By Nick Buglione
Rain forced the rally, originally set for East Meadow's Eisenhower Park, indoors to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, where elected officials, military leaders and veterans of past wars delivered rousing speeches to an enthusiastically patriotic crowd.
"This is a great day to be proud to be an American," said County Executive Thomas Suozzi, who along with other county veteran organizations arranged the April 26 rally. Outside, a U-Haul truck was filled to the brim with donated toiletries and other goods that the United Service Organizations will ship over to the troops.
"Let's show some support for the commander in chief, the president of the United States, George Bush," said Suozzi, a Democrat, eliciting a standing ovation from the audience. "I don't care if you are a Democrat or a Republican; let's support our president at this time."
While most speakers offered only words of thanks and support to the troops, others seized the opportunity to slam anti-war demonstrators and the news media. Army Reserves Brig. Gen. Harry Mott, much to the delight of the crowd, ripped into Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, two of Hollywood's most vocal opponents of the war in Iraq. He also lambasted the Grammy award-winning group the Dixie Chicks, saying they would be more appropriately called the Baghdad Broads. A member of the Dixie Chicks said at a March concert she was ashamed the president was from Texas.
"I was hoping they'd save two tomahawk missiles," Mott said, "one for Peter Arnett and one for Hollywood."
Arnett, a correspondent for CNN, was interviewed on Iraqi TV shortly after the war's outset and said that the coalition's war plan was failing because of Iraqi resistance.
Radio talk show host and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a spirited diatribe toward the end of the rally, charging that the media gave "comfort and support" to the enemy.
"Saddam Hussein could depend on the Al Jazeera networks of America," Sliwa said. "We were not going to let the media lose this war.
"To Susan Sarandon and her boy toy Tim Robbins," he went on, "payback is going to come and payback is going to come morning, noon and night."
Yet it was the words of a 6-year-old that put the rally's true point into perspective. Christopher Brett, whose father is serving as a medic in Kuwait, poignantly closed out the ceremony. "My dad is over in Kuwait helping the wounded soldiers, and I hope he gets back soon," he said.
Of all the veterans in attendance that afternoon, those who fought in Vietnam overwhelmingly underscored the importance of supporting the troops. "The more support you get, the better you feel," said George Hernandez, a 56-year-old Uniondale resident who served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, which claimed more than 58,000 American lives. "We didn't get the kind of support" that troops are getting now.
Though those against the war in Iraq today seemed to go out of their way to offer support for the troops at the same time, Vietnam's protesters labeled those soldiers "baby killers" and spat on them, recalled Stanley Kuchlewski, a Levittown resident and past president of the Nassau County chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America.
"There's a sense of bitterness of what happened in the past, not for what's going on now," Kuchlewski, 55, said. "It took them 15 years to have a parade for us down Broadway."
