{"id":31921,"date":"2018-08-21T21:31:58","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T21:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=31921"},"modified":"2018-08-21T21:31:58","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T21:31:58","slug":"1968-the-year-that-changed-many-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=31921","title":{"rendered":"1968: The year that changed many lives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If you live long enough you get to go through many seminal moments in your life. I’ve been walking on this Earth for 68-plus years and I have had my share of them.<\/p>\n

My marriage to a girl who appeared before me like a vision. The birth of my children. The birth of my granddaughter. Flying over an erupting volcano.<\/p>\n

But 1968 produced another one, too, just as it did for many of us in my generation. That was the year I was inducted into the U.S. Army. It occurred 50 years to this day.<\/p>\n

I actually can remember much of that day in some detail. It’s one of those events that burns into your memory.<\/p>\n

Mom took me to the Army entrance station in downtown Portland, Ore. She bid me so long. I went in, went through a routine physical exam, then took the oath. I made the step forward and was informed by the swearing-in sergeant that we “all had been inducted into the Army.” I would learn later that the Marine Corps also was accepting conscripts; hey, we were at war.<\/p>\n

We piled onto buses and rode off in the dark toward Fort Lewis, Wash., where I would spend the next nine weeks learning how to be a soldier.<\/p>\n

It was a two-year hitch. I finished basic training in October, then flew directly to Richmond, Va., and then rode a bus to Fort Eustis, Va., where I would train for another 16 weeks learning how to keep OV-1 Mohawk airplanes in the air.<\/p>\n

Then it was off to Vietnam and back to Fort Lewis to finish my hitch.<\/p>\n

Why mention this? Well, I feel at times in today’s era that not enough young Americans get a chance to experience these kinds life-changing events. I came out of that experience a better person, more grounded and certainly more committed to getting an education.<\/p>\n

I won’t advocate for a return to mandatory military conscription. Perhaps some form of public service, though, might do a lot of young folks good. The government created the Peace Corps in 1961 to provide young Americans with a chance to make a positive impact around the world. The Peace Corps is still in existence, but one hardly ever hears of it, unless some young person gets into some form of trouble.<\/p>\n

I feel fortunate to have come of age when I did. I feel blessed as well that I survived that most-turbulent time in our nation’s history.<\/p>\n

None of us can rewrite our past any more than we can rewrite history. Suffice to say that 1968 was one hell of a year for many Americans. We endured violence in the streets, the murders of two iconic political\/religious\/civil rights icons and a war that tore at our national soul.<\/p>\n

We survived and we are better for having lived through it.<\/p>\n\n

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If you live long enough you get to go through many seminal moments in your life. I’ve been walking on this Earth for 68-plus years and I have had my share of them. My marriage to a girl who appeared before me like a vision. The birth of my children. The birth of my granddaughter. … Continue reading 1968: The year that changed many lives<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[5041,5110],"class_list":["post-31921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","tag-us-army","tag-vietnam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31923,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31921\/revisions\/31923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}