A friend in the Texas Hill Country notes a seemingly prescient couplet written in 1969 by Philip Larkin:
“When the
Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
Colonel
Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?”
Larkin was
writing in March 1969, as the so-called Cold War was yet again simmering. Seven months
earlier, Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia to squelch the Prague
reformers. Nixon was the newly elected president and the war in Vietnam raged
on. Here is James Booth’s gloss on what he calls a “snappy trochaic quatrain”
in his 2014 biography of Larkin:
“Albert
Sloman was Vice-Chancellor of Essex University, then a hotbed of radicalism,
while students at the London School of Economics routinely disrupted meetings
addressed by right-wing speakers. The implication of Larkin’s lines is that the
fellow-traveling radicals of the British education system will offer scant defence
against the Red Army’s advance across Europe.”
The poem was published in a rather obscure English venue in 1969 – Black Paper Two: The Crisis in Education – and not reprinted until after Larkin’s death.
Larkin’s
longtime friend Robert Conquest published The
Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties a month after Warsaw Pact
troops invaded Czechoslovakia. In an interview, Conquest derided the euphemism “Cold
War” and suggested why it was adopted by so many in the West:
“’Cold War’
isn’t quite the right way of describing it. It was ‘cold’ in the sense that it
didn’t actually blow up, but that wasn’t due to some inherent or natural ‘coldness.’
[The Soviets] weren’t strong enough to attack us. If they had been, they would
have done to us what they did to Eastern Europe. See what I mean? The term ‘Cold
War’ is a sort of western, academic way to avoid blaming anybody too much.”
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the largest offensive of the Vietnam War, when 30,000 North Vietnamese troops crossed the demilitarized zone into South Vietnam. I was on a U.S. Navy ship that was trying to hold back the NVA (the U.S. Army was gone in 1972, leaving only the brave U.S. Marines). We then went to Haiphong Harbor when Nixon ordered the mining of the harbor.
ReplyDeleteRumors circulated that Nixon planned to drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. In 2002, when Nixon's tapes were released, it was discovered that he did entertain this option. Max Hastings, in his book, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, has written a detailed account of the Vietnam War during the critical year 1972, which filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge.
The offensive ended in October, 1972, and I ended my service and returned, unscathed, to civilian life. My only medical legacy from the war was prostate cancer, presumptively caused by Agent Orange.