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| Peaceful but Under Watchful Eyes |
I drove past the West Los Angeles Federal Building last week. I'd heard the president had deployed a Marine unit from Camp Pendleton to protect the building. Why? No one knew for sure.
It was a beautiful summer morning. Traffic moved slowly along Wilshire Boulevard and horns blared. Joggers dodged each other on the sidewalks as men and women headed to their jobs in the Westwood Village. Parents took their kids to a lush park located directly behind the Federal Building, as Marines in tactical gear, wearing dark shades, menacing weapons at the ready, stood guard at the entrances to the parking lot. I don't doubt some of these guys had seen action in the Middle East, from the Middle East to tony Westwood, what a transition.
In downtown Los Angeles, according to LAPD and LASD, the protests against ICE immigration raids were under control. No killing, no snipers, no burning buildings, some reported looting, and three smoldering innocent Waymos the victims of people's ire. Local law enforcement was doing its job.
A man walked his dog past the stoic marines.
I decided to park and take a stroll with my dog. I found a parking spot, pulled over, military jeeps and trucks parked along the curb on Veteran Avenue, a mile from the UCLA campus. I sensed tension on an otherwise normal California day. I knew what could happen if anyone made a mistake, or a miscalculation.
My mind reeled to the past; April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray had assassinated Martin Luther King, and all hell had broken loose. We’d been relaxing in the Day Room, guys talking, playing cards, shooting pool, and watching the news, protests in D.C., a standoff against the police then the violence. People broke into stores and began looting. At some point, D.C. went up in flames, and the national guard pulled in to take control. The order came down confining us to our barracks. We were about an hour's flight from the nation's capital. A day later, blocks of the city were on fire and snipers started shooting at the Guard.
Most of us had been to Vietnam and had hoped to finish our time in the military, peacefully, except we were paratroopers assigned to famed 82nd Airborne. Like our brothers in the 101st Airborne, still in Vietnam, the army referred to us as nomads, sending us at a minute’s notice wherever an enemy threatened U.S. national security.
A few months earlier, we'd also been confined to our barracks when North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces attacked nearly every major city in South Vietnam, on TET, the Chinese New Year. We received orders to pack up and prepare to fly out to Southeast Asia. The first sergeant came into the barracks and asked, “Which of you has already done a tour in Vietnam?” More than half of the guys raised their hands. “Alright, you can stay back, unless you volunteer. Think it over. I’ll be back in a minute. The rest of you get ready. You can write your folks when you arrive in Vietnam.”
We’d been trained like finely-honed weapons, playing war in North Carolna’s backwoods and making combat jumps out of cargo planes, jets, and helicopters. I could hear the guys around me talking it over. A weird energy filled the barracks, excitement from the adrenalin rush just thinking about combat, almost euphoric.
A few guys wanted to return, bored with stateside duty. I knew what they meant. I felt it, too, but it was more than boredom. War is an elixir. They couldn't articulate it, an urge for the exotic, Vietnam, an enigma, a magnet pulling us back into the mire, an unfaithful lover who would never change. We were playing the odds, ignoring the horror from the first time, young minds glossing over the ugliness and terror. We were addicts who needed one more fix.
Caught up in my buddies' gestalt, I was ready to volunteer, until an image of my mom came to me, her face sick with worry. My first tour had nearly broken her, emotionally. She’d aged when I returned, looked older and more tired than her forty-one-years. Right then, I decided to stay behind, for her, or maybe it was deeper, my subconscious reminding me of what I'd forgotten -- death.
A month later, they confined us to our barracks again. North Koreans had hijacked an American Naval vessel, the Pueblo. The U.S. threatened to invade. The call came. Get ready. I don’t recall how long we remained on alert, but it was serious, a ball-breaker, as some guys said. Luckily, nothing came of it except a year of negotiations to finally release the vessel and the sailors.
In Washington D.C., snipers targeted law enforcement and the National Guard, and dead bodies began to appear, we received orders to saddle up. We picked up our weapons at the armory and, within hours, we were flying into Andrews AFB, outside of D.C., but this time it was different. We were invading an American city. We weren’t law enforcement. We hadn’t been trained in crowd control. We were an attack force with all the weapons of war at our disposal, and we weren't afraid to use them.
The first time our unit, along with the 101st Airborne, had been used in an American city was in 1962, in the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, when James Meredith attempted to enroll in classes at the University of Mississippi as authorized by the Supreme Court, to integrate the campus.
Meredith had received death threats. The governor refused to help. JFK sent in 500 federal marshals to accompany Meredith to his dorm. That night, an army of three-to-five-thousand white supremacists, armed with Molotov cocktails and firearms, attacked federal marshals in the center of campus. The marshals responded by shooting tear gas to disperse the mob. The people retaliated using small arms fire and pushing its way forward. The marshals feared they’d be overrun, James Meredith kidnapped, and lynched.
In downtown Oxford, rioters started burning and looting. The conflict was complicated because many in law and the state government supported the rioters who believed in segregation and were willing to die before seeing the sacred grounds of their university integrated. The national guard couldn't handle the masses. News travelled slowly. President Kennedy wasn't aware of the violence. When he finally received the news, he called in the 82nd and 101st Airborne, who came in a set up machine gun nests at key entry points into the city. In no time, they took back the streets.
When it was over, 160 federal marshals were wounded, 28 of them shot. Two men died, one a foreign journalist and the other a jukebox repairman, a curiosity seeker.
In ’67-’69, civil disturbances erupted in many major American cities, blocks of homes and businesses burned down, but only after the national guard hadn’t been able to quell the violence, did the military intervene. Dozens died in Detroit's racial riots. We knew it was serious as we flew into D.C. on C-130 cargo planes, but we had no idea what to expect. This was a different kind of jungle, and in some weird way, American citizens had become the enemy.
We didn't question the "whys" of it. "[Ours] was not to reason why. [Ours] was but to do and die," as Tennyson wrote it so poetically. There were reports of snipers on rooftops. We’d be patrolling the streets around Howard University, the seat of knowledge and enlightenment, among the poor and unemployed, our automatic rifles at the ready.
We’d survived Vietnam. Would we die in the streets of our nation’s capital, seen as defenders or invaders, making sure what some called the 'uppity" citizenry "remembered its place?" Some of the guys in our unit were African Americans, a few probably even from D.C. What were they feeling as they prepared to take up arms against their neighbors?
What if I had to fly into Los Angeles and invade my city, or some mad president decided to declare war on Mexico, my ancestors' land, would I be able to take up arms, to kill people who looked like me standing at the other end of my rifle. Naw, that could never happen.
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