The 1960s, featuring the Vietnam War and its protesters, have returned to downtown Lawrence.

They can be found in pictures, clothing, books and newspapers, all of which are on display at the Watkins Community Museum of History, 1047 Mass.

In addition, there are brown sandbags in one corner of the main floor made into a small bunker similar to ones that were built by soldiers in Vietnam.

“I was kind of for (the war) at first, but eventually I was against it completely,” said Ronald Pine, 65, of Downers Grove, Ill.

Pine, who was visiting Lawrence on Saturday, wandered among the exhibits while a hard rain outside fell most of the morning. Museum officials had hoped to bring in about a half-dozen Vietnam-era military vehicles and put them on public display in a parking lot across the street.

Because of the rain, only one vehicle showed up. Sherm Yacher, Lawrence, brought his 1966 M109A3 radio service truck, which towed two generators and a trailer. The 24,000-pound truck was used by Army crews repairing or putting together radios, Yacher said.

Inside the museum, Pine recalled his 1960s days as a graduate student and teaching assistant at Texas A&M University. The school in College Station, Texas, was run by a president who was a World War II general and who discouraged discussion about world controversies, Pine said. There were no anti-war protests on that campus.

“Texas A&M was another planet at that time,” Pine said.

When he was younger, Pine, who has been a college professor and a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, was a member of the beat generation’s counterculture in Lawrence.

“There was a real Bohemian crowd here in the 1950s, and I was a part of it,” Pine said. “We were apolitical.”

The 1960s Vietnam-era display will remain in view at the museum for at least a year, director Rebecca Phipps said. Attempts to bring the military vehicles for display might be tried again in the spring or summer.