Eight years, a half-a-lifetime

I remember Eisenhower being sworn in for the first time. I watched it on a neighbor’s TV. I was nine years old. I was seventeen and in college when he finished his second term and Kennedy took office. Children, who were nine when Bush fils was sworn in, will be old enough to fight in Iraq by the time his term of office is over. Unfortunately, it looks like they will get that opportunity.

I sat out Vietnam on on an island called Miyako Jima, the “Pearl of the East China Sea.” I was twenty-two and had enlisted in the Coast Guard a full year before American forces got involved in Vietnam, beyond the “advisor” stage. That war ran for more than ten years. Toward the end of the war, young men were dying over there, who couldn’t even recall a time when Vietnam wasn’t synonymous with war, even though it was never officially called one.

I would lay on the roof of the pump shack at the LORAN station on Miyako and watch the B-52s from Okinawa fly over. That was 1967. I was getting a tan. I wouldn’t realize how serious the war was until I got home. It ran another eight years. During that time, I finished college and law school, had my first child, and represented hundreds of accused criminals for the Legal Aid Society in New York City. It seemed like a lifetime.