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50 Years Ago ~~~ Selma / Vietnam
It is hard to believe how fast time flies. When I was 18 major things were happening in our country. I was fully aware of Selma and the march because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a resident of Atlanta. His father pastored a large black church. The move of our first ground troops to Vietnam, I vaguely remember. For most of us it was just a "little bit of help" after already having Advisers there with the South Vietnamese doing the actual fighting. Kennedy had decided to withdraw since the country had no will to win / LBJ reinserted us after the assassination of one of the most progressive Presidents of the 1900's.
A good question right now is: HOW IS IT GOING AFTER 50 YEARS?
I thought we were doing better on racial issues until the continued onslaught of cops-killing-blacks stories of the last 6 months. About the time you think the problem is addressed in one police department another one happens. The events have not been in our part of the South so that makes me feel better. I am grateful for the general decent race relations in Beaufort County - as I plan to live here until I die. The abject hate of a dark-skinned President has concerned me now for 6 years. Say what you please, but many whites have hated our black President.
With respect to race relations, I have never had a personal problem. My problem would have been if the "N" word crossed my lips. Both my parents were serious practitioners of "all men created equal." Momma was the daughter of a SC farmer and all her siblings were the farm hands. There were a couple of tenant black families, but momma said, "If it weren't for their children, I would have had no other children to play with after hoeing cotton."
My father was part of a white Tenant Farm family. We have never owned any slaves
WE WERE THE SLAVES! My father said they were so poor outside Athens, GA, that even the poor folks looked down on them as being poor. Every mother forbade her daughter having anything to do with one of those barefoot Scarborough brothers. According to them my uncles were nothing and would never amount to anything . . . Poverty has its detractors, but my family could not help it that the Great Depression had most everyone poorer than poor.
In Clarkston, GA, where I was reared, there were few black folks to start with. I was aware of them, but did not ride through any section of houses where only blacks lived. My wife grew up in Rocky Mount which was more a city than my Bath-like town of Clarkston. There were distinct black communities in downtown Atlanta as there was in Edgecombe County "across the tracks" in Rocky Mount. Rocky Mount had prided itself in having exactly equal parks on the black side of town as on the white side. You could say, "We were not racists in the least in either Rocky Mount or Clarkston."
Over in Alabama and points around the Gulf Coast it was a far different matter. We had the "back of the city bus" rule in metro Atlanta, but there was no abject racism day-to-day as there was in Alabama. The Klan existed, but in my day it was just a story about cross burnings long ago at Stone Mountain. The Grand Dragon lived there and the Governor was proud to belong, but the abject abuse and fear were behind us as far as I knew. There was no such thing as men in white robes "killing and forcing blacks to behave." The last GA lynching was after WWII.
The Supreme Court decision to integrate all schools everywhere in the US made southerners mad over FORCING us to comply. We sort of laughed at the other kinds of prejudices up north and out west with Orientals and immigrants not being mentioned when we were "so bad in the south. . ." If you are going to "pass laws for the goose, do the same for the gander," is my view.
Both my wife and I were raised southern non-racist, but there were others who made it their point around us. My wife even worked as a Teacher Aide in an all-black school in Wake Forest fas her job to help put me through Southeastern Seminary. The black teachers and students became her friends in that experience. My young wife had lost her mother to cancer at age 16 and those good black women give her some great advice on cooking her first meals. As a matter of fact, they were her best friends!
My summation of racial issues after 50 years is: I THOUGHT WE WERE DOING BETTER, BUT WE CAN MOVE FORWARD TO RESOLVE STUFF NO YET RESOLVED. That "Welcome to Klan Country" big sign beside I-95 in Cumberland County is far from Beaufort County where we mostly are getting along . . . It rotted down years ago, thank God!
War in Third World Countries is another matter. NOTHING has changed with this.
Vietnam raged into a major killer and maimer on both sides of the Pacific. I refused to burn my draft card. I would have gone for Air Force if my lottery number in the draft came up. I always wanted to fly and if it were not for the "Hanoi Hilton reward" for being shot down, I would likely have volunteered for pilot training in the Air Force.
The biggest problem with Vietnam, to me, was the fact the USA was playing with the lives of my buddies from high school and others who were in the military. We had backed a corrupt Dictator and, although Ho Chi Min was a Communist, he was actually more akin to us in America over freedom of the people than was the Dictator of Vietnam. The people of that country were starving and it was basically a coalition of head hunting tribes and farmers who just wanted to eat!
We were fighting a war in a country which was long in geography. It was bordered by mountains inland and water on the coast. The Viet Cong were not in uniform by-and-large. You could not tell friend from foe. Any American soldier had to be wary of anyone getting within 10 feet of them. A grenade tossed in a jeep was a disaster. Booby traps on roads and tails were deadly. Many were simple pits with feces smeared on bamboo stakes waiting for you to fall on them and die a slow death with infection. Coastal Vietnam was just hot and humid.
I have friends who were there. One was a SEAL who snuck out of canals and slit throats of tax collectors or killed the enemy with a knife---feeling their last wiggle as they died in his hands. Another was a "tunnel rat" who took a flashlight and .45 to go through underground areas that could hold 100-200 soldiers around any corner. Another good friend is just seeing his PTSD after some 40 years of abject horror in the hell of a grunt. The horror of constant fear and bloody wounds with men dying is hard to erase from your brain. Most men who came back were wounded either in mind or body from that "little war" we COULD NOT WIN.
We left and the enemy took over. We opened our doors to immigrants by the thousands from Vietnam. Those who lived in the south had no other choice. If you stayed you could be shot to death at any time because our army was simply there. Those who immigrated did not know what a toilet was and when our government backed them for shrimp boats in Mississippi, they had no concept of fishing regulations and conservation. For them, it was "fish until you catch no more and move somewhere else to do the same." We had destroyed their culture and country and then made them unwelcome if they came here.
What was the point????
We are now trade partners with Vietnam after 50 years. Our soldiers are in military cemeteries all over. Millions of them are dead and grieved. Others are in a mental cemetery over emotions which will never get well until you die. You try to tolerate the painful nightmares and sounds that make you go back to a year of horror in a foreign land you could not really help . . .
50 years later, we are in another war in the Middle East (as far a public disclosure). Who knows where Special Ops and covert stuff is going on over the world? We cannot seem to mind our own business and leave other countries to deal with their business. The mock-up of the ben Laden compound is still on a small island in Dare County right here in our back door!
PTSD is the standard result of horrible small war over at Camp LeJune, Fort Bragg, and other places where we have VA hospitals in NC. Turn on your news at night in Eastern NC and you find the mental sickness and damage from war is as wide spread as it was 50 years ago.
WITH WAR WE HAVE LEARNED NOT ONE SINGLE THING!
If this country goes under financially, it is a direct result of war spending and VooDoo tax code. Our infrastructure is neglected, but we sure have the best smart weapons money can buy. We still have enough nuclear weapons to send this earth into the Stone or Ice Age again. We have enough fear to deceive people into thinking there is a terrorist around every corner and living next door. News outlets love bombs like the other current anniversary event---Boston Marathon Bombing . . .
My question is: What will we have in 50 more years, if things don't change and priorities improve?
Go Back
A good question right now is: HOW IS IT GOING AFTER 50 YEARS?
I thought we were doing better on racial issues until the continued onslaught of cops-killing-blacks stories of the last 6 months. About the time you think the problem is addressed in one police department another one happens. The events have not been in our part of the South so that makes me feel better. I am grateful for the general decent race relations in Beaufort County - as I plan to live here until I die. The abject hate of a dark-skinned President has concerned me now for 6 years. Say what you please, but many whites have hated our black President.
With respect to race relations, I have never had a personal problem. My problem would have been if the "N" word crossed my lips. Both my parents were serious practitioners of "all men created equal." Momma was the daughter of a SC farmer and all her siblings were the farm hands. There were a couple of tenant black families, but momma said, "If it weren't for their children, I would have had no other children to play with after hoeing cotton."
My father was part of a white Tenant Farm family. We have never owned any slaves
WE WERE THE SLAVES! My father said they were so poor outside Athens, GA, that even the poor folks looked down on them as being poor. Every mother forbade her daughter having anything to do with one of those barefoot Scarborough brothers. According to them my uncles were nothing and would never amount to anything . . . Poverty has its detractors, but my family could not help it that the Great Depression had most everyone poorer than poor.
In Clarkston, GA, where I was reared, there were few black folks to start with. I was aware of them, but did not ride through any section of houses where only blacks lived. My wife grew up in Rocky Mount which was more a city than my Bath-like town of Clarkston. There were distinct black communities in downtown Atlanta as there was in Edgecombe County "across the tracks" in Rocky Mount. Rocky Mount had prided itself in having exactly equal parks on the black side of town as on the white side. You could say, "We were not racists in the least in either Rocky Mount or Clarkston."
Over in Alabama and points around the Gulf Coast it was a far different matter. We had the "back of the city bus" rule in metro Atlanta, but there was no abject racism day-to-day as there was in Alabama. The Klan existed, but in my day it was just a story about cross burnings long ago at Stone Mountain. The Grand Dragon lived there and the Governor was proud to belong, but the abject abuse and fear were behind us as far as I knew. There was no such thing as men in white robes "killing and forcing blacks to behave." The last GA lynching was after WWII.
The Supreme Court decision to integrate all schools everywhere in the US made southerners mad over FORCING us to comply. We sort of laughed at the other kinds of prejudices up north and out west with Orientals and immigrants not being mentioned when we were "so bad in the south. . ." If you are going to "pass laws for the goose, do the same for the gander," is my view.
Both my wife and I were raised southern non-racist, but there were others who made it their point around us. My wife even worked as a Teacher Aide in an all-black school in Wake Forest fas her job to help put me through Southeastern Seminary. The black teachers and students became her friends in that experience. My young wife had lost her mother to cancer at age 16 and those good black women give her some great advice on cooking her first meals. As a matter of fact, they were her best friends!
My summation of racial issues after 50 years is: I THOUGHT WE WERE DOING BETTER, BUT WE CAN MOVE FORWARD TO RESOLVE STUFF NO YET RESOLVED. That "Welcome to Klan Country" big sign beside I-95 in Cumberland County is far from Beaufort County where we mostly are getting along . . . It rotted down years ago, thank God!
War in Third World Countries is another matter. NOTHING has changed with this.
Vietnam raged into a major killer and maimer on both sides of the Pacific. I refused to burn my draft card. I would have gone for Air Force if my lottery number in the draft came up. I always wanted to fly and if it were not for the "Hanoi Hilton reward" for being shot down, I would likely have volunteered for pilot training in the Air Force.
The biggest problem with Vietnam, to me, was the fact the USA was playing with the lives of my buddies from high school and others who were in the military. We had backed a corrupt Dictator and, although Ho Chi Min was a Communist, he was actually more akin to us in America over freedom of the people than was the Dictator of Vietnam. The people of that country were starving and it was basically a coalition of head hunting tribes and farmers who just wanted to eat!
We were fighting a war in a country which was long in geography. It was bordered by mountains inland and water on the coast. The Viet Cong were not in uniform by-and-large. You could not tell friend from foe. Any American soldier had to be wary of anyone getting within 10 feet of them. A grenade tossed in a jeep was a disaster. Booby traps on roads and tails were deadly. Many were simple pits with feces smeared on bamboo stakes waiting for you to fall on them and die a slow death with infection. Coastal Vietnam was just hot and humid.
I have friends who were there. One was a SEAL who snuck out of canals and slit throats of tax collectors or killed the enemy with a knife---feeling their last wiggle as they died in his hands. Another was a "tunnel rat" who took a flashlight and .45 to go through underground areas that could hold 100-200 soldiers around any corner. Another good friend is just seeing his PTSD after some 40 years of abject horror in the hell of a grunt. The horror of constant fear and bloody wounds with men dying is hard to erase from your brain. Most men who came back were wounded either in mind or body from that "little war" we COULD NOT WIN.
We left and the enemy took over. We opened our doors to immigrants by the thousands from Vietnam. Those who lived in the south had no other choice. If you stayed you could be shot to death at any time because our army was simply there. Those who immigrated did not know what a toilet was and when our government backed them for shrimp boats in Mississippi, they had no concept of fishing regulations and conservation. For them, it was "fish until you catch no more and move somewhere else to do the same." We had destroyed their culture and country and then made them unwelcome if they came here.
What was the point????
We are now trade partners with Vietnam after 50 years. Our soldiers are in military cemeteries all over. Millions of them are dead and grieved. Others are in a mental cemetery over emotions which will never get well until you die. You try to tolerate the painful nightmares and sounds that make you go back to a year of horror in a foreign land you could not really help . . .
50 years later, we are in another war in the Middle East (as far a public disclosure). Who knows where Special Ops and covert stuff is going on over the world? We cannot seem to mind our own business and leave other countries to deal with their business. The mock-up of the ben Laden compound is still on a small island in Dare County right here in our back door!
PTSD is the standard result of horrible small war over at Camp LeJune, Fort Bragg, and other places where we have VA hospitals in NC. Turn on your news at night in Eastern NC and you find the mental sickness and damage from war is as wide spread as it was 50 years ago.
WITH WAR WE HAVE LEARNED NOT ONE SINGLE THING!
If this country goes under financially, it is a direct result of war spending and VooDoo tax code. Our infrastructure is neglected, but we sure have the best smart weapons money can buy. We still have enough nuclear weapons to send this earth into the Stone or Ice Age again. We have enough fear to deceive people into thinking there is a terrorist around every corner and living next door. News outlets love bombs like the other current anniversary event---Boston Marathon Bombing . . .
My question is: What will we have in 50 more years, if things don't change and priorities improve?
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