Last Man Standing (iii)

from true-crime author Jack Olsen about Elmer Gerard Pratt, United States Army

“At Fort Polk, Louisiana, the seventeen-year-old quarterback was issued dog tags, given shots and a physical examination and appointed trainee platoon sergeant. In Washington President Lyndon Johnson was preparing to sign a voting rights act.”

Eunice Petty Pratt gave birth to Elmer Gerard on September 13, 1947. Gerard Pratt turned 17, as we reckon age in the United States of America, on September 13, 1964.

Lyndon Baines Johnson had already signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2 of that year. Elmer remained 17 through September 12, 1965, when Lyndon had just signed the Voting Rights Act of August 6, 1965.

So Elmer graduated high school then started basic training and advanced individual training all in the summer he was 17. Fort Polk inspected the teenager and put him in charge of his peers.

“White supremacists were threatening to torch polling places and kill blacks. African American students at Cornell University were gearing up for armed insurrection.”

If threats came with the Voting Rights Act in 1965, why are we hearing now in this first paragraph about events to come at Cornell in academic year 1968-9?

“Geronimo’s big brothers Jackie and Charles wrote from Los Angeles that the ghetto called Watts was afire in the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ riots.”

Americans took action at Watts over August 11-16, 1965, the second week after the Voting Rights Act.

“The Los Angeles Police Department crushed a series of student rebellions and engaged in a bloody battle with anti-Vietnam War demonstrators at the Century Plaza Hotel.”

So why are we reading now about that battle to come in 1967, on June 22 and 23?

“Racial tension was high, and many blamed it on black militants.”

That could be any year you like.

This paragraph is a mess. Maybe an editor’s garbled summary of ground the chapter will cover? Somebody typeset it by mistake?

What isn’t there? What might you suppose a chapter about Elmer Gerard Pratt’s service with the United States Army in our occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam might mention about the summer of 1964?

When Lyndon Baines Johnson took the occasion of ghosts sighted in the Gulf of Tonkin, by a United States Navy ship conducting reconnaissance by fire on the coast of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam,

to send the United States Army to occupy the Republic of Viet Nam in defense of the campaign for civil and voting rights in the Congress of the United States of America? Did Jack Olsen really leave that out?

Hey, I am sympathetic. It is hard to make sense about the facts of the domestic and the foreign policy of the United States at the same time. I have never seen it done to universal satisfaction.

The task is especially difficult around black Americans. Let us begin by fitting the facts in the order they came to follow our squad leader out the aircraft.

Geronimo!