Letters to the Editor
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I was there too.
Poignant. Thank you for this.
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1968
1968 - Naval Air Station Miramar, San Diego...working on planes that Naval Pilots used for Top Gun Training...One of whom became an Ace, shooting down 5 Migs over North Vietnam. He was later elected to the House of Representative for California and now resides in Federal Prison, one Randy Cunningham.
Also 1Lt Shankel, VA-94, USS Ranger, who is still somewhere in North Vietnam.
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Remembering 1968
In 1968 the voting requirement were still age 21. I was 23 and it would be the first time I could vote. John F. Kennedy had been an inspiration and taken from us. In college in the fall of 1964, even though we could not vote, Democrats and Republicans discussed the Vietnam Conflict and the merits of Johnson vs. Goldwater. By 1968 the as was raging in Vietnam, our friends were being drafted, and dying, and I was so excited about RFK. Then the dreams were taken away, MLK and RFK gone.
Moving on, I participated in the woman's movement as a pro-choice activism, and in many career oriented groups for the advancement of women. Even though I have been a long time Democrat and always vote, this is the first year since 1968, I have been truly excited about a candidate again. That candidate is Senator Barack Obama. I guess he reminds me of RFK. His gentle ways, his keen intelligence, his dignity, his progressive views... A chance for a new direction.
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The Year the World Ended
It was the year I continually try to forget but can't, probably because I try so hard. Everything turned on a dime. We were looking at the arc of The Great Society the way we watched Challenger taking off years later, and everything stopped the same way.
I remember standing next to my car in a drive-in restaurant parking lot in Maryland near DC when the news of Dr. King's assassination fell out of my car's radio like dead birds. Apparently others heard it as well, as I heard some triumphant whoops and hollers and a few guffaws. I knew I was in the Wrong Place. I had no idea where the Right Place was. I'd been involved with The Movement since 1960 and hadn't seen MLK in person since '63 at the Great March, which had been the spring of all our optimism. Now, in the spring of '68 we were plunged into winter. I watched the southern skyline, knowing that later there would be a different light above the trees. I headed in that direction.
I was born and raised in DC. The riots are still difficult to talk about or even think about. All I could do was infiltrate the city boundaries with a friend who'd already come back from Vietnam, and make my way to the old places where I'd spent my childhood and teen years, which happened to include the 14th Street corridor and H Street NE. I remember walking along H Street, talking to people there, trying to get a feel for where this was going to go in the days and weeks to come. Since it seemed like the end of the world at the time, I really didn't forsee the decades of looking at those same scars over and over again. The rejuvenation of those neighborhoods now feels almost as strange as the destruction of the riot times.
That summer I went back to hear Bobby Kennedy speak at a parking lot which had been a rubble-strewn area when I was a child -- a strange juxtaposition at the moment -- just a few doors from the apartment over a store where I'd grown up. The apartment where the living room had no windows, on Park Road, the two blocks of that street which in my lifetime have never been anything but slum, desolation row, and now, at its peak, barrio. But that parking lot where the debris had lain for 20 years was a sign of hope. Then RFK headed off to LA and that was soon that.
I watched Marion Barry establish himself in "my" city. Brushes with the Nation of Islam seemed surreal and comical. My father carried a handgun on the seat of his car.
Nothing was real. Nothing mattered.
I'd already failed my physical upon trying to join my friends who'd already gone to Vietnam. No good. Defective. Heart murmur.
I descended into the miasma. Drugs didn't seem to change anything one way or the other. Neither did drinking. It all looked the same all the time.
I married an alcoholic for a while. She was an artist. Dead now, like several of my friends who went to be in the war. The rest of them seem like dead souls now.
There is no way of dressing up that year nor the ones immediately following. It took several years to shake off that hangover. to wake up from that nightmare.
I still routinely dream of it. The past really is no place to live.
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It was war all the time
I was in boot camp that spring. I joined the Navy to avoid combat. It was a nerve racking game, trying to keep a 2-s deferment by attending Junior College. The only young men left in town, who were not students, were crazy or had criminal records. Already we were seeing the victims of the war return with missing limbs.
My friend played the deferment game as well as anyone, but after two years, and nearly flunking out, he joined the Coast Guard. Two days later his draft notice arrived.
He stayed in the Coast Guard for 30 years. I recall thinking that the war would end soon, after Johnson refused the nomination. Someone would end the war.
I just wanted to be a regular guy, with a car, a job, a girlfriend, an apartment. I knew the Gulf of Tonkin was a put up job, that was the limit of my political acumen. Two people I knew well died that year in the war. I read about it in an issue of Look magazine, which published the high school pictures of the dead for that week or month.
I put in three tours in the China Sea, while we bombed Vietnam. I was ambivalent about it, a soldier has one master. I appreciate was a colossal waste it was, (my community leaders were all too willing to send me there) and I learned something.
When Bush invaded Iraq I called my son and gave him a fair assessment of the situation.
I endeared him not to get involved, because the war would not be difficult, but the glory of that moment would quickly fade, and you will find yourself standing guard on a street corner in Baghdad.
I was against this war all the way. That Bush dropped out of the National Guard service is no surprise, Johnson put the Guard on the front lines until they could start up the selective service act. Bush was imminently in danger. No surprise the future President tried to duck out.