A Voyage of Discovery – From Bloomington to Saigon

[On this the 4^th anniversary of Searching for Jeff, the present post has been written by my collaborator on this blog, Karen Grote Ferb. Karen knew my brother Jeff well during their university days. In 2013 she and her husband Tom traveled to Vietnam where Karen retraced Jeff’s steps as a Vietnam GI during 1963-64.]

I first met Jeff Sharlet at a house party in early January 1966, a little over a year after he returned to Indiana University (IU) from his tour as a US military advisor in Vietnam.  It was a chance meeting.  One of my house mates had been invited, but did not want to go alone; she begged me to go with her.  I really didn’t want to, but she pleaded so long I finally gave in.  Jeff was there, sitting in a dark corner alone.  I’d seen him once before on campus, standing with a group of guys in front of Ballantine Hall.

I introduced myself, and we began a lengthy conversation in that corner, then got away from the general din to continue talking student style sitting on a pile of winter coats in the bathtub.  We talked about socioeconomics, racism, and the war in Vietnam. The war had been building dramatically since the Tonkin Gulf incident in August ’64 shortly after Jeff had returned stateside – culminating in the launching of a major bombing campaign over North Vietnam followed by the landing of the Marines at Danang in early ‘65. 

Our conversation continued over the next eight months until I left for graduate school, and more and more it turned toward the war, as was happening all over the country.  Why were we fighting in Vietnam was the question many were asking, and how could we stop it.

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Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally

 learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.

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Although Jeff was clear that he had done something in Vietnam he couldn’t bring himself to speak of, he didn’t talk much at all about his experiences there that had soured him on our involvement in the war. At the same time, he had developed an admiration for the Vietnamese people, although not for their oppressive regimes beginning with Diem and his cruel brother Nhu, so he joined the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during fall of ‘65; I too joined around that time.          

Antiwar protests grew exponentially from the mid-‘60s, not only at home, but abroad, and even in Vietnam itself.  The Buddhist crisis, in particular, had drawn worldwide attention as clergy began to set themselves afire in public places as a protest against the Diem regime.

Jeff at Indiana University, 1965

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.  I had come across his namesake nephew, at the time beginning his illustrious career as a writer.  At first I thought he was the Jeff I’d known, but a little exploration proved it not so; the namesake was too young and did not resemble his uncle.  The truth was a shock.  Jeff had died of cancer at age 27.  I knew he had an older brother, Bob, so I set out to offer much-belated condolences.

As it happened, Bob, an academic approaching retirement, was determined to give his brother his rightful place in the history of the GI Movement against the Vietnam War by writing a memoir of him.  Jeff too had intended to pursue an academic career. He had begun grad school at the University of Chicago, but dropped out and used his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds to create the first GI-led antiwar, underground newspaper. Vietnam GI was aimed at GIs serving in Vietnam as well as on US bases in the States and abroad. 

Contacting Bob at that time was serendipitous because he had little idea of how to reach out and find Jeff’s friends and comrades from his IU days. We determined that, although I’d lost touch with my fellow IU antiwar activists, I could find them for him.

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I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined when I last spoke

with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared.

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Over time I did find many of those people as well as others from Jeff’s high school years, his Army days, and the time he spent in Chicago as an underground editor, which also took him across the country and abroad. Bob eventually interviewed over 150 people who had known Jeff to one degree or another, and I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined back in late 1967 when I last spoke with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared. 

In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have foreseen the depth of knowledge and understanding I would achieve about Vietnam and the war, nor that I would visit Vietnam, now unified, and walk in Jeff’s footsteps, seeing the places he had seen.

I found myself in Saigon’s cavernous Bến Thành Market, in front of which a massive nonviolent Buddhist protest had taken place on August 25, 1963, the very day Jeff arrived in Saigon for the first time. South Vietnamese government troops had opened fire, killing several people, including Quách Thị Trang, a 15-year old student. 

Bến Thành Market Protest and Quách Thị Trang, 1963

The traffic circle was subsequently renamed in her memory and now holds a statue of her in a space shared with a mid-15^th century general, Trần Nguyên Hãn, a great poet, talented politician and strategist under Emperor Lê Lợi, and a hero revered for his role in liberating Vietnam from China’s Ming Dynasty.

Quách Thị Trang & General Han, 2014

No longer there to see were street-side execution posts as well as the trenches which Jeff could not have failed to notice; they surely would have added to soldiers’ anxieties about the dangers that too often erupted.

Trenches in front of Saigon City Hall, mid-‘60s

 

Nor were the famously well-known Buddhist self-immolations the only evidence of a profound cultural conflict and repression in the cities of South Vietnam.  Widely reported, the images of monks engulfed in flames stunned the world, although the root cause was not widely known. 

The Catholic Diem regime had retained a French colonial rule that Buddhism was not a religion, but an association, which severely limited the rights of Buddhists as opposed to those of the Catholic minority. A request to fly Buddhist flags on the occasion of Buddha’s 2,507^th birthday in 1963 had been turned down while the Vatican flag flew on the occasion of the consecration of Diem's older brother as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Hue.

A protest in the ancient capital of Hue of about 3,000 Buddhists was fired on by government troops.  The regime, attempting to minimize the damage and even pin the blame on its civil war adversary, the Viet Cong, was hotly contested by a huge protest march the next day of more than 10,000 demonstrators.

 

The protests and self-immolations—six in all, including a Buddhist nun—continued throughout the summer of ’63, resulting in several clashes between Buddhists and troops, as well as hunger strikes—over 10,000 participated in Saigon alone—sit-ins, and street fighting between Buddhist and Catholic civilians.  All during the summer the great gong at Saigon’s Xa Loi Pagoda’s tolled, while in Hue the violence had left the main pagoda, Tu Dam, nearly a complete ruin.

Although President Diem had insisted he was pursuing a policy of conciliation, the tragedy in the streets of Saigon in August of ’63 would discredit any notion of it.  Having declared martial law, the president had given the police under his brother Nhu free rein starting that August.

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Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered 

Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone.

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Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone. The overall number murdered or ‘disappeared’ was in the hundreds.  Thousands of Buddhists across the country were arrested and tortured by forces under Nhu, Diem’s brother, who also headed the special forces.  On August 25^th, 6,000 monks, nuns, civilians, and students were arrested followed by many thousands more over the course of the following month. 

A war that had had not yet received much attention back in the States suddenly had many Americans asking questions that before long would result in massive demonstrations against it. The rest of the world began to wonder what our objectives in Vietnam actually were.  In the end, Washington declared, “… it appears that the government of the Republic of Vietnam, has instituted serious repressive measures against the Vietnamese Buddhist leaders…The US deplores repressive actions of this nature.” 

In spite of this, the American media were not quick to pick up on extent of the underlying conflict between Buddhists and the Catholic regime; that is, within the overarching civil war between Communist North and non-Communist South Vietnam, a religious civil war was raging in South Vietnam between Buddhists and Catholics.

Soon after the police attacks against Buddhists and their pagodas, the commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) announced military control over Saigon, instituted censorship of the press, and cancelled all commercial flights into the city.  As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

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As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, 

Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

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Washington had finally recognized that the Diem regime was behind the attacks and had no intention of reconciliation with the Buddhists, a direct violation of a promise made. President Kennedy was also aware that a group of South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup.

 

The ensuing events in September and early October ‘63, to which Jeff was privy in his position of clandestinely eavesdropping on the ARVN General Staff, led on November 1st to a successful military coup and the execution of Diem and Nhu. 

Coincidentally, a year later in ‘64 – also on August 25 – a group of 10,000 Buddhists attacked and burned to the ground a Catholic village near Danang, after which horrendous bloody clashes erupted between Buddhists and Catholics killing and mutilating each other in the streets.  The violence soon spread to Saigon and other urban centers, creating an atmosphere of anarchy in the entire country.*

Violent clashes between Buddhists and Catholics, August, 1963

Contemporary Vietnam: Now a single unified country under Communist rule, the situation from the early-mid ‘60s has been reversed – the officially atheist Communist government now persecutes Christians, but allows Buddhists to practice their religion, although only a single sect, the Buddhist Church of Vietnam, intended to encompass any and all Buddhist sects firmly under state control.

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* R J Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed:  The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam 1964-1966 (2002), 19

Back to the ‘World’ – Return from ‘Nam

For a year my brother, Jeff Sharlet, and I were on different ‘fronts’ of the global Cold War. It was 1963-64, and Jeff was soldiering in Vietnam while I was studying in Moscow. I had learned Russian for my sojourn to the Soviet Union. Jeff had been taught Vietnamese for his Southeast Asian tour.

He was a translator/interpreter in the semi-secret Army Security Agency (ASA) while I was grad student on the official US-USSR Cultural Exchange. We’d both been carefully vetted for our encounters with the Communist orbit – Jeff to assure his political loyalty since his work was highly classified.

Conversely for my program, any connection to the American intelligence community would have been a disqualifier. University authorities took great care to protect the integrity of the academic exchange. Jeff and I both passed muster and shipped out to our respective destinations.

In the Moscow State University dorms in the former Lenin Hills, I shared a suite of rooms with a Soviet law student. Jeff was billeted with five other GIs in a large field tent at a US military outpost in South Vietnam, a small base not far below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the border of Communist North Vietnam. As he wrote home, “we are completely out of contact with the outside world here.”

Jeff’s ‘accommodations’, South Vietnam, 1964

By the ‘60s, the Cold War between the superpowers was approaching mid-point with Washington leading the West, Moscow dominating the East. Fortunately it was not a head-to-head military confrontation; instead, the Cold War was waged in the realm of ideas, propaganda, covert action, and proxy wars in the Third World.

One of those proxy wars, the hottest one, was in Vietnam, a country split into North and South by the Geneva Accords following the French colonists’ defeat in 1954. Backed by the Soviets and Communist China, North Vietnam was supporting a low intensity guerrilla war in the south. The aim was to overthrow the Saigon government and unify Vietnam under the Communist flag.

Jeff was assigned to ASA’s Detachment J, 3^rd Radio Research Unit (RRU) at a place called Phu Bai. His work included electronically eavesdropping on North Vietnamese Army communications as well as liaising with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated north through the DMZ and over the border.†

My academic tasks in the capital of the Soviet Union fell under the heading of Khrushchev’s slogan of ‘peaceful coexistence’, the idea that capitalist and socialist countries could coexist amicably and avoid fighting each other.

Implicit in the cultural exchange was the hope of mitigating international tensions through people-to-people programs. Hence, while I was researching Marxist legal theory for my PhD dissertation as well as studying Soviet law, my Soviet counterpart was studying at an American university.

In late spring ’64, Jeff and I had both coincidentally finished up our time abroad and were ready to head home to the States. For Jeff, it would be back to the ‘world’, as Vietnam GIs were wont to call the journey. The road back would be a long one for each of us, not just in sheer distance, but in the psychological gulfs we’d be navigating.

Reverse culture shock was just part of it – Jeff would be returning to college, quite a remove from the secrecy-shrouded atmosphere of the place  he was leaving, an area of scrub foliage and low sand dunes characterized by a National Security Agency (NSA) official as  ‘virtually a Viet Cong camp ground’.

The transition would be easier for me although, by definition in those days, an American living in Soviet society got used to being ‘watched’ and had to be careful what was said and to whom. Hence, returning to the States would be a radical change from living in a high vigilance, closed society, but that’s a story for the next post.

Jeff had gone to Asia, if not positive, at least open-minded about the US mission in Vietnam. But in the course of being involved in ill-conceived and fouled up political and military operations while simultaneously getting acquainted with ordinary Vietnamese and their culture, he had become increasingly disillusioned.†† On his return to the ‘world’, he’d have to sort out his thoughts and feelings about the war – what he had experienced ‘over there’.

Jeff’s road home began from one day to the next at the tiny base at Phu Bai. One day he was at work amidst the great heat and humidity in the working ‘uniform of the day’ – shirtless, shorts, and flip flops; the next day he was dressed in Class A’s heading for the airfield with his gear.

He was very glad to be leaving, writing presciently in a last letter just weeks before the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in August ‘64, “I hope I get out of the Army before anything blows up in Southeast Asia.”

Jeff caught a hop on a C-123, a large cargo plane that made two scheduled trips a day in and out of Phu Bai. The plane headed south toward Saigon, making a single stop on the coast of the South China Sea at Danang.

A C-123 taxiing for takeoff

Arriving at the military side of Saigon’s vast airport/air base, Jeff took a taxi over to nearby Davis Station, home to ASA’s 3^rd RRU. He bunked there for his week’s leave in Saigon before moving on. He had many friends among the linguists (lingys) and cryptologists (crypts) there from his previous duty station in ’63 at Phu Lam, not far from the Davis base.

After a merry time drinking with good buddies at favorite bars and restaurants in Saigon, then known as the ‘Paris of the East’, it was time for the next leg of Jeff’s journey. That meant flying from Saigon to his home base, the 9^th ASA battalion located at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

In a kind of tradition when a lingy finished his tour and was headed home, his friends would see him off – Jeff’s friends from as far back as ’62 at the Army Language School (ALS) on the California coast did just that – among them John Buquoi, Harvey Kline, Dave Gustin and, if he was in town, Fred Baumann.

The drill was an informal farewell party in the upstairs lounge at the airport – tasty toasted ham and Swiss sandwiches with lots of Dijon mustard and, of course, plenty of ’33 beer, Vietnam’s cheap brew – before Jeff shoved off for the flight line.

‘Mileage’ post at Davis Station, HQ, ASA 3rd RRU

Back at Clark, a sprawling air base, Jeff had an exit physical at an Air Force clinic. His medical report was then sealed along with his basic military file and copies of final orders in a large brown envelope to be hand-carried back to the States.

Separation processing would take place stateside. In military jargon, one was ‘separated’ until a reserve obligation was completed a few years later and final discharge papers issued.

Again, another farewell party before take-off, this one with friends at the 9^th ASA, Keith Willis and others. Jeff boarded a civilian 707, a World Airways charter under military contract, for the lift back to the States. The plane made the same stops as on the way over – Guam and Honolulu – finally touching down late at night at Travis Air Force Base north of San Francisco.

The flight was met by a military bus that took Jeff and the other GIs to a transient barracks on the base. Incoming traffic was apparently heavy because each GI was assigned to a particular bunk in an 8-man room for a specific time slot (about six hours). The following morning Jeff was shaken awake by the next GI assigned to that bunk.

He was directed to a bus for the short ride to Oakland Army Terminal where final out-processing took place. A quick breakfast at the mess hall there and he reported to the ‘Separation Processing’ facility located in a hangar.

At the front of the cavernous space, a podium and several tables were set up. Rows of wooden benches were provided for out-processing troops, a few hundred from bases all over the world. Jeff didn’t know anyone – he may have been the only ASA Vietnam GI in the group.

Separation was typically Army, slow and bureaucratic. At the podium a corporal would call out a name, directing the soldier to one of the tables or ‘processing stations’ – there were nearly a half dozen of them. Jeff would complete his business at one ‘station’ and be sent back to the benches to wait until he was called again – over and over.*

The stages of separation were:

Personnel/Records: Jeff handed over his thick brown envelope. A clerk reviewed the contents and various documents were signed.

Security: A military intelligence clerk briefed Jeff on the ASA secrecy commitment, to wit, if any classified information was divulged he would face federal prosecution, up to 10 years imprisonment, and a $10,000 fine, serious money in those days.

He was also warned against travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years, and there was one additional bizarre caution. If you were to undergo surgery involving general anesthesia, you were to notify ASA in advance so a de-briefer could be on hand in the event of ‘inappropriate disclosures’.

Equipment turn-in: A GI was expected to return all the uniforms issued him except the one he was wearing. A couple of privates unceremoniously dumped Jeff’s duffel bag on the floor and made an inventory of its contents. If any part of the original issue was missing, the cost would be deducted from the soldier’s final paycheck.

Physical Exam/Medical: Essentially blood and urine tests for which the out-processee was sent to an adjoining room.

Payroll: Jeff was given his final ASA paycheck as well as travel funds to cover the flight back to his hometown of record.

Finally at dusk after an all-day laborious process, the GIs were released and bussed to the San Francisco Airport to catch their flights. At the airport, Jeff cut out and headed into the city to revisit the town and see friends.

While in the Bay Area, John Sharlet, our cousin, who was then studying Russian at ALS down the coast in Monterey, came up to San Fran to meet Jeff for dinner. Back east the cousins had gone to prep school together, but hadn’t seen each other for several years.

A few months later in fall ’64, Jeff found himself back in school at Indiana University (IU), a college boy again, to finish his education. He threw himself into the coursework, eager to catch up on his life. Nonetheless he remained unsettled by memories of the war, but couldn’t say a word to anyone. Everything remained secret.

Jeff knew there were many other GIs deeply skeptical about the wisdom of US involvement in Vietnam. Once the war dramatically escalated the following spring of ‘65, the number of disaffected Vietnam GIs would eventually grow and become legion.

Five years later after returning from ‘Nam, Jeff took his secrets to an early grave, although not before founding the underground paper Vietnam GI, which became a rallying point for emerging GI opposition to the war.

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*I am indebted to John Buquoi, Jeff’s Vietnam buddy, for his help in reconstructing the ‘separation’ process.

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-mountains-of-laos.html

††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html

Cold War Sideshow -- Vietnam as Proxy War

The Vietnam War looms large in this blog, but, lest we forget, it was a proxy war within the global Cold War which reigned from 1945 to 1991. And Vietnam was not the first proxy war (Korea) or the last (the Soviets in Afghanistan) between the United States and the Soviet Union, the dominant superpowers. Because the US and the USSR were armed to the teeth with deadly civilization-ending nukes, the idea was to keep the East-West conflict ‘cold’, i.e., avoid direct combat between the adversaries.

That left open a race for influence in the newly decolonialized Third World. Most often the struggle manifested itself through foreign aid missions – the Soviet ruble vs. the American dollar – but sometimes armed conflict broke out with the superpower adversaries backing rival fighting groups. Ideally, Moscow and Washington preferred to steer their sides in the local wars at arm’s length – through military advisors and weapons deliveries.

Occasionally, however, one side or the other was about to go under and required rescue, as the Soviets did in Afghanistan in ’79 to save the local pro-communist regime, and  then found themselves stuck there for nearly a decade. Likewise of course, Washington found its proxy, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), foundering against the insurgent People’s Liberation Army or Viet Cong (VC), and decided to make the war its own in ’65. And just as the CIA clandestinely fed weapons to the Afghan insurgents, including  Stinger missiles that destroyed so many Soviet helicopter gunships, a decade earlier the USSR had supplied North Vietnam with SAMs, surface-to-air missiles, that brought down many a US fighter bomber in the course of our long entanglement in Southeast Asia.

Vietnam was initially our arm’s length proxy war as part of America’s broad ‘Containment strategy’ to prevent the USSR from expanding its control beyond the frontiers of its Eurasian communist empire. During his first year in office, 1961, President Kennedy (JFK) had suffered a series of setbacks in the Cold War arena – the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, his poor performance in talks with Khrushchev in Vienna, and the ultimate humiliation of having to stand by as the East German communist regime, with Soviet approval, erected the Berlin Wall to seal off West Berlin.

Seeking a way to reassert his personal authority and US power, JFK settled on the long simmering, low intensity civil war in Vietnam as the place we would show the Soviets our stuff. Vietnam was simply a conflict of convenience for the United States in its ongoing Cold War standoff with Moscow – nothing more. It was a duel of Cold War surrogates – their North Vietnamese Communists against our South Vietnamese nationalists or, as a scholar once put it, their guys against our guys.

After JFK’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) inherited what had already become our Vietnam quagmire. LBJ’s dilemma: our Cold War surrogate was failing, but pulling out would have been politically risky for the President given the strong anti-communist sentiment in the States. Fearing Saigon was on the verge of losing control and that he’d be blamed for losing a country to the communists, LBJ took us in feet first in early ‘65 – sending the first US combat troops into the South while launching a bombing campaign in the North. With troop levels rapidly escalating throughout the year, it soon became an American war.

Three years on in ’68, the Cold War writ large and its Southeast Asian conflict had become inextricably intertwined in policy and public perception. That was a fateful year for both ‘wars’. Early on in January, a crack occurred in Moscow’s East European bloc when a reform Communist, Alexander Dubcek, became leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CP), opening the way to what became known as the ‘Prague Spring’.

That was good news for our side in the Cold War, but was soon overshadowed by the Viet Cong’s surprise Tet Offensive on January 30^th. It began with a high profile attack by a VC suicide team against the US Embassy compound during the night. A young American-Vietnamese couple asleep within view of the embassy heard shots, assumed it was another coup attempt at the presidential palace, and went back to sleep. In the morning they learned that the VC had simultaneously attacked over a hundred cities and towns throughout the country.*

The VC assault on the center of American power, although of little military significance, had great symbolic import. While they were quickly defeated nearly everywhere and the national uprising they hoped to provoke did not occur, the VC reaped an unexpected psychological victory. They had emerged from the jungles and boldly struck the heretofore secure urban strongholds of the South Vietnamese regime – the news dramatically flashed across America. General Westmoreland himself was the main US military casualty – having just assured LBJ of a light at the end of the tunnel, his judgment and leadership were now in question, and he was discreetly kicked upstairs to a desk job at the Pentagon.

Just as Tet attacks had been getting underway, killing any remaining illusions about ‘victory’, ex-Vietnam GI Jeff Sharlet was launching Vietnam GI  (VGI) 9,000 miles away in Chicago – an antiwar paper addressed to the GIs fighting the war. The first issue featured Jeff’s long interview with a combat vet who talked about being put on ‘point’, fragging officers, and the GIs’ distrust of the ARVN, topics not usually found in mainstream media coverage of the war. Walking point was the most dangerous position in a patrol, and if “a guy was against the war” or crossed the First Sergeant, he would find himself assigned there. The trooper also spoke of an unpopular officer, thought to be a danger to his men, who was ‘accidentally’ shot and killed during a night ambush. As for ARVN troops, he added that he never met a GI who had any respect for them.

As the Prague Spring began to loosen up the Czech regime, especially in the arts and media, students in neighboring Communist Poland took note. When a Polish apparatchik banned a 19^th c. play by Poland’s most distinguished man of letters because of references deemed critical of Russia, students at Warsaw University publicly protested. They were met by police clubs. When on the following day 2,000 students marched in protest of the police action, they too were clubbed and many arrested.

Winter gave way to spring in America as shocking news ran through the country like an electric current – Martin Luther King (MLK), a nonviolent leader of the Civil Rights movement and critic of the Vietnam War, had been assassinated. Dozens of inner-city Black communities erupted in anger and violence, including Chicago where the Army was called in to restore order. About to go to press with its fourth issue in April, VGI bumped the war in Nam off the front page in favor of a lead entitled “War in the States?” Jeff began the piece:   

This country is in real trouble. I say this because from my apartment on the North Side I have watched the West Side burn for the last couple of days. … I caught both Mayor Daley and General Dunn, commanding  general of the Illinois National Guard, on the radio Saturday. They said … the situation had deteriorated … therefore the President was sending in 5,000 Army troops from the 5^th Mechanized at [Fort] Carson and the 1^st Armored at [Fort] Hood. All together [with the 7,500 National Guardsmen and the 5,500    cops], that’s more manpower than the Marines had at Khe Sanh!

Army convoy in Chicago, Vietnam GI, April ’68

Shortly after in New York, the issues of the Cold War, Vietnam, and racism dramatically converged at Columbia University. Student concerns over the university’s planned expansion into Black and Latino neighborhoods, growing awareness of the science faculties’ secret Cold War research for the Pentagon, and outrage that current efforts included Vietnam War projects, created a perfect storm of protest as militant students took over the president’s office and seized campus buildings. Several students groups were involved in the occupations, although SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, got the national headlines – at least until the New York City Tactical Police were called in to retake the campus, which they did with nightsticks swinging.

As the Tet Offensive finally petered out in May with the relief of the Khe Sanh Marines and normal academic life resumed at Columbia, an even greater student explosion erupted in Paris at the Sorbonne and the University of Paris, which shook not just a great city, but the government of France itself. French society and youth being highly politicized, it was felt that recent international events had repercussions in Paris -- including the winds of change blowing through Prague, the Warsaw protests, and the student uprisings in the States from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of ’64 through the takeover at Columbia just weeks before.

Student poster, May ’68, “The Struggle Continues”

The massive Paris uprising involved an array of student groups from Trotskyists and Maoists to Anarchists and even a far right group.  Their issues ranged from university reforms to societal changes to sharp anti-imperialist criticism of both Cold War superpowers. Tens of thousands of students and supporters went into the streets, thousands of riot police mobilized, barricades went up, Molotov cocktails thrown, tear gas fired, and mass arrests made.

When young factory workers went out on wildcat strikes in sympathy and the numbers involved throughout France rose into the millions, the word ‘revolution’ was heard and the government so badly shaken that President De Gaulle briefly fled across the border to a French military base in West Germany.  However, assured of support by the Army, he returned, stood his ground, and announced tough measures and new parliamentary elections, which his party won. The police soon regained the upper hand, retaking the universities, truncheons in hand.

Fast forward to August ’68, a tumultuous month in the Cold War as well as for the Vietnam antiwar movement.  The Prague Spring had steadily advanced since January, liberalizing the Soviet-style regime, but not without growing concerns in Moscow that Dubcek and the CP were losing control of the flowering Czech civil society. Grumbling was also heard from the neo-Stalinist East German camp as well as from the Polish comrades to the north that the Czech reforms were threatening to destabilize their party systems.

Finally, during the night of August 21^st, the Soviet Union and its East European Warsaw Pact allies set in motion a large scale, surprise invasion of Czechoslovakia, aiming to suppress the subversive reform process. Soviet troops arrested the principal reformers, hauling them off to Moscow to face the angry Soviet leadership. In the dock with Dubcek was his close comrade Zdenek Mlynar, a driving force behind the liberalizing reforms, whom I had interviewed in Prague in ’64 when he was then a young, upcoming philosopher of law.

Soviet tanks entering Prague, August 1968

A few days later, while the Soviets were carrying out what was euphemistically called ‘normalization’ in the Czech capital, the Democratic Presidential Convention opened in Chicago. In anticipation, SDS and the New Left had for months been planning major antiwar demonstrations in the city. At the time, Jeff was on the cusp of putting the next issue of VGI to bed. Hearing the hot rhetoric coming from the protest planners and Chicago City Hall, where the mayor made clear his intention of blocking street protests, Jeff foresaw a major confrontation. To avoid the VGI operation becoming collateral damage at the hands of the Chicago Red Squad under cover of mayhem, he and Jim Wallihan decamped to the San Francisco Bay Area to finish editing the forthcoming issue. †

Predictably, the 10,000 antiwar marchers were met head-on by the Chicago police backed up by Army troops and the National Guard. The demonstration began peacefully, but the cops attacked with unbridled force, beating some protestors unconscious, and a series of major clashes ensued. By the end of the week, 600+ demonstrators had been arrested, over a thousand injured, including policemen, with 111 protestors and 49 cops requiring hospital treatment. Much of the Chicago street melee with the demonstrators chanting “The whole world is watching,” had been televised live nationwide. A later inquiry dubbed the violence a ‘police riot’.

The year ’68 could well be called the Year of the Baton, the police baton, as heads were cracked in Warsaw, New York, Paris, Chicago, Prague, indeed globally, as cities, countries, and empires struggled to maintain the status quo. The historical calendar, however, records ‘68 as near mid-point in America’s war in Vietnam as well as in the long Cold War, the overarching framework of Vietnam as a proxy war. Just over a half dozen years later, the Vietnam War would pass into history,  while the Cold War, the master narrative of the second half of the last century, continued on its often dangerous course for almost another quarter of a century.

*Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (1999), 330.

† Jeff and Jim stayed with Joe Carey who had moved to the Bay Area. See http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/07/mission-to-paris.html