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Chapter 7: Birthday Boy
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Seven Birthday Boy Yeah, Onon Generals let's movefast Your big chance hilS come al last. Gatta go out andget those Reds Cause the only good Commie is one that; dead.. - "/ Feel Like lin Fixin'to Die Rag" - CounN110e and the Fish We discovered [hat the days passed almost unnoticeably, since we weren't aUowed radios or other connections to the outside world. No newspapers made their way into the company area, so it was almost as if we were out of time. But I had found a newspaper rack outside the battalion office just across from the rear of the chow hall. Full-time staff members could buy papers there, and senior cadets received news privileges too. The best that I could do was to drift by the machine on the way after chow. rhad to move cautiously, though, for ifa TAC or a senior cadet from another company caught me looking at the newspaper without news privileges, I would be in big trouble, and J knew that Rancek needed little more pushing to be on me again. rhad learned in the first two weeks that if rate late and was one of the last to leave the mess haH, I had a better chance of being able to see the headlines. The next morning I was necessarily one of the last ones in the chow hall. My whole body ached from the workout of the night before, and so f had moved slowly geuing my things rogerher for the day. As I left the mess hall, I angled [Qward the newspaper racks. One rack held the Atlanta Comtitution, the other The New York Times. The Atlanta paper would be current, since Atlanta was only about a hundred miles from Fort Benning, but the Times was usually a day or so behind. T hat meant that I could get two different days' headlines whenever I found it possible to go by the racks. k I neared, rsaw The New York Times headline: ~Nixon Not to Reveal Plan," it read, and I knew that the Story had something to do with Nixon's campaign pledge that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. He had now been in office almost eleven full months, but the war seemed to be escalating rather than scaling down. Nixon's advisor, Henry Kissinger, who reminded me of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, seemed convinced that more bombing of Hanoi and Norm Vietnam would lead the North Vietnamese to make concessions for peace. I thought it ironic that Alabama Governor George Wallace's running mate, General Curtis leMay, had declared that the u.S. ought to bomb the Vietnamese back into the stone age, and Nixon seemed to have adopted it as his secret plan. The more current headline in the Constitution seemed more sensational: ~Massacre Alleged at Vietnamese Village." I squaned down to read the tcxt and discovered that there had been charges of a massacre of civilians, including women and children, at a small Vietnamese village complex called My Lai. So what else is new, I thought. I had already heard enough war stories about how young girls of nine or ten would walk into American camps, saunter up to headquarters nonchalantly, and pull a grenade from under their skirt or out of the fold oftheir black pajamas and toss it into a group ofunsuspecting GIs. I could recall Sgt. Jones' booming voice, saying, "You trust 'em, and you're dead meat. Blow 'em away first, ask questions later, increase the body COUnt." The war dominated all the news, but I thought Americans were numbed to the fighting by now. Students still protested on college campuses around the country, and there had been some large voices of protest against the war~Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, among them. McCarthy hadn't gotten the nomination, and Kennedy and King had been assassinated. So stories ofmassacres and other atrocities in Vietnam seemed commonplace to me. I had long since decided that my earlier hope that public outrage and protest would force Nixon to end the war quickly was a pipe dream. Only a headline such as "War Over, Troops [0 Come Home" would 54 Fort &mling BI"~5 [3.239.214.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:29 GMT) have affected me then. I stood and returned to my platoon area to get my gear together for the day. k I walked in, I noticed Ferona, a big...