Letter From Mountainair
(Editor’s note: We received this a while ago and, while we’re not clear on what’s going on in Mountainair, there are some interesting points contained in the letter. We present it here unabridged as food for thought on several obvious topics.)
by Dan Embree
Fellow Citizens of Mountainair
I’m one of the local trouble-makers – one of the many citizens who over the last couple of years have been attempting to induce the town council and the mayor to comply with New Mexico law in conducting their meetings, and I’m the guy who was famous for 15 minutes last summer for being dragged out of a council meeting by Chief Robert Chung on the orders of Mayor Chester Riley for objecting, in a parliamentary way – it’s recorded – to the council going into executive session without saying, as the law requires, what they were going to talk about.
Because I’ve discovered that my name (and that incident) is being used to frighten people into voting for incumbents Barbara Chung and George Immerwahr, as supposedly stalwart defenders of public order against outsiders and provocateurs, I would like to briefly tell a story that may illuminate my character and that of my accusers.
While I was passively refusing to leave the council meeting that night (but offering to leave quietly if handcuffed and arrested), George Immerwahr shouted “Filthy, disgusting haters!” at me and my wife, Joan (the least hateful person you will ever meet) and a half dozen others who supported us; and Barbara Chung shouted at me, “We know your history! You were one of those protesters who spit on returning Viet Nam veterans!”
“Well, actually,” I replied from the floor, where I was by that time, “I was one of those returning Viet Nam veterans.” (For the record, no one spit on me.) I had served for a year as an infantry officer in Quang Tri Province, in the rice paddies and villages along the DMZ and on a hilltop on the Laotian border. It was all field duty – no staff job, no general’s aide, no rear echelon – and to be fair, no heroism, no medals for valor.
So it stung a bit and it still stings to be called a spitter on veterans. Years later, after the Kent State shootings, I did become a protester. With two of my West Point classmates and a graduate of the Air Force Academy, I helped found Concerned Academy Graduates (surely the straightest, stodgiest, even stuffiest anti-war group of that era), and we grew to a modest 1000 members across the country, appearing on radio and TV and writing editorials and making speeches against the war.
But we never spit on anyone. Nor did any of the protesters that we marched with, as far as I know. We did march: in the spring of 1971 we marched in San Francisco with another 400,000 protesters, many of them veterans, all of them Americans. I pulled my two-year-old son in a red wagon; my wife, Joan (one of George’s “haters”) marched with our daughter in utero. That was one of the best days in one of most meaningful periods of our lives, and it remains beyond the reach of petty politicians to recast into some shameful narrative that suits their own purposes.
The veterans of that war have different stories and different versions of what that war meant. And we tell one another those stories when we meet briefly – on the street or in Gustin’s or at the Alpine or at Mike’s gas station or anywhere. And we often disagree. But we respect one another and we call one another “Brother” and we don’t make up nonsense to blacken each other’s reputations.
So, just as I can laugh off the spectacle of public officials making up nonsense about their achievements in an election flyer, I can see this attack on my reputation and my wife’s character for what it is: the desperate product of over-heated imaginations.
This campaign isn’t supposed to be about me, and I am sorry to have been dragged into it in this silly way. There are several good and reasonable candidates, firmly rooted in reality, who are looking to serve the community without glorifying themselves. I hope you will vote for them.
Dan Embree
[Please forward this email to everyone you know. Please print it out and hand it to your neighbors.]