I followed the war on television as CBS, NBC, and ABC had war correspondents interviewing soldiers and generals on the battlefield. In those days, Walter Cronkite guided Americans through the footage showing villages engulfed in flames as a result of napalm released from US aircraft. We witnessed, at home, miles away, burning bodies of children and their parents and grandparents. We saw the bombs fall and send up plumes of fire. We were angry when little children were left to cry alongside the dead bodies of their mothers.
Were they combatants?
Were the old men and women combatants?
You could smell the napalm in the morning, long before an actor in a Hollywood film alerted us to his peculiar love for the smell of victory.
We didn't know JFK got the ball rolling, taking over the job from the defeated French, and Ho Che Min had to remind the Americans, too, that they had time. Patience. But Vietnam will not roll over and play dead for the US capitalists, either.
But it was the Southerner with the twang and arrogance and cockiness who exchanged a victory against poverty for a defeat in war. Ensuing at home, is a war to kill black activism, social justice, equality. Democracy.
It appears that a US president can smile and murder while at it!
Expand the poverty, LBJ!
"No honorable intentions in Vietnam," King said to America.
"I ain't got no quarrel with those Vietcong," Muhammad Ali said to America.
Was anyone listening?
All total, 58, 200 Americans were killed, some 1, 690 were MIA, while another 303,630 sustained injuries, many of them lifelong.
In Vietnam, over 40,000 civilians were killed by the North Vietnamese army while over 250,000 lives were lost in combat.
Johnson took the heat.
When years later, I viewed the video of a tired and seemingly old Johnson on those phone calls with Robert McNamara, Johnson anguishing over the war, I could hear all the arrogance and cockiness of the chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?" Not enough! Humans still died, and Americans went back to business as usual.
In Garson's Mac Bird, Johnson and his wife are the Macbeths. Not complimentary but then you had to have been there when it all seemed to be falling apart. No foreseeable future in sight. Just death in Vietnam, on that ballroom floor in New York, on that balcony in Memphis, in a corridor at that Democratic Convention.
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