On Saturday, I went to the No Kings demonstration in downtown Colorado Springs. I was surprised by the huge size of the crowd. Surely, I told myself, this popular manifestation cannot represent Deep Red Colorado Springs. But there must have been at least 20,000 people, ranged along North Nevada Avenue on both sides of our main thoroughfare, all the way from East Pikes Peak up to the Colorado College campus and Uintah Street, a distance of more than a mile.

The atmosphere was happy, I would say even festive. Everybody was smiling, waving every kind of sign imaginable, as they spilled over the sidewalks and into the street. Cars slowly cruised by, full of more people sticking signs out of windows and honking horns, the demonstrators surging back and forth. I watched, detached, holding no sign, just the cane that I use now, my painful knees and feet demanding that I walk slowly and carefully lest I stumble and fall. Seeing the cane, the anti-monarchical crowd silently parted to let me pass, obedient like the Red Sea before Moses. I looked, but Pharaoh’s chariots were not thundering in pursuit. 

On March 28, I asked myself: What am I doing here? I could not give myself a good answer. My attitude toward demonstrations has always been ambivalent. Most of the time I prefer not to go. But I attended the No Kings protest because my dislike of the present regime in power overrode my reluctance. 

I remember that when I was a student at Colorado College there were many events protesting the Vietnam War. At the time, I was fresh out of the Army and felt the raw emotional wounds from combat. Truth be told, I had not yet recovered. Friends would ask me to go to the anti-war demonstrations. I always refused.  “Why?” they demanded. “Because it would be disloyal to my comrades, soldiers in my squad, in my platoon, friends of mine, who were killed in the war.” They looked at me strangely. Their reply had an ironclad logic, irrefutable to them. “We are trying to save the soldiers,” they said. “You made a big mistake. If you and your friends had not been willing to fight the war, it would not have happened.” But they simply could not understand the bonds of brotherhood I had with my comrades. I had seen many of those men die. And nothing I said could make them understand that I had volunteered to go to Vietnam because communism was an evil that had to be destroyed wherever it was encountered. I believed that in 1967.

Now I understand that Vietnamese nationalism was actually the primary force inspiring the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. I feel the same kind of thing now. We must fight the Iran War because the evil Iranian theocracy, the worst kind of holy fascism, must be totally destroyed. This I believe. But mixed with Shia fundamentalist Islam, the mullahs have inextricably woven very strong Iranian nationalism. We cannot defeat Iranian nationalism, no matter how many airstrikes we and the Israelis carry out, just like we could not defeat Vietnamese nationalism in spite of dropping a huge quantity of bombs on both South and North Vietnam, more tonnage than was dropped by all the belligerents in WWII. Even with 550,000 troops on the ground, we could not defeat Vietnamese nationalism. Shall we send in the Marines and the Airborne? In spite of the courage and professionalism of these elite troops, they cannot prevail in the face of fanatical Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps resistance. Millions more Iranian nationalists will not surrender, and they will fight to the death.

Because I am forever a combat veteran, my heart is always with the men on the ground. My fear is that a ground attack will be a futile effort, costing the lives of many brave American soldiers and Marines. All for nothing, just like in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History.