Carbines and More... Detroit July 1967

[lemaymiami]

.... and this was just a dress rehearsal. I went into the Army in January, 1968, made it through basic training then went to my assigned training station along the east coast. I was going to be a clerk typist in an interesting field and was waiting for my class to form up (hundreds of us doing whatever made work while waiting for different classes to form up). Then in March, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the urban CONUS went on fire... They took seven of us wannabe clerks into a room and said "you remember that job we were going to teach you?... You got it right now. We'll be training you later." That was my introduction into the place where all the intel reports were collected from around the country as the inner cities burned... We manned telex machines where we received reports coming out of every big city - often, after all police and fire had withdrawn from conflict zones and just allowed them to burn.... the place we worked was going 24-7 for about three months after the assassination.

It was one crazy year and I was there - long before Watergate and all the stuff that came later... I'm wondering whether anyone will write an accurate account of the country's response to those very real threats. It was an eye-opener for me at age 19, to be thrust into that world of unrest. We've never seen anything of that magnitude since, thank heavens. Army and marine armories were being raided - there were accounts of heavy machine gun fire coming out of a few inner cities... The country was being torn apart - but we survived....