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The Vietnam Era in a College Town

Alison Hicks

Vigil
We stood, then walked slowly, facing each other’s backs
People squeezed together to make room.
The line stretched around four sides of the common.
Good wool coat, mittens. Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas?
Dressed for church, cold in tights, patent leather shoes.
No one spoke. Some held signs.
The silence was important, I’d been told. It was the point.
Gathering without shouting, slogans.
Discomfort could not begin to compare:
young men dying
in a war we should not be fighting.

 
War
It felt solemn, like church.
A boy in my fourth-grade class
brought in his brother’s yearbook,
thick and red, 1st Infantry Division embossed in gold.
My mother lay down on the runway at Westover Air Force Base.
Hauled up, booked with the rest.
Too young, people my age could only watch.
Our high school played the Westfield Bombers,
fighter jets on their letter jackets.
A B-52 flew over our house,
Impossible shadow, like death.
My father said, When you argue with your mother,
that’s how wars start.

 
Domino Theory
The hard-liner we had for eighth-grade American History
informed us with some glee that we were close enough to Hartford
to be wiped out by Russian nukes. Probably he didn’t know
about the SAC bunker right there in our town.

 
Country
This is Nixon Country: The thought bubble rose from my father
somewhere on the drive to my grandmother’s in California.
In the backseat, I sat up, looking around to see.
My husband laughs, shakes his head when I tell him this,
says You didn’t grow up in America.

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