The “Riot” at the Pentagon was front page news across the country, over 15,000 marchers were arrested, and most of them were held over night at Griffith Stadium where the Washington Senators played at the time. The government justified its actions by asserting that the First Amendment did not protect us since such demonstrations were illegal acts. At first, most of us in the anti-war movement thought that the over reaction by the Administration’s thugs would backfire against them, there were a series of supporting demonstrations across the country in the weeks ahead, but many of them were just as ruthlessly suppressed. Many colleges closed down for the remainder of the school year. My friends in the Coalition experienced severe paranoia that spring. Suddenly there were rumors that we were all under surveillance by the FBI-everybody was sure the phones were tapped-so we ran down the street to use the pay phone at the Shell Station on the corner. I came in one day and found them in a panic because the Government was about to suspend the Bill of Rights and round up all peace activists. I tried not to give in to my fears, much less the fears of others and I refused to listen all that suspicion, years later I learned that I shouldn’t have been so blasé: two of the Coalition’s inner circle, including the group’s secretary, were paid informants for the FBI; they had files on all of us.
By the late spring of 1967 it was obvious to any fool that the country was badly split over the war with neither side about to give an inch. That path to peace and justice I believed we had been turned away from was going to be much harder to get back on than I had ever thought, but I still believed that we were going to get back there. The longer the war drug on, the higher the casualty lists grew, the more the war touched the sons of the small towns and the suburbs, the more the public grew disillusioned. It would take time, but Johnson and Nixon could not fight a two front war, one against the people of Vietnam and another one in America against their own people. I told my friends at the Coalition that we must not give in to our fears and paranoia if we wanted to triumph in the end. Then in June, we learned that our worst fears were nothing compared to reality and that we would never be able to find our way back to that upward path we had once followed with such great hopes.
Travis Smith: A lot of us had fooled ourselves into thinking that the war was almost over in March 1966; we had just about wiped out the NVA and VC in Binh Dinh province and had run the survivors all the way to the Cambodian border. We were patrolling Highway 19 without seeing hide or hair of the enemy. Some guys were talking about what they were going to do for Christmas back home. Sgt. O'Mara told them to shut the hell up because nothing happens until it happens and until then keep your mind on the job you were doing in the here and now. He was right on the mark, the Commies came right back as nasty as they ever were. They called it the Great Spring Offensive.
With the North Vietnamese counterattacking like they did, morale went down the toilet. The most awful thing about it was the way Charlie was able to infiltrate areas we had cleared and lie low until it was time to strike. Suddenly there was no front; they were coming at us from every direction. The Cong were able to hide in villages, towns, farms or just blend in with all those damn refugees that were always on the roads. The most galling part was the fact that you couldn’t tell the enemy from the people you supposedly were there to save and most of the good people of South Vietnam didn’t give a shit that you were there put’n your ass on the line for them. Twenty-two guys in the 223 Battalion were blown up in their barracks when the ammo dump at An Khe was taken out by a demolition team that got inside the perimeter by pretending to be beggars going through the garbage pile. We knew the locals had to be in on what was going on and we didn’t forget it. All Vietnamese were potential enemies and were to be treated as such, that’s what every cherry should have been told on his first day in country. It never bothered me to see a village burned to the ground; that meant there was one less place for the Cong to hide. Scorch the earth, it worked for the Russians against the Nazis. Some terrible things went on, but what we did wasn’t half as bad as what the North Vietnamese did to their own people, they found mass graves of civilians in every area we liberated. A lot of fools back home tried to blame American soldiers for what happened at Dak To and Khe Sanh and things like that, but it’s a damn lie
These developments only accelerated the rate of deployment of American troops; the airliners were landing almost around the clock at Da Nang and Cam Ranh by the summer of ‘66. Talk about green soldiers, it looked like they had recruited exclusively from every high school in the country, and they hadn’t restricted themselves just to the senior class. Despite the cutbacks in college deferments we didn’t see many frat boys walking patrol in the bush. I was only a couple of years older than most of those kids, but they looked at me like I was their grandfather. We got a lot of them as replacements in my unit-silent, intimidated kids, with nothing more than peach fuzz on their faces. Almost all of them had been swept up in the draft, the Army wasn’t picky when they had huge quotas to fill over night, as long as the recruit appeared able bodied and could sign his name. One of those cherries, named Ernie Spivik, wound up in my rifle team and his story was typical of most of them. He was from just outside Evanston, Indiana and both of his parents were drunks; just a high school dropout, with no prospects and desperate to get the hell out of small town Indiana. So he walked into the recruiter’s office, filled out the papers, passed the physical, got a bartender from the road house across the street to forge his father’s name (for a $5.00 fee), and he was wearing green.