Your Stories: Submitted Stories
- Formative Impressions In The '60s
I was born in 1961. My parents were liberals who, like so many other Americans, felt great hope at that time under the leadership of John F. Kennedy. My "formative years" were colored and textured with sights, sounds and feelings of the devastation wrought by the President's assasinator, and the additional trauma of the deaths of his brother and Dr. King, not long thereafter. Growing up listening to the Beatles on the radio, under the shadow of the grief which my parents -- and so much of the community -- remained spellbound with, I could not help but become a product of a chapter of American history which I had entered at the end of a period of post-war prosperity, and which suddenly took a turn toward disillusionment, and grief. My father continues to avoid presentations which feature the Kennedys, so deep is his wound from that time. I carry, along with my father, a scar not yet healed from those years of my infancy: To this day, each time I hear the melody of "What the World Needs Now...," or I see that footage of Jack or Robert Kennedy, I instantly and spontaneously cry, as though re-living an early childhood trauma. After only two or three years of this life, I could not have understood the impact these great figures would have on our culture; I lived in a world of sensations and emotions. So, the impressions of television programs interrupted by breaking news broadcasts of hopes and dreams suddenly dashed, became forever fused with the abiding grief and sorrow which would characterize my mom's and dad's days, months and years as they did their best to cope with their mixed feelings of hope for me, and dismay with their new world.
- Adam
Phoenix, AZ
- Summer of '68 In The French Countryside
In the summer of 1968 I attended a summer school for graduate students at the Centre d'Etudes Superieures de Civilisation Medievale in Poitiers, France with French, German, Polish, Canadian, Dutch, Roumanian, and Czech students. Experts lectured on Romanesque architecture; we went on field trips to look at Romanesque churches, lived together in dormitories (chastely divided by sex), and ate our meals together. The common language was sometimes stumbling French. One weekend we went to the country home of one of the professors, where we roasted a goat and generally had a wonderful time. As evening drew on we gathered around a campfire and sang folk songs. The Prague spring was just falling apart; mere days later the Czechs would be called home because relatives had been arrested; one Polish activist student subsequently disappeared. The plangency of all our songs I will always remember, but I was most astonished by the fact that everyone knew the English words of my own protest songs. There was much that particularly the eastern European students couldn't discuss, but it all emerged in the songs. I returned to the U.S. to go to drama school in Chicago in September, but that is another story.
P.S.: Your program was wrong about the French educational system not being changed by 1968; in fact a very different new graduate student sequence was introduced and the whole higher education structure was reorganized.
- Patricia
Jackson, MS
- Hot Day In The Jungle
April 3rd 1968. I was a PFC infantryman in a mechanized infantry unit the 2/2 of the 1st Infantry Division. We were based out of Lai Kai on highway 13, "Thunder Road", about 50 miles NW of Saigon. We spent our nights in semi-permanent Night Defensive Positions, NDPs. During the day we opened the road (swept for mines) and provided security and convoy escort as well as search and destroy patrols.
This day we went on S and D looking for a suspected base camp north of our base Thunder 3. We had tanks, morter Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs or tracks), and standard APCs with 50 cal. machineguns and infantry. We also had extra infantry attached to us that day. We were a reinforced company. We turned north off Thunder road towards a bridge over a small river. It was decided that the steal bridge could not support the 48 ton M-48 tanks so they stayed behind and the column moved on. My track was the lead vehicle. We came onto a village with a deep wide trench around it and our track became hung up trying to cross. The column was directed around us to save time and when we got ourselves free we fell back into the column about at the mid point. After leaving this area we came to a very wide trail, just wider than the APCs. In the jungle that's a highway. There were signs of recent use all over the trail. We moved up the trail accompanied by artillery spotting rounds controlled by our artillery Forward Observer. We moved slowly; it was very hot and half of us were nearly asleep on the tracks. The jungle was so thick you could not see 3 feet into it. Suddenly we heard a series of loud explosions and the sound of a firefight ahead of us. We all dismounted, getting on our bellies, facing into the jungle only hearing the sounds of the firefight. Fear and curiosity began to grow. For myself and my friend, this was our first firefight and we really did not know what to do. We heard machine gun fire (the never-to-be forgotten pop of AK47s) and many explosions. Some of the explosions were from our morter tracks stationed some distance from the column. Soon, however, artillery rounds started screaming overhead and crunching in with deafening explosions. They were close enough to make the ground shake under us. The dirt of the jungle floor was becoming an intimate friend. We could hear a chain saw running behind us but we knew the recovery engineers carried them and were doing something. Shortly word came down the line that machine gun ammo and smoke granades (to mark our positions for the artillery spotter plane and gunships) were needed up front. My friend and I grabbed ammo and smoke and headed up the column to where the noise was. When we got up there we handed over our ammo and grenades. We could see the lead track up ahead and a soldier was on his back with blood spurting out his head. We saw other wounded soldiers being moved back or attended to. I saw our supply sargent firing a recoiless rifle into the jungle. We asked the Leuitenant what to do and he said to lay down fire into the jungle on our flanks. I had 10 clips of ammo and started to fire into the jungle. I never saw an ememy soldier; I saw movement in some bushes and focused my fire there. Wounded were continuing to be moved back. I used up all my ammo and started to pick up clips from other soldiers who were, I guess, wounded. Then the order came to pull back. We did, leaving an Armored Personnel Carrier behind. We loaded the wounded onto a track and climbed on ourselves and started to retreat, fast. We came around a bend and found trees cut down across the trail. It wasn't the engineers but Charlie at work. Our driver slowed down and just then there was a huge explosion. We took an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) hit. I was sitting with my friend on the rear of the track, facing the rear. My friend caught a piece of shrapnel across the back of his neck. Nothing touched me. I jumped off the track, based on advice given only days before when I asked what we should do if we were attacked. On the ground with me was a black seargent. I think we called him red due to his light skin and red hair. Also there was another sargent, a big Puerto Rican NCO whose right arm was almost blown off. He was sitting right above the place where the RPG hit the right front of the track. He was screaming. Red kept telling him to be quiet while he bandaged him. Our track drove away. I turned towards the jungle where the RPG came from and stared to fire into the jungle but nothing happened. My weapon was jammed from the dirt off of dropped clips. I was defenseless. I thought this was where I was going to die. However no further attack came out of the jungle. Shortly after another track came around the bend and stopped. Red asked for men to get down and help us load the wounded man, no one moved. Red pulled down his M-16 and said help or I'll shoot. They helped. We mounted the track and headed down the trail again, fast. Again we hit some trees this time breaking the tread on the track. Luckily we took no fire. Soon another track came up behind us and we moved the wounded, mounted up and again went down the trail finally connecting with the main unit in a perimeter in a clearing about 75 yards across. I was posted out in the jungle to create a listening post while the wounded were being med-evacuated out. I remember seeing a guy I knew giving a wounded friend a joint to smoke.
During this time the fast boys (Jets) bombed the abandonded track and the engineers recovered the tread broken track. Several hours later in the dark with artillery flares lighting the way we made our way back to Thunder road and our NDP. In my first firefight we had 3 killed and 32 wounded. They kicked our butt. I learned real fear and became a changed person. I never again went on patrol without 20 clips and the tools and know-how to clear or clean a jammed weapon. I doubled my water and grenades. I started to take control of my own destiny. Fate was not going to take control of me.
- glenn
Norman, OK
- A Camera On New Years Eve, 1971
New Years Eve, 1971. San Francisco. I was just out of college and had moved to the big city for a career. I was non-political. One of my passions was photography. On this night I joined the crowds at Columbus and Broadway to ring out the year. Vietnam was a passionate subject. From somewhere a bottle flew and hit a mounted cop. The SF police waded into the crowd and began beating kids. I had my camera and noticed two officers drag someone into a nearby alley and begin to beat the living tar out of him. My social conscience told me to photograph this unnecessary violence. I had no more taken a couple of photos when I found myself pinned to the alley wall, my feet not touching the ground, held in place by a police baton across my throat. As I choked and thrashed, another cop took my camera and smashed it against the wall. The back sprung open and the officer pulled out the film. I was suddenly dropped to the ground. With a vicious slash of the police baton, the cop told me to beat it. I did. They continued to beat the kid! This event radicalized me and my politics. I became a war protester. I campaigned actively against Nixon. To this day, I don't trust police authority. I still have the camera with the dent it received that night. Sadly, I still remember every time I use it.
- Don
Steubenville, OH
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