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I wrote something a few years back (It was actually right after the “Gathering of Eagles” in Washington DC, March 2007.

This is an excerpt from it (too long to post here) but I wanted to summarize what I saw (The unfinished piece is called “What I Saw”...

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We lived overseas during the worst part of the turbulent Sixties, leaving the country in 1967 and returning in the summer of 1971. During that time, we lived in Yokosuka, Japan and Subic Bay, PI. During that time, we were somewhat physically insulated from the social upheaval in the USA. But, as a kid delivering the Stars and Stripes for the better part of four years, I had plenty of time to look at the newspapers. For a young kid, I was pretty well tuned into what was going on in Vietnam and elsewhere. I read of the aviators who had been shot down. My friends and I knew their names. We wore metal wristbands with their names…Alvarez, Stockdale, Denton. But that was not the subject that bothered me the most.

What really affected me was the anti-war movement. I read the articles about the war protests. I saw the pictures of the anti-war protestors. I was a twelve year old kid, and it seemed too real and too close to my world, and when I read the things that those protestors said, it made me angry like nothing else had. What I saw and read had a profound and lasting effect on me.

The “hippies” called people serving in the military things like “baby killers” and “warmongers”. Nowadays, it sounds almost humorous and archaic. But at the time, it was very serious and disturbing. I would look at my dad, my friend’s dad, and the men I saw going on and off the ships and think to myself “These are ‘baby-killers’? ‘Warmongers’?” They were talking about my dad, who I knew was none of those things. I knew he was a good and honorable man. I took it very personally, it hurt me, and I was angry about it. When it came time for my dad to rotate back to the USA, I didn’t really want to go. I had heard stories about LSD being dropped into the lunch of unsuspecting kids at school and other such things. I was nervous.

But when I came back to the USA, the thing that really made me sit up and take notice was the atmosphere in the country regarding the military and the people who served in it. So much had changed in the years we were gone. The negative attitude towards the military was pronounced and vocal. In the local high school I attended, the teachers spoke of the military in extraordinarily negative tones. I remember one class where the teacher had us listen to “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the rest of the class was a discussion about why the military was an evil thing. I sat there and stewed, steaming mad. I was embarrassed, angry and hurt, but didn’t have the guts to say anything. To me, it seemed like people left the military and disappeared into society, never to be seen or heard from again. The mental image I had was of men taking their uniforms off, ashamed, putting them in a box and never speaking of their service again to anyone.