Don't Drop Anchor Here (Part III) - Sex Stories

Don't Drop Anchor Here (Part III)

Vietnam June 1970: The War There were now over 475,000 USA personnel in South Vietnam supporting a massive war effort. The number had peaked at almost 550,000 in April of 1969. But then President Nixon had started a slow un-declared withdrawal. The public mood had turned sharply against the war. In spite this change in public sentiment towards the war, it had expanded and then expanded some more. But now a change was happening. Government debt and the political elite’s leadership spirits were both in a shambles. People were still talking about the My Lai massacre that had occurred in November of ’69. Unknown to Rob or Ronnie a man named Henry Kissinger had begun secret peace talks with North Vietnam in February of 1970. The secret meetings took place in Paris. Notwithstanding these meetings the war carried on and men kept dying. In late April of 1970 the war was expanded into Cambodia to clear out enemy “sanctuaries”. On the 4 th of May 1970, the anti-war anger in America had exploded when four young students were shot in cold blood on the campus of Kent State University. The Ohio campus and much of the country was still in blood-dripped shock at the death of young American protesters on their own soil at the hands of their own soldiers. By the middle of 1970 a steadily growing majority of Americans considered the US military involvement in Vietnam to be a huge mistake. This depth of this “mistake” would be laid bare decades later by the then head of American war planning, ...

... former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, when he tried to cleanse his soul in a self-critique. Gritty and heroic frontline war reporting by the media had played a big part in changing the public’s mood. Horrific images of the war had seared American eyeballs almost nightly. Never before had unvarnished images of such a brutal war been transmitted almost instantly to the people huddled in front of their home-fires like this. A young girl screaming and running while dripping in flaps of skin and Napalm was an image that would still resonate even decades later. This is also true of the up-close execution of an “alleged” spy with a pistol to his head and his brains spilling out the other side. These images played a huge role in altering America’s view of the war. NBC’s Frank McGee had made an open admission during the news broadcast in 1969 that “the war is all but lost”. Significantly Martin Luther King had come out against the war, as had many prominent leaders of the women’s movement. Counter-culture artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell provided the music to cheer the protesters on. The most popular “anti-war” anthem is actually a song few people outside the generation and outside the anti-war movement will even remember decades down the road. This song “The Fish Cheer” by a band named “Country Joe and the Fish” was far too radical to get radio play on conventional radio or “Top 40” stations at the time. The “Fish” song was recorded in 1965 in Berkeley, ...