Incipient Provocateur - Joel S. Teig

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States in 1960, and even before he assumed the office, he was consumed with many dramatic, and potentially threatening events, that would have a major impact on America.   The Incipient Provocateur is an historical fiction, that addresses the stresses that America and its citizens endured during much of the 1960s.

The new countries of South and North Vietnam, were created in 1954 at a Geneva conference, in which the country of Vietnam was split, due to incessant internal disruptions and fighting within the country; as mostly the northern part of the country attacked the south.  The splitting of Vietnam into two countries did not repair the region’s internal turmoil.  

North Vietnam became aligned with Communist China and the Soviet Union, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States.  Immediately after the split, President Eisenhower provided financial assistance to the South, to counter a continuation of the pre-split Communist military escalations of the North against the South.  Fighting was constant and unceasing.  When President John F. Kennedy assumed office, in 1960, he increased the funding to the South, and soon sent military aides to assist and train the South’s military forces.  The conflict continued to escalate and in 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, the United States began sending American Air Force pilots, helicopters and planes to South Vietnam, to help quell the North’s initiation of an increasing number of airstrikes and bombings into the South’s villages.    

The pressures applied by the Communist North forces on the South, caused President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the office of President in late 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, to soon begin sending American military fighting forces, to fight alongside and support the Southern soldiers, and soon supplant the South’s overmatched military.  With the number of American soldiers being needed to fight in South Vietnam growing rapidly, the United States was forced to increase the number American men being drafted into the military.    This was the beginning a major rift in America.

The mounting internal division in America, presented in many ways, but with young men being drafted to fight in Vietnam, a country most Americans knew relatively little about or even had an interest in, the internal turmoil in the U.S. escalated.  The emotional uproar that the war and the draft created, rapidly produced many schisms among American citizens of all ages.  Matt Lyons and Roger Makowski were both college freshman, who had envisioned successful professional futures after college.  The escalating threats of being drafted, if a male student could not maintain a high enough grade point average, would place them in a group below the requirements of a 2-S draft status and now they could be drafted, then sent to Vietnam, and potentially die there.    Many new antiwar groups started during those days, who solicited young men, fearful of being drafted and against the Vietnam War.  These groups marched, spoke out against America and accentuated the internal rift.  

The burdens of college skyrocketed the worries about the draft and the war in Vietnam, as it forced young men in America to make appropriate decisions to enhance their chances of achieving successful futures.   Both Matt and Roger will need to choose mentors, who can assist them along the correct pathways to survive and prosper.