BELFAST - With the parades and other public celebrations of Veterans Day passed, the Monday holiday offered some in Belfast — veterans and nonvets alike — a chance to quietly be with their people.

The Belfast Chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars held a parade on Sunday, so by Monday the scene at Post 3108 was, according to longtime member Lenny Harvey, typical of many days.

Johnny Cash played from speakers in the stairway leading to the upstairs cantina that Harvey manages for the VFW. By 11 a.m., the bar was open, circled by a half-dozen VFW members — veterans of the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars. There was cigarette smoke and laughter. If not for the sunlight coming through the side windows, it could have been any time of day.

It could have been any day. Any time in the last 40 years. 

Harvey served nine months in 1991 as an Army combat engineer during Operation Desert Storm. As part of a flanking operation he woke several times to the sound of multiple rocket launching systems but was not in direct combat. After his tour he was discharged because of Army troop cuts, he said. In the mid-1990s he joined the VFW.

The organization recently took in one veteran of Afghanistan, but the younger ones are rare, Harvey said. At the same time, he said, membership numbers have remained steady in his tenure, suggesting that older members have stuck around, and that the VFW's natural membership cycle may just be catching up.

Richard Stevens of Swanville, a veteran of the Korean War, reasoned that younger vets were naturally busy with families and jobs. Eventually they might want to be in the company of other veterans, and then the VFW would be there.

"It's just vets coming in to brush stuff aside," he said. "It's like any club."

Asked if the VFW members talk about war, Stevens acknowledged there's some common ground, but said the topic is hard for many members. "You joke around on stuff like that to a point, and then it stops," he said. "If you heard some of that stuff, you'd understand."

Stevens ended his service in 1968. In Korea, he had patroled the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, as part of a "clean up crew," retrieving bodies and body parts of dead soldiers. Beyond that, he said, he wasn't permitted to say what he did. "Until they sign the treaty, it's still sealed," he said, referring to a war that never technically ended, and the secrets he's dutifully kept for nearly 50 years since.

Ian Collins of Liberty — one of several veterans who volunteered to be painted, drawn and photographed at Waterfall Arts on Monday as part of the Bring Our War $$$ Home draw-a-thon — held his tongue for 16 years after serving in Vietnam, but for a different reason.

In a gallery lined with Robert Shetterly's portraits of whistle-blowers and activists and Alan Magee's war-themed images of eeire humanoids, 10 or 12 artists painted portraits and scenes from their imaginations on the topic, loosely defined. Suzanna Lasker, of Jefferson, painted a traditional bust portrait of Collins in watercolor, then another of only his clasped hands, and the phrase, "a veteran for peace."

After his discharge in 1970, Collins said he stayed in Europe for a time. Later, while trying to get a return flight to the US, he was mistaken for a draft dodger by a man leading a tour group, who berated Collins for not serving his country. The incident shook Collins enough that a woman sitting next to him on the plane asked what was wrong. When he told her what had happened, the woman announced that she didn't want to sit next to a "baby killer."

"I said 'that's it,'" he said. "I didn't talk about it again."

Not until 1986 when he and other members of a veterans' group from Camden rode on a float in a Veterans Day parade. It was the first veterans' parade he'd been to. He described the experience as "another little crack in the egg. Another opening to let it out."

After Collins left, Lasker painted a picture from her imagination. Three large eyes looked down on a landscape from amid the stars in an ultramarine night sky. The idea, she said, had come from a phrase someone had used that day to describe military satellites. 

"Space eyes," she said.

The Armistice/Veterans Day draw-a-thon is in its fifth year according to organizer and artist Kenny Cole of Monroe, who said the idea of the event has been to improve the visual quality of signs, posters and other tools of activism. It's also been a way for artists to encourgare one another, he said.

"Sort of supporting each other and inspiring each other to be active," he said, "and to invigorate activism with our talents as artists."

While painting the portraits of veterans, Cole said he's asked how they think war money could be better spent and been surprised to find that they could think of a lot of things.

"That process," he said. "... there's common ground. It's not controversial. It's not confrontational."

Penobscot Bay Pilot reporter Ethan Andrews can be reached at ethanandrews@penbaypilot.com