The other day I got on my Newspapers.com site to see...through the Fort Lauderdale News, which was my home Broward County's main newspaper back in the 1960s when I was growing up there...whether any mention was made of the new Nova elementary school that was to open in August of 1965. I switched from Boulevard Heights to Nova that year when I entered the fourth grade...my sister Anita was already going to Nova Junior High, situated right across the field from the new elementary school in Davie on the site of a converted airfield (along with Broward Junior College). I began by putting on my screen the front page of the paper's July 1, 1965 Main Edition, on which most of the stories were about the escalating Vietnam War with the U.S. increasing its presence in that troubled southeastern Asia country with armed soldiers on the ground increasing from around three thousand in March of '65 to two hundred thousand by year's end. On July 1 the paper was reporting Viet Cong attacks against the American base in Da Nang, opposition in Congress to President Johnson's war policies, and there was a piece describing how the Viet Cong operate in guerilla warfare. In the Senate, Senator Wayne Morse, of the President's own Democratic Party but one of the two voting against his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the previous August that authorized troop buildup in Vietnam, urged Johnson to end the war and instead go to the United Nations and build up collaborative relationships with other countries to bring about peace. On the Republican side in the House, their leader, future president Gerald Ford, proposed that the President remove the ground troops and restrict the fighting there to heavy aerial bombardment in strategic locations...needless to say Lyndon Johnson passed on both of these, precipitating one of the most traumatic, divisive periods in our nation's history. Malcolm W. Browne's article about Viet Cong guerilla warfare was haunting in its prescience as he describes one such warrior, stationed within an echo chamber in a hole in the ground, enabling him to detect distant helicopter sounds before any others: "The man, wriggling through a short tunnel to the surface, can yell an alarm. Instantly, shadowy men lounging or cooking at the bases of the tall trees are on their feet and moving fast. The heavy equipment from last night's battle has been stowed for future use in deep, camouflaged holes. The bodies have been buried. The men move rapidly, scattering in many directions in twos and threes. This is their base area, and they know every feature of the dense jungle in the area...the hidden trails, the camouflaged bunkers and tunnels, the gun emplacements, the mines and booby traps." You can easily see the wisdom from hindsight in reading this article and others and think of what might have been if information in plain sight, as well as alternative options, were taken more seriously by those with the power and authority to properly understand and use them...think of all the lives that could have been spared. But hindsight it is, and in 1965 the American public was strongly behind Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam escalation policy...I wonder what information today, also in plain view as was the material in July of 1965, is warning us about where we're going...but of course nowadays we have to sift through all the false crap floating around. As for my then-new little Nova school, I'm continuing to search for any reference to it...
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