Gary Newton lives in Georgetown.

The Sagadahoc Bridge, over the Kennebec River between Bath and Woolwich, is a good place for “No Kings” protests.

You stand with your sign at the railing along the pedestrian walkway, waving to motorists zipping by on Route 1, heartened by all who respond with thumbs-ups and staccato horn beeps (though one guy gave us the bird and barked “Get a job!” which is hysterical, because the group I was with was entirely gray-haired or no-haired).

The view from the bridge toward Bath offers a panorama of the area’s storied shipbuilding history. Downstream, at Bath Iron Works, seven 510-foot, $2.5-billion Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are under construction. Upstream, at the Bath Freight Shed pier (in fair weather), is the 50-foot Virginia, a replica of the first ocean-going vessel built about 8 miles downriver by English settlers in North America in 1607. A nasty Maine winter and the death of their leader, among other travails, led settlers to abandon their short-lived colony in Popham and sail home.

On March 28, the day of the third national “No Kings” protest, it was cold on the bridge but a spirited crowd of about 1,000 people warmed the heart. To warm appendages, we walked the half-mile-long bridge that bends toward Woolwich — and possibly justice, too, if we all keep coming out to demand it.

Nationwide, an estimated 8 million people participated in No Kings III, more than the first two protests. President Trump cannonballing into a war with Iran on Feb. 28 with only a half-baked plan to get out likely made more people want to stand on a bridge in the cold and scream “Stop!”.

Let us pray the war will be over by the time the new destroyers are launched from Bath Iron Works, lest they be ordered to sail straight to the Strait of Hormuz into a gauntlet of floating mines and whining drones. With Bath-built guided-missile destroyers comprising almost half the Navy’s fleet of these vital ships, there must be several in the thick of it already.

To folks of my vintage, the war in Iran brings back the war in Vietnam and those memories evoke an acid reflux-y feeling of “déjà vu all over again.” Standing with a sign on the Sagadahoc Bridge in 2026 reminded me of walking with a placard across the Arlington Memorial Bridge in 1969.

At the end of my freshman year at Colby, the dean sent me a letter that began, “As expected, you failed French,” and ended, “you’ve been placed on academic probation.”

First semester sophomore year, I was toying with the idea of going to D.C. to protest the war in Vietnam. I would had to have cut a couple classes; not a great idea for a probationer. Even then, ending the war to save American and Vietnamese lives seemed more pressing than attending classes on Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

I cut the classes, went to Brunswick, mustered on the town green with college kids from all over and boarded a bus to the nation’s capital.

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The Nov. 13-15, 1969 protest in Washington began with a “March of Death” where we each carried a placard with the name of a dead American soldier. By then, there were 40,000.

We walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the Capitol, where the placards would be laid to rest in mock coffins. When passing the White House, we shouted out “our” person’s name for President Nixon to hear. It took 40 hours for 40,000 people walking in single file to complete the march.

My placard and I were crossing a downtown street when a random Washingtonian gave me some “feedback.” A guy leaned out his car window, exercising his First Amendment right to flip me the bird and call me a “pile of commie crap.” (He didn’t add, “Get a job.”) Sad that I remember the deadbeat who gave me the bird but don’t recall the name of my dead soldier.

The March of Death was followed by a 500,000-person peace march down Pennsylvania Avenue. In addition to being notable for its size, the march was notable for the relative diversity of participants. Marchers weren’t just the usual suspects, an “effete core of impudent snobs,” per VP Spiro Agnew, but moms, clerics, veterans, business people, union people, members of Congress and government workers, among many other groups.

A couple of thousand folks split from the main march to gather at the Department of Justice for a “Stop the Trial” rally organized by the Youth International Party (a.k.a. the Yippies). The defendants, the Chicago Seven, included the two co-founders of the Yippies. They were charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a charge they considered bunkum. During the rally, red paint bombs (this was pre-Ziploc plastic bags) were launched from the crowd to splatter against the façade of the Justice — or Injustice, as the Yippies called it..

Forty years after the paint-bombing, living in downtown D.C. near the Justice Department, I went by the million-square-foot federal building to scan its façade for 40-year-old red paint stains. Not a trace. Drippings from the 1969 protest had been washed away, just as the Vietnam War had been washed from the memory of most of us, if certainly not all.

When living near the mall, I’d walk over to the Vietnam Memorial, a 500-foot-long scar in the ground of our nation’s capital. You walk down into the memorial. At its dead center, where the two sides of the sunken “V” meet and the black granite wall is over ten feet high, all you can see to the left and right, above and below, are 58,318 names of dead Americans, including 341 Mainers (plus 11 missing in action). The sense of loss is knee buckling. Aging mourners stand at the polished wall tenderly touching the cherished, chiseled names of dear ones long gone.

We sent 2.7 million U.S. military personnel, dropped 7.6 million tons of bombs (three times the tonnage dropped on all enemies in all theaters during WWII), spent $168 billion (about $1 trillion today); gave the lives of 58,318 American soldiers, 5,000 allied soldiers, and 200,000-250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers to save South Vietnam from communism, something pitched as an existential threat to them — and ultimately to us.

It wasn’t enough.

We withdrew in 1973. In 1975, South Vietnam fell to the communists.

In 2022, 47 years after two Marine Security Guards were the last to die in Vietnam, representatives from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, among others, attended Vietnam’s International Defense Expo in Hanoi to sell aircraft, helicopters and miscellaneous weaponry to the kith and kin of Ho Chi Minh.

In 2023, President Biden and the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam elevated the U.S.-Vietnam relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the highest level of importance on Vietnam’s diplomatic dance card. Among other benefits of the designation, the U.S. has better access to Vietnam’s rare earth minerals for our smart phones and drones, MRIs, EVs, LEDs and ETCs.

In 2025, the Trump Organization and Vietnamese partners broke ground on a $1.5 billion luxury golf resort outside Hanoi. Eric Trump is overseeing his family’s role in the joint venture.

In 2045, the way the world turns these days, Eric Trump’s son may well be breaking ground with Iranian partners on a Trump-branded golf resort outside the remains of Tehran. A Trumpian version of Biden’s “Build Back Better” where golf courses are essential “infrastructure.”

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How to prevent Iran from becoming another “forever war” which adds another memorial to the nation’s capital?

Anti-war protests that peaked in the fall of 1969 involved an estimated 2.5 million people, 1.2% of the U.S. population. The strength and breadth of the protest made it clear to President Nixon that he lacked the political and popular support for a planned Epic Fury-like escalation of the war, so he nixed it and opted for an incremental de-escalation and troop withdrawal.

The national protests on March 28, 2026, involved an estimated 8-9 million people, 2.5% of the U.S. population. Sustained, broad-based, non-violent civil resistance in the form of demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and the like by at least 3.5% of a country’s population can induce democratic change.

In the U.S., that would be 12 million participants. “No Kings” is snowballing towards that tipping point. Time will tell whether the Iran war adds the critical increment of resistance necessary to change policies of the current regime.

The Iran war is vastly different than prior wars in the sense that it’s being fought virtually with bombs, drones and missiles. The battlefield is “sanitized,” depicted on screens not unlike video games like Call of Duty. The war’s human wreckage has been largely unseen, perhaps making resistance to it less intense than it was for Vietnam.

The recent “No Kings” protest in Bath began on a hopeful note. At a kick-off rally under the gazebo at Library Park, two high school students, members of Gen-Z, spoke with confidence, hope and inspiration about the group of activists they’d brought together to bring about change.

If Zoomers join Boomers in large enough numbers, the nation’s core ideas and values, the rebar in the foundation of our nation corroded by the current regime — the rule of law, pluralism, equality, individual rights, tolerance, E pluribus unum, etc. — will once again be what defines us and makes our country truly exceptional.