Vietnam would be coming home, too. The promise would be a blessing, except that troops are not the same when they return. Roughly a third of American soldiers in Vietnam are addicted to heroin. The antiwarsentiment is so strong, the soldiers have also become targets for loudmouths and longhairs. What are they fighting for, anyway?
Troops are refusing orders, turning on their commanders. In 1970, there were at least 109 reports of fragging, incidents where soldiers killed officers. Others refused to enter Laos, and scribbled antiwar sentiments onto their combat helmets. “The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.”
The body counts in Vietnam are staggering—almost 60,000 dead, more than 150,000 wounded. Only months before, details of the Pentagon’s covert bombings in Laos and Cambodia were leaked to the
New York Times
. In Congress, legislators read the so-called Pentagon Papers into the public record to ensure the Nixon White House could not cover up the scandal. Anyone with access to a newspaper or a television set now has proof: their government is lying to them about Vietnam. How many other lies are there?
“I’ll say modestly that our country will be gone very shortly,” H. L. Hunt, the San Francisco oil magnate, said earlier in the week. “The communists are much smarter than freedom-loving people. America doesn’t want to do anything else except make a profit.”
Even the weather in 1971 seems to contribute to a feeling of looming Armageddon. In the South, fifty tornadoes blew through towns and cities in one week, leaving one hundred dead. Los Angeles was rocked with its biggest earthquake in four decades, leaving sixty-five dead.
A mob has been forming. In Detroit, the city zoo had to hire extra security guards because animals were getting attacked. A baby wallaby was stoned to death. A duck was shot with a steel-tipped arrow. Firecrackers were thrown at a pregnant reindeer. A hippopotamus was found with a tennis ball stuffed down his throat.
Cops are getting killed. In Syracuse, the police chief complained that black teenagers were using cars to conduct “guerrilla-type warfare” against his officers via “hit and run.” During the first nine months of the year, ninety-one cops were reported to have been killed on the job.
The war—cultural, political, generational—is raging. Throughoutthe year, the authorities reported 771 bomb threats in federal buildings. Over the summer, 200,000 protestors descended on the capital. In one day, 12,000 people were arrested. In Miami, anti-pollution activists shuttered a Pepsi bottling plant by pouring cement over a drainage pipe. In Chicago, college students and members of an activist group were arrested for plotting to poison the city’s drinking water. Their plan: inoculate themselves, and create a superior race.
Prisons are overcrowded. Riots break out. In early September, in the upstate New York prison of Attica, inmates armed themselves with shanks, chains, broomsticks, baseball bats, and hammers. They seized the exercise yard. They burned the schoolhouse and chapel. They gagged prison guards at knifepoint, ordered them to strip naked and navigate a club-swinging gauntlet. Gas was released. Shots were fired. Inmates were stripped naked and beaten.
“The Attica tragedy is more stark proof that something is terribly wrong with America,” said Maine senator Edward Muskie, who’s campaigning for president. “We have reached the point where men would rather die than live another day in America.”
To combat violent hippies and homegrown terrorists, a new conservatism has been born. Just this past September, a twelve-year-old boy called the police to turn in his own father for smoking pot.
“There is such a feeling of powerlessness in this country,” said John Gardner, who resigned as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “We all have the feeling that we want to complain to the manager, but the
Troops are refusing orders, turning on their commanders. In 1970, there were at least 109 reports of fragging, incidents where soldiers killed officers. Others refused to enter Laos, and scribbled antiwar sentiments onto their combat helmets. “The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.”
The body counts in Vietnam are staggering—almost 60,000 dead, more than 150,000 wounded. Only months before, details of the Pentagon’s covert bombings in Laos and Cambodia were leaked to the
New York Times
. In Congress, legislators read the so-called Pentagon Papers into the public record to ensure the Nixon White House could not cover up the scandal. Anyone with access to a newspaper or a television set now has proof: their government is lying to them about Vietnam. How many other lies are there?
“I’ll say modestly that our country will be gone very shortly,” H. L. Hunt, the San Francisco oil magnate, said earlier in the week. “The communists are much smarter than freedom-loving people. America doesn’t want to do anything else except make a profit.”
Even the weather in 1971 seems to contribute to a feeling of looming Armageddon. In the South, fifty tornadoes blew through towns and cities in one week, leaving one hundred dead. Los Angeles was rocked with its biggest earthquake in four decades, leaving sixty-five dead.
A mob has been forming. In Detroit, the city zoo had to hire extra security guards because animals were getting attacked. A baby wallaby was stoned to death. A duck was shot with a steel-tipped arrow. Firecrackers were thrown at a pregnant reindeer. A hippopotamus was found with a tennis ball stuffed down his throat.
Cops are getting killed. In Syracuse, the police chief complained that black teenagers were using cars to conduct “guerrilla-type warfare” against his officers via “hit and run.” During the first nine months of the year, ninety-one cops were reported to have been killed on the job.
The war—cultural, political, generational—is raging. Throughoutthe year, the authorities reported 771 bomb threats in federal buildings. Over the summer, 200,000 protestors descended on the capital. In one day, 12,000 people were arrested. In Miami, anti-pollution activists shuttered a Pepsi bottling plant by pouring cement over a drainage pipe. In Chicago, college students and members of an activist group were arrested for plotting to poison the city’s drinking water. Their plan: inoculate themselves, and create a superior race.
Prisons are overcrowded. Riots break out. In early September, in the upstate New York prison of Attica, inmates armed themselves with shanks, chains, broomsticks, baseball bats, and hammers. They seized the exercise yard. They burned the schoolhouse and chapel. They gagged prison guards at knifepoint, ordered them to strip naked and navigate a club-swinging gauntlet. Gas was released. Shots were fired. Inmates were stripped naked and beaten.
“The Attica tragedy is more stark proof that something is terribly wrong with America,” said Maine senator Edward Muskie, who’s campaigning for president. “We have reached the point where men would rather die than live another day in America.”
To combat violent hippies and homegrown terrorists, a new conservatism has been born. Just this past September, a twelve-year-old boy called the police to turn in his own father for smoking pot.
“There is such a feeling of powerlessness in this country,” said John Gardner, who resigned as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “We all have the feeling that we want to complain to the manager, but the
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