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  stuff has happened, and our country is in such a mess, but mostly I can’t

  stand the thought of losing you, and I miss you and everything about

  you, even puking in my popcorn. Ha! Ha! I don’t blame you the same

  way I blame Don because I know you were stoned out of your mind and

  crazy nuts after losing the baby, but I don’t understand why Don did it?

  Not if he really loved me, like he kept saying. Now I know he never did.

  Not really. And I’ll never forgive him. Never. But you’re still my best

  friend, and I had to tell you before someone drops a bomb on us. Girls

  rock! Girls rule!

  Love, Cheryl

  Phil

  Pages of the new testament fill my pillow,

  gospels on a recon in search of a soul.

  Mickey

  USS Hermitage LSD-34 World Traveler

  Dear Cheryl,

  Look at all the places I’ve been

  since hooking up with the Navy:

  Boston

  Miami

  Virginia

  New York

  Washington, DC

  Halifax

  Cuba

  Jamaica

  Puerto Rico

  Virgin Islands

  I’ll double that next year when we make

  a Mediterranean cruise—Unless we go to

  Vietnam which is a definite possibility.

  Love, “The Mick”

  Ziggy

  Fat tits + quick wit

  does not = stupidity

  if that’s what you think.

  Phil

  Dear Cheryl,

  Sarge just strolled in.

  Told me to get my shit together.

  A truck’s leaving for the airport in Pleiku in 30 minutes.

  He snatched my M-16 and walked out,

  not another word.

  Fuck it! I’m gone! I’m coming home, baby!

  Love ya, Phil

  Cheryl

  I’m wiggin’ out over Dr. Kildare, that dimple

  in his chin and those dreamy blue eyes, humming

  the theme song “Three Stars Will Shine Tonight.”

  Ziggy storms in like the good old days,

  hair in soup can rollers,

  “Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle.

  Broken neck.

  Concussion.

  Critical condition.”

  We sob listening to his album Highway 61 Revisited,

  singing “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”

  I unpin her rollers, brush out her hair.

  She irons mine. “Let’s go cruisin’.”

  We drag Van Nuys Boulevard in Bubba’s beater,

  flirting with bleached blond surfers in a woodie.

  Ziggy peels out, ditching them for Bob’s Big Boy,

  cranking The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do You Believe in Magic?”

  We share a banana split, extra whip cream and cherries,

  celebrating 2 hours, 43 minutes without talking about the

  two you-know-whos.

  “Who needs them?”

  It’s 1966

  and

  Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

  breaks bookselling records

  and

  Johnson says, “To know war

  is to know that there is still

  madness in this world”

  and

  the Beatles top the charts,

  “We Can Work It Out”

  and

  American troops in Vietnam

  double in size to 400,000

  and

  correspondent Bill Rowley

  travels with a patrol in Vietnam

  giving a vivid account, “GIs holding the

  rifles above their heads ... one just fell.”

  and

  80,000 Americans are killed

  or wounded in Vietnam

  and

  the president’s daughter,

  Luci Baines Johnson, gets married

  with a 13-tier 300-pound cake

  decorated with swans

  and

  Captain Kangaroo is the only

  live-action show on TV.

  1965 Timeline

  January 2. The Selma Voting Rights Movement officially begins when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks at a meeting in Brown Chapel, which becomes the starting point for the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. The gathering is in direct defiance of an anti-meeting ordinance.

  January 20. Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as President of the United States. He remarks, “We can never again stand aside, prideful in isolation. Terrific dangers and troubles that we once called ‘foreign’ now constantly live among us.”

  January 27. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara send a memo to President Johnson declaring that America’s limited military engagement in Vietnam is not succeeding, stating that the U.S. stands at a ‘fork in the road’ and must either escalate its involvement or withdraw.

  February 18. Jimmie Lee Jackson walks with other African Americans in Marion, Alabama to protest obstructions in voter registration. Local police and Alabama State Troopers forcefully break up the unarmed protesters using bull-whips, billy clubs, and tear gas. Jackson, his sister, mother, and 82-year old grandfather seek refuge inside a café. Jackson is shot in the stomach by an Alabama State Trooper, chased into the street, and brutally beaten.

  February 21. Malcolm X is assassinated at a speaking engagement at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. Three gunmen charge the stage, shooting him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old minister and political rights activist is pronounced dead at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital.

  February 21. Augustus Owsley Stanley III operates a makeshift laboratory in the bathroom of a house near the University of California, Berkeley. The lab is raided by police who are searching for methamphetamine. They only find LSD, which was not illegal at the time.

  February 26. 27-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson dies at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma from an infection associate with his gunshot wound.

  February 27. Malcolm X’s funeral is held at the Faith Temple Church of God in Harlem with 1,500 people in attendance. After the ceremony, friends pick up the gravediggers’ shovels and bury their leader themselves.

  March 7. Between 500 and 600 civil rights activists march east from Selma, Alabama. After crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge, they encounter state troopers and are ordered to disband. Soon thereafter, unprovoked troopers begin shoving demonstrators, knocking them down and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment begins hurling tear gas. Images of bloodied and severely injured protesters flash across news media evoking the name “Bloody Sunday.”

  March 8. Da Nang, Vietnam. 3,500 U.S. Marines land at China Beach to defend the American air base. They join 23,000 U.S. military advisors already stationed in the country.

  March 9. Two days after Bloody Sunday, Dr. King leads 2,500 people in a symbolic march to Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. They kneel for a prayer session and sing hymns. Afterward, they march back, thereby obeying a court order against marching all the way to Montgomery.

  March 9. Selma, Alabama. Three white ministers are attacked and beaten with clubs outside a café where segregationist whites are known to gather. One victim James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, is rushed to Selma’s public hospital where he’s refused treatment.

  March 9. President Johnson sanctions the use of Napalm-B for use in Vietnam. When dropped from “hedgehoppers”—planes flying around 100 feet—the antipersonnel bomb showers a surface area with flames about 270 feet long and 75 feet wide.

  March 11. Minister Reeb dies at University Hospital in Birmingham with his wife by his side.

  March 16. Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. rules in favor of civil rights activists wishing to march peacefully from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He cites, “The law
is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups ... These rights may ... be exercised by marching, even along public highways.” (Williams v. Wallace, 1960).

  March 21–25. Dr. King leads 3,200 protesters in a march from Selma to Montgomery, walking approximately 12 miles per day and sleeping in fields. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arranges logistics—providing food, water, and sanitation. Dr. King delivers his “How Long, Not Long” speech on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

  April 1. President Johnson sanctions additional Marine battalions and up to 20,000 logistical personnel in Vietnam. American combat troops are authorized to patrol rural areas and flush out Viet Cong. The decision to permit offensive operations is kept secret from the American public for two months.

  April 15. U.S. and South Vietnamese fighter-bombers drop a thousand tons of bombs on Viet Cong positions.

  April 17. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organize the first national march to protest the Vietnam War. More than 20,000 people assemble, a turnout that surprises the organizers. SDS President Paul Potters speaks to demonstrators in front of the Washington Monument.

  April 20. General Westmoreland meets with other top aides. They agree to recommend to the president that he send another 40,000 combat soldiers to Vietnam.

  May 13. The United States enacts the first halt in bombings in hopes that Hanoi will negotiate. There are six additional bombing pauses in the Rolling Thunder campaign, all with the same goal. The North Vietnamese ignore the peace offerings, using the respite to restore air defenses and dispatch troops and supplies to the South by way of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

  May 19. The United States resumes bombing of North Vietnam.

  July 28. President Johnson announces he will send another 44 combat battalions to Vietnam, raising the U.S. military presence to 125,000. Monthly draft call will double to 35,000. “I have asked the commanding general, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam.”

  August 6. President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, which follows the language of the 15th Amendment. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other requirements that were used to restrict black voting are made illegal. Other provisions include special enforcement terms directed at those parts of the country where Congress believes the potential for discrimination is the greatest.

  August 11–16. The arrest of Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black man, sparks 5 days of riots in Watts, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles. During the course of the riots, there are 34 deaths and 1,032 reported injuries. The estimated loss of property exceeds $40 million, mostly due to damage by fire. The Watts Riots are the worst of a series of disturbances that break out across the country during the summer of 1965.

  August 12. The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), a powerful force in antiwar activities, stages a demonstration designed to disrupt trains with soldiers embarking to Vietnam via the Oakland Army Terminal.

  August 30. President Johnson signs a bill that adds four words to the Selective Service law, “knowingly destroys, knowingly mutilates.” This refers to draft registration and classification cards held by men in the United States between the ages of 18 and 35.

  September 24. President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246 to enforce affirmative action, stating that civil rights laws alone are not enough to rectify discrimination. It obligates government contractors to “take affirmative action” toward prospective minority employees in all areas of hiring and employment.

  October 15–16. Antiwar rallies draw as many as 100,000 in 80 major U.S. cities, as well as globally in London, Paris, and Rome.

  October 18. David Miller becomes the first activist arrested under the new Selective Service law for knowingly destroying his draft card.

  October 30. Five Medal of Honor recipients lead a march of 25,000 people in support of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

  November 14–16. The Battle of la Drang Valley is the first major battle between U.S. troops and North Vietnamese Army regulars (NVA) within the bounds of South Vietnam. Seventy-nine Americans are killed and 121 are wounded. NVA losses are approximately 2,000.

  November 30. Upon his return from a visit to Vietnam, Defense Secretary McNamara warns that the American casualty rate may be up to 1,000 dead per month.

  By the end of 1965, U.S. troop levels reached 184,300. It’s estimated that 90,000 South Vietnamese soldiers have deserted, and 35,000 soldiers from North Vietnam have infiltrated the South. Up to 50 percent of the countryside in South Vietnam is under some measure of control by the Viet Cong.

  During the entire war, the United States will fly 3 million missions and drop approximately 8 million tons of bombs, which represents four times the amount of tonnage dropped during World War II, and the largest display of firepower in the history of warfare.

  General Willliam C. Westmoreland is chosen by Time magazine as 1965’s “Man of the Year.”

  Acknowledgments

  First, this book would not have been remotely possible if it weren’t for my small, but intimate circle of friends in high school, especially my first serious boyfriend. (You know who you are.) Unbelievable, that I kept dozens of their letters, stored in a shoebox for more than forty years.

  Second, I applaud the faculty in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts for encouraging us all to push the creative envelope, especially my faculty advisors Ron Koertge and Tim Wynne-Jones. I remain grateful for the undeniable friendship of “The Unreliable Narrators.”

  Third, I am beyond fortunate to have Kelli Chipponeri and Greg Jones as my editors at Running Press Kids and Jill Corcoran as my agent. All carry an extraordinary compassionate gene and are equally passionate about books for young people.

  Fourth, I am grateful for my two writing families, Cambria Writers Workshop, and most affectionately, Kiddie Writers, always willing to wring out a hanky over rejections and eager to pop a cork over successes.

  Fifth, I treasure my mom (who survived my teen years, barely), Lou (for sharing his crazy Navy stories), daughter Krise (who makes me laugh when I need it most), daughter Kyle (who reads to our boys every single night), Jon (who puts up with us), and grandsons Michael (who thinks I’m famous), Cooper (who never rats me out), and Chase (who shares his finger food).

  Sixth, I am indebted to my partner and best friend on the entire planet, Phillip Cole, not only because he was essential to the writing and revision of this story, but for a gazillion other nameless reasons.

  Seventh, my utmost admiration for the two-and-a-half million American soldiers who braved the living hell of Vietnam from March 8, 1965 when the first combat troops landed at China Beach to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

  © 2011 by Sherry Shahan

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and

  International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any

  form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

  and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented,

  without written permission from the publisher.

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010941249

  eISBN : 978-0-762-44247-8

  Published by Running Press Teens

  an imprint of Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

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  www.runningpress.com

 

 

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