getting the wounded loaded, so he ran over to help and was caught in a shell burst. At the field hospital only yards away, Spicer was pronounced dead. Such field units are not set up for major surgery and normally only patch up the patient and send him on to a full hospital. But this doctor thought he could save Spicer and opened his chest, massaged his stopped heart, plugging up a hole with his finger until he could stitch it closed, and brought the young man back to life. This was not a Hollywood story, though, and three days later Private Spicer, nineteen years old, shipped to a hospital in Japan, died of his wounds.
Now that people could watch the war, many did not like what they saw. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands were becoming commonplace around the world. From February 11 to 15, students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the war. On February 14, ten thousand demonstrators, according to the French police, or one hundred thousand, according to the organizers, marched through Paris in the pouring rain, waving North Vietnamese flags and chanting, “Vietnam for the Vietnamese,” “U.S. Go Home,” and “Johnson Assassin.” Four days later, West Berlin students did a better job of imitating American antiwar rallies when an estimated ten thousand West Germans and students from throughout Western Europe chanted: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”—reminiscent of the American “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Ho Chi Minh had called his movement the National Liberation Front. German student leader Rudi Dutschke said, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” The demonstrators urged American soldiers to desert, which they were already doing, applying to Sweden, France, and Canada for asylum. In February, the Toronto Anti-Draft Program mailed to the United States five thousand copies of its 132-page paperback,
Manual for Draft Age Immigrants to Canada,
printed in the basement of an eight-room house by U.S. draft dodgers living in Canada. In addition to legal information it gave background information on the country, including a chapter titled “Yes, John, There Is a Canada.” By March even the relatively moderate Mexico City student movement held a demonstration against the Vietnam War.
American antiwar poster depicting a draft card being burned
(Imperial War Museum, London, poster negative number LDP 449)
The Selective Service had been planning to call up 40,000 young men a month, but the number was ballooning upward to 48,000. The Johnson administration abolished the student deferment for graduate studies and announced that 150,000 graduate students would be drafted during the fiscal year that would begin in July. This was a severe blow not only for young men planning graduate studies, among them Bill Clinton, a senior at Georgetown’s School of Government who had been appointed a Rhodes Scholar for graduate study at Oxford, but also for American graduate schools, which claimed they would be losing 200,000 incoming and first-year students. One university president, remarkably free of today’s rules of political correctness, complained that graduate schools would now be limited to “the lame, the halt, the blind, and the female.”
At Harvard Law School Alan Dershowitz began offering a course on the legal paths to war resistance. Five hundred law professors signed a petition urging the legal profession to actively oppose the war policy of the Johnson administration. With 5,000 marines in Khe Sanh surrounded by 20,000 enemy troops who could easily be replaced and resupplied from the northern border, the seven days ending February 18 broke a new record for weekly casualties, with 543 American soldiers killed. On February 17, Lieutenant Richard W. Pershing, grandson of the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, engaged
Now that people could watch the war, many did not like what they saw. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands were becoming commonplace around the world. From February 11 to 15, students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the war. On February 14, ten thousand demonstrators, according to the French police, or one hundred thousand, according to the organizers, marched through Paris in the pouring rain, waving North Vietnamese flags and chanting, “Vietnam for the Vietnamese,” “U.S. Go Home,” and “Johnson Assassin.” Four days later, West Berlin students did a better job of imitating American antiwar rallies when an estimated ten thousand West Germans and students from throughout Western Europe chanted: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”—reminiscent of the American “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Ho Chi Minh had called his movement the National Liberation Front. German student leader Rudi Dutschke said, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” The demonstrators urged American soldiers to desert, which they were already doing, applying to Sweden, France, and Canada for asylum. In February, the Toronto Anti-Draft Program mailed to the United States five thousand copies of its 132-page paperback,
Manual for Draft Age Immigrants to Canada,
printed in the basement of an eight-room house by U.S. draft dodgers living in Canada. In addition to legal information it gave background information on the country, including a chapter titled “Yes, John, There Is a Canada.” By March even the relatively moderate Mexico City student movement held a demonstration against the Vietnam War.
American antiwar poster depicting a draft card being burned
(Imperial War Museum, London, poster negative number LDP 449)
The Selective Service had been planning to call up 40,000 young men a month, but the number was ballooning upward to 48,000. The Johnson administration abolished the student deferment for graduate studies and announced that 150,000 graduate students would be drafted during the fiscal year that would begin in July. This was a severe blow not only for young men planning graduate studies, among them Bill Clinton, a senior at Georgetown’s School of Government who had been appointed a Rhodes Scholar for graduate study at Oxford, but also for American graduate schools, which claimed they would be losing 200,000 incoming and first-year students. One university president, remarkably free of today’s rules of political correctness, complained that graduate schools would now be limited to “the lame, the halt, the blind, and the female.”
At Harvard Law School Alan Dershowitz began offering a course on the legal paths to war resistance. Five hundred law professors signed a petition urging the legal profession to actively oppose the war policy of the Johnson administration. With 5,000 marines in Khe Sanh surrounded by 20,000 enemy troops who could easily be replaced and resupplied from the northern border, the seven days ending February 18 broke a new record for weekly casualties, with 543 American soldiers killed. On February 17, Lieutenant Richard W. Pershing, grandson of the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, engaged
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