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My Montclair High View of the Vietnam War
Sometimes I imagine telling my grandsons about The War. Of course, there have been many others since then, sad to say. But when I was in high school, The War meant only one thing to me: Vietnam.
It wasn’t new to us at high school age, in 1965. Back in 1960 the Viet Cong formed, and from then onward, “current events” for elementary school and junior high involved clipping out long articles from the front and inside pages of the newspapers: the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, both of which, I think, arrived on our driveway early in the mornings in Montclair.
But 1963 was when it became a nightmare: Buddhist monks drenching themselves with gasoline and lighting themselves on fire, as a “nonviolent” protest against the war. The murder of Vietnam’s president, and a few weeks later, the murder of our own, JFK. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, and in March 1965, the first U.S. Marines with boots on Vietnamese soil.
Grade 8 social studies teacher Miss Gero, at Mount Hebron, tried to teach about the war open-mindedly. I recall a red-covered thick paper brochure on Communism that laid out the high principles supposedly guiding that movement. And at the same time, the horror stories of life in a very different culture flooded the news — and I believe now, were tinged with the anti-Asian sentiment that some Americans…
