Sights. Sounds. Places. People. Moments. Events. Experiences.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I was in school the day JFK was assassinated. Don't really have a clear memory of much other than early dismissal and walking home.

I was at work on the day of the 9-11 attacks. We were listening to it on the radio as it happened. Everything closed and the traffic was such that I could not get off campus. After we shut everything down, I and one of my post-docs walked over to my tech's home where we watched the aftermath of the day. I was not sure where my wife was - was it her day to be at the Pentagon or not. Took hours for the phone lines to clear and then I got hold of here at home. Several hours later I walked back to campus - total ghost town. Got my car and drove about a bit to the back end of campus to look about - found one of the safety office guys who had been "ordered" to stand guard over one of the now empty deserted buildings. We had a talk and I headed home. I might have been the only driver on the DC Beltway that afternoon. We did not go back to work for a couple of weeks.

[rogruth]

In November of 1963 I was teaching in a very small town in southeastern Ohio and had been elected to represent our county at the Ohio Education Association conference in Columbus. It was the second day of a 3.5 day conference and there were scheduled meetings with the governor and many other state officials to take place that evening and on Friday. I found it interesting that very few wanted to end the meetings and go home. The schedule was modified and much was accomplished. Most did not feel that ending early on Thursday would change anything. The schedule for the next several weeks was different for everyone.

In September of 2001 we had been to Kentucky to visit our daughter and her family. We had just loaded our car and were starting to pull out when a grand daughter ran out to stop us because our daughter had passed ou. So we got the EMT people who took her to the hospital a mile away and kidney stones were the diagnosis. We were in the waiting area when the announcement was made on TV and many in the waiting room, not me, thought they were seeing an advertisement for a TV program. Changing channels finally convinced them it was for real. I still feel like Chuck and most would probably be pleased that I was not in charge.

Those two events along with the assassination of M.L.King I will not forget.

[healey36]

The assassinations, Kennedy, King, Kennedy, were remarkable, but I was pretty young and the impact was hard to gauge. The deaths of Presley and Lennon soon followed, and that hit me harder, the sense of finality. Lennon's been gone now longer than he lived, and that's still hard to wrap my head around.

Oklahoma City was the game-changer for me, watching that all unfurl sitting in a McDonalds while on a business trip. It was hard to imagine some effing maniac would/could do that, especially a home-grown maniac. 9-11 was just surreal, that didn't really settle in for a few days. We had visitors at work from LA...took us a week to figure out how to get them home. The desk we used for foreign currency transactions was on the fortieth floor of the north tower, and as far as I know they all got out.

Then a year later we had the DC sniper duo. I still remember duck-n-cover across the parking lot of our office building in Germantown, running in between parked cars.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Then a year later we had the DC sniper duo. I still remember duck-n-cover across the parking lot of our office building in Germantown, running in between parked cars.

Oh, I had almost forgotten that -- was on my way to work one morning and they closed the Beltway going across the river; managed to hear it on the radio just before I got to a point of no return and get back home in time to tell my wife not to bother to try going in to her office.

[MurphOnMillerAve]

On 9/11 , I was teaching high school in New Jersey when news of the towers being hit was broadcast on all the TV's in the classrooms. I was in a hallway at the time, supervising, when a much-liked male African-American 10th grader had just entered the front foyer to the building . He yelled out to anyone in the area near him, "My mother works there!!!! "

We went to him to comfort him, but he was inconsolable.

Fortunately, she was able to call the school , later, to tell us and her son that since she had let him off at the school and then began the journey toward Lincoln Tunnel, she was stopped there and not allowed to complete her trip into the city to her job in one of The Towers.

Everybody was thrilled. The boy wept with joy and relief.

I can still see and hear his first outburst on his way into the school and feel his absolute horror and fear. We teachers wanted to be helpful but were unsure ourselves of what was transpiring, actually .

The school day was abbreviated, eventually, and we teachers were warned that we might have difficulty making our ways homeward if we were accustomed to using Rt80. We were told State Police had been stopping traffic, especially eastward toward the city.

On my journey homeward along Rt80W, I was not stopped, but upon exiting, which took me near a State Police headquarters, I saw that there were a 1/2 dozen troopers standing alert at its perimeter, at attention, and holding long guns at their hips, pointing skyward, at-the-ready.

It seemed that nobody knew what to expect next.

[HONDO74]

I often wonder what our country would be like today if JFK has not been assassinated. Because Johnson turned out to be a total disaster with his Vietnam war

[MurphOnMillerAve]

I often wonder what our country would be like today if JFK has not been assassinated. Because Johnson turned out to be a total disaster with his Vietnam war

Yet, I've heard, somewhere along the way, that interest in being involved militarily in Vietnam began with Eisenhower and continued with JFK.

[rogruth]

I often wonder what our country would be like today if JFK has not been assassinated. Because Johnson turned out to be a total disaster with his Vietnam war

Yet, I've heard, somewhere along the way, that interest in being involved militarily in Vietnam began with Eisenhower and continued with JFK.

I had a friend who was first sent to Viet Nam as a military advisor during the Eisenhower administration.
He was an officer and spent a goodly amount of time there. He could/would not tell me what he did there.

[chuck]

Ike and Kennedy were wary of involvement in French Indo-China as on one hand they saw it as a potential quagmire since the French colonial rule had severely fractured any semblance of possible local democratic rule and b) the north had seized upon communist system with support from the Soviet Union. This was rapidly degenerating into a class war where we would find little in the way of true allies. Johnson wasn't originally that high on getting involved but the old in for a penny, in for a pound philosophy lead us down a very, very slippery slope. It is hard to "win" a war when many of the locals view you as outside invaders.

Vietnamese nationals tried to get the US and England to intercede on their behalf to get them out from under French rule back at the end of WW1. We (US/England) didn't and the French continued to botch local rule and allowed Indochina to come under Japanese rule during WW2. Following WW2 they (France) tried to re-assert control but lost it and then they bailed in 1954. That's when we started to get involved.

[MurphOnMillerAve]

Roger and Chuck, Thank you, both, for the clarification.
murph

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I often wonder what our country would be like today if JFK has not been assassinated. Because Johnson turned out to be a total disaster with his Vietnam war

Yet, I've heard, somewhere along the way, that interest in being involved militarily in Vietnam began with Eisenhower and continued with JFK.

Yes, there were many years of poor decisions well before Johnson.

[HONDO74]

My high school graduating class was devastated by the Vietnam, war 1960. our 10 year 1970 reunion was a somber event, they had a memorial for those killed.

I remember the 1964 election when Goldwater ran against Johnson. The democrats ran ads with a little girl with an atomic bomb in the background saying Goldwater would get us into a nuclear war.

So Johnson sent over 50 thousand young men to get slaughtered in Vietnam.

[up148]

I've often wondered what our world would be like today had we not lost all the fathers in WWII and Vietnam. I think we lost more than their lives. The "greatest generation" had to lose some of their "greatness" when fathers who could have made a major difference, never returned home (mine did fortunately). Same for Vietnam.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Lots of counties wonder what might have been had a generation not been lost in a war.....think about the US Civil War, WW1, WW2, and how the latter 2 affected England (maybe never really has recovered from WW2), other countries in Europe, etc.

[healey36]

So Johnson sent over 50 thousand young men to get slaughtered in Vietnam.

The U.S. actually sent quite a few more than that during the course of the war. Some 2.6 million actually served inside the country, with a bit less than 1.2 million in combat roles. Peak U.S. troop strength in-country was 543,482 (04/30/1968). I have always felt McNamara and Westmoreland were the real culpable ones. I can still recall McNamara talking up the waning strength of the NVA and VC forces in early 1968. Then the Tet Offensive hit, and we found out how much we'd been played.

I had a half-dozen neighborhood friends that got called up. Only one didn't make it back. By the time I was draft age, Nixon had ended the draft. They still held the lottery, and my number was 12. Nixon was a great president.