January, 1968

January 1968

1968—the year than changed everything

In January of 1968 America had an increasingly unpopular president presiding over an increasingly unpopular war. I was in my fifth year of college. Vietnam seemed to have no end and the body count of soldiers accumulated daily on the news I watched on the TV set at the hospital where I worked. The big news in the first half of the month was at President Lyndon Johnson’s conference on crime singer Eartha Kitt denounced the Vietnam war to the president’s face. Mother Teresa denounced abortion to Bill Clinton’s face decades later, but in 1968 showing such disrespect to the President’s face divided the generations. Some of my professors at the Bible school I was attending had other ideas: “The Secret service should have taken her out on the White House lawn and shot her.” However, my generation (at least most of us) cheered her “truth-telling” to the President. We had sung along Pete Seger, “The President can’t hear us; he’s got beans in his ears,” so we thought Eartha was a hero trying to remove some of the beans out of the ears of people over 30—those we couldn’t trust.

I was working as a children’s attendant at a state mental hospital in Allentown Pennsylvania. I earned $1.65 rhrH hr. working middle shift—2:30 to 11:00 p.m. We had a TV in our “day room” so I watched the war nightly with the other attendant on our floor. On January 23, we witnessed yet another humiliation of American might as North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, a spy ship that North Korea claimed had violated its territorial waters. War with Korea was unlikely since we were so heavily committed to Vietnam. Again there were two approaches to the incident: older people assumed north Korea had illegally hijacked the ship on open waters and called for reprisals or even nuking them. Younger folk in my generation already distrusted our government so we believed the ship probably was spying inside Korea’s water. But the Pueblo incident divided us even more when it came to the commander of the ship, Pete Bucher. When surrounded by overwhelming force Bucher surrendered to the North Koreans. Older people called him a coward and a traitor and thought he should have fought to the death. Younger folk generally thought he did what he had to do—save his crew by surrendering. When Bucher and his crew were released eleven months later, he was indeed court marshaled, though the head of the Navy overruled the court.

America

In the third week of January (January 21) Vietnam was began to unravel. Johnson had been telling us for four months that all we needed to do was “stay the course” and soon we would achieve victory—the Vietnamese were on the run. Now the TV I watched at the state hospital exploded with stories of the 20,000 North Vietnamese attacking America’s air base at Khe Sanh. The base hunkered down while Johnson’s B-52’s dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on the enemy yet the siege continued—and continued for the next 77 days. We students believed the war was a mistake in the first place but we also doubted President Johnson’s assurance that victory was near. Khe Sanh showed the enemy was stronger than we were being told. Rather than being almost defeated, we were the ones looking almost defeated. Most people over 30 stuck with the President and believed that more money, more troops, and more months would bring victory. Most students believed continuing was “spending good lives after lost ones.” Watching American troops under siege the next few months made Johnson’s assurances of victory look wobbly.

LBJ’s wobbly assurance were soon to get even more wobbly. On January 31^st 85,000 “almost defeated” Vietnamese launched the massive Tet Offensive in hundreds of towns and cities throughout Vietnam including right on the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon. Older Americans who had been saying, “Stay the course—victory is close” gasped as they saw color footage of slaughtered Americans on the battlefield. LBJ had tossed the mighty weight of American military might into Vietnam and could not win. Millions of tons of bombs and millions of gallons of napalm along with hundreds of thousands of troops had not defeated the Vietnamese. Our war only seemed to make them stronger. More older folk than would admit now called for simply “nuking Vietnam off the map,” but we were supposedly protecting the Southern half of the Vietnam people so killing our allies wasn’t a valid option for the government—it was their nation too.

Many in my generation still are affected by the lesson of Vietnam. Some came to believe 1) “Never get into war unless you are willing to commit overwhelming force to winning” (the Colin Powell doctrine). Others took the lesson as, 2) “Never get into a war unless our actual soil is directly threatened” (Ron Paul). Either way, in the first month of 1968 Vietnam began to unravel and the “first war America ever lost” was about to happen.

One bright spot for us in January lightening the load of the war came through TV. The 1960’s hippie culture had sponsored sit-ins and love-ins and now Laugh in came to us on Monday nights led by Dan Rowan & Dick Martin. The show was packed with short two line jokes, frantic activity and silliness that older people couldn’t get (that would later lead to such shows a Saturday Night Live). On this show, we all fall in love with a lovable dumb blond, Goldie Hawn. Goldie Hawn was born in November after World War II ended in 1945, and is thus one of the first “Baby Boomers” –the generation so affected by the events of 1968.

As for me, I was more concerned about getting out of college than getting out of Vietnam. 1968 was my first year of marriage and my fifth year of college. It was time to graduate (it would take yet another year—the price of picking courses for four years that were taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays). I did not worry about going to Vietnam personally since I was double exempt. I was exempt first as a full time student (deferment 2S) and better yet, deferred as a ministerial students (4D). It was the single guys 18 ½ to 25 who went to get killed (1A) thus we middle class kids went to college and watched the poor kids go to Vietnam. We graduated; they died. It would not be until another two years passed (December 1969) that the more equitable lottery system of the draft would be introduced making the sons of the middle class (and Congressmen) also go to war.

By January, 1968 I was against the Vietnam war, but I didn’t say so very loudly. Older folk considered you a traitor if you opposed the war. One relative of mine said of college students protesting the war, “They ought to call in the Marines and mow them all down with machine gins—that would send a signal to other students.” I didn’t say much about the war to him—I knew he still kept a rifle in his bedroom he “took from a dead Jap” during the second world war. I didn’t want to get killed over Vietnam while still in the USA. Mostly in January, 1968 I went to work 40 hours a week, went to classes and studied a few dozen hours, went hiking with Sharon on Saturdays, then drove every Sunday an hour to the edge of Pennsylvania to work at the Stroudsburg Pilgrim Holiness Church where both Sharon and I taught “Catechism Classes” during worship—she the junior high girls and me the boys. Vietnam seemed far away from us. The only guys we knew who went were college dropouts or flunk-outs—only one student from our college actually willingly enlisted. If we stayed a full time student and kept our grades up we escaped. My grades soared. Our professors said in those days, “Either go to the library or go to Vietnam.” The choice was easy.

So what do you think?

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Keith Drury January 22, 2008