Tet Documents

     The Tet offensive is named for the new year holiday the comes at the end of January in Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries.  During the 1968 Tet holiday the U.S. had declared a temporary cease-fire to allow for the celebrations to take place.  Hanoi (the capital of North Vietnam) and the Viet Cong used this cease-fire as an excuse to send forces across the border to 'celebrate'.

     Hanoi knew a lot about the current peace movement in the U.S. and the strong divisions that were being formed as a result of the war.  Hanoi was worried that continued U.S. involvement would allow for the South Vietnamese government the time it needed to become strong enough to fight on its own.  In an attempt to speed up the ousting of the U.S. forces General Giap (the NVA commander) planned the Tet Offensive.  The attack was planned to have a strong effect on the U.S. presidentail  elections that were coming up later that year.  The Tet Offensive consisted of attacks on almost all major cities and military instilations in South Vietnam.  Militarily, it was a complete failure.  The VC and NVA forces lost upwars of 45,000 dead and 7,000 captured while the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces lost only 4,424 men and 16,063 were injured.  Despite the heavy losses suffered by the VC/NVA forces, the Tet Offensive is recognized as a turning point in the war.  Antiwar demonstrations erupted across the U.S. and U.S. leaders lost much of their credibility since they'd been claiming that victory was, if not close, at least achievable.  Because of the Tet Offensive LBJ decided not to run for another term, denied Gen. Westmoreland's request for more troops, and was the reason Nixon began diminishing the U.S. presence in Vietnam.  Gen. Giap had planned for there to be an uprising to coincide with the Tet Offensive to further stress U.S. forces and I wonder how they had such good inteligence about the political situation in the U.S. but were less accurate in their information about the South Vietnamese people's attitude.  I think that if the planned uprising had occured, that might've ended the war then and there.

     Not every city was as well defended as the others.  Hue was a city attacked during the Tet Offensive.  The battle raged for 25 days, but eventually the communists were victorious.  The communist forces took many prisoners when they left.  Various rumors and the findings of some mass graves led to further searches.  It appeared that the communist forces believed they would be unable to keep their prisoners and so they killed them despite rumors that the kill orders came directly from Ho Chi Minh.  A local province chief, Colonel Le Van Than, people realized that the Viet Cong would kill them, regardless of political belief".  While I know that there was the ARVN, I wonder why this kind of massacre didn't cause a surge of South Vietnamese resistance to the VC.

     CBS aired a broadcast called, "We are Mired in Stalemate" on February 27th 1968.  In the broadcast, Walter Cronkite talks about the current post-Tet situation in Vietnam, that is, a stalemate.  Cronkite talks about how the American people have been repeatedly let down by their optomisic leaders and how the only way out is through negotiation, not continued bloodshed.  While many Americans had probably already readjusted their opinions about the war based on the Tet Offensive I think that this broadcast played an important part in changing the minds of the American people to be against the war.

     Work is, as far as I'm aware, something everyone does.  A person's job and how they feel about it can tell you a lot about thier character.
     Dolores Dante is a waitress who has been waiting tables at the same restaurant for 23 years.  She talked about some misconeptions she feel surround waitresses.  She became a waitress because after her husband left her, she needed some money to feed her kids and pay some debts.  Dolores says taht broken homes lead to waitresses instead of waitresses leading to broken homes as most people think.  She says, "I can't be servile.  I give service.  There is a difference."  Again this is her distinguishing what she does from what people think she does.  Her long work experience has given her a lot of insight into her job.  To keep from getting bitter or resentful about low tips she doesn't look at what she's made until the morning after.  And when people purposely try to be demeaning she tells them what she thinks and stops worrying about the money.  She doesn't like bosses either because they make it so that you need to be popular enough to be treated well, but not so popular as to garner resentment from them.  Dolores has a give nothing attitude that very much reflects this.  She says, "There  are only two things that regulate us -- the bathroom and the grave.  Either I'm gonna have to go to the bathroom now or I'm gonna die now."  Dolores treats her job as an art form where she's constantly on stage.  Dodging and twisting between people she feels like a ballarina and she gets a lot of enjoyment from her job.  She says that she doesn't just work in order to pay the bills but to have something to do as well.  I think that Dolores is very lucky because the job she has to do is a job that she enjoys, something that most people aren't able to do because they need to pay the bills.
     Tom Patrick is has been a firefighter for two years who came from a very poor family.  So much so that he has trouble believing that he has a house.  In '62 he went into the army where he learned how prejudice he is.  Before he was a firefighter, Tom was a cop.  He learned a lot about the job from his many years of work.  After his first arrest the other cops through him a party because he'd 'popped his cherry'.  He learned about the difference between housing cops and the city cops who thought themselves the elite.  He learned about how people associated more arrests with being a better cop (something Tom himself doesn't agree with).  And he learned about people.  However, as a cop, Tom was on the receiving end of a lot of hate, which is why he became a firefighter.  He likes the teamwork and the comraderie that comes with being a firefighter.  He also likes that there isn't the BS that there was as a cop.  Tom has a lot of pride in his job which is important.  I think that Tom is also very lucky because he has pride in what he does.  This means that he'll keep doing it and do it to the best of his ability.
    Tom and Dolores are part of a lucky few who enjoy their lives because they enjoy their work.  It makes me wonder what would happen to our society if everyone could do what they enjoy, instead of having to work just to make ends meet.

Division Street: Dennis Hart, cabbie

Dennis Hart was born into poverty in Chicago but worked on a farm with his family when not in school.  He would get into fights at schol because of his accent and backing down was more humiliating than losing.  Hart was crushed by poverty and has been changed forever by his experiences with it.  Hart says, "if I die, I don't want to die a natural death that most people succumb, say at 60 years old.  IF I could die on some battlefied someplace, doing something good, I feel mylife would be worthwhile.  I want my death to mean something".  For me this is a profound comment about life and death since I've always wanted to go in my sleep or something where I wasn't really aware but Hart wants his death to mean something, not just his life and this is an idea that I think is an older idea but one that is no less meaningful because of it.  I wonder if the reason that Hart believes this is because of his early life in poverty a growing up in a difficult place.  When talking about the atomic bomb, Hart says taht he thinks athiests are more worried about it than religious people are because for religious people know they have something to look forward to but athiests believe that this is it.  Throughout his life, Hart learned many things: the importance of empathy, the simplicity of life despite the fact that people say it is complicated, to be a man you have to have a heart, and the importance of goals.  I think that these lessons are very important and when I see people who clearly haven't learned these things it makes me wonder if there aren't some disadvantages to living in a well-to-do society (like Deerfield) as compared to being brought up poor like Hart.  However, Hart had some beliefs that I strongy disagree with.  He thought that the only reason communists were communists was because they didn't know enough about democracy and if they did they wouldn't want to be communists.  I think this is outrageous and ignorant of him to think that there is only one solution and that people who don't think that that solution is correct must think that because they are idiots.  Furthermore, Hart disliked MLK Jr. because he was being peacefully destructive and thought that he was part of a communist plot.  Again, for me the ignorance shown here is astounding especially because, as I mentioned previously, Hart has learned many lessons that I think are very important.  One thing that really stood out to me though was the reason that Hart liked Gen. MacArthur so much was because, "He didn't care what the majority of people wanted in a democracy.  He knew what was right and he did it".  Ignoring for a moment wheter or not what MacArthur did was right or wrong, that seems to defy the very point of a democracy.  It seems to me that Dennis Hart is a somewhat contradictory person who knows many values about being a good person and can still be so closed-minded and ignorant.  However, despite my problems with Mr. Hart as a person, Studs Terkel interviewed people who he hoped would be somewhat representative of America as a whole.  This is a little disturbing if one considers the possibility of the majority of Americans having the same mindset as Dennis Hart.  Additionally, this might suggest why America isn't the most popular country right now if we are so often contradictory about our values, and our actions based on them.

World War Two (Peggy Terry, Hillbilly / E.B. Sledge, Marine)

Peggy Terry was a woman on the homefront during WWII.  She, her mother, and her sister, worked together at a shell-loading plant pulling in  a collective $32 a week to pay for rent and put food on the table.  They were ignorant of the deatails of the war.  Peggy recalls that, "when you are involved in stayin' alive, you don't think about big things like war".  This was probably an idea that many post-Depression workers shared as they concentrated on working their way out of the hole that they had been shoved into by the Depression.  Working conditions at the plant were terrible.  A chemical used at the plant called tetryl turned workers orange.  Workers would aslo inhale chemical fumes.  They had no water or bathroom breaks either.  Workers had no rights and didn't know much about human or union rights.  A family connection brought Peggy and her mother and sister to Jackson, Michigan where they were able to make $90 a week.  "The war [...] widened my world" Peggy recalls.  New work around the country probably inspired many people to move.  Although they knew few details about the war Peggy remembers that, "We were very patriotic and we understood that the Nazis were someone who would have to be stopped.  We didn't know about the concentration camps.  I don't think anybody I knew did.  With the Japanese, that was a whole different thing.  We were just ready to wipe them out."  This is an interesting thing to note since, for the most part, the European theater is what is talked about when WWII is discussed, not the Pacific.  Through propaganda and censorship of letters from the warfront, people at home had little idea that they were being subtly manipulated.  These manipulations changed old prejudices in order to suit the Allies.  People on the homefront were changed by the war, their expectations were raised and changed how people thought about religion and society.  The people who fought were also changed.  Peggy's husband came home a violent alcoholic, a shadow of the respectful man who had left.  Peggy recalls that, "[the bomb] was dropped on women and children who had nothing to say about whether or not their country went to war or not."  This leaves us with an interesting idea and a question about the justice of war.

E.B. Sledge, a marine from the Pacific, recalls how, "there was nothing macho about the war at all" going against the romanticized view of WWII that most people hold in their heads today as well as the idea that most people held on the homefront.  Sledge remembers thinking that there were two wars in the Pacific.  There were the frontline soldiers doing the killing and the dying, and there were the support people 'sitting back' and only indirectly helping the fighting.  Sledge remembers that the real motivator wasn't patriotism or a desire to defeat the Japanese, rather it was the need to not dissappoint his buddies.  They had no rest while fighting the Japanese who would fight day and night without surrender.  The Japanese were motivated to fight by their bushido honor code, while the marines were motivated to fight because they knew what had happended at Bataan and didn't want that to happen to them.  Insensitivity became a coping mechanism that turned kindhearted men into brutal savages.

These two radically different points of view present an interesting and rich story about WWII.  On one hand there is the violence and brutality recalled by E.B. Sledge, and on the other, there is the romantisized view of the war held by people like Peggy Terry who were working on the homefront.  These points of view show how different people can look at the same world shaping event in totally disimilar ways that are both accurate and true.

Studs Terkel 2 (Ed Paulsen, freight-train rider / Mary Owsley and Peggy Terry, mountain people)

Ed Paulsen's story, that of the migrant unemployed looking for work, was unfortunately common during the Great Depression.  Paulsen recounts how 1000's of men would crowd around for three or four jobs all hoping for the chance to work (I find it interesting how lazy many people are now-a-days in comparison).  All these unemployed people, blacks, whites, and others together, all wanted the same three things: work, food, shelter, and those that had them also wanted security for their families.  Paulsen noted that, "more and more men were after fewer and fewer jobs.  So San Francisco just ground to a halt".  While no city (that I'm aware of) has fallen that far during this recession, the idea of more people wanting fewer jobs, seems similar to this time of economic crisis.  And while more people wanted fewer jobs, Paulsen says that there wasn't a whole lot of anger in these people.  Having been in a work riot and traveling all over the country, Paulsen realized the general feeling, "was a bewilderment, not anger.  Not a sense of being particularly put upon.  We weren't talking, revolution; we were talking jobs".  This is an interesting idea to compare and contrast to the Occupy movements.  While Paulsen says, and means, 'talking', the modern movements have often been organized online both peaceful (as in the U.S.) and violent (as in the Arab Spring).  Eventually Paulsen came to a Transient Camp where he would find significantly improved conditions and other amenities as a part of the New Deal.  At the end of the interview Paulsen tells Terkel that, "It wasn't a big thing, but it created a coyote mentality.  You were a predator.  You had to be.  The coyote is crafty".  Paulsen had to be crafty and think of only himself in order to get along during the Great Depression.
     The story of Mary Owsley and her daughter Peggy Terry is much different.  While hardly prosperous, Mary and Peggy didn't have to endure the kind of hardships Paulsen went through, though they still had hardships of their own.  Mary remembers that, "the dust storms, they were terrible".  The oily sand, dust, and dirt carried by the winds would stain clothes so much that they would have to be thrown out, but Mary and her family couldn't afford new clothes and so they had to stick with the stained items they had.  Mary knew quite a few people, who, with no end in sight, committed suicide.  However, not everything was terrible.  Mary remembers, "a lot of times one family would have some food.  They would divide.  And everyone would share".  These instances show that even in the darkest times, when it would be so easy to hoard all one's food for oneself and family, people still have the ability to show compassion.  Although I don't think people would actively share their food today, I do believe that more people are donating or helping out at soup kitchens and food pantries around their community.  I also think that many people feel the same way as Mary's husband did.  She recalls that, "my husband was very bitter.  That's just puttin' it mild.  He was an intelligent man.  He couldn't see why as wealthy a country as this is, that there was any sense in so many people starving to death, when so much of it, [...] was being poured into the ocean".  This is something that bothers me as well about the Great Depression.  Even though people couldn't make money off their goods, I don't see why instead of selling them for a loss or dumping them, why they weren't decent enough to give away what would otherwise go to waste.
     Peggy Terry grew up during the Great Depression, and she learned to swear in soup lines.  A nearby family had a fruit tree from which kids could pick fruit for their families.  Because food wasn't always on the table and you never knew when your next meal would be, kids would eat until they were sick.  Peggy recalls a time when she, and others, stole oranges from a family giving away potatoes because the family wouldn't say why they were saving the oranges.  She notes that, "it's different today.  People are made to feel ashamed now if they don't have anything".  This is an interesting idea so foreign to us today, it is so ingrained in society that possessions show what you're worth and this is a very disturbing thing to have ingrained, that we can't even imagine (or at least I can't) of a world where people aren't looked down on for having less or none.  Peggy married at 15 and traveled around with her husband.  They were shocked when they saw their first Hooverville and although they worked for their food Peggy still got preferential treatment since she was pregnant.  During her journey through this economic trouble Peggy got over her racism when she realized that blacks and other peoples were just like her, tired, hungry, and looking for work.
     These stories all show different, but equally interesting, points of view of the Great Depression.  Not everyone had a story like one of these, but the fact that anyone had a story with a positive ending, gives hope to those who worry about our future in this recession.

Studs Terkel 1 (Andy Johnson, harscrablle Finnish Immigrant)

I find Terkel's whole idea about American history to be very interesting.  Going around and interviewing people about their experiences as they relate to certain important events in America's history is a cool way to learn about America.  I think its somewhat unusual or strange that so many of these people that he interviewed invited him into their house, this person who they probably had never heard of who wanted to ask all about their past.  I don't think the same thing could be done today because of fear of scams or other various things.  Johnson's story is one of the many immigrant stories that so fill the history of America.  However, despite the commonness of these stories, they are all unique and tell a slightly different perspective of different times in U.S. history.  Johnson came to the U.S. at a young age in 1906.  His father had left earlier to find a job and avoid the Russian draft.  Johnson's family sailed across the North Sea and then took a train across England to Liverpool which they left on a Cunard liner bound for New York City.  Johnson told Terkel that, "Coming to America was like being transferred from one century to another.  The change was so great".  This probably typified many post industrialization immigration stories for lower class immigrants.  Before coming to the U.S. Johnson hadn't ever seen a black person, nor did he, at the young age at which he arrived, understand the concept of racism or slavery.  Despite the drastic change from Europe, "when [they] first came here, [the houses] were about six feet high, made out of poles stuck in the ground and boxboards nailed to the posts, and tarpaper over that. [Johnson] didn't think they had any floor".  This shows that the Johnson family continued in destitution despite their arrival in America, a place thought of as an area where prospering was hardly as difficult as in Europe.  Johnson's father was later fired for his political views, something that would cause an uproar today was commonplace then.  While this kind of discrimination is hardly evident in America (as far as I'm aware), racism, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination are still, unfortunately, widespread.  Johnson noted that he saw "a wonderful future for humanity, or the end of it".  I wonder where he thinks we stand today, on the path towards a wonderful future, or on the road to self-destruction.

Just War: Was the Spanish American War Just?

I think that originally the Spanish American War (SAW) was just.  However, its execution was unjust.  The destruction of the Maine, as well as the harsh rule of the Spanish and potential gain of war, as well as the idea that America could establish another democratic government and the fact that peaceable efforts to free/obtain Cuba had failed lead me to believe that going to war with Spain was the right idea.  Although the blame for the Maine's destruction is somewhat iffy, America needed to stand up for itself at this time since it was just coming into itself as a international player.  However the way the SAW was conducted, not just in Cuba but in the Philippines, keep it from being really just.  In Cuba, the American government of the time basically ignored the rebels.  They felt that, because most of them were black, they needed guidance and help along their way.  Racism was also evident in the Philippines.  Taft, called the Filipinos, "little brown brothers".  This clearly derisive language, as well as the eventual treatment of the Filipinos after the SAW are one of the reasons I feel the execution of the SAW was unjust.  When America didn't grant the Philippines independence, and there was additional violence from the Filipinos, America responded in much the same way that Spain did.  This was very unjust.  Because of its execution the SAW was an unjust war despite the originally just intentions.