Here is a summary of the political environment, in terms of
notable events, in the countries we visited.
In Italy, the Red Brigades organization had become active
by 1971 although not yet in Rome. (This is the group that
would later kidnap and murder Aldo Moro.) Palestinian
terrorists killed 30 people at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in
Rome in December of 1973.
Greece was four years into a military dictatorship
(described in the movie Z) that would be
overthrown three years after we were there.
In Israel it was four years after the Six-Day War which had
brought all of Jerusalem under Israeli control. Our hotel
was in what had been, for 20 years before 1967, Arab East
Jerusalem. The Japanese Red Army killed 24 people in Lod
Airport in Tel Aviv nine months after we were there.
Ethiopia's problem with Eritrea, a few hundred miles north
of Bahir Dar, was just simmering in late '71. Haile
Selassie was secure but he had been dealing with
increasingly restive landowners on the right and student
activists (at Haile Selassie University) on the left for
the previous decade. The drought a year later with its
resulting famine in northern Ethiopia destroyed the
emperor's support and he was deposed three years after we
left. What followed was 17 years of civil war.
Aden, in which we sat on the ground in a hot 707 for a few
hours in October of 1971, was part of the
less-than-a-year-old People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.
The country was controlled by a radical faction of one of
the groups that had expelled the British four years
earlier.
The typhoon system that gave us so much rain those first
couple of weeks in Allahabad killed 10,000 people around
the Bay of Bengal that fall.
The India-Pakistan war was brewing the entire time we were
in India and we did, indeed, get out just in time. The
Pakistani leader Yahya Khan declared a state of emergency
on November 23rd, the day before we flew to Calcutta. The
war began on December 3rd when Pakistan attacked several
airfields in northwest India. The war, which India won,
hurt U.S. prestige (the U.S. supported Pakistan),
strengthened India's relationship with the USSR, and led to
the formation of Bangladesh out of what had been East
Pakistan. (The formation of Bangladesh was announced in
January, before we arrived back in the States.)
Thailand was relatively stable in late '71. This was
probably due in no small part to the infusion of U.S. money
during the Viet Nam war. Bangkok was a popular R&R
location for U.S. servicemen. Our flight from Bangkok to
Hong Kong did not fly over Viet Nam.
Hong Kong was four years after riots and bombings inspired
by the Cultural Revolution in China. And the British
colonial government knew that they were 25 years away from
giving the country back to the Chinese.
Taiwan was under martial law and the one-party rule of
Chiang's Kuomintang in late 1971 (as it had been since
Chiang arrived in 1949). The People's Republic of China
(Communist China) had taken the Republic of China's
(Taiwan's) seat in the U.N. eleven days before we arrived
in Taipei. A month after we returned to the U.S., Nixon
went to China.
Combine all of this with a couple of major airplane crashes
while we were gone and our parents probably had reason to
be nervous. I don't think any of us, with the possible
exception of Jeanne and Bill, gave it a second thought.