1968

The year of 1968 was a very big year for me. I graduated from college, that's the good news. The bad news is the country was being torn apart by an illegitimate and unwinnable war thousands of miles away. With my 2S deferment a thing of the past I considered a trip a few hundred miles north to Canada. Instead I enlisted in the Army in an attempt to avoid becoming cannon fodder for Johnson's folly in Asia. It worked and I spent a little over two years on the frontiers of freedom in downtown Munich Germany where I met my dear friend Bill in DC. It was also the year of "Clean Gene", Eugene McCarthy. He was a white knight of reason intent on rescuing America from the quagmire in South East Asia. As it turned out he was not so much a white knight as a Don Quixote tipping his hat at the windmills of the political establishment. While the political establishment was successful in derailing his presidential bid they could not stop the questioning of the war. The majority of protesters in 1968 were young people who rallied around Eugene McCarthy. Although they were no longer young it was those same people who initially protested the war in Iraq; the McCarthy generation. A quiet legacy for a quiet man. It's ironic and sad that he should die at a time when the United States is once again stuck in a quagmire.