Retired But Not Shy

[This concluding segment of the lecture was the part that, unfortunately in my view, I found I needed to update  virtually every year, in order to fit more recent adventures in American foreign policy into the context created by the autobiographical portion of the talk.]

* * * * *

A preliminary list of the major consequences of the war in Vietnam might look something like this:

1.  Over 58,000 Americans died in the war.

2.  The average age of those who served in Southeast Asia was 19 (World War II, 26).  27 million American males were eligible for the draft during the height of the war:

a.  2,215,000 were drafted

b.  8,700,000 enlisted (many to avoid the draft)

c.  500,000 evaded or resisted the draft

d.  16,000,000 received deferments, exemptions, or disqualifications

3.  To answer complaints that draftees right out of high school were old enough to die for their country but not to vote for its leaders, Congress approved an amendment, which became the 26th Amendment to the Constitution in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18.

4.  The draft was abolished.  This action freed most privileged young Americans to indulge “their distaste for public issues,” according to historian Loren Baritz.  Many of them evinced no real concern beyond self.  The emergence of the prototypical American of the 1980s, the Yuppie, was just around the corner.  Thus, we became, again in the words of historian Baritz, “a nation without citizens, a people without politics.”  Since then, we have been defended by an all-volunteer military, which, I think, has made it easier for our Presidents to commit these forces to war:  no one they knew, including most members of Congress, actually had children or spouses in the line of fire.  Many middle and upper-class class American youths, like future President Bill Clinton and future Vice-President Richard Cheney during the Vietnam War, have had “other priorities” that would not allow them to risk their lives defending their country.  Future President George W. Bush transferred from the Texas to the Alabama Air National Guard so that he could help a prominent Alabama Republican seek political office, then somehow managed to fall off the radar screen of his unit.  To this day, whether Bush actually attended drills with the Alabama Air National Guard remains a matter of dispute.

5.  Angry at the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” and other classified government documents, President Nixon authorized the formation of a group within his administration, nicknamed “the Plumbers,” to stop those embarrassing “leaks.”  In the creation of “the Plumbers” lay the origin of the Watergate break-in in 1972 and the ensuing scandal that eventually drove Nixon from office.

6.  The so-called “Credibility Gap,” the distance between what a President said and what he actually did, grew to a vast, yawning “Credibility Chasm” during the Johnson and Nixon administrations and ushered in an era of cynicism and distrust between the American people and their leaders that, fed by later events, continues to this day.

7.  The Vietnam disaster also dealt a telling blow to our national self-image as “Savior of the World” and made isolationism respectable again.  The rallying cry of “No More Vietnams” was fueled by strong suspicion of both current and proposed U.S. military ventures.  This dread of making a potentially open-ended, Vietnam-like commitment limited the scope of our foreign policy efforts in places like Central America, Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia.  Nevertheless, a group of advisers, buried like moles in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, the so-called “neo-conservatives” or “neo-cons,” convinced President George W. Bush and his associates that toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and installing a democratic government in Iraq would be a cakewalk.  Realizing, however, that the American people might not be eager to sign on to a crusade to make the Middle East safe for democracy, to justify our invasion the Bush Administration instead conjured up, using either flawed intelligence or outright lies–take your pick–the scary scenario that Saddam possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”  We–and the Iraqis–are still paying the price for that ideological miscalculation.

8.  The nation’s Vietnam experience hung like an angry black cloud over the Persian Gulf War. The first President Bush promised that Operation Desert Storm would “not be another Vietnam.”  There would be no reinstitution of the draft.  The President would not second-guess his generals, nor would he limit their ability to prosecute the war.  (And yet, that war ended with Saddam Hussein still in power, which helped set the stage for our current involvement there.)  There would be no “body counts,” a weekly staple of TV coverage of  the war in Vietnam.  There would be no media coverage of the arrival at Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) of dead Americans in “body bags” (now euphemistically dubbed “human remains pouches”).  [Recently, the Obama Administration changed this policy to allow media coverage of dead Americans being returned to the U.S., but only with the permission of the deceased service members’ families.]  And, most importantly, media coverage of the Gulf War would be severely restricted.  The U.S. military was convinced that vivid media coverage of the Vietnam conflict turned the tide of American public opinion against the war (a contention refuted, by the way, in a book published a few years ago by the Army’s own official historical branch, but no matter).

9.  The activities during the Vietnam era of  subsequent candidates for major political offices became a sort of litmus test of a leader’s fitness to commit American troops to future wars.  When he ran for Vice-President on the Republican ticket with the first George Bush in 1988, Dan Quayle struggled to explain how he had secured admission to the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War when people without his political connections were unable to do so.  During the 1992 campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton had trouble explaining a 1969 letter to his ROTC commander in which he seemed to weasel out of a commitment to enter the military.  As I said earlier, the lack of documentation supporting George W. Bush’s claim that he had actually served in the Alabama Air National Guard during the Vietnam era was an issue in the 2000 presidential election. Also, in 2004, the so-called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” waged a determined and ultimately successful campaign to besmirch the Vietnam War record of Bush’s Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

10.  Finally, ever since our involvement in Iraq began, there has been a debate about the degree to which our current war is like the earlier one in Vietnam.  Clearly, Iraq is not Vietnam, geographically (Middle Eastern sand, not Southeast Asian jungle and rice paddy).  On the other hand, there are a number of disturbing parallels:  we were told less than the truth by our leaders each time; in neither case did the administration have an exit strategy; and, once things began to fall apart, despite our obvious technological superiority and our ideological certainty, the presidents were unwilling to declare victory and pull out, so we sank deeper and deeper into the mire.  Now, we have been engaged in Iraq longer than we were in World War II.  Yes, say defenders of the war, but there have been “only” 5000 or so American deaths (an argument which, by the way, ignores Iraqi casualties, which are many times those of the U.S.).  True enough; but, once upon a time, there were “only” 5000 American dead in Vietnam, and yet, another 53,000 or so Americans died before we withdrew our forces.  How many more Americans (and Iraqis, and Afghanis) will perish before we come to our senses this time?

* * * * *

For something begun almost casually, our involvement in Vietnam developed a deadly momentum.  As is so often the case with war, its legacy must be sorted out, its lessons learned and applied, by the survivors and, especially, by their children. I believe that the Vietnam War was a turning point in modern American history, but I also recognize that, from a historian’s perspective, we are still too close to that era to make definitive judgments.  As a preliminary verdict, though, let me offer an assessment from a 1994 book on the impact of the Vietnam War on the United States:

 . . .The [Vietnam] war remains a watershed in American history.  On one side of that history, America, whatever its rights and wrongs, stands triumphant, its glorious destiny manifest.  On the other, America knows defeat, even shame.

                From Todd Gitlin’s “Foreword” to Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, p.xiii.

* * * * *

Selected List of Sources

          Baritz, Loren.  Backfire:  A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did.  New York:  William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985.

         Beschloss, Michael.  “‘I Don’t See Any Way of Winning,” Newsweek, Nov.12, 2001, pp. 58-61.  [Excerpt from Beschloss, ed.,  Reaching for Glory,  a version of the Lyndon Johnson presidential tapes.]

         Fitzgerald, Frances.  Fire in the Lake:  The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.  Boston:  Atlantic Little Brown, 1972.

         Herr, Michael.  Dispatches.  New York:  Avon, 1978.

         Herring, George C.  America’s Longest War:  The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975.  New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1979.

         Kaiser, Charles.  1968 in America:  Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation.  New York:  Grove Press, 1988.

         Kaiser, David.  American Tragedy:  Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War.  Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000.

         Karnow, Stanley.  Vietnam:  A History.  New York:  The Viking Press, 1983.

         McNamara, Robert S.  “We Were Wrong, Terribly Wrong,”  Newsweek, April 17, 1995, pp.45-54. [Excerpt from McNamara, In Retrospect.]

         Maraniss, David.  They Marched Into Sunlight:  War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2003.

         O’Brien, Tim.  The Things They Carried.  New York:  Penguin Books, 1990.

         Santoli, Al.  Everything We Had:  An Oral History of the Vietnam War By Thirty-Three American Soldiers Who Fought It.  New York:  Random House, 1981.

         Schell, Jonathan.  The Time of Illusion.  New York:  Vintage Books, 1975.

         Sheehan, Neil.  A Bright Shining Lie:  John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.  New York:  Random House, 1988.

         Spector, Ronald.  After Tet:  The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam.  New York:  The Free Press, 1993.

         Wells, Tom.  The War Within:  America’s Battle Over Vietnam.  New York:  Henry Holt and Company, 1994.

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities:  Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians:  One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery:  Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

 [This segment covers the period between 1968, when I left the Army for grad school in History, and 1988, when the Vietnam Warfinally ended for me, sort of. For a list of sources, see Part IV]

* * * * *

The peace talks got off to a rocky start in Paris.  During 1968, while the negotiators squabbled over the shape of the table and the U.S. elected a new President, Richard M. Nixon, who claimed he had a “secret plan” to end the war, 14,589 Americans were killed in Vietnam, more than half again as many as in 1967, and the highest total for any year of our involvement there.  President Nixon’s “secret plan” turned out to be “Vietnamization,” the gradual transfer of the war effort to the South Vietnamese Army as American forces were withdrawn.

I left the Army in July 1968 for graduate school at Emory University, where I would spend the next five years.  Nevertheless, studying the past brought small consolation to my life in the present, as the war in Vietnam ground bloodily on.

* * * * *

In 1969, a shocked American public learned of the so-called “My Lai Massacre,” the systematic murder of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, by a U.S. Army unit, an event the Army had covered up since March 1968.  The spring of 1970 brought the joint American-South Vietnamese “incursion” into neutral Cambodia in pursuit of North Vietnamese troops.  This decision by the Nixon Administration revived the dormant anti-war movement in the U.S., even on the normally placid Emory campus; led to the killings of protesting college students at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi; and pushed Cambodia down the slippery slope to the “Killing Fields” of the Khmer Rouge.

The New York Times began to publish in January 1971 a hitherto secret history of American involvement in Vietnam, the “Pentagon Papers,” that revealed a trail of lies and deceptions by a series of presidential administrations over nearly two decades.  Five months later (June, 1971), an angry Congress reasserted its control over the war by repealing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.  To pressure the recalcitrant North Vietnamese to the conference table, President Nixon renewed the bombing of the North in the spring of 1972 and ordered the mining of North Vietnam’s major port, Haiphong.  These steps, plus a devastating series of bombing raids in December (the so-called “Christmas Blitz,” or “Merry Christmas to you, from a B-52”), got peace talks moving again, and in January 1973 the delegates announced a cease-fire, trumpeted as “Peace with Honor” by President Nixon.

* * * * *

“Peace with Honor” had taken hold, and most Americans had left Vietnam by the fall of 1973, when I began teaching at this school.  The cease-fire had allowed the U.S. to extricate itself from Vietnam with some semblance of national honor but at a staggering cost.  During the Nixon presidency nearly 21,000 Americans were killed and about 53,000 wounded, more than one-third of the total U.S. casualties for the war.  With the American withdrawal, only the North and South Vietnamese were dying, an estimated 50,000 of them in the twelve months after the cease-fire.

Less than a year after the Watergate scandal drove Richard Nixon from office and brought Gerald Ford to the Presidency, the North Vietnamese invaded the South and the truth of “Vietnamization” became clear to all.  South Vietnamese resistance collapsed like a house of cards.  When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in May, 1975, I was a 31 year-old History teacher finishing my second year here.

* * * * *

During my first few years at this school, I literally could not teach about Vietnam in my American History classes.  I told myself each spring that, from the historian’s point of view, the conflict was still just “current events.”  The nation needed distance, perspective, before it could make sense of the war, and so did I.  By the early 1980s, I was finally able to sit down and explain at least the chronology of Vietnam and to teach it that way, but something was still missing.

The Vietnam War finally ended for me in the summer of 1988, when my family and I went to Washington, D.C. Even though I had not actually been to the Nam, I, like countless men and women who did serve there, needed to visit the Vietnam Memorial to experience, finally, a sense of closure, of peace.  I found and photographed two of the names on the Wall:  those of Larry, my former soccer teammate, who had been killed in 1967; and of the Major I had helped to bury in Arlington in 1968.

The experience was a moving one for me.  The place was like an outdoor cathedral. At the base of the bronze statue of the three soldiers, some pilgrims had placed personal mementoes:  a hat emblazoned with the insignia of a Vietnam-era military unit; a few campaign ribbons and medals; and flowers, always flowers.  Visitors arranged themselves in two parallel lines along the sidewalk.  The line farthest from the Wall moved steadily and quietly, drinking in the scene in front of one of the Capital’s more popular tourist attractions.  The line closer in moved haltingly, with a more solemn purpose:  each person was looking for a name, to touch, to trace, to photograph.  These people were quiet too, until they found what they were looking for.  When they did, their almost reverent silence gave way to halting conversations, reminiscences mixed with regrets, and, finally, to tears.

Perhaps even more striking was the sharp contrast between the Vietnam Memorial and the nearby Lincoln Memorial.  In one, a marble Lincoln sits enthroned high above the visitor, staring down the Mall toward the Washington Monument and the Capitol, flanked by inspiring words from his speeches.  At the other, three bronze soldiers stare directly into the eyes of the visitor and past him towards the Wall beyond, where the only words are the names of the dead, unembellished even by indication of rank.  The huge marble shrine commemorates the leadership of a great President during a fraternal war that was a watershed in our national development.  The quiet, almost bucolic setting of the more recent memorial remembers those who died in Vietnam but makes no explicit statement about the war that killed them.

[End of Part III]

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities:  Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians:  One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery:  Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

[As the title indicates, this part of the story concerns my two-year tour of active duty in the U.S. Army, 1966-1968. (Go here for Part I, on my pre-Army life and the early years of the Vietnam involvement.  For a list of sources, see Part IV]

* * * * *

All able-bodied male students at my university were required to take two years of ROTC; the last two years of the program, which led to an officer’s commission in the U.S. Army, were optional.  I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect, but neither was I worried.  I figured that I could put up with playing soldier for a couple of years, spend the last two years making fun of ROTC, and get on with my life.

During my first two years in college, though, things in Vietnam began to change rapidly–and for the worse.  In 1963, the U.S. withdrew its support from South Vietnamese President Diem, who had steadfastly refused to make any reforms in his corrupt, unpopular government, and we actively backed a group of officers who overthrew Diem and murdered him.  This change brought no improvement, however.  By the time President Kennedy himself was assassinated later that year, there were 15,500 American advisers in Vietnam.

I got a mild surprise in the summer of 1963, when I read in the local paper that Larry, my former soccer teammate, old “super nerd,” had joined the Marines upon graduation from high school.  I remember thinking that, of all the boys I knew, Larry was the last one I could picture as a “gung-ho” Marine.  In the spring of 1967, I learned that Larry had been killed in Vietnam.  By that time, I had completed Advanced ROTC, graduated from college, and been in the Army for nine months.

There was no real crisis of conscience involved in my decision to enroll in Advanced ROTC.  Like a lot of people of my generation, the so-called “silent generation” of the 1950s, I had been brought up to do what I was told, and one thing I’d been told over and over was that when my country called me, I must answer the call, with no questions asked.  More practically, draft calls were up, the marriage deferment was no option for me, and, as a History major, I certainly could not qualify for the only other available deferment, one open to those engaged in certain “critical occupations.”  Thus, only by signing up for the last two years of ROTC could I be assured of finishing college before being summoned for military service.

By the time I graduated in June 1966, the U.S. was deeply committed in Vietnam.  In the summer of 1964, Congress had approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which handed President Lyndon Johnson a blank check to deal with what we were told was “Communist aggression.”  During my junior year, 1964-65, we began bombing North Vietnam, the first American combat forces landed in the South, and our troop strength soon grew to 184,000.  In this country, the anti-war movement began.  Since I was a white, lower middle-class male who could (just barely) afford a college education and, thus, qualify for a student deferment, I watched these developments as a spectator rather than as a participant.

* * * * *

My luck continued to hold once I went on active duty in the summer of 1966.  Of the 28 officers in my specialized training course, 26 went to Vietnam upon graduation.  I was one of the two who did not.  Instead, I was sent to a large Army base in Maryland.  My new job kept me busy for long hours, so I didn’t have much time to sort out my feelings about the war.

When there were more than 500,000 American troops in Vietnam and we were paying $30,000,000,000 a year to support our effort there, it was hard to fault the reassurances from our leaders that the war was going our way, that there was, in a favorite Administration phrase of the time, “light at the end of the tunnel.”  Yet, victory continued to elude us, and a number of officers I knew asserted that, unless the Administration changed its policies and allowed our forces to wage all-out war, we would never win.  Then came Tet, the Lunar New Year, 1968, when Communist forces launched simultaneous attacks on 27 South Vietnamese cities, including the capital, Saigon.

The Tet Offensive broke the back of domestic support for our continued involvement in Vietnam.  It also brought me the only really worthwhile assignment I had while on active service and made up my mind about the war.  One of the Americans killed in Saigon during Tet was an Army major whose family lived a few miles from where I was stationed.  I was assigned to work with the Major’s family.  My duties included  arranging for his burial in Arlington National Cemetery, accompanying his family to the military funeral, and seeing to it that his widow and son received all of the government benefits to which they were entitled.  During the six months I worked with the Major’s family, the whole direction of the war in Vietnam changed.  President Johnson stopped the bombing of the North, called for peace talks to begin in Paris, and refused to run for re-election in 1968.

It was clear at last that we were not going to “win” the war in any meaningful sense, that in fact our policy was now–and perhaps had been from the start–bankrupt.  Like Humpty Dumpty, our grand crusade had fallen from the wall, and all the blood, money, and technology we possessed could not put it back together again.  I understood that, then; what I could not grasp was a more troubling question:  however pure our intentions, did our policy justify the sacrifice made by Larry and by the Army major I had helped to bury?  What sort of consolation did Tet and its grim sequel offer to the Major’s widow, his 6 year-old son, and to the rest of his family?  I never learned the answers to those questions.  All I do know is that, for me, the events surrounding Tet were a turning point:  I could no longer support the war in Vietnam, and the end of my two years’ active duty could not come quickly enough.

[End of Part II]

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities:  Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians:  One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery:  Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

  [Over the next several posts, I plan to serialize  a lecture, “Growing Up With Vietnam,” that played a very important part in my life and in my teaching career.  It took a long time to write, as you will learn, but, once  finished, I used it almost annually for the next twenty years, first in what my school called the “Senior Lecture Series”; after that forum expired, I switched to using the lecture each spring, along with a growing number of “artifacts”  I passed around during my talk, in my Advanced Placement American History senior classes; and, now and then, I also gave the thing, when invited,  to other classes.  Student reactions to the presentation were always interesting to me, and it soon became clear that most students were not used to having their teachers put so much of themselves, for better or worse, into classroom presentations.  This first segment carries the story through my high school years. For a list of sources, see Part IV.]

* * * * *

                In any war story, but especially in a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.  What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.  The angles of vision are skewed. . . .In many cases a true war story cannot be believed.  If you believe it, be skeptical.  It’s a question of credibility.  Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, pp.78-79

 I was a child of the Cold War, and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, so was our involvement in Vietnam.  In 1950, when President Harry S Truman agreed to supply aid, including 35 American “advisers,” to bolster France’s effort to regain her colony of Vietnam from the Communist Viet Minh, I was a 6 year-old in an industrial suburb of Baltimore, Maryland.

The context for our first steps into the Vietnam morass was the Cold War and the doctrine of containment adopted by the Truman Administration in hopes of halting Soviet expansion in Central and Eastern Europe.  Despite the terrifying fact that the Russians somehow had developed their own atomic bomb by 1949, the Cold War in Europe soon reached a stalemate.  By that time, however, we perceived a similar Communist threat orchestrated, we were sure, from the Kremlin, in Asia.  China “fell” to Mao Zedong’s Red Army in 1949; tensions between Communist North Korea and anti-Communist South Korea were about to explode.  Meanwhile, the U.S. itself was in the throes of a second “Red Scare” that would produce a Commie-hunting, demagogic Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Vietnam was definitely a Cold War sideshow when I was growing up in the 1950s, or so it seemed, just another effort by the U.S. to stem the creeping Red tide of godless, monolithic Communism.  The ’50s were, after all, the decade of the Korean War and the Army-McCarthy hearings.  Vietnam might have been an exotic locale for the battle between freedom and slavery, but I was less aware of events there than I was of the Eisenhower Administration’s efforts to defeat Communism in Guatemala, Iran, Lebanon, and off the coast of what all of us Cold Warriors referred to as “Red China.”

Then, too, the stakes in such places didn’t seem very high when measured against heated Cold War rhetoric that made the prospect of nuclear holocaust a nightmarish possibility.  The Eisenhower Administration developed a policy of “massive retaliation” that promised “more bang for the buck.”  A Soviet leader promised to bury us.  I practiced “duck and cover” drills at school and watched helpful public service announcements on TV that showed me what to do if the Russians dropped an A-bomb on my neighborhood.

* * * * *

By the time the first Americans were wounded in Vietnam, in 1957, I was a 13 year-old seventh-grader.  I was a high school freshman in 1959, when the first Americans were killed there.  By the end of Eisenhower’s second term, in 1961, there were 700 American military advisers in South Vietnam.  Again, I must admit that all of this went by me and, I suspect, most other Americans as well.

Eisenhower’s successor, Democrat John F. Kennedy, brought a new defense policy with him, called “flexible response.”  Rather than focus exclusively on nuclear weaponry, JFK built up our conventional forces and introduced a new type of soldier, the “counter-insurgency” specialist, who was trained to fight, and of course to win, “wars of national liberation” like the one being waged by the Communist Viet Cong against the American-backed government of South Vietnam.  The symbol of Kennedy’s commitment to counter-guerrilla warfare was a newly-formed Army unit, the Special Forces, popularly known as the “Green Berets” for their distinctive headgear.  The popularity of the Green Berets briefly gave our involvement in Vietnam a much higher profile, helped along by such cultural signposts as a hit song, “Ballad of the Green Berets,” and John Wayne’s epic (in length, anyway) film, “The Green Berets.”

I was not a Kennedy fan, nor was I particularly concerned by events in Vietnam in 1962.  College beckoned, and my friends and I worried only about proving ourselves well-rounded high school seniors.  A bunch of us decided that what we needed to fill out our brag sheets was athletic experience.  So we–are you ready for this?–we started a soccer team.

We conned a rookie math teacher into being our coach, bought him a book about soccer, and went on to compile one of the worst records of any team in the history of our school.  Since most of us were seniors, we didn’t care, but it must have been tough on the younger members of the team, especially on one of them, a kid named Larry, who already had a reputation as a kind of super nerd (a term we didn’t have then, by the way) and didn’t need anything else to apologize for.  Physically, Larry and I resembled one another:  we were overweight, wore our dark hair in very short burr cuts, and peered at the world through horn-rimmed glasses.  Despite the fact that I avoided two of Larry’s more nerdish affectations, carrying a brief case and wearing a slide rule in a holster on his belt, we could easily have been mistaken for one another at a distance, and sometimes were.

[End of Part I]

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities:  Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians:  One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery:  Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)