Chapters from "TIME TRIALS"
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Vietnam War
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Shortly after arriving at Paricutin in early November 1963, while steaming off the coast of Japan, my shipmates and I learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22. Suddenly, this was a bleak time in America’s history. After a “happy-go-lucky” 1950s and upbeat early 1960s, the nation’s consciousness had been raised, and protests began. The underclass, Blacks, and those left behind in society along with college students and older conscientious objectors pushed back.
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By 1960, African Americans were beginning to resist segregation with sit-ins at lunch counters in the South. On April 15, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized. Later that year Martin Luther King, Jr. joined student protests at white-only restaurants in Atlanta.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
John F. Kennedy
In 1961, Freedom Riders composed of African American and white protestors departed Washington, DC for the segregated Deep South. The trip was to test the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), ruled the previous December, that racial segregation in public transportation violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
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Other Freedom Rides and protests continued into 1962. A planned trip from Birmingham on May 15, scheduled to travel deeper in the South, was prevented from doing so, because no bus would take the riders. My August journey that year from Birmingham to New Orleans looks all the more perilous in retrospect.
Freedom Riders movement - 1962
Michael Harrington, author, democratic socialist, and political science professor, published The Other America in 1962 describing the plight of the poor amidst plenty. Then on September 10, the Supreme Court ordered that James Meredith, a veteran and African American, must be admitted to the University of Mississippi. Governor Ross Barrett ordered state troopers to prevent Meredith’s enrollment, but President Kennedy had sent U.S. marshals to the state to ensure his safety. The 1960s civil rights movement was underway.
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January 1964 was an inauspicious time to be in the U.S. military. Few of us had paid attention to Vietnam, a small nation hugging the Asian mainland and south of Japan. The United States had had “boots on the ground” since October 1961 after successful Viet Cong attacks. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recommended sending six divisions to Vietnam.
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Near the end of July, 1964, the United States stepped up its presence, sending 5,000 additional advisors to South Vietnam up from 16,000 already there. On August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox, a destroyer, engaged three North Vietnam Navy boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day, the USS Turner Joy joined the Maddox, after which the episode gets dicey. Torpedo wakes from what were thought to be North Vietnam torpedo boats were sighted. U.S. ships then fired on the torpedo boats.
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Five days later, Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Lyndon Johnson the power to wage war in Vietnam. The USS Paricutin, along with other ships were ordered on ready duty. Shortly thereafter, we headed to Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin, a saltwater bay in between Vietnam and China.
The first of 3,500 U.S. marines arrived at Da Nang on March 8, 1965, while we were in the gulf. The war was on. Our government was no stranger to this small country that the French had colonized in the 1940s. They met with Anti-French resistance that lasted from December 1946 to July 1954. In the process the Viet Minh developed a formidable military force. The French wanted out, and Vietnam was partitioned into North and South. This left the Republic of Vietnam regime (South) with U.S. support to resist the communist North Vietnam.
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Ours was a treacherous and dubious venture buttressed by the spurious domino theory fearing that if Vietnam fell, other Southeast Asian nations would follow. Being Education and Information Officer, my secondary duty aboard the ship, required me to research and inform the crew why we were engaged in this mission.
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Early 1964, the Paricutin had returned to its California base. Suzanne and I were married February 29, leap year, and found an apartment in Walnut Creek not far from Port Chicago. This was after a brief stay at a lovely apartment in Oakland adjacent to picturesque Lake Merritt. This phase was to be short.
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While aboard both the Tracer and Paricutin, I had taken up running longer distances. After a day’s work onboard and before dinner, I would run the ship’s perimeter. This was lonely work that I, nonetheless, found reflective and a path to exploring deeper issues in life and within myself. I was not a jogger but a runner, so the pace was brisk. While living in Oakland, I would run the 3.4-mile circumference around Lake Merritt.
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Suzanne’s apartment in San Francisco was on Lombard Street just below Coit Tower, on the hill adjacent to “winding road” and near the Embarcadero. I also enjoyed running the city’s picturesque hills and Washington Park just down from her apartment and along Columbus Avenue, where one could find local grocers, dry cleaners, flower shops, quaint restaurants and other small markets. It was an exquisite existence, fairytale-like.
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It was during this military period that my love of distance running took hold and would send me on an invigorating life’s path.
Lombard Street - San Francisco
After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Paricutin hastily prepared to set sail for Vietnam, where I would be the remainder of my military tour that ended in May 1965. My research on the United States’ involvement in Vietnam took me into “unchartered waters.” Magazines, journals, and newspapers led to unsettling views on the war. In a sense, it was an extension of what and how I learned in college. What I was expected to pass on to the crew from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was simplistic and essentially propaganda. I was not about to disillusion the enlisted men, but I was not going to lie.
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I kept much of what was learned to myself, but it was the beginning of disenchantment with a gratuitous war, military adventurism, and self-serving foreign policy. This began my deeper examination of U.S. imperialism that appeared aimed at furthering our national economic interests rather than “keeping the world safe for democracy.” Our foreign policy primarily is designed to serve corporate interests in acquiring more resources to enhance our nation’s economic growth. It’s a jaded path at odds with the ideals of our nation’s “better angels.”
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The longtime diplomat and historian, George Kennan, put it aptly in explaining that it’s folly for the United States to extend its global influence in an attempt to spread democracy. Rather, our aim should be to garner strategic resources worldwide to ensure American’s dynamic economic growth, prosperity, and opulence. And this we did in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa as well the Far East.
George F. Kennan
Some ventures meant overthrowing democratically elected leaders, such as President Mohammad Mossadegh (1953), because he nationalized Iran’s vast oil reserves. For this, we ousted the leader replacing him with the Shah. Just a year earlier Mossadegh had been named Time magazine's “Man of the Year.” Iran’s oil reserves were returned to Western control and 26 years of rule by a despot followed. This was the beginning of U.S.—Iranian troubles.
Mohammad Mossadegh - Time Magazine Man of Year 1961
The United States also ousted Jacobo Arabenz (1953) turning Guatemala into a “killing field” of assassinations by the dictator who replaced him. Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo was overthrown and executed by captors (1961).
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A U.S.-backed armed coup resulted in the death of one million peasants in Indonesia and installing dictator Suharto (1965). Ten years later, Suharto invaded East Timor with U.S. support (and weapons) wiping out 30% of the Timorese population.
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After Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, he was overthrown and murdered by U.S. funded opposition and replaced by fascist Augusto Pinochet (1973), who catered to American interests for years. The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela—the list of U.S. influence in support of self-serving policies is extensive. So much for promoting democracy.
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The beat goes on. More recently, the United States’ global adventurism entangled us in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. As Jeffery Sachs, public policy analyst and director of the Department for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, points out, this is a continuation of our aim to maintain global U.S. hegemony. The Russian invasion, as commonly referred to the media, began in February 2022, but U.S. involvement commenced nearly a decade earlier in February 2014, when the United States began supplying aid and arms to Ukraine.
American foreign policy has been driven by neo-conservatives and their imperialistic goals to maintain dominance. It’s slipping away, as U.S. power wanes relative to the economic growth of other nations, particularly Brazil, Russia, India, and China, known as the BRICs. Since the cold war hysteria of the 1950s, the Soviet Union, then Russia, has been a source of paranoia for Americans. This irrationality influenced by the Military-Industrial Complex, referred to by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, is a factor in impoverishing our nation materially and morally.
Russia is the perennial target of animosity, and expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) farther East is the political spear to effect this. The adventure is an immense threat to Russia, who is no stranger to incursions from Europe for its vast, rich resources. As a result, relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated with the American media seeing the saga through a narrow, foggy lens.
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Our military rashness has occurred during inflationary times, when U.S. policymakers, and households should be trimming both public and private spending.
When right-wing, politically conservative, and illiberal family and friends ask where and how I went astray, they attribute it to graduate school in the radical environs of the University of Wisconsin. But they would be wrong. While sensitivity germinated with study in college, my ideas blossomed with military adventures and flourished in living life.