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ter than that. Lyndon Johnson felt the pinch and bailed out on another term as your President,
live on TV. His heir would be Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, a skilled politico who may
have stopped the carnage but was hamstrung on Johnson's graces, such as they were. he end
result: riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Chicago looked more like Dresden than
a windy city, more like a repressive regime than an urban center—but tear gas, rubber bullets
and billy clubs were a walk in the basil next to the jungle war. And who showed up on the
Chicago front to defend the country they loved? The Viet Vets.
Spit on them? The fuck you talking? They were part of us, bearing witness as only they
could do. The Doors put a heartfelt tragedy into a lyrical love ballad,
he End
, lamenting the
love lost between a generation and its country. Whether love gone awry is better or best or
even comparable to Rosie the Riveter and a kinder, gentler patriotism is infinitesimally in-
cidental to the hard cold fact that we felt this sentiment. Viet vets against the war lived this
loss. So when anybody calls “the 60s” a lost opportunity, he does not reflect the true loss that
defined the greatness of those years for what they revealed.
Another Vietnam classic decades later weaved a compelling thread of Viet veteran oppos-
ition.
Sir, No, Sir
shines a light on American military might and what it still wants to keep in
the dark. Viet vets pushing seventy share the truth of the country they loved and fought for
without question.
Many draft dodgers saw the truth first or were afraid. In any event, even if young, naïve
and drug-addled, draft resistors knew that Vietnam had no link to the USA or its defense,
that “winning” the war would warrant occupation, billions more in defense contracts and a
corporate/cultural beachhead to make Southeast Asia free for consumer products. Hail, Coca
Cola and Big Mac.
Losing the war would make the world no different than it had been, except for making it
more peaceful.
And so it came to pass.
It's not fair to criticize anybody for missing the point and the action, even a career-minded
journalist with impeccable credentials and potential. By the same token, a network up-and-
comer cannot criticize his government or the leaders he must interview objectively on any
tender subject, especially a jungle war with no clear objective. But the inference is clear on a
book entitled
The Best Generation
, and that gets tricky for Tom Brokaw. The WWII guys were
the best, and so were our guys, with a challenge uniquely layered and complex, with a cultural
rift demonstrating the weakness and strength of America in a topsy-turvy reversal of power in
regard to guns and flowers. We were not meek and did not turn the other cheek or inherit the
earth. The war protest was both violent and disobedient, running the gamut from Students for
a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. They blew up buildings to let us know
which way the wind was blowing
