1968: Year of Decision

I am a Vietnam Veteran, a college graduate of the Vietnam Era, and a professional journalist. That should establish either some kind of credibility or culpability. The Vietnam War began when I was l7 years old and ended when I was 30. That means my generation of draft-aged males lived with the reality of War throughout their adolescence. I went to college in the '60s and, like most of my classmates, lived under the shadow of Vietnam for my entire college career. Flunk out, you get drafted. That happened to a friend of mine at Yale. He partied too heartily and ended up as a grunt in the Mekong Delta. As the war escalated, so did the dissent and the polarization of the country.

In l968, the following events occurred:

* The Tet Offensive;

* the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with the arrest of the Chicago Seven;

* The Mexico City Olympics black power protests;

* The assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK;

* student demonstrations at Berkeley, Columbia, and Paris;

* And the increase in the Force Level in Vietnam to 500,000.

That makes 1968 the most significant year in my life. That was also the year after I graduated from college, and, lacking plans for graduate school, enlisted in the Army (not out of patriotism but pragmatism. I made a deal with the devil: I'd volunteer for three years as a broadcast specialist, and the Army would keep me out of The Killing Zone. When I got to Saigon, I worked for Armed Forces Radio and TV, reading news they wanted me to read (like Robin Williams's character Adrian Kronauer in "Good Morning Vietnam.")

Somebody once said "If you lived through the sixties and remember them, you didn’t do it right." I suppose that means most of the 60s generation were too stoned to care. I missed the flower children and Woodstock era: too busy reading ancient literature. I didn't become political while at Columbia, because of my own protests against THEIR protests. Everytime I turned around, there was another unwashed Yippie or SDS Hippie protesting against something: racial injustice, the environment, and the ever-looming war. It was easier--and safer--to retreat into the 18th-century or medieval philosophy. Education and politics were too much to deal with at the same time.

I had graduated by the time the inmates took over the asylum (Columbia University was closed down by a student takeover in April 1968)

but college friends who were still there were totally disgusted. Some of them joined the military for the same reasons I did: personal development and professional curiosity. For me, the three years I spent in the military and the one year I spent in Vietnam were the most crucial in my life.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy within a few months of each other were devastating. I was in Indiana at the time. Bobby Kennedy heard of the King Assassination while campaigning for the Indiana Primary. He gave a speech that compared King’s assassination with his brother John’s. His calming presence was credited with preventing racial riots in Indianapolis when other cities burned. Three months later Kennedy was dead in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I sometimes wonder how history would have changed if he had been elected president instead of being assassinated.

After basic training and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, I spent time at the same facility handling public relations for the Army Adjutant General School (secretary’s school and computer training). It was boring work, but safe. Nice, elm-tree shaded "Campus" with a golf course and no marching GIs and shouting drill sergeants. I didn't even have a weapon.

The year in Vietnam was surreal, like the Mel Gibson movie "The Year of Living Dangerously." I was assigned to Armed Forces Radio and TV, Vietnam (AFVN). I prepared and delivered radio and TV newscasts, under the watchful supervision of officers whose job it was to assure that the troops received "Favorable" news without the stateside press corps' slant.

I used to go to the daily news briefings conducted by the MACOI Briefers.

The Civilian Press called them the 5 O’Clock Follies.

Again, I had no real contact with the military: I lived in air-conditioned barracks, ate at a chow hall, worked a ten-hour day, and got to go to Australia for five days on R&R. The work was routine, the days predictable, the danger minimal. Buddies and I drank at the Bar at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon (it appeared in the Michael Caine movie "The Quiet American" as the scene of the car bombing). The war seemed distant and surreal--a tableau of tracers and explosions in the night sky, the churning of helicopters, and the smell of burning garbage and human waste.

The important point is that I made some good friends, friends I keep to this day.

The military has a way of creating bonds that civilian life never does. I found out things about life and myself that I would never have found out in civilian existence. Some of them I wish I hadn't.

I find that even 35 years later, I still stay in touch with military friends. It's like picking up a conversation you left off yesterday. The common experience is what holds us together. I'm a member of a Yahoo! Group composed of former broadcasters for AFVN. We have over 400 members all over the world: Texas, California, North Carolina, Alaska. We're just a mouse click away from sharing memories, good and bad.

I spent 35 years covering state politics in Indiana and Connecticut, national politics in Washington, DC during Watergate; I spent countless hours in state and federal courthouses covering trials, worked too many nights and weekends to remember, and soothed my nerves with copious amounts of beer and vodka until my liver rebelled.

I'm out of the broadcast news business now. I call it a business because it has become one: the profit motive governs everything from the appearance of anchors on TV newscasts to the editorial policy of national newspapers. We have lost part of our national identity: the regional and local interest that makes America so, well, interesting. A radio station in Texas sounds like one in Indiana. It used to be you could travel across the Country and tell what part you were in by the accents on the radio. Now, they all sound like Ryan Seacrest.

All our downtowns look alike (mostly deserted at night except for gangbangers).

We have eliminated Mom and Pop stores in favor of Walmart and neighborhood bankers for Bank of America. All food tastes the same: McFood is McFood.

Literacy and civility are dead. Civilization as we knew it is over.

But I ramble, like old men do. I'm entitled to complain. I've earned it.

--Phil Henry

Columbia College, BA '67

-- 30 --