President Eisenhower had prevented the USA from becoming involved in the Vietnamese civil war.
He was a military man who understood that the military-industrial complex was only interested in profits as well as the logistic strain of transporting troops and weapons halfway around the world to fight support the despised Diem dictatorship. Unfortunately after the disastrous Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis the Kennedy administration had to play tough against any form of communism to placate the arch-conservatives on Congress. The CIA okayed the assassination of the Diem and set up puppet governments to fight a 10,000 Day War.
The 1968 Viet Cong Tet Offensive basically proved to a large segment of Americans that this war was unwinnable by the Pentagon, who only cared about 10-to1 body counts of VC versus the dead soldiers from the USA.
The Pentagon turned our troops into baby-killers.
Still I wanted to enlist.
Mostly to get out of my hometown on the South Shore of Boston, but my mother, an arch-anti-communist, refused to singed my underaged enlistment papers.
Like millions of other American youth I became a hippie.
I marched against the War and I cried the night of RFK’s murder by the Dark Cabal.
I miss his life.
Almost 50 years gone.
A long time ago.
Nixon, The war criminal Kissinger, the Fall of Phnom Penh, the bombing of Laos, millions of dead.
The Khmer Rouge.
All the world needed was peace.
But the War dividing America is stronger than ever.
I’m living in Juneau Alaska this summer.
Four year ago I was selling jewelry to the tourists off cruise ships.
“Most of them are from the South.
This afternoon a four-year vet came into the store.
He wasn’t buying and I said, “I’m trying to get a pension from the Pentagon for my anti-war protests.”
“Maybe you should ask Jane Fonda. She was a traitor to America.”
Our war was not over and I said, “Same as Nixon.
He said nothing and my boss came over to ask why wasn’t I able to sell their shit. She was also an anti-peacenik.
“He didn’t want to buy nothing.”
“You’ll get lots of those.”
And I did for the rest of the day.
Curse you Jane Fonda.
“And peace on Earth.