For the month of April, participating for the 10th time in the annual A to Z Blogging Challenge, I will be endeavoring to write a short personal post every day on the subject of War and Peace—short because of time, War and Peace because of the times. To make things more bearable, I will endeavor to include music in every post.
I started school in Brookline, Massachusetts in February, 1970, immediately after we arrived in the United States. I was fifteen years old and had to take in a lot very quickly. But it was not only my life and my family’s life that was turbulent at that time. The whole country was in turmoil and I was plunged into the midst of it. The cover-up of the 1968 My Lai massacre was revealed that spring, and President Nixon expanded the massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Vietnam continued to be bombed relentlessly. April was the worst month of the year for U.S. casualties, as 730 troops were killed, and of course thousands more lost their lives when one counts the Vietnamese civilian and military deaths on both sides. U.S. campuses erupted in protest at the May 4th and May 15th killings of student anti-war protesters at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. Students in my new high school took a vote to go on strike, and teach-ins and protests gave me a rapid introduction to this violent new country which was to be my home.
I use the term “anti-war movement,” but in fact the U.S. Congress never declared war on Vietnam. President Johnson (LBJ) used the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to get congressional troop authorization for this “conflict.” But make no mistake: it was a war, a devastating war, which left some 3.5 million people dead, most of them Vietnamese civilians, leaving its mark on the survivors and indeed, on everyone who lived through the era. It lasted from 1954-1975, with the U.S. involved for most of that time, but engaged in increasingly heavy bombing campaigns (beginning with Operation Rolling Thunder) and ground combat from 1964-1973. April, 2025 marked 50 years since the fall of Saigon, and here you can listen to a conversation on the subject with the Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer.
Although the United States public were largely indifferent to the war in its early years, they became much more engaged after 1965, when large numbers of men began to be deployed to Vietnam, growing from 23,000 to 183,000 in a single year. Even then, a majority of Americans supported the war. They were fiercely anti-Communist in the 1950s and 1960s and had been sold on the Domino Theory, used by U.S. governments throughout the Cold War to justify American military interventions into the affairs of other nations. It wasn’t until large number of young men started coming home in body bags, cover-ups came to light revealing that the U.S. had massacred innocent civilians and invaded Cambodia, and the police at home shot and killed students protesting the war, that the tide began to turn. Vietnam Veterans against the War had an important impact on high school and college campuses–including Brookline High, where they showed a powerful documentary filmed in Vietnam at one of our teach-ins, and later testified on Capitol Hill. It also came to light that a disproportionate percentage of the 40,000 young men who were being drafted every month were African American and economically disadvantaged. The student movement began to link the issues of racism and poverty at home to imperialism and economical exploitation abroad, thereby diversifying and strengthening the movement.
Coming from outside the U.S., and specifically from India which had taken a position of non-alignment in the Cold War and had quite recently won independence from colonial rule, I was predisposed to join the opposition to the Vietnam War. I also suspect that arriving in the U.S. as the anti-war movement was reaching its peak had something to do with it. That Spring of 1970, students from nearly 900 high schools, colleges and universities across the country walked out of classes, with some 100 shutting down altogether. My high school was in the thick of all this turmoil, which came to a head just weeks after I first set foot in it.
Music was another force that shaped my sensibilities about the war, before I knew anything about the anti-war movement. The year before I came to the U.S. the Beatles song, The Ballad of John and Yoko, featuring the couple’s very public honeymoon bed-in for peace, had been number one in the British pop charts for three weeks. (It was also banned by the BBC.) John’s solo single, “Give Peace a Chance,” was also issued in 1969 and became an anthem of the anti-war movement. For Christmas that year my mother had given me my very first record album, Donovan’s Greatest Hits, which included a cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s 1963 song, “Universal Soldier.” Woodstock, the biggest ever open-air music festival, had been held in 1969, and I had missed it. However, the concert movie was released in March, 1969, and the triple album in May. Needless to say, we teenagers went to see the movie and listened to the album again and again. In it, Country Joe McDonald led the crowd in his I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag. Rest In Peace, Joe McDonald.
For the rest of this month of posts on war and peace I will close each one with abecedarian links to one or two songs.
For the letter A, I choose:
Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower as sung by Jimi Hendrix (released in 1967 and 1968 respectively); and
The Beatles’ Across the Universe (first recorded in 1968 and released in December 1969 and May 1970). Neither explicitly mentions the war, but both are imbued with the spirit of that time.
Tell Me Another 