I was born in 1964 -re the post about what people thought as they lived thru 1968, I had a flashback to seeing coffins being unloaded from planes. It was anxious in our house because my mother‘s little brother was in Vietnam.
Is this a real memory? Did the news show coffins coming off of planes?
Comments
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See this post, the rules, and the sidebar for details. Thank you for your submission, JvaGoddess.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Yes, they did. They also showed bodies on the ground killed in combat. And natives killed or injured by combat. It was not a good time.
Yes they did. I remember that stuff as a kid also
Yes, that’s real. I’m 68 and remember seeing this
There was also a “scorecard” that showed the number of Americans killed or injured. Tough, tough times.
Yup and we got the body counts every night too.
News photo circa 1965:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/caskets-containing-the-bodies-of-nine-u-s-servicemen-killed-news-photo/515493134
On the evening network news, I think ABC(?), they had a little soldier icon at the bottom of the screen. One soldier icon represented a certain number of casualties that day/week.
I remember the body count on the news every night. I was in Jr High in 1968.
I was born in ‘64. My sister and I used to call the evening news The War Show. Sure, you could have seen that. Back then the news was more visceral.
Born in 1961. Every night, we watched Vietnam on the news with Walter Cronkite. I remember the coffins,the planes, and seeing the soldiers saluting. Not really much else.
Oh yes, this was the time the fourth estate (news) was very heavily embedded with the troops on the ground and were able to send near live broadcasts of the action. It’s part of what turned the country against the war, thank God
During George W Bush’s presidency they decided to sanitize the war and stopped showing the coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.
Those of us who grew up during Vietnam will never forget the body bag count of the nightly news. Nor the other images we saw for years on television.
I was 10 in 1968. I remember going to the funeral home for a neighbor’s son who had been killed by firing squad in Viet Nam. They were captured, forced to kneel and shot in the back of the head. His fiancee was there, crying hysterically. The entire neighborhood was suffering and angry. It was a dark time and looking back, my parents should have spared me that experience. The news reported on it every night and the coffins were draped in US flags.
Same age and my earliest memories of the nightly news was daily casualty counts.
I wasn’t allowed to watch the news for this very reason.
Yes. I thought the lesson that politicians would learn from Vietnam was “don’t fight pointless foreign wars.” But apparently the lessons they learned were:
Don’t let anyone take pictures of wounded or dead American soldiers (the Bushes issued this order during their wars), and
Don’t draft the sons of rich white families to fight your wars.
The reporters and camera people were in the trenches beside the soldiers with bullets whizzing around them. 63 reporters died in Vietnam. They showed everything every night.
Those of us in high school or college during those times knew of at least one person we went to school with or were friends with that died over the there. And those that came back physically okay but mentally damaged.
This is why this war was such a shock to many people, especially since it was just the opposite of past war coverage. My mother said during WWII, reports always said our casualties were light. When she saw a few documentaries about the war some years later, she was so surprised at a lot of it being so different from news reports at the time.
With the TV coverage of Vietnam, that kind of deceit wasn’t so easy.
I remember when I was about six which would have been 1970 there was a picture on the front page of are morning news paper of a little Vietnamese boy about the same age as me running down a road and was missing half of his arm. It was a fresh wound and I couldn’t stop looking at it. I also remember Walter Cronkite and the six o’clock news and leading with stories of Vietnam.
Yes. It was godawful.
I delivered papers during those years. Every day the front page was covered with Viet Nam stories and photos.
Yes, your memory is correct. Coffins were shown. Loading and unloading. There was a young handsome reporter named Dan Rather who would broadcast from the jungle via tapes sent to CBS News and which were shown on the evening CBS News with Walter Cronkite. Mr Rather is now 93.
They showed everything – coffins, dead bodies, street-corner summary executions, children running down the street with their skin melted off from napalm.
It wasn’t just the TV news, it was also newspapers and magazines.
It’s the reason they control what you see now. The real battlefield is too much for the civilian world to see.
Yes. And more impacting for me was the reading of the daily fallen at the end of the newscast.
It was the first TV war.
Every Friday night I watched the news, seeing the US and NVA body counts for the week. Wondering if I’d stick around in a few years to get that letter or develop a deep interest in Canada. By then it was obvious that we had a zombie foreign policy that was going to continue to consume young, not-rich guys until some politician decided it was expedient to end the war.
They literally put up a table of casualties and “confirmed” kills for the week, every Friday night, on the 3 networks. Frank Reynolds and John Chancellor.
This was at the same time we had Apollo 8 orbiting the moon Christmas eve, Apollo 11, and 2001 playing in the theaters. Sublime discordance between our reach and our grasp.
Oh yes.
Simon and Garfunkel had a pretty sharp take on the horrors of the nightly news in general on their 1966 album “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme”:
7 O’clock News/Silent Night
The evening news was so awful I turned it off & didn’t watch for three years. Much of it was unedited, grotesque reality and way too much for me.
Absolutely. The pictures of their wounded sons on the nightly news is what finally got parents to question the war.
Yes, its real. I remember the news about the war and the protests a couple of years later after they started drafting college students. It was a time when young people were really a disenfranchised group. They couldn’t vote. There was also a lot of coverage about segregation in the South and the civil rights movement. There were reporters in the midst of it all, and they had no problem with reporting facts that the people in Washington didn’t want known.
Dad started watching it every night starting in about 1970. I was 8. Those black and white images still haunt me. The sounds of gunfire. Knowing that half a world away, friends of my older siblings were dying.
And then my brother volunteered. He went missing shortly after boot camp, we knew his platoon was sent over. But there was a big blank space around him. The Red Cross knew nothing. He wasn’t on a KIA or POW list. But the Army knew where he was. You see, he was part of an experimental drug trial to build more aggressive soldiers. He never left the states. He was buried in a mental hospital until after the end of the Vietnam War.
My cousin died in country while my dad was there when I was 3. It was his sister’s oldest boy. My aunts and my mom were beside themselves at the funeral.
I remember the nightly body count numbers.
It was a lot like now with Trump; daily crises and tragedies of our own making to be followed by more crises and tragedies the next day. It was relentless and exhausting.
We saw the casualties in color on the 6 o’clock news. That was also an era when news magazines were still a thing, and Newsweek, Time, and particularly Life magazine often had still pictures which showed the horror of the war. I was 12 in 1968, and I had a pretty good understanding of what was happening by then.
Here is the Life magazine story on the My Lai massacre. This is a pretty graphic and shocking example, but there were many such stories even if this one was worse than most, as it was a village massacred by American troops.
https://www.life.com/history/american-atrocity-remembering-my-lai/
I was a kid then. I had nightmares from the stuff I saw on the news and the stuff I heard from my older siblings & their friends. VN made me a life long conscientious objector.
I can confirm. I also remember at least one news piece showing American soldiers being shot and killed and being broadcasted.
Nightly news body counts. Next day, schoolmates wearing copper bracelets bearing the names of pilots who were shot down and became POWs. Friends whose older brothers were drafted. The Vietnam War through the eyes of an elementary school student in the late 1960s.
1962 baby here. Yes the coverage each night was much more graphic, but you had the comfort of Walter Cronkite. It’s why I became a nurse.
DoB 63 -family received medical benefits at Philadelphia Naval base. I must’ve been 5yo and remember an alarming number of amputees in the wards. Man, didn’t say a word, but it def freaked me out.
The coffins coming off the planes daily on the news was real and had a big effect on people. And also the reason that future Republican administrations refused to let coffins coming off of planes be recorded is so they could not be shown on the evening news.
Yes. And a nightly body count.
We turned against the war en masse. And the draft was a reason as well.
Games back then were pinball and foozball, not all the shooting and killing games pushed on kids in 1990s on
Between the War, the protests (remember the Chicago Convention?), the race riots, the assasinations and oh, a year later we put a man on the moon, what a horrific time to be a 10 year old American. Oh, don’t forget all those long haired hippies and the drugs! Just ask Alice! lol. Thanks for reminding me that these times aren’t necessarilly the worst of times!
I can vaguely recall arguements and very strong opinions from the family during that whole time.
My brother wanted to flee to Canada and my parents didn’t want that to happen. He ended up enrolling in college and got out of going, or his number wasn’t called, I do not remember.
I had a cousin that stayed with us before being shipped out, I think he went AWOL or was thinking of it. His Dad was a lifer in the Army and I this was a big blow up in our house. He eventually did up going to Nam.
Another cousin was the golden child, good looking, star football player, loved by all, went to Nam and came back a drug addict. Ended up killing himself and devastated our whole family.
this is when the “news” stopped being the news.
what we have now are paid advertisers.
The news nightly had the body count. That is what hit me. I was around 8 to 10 in that era. I lived in the DC area so the Vietnam War was in your face every day. What got me the most as a child was the way a hill leading down to the Potomac at Arlington Cemetary (people used to picnic on) filled up with a sea of graves as far as you could see.
I was born a decade and more before you. I worked in St Louis and rode the bus to my summer job in the inner city.
I’d always read the daily newspaper and was horrified each and every day to see the reporting on the “war”.
At the same time I was also eligible to be drafted.
I remember. Also just firestorms and bombing. A hellish landscape on tv every night. It was completely normal . Sick.
It’s a real memory. My father had four tours. Two before I was born and 2 during my childhood. I remember watching the nightly news with my mother. She was always antsy when the news was on. She was a tough lady.
every day > 6:30 PM – ABC News – Viet Nam body count
Believe me when I say I lived through agony in 1968 1969 and most of 1970 in the service and mostly with the 1st cavalry in the jungles around Saigon , and now you have people from around the world flocking to Vietnam as a tourist destination it’s still very heartbreaking and traumatic when I think about it .
all the wasted lives and the draft dodging traitor sitting in the White House looking to build a golf course in the former bloodbath nation it’s unthinkable and disgusting.
1968 I was in Viet Nam
Yup, the media went from reporting the war to being virulently anti-war. Which wasn’t a bad thing…it was a stupid war and we had no business being there
Yeah they did. Daily body counts in the newspaper. Horrific combat footage.
I was about 10 and at the public library with my mom when the news came out that we were withdrawing from Viet Nam. My mom had worked at the library and knew the staff, and one of the ladies came up to tell her and then broke down in tears and they hugged for a while. Later mom told me that her son was on active duty over there and would now be coming home alive. Made an impact on me and set my attitude towards war for the rest of my life.
Yup, they sure did. The media also showed soldiers coming home and being spit on.
Only a few years old than OP. My mother was shocked when, in my 50s, I told her that one of my most consistent memories was the casualty reports each night on TV during dinner.
Totally real. They eventually made this illegal in order to further promote war.
In the Vietnam time during the sixties and early seventies it was not common at all for the return to be filmed at the air force base. I can’t say it never was because I did just find a clip of film footage. However the solemn ceremony of removing the coffins is not a part of this clip. The bodies had been unloaded and were already on a trailer. I also have no recollection of ever seeing this. And during the 1970s I worked in radio and television. The major networks did have limited film of battles and aftermaths on their nightly news. Now local TV stations may have filmed a service in their community. But in general the unloading of bodies was not shown on network television. For many years the networks supported the war and the administrations positions on Vietnam. It really was not until Walter Cronkite of CBS took a long hard look at the military actions going on and on and decided that what was taking place was not a winnable position.
A turning point in the Americsn sentiment on the war came when LOOK Magazine devoted an entire magazine to pictures and names of 150 Americans killed in the war the prior week.
I was born in 1960 and my older brother served in Vietnam. I didn’t really watch the news, but I remember magazine covers that affected me with children from the war screaming running naked. I remember parents in the neighborhood whose boys weren’t coming home. I remember the Beatles on the radio playing “Here comes the sun” when my brother came home and it will stick in my mind forever
I was 9 when the war ended.
I asked my parents in all honestly why someone was giving guns to gorillas.
There were also the clips of Vietnamese orphans on planes bound for America. My Dad was fighting in Vietnam at the time and I always thought he would come home with one of them. I was so looking forward to a new sister or brother. In the end, I was just happy to get my dad back.
They did indeed. Which is why showing coffins, much less bodies, was banned during the Bush years.
Every night, it seemed.
Born in ‘62, they showed coffins and bodies. They also gave the body count during the news every night.
I’m a couple of years older than you and my grandmother watched the evening news every night. What you are saying is correct. I do remember the news also including how many Americans and South Vietnamese troops were wounded or killed every day. The South Vietnamese total was always much higher. I remember one time asking my grandmother how a family would feel if their son was in Vietnam and every night they saw that X amount of Americans were killed or wounded. My grandmother told me that if she had a family member in Vietnam, she wouldn’t listen to the news broadcast as she would be worried that the family members was among the dead or wounded. It would unnerve her but because no one in the family was in Vietnam (there were 3 girls in the family (me, my two cousins) and the one boy (brother) that were in the family and my brother at the time being 12 years old was too young to fight in Vietnam), she could listen to it and pray for the families of those who died or were injured. She also prayed that the war would end before my brother turned 18. He was 14 when the war ended.
My uncle was in World War II (he turned 18 a month after the War ended), so when he went to Italy, you didn’t hear every day about Americans being killed or wounded.
Yes, the nightly body cout on the 6 o’clock news…terrified me because I had 2 older brothers in the military. Dad had to watch the news on the only TV we had. Between that and the frumman plant right by my house testing fighter jets ALL.THE.TIME. traumatic times…especially when my brother got seriously hurt in basic training at Camp Lejune when I was 6. I hate the news
My ex-partner was living in New York during the late 1960’s. The priest at the church he attended was in favor of the war in Vietnam. When my ex-partner questioned him about this and war in general, the priest became quite angry with him and said that he shouldn’t question him or God. He questioned the priest because someone in town died in Vietnam. He saw the family got into the church (they weren’t Catholic, it was another church) with the pall bearers. The mom was sobbing, the dad looked very stoic and others were also sobbing. He didn’t know the family but apparently others in the town knew the young man who died.
After that, my ex-partner left the church as seeing the impact the war had on this one family left a lasting impression on him. He couldn’t understand why God would look favorably on war or why it was God’s will that this young man die such a horrible death.
I remember casualty reports every night on the evening news. We had the news on during dinner. After the Tet offensive in 1968, they stopped reporting numbers.
Walter Cronkite at the supper table every night