Who Is Al Hubbard?

Al Hubbard is the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans against the War. I first met him the morning of April 21 at the VVAW “camp-in” on the Capitol Mall in Washington. He was sitting on a flatbed truck, explaining to a circle of six hundred or so members of his group that the Supreme Court had upheld the earlier ruling that the Veterans would not be allowed to sleep on the Mall that night. He was very calm and soft-spoken about it all, at one point interrupting himself to ask that volunteers take down a Vietcong flag someone had stuck in a tree. When he was finished talking, I went up to Hubbard and introduced myself and asked him about his service record, among other things. He said he had been an Air Force captain.

Actually, if I had watched Meet the Press the previous Sunday, I wouldn’t have needed to ask that question at all. Hubbard had been introduced on that show by Lawrence E. Spivak as a former captain who had spent two years in Vietnam, and who had been decorated and injured in the process. The way it was later explained to me at the Washington “camp-in” was that Hubbard had been flying a transport plane into Danang one day in 1966 when he “caught some shrapnel in the spine.”

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William Overend

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Al Hubbard is the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans against the War. I first met him the morning of April 21 at the VVAW “camp-in” on the Capitol Mall in Washington. He was sitting on a flatbed truck, explaining to a circle of six hundred or so members of his group that the Supreme Court had upheld the earlier ruling that the Veterans would not be allowed to sleep on the Mall that night. He was very calm and soft-spoken about it all, at one point interrupting himself to ask that volunteers take down a Vietcong flag someone had stuck in a tree. When he was finished talking, I went up to Hubbard and introduced myself and asked him about his service record, among other things. He said he had been an Air Force captain.

Actually, if I had watched Meet the Press the previous Sunday, I wouldn’t have needed to ask that question at all. Hubbard had been introduced on that show by Lawrence E. Spivak as a former captain who had spent two years in Vietnam, and who had been decorated and injured in the process. The way it was later explained to me at the Washington “camp-in” was that Hubbard had been flying a transport plane into Danang one day in 1966 when he “caught some shrapnel in the spine.”