I saw Bowdoin faculty names, and I clearly thought “They are really out there. Is that right?"
The turmoil of 1968 opened as we stood around the TV in the Senior Center lobby, still in our dress-code coats and ties, coffee cups in hand, watching Walter Cronkite’s grim-faced report on the Tet offensive. My emotions were a mixture of pain at the losses of American lives and the lesson that Vietnam was truly an unwinnable war.
By March 1968, during spring break, I went to Milwaukee to join hundreds of volunteers walking precincts for Gene McCarthy in the Wisconsin primary. That Sunday night, getting back to Chicago, we listened to LBJ’s speech on the car radio, cheering at “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party….”
“We won,” I shouted. Of course, we hadn’t.
The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were sad, depressing low points, just a blur. I did manage to finish Bowdoin classes in good shape, and I hoped to stay out of the draft in the Peace Corps. I did not stay with that, and on August 21, 1968, I was in Boston at my girlfriend’s family’s home, when we heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the Prague Spring.
Days later I was at O’Hare Airport, flying to Detroit for a grad school interview. My flight was delayed as National Guard troops were flown in to patrol the Democratic Convention. Then, at O’Hare again to start at Michigan, the runway was lined with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. Air Force One was flying LBJ in to check in with Mayor Daley, after the convention debacle.
November was my first election. I filled out an absentee ballot, but I’m not sure if I brought myself to vote for Humphrey. I was 1-A by then, but stretched out appeals until the 1970 lottery. With “267,” I never faced the decision about serving.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, I had a three-month stint with a Jewish social service agency resettling Vietnamese refugees out of Camp Pendleton in San Diego. The Marine guards waved me through the gate each morning. That was my alternative service.
This reflection is part of a series written by members of the Class of 1968. Read more in For Conscience and Country
This story first appears in the Fall 2018 issue of Bowdoin Magazine.
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