Sunday, July 4, 1976. The Bicentennial., additional Labels.

Friday, July 2, 1976. Repent.

In a move surprising noone, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam was dissolved and the former Republic of South Vietnam was united with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam).

The united Communist state changed its name to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.  

Regarding Vietnam, the News ran a story on a US raid to free POWs, but with a twist I've never seen before.

The News also reported on an example of actual judicial activism in the instance of abortion.

And the 1976 election was having some interesting twists and turns.

A coup failed in Sudan, but resulted in 800 deaths.

The National Catholic Register went to press with birthday wishes for the United States. Dorothy Day's message was "Repent", a message a valid now as it was then.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 1, 1976. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum opens.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, AGH Photographs, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington DC

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 142nd Edition, 25th Amendment Watch 21st Edition. The Vietnam Rag, Red Scare Editions.

Donald Trump posted a picture of himself in uniform, purporting to be of himself at age 20, next to one of Barack Obama smoking a cigarette and wearing a panama at, when he was 18 years old.  In truth, Trump was 17 or 18 years old in the photo he posted and he's in the Ne wYork Military Academy, where he was a student from age 13 to 18.

He was sent there because his parents found him to be a bullying asshole.  At that time the thought was common that if you sent a kid to military school they came out a better person.  That was still the thought when I was young, although in the wake of the ongoing Vietnam War, that was getting hard to believe and the schools were dying off.

Put another way, military discipline hadn't turned William Calley into "a plaster saint" as Kipling would put it.

The New York Military Academy itself reflects this.  It's one of the oldest ones in the United States, but it went bankrupt in 2015.  It's been reorganized, but it's student body is a shadow of its former self.

I don't know anyone who went to a military school prep school, unless you count the mandatory high school JrROTC that my high school had before it was eliminated in the late 60s or early 70s (a net search says that was in 1968, which seems early, but which would also show how much the Vietnam War was impacting things everywhere).  I know one person who was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Nebraska as he was a difficult to handle kid. The school was probably Mount Michael, a Benedictine school which has a strong focus on science. According to that person, who later became a lawyer, it really helped him and he was grateful his parents sent him there.

If being sent to military school was more of a threat than a reality for most boys, being given the option of joining the military rather than going to jail was not  I know one person who did just that, and by  his account, it did straighten him out.  He opted for that right after the Vietnam War and part of the process on his end was to volunteer to be a Ranger so he didn't have to serve with the deadheads who were part of his regular advanced training cycle.  That may sound amusing, but when the Army was large that was more common than a person might think.  A major reason for soldiers to volunteer to become paratroopers during World War Two is so that they'd be serving with a better class of soldier.  Anyhow, in this person's case, while he knew he didn't want a military career, it did straighten him out as well.

Military school didn't serve to straighten Trump out at all.  The characteristics that caused his parents to send him to military school are still there.  A person has to wonder if he'd served in the Army if he'd be a less dismal human being.

Trump's draft card. His signature changed enormously between 1962 and when he signed it on a pornographic Epstein birthday card where it symbolized female pubic hairs.

Trump's draft classification is a bit more complicated than is generally acknowledged.  He was initially classified as 2-S, meaning he had a student deferment.  He was reclassified as 1-A after graduating from university in 1968, meaning he was fully eligible for the draft at that time, but he held that status only briefly.  In October 1968 he was reclassified as 1-Y, which meant he was only eligible in the event of a national emergency and in 1972, which was at the point the draft was really winding down, he was reclassified as 4-F.  It's the October 1968 and 1972 classifications which are the now famous bone spur classifications.

Student deferments started to become problematic during the war in 1966 and in 1969 they were hugely overhauled so that student deferments became much more problematic.  Of course, by 1969 Trump was beyond the student deferment classification anyhow.  An eligible person was very much liable for the draft at t hat time, and draft number for the years of the war are as follows:

1964 112386

1965 230991

1966 382010

1967 228263

1968 296406

1969 283586

1970 162746

1971 94092

1972 49514

1973 646

1968 was, accordingly, the high water mark of the draft, but nearly as many men were drafted in 69.

Was Trump's bone spur 1-Y nad 4-F bogus?  I have no way of knowing and neither does anyone else at this point.  I do know that bone spurs can make you ineligible to serve, but only in an odd way.  A soldiers I was good friends with in basic training was having pretty severe foot problems and went in to sick call as a result  He was diagnosed with bone spurs and given a medical discharge from the Army, although that still required him to visit his National Guard unit upon his return home.  He was almost done with AIT at the time.  When he went to the Guard and reported, they asked him how he was doing, he said fine, and they reenlisted him as prior service.  Ultimately, he went on to a career in the Army and retired as an officer.

Bone spurs don't go away on their own, but they can be asymptomatic, which is presumably what happened here.

Anyhow, Trump didn't serve in the Army.  If he had, he probably wouldn't have served in Vietnam.  Most of the troops in Vietnam were volunteers, something commonly forgotten about the wartime draft.

Anyhow, serving in the military would have done him good.  IT would have forced him into a world where money doesn't mean that much and isn't everyone's focus, and it would have forced him to deal with people who weren't rich, like himself.

Barack Obama turned 18 years old in 1979.  Conscription was over, and he was a university student.

Part of the reason that the photo of Obama was put up by Trump was the sort of hip appearance that Obama affected in the photographs.  People vary, but a lot of people really don't look the way they do professionally in their first year of college.  Trump in 1979 had already affected a young businessman look, which is what he was.

The last President with military service ws George Bush II.  His father was the last President with combat experience.  No member of the Trump family has ever served in the U.S. military.

One of the things I've really noted about the Baby Boom generation is that there's a lot of guilt felt by men who avoided the draft.  They were given a hard time about it when they were young, but defended it. At some point in the 1980s that began to change.  The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now came out in 1979, and they are definitely anti war films that a draft evader or draft protester could love.  But 1986's Platoon showed a marked shift.  It's an anti war film, but anti war.  It is pretty sympathetic to the troops and even the Army in a way that the earlier movies were not. Every Vietnam War movie since them took that point of view until We Were Soldiers which is about as rah rah Army as can be.  Somewhere in there the public view of the troops changed.

I've known a handful of men who either avoided the draft or felt like they did.  One I know avoided service in Vietnam by joining the Army Reserve, which is still military service.  He remained perfectly comfortable with his decision.  One National Guard officer I knew was upfront about that being his original reason for joining the National Guard.  He felt guilty immediately, and then ironically his Guard unit actually was one of the few that went to Vietnam.

More commonly, however, I've noticed that the men who felt they didn't go later developed almost sort of a hero worship of those who did.

Trump likes to portray himself as a hero.  He isn't.  He's really quite pathetic and his life is meaningless in al arger sense, as he's accomplished nothing of enduring value.  Barack Obama, whom I frequently disagreed with, will always retain a place in history as the nation's first black President, an accomplishment which seemed to suggest we were finally over the legacy of slavery and egregious racism.  It turned out not, and that helped bring Trump about.

Trump's casting about widely for some success to be measured by.  As his mind deteriorates he's attacking his own past, and that of others.

The man that Trump should be comparing himself to is Vlad Putin.

By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70906985

Both Putin and Trump unilaterally got their countries into wars with smaller powers that they expected to rapid win, and are losing.  Putin, this past week, started to be openly threatened by members of his own military.  Russia has a long history of supporting enormous military suffering and then suddenly rebelling.  When Russian soldiers show discontent, usually a revolution is right around the corner.  If there is one, and right now the odds of there being one are relatively high, Putin will be killed.

The United States has no tradition of military rebellion, but Trump has created the same national crisis.  Putin can't win the Ukrainian War and is losing it.  Trump can't win the Iranian war and is losing it.  The difference is that Putin has absolute control of his country, and Trump does not.  There's some suggestion that Trump is now upset with Steve Witkoff and his son in law Jared Kushner, two people whom he naively allowed to negotiate with Iran because Trump knows nothing about negotiating with foreign powers at all.  He knows that hasn't been working so now he's thrown J. D. Vance under the bus.  Both Vance and Rubio opposed the war.  Trump, whose been an asshole his whole life, is effectively requiring an opponent of the war to find a way out of it knowing tha t if he can't, that person's political career is over.

It'll be over, as Trump as an effective President will be over.  Right now, the House is slated to go Democratic in November and there's a decent chance the Senate will as well. Even Lindsey Graham appears to be in real trouble.  According to insiders Trump may want that as he likes being an asshole better than actually leading.  The irony here as been pointed out by Thomas Massie. The GOP controls everything and yet they're still running around all pissed off.

So it's time for a Red Scare.

The US has had two Red Scares, one post World War One and another post World War Two.  The second one actually made more sense than the first.  The first one resulted in illegal actions by the Federal Government.

Both of those scares were more genuine than the current one by a long measure.

The current one is trying to be ignited due to the recent success of Democratic Socialist in New York state.  Absent something really wild, New York will have a Democratic Socialist in Congress next year.  This is nothing new. There have been actual Socialist in Congress before, and right now there are seven members of Congress with Socialist affiliations.

M'eh.

Socialism is the same as communism by a long shot.  A person can be a strong believer in Democracy and, while it is regarded it its real form as antithetical to Christianity by Catholics (who also have strong criticism of Capitalism), there are Christian socialist.    Usually American socialism is so watered down economically that it's capitalism, but the supposed socialist supports child care or something.  Pretty tepid.

The US has had three Presidents whom you could accuse, or celebrate depending upon your views, who advocated or caused to be enacted socialist programs.  Theodore Roosevelt was the first, but it came in his last unsuccessful run when he advocated for what ultimately became Social Security and also for government regulation of large corporations as public utilities.  His cousin Franklin had a lot of socialistic programs, and enacted Social Security, although much of what he did was temporary.  Harry Truman advocated for national health care, but then so did Richard Nixon.  I guess that could bring us up to five, with the final entry, Donald Trump.

In some of his economic policies Trump is an outright Socialist.  He's advocated for government ownership of shares of companies and for seizing foreign oil as if the US owned it.  He frequently sees things as if the US is one big corporation and he's the dictatorial CEO.

That's Socialism.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 141st Edition, 25th Amendment Watch 20th Edition:. Sure, we lost a war to Iran, and the war in Lebanon continues on, and the $13 Rhino Lining treatment of the Reflecting Pool is coming up, but King Donny got a shiny new toy!

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 25th Amendment Watch List, Aircraft, Donald Trump, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, This is why we can't have nice things, Transportation, Zeitgeist

Sunday, June 20, 1976. Departures.

The United States completed its withdrawal of troops from Thailand and closed the last military installations that it maintained there.  Thailand had played a major role in the U.S. air campaign during the Vietnam War.

The United States evacuated Americans and Westerners from Beirut by sea.

Last edition:

Tuesday, June 8, 1976. The last primaries of the 1976 season.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, 1976 Election, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan

Movies in History. Platoon Leader

I keep finding out that there are Vietnam War movies I've never seen.  That's probably because a lot of them aren't that good and are therefore obscure.  Still, with a movie as bad as The Green Berets being well known, you'd think you'd have heard of them all.

This one was on cable, and I'd never heard of it, so I watched it.

It's pretty bad.

Filmed in 1988, it's apparently based on an actual memoir, but it sort of comes across as an effort to film something like Platoon, but where all the Americans are admirable and on a much smaller budget.

The basic plot follows a young officer as he tried to gain the trust of his men, a theme that's been filmed a zillion times.  In this instance, the young lieutenant is assigned to an impossibly badly designed very tiny defense position out in the bush, whose only purpose is to guard a nearby village.

From the outpost, he leads patrols.  He's always steadfast.  Three career NCOs help him, the distrusting long time sergeant, the sympathetic Christian African American sergeant, and the battle hardened corporal.  Back somewhere is his commanding officer, a rather old and crusty major.  Officers occasionally pop in to check on the post.  Pretty much 100% of the characters are cartoons.  Eventually there's a climatic battle. . . like Platoon.

In terms of material details, the film isn't horrible, but like Platoon it features a CAR 15 in the hands of an NCO.  Platoon seems to have created the myth that this was common.  The same NCO carriers a very large frame revolver, which actually isn't impossible.  All of the enemy combatants seem to be NVA regulars for some reason, although they're indicated to be VC regulars, which doesn't make any sense.

Not really worth watching.

At last, the Trump's have a chance to erase the stain of no service.

Reporter: How long are you willing to wait for a response from Iran?

Trump: Don’t rush me. We were in Vietnam for 18 years.

From a press conference yesterday.

I must ask who is "we"?  Trump wasn't in Vietnam for 18 years. . 18 months, or shoot,. 18 hours.  

No Trump has served in any U.S. war. . . ever.  While there are reasons that explain it, Trump's grandfather was regarded as a draft evader in his native Germany and had to leave as a result, upon returning home after having made his initial fortune in lodging and prostitution.

Well, at last, it appears this historical stain can be addressed.

The White House posted this as a pin for "no pannicans".  People who really trust in Trump.

And who could trust more in the demented octogenarian than members of the Trump family itself.  This must be the Designated Insignia for a 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, a la Spanish American War, unit for Trump's new forever wars.

Oh, just imagine the glory.  Don Jr. and Barron can be the first off the Blackhawk in Iran, or Cuba, and finally be under fire.  Sure, some of them may get blown away, just like Quentin Roosevelt in World War One, but they will have given their lives for the thing that matters most to Donald Trump, that being Donald Trump.  

Not that an entire unit can be filled up with just Trumps.  There's a lot of them, but not that many.  Just like the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, recruiting can occur quickly and the unit can be filled up with rich swells and MAGAs.  Elon Musk missed his mandatory military service in his native South Africa. . .well here's his chance.  Name appear on the Epstein lists. . .well here's the chance to blot that out.  Maybe even the prince formerly known as Andrew can join.

And Bebos. . . there's a spot for you!  

And of course all the smaller MAGAs can go.  No reason single men like Chuck Gray and Reid Rasner can't show their undying love of the leader.  And some with military experience can finally prove their mettle in the new Trumpian world.  After all, Theodore Roosevelt left his position in the Department of the Navy to fight in Cuba. . . there's no reason that J.D. Vance can't resume his military career. And Marco Rubio might get his chance to lead a charge up San Juan Hill.

And triumphal arch will at last serve a purpose.  The dead bodies of the Trump Riders can be dumped into the hollow core of the monstrosity.  A fitting purpose for it.

"We can't just quit now". Yes, we can.

The argument was predictable, so its no surprise.  Republican supporters of Mad King Donald are arguing that, well, sure it might have been a big whopping mistake, but we can't quit now.

Oh yes we can.

We've done it before.

We did that in Vietnam after seventeen years of effort and 50,000 dead.  Heck, we left and felt good about leaving, blaming our embarrassing departure on the South Vietnamese, whom supposedly we were there to help.

Mad King Donny did that with Afghanistan, actually surrendering to the Taliban and leaving the mess for his successor Joe Biden to handle.  To Trumpites everything is always Joe Biden's fault, but the abandonment of the Afghanis was Donny's fault.  

So he has experience in losing wars and pulling out already.

We went into this war because Israel basically duped Donny into it.  Knowing that Donny was of weak and declining mind, they convinced him that an Israeli strategic goal was an American one, as they couldn't achieve it on their own.  The entire concept was lame in the extreme.  We'd bomb Iran for two or three days, murder the leadership of the Islamic Republic, and suddenly everyone in Iran, exercising their Second Amendment Rights, would rise up and turn the country into a liberal democracy, complete with a representative government that loved us, and proper voter identification.

It was a stupid idea.

The Iranians are a captive people, but they aren't armed the way we are, and for that matter, if the Trump administration is any guide, even freedom loving. AR 15 toting, patriots will roll over like a dog when the government tells them to, even accepting that, well, guns are bad as King Donny said so.  Sparking a revolution in a foreign country by bombing the crap out of it won't achieve that goal.  Indeed, if the Germans, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, etc., are any example, bombing a civilian population causes support for the government.  At some point, some person whom wanted freedom is burying a child and hates your guts.

Not that Trump could appreciate this.  Trumps haven't served in the military the entire time they've been in the US.  Heck, the founder of the Trump dynasty in the US was regarded as a draft dodger in the German state he was from, although that can be debated (he was, after all, busy in the US serving food and running a house of prostitution).

So, now we have the Iranians proposing terms to us.

In order to "win" this war we'll have to seize the country.  Given the population of Iran, that will mean calling up the National Guard and occupying the country for at least a decade.  My guess is that we'd sustain at least 20,000 dead, not as much as Vietnam, but a lot more than any war we've fought since Vietnam.

Let's not.

Chances are pretty good that King Donald is going to accept whatever terms the Iranians dictate to the US and call it a victory.  It's a bit of an American tradition, after all.  The British and the Canadians beat the crap out of the US in the War of 1812 and we still pretend that we won it, when in fact the British dictated terms to us.  We won the Mexican War but only by forming our own Mexican body to surrender to us, legitimate Mexican authorities never did.  We declared victory in the Philippine Insurrection when the war became too unpopular to continue to fight, through which we dictated to the Filipinos that they'd have to go independent, just like they were fighting to be.  We went into Mexico in the Mexican Border War and then came back out, tail between our legs.  We flat out lost the Vietnam War but got out before everything folded up and then blamed it all on the South Vietnamese.

And of course, as noted, we surrendered to the Taliban.

Trump is going to Congress and asking for $200B to fight this war.  Just say no, Congress.  Trump will then declare victory and claim that we wiped out Iranian nuclear material, which we claimed to have earlier wiped out, and go home.  

This problem can be left for the adults.

If this war is to go on, one modest proposal.  The Trump family ought to serve in it.  Every single one under age 55. And in combat roles.  The Trump family head of household can make that happen.  And Trump lovers, like Chuck Gray, who are under 55 should sign up and go.  To not do so would be hypocritical.

Shoot, it would make this a rich man's war, and a poor man's fight, if that didn't happen.

But, the better course, just stop.  Chances are that's exactly what we're going to do anyhow.

Movies In History: The Siege of Firebase Gloria.

This movie is flat out bad.

Everyone once in awhile I think I've seen every Vietnam War movie there is, but then I remember there's always at least one more out there.  This was one of them.

This movie features a Marine long range patrol that runs into some early horrors just as the Tet Offensive commences. At that point, they ride a helicopter, stricken by gunfire, into  Firebase Gloria.  

Firebase Gloria is way out in the middle of nowhere and virtually forgotten. It's commander is a drug addled pornography addict whom the Marines frag right off.  The Marine Sergeant Major, played by R. Lee Ermey, in charge of the patrol (no SMG would be in charge of a patrol) takes command of the Army base, somewhat assisted by an improbably old Army 1st Sergeant, and they resist wave after wave of Viet Cong attack.

There's more to it than that, but this film is just really bad.

In material details, it's basically correct, although both of the principal marines wear a jungle fatigue pattern uniform in the French Lizard pattern.  That's not impossible, it's just odd.

Split Screen

This past week gave us a tragedy which shows how divided, by way of the country's reaction to it, the United States really is.  Oddly, it gives me a little hope that we're now at the point where we're going to start the process of overcoming it as well.

I'm writing, of course, about ICE agent Jonathan Ross's killing of immigration protester Renee Nicole Good.

Body cam footage of Renee Nicole Good seconds before she was shot by ICE Officer Jonathan Ross, a ten year veteran of ICE.  Prior to ICE, he served with the U.S. Border Patrol from 2007 until 2015, and before that he served in Iraq in the Indiana National Guard.  Contrary, therefore, to my suspicions, he wasn't a new or green officer.

Or, at least, I'm writing about it, somewhat.  What I'm more particularly writing about is the reaction to the killing and the instant polarization surrounding it.

Let's start with the killing itself and what we actually know if it.  

Good was killed by Ross on January 7, 2026, a few days ago.  ICE was operating in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a quite liberal Minnesota city in which ICE was undoubtedly wholly unwelcome.  Donald Trump has used ice in various municipalities, but he's sent it into liberal bastions as what may be regarded as a sort of taunt.  ICE, moreover, has acted like a pack of Brownshirts everywhere it's gone.  Not only as militarized police, but as Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers really, for Trump.

Good was there as a protestor, and she was blocking their way with her car.  To the extent we know much about her, she was a classic Minneapolis lefty.  Apparently originally from Colorado, she was graduate from Old Dominion with an English degree, she was a poet.  She had a daughter who was 15 years of age and sons who were 12 and 6. While not alway so identified, she presently identified as a lesbian and was "married" to another woman.   

On January 7, what was known to Ross was none of this at all, other than that she was blocking the road.  Another ICE officer went to confront her in the typical heavy handed ICE fashion, a fashion that no trained municipal force, and I've worked a lot with municipal police forces, would have used.  A trained municipal force would have, rather, simply walked up and said, "ma'am would you move your car?"  Based on her last words, she would have.

ICE, however, does't operate that way.  Like SA in German streets in the early 30s, or, if you prefer, like strikebreakers at Ludlow in 1914, they hit or strike first and ask questions later, having been given license to do just that. 

Colorado National Guard, many just newly recruited, breaking up a crowd with the flats of their sabers, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

This always leads to the loss of innocent life sooner or later.  Good had no legal right to block ICE, but what she was doing is a time honored, and mild, form of protest.  

Good appears to have turned her car wheel to the right, in compliance with ICE's wishes, but not in compliance with being drug out of her car, which an ICE agent was stupidly, but typically, trying to do.  I wouldn't have done that either, and frankly I have actually been in a vehicle, by accident, at the wheel, in the midst of a huge urban protest.  I wouldn't have gotten out my truck in that for anyone, including the police.¹  Ross, inexplicably, got in front of her car.  He drew his sidearm, and as she moved forward, armed as he was with a 9mm, a fine police weapon, he shot her three times, exhibiting the training that's carried over from the Armed Forces where the anemic 9mm is a known complete dud, necessitating multiple shots to kill.²   As a police weapons, supplaning the old .38 revolver round, which doesn't kill either, it was perfectly adequate.

Shot three times, she died, probably instantly.

There's a lot to break down here. ³ 

The thing, however, it reminds me of, is Kent State, in 1970.

Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.

Which might give us a slight bit of hope.

For most Americans today Kent State doesn't mean anything at all, or if it does, that's because they're a student of history.  For some of us yet, however, Kent State is both a prescient moment in history, and a personal memory.

I was only seven years old or so when Kent State happened.  I feel like I can remember it, but that may be a false memory.  In 1970 we had a television and my father and mother watched the news every night.  The television, which we had only had for two years, was by that time located in the kitchen, moved from the living room in our 1958 vintage house which was not designed to house a TV.  It seems to me that I can recall this event from them, but I might not be able to.   Having said that, I can remember seeing some of the rioting of the 1960s on television, and seeing Jimi Hendrix on the news on the last morning of Woodstock, so my memory goes back to my early years.

Kent State was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War and in the ushering in of the liberal 1970s.

The real lynchpin in the decline of American support of the Vietnam War was the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The American military reacted to the Tet Offensive brilliantly and completely crushed the North Vietnamese effort.  NVA and VC gains were temporary and despoiled by atrocity.   Only in Hue did the NVA hang on, and to their everlasting discredit by their horrific actions against the civilian population there, which should disqualify the current regime in Vietnam from evcen existing.  But in spite of that, the American public was shocked and horrified, feeling, really, betrayed by promises and assurances broken.

Much like some are now about the end of "forever wars" when the regime that promised the end to them kills Venezuelans for some reason, and then entertains oil executives in the White House shortly thereafter, while also acting as Putin's agent, for one reason or another, in making claims against a NATO Ally.

1968 saw the American public abandon support for the war in Vietnam, but not for the American soldier. A new Republican President came in promising to end the war with a secret plan.  Richard Nixon was going to make things better in some vague, undescribed, way.

The war hung on and 1970 arrived.  By that point college campuses were solidly opposed to the war.  The working class, in contrast, remained behind it, sort of, with it supplying the troops.  University students who didn't want to serve in Vietnam found ways towards deferrements, with people like Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, finding ways not to serve. Working class people, on the other hand, largely served, and in many instances joined the National Guard and ARmy Reserve, something that rich people like Donald Trump would not condescend to do.

This was the situation in Kent, Ohio, in 1970.  Often missed in the analysis of the terrible events that happened there, the students at the university were neither serving in Vietnam, or serving in the National Guard.  Those in the Ohio National Guard were from the town.  Blue collar men who didn't go to college, and because they were in the Guard, were not in Vietnam.  They were likely in the Guard as they didn't want to go to Vietnam, although that wouldn't univerally work for everyone who joined the Guard, contrary to what's commonly imagined.⁴

The Cold War National Guard was trained for the Cold War, not riot patrol, and in 1970 it would have had a lot of older soldiers in it who had served in World War Two and Korea.  Even when I joined the Guard a little over decade later we still had one soldier who had served in World War Two, and a lot who had served in Korea.  Soldiers do not make very good policemen as they aren't trained to be police and are trained to react to a threat with aggression.

Perhaps for that reason, it's always surprised anyone familiar with this role of the Guard that the Guardsmen at Kent State had been issued ammunition  That alone would have predisposed them to believing that they were going to need it.  What occurred such that they used it has never been clear, and there are of course conspiracy theories associated with it.  What's clear is that rocks were thrown and shooting started.  Allison Krause, age 19, an honors college student and anti-war activist,  Jeffrey Miller, age 20, a psychology student who was participating in the protest,  Sandra Scheuer, age 20, a speech and hearing therapy student who was walking to class, and William Schroeder, 19, a psychology student and ROTC member, also walking to class, were all killed by National Guard bullets.

It's the reaction to the event that causes our long winded recollection of it here.

In 1970 Americans were still divided over the Vietnam War, but the mass of American people had pulled away from strongly supporting it. The 1968 Tet Offensive had been an American tactical victory and a NVA disaster, but the public was so shocked it no longer supported the war or trusted the Government.  In the 1968 Election the Democrats paid the price and Republican Richard Nixon, with a "secret" plan to end the war came into power.

If Nixon ever had a "secret" plan to end the war, we don't know what it was, but it quickly became pretty unmanageable for him.  His basic strategy seems to have been to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, and let them fail, which he ultimately did, but in trying to get breathing room to do that he ended up having to occasionally expand the war or the war's violence. The Kent State protests were over the invasion of Cambodia, which had just occurred.

Young college bound people had turned against the war.  Middle Americans, however, were hoping in Nixon to find a way out.  Kent State turned a lot of those people against the war as well.  Americans moved to the left.  By 1972  and 1973 they'd moved substantially to the left.  The collapse of the Nixon Administration with Watergate brought a wholescale distrust of the Republican Party that had come in to power as it was perceived that the Democrats had no solution to the war.

Sort of like Donald Trump and the GOP coming in as it was perceived that Biden was senile and Harris a bad candidate, and they were all responsible for COVID era inflation. . . 

The shift was massive.  Large elements of the American population went from weakly opposing the war to strongly opposing it, and strongly backing an increasingly left wing Democratic Party. The military, both active and reserve, was held in open disdain.  Law enforcement also was.  The active duty military would not recover its reputation for well over a decade and the Guard for two decades. Contempt for policemen remained widespread into the 1980s.

On the other side, however, right wing Americans backed cracking down on protestors and what happened at Kent State, regarding the use of arms as justified.  I can remember this still being discussed in the 1980s.  The right's hard drift in this directly helped shit it out of politics for the rest of the 1970s.  The pre 1973 Republican Party never fully recovered and in order to come back into power in 1980 the Republican Party had to seduce Southern Democrats who were hardcore right wing populists, thinking that they could control them.  The entire event went a long ways towards giving us the modern Democratic and Republican  Parties.

We are starting to see history rhyming right now.

Donald Trump was elected in no small part because most Americans eligible to vote, don't.  He's massively unpopular with large elements of the American public.  While his supporters do not like to acknowledge it, and some cannot believe it, the majority of Americans do not like or support him.  Trump himself, who is not a smart man, and whose been coddled by wealth his entire life, can't grasp why he isn't loved.

But there is no doubt that the Democrats helped bring his rise about due to ignoring many issues that we've referenced here for years.  Immigration is certainly one of them.  In reality, even though nobody wants to portray it this way except for those on the Republican hard right, most Americans have had enough of largescale immigration.  Frankly, most Americans would like to see the country have a smaller population than it does.  It's not just illegal immigrant that upsets people, it's immigration.

People wanted something done about that, but they did not want the Sturmabteilung in their cities, just as people wanted an end to the Vietnam War, but didn't want to bomb Hanoi and invade Cambodia to get there, and they didn't want National Guardsmen killing college kids on campus.  In short order, they'd make it pretty clear that they didn't want a President who covered up a paranoid breakin, although they did return him to office in 1972.

We're seeing the same thing now.

People don't want militarized police at all, and they don't want masked policemen patrolling their cities dragging people out of cars. They don't want men who have been trained as part of ICE special units shooting women in the street.  No amount of excuses as to why this occurred are going to matter at all.  Middle American started shifting this past week, which it already was doing.

The right in turn is making the classic mistake on doubling down on the shooting, trying to justify it.  The officer had PTSD, we are told in which case he shouldn't have been there and in which case it means, implicitly, if he had fully had his faculties he wouldn't have shot.  The shooting was justified as it wouldn't have occurred if she wasn't there protesting, which is true but is true about every government act of violence wherever it occurs, from Tehran to Kent State.  The film shows he was justified, just as, we were told at the time, the film at Kent State, which is in fact much more dramatic, shows that the Guard shooting was justified.  No, it shows the opposite.  

And finally, and not too surprisingly in our current era, there's the character attacks, which nobody who has participated in this discussion here has engaged in.  Renee Nicole Good was a lesbian flake.  She was woke. Well, she was a lesbian and she may have been a flake, but that doesn't mean, as is implied by those statements, that it was okay to kill her.

Nixon's managed to get elected, and handily, in 1972.  Part of the reason for that is that the Democrats, as they tend to do, just flat out botched the election.  They botched the election of 1968, and they did it again in 1972, although their 1972 candidate was better than 1968.  Had they run from the center, Nixon may well have lost.  It was all unraveling already however, and by 1973 he'd bring himself down in scandal.

Before he finally resigned, those around him were extremely concerned by his mental state.  He was drinking heavily and impairing himself accordingly.  Trump's becoming impaired quite rapidly by dementia.

Trump is unraveling, politically as well as mentally, right now.  Americans are already upset by his continual weirdness, and a man elected on the promise of no more wars seems really eager to start them, while openly admiring some of the worst foreign powers that exist.  Sending Guardsmen into the streets, as he has done, has been no more popular in 2026 than it was in 1970, and the same thing is beginning to occur. A National Guard that worked hard to avoid the errors of the 1960s and recover its reputation is finding it besmirched, and ironically by one of the very people who didn't serve in the 1960s.  ICE and the Border Patrol, which most Americans had no opinion on before 2025, are regarded, and rightly, with suspicion.  Now they're going to be disdained.

If there's any hope in any of this, it's this.  The country did get over the events of the 60s and 70s and start to recover, although it would really take into the mid 1980s to do it.  Looking back, almost everyone agrees that both sides were too extreme at the time.  Part of the reaction in 1970s was that Americans didn't want a government that would kill American kids, and after the completion of the Nixon regime it didn't want one that foreign kids either.  We're probably headed in the same direction.

Footnotes:

1. In my case I happened to accidentally drive right into the middle of a Nation of Islam protest on Martin Luther King Blvd in Denver.  It was large and I was the only person of my demographic on the street, and was driving a pickup truck with Wyoming plates at that.

I'll say, however, that the protestors were very gracious.  I could see them looking at me, but as Wyomingites often find, I was protected in part by my cluelessness.

2.  People hate it when this is stated, but the 9mm is a worthless military round.  

A military sidearm serves one of two purposes, use or ceremony.  If its to be used, it actually should stop the opponent immediately, keeping in mind that an armed combatant in war is a much different target than those the police normally face.  Most of the time when a policemen uses a firearm a single bullet from a light weapon will stop the opponent who is much less motivated than a soldier in war.

For that matter, in most trained police forces the first resort anymore is to a taser, not a sidearm.

9mms were a Continental European round in armies which at first used pistols as sort of a gentleman's thing.  Officers carried them, and rarely used them. By World War One that had changed, but the 9mm had set in.  By World War Two any soldier who had the option to carry a .45 ACP rather than a 9mm did, which is why you see British Airborne so frequently armed with M1911s.

The 9mm hung on, however, and by the 1980s those armies used them had gone to the multiple shot, "double tap" technique, acknowledging its deficiencies.  The round spread to the U.S. at the instance of NATO which wanted the service to play nice on this topic.

3.  Ross wasn't green, so that doesn't explain what occurred.  What might, however, is that he's seen too much service, quite frankly.

4.  For much of the Vietnam War the National Guard was hard to get into.  

The history of this isn't very well remembered.  The Vietnam War was a big war, for the U.S, from 1965 until 1972.  Contrary to what's popularly imagined, the majority of soldiers who served in Vietnam were volunteers, which is in fact somewhat complicated by the fact that people facing conscription often volunteered prior to being drafted.  Conscription itself had been in place since about 1948, after briefly terminating after World War Two.  Setting that aside, the U.S. had conscription pretty continually since 1940.  Most men expected to be conscripted form 1940 forward and therefore, for that reason, they planned on military service as an aspect of their immediate post high school life.  Those going to college and university obtained deferrements, up until the late Vietnam War period, which were just that, deferrements.  They entered the service after they were done with university, which was the case for my father and two of my local uncles.  Usually, although not always, that meant that they entered the service as officers and chose their branches, none of which was the case for men who were simply conscripted.  Added to that, as conscripts only served two years, the service often assigned them to Reserve units following their active duty service, which was the case for one of my uncles.  Indeed, men who were part of ROTC units often found that they were assigned to hometown Reserve units rather than active duty units, which was often to their frustration as it mean six years of Reserve duty rathe rather than two years of active duty.

As a lot of working class men who didn't intend to go to college didn't want to do two years away from home and disrupt their post high school lives, the Guard and Reserve were already popular options before the Vietnam War.  That meant that it was nowhere near the case that men who were in the Guard were avoiding Vietnam.  At the time a hitch in the Guard for an enlisted man was at least four years (it might have been six).  Therefore, men who joined the National Guard as late as 1965 and prior to the Marines being deployed at Da Nang were still in the Guard in 1969.  The war itself did not really start being unpopular until 1967 meaning that somebody joining the  Guard in 1967 was still it at least until 1971.  And the war would have had no impact on retention as the service was never going to call up anyone who had completed Reserve or Guard duty.

This does not mean that nobody joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam.  I know at least one person who in fact did just that.  But getting into the Guard was hard.  Getting into the Reserve also was, although I know one person who joined the Reserve in order to avoid going to Vietnam.

People who really wanted to avoid joining the service, however, were better off finding a doctor who would qualify them as medically unfit, or, up until the end when conscription deferrements changed, staying in university.

Finally, contrary to what people imagine, some Guardsmen in fact served in Vietnam.  Not many, but as the war went on some Guard units were called up and deployed to the war.

Related Threads:

In Memoriam. Renee Nicole Good.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Homicide, In Memoriam, police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Zeitgeist

Additional Labels:

Split Screen, additional labels.

Monday, September 29, 1975. Driving 55.

Due to a failure on the part of the legislature to address the enabling act, Wyoming Attorney General Frank Mendicino opined that the 55 mph speed limit remained in effect.

Mendicino was only five years out of the UW's law school at the time.

Oops.

The Chicago Tribune abandoned its standard practice of phonetic spelling of certain common words. 

Kissinger sent a memo to President Ford.

September 29, 1975

MEMORANDUM FOR: THE PRESIDENT

FROM: HENRY A. KISSINGER

SUBJECT: Information Items

CIA Summary: Vietnam After the Fall: Nearly five months after the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam remains under a form of martial law in which North Vietnamese military personalities make all day-to-day political, administrative, and economic directives. The primary authority, however, appears to be Pham Hung, fourth-ranking member of the North Vietnamese Politburo, who is in charge of party and military affairs in the South. The South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government, which ostensibly serves as a national government, has no meaningful authority over either Pham Hung or the military management committee. Immediately after the take-over, the communists moved to offset the lack of capable and trustworthy administrators by importing large numbers of officials from the North. Many of these appear to have been former southerners who had come north at the time of the 1954 Geneva accords.

Communist policies to date have been aimed primarily at restoring order and the economy. The communists early adopted a relatively conciliatory approach in order to mobilize support. But given the long and bitter nature of the conflict and the abundance of firearms in the country, they are now admitting to opposition from a variety of sources, including former government soldiers, religious sects, and ethnic minorities in the highlands. The continued presence of 18 of the 20 North Vietnamese divisions in the south attests to the fact that security remains a problem. The economy is probably far more worrisome. The communists admit that it is still in bad shape. Low production and high unemployment have reduced the level of living throughout the country. Considerable help from Hanoi’s foreign allies will be required to get the economy on its feet. So far the communists have not attempted to make fundamental or sweeping changes in the South’s economic structure and they are depending heavily on private enterprises to revive the economy.

Vietnamese officials, both North and South, proclaim formal reunification as their foremost objective. At the same time, they make it clear that the process will be gradual, following progress in developing an acceptable communist administrative structure and in restoring order and economic stability. Although the communists are maintaining the fiction of an independent South Vietnamese state, there is no question that Vietnam is now one country with one policy.

Casey Stengel died at age 85.

Last edition:

Friday, September 26, 1975. Petroleum and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, 1975 at the movies, 94th Congress, Gerald Ford, inflation, Movies, Petroleum, The Great Inflation