All the MSM’s 1968 retrospectives this year were inevitable. That’s what the news media does. It fills a hole, or time, when nothing else is available, or interesting enough to the editors, with retrospectives, anniversaries, etc. And 1968 was a truly horrific year. Not just the TET offensive, which was worrisome from my perspective in Infantry OCS, because we knew we were going. Dr. King’s murder didn’t surprise me, though it was sad. I had worried that it might happen. RFK’s murder was a surprise, coming right around the time we graduated in June. Being in the Army made the experience of the year altogether different from the usual stuff the writers will produce in the retrospectives. Few of them serve.
The black riots, for instance. They weren’t surprising by then, but you still had to wonder why they occurred after emancipation from segregation, rather than before. Lots of Army units in the States were training to handle the riots, if necessary. In the Sixth Cav, that fall, we trained to do it not with force, but with a menacing show. Only after the show–which included marching in column, changing to a line and then, after an elaborate fixing of bayonets, slowly advancing–were we to go to lobbing tear gas canisters. Stabbing people was not on the menu, or bullets, though our magazines were full. We were regular Army, not the draft-dodger haven that was the National Guard in those days, which would shoot up Kent State two years later.
What I remember most about our training was that it emphasized that we must leave the mob an exit route. This was not Red China, or Mexico City. The idea was to disperse them, not trap and hurt them. Luckily, we never had to do it for real. In that sense, for me, 1968 was a piece of cake.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 