We were weary from the long hours and suspension of off-days, but there was a higher morale because we knew we were winning the war on the ground. We grew closer to each other and the distinctions that often separated us at home, such as race, social status, education, or region, were meaningless in The ‘Nam. We were made brothers by the war and shared one overarching desire: to finish our tours alive and return home.

‘Back in the world,’ as we used to refer to the U.S., though, things were almost as crazy. Cities were burning, campuses were boiling, and the whole society was unraveling. There were few steady voices that reached across the massive divides of the nation. The voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of those voices.

His influence had peaked in the first half of the 60’s when his powerful rhetoric had inspired a nation, and his personal courage and unrelenting love had ended decades of de facto apartheid in the South and opened doors across the nation that had been closed to minorities. Now, in April of 1968, Dr. King’s message of nonviolence was being questioned in the minority community by the voices of hate and destruction, emerging from Black Panthers and militants like H. Rap Brown.

We knew what was happening at home. We got the news. Reports of riots and racial confrontations stressed the relations between black and white GI’s, despite the bonds of our common cause. We just didn’t talk about it very much because we felt powerless, so far away, to have any affect on it.

A minor news item caught my attention because it mentioned my home state of Tennessee. Dr. King had gone to the City of Memphis to lead a strike of sanitation workers that were seeking better pay and working conditions. It was not a matter of national attention, until he arrived, and that, I remember, made me respect Dr. King for bringing his prestige to such a relatively small setting. He was marching in protest with the garbage men, arm-in-arm with the most humble of workers.

When I came back to the base that fateful April morning, after patrolling the perimeter of the Bien Hoa base all night, I learned that Dr. King had been killed by an unknown assassin. America’s cities were burning, again. Many of us did not know Martin Luther King, Jr., then, as we have come to know of him after a generation of reflection.

Young white men like myself did not know, and could barely comprehend, what Dr. King meant to blacks. I went looking for one of my best friends, a black GI also from the South. I couldn’t find him for hours, but finally tracked him to a hut far across the sprawling military complex. When I walked into the dim-lit building, I was met by stares of hatred from the eyes of a dozen black soldiers. Most had tears on their faces.

"What are you doing here, Whitey?" one demanded. I looked straight in the eyes of my friend, who recognized me. He was silent and the look on his face was from a different person I had known before.

"I came to tell you that I heard about Dr. King and that I was sorry to learn he was killed today." Silence hung heavy in the room. A soft voice came from my friend, "Thank you, Mike." I turned and left, not knowing what else to say and realizing there was nothing else I could say. My heart was on fire, aching in awareness of what it must mean to lose a king.