Two Days In October 1967

It started as a protest against Dow Chemical…at the University of Wisconsin of all places.

I was a Junior at Stanford. Both Stanford and UC Berkeley were demonstrating against the War in Vietnam.

As a Freshman, the War was actually supported by over half of the students at Stanford at any rate. Not so at Berkeley, they were one of the first to protest in 1965 when the draft was first used to feed the war.

Stanford then was a white man’s privilege college.

The only African Americans and Native Americans that were getting admitted to Stanford were a few on the athletic teams and that was about it.

Stanford was named Indians in those days. The icon coach, Pop Warner, had been successful years before and established. the mascot to be a Indian warrior.

As a member of the football team, I followed Prince Lightfoot out through the tunnel onto the gridiron for four years.

In 1972 the mascot was retired and many alumni stopped giving money to the University.

Berkeley was light years ahead of us, with the “Free Speech Movement” as a start in the late 50s and then the war; Civil Rights, you name it, they protested it.

Ronald Reagan was elected governor on a promise to crack down on Berkeley and student protests. He won, then ran on the same platform for President in the 1980s; law n order and a outright war on people of color that incarcerated thousands. He used his crack down on Berkeley war protestors as the springboard to the Presidency.

The roots of Trump lie with Reagan and his right wing advocates.

LBJ had the bright idea to have all colleges take tests to earn your deferment. I remember walking into a classroom packed with young men, all of whom were the best scholars in their high school, county even state.

I remember, being a poor kid from Redding California, a public high school product, thinking that I didn’t have a chance. I remember finishing the test, with some students dressed as soldiers in protest and just knowing that it was my last year as an undergraduate, that my senior year I would be in Vietnam.

The anxiety began building then. And I was not alone, as the casualty rates went up from Vietnam.

Some of my fraternity brothers fathers were still in the service and were in Vietnam. Some of my fraternity brothers were in ROTC and were preparing for Vietnam. The military obligation seemed to be everywhere.

Just like the Pandemic today, the odds of being killed were publicized every week, the body count carried on the nightly news, with breathless news men dodging bullets on camera.

I couldn’t sleep after awhile. As a child I always liked to play army. I saw the military as the heroes, my father’s generation had won the war, were heroes to all of us.

But now it was my turn and there was just enough negative press at the time about the war that I just knew my turn was coming and the hint of an unjust war was getting more clear.

Nobody wants to die for a mistake. As time wore on, it was “the issue” that consumed most male undergraduates…

I was playing football, on a scholarship. and some of our players had quit school and joined, or quit from homesickness and got swooped up by the draft. One even transferred to West Point, who we played at West Point my junior year (quite a trip by the way).

The draft like the pandemic now, was a threat to life.

And the government did not handle it very well.

All of the men in government had either served in WWII or were 4F. Almost all of them believed in the Vietnam war at first, figuring the same strategy that had won in 1945 would work in 1965.

I mean everyone was a veteran and in the mid 1960s. ALL of them supported the war.

By 1967 that support was slipping, but only in the young men who were getting drafted.

The rest of the country believed what LBJ was saying.

LBJ, the President, had succeeded JFK who had been assassinated. The leader of the Great Frontier, young and charismatic, was succeeded in the horror of an assassination by a Texan, with a drawl, who had practically no charisma at all.

He was easy to distrust, just like Trump is now, in handling a national crisis. And he, like Trump, had trouble with the truth!

It became evident that our own fathers were against us, as time went on and the war got worse.

But in 1965 to 1967 the war still was a remote threat. The odds were very small that we could get drafted.

So we drank beer, acted like college students and denied the reality that got worse every day.

The death toll went up exponentially as the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam increased. As the number in country went to 500,000 plus, the death toll per week went into the hundreds.

This ghoulish coverage of the war was depicted every night as we crowded into the TV room and watched what for most of us we believed was a real threat to our existence.

Just like now…the anxiety, the figuring of the odds of getting sick or getting drafted, were openly talked about fearfully. “How are you with the draft” was a common ice breaker.

And as time went by, the glory went out of war. Hollywood was making war films that had begun with the Green Berets and John Wayne then changed to Apocalypse Now.

By the end of the decade the war became “The Green”, the “Green Pit” and Death. By 1969, when I graduated, support for the war had flipped from the optimism of 1965, to a deep pessimism that the war would never end.

Walter Cronkite one evening took off his glasses and said basically he could no longer trust what the government was saying. The body counts were exaggerated. The briefings every day were shown to exaggerate the successes and under estimate the failures.

And then came October 1967, two days that simultaneously laid bare the anxiety that all of us were beginning to feel more every day.

Two days in 1967 Wisconsin University had a protest against Dow Chemical that was ruthlessly suppressed with many wounded by Wisconsin police. During the same two days, a couple companies in Vietnam were ambushed and almost wiped out.

The Two Days in October were not just a few casualties; it was in the hundreds…One. company was essentially annihilated by a brilliant maneuver by the Viet Cong, luring the green Lt. Colonel into a trap.

The Lt. Colonel, the son of a WWII hero, was killed in his capacity as commanding officer, and later it was shown that he had bungled the mission. In short the Viet Cong out smarted him…

This was not unusual, what was unusual was basically the Army was caught in the lie.

The Army tried to cover up the blunder. The fact that the company had been “ambushed” was hidden. The reason: The Army did not want to admit defeat at the hands of a well armed and well disciplined opponent.

As it turned out, the Viet Cong were a hell of a lot better soldiers than advertised…the fact that the same fighters had destroyed France a few years before necessitated American involvement to “stop the spread of Communism”.

In short, the NVA and the Viet Cong were crack soldiers. The Americans were not, they were mostly green draftees.

When I was in Basic Training in 1974 we were told the American military had never lost a battle in Vietnam, that was a lie; the Two Days in October proved it as a lie!

Those two days did what many other lies could not do, defined a new realty: the college students were beaten to a pulp further dividing the country; and the son of a WWII hero, sent his troops into a trap, that cost him his life and about 200 others!

We didn’t know that in 1967. But the GIs who were coming home, were telling stories about their experiences that did not jive with what the news was telling us.

A “credibility gap” developed that sent more of us into the streets to protest. The futility of it was becoming more apparent each day, similar to the anxiety the present pandemic is causing in all of us.

By the time I graduated, the draft test was thrown out as a bad idea, I was going to get my teaching credential that continued my deferment for a couple years. But that could be rescinded at any time.

And along came Dick Nixon and his “plan to end the war”.

Nixon won on a pack of lies we discovered just a few years ago: he subverted LBJ’s peace proposals promising behind the scenes to the North Vietnamese that if he was elected they would get a better deal.

This secret fix of the election led to Watergate, another story that added even more to a credibility gap of the government and its people.

The anxiety continued for my age group…the same foreboding, the anger knowing that you were being lied to; especially as the death toll continued into the 1970s.

I finally, with my deferment expiring, joined the Army National Guard in 1973, as the war was actually winding down. I never went to Vietnam, as it turned out I was on medical profile, that basically kept me state side no matter what. I was honorably discharged after serving three and a half years when the country went to an all volunteer force.

I was asked by the doctor who discharged me, “How did you ever get into the service?” In the first place, since my back injury was so severe, how did I get in?

The term FTA comes to mind…fuck the Army! A whole bunch of Vietnam Vets know exactly why this is a popular saying…Nobody wants to fight a war that is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time!

Another young man, of about the same age, got a 4F because of bone spurs in his feet that was false…That went on a lot in men of privilege…That man is now President of the United States; yet another story that proves what a fraud the government can be.

I was a poor kid from Redding who trusted what my Stanford team doctor told me, that my back injury from football was an “automatic 4F”.

Yet another falsehood that might have got me sent to Vietnam if I would have been drafted.

I am forced into the service with a real disqualification, our President gets out on a doctor’s lie!

And then Kent State happened and the public opinion finally turned against Nixon who finally resigned because of Watergate and Vietnam finally ended under President Ford.

It took FOREVER!

But the history books did not leave it alone. History showed, as our perspective got more accurate, that the protestors of 1967 were right; that the military was lying even more than publicized, that the Two Days in October were the rule and not the exception.

Veterans threw their medals away on TV in protest to Vietnam….the whole thing was a sham, a lie, a product of a government that operated more on lies than the truth.

The comparison to our current governmental lying regarding the pandemic are startling.

And once again, my generation, now being over 65, are faced with the same stresses and anxiety as in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The feeling builds that the burden of the threat to life and limb is falling on a certain demographic more than others. In the 60s that was anyone under 26, now with a pandemic that affects people over 65 more adversely; it’s……..the same people!

It is the same damned thing, with Two Days in October happening every night on TV. The death toll of the Pandemic passed the Vietnam War death toll in Three Months! And many of those deaths were Vietnam era “veterans”.

The President of the United States, like Nixon and LBJ, lies all the time. The credibility gap is huge, as Trump and the Republicans play the blame game, lie about the threat all the time, even refuse to wear masks.

Our generation once again gets the feeling that we are again expendable…that we are being thrown under the bus.

It was not lost on us in the 60s that the two Presidents who held our lives in their hands, were unscrupulous liars…The chant, “Hey Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today”, is the same as the fear of going to the gas station or being around any people at all that consumes us today. Trump is killing us!

Why our generation? What did we do so wrong except to be born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

And our children inherited this same anxiety (which by the way is at record levels), suffering every day as a pandemic threat roams the streets, with a government in denial and lying all the time, with the worst pandemic record on earth

It’s Vietnam all over again…Led by a Draft Dodger……it’s the Two Days in October….