"Don't punish me with brutality. Talk to me, so you can see what's goin' on"

Forty years ago I was serving with C Company of the 1st Batallion, 4th Marines near Con Thien, Vietnam. I wrote in an earlier post, that numerous events to which we were horrifically exposed as a Marine company and as individuals occurred during the spring of 1968.

Several of these occurred back home and gave us pause to wonder what it was that we were fighting for.

Early on the morning of April 5, 1968, as we dragged our filthy, smelly, exhausted bodies inside the perimeter through the south wire, fresh from an all night ambush emplacement to the west, we were greeted with the most awful of the escalating bad news from home. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., while spending a day working at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis to plan a Poor People’s March on Washington, DC, was killed with a single shot from a 30.06 rifle.

Despite pleas for calm and a powerful extemporaneous eulogy from Senator Robert F. Kennedy, we heard that rioting had broken out in cities throughout the United States killing dozens of people and causing untold millions in property damage.
That morning, I became aware of a thin line that began to divide the black Marines from the rest of us – nothing that ever manifested itself in combat – but a “something” that began to appear in a thousand little ways in our day-to-day lives.
© Loon - A Marines Story

Thank you for visiting.

Jack