Eve of Destruction
by Doug Bradley
I turned 18 the summer of 1965. By all adolescent indications — personal, social, musical, and extracurricular — it promised to be the best summer ever. High school drama and in-crowd bullshit were a thing of the past, and, for moderately fortunate sons like me, the ultimate freedom of college beckoned.
Little did I know that turning 18 in the summer of 1965 would augur the end of my innocence and the beginning of my disillusionment with my country, my president, and my government.
Things began innocently enough, sort of, when I turned 18 that June and was told by my father and Uncle Sam that I had to register for something called Selective Service. My World War II dad accompanied me to the nearby U.S. Post Office, revealing nothing to me about his own military service. “It’s just something you have to do,” he instructed me, “so let’s get it done.”
And so on June 11, 1965, I aligned my “good moral character” with the soldierly aims of the USA. Uncle Sam now had dibs on me, a stake he’d eventually claim within five years…
I got a job at a grocery store, wondering why something called “union dues” was regularly being taken out of my paycheck. “Job security,” the older workers would explain, smiling. But when I clocked out after work, summer of ’65 life unfolded in a deluge of cars, beer, cigarettes, and girls, not necessarily in that order.
And music, lots of it. Top 20 songs that counterpointed who we were (“I’m Henry VIII I am”) where we were (“Sitting in the Park”), what we needed (“Satisfaction”) and where we were headed (“Like A Rolling Stone”). Hell, if I was gonna lose my direction home, I felt confident that music would help me find my way back.
I wasn’t working one late July afternoon, and instead of watching “Where the Action Is,” I stumbled on a press conference with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The topic at hand was Vietnam, which LBJ pronounced “Viet-nam.” While painting a grim picture of the current U.S. situation there, the president sounded downright upbeat about prospects for a negotiated solution. “We would negotiate with any government, any place, any time,” he stated. “The Viet Cong would have no difficulty in being represented and having their views presented if Hanoi for a moment decides she wants to cease aggression. And I would not think that would be an insurmountable problem at all. I think that could be worked out.” Plus, our commander-in-chief deftly deflected every tough question from the media. Maybe there was an easy way out of Viet-nam?
But when he added this — “I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle…I think I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow. This is the most agonizing and the most painful duty of your President” — it sounded too phony, disingenuous even. I became less and less convinced he meant it.
Then everything started to seem off…maybe it had something to do with a new song I’d just heard by a guy who used to be a member of the New Christy Minstrels. “Green, Green;” this wasn’t as Barry McGuire, the singer, snarled about the Eastern world explodin’ and “being old enough to kill but not for votin’…;” a lyrical litany of danger, peril, and hypocrisy.
Next thing I knew some stations were banning “Eve of Destruction,” the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles was in flames, and another white Civil Rights worker from New Hampshire had been killed in Alabama. Maybe we were on the eve of destruction?
I was confused. Could you really keep a song off the radio? Were stations doing that because Barry McGuire was telling the truth? Hadn’t Congress just passed sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation? Then why were the black residents of Watts rioting? Were U.S. race relations worse than I thought? Had we lost the war on poverty? Was the Great Society less than great?
And then I began to wonder if maybe the government and the president weren’t telling me the truth. Were they violating my Selective Serve oath? I grew suspicious. Critical. Cynical. Maybe I needed to believe we were on the eve of destruction.
By the time I was in Vietnam in 1970–71, I gleaned from the Pentagon Papers that LBJ had lied during that July 28, 1965, press conference. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the generals told him they needed money and manpower, maybe 300,000 additional troops or more. They urged LBJ to activate the Reserves and allocate lots of money to the war effort. Calculating that his Great Society would suffer, Johnson threw us baby boomers and our futures under the bus.
Next stop, Vietnam.
Yep, the eastern world sure was explodin’ in 1965. And in 1970–71 when I was there. But we wouldn’t hear “Eve of Destruction” on Armed Forces Radio. The playlist powers-that-be had banned it.
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About the Author: Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, will be released by Legacy Book Press in 2025.