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Home , Aquarius Festival, La Onda, Piedra Roja, Summer of Love, Woodstock

I- The

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was a Cold War military conflict that may be said to have occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from September 26, 1959 to April 30, 1975. The war was fought between the communist North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the and other anti-communist nations. The Viet Cong, a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist-controlled common front, largely fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The North Vietnamese Army engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery and airstrikes. The United States entered the war to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. Military advisors arrived beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early , with U.S. troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Involvement peaked in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were withdrawn as part of a policy called Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued. The Case-Church Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress in response to the anti-war movement, prohibited direct U.S. military involvement after August 15, 1973. U.S. military and economic aid continued until 1975. The capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese army in April 1975 marked the end of Vietnam War. North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities, including 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.

II- The Movement The hippie was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe who had moved into 's Haight-Ashbury district. These people inherited the countercultural values of the , created their own communities, listened to , embraced the , and used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness. In , the Human Be-In in in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Festival on the East Coast. in , known as jipitecas, formed Chicana and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom, mobile "peace convoys" of travellers made summer pilgrimages to free festivals at Stonehenge. In Australia hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 and the annual Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. In Chile, "Festival " was held in 1970 (following Woodstock's success), and was the major hippie event in that country. Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a wide audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms — from health food, to music festivals, to contemporary sexual mores, and even to the cyberspace revolution.

III- Links between The Vietnam War and The Hippie Movement The war in Vietnam was one of the most important factors in the whole Hippie movement and the central political “event” in the late sixties. The USA was never officially in war with North Vietnam, their whole military forces in the area had the status of “military advisors” of the Republic of South Vietnam. Jungle warfare against an enemy knowing the landscape, being at home in the “green hell”, was terrible for the young American soldiers, who had been drafted in big numbers, not wanting to fight a war against a country they had nothing to do with and against a big number of the people of the country they had protect from the enemy forces. So this war became the biggest target of the young people’s rebellion. When the war became larger and larger in the years after 1965, the need for soldiers also grew. A lot of people were drafted, which caused the protest of the rebelling youth. Ironically, those who were the first ones to organize a sit-in or a demonstration against the policy of sending young men to a country far away were the students at the universities – who were all excluded from the draft. But the Hippie movement not only consisted of students, and soon, a lot of young men flew from the army, preferably to San Francisco, and “draft card burnings” were staged in front of the military installations, with a lot of media presence. Destroying your draft card was sentenced with jail up to six years, but the police faced the problem that they weren’t able to take legal action against several thousand young men at one time. Although many were arrested; the most prominent one was David Baez, the husband of . In Vietnam itself, the situation was horrible. The war in the jungle, the fight against an often invisible enemy caused extreme psychological problems among the soldiers. A lot of them retreated into a surreal world of their own, some went completely mad, became unbelievably cruel and killed everyone in their way, like in the massacre of My Lai. A far bigger number started taking drugs – marijuana and LSD consume was a very big problem among the military forces in Vietnam. This situation was of course reported to the Americans at home, it caused massive protest – mostly led by the SDS. Thousands of young people went on the street regularly, blockaded roads and governmental buildings, sitting there for days, singing songs, taking drugs – the famous sit-ins which soon became a Hippie myth of their own. Those demonstrations were mostly visited by typical New-Left- members, university students or draft resisters. An average, middle-class American would never have thought of joining a sit-in, although resistance against the war was widely spread among the US population, as nearly everyone had a relative fighting somewhere between Saigon and Hanoi – it just didn’t become public, McCarthy & Co. had left a deep impression in people’s minds.