Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image by jimbowen0306 via Flickr

I don’t remember exactly when I heard about some far off Southeast Asian country and the war that would consume the 60s and part of the 70s for the first time. However, when I did, it was when I heard the week’s body count reported on the radio.

It was on the hourly news on WLS Radio out of Chicago. Right after Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” and before The Box Tops’ “The Letter” the disc jockey would read some of the news coming off the wire and say something like, “This week in Vietnam ten soldiers were killed, fifteen wounded and five missing in action.” While I wouldn’t know this at the time, (I was eight or nine at the time) it must have seemed so surreal to have the war and body count interspersed between the music.

Although I probably had a hard time understanding terms like guerilla warfare (were gorillas really fighting each other?) body count, KIA, MIA, I knew what killed meant. That’s okay, within a couple of years I would know what all those places, words and acronyms meant.

This was not long after Tonkin and the USS Maddox when Washington upped the ante for our involvement in Vietnam and before Tet when North Vietnam put all their cards on the table. Tet. In many ways the Tet Offensive was the media turning point that really brought the war home to America-into our living rooms every night on the nightly news.