Taking an anti-war stance
In May of 1969, a young soldier soon to die on Vietnam's infamous "Hamburger Hill" scribbled a letter back home: "I am writing in a hurry. I see death coming up the hill."
The passage, published in Life magazine the next month along with the photographs of all 242 U.S. servicemen killed the week the soldier died, helped ignite anti-war unrest that swept across Long Island and the region during the spring and summer of 1969.
Anti-war students occupied the library at Stony Brook University that April, and more than 25,000 anti-war demonstrators converged on the Central Park band shell three weeks later. Students at Columbia University camped outside the building housing the campus ROTC military cadet program, demanding its ouster. In July, a 17-year-old Army private from Ronkonkoma, Kenneth Cross, was sentenced to 3 months in prison plus 6 months hard labor for anti-war leafleting at a base in South Carolina.
"There was a growing perception in the country that summer that the war wasn't going well and young Americans were being killed for reasons that didn't make sense anymore," said Carolyn Eisenberg, a Hofstra University professor who is writing about military policy during the Nixon presidency. "There was an alienation, reflected in the breakdown of authority, among young people who couldn't believe that grown-ups were actually going to send them to Vietnam."
More than 1 million Americans had been drafted in the four years before 1969, and nearly 300,000 more were compelled to serve that year, according to the Selective Service System.
Long Island households, many of them headed by veterans of World War II, were divided over seeing their children sent off to a new war, one whose objectives were less clear. "You had to choose sides," said Larry Marino, 53, of North Massapequa, whose elder brother was in Vietnam. "It really upset my mother, because the war was [televised] right in our living room."
With their futures squarely in the crosshairs of the Vietnam War, the Island's youth fretted over whether to avoid service overseas. Draft boards were inundated with applications for student deferments or conscientious objector status. Thousands volunteered for the Navy or the National Guard, whose units were mostly spared hostile action. Scores in the region faced jail by simply refusing induction.
The summer of 1969 launched the anti-war career of Bobby Muller, a Great Neck native who in 1978 cofounded Vietnam Veterans of America with now-Sen. John Kerry. A Massapequa Marine, Ron Kovic, penned the anti-war bestseller "Born on the Fourth of July," six years after being paralyzed in battle near the Demilitarized Zone in 1968.
"The summer of '69 was for me the beginning of trying to figure out what the -- that war was all about," said Muller, who grew up in Great Neck, joined the Marines the day he graduated from Hofstra University in 1968, and was paralyzed by a bullet the next April. "I spent a year at Kingsbridge veterans hospital in the Bronx. I felt completely abandoned and just forgotten."
