrongs of the past are acknowledged."