The sheep was being a sheep and Odin was doing what dogs do. 

Sounds like ice you have a decent neighbor. 

Growing up up we had a neighbor that we had legal problem with.  Thankful that's not the case here !

Like Ish, I turned 18 in 1972, so the odds were against my being drafted. Then my number came up very high in the lottery, anyway, which still caused me to breathe a sigh of relief.

However, those years were fraught with tension.  Eerily reminiscent of the divide we're seeing here now. "The War" was an omnipresent, volatile topic.

My hometown, which only had 13,000 residents, lost three young men, including the older brothers of two kids I knew from school.
One of them was the older brother of one of my wife's best friends; in fact, we are still very friendly with her and her husband. When they visited last summer, we did talk about how Tony's death affected her family. In short, they were never the same and his death is still an open wound for her and her two siblings.

The son of our neighbors, who served on one of those river patrol boats, was severely wounded: legs, back, head. He had a long road back, and eventually became a realtor in town, but was never really the same. Personality changes as well as physical limitations.

I had older friends whom I met in college who did what they could to get out of induction, including drastic fasting and pulling a nutty.

A friend of a friend went to prison for a couple of years for resisting.

Other friends joined up when their numbers came up high, hoping to avoid being sent over. I had a cousin who joined the Army and was lucky; he served in Germany for several years.

An older brother of Johnny, one of my buddies, whom I worked with pumping gas, had been a helicopter gunner; he "entertained" visitors to their house with films he'd taken of him shooting people to death from the helicopter.  I passed. Johnny said his brother was crazy.

Rob may remember that, on the lower right-hand corner of its front page, the Newark Evening News, the paper of record where we grew up, posted a box with the number of casualties -- for both sides -- as well as a specific count of the New Jerseyans who had been killed. Any time someone from New Jersey was killed, a story about him or her ran there.

The war was visible, palpable to us, a far cry from the coverage of the Iraq Wars. (Lesson learned by the US government.) And the pivot away from a general support was just as palpable. The Tet offensive in early '68 was perhaps the proverbial straw; it was then that previously hawkish supporters beagn to question what the hell was going on and switch sides. The cliche that peopel watched the war when they ate dinner was not untrue, and between the news coverage and Life magazine, everyone was face-to-face with the war on a daily basis. 

Add in the racial unrest, riots on campuses, the anti-war demonstrations, the assassinations, the Democratic convention, the crushing of the Prague Spring, George Wallace, and the Nixon campaign, which we suspeceted, and know now for sure, was using foreign help (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek) to meddle in the peace talks so that even a tiny bit of hope that the war might at least slow down was squashed, and you can see why 1968 was the year immediately invoked by commentators as the most obvious example when they were asked for some analogue to 2016.

There is much to cherish about the 60's, which ran from November 22, 1963 through August 9, 1974, but overall, those years were an awful time. 

Thanks for sharing your memories, Hal. They made for interesting reading.




Much was made at the time and in the years since about the supposed unfairness of the draft. The generally accepted cliche being that mostly those from poorer, working class backgrounds or the African American community ended up getting sent over to Vietnam, while those from more middle class backgrounds got out of it. There was much criticism of this at the time, even in popular song, and there certainly has been in books and movies since.

However, while those from blue collar families and the black community certain made up a sizable portion of the U.S. troops, from what I can see from accounts of Vietnam vets that I've read or those that I've seen interviewed on TV, an awful lot of the soldiers who fought in the war were from white middle class backgrounds. This is especially true of those who volunteered in the earlier years of the war, say from 1965-1967. You hear the sadly familiar story of young, naive kids joining up because they either felt that it was their patriotic duty or because they wanted to be involved in "their war", just as their fathers had fought in World War II, again and again when reading accounts of the war.

I just wondered what your own experience of this alleged inequality was? Were the kids that you knew who went to Vietnam from lower income households or where they more affluent middle class types?




Yeah, that kind of thing is the really uncomfortable and dark legacy of Vietnam. For every high profile My Lai massacre type event, there were countless smaller, but no less appalling, instances of inhuman brutality towards the Vietnamese civilian population by the American forces. I think it's a no-brainer that acts of appalling violence towards civilians occur in any war zone, but I believe things were exacerbated in Vietnam because the enemy were guerillas who looked indistinguishable from the regular population.

The Viet Cong's hit and run tactics meant that many American platoons received casualties, but had no chance to retaliate against this invisible enemy who melted away into the jungle, which in turn bred resentment towards anyone looking remotely like the Viet Cong, which would obviously include the civilians of South Vietnam. Add to that the fact that, actually, the Viet Cong did very often hide in plain sight and that sometimes the villagers were more sympathetic towards the guerillas than the U.S. forces, and you got a creeping paranoia forming in the minds of the grunts on the ground, which would all too often manifest itself in wanton acts of brutality against unarmed civilians, just like the Huey gunner's tale you recounted above.

What's worse is that, as early as 1966, the U.S. military was well aware of the unusually high number of instances of brutality towards the Vietnamese population by its soldiers and they basically just turned a blind eye.

We're likely going to hit a new record for number of people online at one time within the next hour. A minor thing to celebrate, but I'm excited. Hang on, everyone

five more...

Heheh. Just don't have it out when you get to church, now

Hmmm. We may not hit it until the Eastern Standard Time folks return from Sunday services, now. Darn divinity competing for our attention...