Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee by Joel P. Rhodes

Author:Joel P. Rhodes [Rhodes, Joel P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780826273857
Google: YgWUDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2017-06-01T00:29:24+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Vietnam War

We were also always aware of the Vietnam War in our home. It was on the news every day so we saw firsthand how horrible war was. Because the horrible news was followed by such innocence, it made it all the more poignant to me growing up.

Minnesota woman born in 1964

WITH HIS AVUNCULAR air of detachment, Walter Cronkite concluded an all-too-ordinary CBS Evening News broadcast in the summer when American troop levels in the Vietnam War first exceeded 300,000 as all network newscasters of the era reliably did, by tallying the most recent numbers in television’s seemingly endless arithmetic of war. The “latest casualty figures put American battle deaths last week at 91, the South Vietnamese lost 216 killed,” the anchorman reported succinctly on this given night, “and enemy dead number 1,827, the second highest weekly figure this year.”

And that’s the way it is, August 25, 1966.

For children raised exclusively in wartime—that is, a Cold War to contain monolithic communism turned hot in the jungles of Southeast Asia—and the first to grow up with televised combat, Vietnam was predominantly a mediated experience; Cronkite’s was the voice of the conflict and those grim, nightly statistics its most recognizable feature. It is said that without Vietnam, the civil rights movement would have been what we think of as “the sixties,” but instead, as Lyndon B. Johnson “Americanized” the war in the spring of 1965, the escalating military commitment became the nation’s most pervasive, and devastating, collective undertaking. As U.S. involvement grew, Vietnam effected numerous changes in child life, comparable to the childhood impact of previous conflicts—chiefly the Civil War and World War II—whose intensity and duration likewise dominated American culture. The effects of wartime experience followed closely the development of abstract thought—preadolescents grasp local circumstances before identifying with national life—as the impact of Vietnam, similar to civil rights activism, was directly proportional to the conflict’s penetration of the child’s proximal world. In this protracted struggle which took on the look of permanence from a child’s perspective, adult lives were increasingly militarized, leaving few preadolescents totally insulated. Over the years 1965 to 1973, the vast majority of American children integrated at least some elements of the war into their own reality, most often through television imagery, war play, and, to a lesser extent, music. Parents, in turn, shaped their children’s socialization to Vietnam, while the more politicized mothers and fathers exposed them to the bitter polarization the war engendered. The fighting only became truly real to children insomuch as service in Vietnam called away older community members—neighborhood teenagers, lifeguards, church members, a teacher’s son, a babysitter’s boyfriend—or was driven home literally when families shared the hardship of separation from cousins, brothers, and fathers. All of these circumstances involved frightening absences culminating in provocative reunions and anxious days of readjustment. Such intensified Cold War anxiety during formative childhood stages and the perplexing nature of the Vietnam experience tended to shape political socialization and moral development largely independently of factual knowledge. Hence

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