Loon - Jack McLean [51]
Early March brought changes back home that could barely have been predicted even two months earlier. On March 12, liberal Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an antiwar platform, came within two hundred thirty votes of defeating President Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic party primary election, the traditional beginning of the presidential campaign season. McCarthy’s campaign was buoyed by more than two thousand full-time student volunteers who cut their hair, cleaned up their dress, and convinced the conservative voters of the state that a new day was indeed dawning.
Four days later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, responding to the abrupt change in the national mood, ended months of speculation by announcing that he too would enter the race to defeat President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president.
The primary plank in his platform was opposition to the war in Vietnam.
As winter changed into early spring, the days became hotter and the ground grew progressively drier and harder. What was left of the jungle had been severely defoliated by the relentless aerial spraying of Agent Orange over the past month.
We continued to feel ourselves becoming soft—losing our edge. We hadn’t had any real sustained contact with the enemy since December 6, 1967. Half of Charlie Company had rotated back to the States by this time, and the rest of us were starting to get short in tenure and overly cautious.
When we returned to camp late one afternoon and dropped the deadweight of our gear from our exhausted bodies, we were greeted with the news that the commander in chief—the top person in our chain of command—was not running for another term.
The president of the United States, the near immortal Lyndon Baines Johnson, had become the latest victim of the war in Vietnam.
I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.
With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
But let men everywhere know, however, that a strong, a confident, and a vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace—and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause—whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice that duty may require.
The war had claimed its ultimate victim—the president of the United States.
The country was undergoing enormous change.
Nothing had a greater impact on this change than the now totally out of control American adventure in Vietnam.
What the hell were we doing there?
Early on the morning of April 5, 1968, as we dragged our filthy, smelly, exhausted bodies inside the perimeter through the south wire, fresh from an all-night ambush emplacement to the west, we were greeted with the most awful of the escalating bad news from home. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., while spending a day working at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to plan a Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C., had been killed with a single shot from a .30–06 caliber rifle. Despite pleas for calm and a powerful extemporaneous eulogy from Senator Robert F. Kennedy, rioting had broken out in cities throughout the United States, rioting that had killed dozens of people and caused untold millions in property damage.
That morning, I became aware of a thin line that began to divide the black marines from the rest of us—nothing that ever manifested itself in combat, but a “something” that