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The Late, Great, '68

By Horace Coleman

Of course it started with Tet—the Lunar New Year that came with a sucker punch that staggered the US military and made the US blink, for a second. The US won the Tet Offensive militarily but some people thought the foe might not be defeated as soon, or as easily, as we had thought.

The war wasn't over but it reeled for a while. My Freedom Bird flight left at night, in the middle of Tet. As the plane climbed out of Tan Son Nhut, quiet passengers saw the flashes from outgoing artillery, the impact of shells and bombs, tracers arcing and parachute flares mimicking falling chandeliers. Good by Nam! Hello World!!

University students rioted in Paris; the USSR crushed Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison local cops showed anti-war students, demonstrators and bystanders who was boss by doing what overwrought police officers do best with crowds.

In less than three months after my Freedom Bird landed stateside, Martin Luther King would be assassinated, major American cities would suffer riots (again) and armed troops would be guarding the Capitol. I'd just changed locations. There was a "war" going on here; a civilian conflict called social upheaval. I wouldn't find out about the party at My Lai for a while.

The government and military were doing the Cold War at the same time as Vietnam. It was mostly a series of coups, subversion, propaganda, espionage, intrigue and military feints that the US and Russia used to indulge themselves. We would win that one, eventually. The Russians went broke first

Unless you were on, close to, or in certain college campuses, ghettos or big cities you could usually easily miss it. TV would shove it in your face, though, just as it did with Vietnam.

The hot war, Vietnam, was opposed by a growing handful of disillusioned vets, peace activists and members of The Left (whatever the hell that was). The Silent Majority (a term some one first used to describe those dead) mostly, and silently, "approved" the war. The Black Panthers (Huey Newton's lumpen proliteriat) did symbolic acts, some violence, battled cops and ran free breakfast and educational programs. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) tried to organize the working class. Later on they would get into street fighting and blowing up buildings and themselves.

People didn't know what to do so they just did their thing.

I'd missed the Orangeburg Massacre, a little dust up in South Carolina where three blacks were killed and 28 shot in a flap about integrating a bowling alley in the town. My last duty station stateside was in South Carolina. Where was an air strike when you needed it? I hadn't yet gotten the news about Eartha Kitt getting on LBJ's case about Vietnam (while in the White House and his face). Secretary of (War) Defense McNamara was still running things with a spreadsheet.

When I heard LBJ's speech where he said he wouldn't run for president, I was shocked. The power lover was giving up power and letting some one else "solve" the problems of Vietnam and this country? It seemed like minutes instead of weeks later that I watched Bobby Kennedy on the tube announcing MLK's death. Within months I would hear some one announce Bobby's assassination. Sprinters John Carlos and Tommy Smith showed out at the Summer Olympics, in front of the whole world, when they stood shoeless on the victory stand to get their medals and raise clenched fists.

Chicago cops rioted at the Democratic convention, head whipping any one in sight. Mayor Daley resembled Mussolini as he bullied the convention and tried to control the TV coverage. Jimi Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner was really right on now. And, where had all the flowers gone?

So many unusual and outrageous things were happening so fast and loudly that you didn't need a grapevine. What's going on? Sensory overload. Soul shock. Mind mess. I thought about a poem I'd studied in college: "Things fall apart. The center can not hold."

Just like now. "Deja vu all over again." Except gas was 34 cents a gallon. A first class stamp cost a nickel and it didn't cost more to make a penny than it was worth.

And we only had one dubious hot war going on.