re: Who here remembers the Bicentennial of 1976?

The railroads got into it, repainting some locomotives into bicentennial colors.

Going by my birthdate, my parents had fun celebrating it.

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Huh ? Any of us here on this board who are in our 40s and 50s- which im guessing is one of the prime demographics here- we most certainly had fathers and uncles who fought in the Vietnam “conflic

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Poster was talking about being 12 in 1976.
First draft for Nam was 1969
So, say poster's father was lucky enough to be the first group drafted and he was 18 years old.

He does his two years in nam and gets out in 1971 and is now 20 years old.

The poster claimed he was 12 going on 13 in 1976. Poster would had to be born in 1964 for him to be 12 years old in 1976.

I guess his dad could have been involved earlier, but I doubt it.

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People say that, but it’s just not true.. you had inflation, lines around the block for gasoline

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I tell people that all the time. These years are not as bad as the 60’s through the 70’s. There were three MAJOR American assassinations; the geopolitical situation was much more dangerous, with the USSR and USA aiming hundreds of nuclear missiles at each other; stagflation was at least as bad as what we are probably facing; racial tensions were awful; and America’s youth seemed unsalvageable.

Reagan got elected, and it was Morning in America. But that wasn’t really the case until 1983.

Camp Page, Korea….B Battery 1/42d Field Artillery (Honest John)

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Huh ? Any of us here on this board who are in our 40s and 50s- which im guessing is one of the prime demographics here- we most certainly had fathers and uncles who fought in the Vietnam “conflict

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I was born in 1966 and there were a lot of people my dad's age that had fought in Vietnam. My best friend's dad had fought in Vietnam, and we were both 10 years old in 1976. As a side note, I remember asking him if his dad had been drafted and he stated "no". His dad told him that he felt like he was a bad arse so joined the marines during the war. I guess southern boys had a little different view than the hippy draft dodging crowd.

From Wikipedia -
 
July 28, 1965 — In a nationally televised speech, President Johnson announced his decision to send an additional 50,000 American troops to South Vietnam, increasing the number of personnel there by two-thirds and to bring the commitment to 125,000. Johnson also said that the monthly draft call would more than double, to more than 1,000 new young men per day (from 17,000 to 35,000) for enlistment and training in the U.S. Armed Forces.

1966 — Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the number of troops being sent into Vietnam to 385,000.