Activist admits marchers not all Iraq War veterans

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on August 22, 2008

A man who joined a July 4 procession in Amherst now acknowledges that not everyone who walked under an Iraq Veterans Against the War banner was a former member of the armed services.

The admission confirms a complaint raised by a man who questioned whether the marchers were veterans.

Robert McAllister was among the first American soldiers to enter Iraq - by parachute two days after the war started in 2003. He came home over a year later, wounded, with Army Accommodation and Purple Heart medals as well as the Bronze Star with Valor.

McAllister said he felt a duty to the public to report that some of the people who marched behind an Iraq Veterans Against the War banner in Amherst's Fourth of July parade this year, were not actually Iraq war veterans.

"As a decorated Iraq war vet I found it nauseating," McAllister wrote in a letter to news outlets.

He questioned why Albert N. Sanchez, of Northampton, an Iraq veteran who leads the local Iraq Veterans Against the War contingent, would have sanctioned the action.

Sanchez, reached last week by the Bulletin, explained that he was the only member of his eight-member group who was able to march that day, and he was joined by Vietnam-era veterans, as well as some individuals who were not veterans at all, as McAllister pointed out.

"It's true I was the only Iraq veteran (in the group)," Sanchez said. "There were a couple of other people who wanted to march with us in the parade that are just concerned citizens."

Sanchez did not organize the contingent and his participation was kind of last-minute, he said, so he did not consider that parade viewers might draw the conclusion that everyone who was marching was an Iraq veteran.

"I understand his concern," Sanchez said of McAllister. "I would be upset too."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.