As we look back 40 years, books and documentaries tell us that 1968 was one of the most divisive years in the United States in the 20th century. Anniversaries of events keep popping up to remind us of the serial unpleasantness that tore at the nation's citizens and their beliefs. Because of my shipboard duties in the Far East at the time, 1968 was the only year of my life in which I was not in the United States even a single day. My knowledge of that tragic year came only far removed geographically and often only in retrospect.
My assignment was on board the tank landing ship Washoe County (LST-1165), home-ported in Yokosuka, Japan. The main sources of news at that distance from home were considerably different from the nightly network news broadcasts most Americans were seeing. We were reading Stars & Stripes, a daily newspaper put out for service members, and listening to Armed Forces Radio Network. Neither was noted for representing a broad range of political viewpoints, and neither had the sense of immediacy that television provides. News magazines arrived late.
The Washoe County was under way off the coast of South Vietnam on the morning of 1 April 1968 when one of the big news events of the year hit us with more timeliness than usual. In a huge break from the shipboard routine, the general announcing system carried the audio portion of a speech that President Lyndon Johnson made to the American people. He said he was putting nearly all of North Vietnam off-limits to American bombing and shelling. Even more startling was the announcement that he would not seek re-election that fall.
Only sometime afterward was I able to get a feel for the factors that had led him to that decision, because I had assumed he would be on the job for another four years. I did not have a sense of how disaffected many American people had become with the nation's continuing involvement in Vietnam. The irony has struck me many times since then—our ship's proximity to the war zone was completely disconnected from the impact the war in that country was having back home.
Sometimes the news came in by teletype to the ship's radio room—the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. We read of the rioting that turned American cities into urban battlegrounds after the shooting of King. The most lasting image I have following the killing of Kennedy was being in Hong Kong and seeing the covers of Time and Newsweek, which carried pictures of handguns.
Violence seemed to be the order of the day that summer as the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago to select Vice President Hubert Humphrey to run for the office Lyndon Johnson was relinquishing. I still recall listening to a program about the convention that came through on Armed Forces Radio, but even that greatly muted the impact. In 1978, I saw a television documentary that observed the tenth anniversary of the Chicago convention, and only then did I really gain an appreciation for the confrontation between the protesters and the Chicago police.
With all those events in the background of my consciousness in that history-making year, the ones in the foreground captured the bulk of my attention. The Washoe County was a truly versatile ship in 1968, generally shuttling among Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Frequent were the logistics runs to transport to Vietnam all manner of supplies, weapons, and equipment that could be crammed into the cavernous tank deck. Later the ship embarked Marines as part of an amphibious ready group off the coast of Vietnam. I recall conning the ship in the area south of the demilitarized zone. At night star shells floated lazily to earth, creating an eerie mood as they illuminated inland combat zones. Still later in the year the LST operated as mother ship for Swift boats and Coast Guard patrol craft that made incursions along rivers and canals near the southern tip of Vietnam.
The ship's duties gave us direct evidence of war casualties. Helos sometimes landed on the deck to carry away wounded boat crew members for medical treatment. But not all the victims were killed or wounded in action. One day Washoe County deck crewmen were closing a bow door when a mooring line snapped and tore into a man's leg, leading to its amputation.
And I particularly recall a night when the ship was taking aboard a load of trailers at the LST ramp in Naha, Okinawa. Tractors backed them into the tank deck, and then crew members sprang in beneath them to attach turnbuckles in order to secure them to the deck and thus keep them from getting loose later when the ship would be rolling at sea. The back of each trailer was supported by heavy wheels, the front end by an arrangement that hinged down.
Sadly, one of the hinged mechanisms did not completely lock into place. As one Sailor dutifully tightened a turnbuckle, the trailer fell and crushed him. He died en route to a hospital. The crew mourned, for this event had a sense of immediacy far beyond all those calamities we had heard and read were taking place in the United States. We needed no media reports to tell us of this consequence of the war.