Nguyen Thai Binh Street, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
There’s a street in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City called Nguyen Thai Binh Street.
The United States had intensified its bombing of both northern and southern Vietnam earlier in April. 1972. Nixon, Kissinger and their henchmen in the Pentagon called the campaign Operation Freedom Porch. The northern cities of Hanoi and Haiphong were carpet-bombed with wave after wave of United States Air Force B-52s dropping their explosives across both metropolises. Meanwhile, the US Navy was preparing to mine Haiphong Harbor.
On April 20th, 1972 a rally against the US bombing northern Vietnam and the mining of its harbors took place in Seattle, Washington at the University of Washington. It was one of hundreds such protests against the US actions taking place that week around the world. I attended one in Frankfurt am Main, Germany that ended up being broken up by police with truncheons and water cannons. People I knew in Maryland and DC wrote to me about similar police attacks at protests in DC and at the University of Maryland. Following their stories about the bombing raids, the military’s daily newspaper Stars & Stripes (published for men and women stationed overseas) provided its readers with a brief summary of demonstrations against the latest US attacks. So did the International Herald Tribune and various European newspapers available at the newsstands in downtown Frankfurt.
Anyhow, back to that rally in Seattle. One of the reasons…