[jmcarter]

Gary, I wanted to acknowledge your post and certainly your sacrifice. I was an AF medic who served with the 432nd Support Squadron in northern Thailand where we supported a very large Air America contingent. A few sapper attacks and hairy trips into some villages were the limit of my exposure but I treated a large number of Casualties including many of our own. When I rotated home in 1972 I first flew into SFO in uniform so you can well imagine the “reception” I got at the airport. In any case, in spite of the unpatriotic and cowardly vile of many of the protesters I have come to realize there was a kernel of truth in their protests even if they didn’t fully realize it. I can more easily forgive them than I can the political hacks who knew early on the folly of Vietnam and yet continued to send so many of us to certain ill fated futures. It’s astounding the percentage of those 58,000+ who were younger than 21 years old.

My thought in posting about Kent State was that the whole era seemed to numb us to mayhem and how sacred life is. I’m no Neil Young fan but “four dead in Ohio”, “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming”, and “we’re finally on our own”are on continual loops in my head sometime. The “pending” Roe v Wade decision swirls into those lines, like one part of government can ban abortion and meanwhile some states permit full term abortions. So often it seems we’ve lost our way and government seems determined to keep us that way.