7. “1967"

It feels like 1967, and CONTRA-19 feels like Vietnam. No sounds of choppers and gunfire, but the sirens of ambulances and the humming of refrigerated trucks holding dead bodies. The bodies are older, but the body count is higher.

I left the US for my Peace Corps tour in Turkey in July in 1965—a month before Watts blew up. There had been indications—“Freedom Summer” in ’63 in the South; the Kennedy assassination; a Vietnam teach-in I’d gone to at Northwestern in the fall of ’64; racial incidents in Eastern cities in that same year. But I left Peace Corps training at Portland State University in June with a pocketful of Kennedy half-dollars, a few hundred Turkish words and phrases, and the idealism of a 22 year-old convert to peace and the Peace Corps.

I came back to a radically different US in the summer of 1967. Vietnam had moved from the background to the headlines. There were daily body counts, of our dead and General Westmoreland’s precise if fabricated statistics of the North Vietnamese dead. Dr. King had linked the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam in an April speech.

I took a Peace Corps staff job and lived at DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was on our minds as we focused our work lives on the rest of the world. The country was divided. “Hard hats” were the MAGA hats of the day. I and 100,000 others marched on the Pentagon in October.

The calendar turned. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April; D. C. erupted. We were curfewed as the city burned. In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Today’s pandemic is the drumbeat of our lives, like Vietnam was in 1967. George Floyd’s killing and today’s riots feel like the spring of 1968.

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