Sixties Personal Narrative Project

The following narratives have been contributed by visitors to the Sixties Project Web site. If you'd like to contribute a narrative, please fill out our form. If your browser doesn't handle forms, just write us an email. For permission to reprint narratives, please contact Viet Nam Generation, Inc.

• Submitted 20 September, 1996. Mary Dodson, b. 1953. Long before I was old enough to legally stick my thumb into a south-bound lane of traffic, I was running away....
• Submitted 30 September, 1996. John Cruddas, b. 1948. I was standing guard at the Oakland Army Terminal in 1966, en route to Nam....
• Submitted 15 October, 1996. Tim Geoghegan, b. 1961. I was born in 1961. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in New York City....
• Submitted 21 October, 1996. Phil Carter, b. 1947. I had ADD before it was cool to have ADD. In fact, like PTSD, ADD didn't even have a name, much less an acronym, when I joined the Marines and left for boot camp in January of 1967....
• Submitted 8 January, 1997. Patrick Cosper, b. 1949. I grew up with Howdy Doody, Davy Crockett, twenty five cent movies, and nickel colas as a child. Life was fun in the fifties....
• Submitted 21 January, 1997. Brent Green, b. 1949. I saw a tapestry of images woven with mop-top hair, stringy recording tape and tattered denim... The songs I nodded to were of silence, wind and JFK....
• Submitted 23 March January, 1997. Daniel Raphael, b. 1948. The Viet Nam war was the main, defining event of my young adulthood. It taught me what evil is, in human form. I learned about the seemingly limitless capacity of people to lie, rationalize, and perform every sort of inhumanity....
• Submitted 10 April, 1997. Jim Campbell, b. 1946. I was a youthful Republican in 1960 -- Nixon all the way, but by 1968 I progressed to the point where I could cast a write-in vote for Eugene McCarthy....
• Submitted 27 April, 1997. Rich Partain, b. 1946. I was a navy officer who spent 2 1/2 years as ship's company on a CVA with one tour in the Gulf of Tonkin....