Posts Tagged ‘Vietnam’
Kansas City’s Vietnam Era
Finding Kansas City-area Vietnam veteran John Musgrave for the upcoming PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” was “the most fortuitous thing,” filmmaker Ken Burns said last week while in Kansas City. Musgrave, long known to Kansas Citians as an eloquent and thoughtful commentator and critic on the war, has been referred to as the Shelby Foote of…
Read MoreVietnam War Refugees Succeed — and Struggle — in Kansas City
When American troops made a chaotic, embarrassed withdrawal from Vietnam in April 1975, the flood of terrified Vietnamese refugees to Kansas City began. Ty Bui, who had spent seven years in the Vietnamese military, escaped his country in August that year and, after staying in a refugee camp in Arkansas, came to Kansas City in…
Read MoreA Ledger of Names, Mine Among Them, Tell Our Vietnam Stories
All 30 of the boys listed on the Vietnam-era Selective Service ledger were born in the spring of 1948, during America’s most prolific era of mass procreation, the end of World War II. At 18 years old, the thing first and foremost on our minds was to find a way to commit the same act…
Read MoreKC Clergy Stood Fast With Anti-War Stance
He’s 84 now, and has been retired since 2003 from his role as pastor of a United Methodist Church in northern California, but the Rev. Phillip Lawson vividly remembers all the trouble he stirred up in Kansas City in 1970 by speaking out against the Vietnam War. He went to Hanoi and, in a radio…
Read More‘Invest Your Son’ — Catching Up With the KCAI Student Who Spoke Against the Vietnam War and Caused A National Furor
The year was 1966. The Vietnam War was escalating, but the public tide had not yet fully turned against the war. That didn’t stop Joe Draegert, then a 20-year-old student at Kansas City Art Institute, from deciding to make a statement. Even as a boy, growing up in the small town of Chariton, Iowa, Draegert…
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