Buckeye

Tom, now a communications major interested in radio as a career, decides not to go home until after he graduates. Felix learns of Skip’s death from Tom and goes over to the Jenkinses’ house. Cal and Becky are mired in grief, so Felix begins bringing them groceries and inviting himself over to watch television. They are thankful for the help and company.

As Becky and Cal navigate the first year after Skip’s death, the world seems to explode. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated. The Tet Offensive, the operation in which Skip was killed, results in the deaths of more than 10,000 American soldiers.

Tom is wounded during an anti-war protest but extricates himself from the altercation by remembering when Skip saved him from bullies when they were children: He takes Skip’s long-ago advice and kicks his assailant right between his legs. After spending a summer at home in Bonhomie looking for work, Tom lands a job at a radio station in Toledo.

The war rages on in Vietnam, even as support for it in the US reaches record lows. In 1969, word of the My Lai Massacre reaches the American public: US soldiers, expecting to encounter the enemy while on an ambush, instead massacred an entire village of innocent civilians.