by Gwen McMath
Make love, not war was the constant cry of the youth of the sixties and typified the feelings of most young people (mine included) during the height of the Vietnam War. However, to truly give a clear picture of this time in my life we need to go back a little further in history.
The beginnings of unrest in Vietnam began in July of 1954, when a defeated France was forced to leave Vietnam. Then from 1956 through 1960 the Communist Party of Vietnam desired to reunify the country through political means alone. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy sent a team to Vietnam who wanted to increase the military and advisers to Vietnam. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency brought the first attack on Vietnam on August 2, 1964.
In the fall of 1964 I was a sophomore in high school. The decade of the early sixties started off much like the fifties had. Teenagers like me drove around in cars, went to dances and football games, dressed neatly and conservatively and were patriotic because our parents were. There were some rumblings of unrest among young people even in the late fifties. There was music from the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Joan Baez. The California music scene began to produce the beat generation. Their song lyrics and dress even filtered all the way out to Texas. I remember in the sixth grade on Halloween I dressed up as a beatnik. I wore black leotards and a long sweat shirt. I got the idea from a television show called Dobie Gillis that had another character on it named Maynard G. Crebbs, who was a beatnik, and he was the first to give teenagers their own language. My brother David had a Dobie Gillis shirt that had a logo sewn into the label that said, “Like lifted from Dobie”. During this year the assassination of President Kennedy gave Lyndon Baines Johnson the presidency. Being a Texan, it felt great to have LBJ in his Stetson hat in the White House and everyone knew he was going to help the civil rights movement to advance, but what about Vietnam? In 1965 the first combat troops began to arrive in Vietnam from the United States and this invasion of troops began to invade our innocent teenage lives as well. We began to experience death through the lives of classmates that were older than us that began to die in combat. Patriotism didn’t dissolve the sting of death. The shadow of the escalating war in Vietnam was to shade my whole high school and college career. Add to this unrest the changing music scene of the sixties. We had Elvis Presley, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon in the fifties, but there was an unrest or boredom with our music. Then from across the ocean to the Ed Sullivan Show came the Beatles, with their new look and longer hair, which was the start of the British Music Invasion. Next came the Beach Boys out of California, then a whole tide of music makers who would bring us protest music. We could protest the war, the status quo, civil rights, or any other issue. The music really added fuel to our rebellious natures.
It was in the middle of this explosion that I found myself a freshman in college at East Texas State University, in Commerce, Texas. I had a wonderful year learning who I was and what I wanted in life. During this year my older brother, David, was drafted. He was sent to basic training to Fort Polk near Leesville, Louisiana, then to El Paso for more training. Our family spent a lot of time worrying whether he would go to Vietnam. In the end he was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany at Camp King for the duration of his military career. It was during this year that I became engaged and that summer (the infamous summer of love, 1968) my fiancée Charley and I worked at a defense plant (LTV in Grand Prairie) in order to make enough money to return to school in the fall and marry. Working at that plant seemed a compromise of values for us since we weren’t in favor of the war at that time. I remember how every day when I came into work I would see a huge posture of Ho Che Ming pointing his finger at me and the caption under his picture read, “Ho Che Ming wants you to waste materials.” I felt cheated working there while on the west coast people my age were not working but converging in the Haight Ashbury portion of San Francisco turning on to music, drugs, and other things infinitely more interesting than working.
As I had with my brother, I now worried about Charley being drafted. When the draft lottery was instated, Charley’s birthday, which was January twelfth, was number two twenty one on the list. Because his number was so high (265 of a possible 365) his deferment (2S) meant as long as he passed twelve hours of school per semester he probably wouldn’t be drafted. This was great incentive to keep up his grades. If he didn’t do well in school, chances would be that he could end up in Vietnam. He became 1A for a year as was required by the draft board of Dallas County but was never drafted. I should add that Charley wanted to join the army when he graduated from high school in 1967 but his Dad wouldn’t let him. His Dad was a combat infantry soldier in World War II under Patton in the Third Army and out of one hundred fifty people who left Dallas when he did he was one of the two men who came back. He had known combat first hand and didn’t want his son to experience what he had but in a war he felt the country was not trying to win. Another reason Charley wanted to join was that a friend of his joined the army and went to Vietnam and was killed. Charley was very moved by his death. Then his friend’s brother went to Vietnam to avenge his brother and he was killed. This only heightened Charley’s desire to join the military.
The next fall Charley and I married and returned to school. Protests erupted on almost all college campuses. One of the most famous incidents in the anti-war movement was the police riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Another terrible event during this time was at Kent State University in Ohio where four students were killed by National Guardsmen who were called out to preserve order on campus after days of anti-Nixon protests. Next, students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were shot and killed for political reasons. These events added authenticity to our feelings of sacrificing for our anti war beliefs.
Finally the war ended with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. By this time I had graduated from college and was pregnant with my first child. There had been a legacy of music and movies written about this era of time all of which can tell the story better than I. My personal favorite movies were Coming Home with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, and Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise. The sixties remained to be a wonderful time to grow up in because the questioning of a whole society of young people (including my husband and myself) helped us to choose lifestyles and careers that included helping other people. But I must say that as the years have passed and I look back I do have one big regret. That regret is how my generation treated the soldiers who came back from Vietnam. They deserved our support and we as their peers didn’t give it to them. So for all of those young men who gave their lives for me and my family, I owe you a long belated and sincere thank you. More specifically to the few I knew that went to Vietnam thank you because I know you were never the same after going. Mike Powell, Rusty Trammell, and Christian Belew, thank you. May God richly bless you for your sacrifices for your country and for the people in it. May you live the remainder of your life as you did in Vietnam with the promise from Psalm 91:15, 16—“I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and show him my salvation.” I thank God he brought you back, but I know you paid a high price for the journey. Having to see and experience the things you did in battle situations must have been like living in a bad nightmare on good days and worse on bad ones. Coming home and not being treated as the hero’s you were must have added to your lack of feeling valuable to your country. Your sacrifices were not in vain, you added to our country’s freedom that we now enjoy.