Westwood Federal Building, Los Angeles, Tuesday night
What dimbulb at the Army Reserve Center up the street from the Federal Building determined this would be a swell time to send armored personnel carriers driving around Westwood and into an antiwar demo?
When two APCs got stuck at a traffic light, protestors swarmed around them. Those with the ANSWER Coalition chanted “Bring the troops home now” while regrettably those with another group yelled “baby killers.” Sharp thinking there, bozos. Y’see, if you are actually serious about antiwar organizing and not just jerking off, then you want to convince soldiers to join you. Chanting ‘bring the troops home now’ might well resonate with a reservist nervous about being shipped to Iraq. Chanting ‘baby killers’ will do nothing but convince the soldiers those protestors are obnoxious assholes – which they most certainly were.
Even the police looked nervous when this was happening. Not so much at the protestors but at the APCs. Probably wondering how anyone could be dumb enough to send them into an antiwar demo.
QuickTime video from LA IndyMedia.
Update: I’m getting a lot of hits from DailyKos and MyDD on this. Some of the comments there have been questioning whether this actually happened. Oh yes, it sure did.
However those soldiers did NOT appear happy to be surrounded by protestors and the event seemed more of a screw-up by Army Reserve than anything actually menacing. I found the whole thing to be bizarre and surrealistic.
Update 2 They were LOST!
From the comments in LA IndyMedia (look for the post titled “Citizen”)
I talked to one Marine with one of the “Striker” vehicles. He told me they had driven the vehicles up from Camp Pendleton the night before (Tuesday) on the freeway. Getting off the 405 Freeway going north, they would have passed Wilshire and Veteran where ANSWER had called a rally to protest the attack on Fallujah in Iraq.
I asked him if he was “rolling around Westwood” Tuesday night. He said, “Yeah, and we drove past that anti-war demonstration. We was lost. We’re not from L.A. We didn’t know where this place (WLA VA) was. We were trying to find it.”
“Did you drive around the block twice?” I asked.
“Yeah, we did. We stopped to ask them (the protestors) directions, but they weren’t very nice.”