Morning After

MAD DASH

I am launching this blog today in memory of all those young (and not so young) American soldiers who fell in the rice paddies and filth of a contaminated landscape that remains scarred and maimed today. God bless you each one-whether you made it back in one piece or not.

I will never forget.

Refugees and helicopter on
roof of US Embassy, Saigon

It was thirty-seven years ago yesterday that the last U.S. Troops left South Vietnam. It was 1973. I suspect most of us remember this well given the terrible sights of Vietnamese trying to pile onto  helicopters on top of the U.S. Embassy to get out of SVN as the Communists took over Saigon and other parts of the south.

Refugees and US soldiers, Nha Trang

Here is a link to an eyewitness account: Eyewitness Account 

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Monks on Fire

BUDDHIST MONKS EMOLATE THEMSELVES

My memory was just jogged the other day by the vision of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in the street in protest of the escalating war in Vietnam.

It was always a bizarre thing to see on the evening news. But no more bizarre than riots in Watts and Detroit, Washington, DC and Atlanta the days following the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the murders of students at Kent State University in Ohio or maybe the two immortal pictures of that war, the one of the young girl running, screaming naked having been doused with napalm and the one of the alleged traitor having his brains blown out.

These are the horror scenes we were seeing in the 1960s and early 1970s.

It seemed like the world was coming to an end.