(4 of 14)
It was a moment, 1968, that mysteriously stepped outside of time, one that was forever bringing the young to dimensions of eternity and the sacred: the boy-soldiers in Viet Nam were connected to death, the heroes to their own cessations, cut down in the prime of their youth and work. Part of the power of the year derives from the mystery of all the possibilities that vanished into death and nothingness. (In October there came an odd, minor coda to the sex and death and disillusion of the '60s, when Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis. Illusion -- Camelot and the rest -- came to disillusion, a passage that was a major theme of 1968.)
Anthropologists speak of the origin myths of tribes. The children of the post-World War II baby boom, 76 million of them, were -- and in ways, still are -- an enormous tribe. The year 1968 represents the origin myth of that tribe.
The Tet Offensive
More than any other force, the war in Viet Nam alienated the American young from their elders -- and, in equally tragic ways, from one another. The war was the dark hallucination, the black magic that would come and take the young and bear them off to the other side of the world and destroy them, for reasons progressively more obscure. Lyndon Johnson had campaigned for the White House in 1964 by promising that "we are not about to send American boys 10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves," but he ! ended by treating the war as a crusade for freedom and squandering his presidency and his country on it.
By the beginning of 1968, almost 16,000 Americans had been killed in Viet Nam and more than 100,000 wounded. During that time the war in Viet Nam became a gathering presence in American life. History obeyed Newton's Third Law of Motion: for every U.S. action in Viet Nam, there came a (seemingly) equal and opposite reaction back home. America internalized the war, as if it had swallowed fire. In the fall of 1967, 35,000 demonstrators had marched on the Pentagon and in the hip-mystic style had attempted with chants to levitate the palace of the war machine. Draft resistance had become a conspicuous form of American political theater. Young men burned their draft cards in front of news cameras, the flames licking around the edges of the cardboard in a poetic echo of the televised flame that licked from a Marine's Zippo lighter to torch a Vietnamese hut.
The '60s had their crisp, brutal simplicities, which coexisted in surreal stagecraft with hallucinations and mirages, masterpieces of illusion and self- delusion. Many of the young, for example, cherished (almost autoerotically) the illusion that they were part of "the Revolution," a force of history that would overthrow the power structure in the U.S. And illusion was an indispensable instrument of the war effort: the "body count," for example, or the "light at the end of the tunnel," the longed-for illumination, never seen, that would indicate that victory and salvation were near. At the close of 1967, the official invocation of the light at the end of the tunnel was still ritual. The New York Times, influenced by Government briefings, reported in late December that "military indicators in Viet Nam present the most dramatic and clear-cut evidence of progress in the war since the dark days of 1965."