LIFE The Vietnam Wars: Over 400 Mouthwatering, Made-with-Love Recipes by The Editors of Southern Living

Author:The Editors of Southern Living
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THEI
Published: 2016-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

COMING HOME

BILL RAY/LIFE

“NO ONE SAID THANK YOU”—this was a phenomenon commonly reported by the troops returning to the United States. After the horror of Vietnam, another hell awaited them at home: “Baby killer,” they heard. They were spat upon. “I flew back to my family in Maine,” veteran Alan Cutter later wrote in the Guardian. “They were glad to see me, but not even they said, ‘Welcome home’ or ‘Thank you.’ Even if they had, I wouldn’t have known how to respond.” Here, in April 1967, returning vet Mike Cowenhaven hugs Mrs. Rusher, a family friend who was like a second mother to him, in Monterey, California.

President Nixon’s approach to ending the war in the late 1960s and early ’70s seemed to send mixed messages. In November 1969 he sought “Vietnamization,” a change in American policy with the goal of having the South Vietnamese fight their own war with American support but no substantial contribution of troops; five months later he announced that by the spring of 1971 there would be achieved “a total reduction of 265,500 men in our Armed Forces in Vietnam below the level that existed when we took office 15 months ago.” Meanwhile, he escalated bombing campaigns, including new ones in Cambodia, and even feinted with nuclear weapons borne by a squadron of B-52s—bombs that were never dropped. And in the midst of all that, Nixon’s administration engaged in all sorts of negotiations: détente with the Soviets, cordial hellos with the Chinese (“Ping-Pong diplomacy”) and, eventually, the formal peace talks in Paris. But in the midst of all that, he fought the fierce domestic fallout of the My Lai Massacre and other awful news from Vietnam by asking the “silent majority” to support his plan to end the war. It seemed we were winding down one day, winding up the next—probably a fitting conclusion to a conflict that had seen the U.S., in the period following World War II, hedging its bets on which side to back.

In September 1969, Ho Chi Minh died at 79. The following year, the incursions into Cambodia along its border with Vietnam led to nationwide demonstrations in the United States and four students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. The White House seemed indifferent, and the bombing was ceaseless. In June 1969 the faces of 242 U.S. servicemen killed during a week of war appeared in a cover story in LIFE (a page of which appears opposite). The response was enormous, fanning the flames of increasingly large and sometimes violent protests. Walter Cronkite’s earlier reports from Vietnam for the CBS Evening News had a similar effect. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times, and theretofore top-secret accounts of the U.S. role in Vietnam, commissioned by the Defense Department, depicted a long trail of misinformation and outright deceit. More protests still.

In that same year, ’71, the fighting spread to a section of the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, but by

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