Their Last Full Measure in Vietnam

A few years ago, I wrote a novel about what happened to America during the Vietnam war.
In my Baby Boomer g-generation, many of us went one way, and some of us went another.
Published in 2017, King of Soul told a story of what happened here, Stateside, on a college campus in 1969-70. In writing the book, I included scenes from Vietnam. To properly depict the challenges and hardships that our soldiers faced there, I retrieved, from several reliable sources, accounts of several battles.

In order to maintain accuracy and give honor where honor is due, I lifted and carefully rewrote a long passage from Dave Galloway's memoir,
We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and reporter/author Joe Galloway.
My rewritten account of certain events at the battle of Ia Drang is found in chapter 6 of my book. On this Memorial Day, I want to call your attention to the bravery and dedication demonstrated by our troops. Here is an excerpt of my retelling of what the "Lost Platoon" endured on that fateful day, November 14, 1965 :

       So Lt. Henry got hit; he was kneeling when he caught the fatal bullet. A few moments later, his replacement in command, Sgt. Palmer took a bullet in the head, was suffering and then a grenade landed nearby and snuffed the life out of him.
       The encircled infantrymen of the Lost Platoon were all on the ground now, unable to raise their heads because, to do so, and they knew it, would bring instant death. They shifted into defense positions. Suddenly a mass assault came from three directions; they slapped their M-16s on full automatic and mowed down the oncoming enemy.
       Now with eight or nine men of the platoon’s twenty-nine down, and thirteen wounded, they were caught under fire in a 25-yard perimeter. Medic Charlie Lose crawled from man to man, treating their wounds, amping up their resolve, boosting their courage, keeping the breath going in and out of their lungs, the blood running through their arteries, the pain down to a dull roar as much as possible, the bandages going on and the defensive bullets going out, serving up medical treatment and administering raw courage itself with all that life support.
       Sgt. Rob, platoon weapons forward guy, now in charge, had radioed elevations and deflections from the lost platoon’s position so that Specialist Vincent, down below, could help protect them with closely-placed mortar rounds fired from the LZ. When they ran out of mortar rounds, the mortar crews grabbed their personal weapons and started up the hills to assist Sgt. Rob and whatever was left of 2^nd Platoon.
       A hell of a lot of fire was raining down on the guys up on the ridge; the only cover they had was the rise of the hill itself. Sgt. Rob said to Sgt. Ernie we gotta get out of here; stood up, and immediately got shot in the head, fell over backwards on a log, the radio on his back. Sgt. Ernie, now in charge after Lt. Henry, Sgt. Carl and now Sgt. Rob had all gone down, reached under the log, grabbed the radio handset and called in more artillery and mortars. He told the guys down below he would direct their fire in as close as possible. The artillery guys never could establish the platoon’s position exactly, but Lt. Riddle could adjust fire based on Sgt. Ernie’s sensing.
       And that is what they did, shot mortar rounds all around the stranded guys, without killing them, but instead killing the NVA soldiers who were assaulting them from three sides.

I have appreciation for our guys who went over there and served in Vietnam while I, and many thousands of others, were skating through on a student deferment or a high draft number.
Over 58,000 of those guys gave their last full measure of devotion, so they never came back. On this Memorial Day, we honor them along with all the thousands of men and women who have defended our nation during these 225 years of prospering in Constitutional  freedom.



And to all you Reserve, Active and Veteran citizens of this United States of America, thank you for putting your life on the line for us! Keep up the good work!

King of Soul

A Story from LSU

I grew up with LSU. My daddy went there in the late '40's; my mama did too.
Growing up in Baton Rouge was all about LSU, and so I moved across town to enter the University as a freshman in 1969. My freshman dorm room was in North Stadium, which was--you guessed it--Tiger Stadium. And I don't mean Clemson Tiger.
From a south-facing window in Death Valley, I had an excellent view of Mike the Tiger's cage. At that time, our mascot was called Mike the Third, or Mike III.

LSU always had a great football program, and it was a big deal in Baton Rouge. Back in my junior high days, my friend Johnny Lambert got me a job selling concessions at the Saturday night games in Tiger Stadium (known to our opponents as Death Valley.)
By December 1973, I had somehow managed to graduate, in spite of being a useless sometimes-PoliSci, sometimes-English major.  Very near Mike the Tiger's cage (mentioned above), the University had built a new indoor stadium for the basketball team. My graduating class was the first to walk the aisle in the Pete Maravich Center, better known as Pete's Palace.

Years went by. In 1975, I relocated to North Carolina, where I have lived ever since. Since that new beginning I have lived, married and raised three young'uns in the state where Press Maravich coached NCState basketball before he coached the Tiger basketball team, which included his son, incredible phenom  "Pistol" Pete.
For many, many years since leaving Louisiana, I have followed the Tigers. I have to say it has mostly been a frustrating experience.
Until now. Oh, there was a victorious flash-in-the-pan or two. We won a national championship in 2003, but had to share it with Southern Cal, because the AP writers couldn't make up their minds, or some such. In 2007, we had another NCAA title when we beat the Buckeyes.
Before that, the way-back-in-the-day championship was in 1958, when beat that other so-called tiger team-the one from somewhere in South Carolina--the same team that we will beat this coming Monday night.

To commemorate our immanent victory, I'll share a scene with you, from my recent novel, King of Soul, that takes place at LSU during 1969-70. This turn of events came as I was reflecting on my life, recalling those college years at LSU. The story revolves largely around what was happening to our nation during the Vietnam War.
As I mentioned above, I was an English major, which is why I spent most of my adult life banging nails, building houses in North Carolina. But I have managed to get four novels written and published out of the English major deal.

In  chapter 11 of the fourth novel, King of Soul, we find the main character, Donnie Evans conversing with Marcy Charters, while they are getting to know each other. In the scene, Donnie asks her:

           “You live in Savannah?”
         “I did. Now I’m living in Baton Rouge.”
         “Glad you’re here.”
         “Thank you. There I was, the middle of July and I still didn’t know where to go to school.”
         “Did your boyfriend want you to go to Georgia?”
         “He did.”
         “But you didn’t want to.”
         “That’s right. I wanted something different. Or. . .some place different, and it wasn’t going to be France, and there I was sitting on a park bench in Savannah, by the waterfront. . .not knowing what was going to happen but knowing that I had to do something. This is not me, you understand. I’m usually right on top of things—“
         “Sittin’ on a dock of the bay,” Donnie inserted, “watchin’ the tide roll away.”
          Marcy stopped in her tracks. They were beneath the crepe myrtles now, near the entrance to the Union building. “That’s it,” she said, eyeing him surprisedly as if to say who are you and how did you get here ? “It was just like that—like Otis sang it,” she exclaimed.
         “Otis Redding. I hear ya, babe.” Donnie snapped his fingers, started crooning the tune. . .”watchin’ the ships roll in, and I watch ‘em roll away again. . .” Yeah, Otis knew all about it; he was the King of Soul.”
         “King of Soul? I thought  James Brown was the King of Soul.” she said.
         Donnie laughed. “He might have been at one time.”
         Up the stone staircase, into the palatial student Union building, breezing through high, grand hallway, and then they turned into the cafeteria line where she got salad, he got a sandwich and of course the two coffees. Then they were out in the grand dining room, sunshine streaming in through the high glass, the buzz of multi-voiced cacophonic conversation rising into the high ceiling, contributing to the wisdom of the universe, or the serendipity of Friday afternoons with someone who just transported from a crunch time decision while sitting on a dock of the bay, in some place far, far, away. . .
          When they sat down, she sang:
      “I can’t do what ten people tell me, so I guess I’ll just stay the same.”       Then she spoke: “And the best way for me to do that was to come here.”
       “And they just let you in? Are you so special?”
       “Well, I had already been accepted, in April. But at that point, this whole LSU idea was just a kind of a lark thing.

Glass half-Full

Change Is Gonna Come

Some wise person said a fish wouldn’t know (s)he was out of water until it actually happened. When the angler yanked the critter up the into air, the fish would immediately know that something had gone terribly wrong.

I think our situation in modern life is a little bit like that. In our present media-engulfed life, we humans are so totally immersed in electronic media that we would feel disoriented and panicky if we were suddenly jerked out of it—like a fish out of water.

Some might even suffer withdrawals.

Nowadays some social critics among us complain about the dumming-down effects of twitter and facebook, and all that other blahblah googlifief also-ran flimflam that’s floating around in the datafied air of 2018.

Back in the day, during the adolescent phases of my baby boomer generation, people romanticized about the fact that we were the first generation to get raised up with a tv in the living room and therefore a boob-tube mindset. Whoopdee doo that we had pop-culture and instant gratification on the brain instead of the traditional 1-2-3 and a-b-c worldview of previous generations. No wonder we fantasized that we could change the world. We were walking around in the first-ever TV-generated dream world.

Actually, some of us did change the world. Those guys who were mastering their calculus and fortran instead of doping up—they managed to hatch out a totally electronic data tsunami that has since commandeered our attention and maximized our compulsive fascination with constant entertainment distractions and rampant twitt-faced narcissism.

Along with some real information, of course. There's always both bad and good in any changes that are gonna come.

A  generation before us in the timeline, it was another set of emergent media wonders that were transforming the world of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. Our parents’ generation also grew up with a revolutionary media box in the living room and the dashboard—radio. They had Roosevelt’s fireside chats, Glenn Miller, Amos n’ Andy,  and Orson Wells’ terribly realistic radio depiction of us being invaded by extraterrestrial aliens.

But radio was no TV. Radio was about hearing. TV was like a whole new, artificial world of hearing AND seeing.

The rate of change, accelerating in the TV age, has exponentially accelerated and intensified with the coming of the electr(on)ic internet, 21st-century version.

A few years ago, I undertook a writing project to express some of the angst of the boomer generation that I grew up in.

Because I had graduated from high school and then entered college in 1969, my novel, King of Soul,  turned out to be mainly about the elephant-in-the-room issue of my g -generation's historical  era—the Vietnam war.

But that war was far from being the only issue that we Americans had to deal with.

In struggling to depict—and even to somehow reconcile—the great divide between them that went and us who did not go to Vietnam, I embarked on a research project to learn how the Vietnam war had started and how it escalated to become such an overarching generational crisis. My g-generation was torn apart because of what all took place over there as a result of our tragic illusion.  We thought we could, with our high-tech way of doing things, show a country of undeveloped farmers how to expel the communists.

We learned a very hard lesson. It was tragic, what happened. 

While the world had worked a certain way during the Big War, when we ran the Nazis back into their holes, something had sure as hell changed by the 1960’s.

The old tactics of massive military push against jungle guerrillas did not work.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the kids didn’t wanna have to go over there and do Lyndon’s dirty work.

The anti-war movement’s seemingly sudden organizational strength in 1967 was no mere happenstance. Those activists who devised a widespread effective resistance against the war had learned the hard facts of life from a previous protest movement—the Civil Rights movement.

It took a while for the anti-war movement to get its act together. But when they finally did, it was because of a hard lesson that had been learned by black folks down in dixie.

In the Freedom Summer of 1964, a widespread collection of honky activist youth suddenly showed up down in the Segregated South to help the black folk get organized for voting and organizing real societal change. There in the historical shadow of the old defeated, slave-slappin’ South, wide-eyed yankee students got a fierce reality check. Their rose-colored glasses were left broken on the blood-stained grounds of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, when they saw what violence and oppression the racist Establishment was inflicting on people of color.

Right here in Amerika, it was. Land of the free? and home of the brave!

A wake-up call it was. Based on what them wide-eyed college kids from up Nawth encountered when they got down here, they got a severe reality check. Stopping the war in Vietnam  would be no walk in the park. There was bad shit going down right here in the good ole USA, just like in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

If the peaceniks wanted to get us out of Vietnam, they would have to get organized, and maybe even pick up some heavier-duty tactics . . . civil disobedience.

Meanwhile, there were a few blacks who were doing alright. Sam Cooke was one of them.

During the early 1960’s, Sam was a very successful singer-songwriter. Most of his tunes were soulishly romantic and swingy. He had a knack of finding the best in everything he wrote about. With an admirable optimism that shone forth in all his song-work, Sam managed somehow to spread good will and positive attitude everywhere he went, in spite of all the tough changes that were going down.

Some may have thought Sam to be an uncle tom, because he didn’t get angry.

But Sam Cooke—even though he celebrated optimism and good attitude—was no uncle tom.

He was not a “house nigga.”

Here’s a song that expresses Sam’s feeling about the societal changes that he felt needed to happen in the USA in the mid-1960’s.  After his death in 1964, this composition was released posthumously on the B-side of a single record called Shake, and also on an album by the same name.

Here’s the tune, A Change Is Gonna Come:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEBlaMOmKV4

And here’s my version:

Sam's Change Is Gonna Come

As we geezers have seen in our lifetime, change did indeed come.

But some things will remain the same.

Here’s a truth that always remains: Change is gonna come, like it or not.

When it does, may the change be with you, and . . . may you be with the change, if it is good.

If it’s not good, go listen to some of Sam’s old hit songs and get an attitude adjustment. Maybe you can learn to deal with it as he did—with a good attitude.

King of Soul

Vietnam, at ground level 1970

Herein I recommend a novelized real story from that infamous "War in Vietnam."

  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13437

John Podlaski’s novel about a brand-new American soldier in Vietnam strikes at the heart of the matter— just what the hell were our soldiers over there supposed to be doing?

Them brave boys were  putting their asses on the line, stalking communist enemies in strange jungles on the other side of the world, when all the while their survival instinct was demanding them to just hunker down, lay low, and get through their year-long sentence of jungle warfare in one living, still-breathing piece.

And All for what?

Because we sent them to do a job—kill communists, and run the ones we couldn’t kill back to the North.

Now we all know it didn’t work out that way, but we learned some lessons—and the world did too—in the process.

The problem our guys had over there was: how could we know, in a SE Asian village scenario, which villagers were helping the NVA, and which ones were on our side? As if these rice-cultivating peasants knew the difference between Karl Marx and George Washington!

After reading this book, Cherries, it seems to me that, in the midst of the terrible gun battles, every soldier’s internal war must have been a constant conflict between these two missions: to kill enemies and thus keep the brass-mandated “body count” on an upward curve, or to stay alive!

Which would you choose?!

In most cases, it seems it came down to protecting yourself and your squad buddies, while treading fearfully through the booby-trapped minefield of two opposing international ideologies whose political strategies had turned absolutely, militarily lethal.

That project required real men—brave soldiers who could bite the bullet— who could launch out and give it a shot while death and danger stalked them at every turn along the path.

This was a terrible, terrible ordeal that our nation put these guys through! We need to talk about it.We need to acknowledge their incredible bravery.  We need to ask: Just what the hell happened back then and there in Vietnam?—in that war that so many of us managed to evade.  Whether you were for the war of against it— reading John Podlaski’s “Cherries” is a provocative way to begin the assessment— an evaluation that needs to take place, for the sake of our nation’s future security.

Read the book, because this quasi-autobiographical story gives a close-up, day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground account of what our guys were doing over there in Vietnam, while we were trying to figure it all out here, stateside— here, safe in the home of the free, while the brave were answering the terrible call that our government had imposed on them.  They endured that jungular hell-pit so that we, as a nation, could, in spite of defeat,  pass successfully through the 20th-century burden of Cold War paranoia.

John’s fictionalized personal story fleshes out the constant conflict between two soldierly inclinations: fulfilling military responsibility by driving up enemy “body counts,” vs. following  the human instinct to just stay alive, and somehow make it through your one-year tour of duty without getting your ass killed.


Our American purpose there was unclear. No definite battlefield could be found;  the war was waged wherever our boys happened to run into the Viet Cong or the North Vietnam Army, in a perpetual theater-game of deadly hide-and-seek. Our teens and twenties recruits and draftees were dropped into unfamiliar Asian jungles, then immersed immediately in extreme fear—fear like you would feel seeing two of your platoon-mates’ heads staked on bamboo poles.

Not in Kansas any more, Toto!

Khe Sahn. A Shau, Ah shit! What have we gotten ourselves into?!

Read John’s book to find out what perils our boys  were trudging through while we stateside were trying to figure out the whys and the wherefores.

BTW, by the 1990’s it was plain to see that  the free world, led by the USA, had prevailed in our struggle against both fascism and communism. In the big picture, our effort in Vietnam played an instructive role in that victory. The governance of nations has more to do with learning from your mistakes than fighting a lost cause to some idealized bitter end.

Thanks to you all you guys—Cherries, LongTimers and Lifers—who answered the call to service at that time. Oh yeah, and here’s another belated message: Welcome Home!

King of Soul  

Their Last Full Measure of Devotion

In the novel King of Soul, which I have recently published, college students Donnie and Kevin take an impulsive road trip to Kevin's home in Ohio. This happens in early May of 1970. While on the road in Tennessee, they pick up Ed, a hitchhiker. Ed has been honorably discharged from military service in Vietnam only three weeks ago. In chapter 23, we find Donnie and Kevin accompanying Ed to a bar in Nashville:

At the China Beach bar and grill in downtown Nashville, Donnie and Kevin tagged along while Ed linked up with a buddy of his from the war.

Sled was a sort of hillbilly with a twist. His West Virginia upbringing had been traumatized in a snow-sledding accident that happened when he was ten years old. In a head-on collision with a pine tree, a low branch had penetrated his left cheek. A scar that resulted from the surgery gave the appearance of a question mark on the left side of his face. From his teen years onward, all John’s people called him “Sled” because of what had happened to him in a sledding accident when he was a kid.

Ed and Sled had become friends at Fort Hood, Texas, before they both went to Vietnam. They were assigned to the same Company, but different platoons. On this particular evening , Sled and Ed were having beer and burgers as they celebrated the fact that they both had survived Vietnam. This was the first time they had seen each other since both were honorably discharged. Donnie and Kevin listened intently as Sled reported to Ed the account of how their CO, Lt. Gary, had fallen in battle only 11 months ago.

Sled explained that, in a strategy to avoid group casualties, Lt. Gary had his men spread out as they were advancing down a jungle hillside. Three dozen soldiers had distanced themselves from each other, and each man was walking alone. The radio man reported that an NVA encampment was below them, but the exact location had not yet been determined.

Delta company was thus strung out for a mile or more. When their point guys reached the bottom, they caught sight of evidence of the enemy bunkers above them, up on the north side. Sergeant Charles halted his men at a covered spot. He knew they were near the enemy because, he said, he could smell their rice cooking; but as he took a few steps to obtain a better view of the area in question, suddenly he was struck with a bullet. It hit him in the abdomen;. Within seconds, an assault by automatic weapons erupted somewhere northward and above them, with what sounded like AK-47 fire.

Sgt. Charles did not make it home alive from Vietnam.

On this Memorial Day, 2017, we remember Charles and the other 54,000 American soldiers who never got back here to taste the good life of the dear ole US of A. We appreciate that these men and women sacrificed their last full measure of devotion so that we we can live free.

King of Soul

Tan Son Nhut 1970

When Johnny came marching home again it was in 1971, although really, there was no parade.

He wasn't actually marching, anyway, but rather flying commercial out of Vietnam on a PanAm from Cam Ranh Bay. The jet featured American stewardesses, and this was a very favorable detail that our exiting guys did not fail to notice as they soared off to Pacific destinations and ultimately all the way back over here to the good ole USA. It was a long flight from the war, and a long time to have to watch stewardesses traipsing up and down the carpeted aisles, serving food and drink; but our guys managed to get through it.

My old friend Johnny's departing flight from Vietnam was a reversal of his arrival there, a year earlier, on a commercial US aircraft.

But here's a curious fact that he confided to me. The "scaredest" he ever got while in Vietnam was on that first day, during the jet's approach into Cam Ranh, because the descending plane was drawing enemy fire!

Welcome to Vietnam! Haha!

Last week, during the first days of October 2016, my old neighborhood friend Johnny told me about his one year tour in Vietnam. He lives in Louisiana, where we both started life; now I live in North Carolina. We brought our wives and had a Florida panhandle reunion at the beach.

We were chums in high school, but after our graduation in 1969 he went his way and I went mine. I went to college; he went to Vietnam.

I was protesting the war; he was over there in the middle of it.

Before last week, I had not seen Johnny since about 1975.

Now I'm writing a novel about that period of time, and about some of the differences--and reconciliation-- between those two diverging groups--"them that went" and "them that didn't."

As it turned out, Johnny's year of duty at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, just north of Saigon, was, he admits, easier than the brutal combat some of our guys had to endure out in the jungles while they were on patrol being relentlessly pursued by the silently stalking Viet Cong.

During our time of defending the former Republic of Vietnam, tons and tons of weaponry, machinery, and supplies had to be delivered into the country to supply our people there. Tan Son Nhut was a busy location for transport and communications, and we needed a lot of guys on the ground to keep systems oiled, protected and combat-ready. My friend Johnny was one of those men.

During high school, Johnny had acquired some work experience in appliances and refrigeration. After our high school graduation he was not inclined, as I was, toward college. He worked for a while. Then he saw, you might say, "the handwriting on the wall" about how career choices were shaping up in 1969-70. So he volunteered for the Army. After boot camp at Fort Polk (Louisiana) and some duty-specific training at Fort Belvoir (Virginia), he shipped out, which is to say, he was put on a flight path that landed him at the Cam Ranh Air Base where they almost got shot down before setting foot in the infamous theater of Vietnam.

When my friend arrived at his post on the perimeter of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, he spent a year on guard duty, keeping watch over the rice paddies and distant jungles beyond the fence, and reporting whenever mortar fire or any other unfriendly thing was approaching the air base.

Inside the base, there were moments when our guys could take a little time off. Here's a pic that Johnny snapped; it depicts a recreational session of high-stakes card-sharking, with maybe a little bluffing and probably some bravado bullcrap thrown in to keep the game interesting.

Here's a pic of Johnny, taken when he had only been in Vietnam a few days.

Last week, after Johnny showed me a few hundred photos that had been stored away at his home, I thanked him for taking the time to meet me in Florida so we could talk about Vietnam.

Because I can't write a book about what was happ'nin' in the USA in 1969 without talking about Vietnam. I also thanked my friend for his service to our nation.

And I thanked God that he survived it. There were 58,000 of "them that went" who did not.

If you were a college kid like me in the 1960's-'70's, you will find it well worth your time to visit a few of the men and women who did not do college at that time, but who served--by choice or by draft--in the military. Right or wrong, won or lost, however you call it, they did what our country called them to do.

We may need many more like them before it's all over with.



King of Soul

A Boomer Looks Back

Now that I've been growing up for 65 years, I am at last approaching some semblance of adulthood.

During the course of my baby'boomer lifetime, I have seen some changes; some of them I am actually starting to comprehend.

Now I look back on it all and find myself wondering about some things, but quite sure about some other things.

Several years ago, my wife and I spent some vacation time on the island of Maui, in the great state of Hawaii. While driving one afternoon down the western slope of Hale'akala volcano, we happened upon a memorial to a great man named Sun Yat-sen.

In his lifetime, during the early 20th century--1911, Sun lead many of his countrymen in a revolution that deposed the old monarchy of their country--the Chinese Qing dynasty. But before that happened, he had spent some time in Hawaii; that's why there's as statue of him there.

At the base of Sun Yat-sen's memorial a quote from him is carved in the stone, and this is what is said:

LOOK INTO THE NATURE OF THINGS

Ever since I saw that, I have been working that pearl of wisdom into my way of living as much as I can. And this principle of living and learning has been not only a motivation for me toward acquiring useful knowledge, but also a source of great joy and satisfaction.

This principle is expanded in the Proverbs of the Bible: Understanding is a fountain of life to one who has it. Proverbs 16:22.

Now this may seem like a philosophical idea, but it is really very productive in the living of real life. Here's a nuts n' bolts example:

In 1992, when I was still a young man of 41, working as a carpenter to provide for our three children, and for my wife who had not yet become a nurse, and for our household, I took a job with a construction company remodeling (a refurb job) an old K-Mart. My job was to tear old stuff out from around the inside perimeter of the store and replace it with a newer style of retail display.

I had been visiting K-Marts ever since I was a teenager in the 1960's. So I had been seeing those retail structures for most of my life. But to look behind the facade, into the structure, and then to reconstruct the structure based on newer, more modern components--this work experience held a strange satisfaction for me, as well as a source of income for a season of our life.

Working on that K-Mart was more than a paycheck; it was a joy to behold as the various phases of reconstruction unfolded beneath my hands and before my eyes.

Look into the nature (or structure) of things!

Many years have passed; now I'm looking back on it all. Part of the outcome from this reflection will be a novel that I am now researching and writing. It is a story that takes place during the time of my youth; it has become a cathartic process for reconciling the difference between what I thought I knew then and what I now know about that turbulent period of my g-generation's growing up.

Ours was the generation whose maturing was said to be delayed because Dr. Spock wrote a book about child care that--as some have judged it--convinced our mothers to spoil us.

While there may be an element of truth to that judgement, I have noticed in my conversations with some people lately that there is category of folks in our boomer generation who were definitely not spoiled:

Those guys and gals who fulfilled their duty to our country by going to fight the war in Vietnam--they found themselves in a situation where they had to grow up in one hell of a hurry.

What I am seeing now is, in my g-generation, there was a great divide between: Them that went, and them that didn't.

While I was college freshman in 1969, trying to figure out what life was all about, and marching against the war, those guys who who went to 'Nam were required--and yeah I say unto thee--forced to figure out how to keep life pumping through their bodies and the bodies of their buddies who fought with them.

Those soldiers who went over there had to grow up a lot quicker than I did.

I did not go to Vietnam. My lottery number in 1970 was 349, so I literally "lucked out" of it.

During that time, a time when I was stepping lightly through ivory-tower lala land, our soldiers on the other side of the world were trudging through jungles, heavy-laden with weapons and survival gear. While I was privileged to be extending my literacy skills, they were committed to learning how to kill the enemy before he kills "us."

Now it turns out my research about the '60's is swirling around two undeniable maelstroms of socio-political showdown: civil rights and the Vietnam war.

So, in my project of looking into the nature of things in the 1960's, I am learning about that war and how it came to be a major American (undeclared) war instead of just a civil war between Vietnamese.

One thing I have found is that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara undertook a similar project in 1965. When he was in the thick of it all--as one of the best and brightest industrial leaders of that age, having been recruited as an insider in the White House, then calling the shots on major events, wielding incredible military power on the other side of the planet, in the heat of the moment and in the fog of war, he found himself wanting to know. . .

how the hell did this happen? how the hell did we get here?

McNamara's question lead to a .gov-commissioned research project, paid for on our taxpayer dime, and ultimately made public by the primary researcher of that undertaking, a former Marine Lt. Col. named Daniel Ellsberg.

Look deep into it. In Ellsberg's case he looked deep into 7000 pages of military documentation, starting in the 1940's and going all the way through Tonkin Gulf in 1964.

Look into the nature of things.

I'll let you know in another year or two--when the book is done-- what my search dredges up from the streets and battlefields of our g-generation's search to find meaning and fulfillment, and maybe even a little justice and mercy thrown in.

But one thing I want to say, now, to THEM THAT WENT:

Although things did not turn out the way we had intended, there isn't much in this life that actually does end up like we thought it would.

You went and did what the USA asked, or compelled you, to do, while many of us were trying to pull you back to stateside.

Thank you for your service. We'll need many more of your stripe before its all over with.

Glass half-Full

Listen: Boomer's Choice

Hammer and Sickle '65

Here's an excerpt from chapter 5 of the new novel, King of Soul, now being researched and written. We're talkin' 'bout 1965:

The manipulations of human history had conspired to contrive a vast, geographical hook. The hook itself was forged in the shape of a country; it was a skinny little wire of a nation, slung long and slender along the 900-mile S-curve of an Asian sea strand. Upon this seacoast hook the fearless pride of Pax Americana would be fearlessly snagged, fish-like. But the snagging ended up requiring an extremely long expedition, for the catch fought on the line for eleven years before being reeled in.

This was Ho’s intention all along; he was a very patient angler. Ho was not a novice; he had been around the world a time or two. He’d been to London and to Paris, Hong Kong and Can-ton. He had spent part of the 1930’s in Stalin’s Russia, and had learned a thing or two by observing Uncle Joe’s tactics. Ho Chi Minh understood what it would take to get his fish on the line, and how to handle the catch once it was snagged. The expedition would take 11 years, but eventually South Vietnam was dragged up into the Viet Minh boat.

Uncle Ho had learned a thing or two.

Around the world, especially in defeated France and in bold America, there was talk about Ho Chi Minh—who was he and who did he think he was and what the hell was he capable of.

Some folks never saw the hook at all. When they looked at that odd-shaped southeast Asian country on the map, it resembled something else, with its long arc curving around the western shore of the South China Sea. . . . . maybe a domino?

No. Vietnam was no domino; there was nothing straight nor square about the place. Nothing predictable. But we didn’t know that until much later in the game.

The shape of Vietnam did, however, have resemblance to a sickle, like that sickle of the infamous hammer and sickle. It was a curved blade, hauled upon the lean, hard backs of legions of peasant laborers. As the years of the 1960’s rolled by, the sickle was forged into a weapon, to be skillfully wielded in the hands of militarized Viet Minh insurgents and Viet Cong guerillas. And that army of sickles was backed up by the persistent pounding of Uncle Ho’s communist hammer.

Vietnam was a hammer and sickle; that’s all. It wasn’t some great domino scenario that toppled the Republic of the South during the 1960’s, ultimately rejecting President Diem and killing him, and then later ousting Thieu and Madame Nhu, like Ho had swung up at Dien Bien Phu.

After the French pulled out—with tail between their legs in 1954—when the Americans pulled in, hellbent on showin’ the world how to defeat communist incursion, it was pretty slow going for awhile. B’rer Ho Chi Fox, he lay low, waitin’ to see what B’rer Rabbit-ears would pickup on his radio, because B’rer Rabbit did have a pretty fancy radio, and a lot of heavy equipment to back it up with, and a heap o’ ordnance to fling around with a lot of fired-up thunderations. B’rer Rabbit-ears could sho'nuff make some powerful destructions when he put his mind to it.

By the time things got really cranked up in 1965, the man in charge of yankee warfare had come up with a plan. But there was a problem.

The problem was an old one; stated simply, from a mathematical viewpoint, it was this: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

No way around it; shortest distance between Hanoi and Saigon was a straight line. But the line didn’t go through Vietnam; it went right through two other countries.

If Uncle Ho were to set a taut insurgent line of troop transport from, say, Hanoi to Saigon—like from the handle of the sickle to the endpoint of the sickle’s curved blade—it would pass, not through the south part of Vietnam, but through Laos and Cambodia.

This was a problem. It wasn’t so much a problem for Ho—his stealthy, low-lyin’ insurgent diehards just crawled right under the rules of international proprietary expectations; they slouched through Laotian jungles and beneath Cambodian canopies like it was nobody’s business. After a while, the clandestine route they had cut for themselves was called by the name of the one who had commissioned it: the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

King of Soul

In Memoriam

I have written a story in which, in the year 1937, a young man and an old man travel from Paris to a World War I battlefield cemetery in Belgium. In the scene, Philip poses this question to Mel:

“How could this place have been a battlefield for a world war?”

The old Frenchman cast his eyes on the passing landscape, and seemed to join Philip in this musing. He answered slowly, “War is a terrible thing, an ugly thing. I did not fight in the war; I had already served my military duty, long before the Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo and the whole damn world flew apart, like shrapnel. But I had many friends who fought here, and back there, where we just came from in my France, back there at the Somme, the Marne, Amiens. Our soldiers drove the Germans back across their fortified lines, the Hindenberg line they called it. By summer of 1918 the Germans were in full retreat, although it took them a hell of a long time, and rivers of spilt blood, to admit it. And so it all ended here. Those trenches, over there in France, that had been held and occupied for two hellish years by both armies, those muddy hellholes were finally left behind, vacated, and afterward . . . filled up again with the soil of France and Flanders and Belgium, and green grass was planted where warfare had formerly blasted its way out of the dark human soul and the dark humus of lowland dirt and now we see that grass, trimmed, manicured and growing so tidily around those rows of white crosses out there, most of them with some soldier’s name carved on them, many just unknown, anonymous, and how could this have happened? You might as well ask how could. . . a grain of sand get stuck in an oyster? And how could that oyster, in retaliation against that rough, alien irritant, then generate a pearl—such a beautiful thing, lustrous and white—coming forth in response to a small, alien presence that had taken up unwelcomed residence inside the creature’s own domain? The answer, my friend, is floating in the sea, blowing in the wind, growing green and strong from soil that once ran red with men’s blood.”

Now they were arriving at the battlefield. Jacques parked the car, leaned against the front fender, lit a cigarette. Mel and Philip walked through a stone arch, along a narrow, paved road lined with flowering linden trees, spring green with their large spadish leaves, sprinkled with small white blossoms. The sun was getting low behind them. Shadows of these trees had overtaken the narrow lane, turning it cooler than the surrounding fields, acres and acres neatly arranged with white crosses and gravestones, and continuous green, perfect grass between all. Having reached the end of the linden lane, they stepped slowly, reverently, along straight pathways, passing hundreds of silent graves on either side. The setting sun was still warm here, after their cool approach from beneath the trees.

At length, they came to the row that Philip had been looking for, the one he had read about in the army guidebook, where his father’s grave was nested precisely and perpetually in its own place in eternity . . .

The excerpt above is taken from chapter 27 of Smoke, the novel I published last year. I highlight the above passage as a memorial to the brave men and women who have died in wars while defending our United States of America and assuring the causes of human freedom throughout this tragic, precious world.

We Boomers will have a Choice to make.

Well, the boys came marching home from Germany and France,

and the bomb had made a blast in Hiroshima,

We were driving brand new cars;

we were waving stars and bars,

and everywhere was another factory.

Back in in 1953, cruising with Dwight E,

Elvis sang the white-boy blues,

McCarthy looking under every bush.

In the home of the brave and the free, rolling on prosperity

and all the kids were going off to school.



Ten years down the road. . .

another dream had come and gone

and the power of one gun had made itself known. Then,

back in 1964, big Lyndon opened the door

for civil rights, and a bloody Asian war:

Young men on pork chop hill; young women on the pill;

at home they said don't kill, get a psychedelic

thrill.

But the dreams of a Woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in '73.



And it's hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and it's hi hi hey!, seeking light in the night of day,

but the dreams of a Woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in '73.



Well, it just don't pay to sob.

Guess I'll get myself a job

selling leisure suits or maybe real estate.

I'm not moving very fast,

just waiting in line for gas

and Johnny Carson gives me all my news.

Back in 1976, overcoming dirty tricks,

some were moving back to the sticks.

Some were looking for a fix.

Ayatollahs on the rise,

sulfur dioxide in the skies,

and the System makes the man that's got his own.



They say an elephant don't forget.

Let's play another set.

There's always another ghost on PacMan's trail.

Don't let this boom go stale.

Let's find an airline for sale!

or pop another tape in the VCR.

Back in 1989, we're living on borrowed time,

getting lost in subtle sin

eating oat bran at the gym.

But there's an empty place inside,

and I was wondering why

thèse vanities don't suit.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



And its hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and its hi hi hey, seeking light in the night of day.

Yeah, there's an empty place inside

and I was wondering why

thèse vanities don't suit.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



Put on your Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Kalashnikov and Columbine

shoes,

for the way is treacherous with ruts and rocks.

Yeah, we figured our digits out

before that Y2K could spoil our rout,

but that 9/11 call was in the cards.

Did you consider the question of heaven

before the wreck of '97?

Will you hear the trumpet call from the Ancient

of Days?

Our way is littered with freaks and fads,

from Baghdad through our mouse pads

as the reaper swings his steely scythe across

our wicked ways.



And its hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and its hi hi hey, seeking light in the night of day.

Its a dangerous world outside

and I was wondering why;

this world don't give a hoot.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



Listen to it:

Boomer's Choice © ℗ Carey Rowland 2004



Music and Books

52 Pickup

Strange things happen in this world, but you never know what's pre-planned and what's the luck of the draw.

52 years ago, the government of Vietnam was overthrown when President Ngo Dinh Diem was deposed in a coup led by his own military leaders. The next day, November 2, Diem was shot dead.

Three weeks later, American President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. Two days after that, the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead while in official custody.

I was twelve years old at the time.

Strange string of events, it seemed to us. Mystery still surrounds. Some things we'll never know.

After Kennedy was gone, Lyndon Johnson became President. Johnson was a good man; among many other notable accomplishments, he shepherded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, as he knew it had been an important component of his slain predecessor's would-have-been legacy. Lyndon was very good at getting things done, and so he came through, as Chief Executive instead of President of the Senate, to get that historic legislation manifested as the law of the land.

LBJ was a Texan. He walked tall like a Texan because he was a Texan. Lyndon's leadership style had originated within his humble beginnings; he was a man who knew the nuts and bolts of what makes America work. He knew how to get things done; was a wheeler dealer politician who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. As fate and his own fortitude would have it, he was in the right place at the right time in 1960 when the Democrats selected him to take the VP slot on Kennedy's ticket.

And so, three years later on that fateful night of November 22, 1963, while the nation was in shock, he was in the right place at a bad time, to receive, in the whirlwind of a tragedy, the awesome mantle of national--yeah I say unto thee-- even world, leadership.

But good ole Lyndon was in a very difficult place at that right time. While we were weeping, reeling from the thought of Jackie dressed in pink climbing on the back of that convertible to get away, or to assist the Secret Service guy while she reached over what was left of her husbands head…

while all that was fresh in our minds, this big man Lyndon Baines Johnson took an oath while winging through the atmosphere at 35,000 feet, and the nation heard of it, and he landed a few hours later in Washington. Even before he stepped off that plane Lyndon was in charge.

Like it or not, there he was.

There we were.

And while we loved Lyndon, prayed for him, looked askance at him, we hated, absolutely hated the circumstances that had slammed him into that perilous Office, and had thrusted him into the fragile pinnacle of leading--not just the Senate or the Congress--but the whole damn United States of America in the days to come.

In the days that followed, he proved to be a strong President. I mean, after all, he was a strong man with a forceful, arm-twisting leadership style.

A couple of years passed. In some ways, our nation settled down a bit after the trauma of Kennedy's assassination; in other ways, we didn't settle down at all, because a lot of circumstances were raveling at the time. One of them was the war in Vietnam. By 1965, after consulting, as Kennedy had done before him, multiple voices of military and diplomatic leadership, LBJ decided to escalate the war.

It was no simple situation over there. The South Vietnamese could not stop the onslaught of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese insurgents, and it's questionable whether they really had the gumption to do it.

The tall Texan was not about to allow to the USA to withdraw from such a thing as that. Many of his advisors, even McNamara, indicated that maybe the whole damn thing was, as Cronkite said, a stalemate. But LBJ plunged us in deeper.

Then in 1968 LBJ, strongman that he was, decided not to run for re-election. He could have, perhaps, devised a plan, before retiring, for this nation to extricate from Vietnam, but he chose not to do so. Not on his watch.

When Nixon got in the White House in 1969, he could have saved us a lot of grief and death if he had wound the war down at that time. Instead, he escalated it with intention of obtaining peace with honor. Another Not on my watch scenario.

He should have just gotten us out of there. A few years later, Nixon was history too; by '73 we were officially out of there, and by '75 we were really out of Vietnam.

Strange string of events, it seemed to us. Mystery still surrounds. Some things we'll never know.



52 pickup; here's another card I chanced to pick up today:

64 years ago, the King of Jordan, Abdullah I ibn al-Hussein was assassinated while attending prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Not that it means anything here, but this writer was one week old at the time.

King Abdullah had sought to be a peacemaker. He was one of the few Arab leaders who had been willing to negotiate with the Israelis in 1947-48 when Israel was establishing its independence and identity as a nation.

July 20, 1951, a Palestinian named Mustafa Ashi shot Abdullah dead after Friday prayers. Ten alleged conspirators were later prosecuted in Jordan. According to Wikipedia, the prosecutor alleged that one conspirator, Colonel Abdullah el-Tell, ex-Military Governor of Jerusalem, had given instructions "that the killer, made to act alone, be slain at once thereafter to shield the instigators of the crime."

Strange string of events, it seemed to us. Mystery still surrounds. Some things we'll never know. Strange things happen in this world, but you never know what's pre-planned and what's the (bad) luck of the draw. Makes you wonder what woulda, coulda, shoulda happen.

No point in that, really. Life goes on. It is what it is.

Boomer's Choice

Robert McNamara's Tragic Choice

My freshman year of college at LSU was a real eye-opener. The world I entered that September was remarkably different from the high school existence from which I had just graduated.

There was a lot going on in 1969. I understood practically none of it, so my college education would be a huge learning experience--not only about the subjects of classic university study, but about the tumultuous times that we lived in then.

If you have, in your life, spent a freshman year at a large university, then perhaps you know something about the changes I was dealing with. But if you were a baby boomer like me whose collegial initiations happened in the late 1960's, then you might agree that our experience then was even more intense that most college frosh would typically experience.

Nowadays, in my 64th year of life, I have undertaken to write a novel that is centered around this experience. The book, which will be a fourth novelic publishing project, is called King of Soul.

Who is the King of Soul, you may ask. You'll have to read the book to find out. But of course you cannot read it, until I finish writing the dam thing, probably about 3 years from now.

Now when I'm doing this sort of project, I'm heavy on the research. The direction of my research will determine much of what happens in the story. For the last six months or so, I've been reading many books and articles about the 1960s. My historical novels are subjective explorations of selected time periods. The three previous novelic projects were propelled by research explorations in these years: 2005 (Glass half-Full), 2000 (Glass Chimera) and 1937 (Smoke).

1969 was, as Frank Sinatra might say, a very good year. On the other hand, in some ways it was a very bad year.

Just like any year, I guess. Depends on who you are, where you are, and what is happening around you.

What I found was happening around me and the other college students of 1969 was this: a helluva lot of change, and it was going down at a very fast clip. Most of the change revolved around three areas of societal ferment: civil rights, the Vietnam War, and sex.

I wandered, like millions of other high-school graduates, into a maelstrom of disruptive events and ideas.

My current enquiry about that anarchic decade has identified three main influences:

~the civil rights movement, which had started long before, but was accelerating in its intensity during that time

~the Vietnam War, and the draft

~the metamorphosis of the 1950's "beats" into something new called the hippies

My first great discovery has been that the groundbreaking civil rights activists of the 1950s-60s taught the antiwar activists of the late 1960s how to mobilize and organize in order to get things done. The "Freedom Summer" of 1964 is the clearest expression of this development. That's when bunches of white kids from up north spent their summer going down south to help blacks in their struggle for civil rights, and America was never the same after that.

My second great revelation is (as if we didn't already know) the elephant in that era's living room: the war in Vietnam.

This may seem obvious to anyone who was there, in the USA at that time. But God, and my advancing age, have taught me a great lesson in recent years. And the lesson is this:

One of life's greatest satisfactions is to, by study, delve back into the time in which you were growing up, and learn about what the hell was going on then when you were so young and clueless about it all.

Toward that end, I am reading a great work of jouralism now, one of the best I've ever picked up: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Brightest-David-Halberstam/dp/0449908704

Today I encountered in that book a startling realization. You can perhaps discern what it is by reading this selection from page 242 of the 1972 Ballantine paperback edition:

". . .in making his (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's) arguments against nuclear weapons, forcefully, relentlessly, he had to make counterarguments for conventional forces. We had to have some kind of armed might, so he made good and effective arguments for conventional weapons (and if the Chiefs wanted to use them in Vietnam, to send American combat troops without nuclear weapons, he had to go along, since he had developed the thesis, the mystique of what conventional weapons could do with the new mobility). He gave them a rationale, for his overriding concern was quickly to limit the possibilities of nuclear war, to gain control of those weapons.(emphasis mine)."

In other words, the slippery slope of conventional warfare in Vietnam war escalation came about as an effort to prevent ultimate nuclear war with the Communists!

That's something to think about. Who knows, maybe the strategy worked. Maybe it will help us understand how that war slid, over the course of a dozen years or so, from a few military advisors deployed in 1961 to 54,000 Americans dead by the time we finally got out of there in 1975.

There was, admit it or not, a rationale to the tragedy of Vietnam.

As we (still) face a 21st century situation of potential nuclear disaster, maybe the strategy of conventional war--a lesser evil-- can fend off the worst possible bellicosity--nuclear war against the "Communists" of our present age, the Islamic State of Iran, or North Korea.

Our detonation of atom bombs over Japan in August 1945 has changed the world--and the world's strategic inevitable realities--forever. We'd best not forget that. For the preservation of human life on this planet, any bellicose nations who strive to develop nuclear warheads must be kept in check.



Smoke

The Old Men and the Young

If ghosts could speak, they would probably agree with what the old man said. Sitting on the lowered gate of his black pickup truck, Ramus was saying that old men make wars; but young men fight them.

Now while we understand there is some truth in such a statement, we all know that it’s not really as simple as that. Nothing in this life is so easily explained, especially the thing called war.

Ramus blinked both his eyes at the same time. It was a habit he had. Some crows were making a ruckus in the nearby hickory, but he paid no attention to them.

“Consider Medgar Evers: he was a young man,” Ramus said. “He slogged his way across Europe, along with thousands of other Allied soldiers, to arrive triumphantly in Germany and then knock the hell out of the Nazi war machine. So he contributed to that great collective effort through which we won the big war. But then he came back to Mississippi and was told to go to the back of the bus.

“So, at the end of his homeward journey, Medgar entered, almost involuntarily, into another great war. It was an old war that had been started by old men. That is to say: men who we think of as old because they had lived and died long ago—men who, in centuries past, had embodied the fallacies and the limitations and atrocities of their own era. Those men had brought his ancestors to America in slave ships. It was a helluva an evil thing to do, but that’s what was happening at that time; there was shit just as bad going on over in Africa that enabled the slavetraders to do what they did, and that’s what started all this trouble we got now.

“Any trouble you find on the face of the earth is traceable to shit that happened a long time ago,” he said. "I don't know if it ever ends. I hope one day. . ."

Behind Ramus and his truck, the morning sun was peeking up from behind distant pinetops. For whatever reason we know not what, the nearby troop of bothersome crows decided to vacate the hickory tree they’d been in, and get the hell out of dodge. Their sudden departure presented a scene of black wings flapping out against a cloudless summer sky. Ramus glanced at their disturbance, but gave it not a thought. In these mountains, their antics were as old as the hills.

The volume of Ramus’ speech, which had steadily increased in order to compete with the birds, now rescinded to a soft, summary tone. “The Mississippi man's newfound battle—a great struggle into which he found himself caught up, by default—it eventually killed him. So he was a young man who never tasted the privilege of becoming an old man. Although he had marched with the victors in World War II, the battle that he found simmering back home was the one that put him in his grave.

“In 1963, only six months before Kennedy was killed, Medgar Evers was shot dead in his own front yard in Jackson Mississippi. He had just come from speaking to some brothers and sisters at the New Jerusalem church."

That quiet following the crows’ departure was blissful.

“But I got to go now: places to go and people to see.” Ramus said. He slid off the tailgate, called to his old hound dog and prepared to leave. His talk about old men, young men, and old wars was put on the shelf of memory for a while.

Now in 1969, a new war, hot off the press, was being waged. But it was fast becoming an old one. Young men were dying by the thousands. Old men too, and women and children. What else is new?

The scene above is an excerpt from the new novel being written:

King of Soul

Walking into a Maelstrom, 1969

I graduated from high school in May of 1969. Then I left home and went to college. What a change that was. There was a lot going on at the university.

I think most kids who leave home at the tender age of 17 find out that there's a whole 'nother world going on out there, and it seems quite different from what they grew up in. It's exciting, like turning over a new leaf, or starting a new chapter of life.

Now that I'm past sixty, I've gained some perspective that I didn't have then. And since reading and doing historical research are pursuits I enjoy, I've decided to study that decade in which I lived as a teenager--the 1960's.

I have a feeling I'm not the only boomer who is doing this, which is why the stuff of my research will eventually be written as a novel, my fourth. It is named King of Soul.

Back in September '68, when my senior year in high school had just begun, I addressed our student body as the incoming President of the Student Council. I remember telling them something about there was a lot going on out there in the world, and that our generation seemed to be discontented. But we, as responsible young adults at a Catholic high school, could certainly change the world by acting reasonably and playing by the rules. The students rewarded my innocent positivism with a standing ovation at the end.

About a year later, when I was a freshman at LSU, I began to see (although not necessarily understand) that my well-received idea of playing by the rules was not so simple as I had presented it.

There was, indeed, a lot going on in in 1969, and a lot of that change was being propelled by kids, not much older than I, who were working against the system with organized resistance, rather than "playing by rules." There was an authentic reason for this.

The Vietnam War.

One of the things that happened to me while I was discovering all this angst and protest in my g-generation was the draft lottery. My number came up 349, so I didn't have to worry about being drafted. I would be able to stay in school without being called to go fight the Viet Cong.

Nevertheless, all that '60's stuff was not just about the war. There was something happening here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5M_Ttstbgs

Among the war-protesters, there was a wide array of strategies being implemented to end the war--everything from pacifist Episcopalians, to SDS "bring the war home" agitators, to outright Weatherman revolutionaries.

In the research I am now doing, here is something I have come to understand clearly:

The seeds of antiwar, anti-establishment resistance tactics were sown into the American experience during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's-60's.

Oppression breeds Resistance, which leads to Tactics.

You know what I'm talking about--Little Rock Schools, Rosa on the bus, Dr. King's courageous, nonviolent leadership, Selma, Greensboro Woolworth's sit-in, voter registrations in the deep South, etc. It was mostly black folks getting organized.

Medgar Evers had fought in the Great War, in Europe. He was a hero, like all them Americans and others who had run the Nazis into the ground back in '45. But when Medgar got back to Mississippi (where I was in the 1950's a clueless white kid living in suburban Jackson), he got on a bus to ride back to his hometown, and the driver told this war hero-- who had risked his life for our freedom-- to go the the back of the bus!

Say what?

Medgar, being a man of peace, a Christian--well, he got through that humiliating incident--but he quietly went about his bid'ness. But he got to thinking he might try to help his people make some changes (and he was playing by the rules) so he started working with the NAACP to get black folks registered to vote in his home state.

But in June, 1963, brother Medgar was shot dead, near midnight, in his own front yard.

Now that--along with all the other injustices being brought into the light of day-- got the attention of a lot of Americans.

So some of us honkys started to see the light and get involved.

The next year, 1964, saw a flood of white folks headed from up Nawth, going down South, to help black folks get organized and register. The whole movement was called the Mississippi Freedom Summer. It was a great event in American history, except for when Andrew Freedman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner got murdered.

During that sweltering summer in Mississippi, the seeds of American antiwar, antiestablishment resistance were sown. White kids from Boston, Philly, Santa Monica and Sausalito and everywhere in between went down south to help black folks.

And the black folks taught 'em how its done--civil disobedience to resist injustice, in the streets of America.

There were hundreds of white kids who went. To name just one: Mario Savio, who went down South to do civil rights work, then returned to his home in California. Later that fall, 1964 he climbed on top of a car so he could be heard while making a speech about a local issue to his fellow protesters.

And the Free Speech Movement was born in Berkeley.

Now, go back to the future--the year I was telling you about when I started this piece--1969:

While the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley was still rattling the ivys at colleges all across the nation, including the campus at LSU were I was a clueless freshman . . .

The administrators of the University of California at Berkeley had bought a vacant lot very close to campus. It was, according to David Obst, in his book, Too Good To Be Forgotten, a "three-acre field the school had bought a couple of years before."

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Good-To-Be-Forgotten/dp/0471295388

David writes:

"In mid-April a number of street people decided the field would make a groovy park. They decided to reclaim the land from the university and give it back to the people. All this was to be done under the doctrine of squatters's rights.

For the next few weeks, hundreds of students and street people, folks who wouldn't work if their parents or employers begged or paid them, worked for free at the park. They transformed the mud-splattered field into a grass-covered park by bringing together a weird collection of sod, shrub, and seedlings. A grove of apple trees was planted and and a brick walkway was laid. Swings and a sandbox for kids were put up; there was even a fishpond, and a . . .'revolutionary cornfield.' "

Now, I, reading this, thought that was a pretty productive, creative way to make good use of a vacant lot.

But of course the Berkeley admins didn't think so, so the chancellor called Governor Reagan, who called in the National Guard, and things got ugly, kind of like, you know, Selma, or you know--but this was a bunch of white kids.

By 'n by, I later came to appreciate Ronald Reagan, when he was President. But this was not one of his shining moments.

Which gets to my point: there are two sides to every story. Confusion is the order of the day when you're a freshman.

When I walked into the college maelstrom of 1969, I was entering a storm of controversies. . . with both sides right and both sides wrong. How was I to make sense of it all?

As I later learned from Scriptures: "There is not one right, no, not one."

The long, collegial tradition of free thought and orderly discourse was being challenged from both sides--left and right--during those tempestuous days. On the left, the "Movement" was being split. A huge rift was tearing the violent-prone revolutionaries apart from the "play by the rules" nonviolent protesters.

David Horowitz, years ahead of me, had been, along with David Obst (quoted above) in the very thick of the antiwar, antiestablishment resistance during those days. But later, in the 1970's, he changed his tune and his political affiliations. In his book, Radical Son, Horowitz wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-A-Generational-Odyssey/dp/0684840057

"Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small . . .its leaders were able to rob and kill without incurring the penalty of the law. They were able to do so, because the Left made the Panthers a law unto themselves. The same way the Left had made Stalin a law unto himself. The same way the Left makes Fidel Castro and the Sandinista comandates laws unto themselves."

". . .the best intentions can lead to the worst ends. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised; I had learned to judge it by the evil it had done."

Such is the electrifying commotion of ideologies and tactics that I walked into while starting college in 1969. And I am still trying to figure it all out--who is right, who is wrong.

More about all this later. Film at 11. Book in, probably, about three years.



Glass half-Full

Kent State 1970

While doing research for the novel I now am writing, King of Soul, I read James A. Michener's non-fiction book entitled

Kent State: What happened and why. (Random House, 1971)

http://www.amazon.com/Kent-State-What-Happened-Why/dp/0449202739

Toward the end of it, here are some thoughts that came to me:



Oh, the insanity of those days,

shrouded in tear gas haze:

our dutiful young Guards, slogging in sweat-drenched gear,

moved against fellow-students erupting in fear.

They eyed each other across grassy knolls

while the crowd mocks and the clanging bell tolls.

Our ragged nation was ripping apart at the seams,

as confusion conspired to assassinate our dreams.

Sandy and Allison, Bill and Jeff didn't know;

they never looked back when the bullets laid them low.

The shock and the awe, the plan and its flaw

could offer no reason to explain which law

had judged them worthy of martyrdom, sentenced to death:

a sinnish twist of fate fired right, but hit on the left.

Things were never the same after that.

The movement waned thin; the bitter got fat;

America was laid low when those four lives got spent

on that deadly tragic Mayday at Kent.



Smoke

Zeitgeists and the King of Soul

People talk about "the zeitgeist" of an historical period as if it were one spirit. But in reality, the events of any particular epoch reflect several spiritual compulsions or visions that hover amongst the human hearts and minds of that age.

With that in mind, I have begun writing a new novel, my fourth, which is named King of Soul. The story will examine the teen years and coming-of-age of a young man,Donnie, who is growing up in the South during the 1960s. The novel is only mildly autobiographical.

Donnie's personal development is of course shaped by the familial, political, philosophical, economic and spiritual condition of that era. Within these influences, I Identify four zeitgeists that are especially potent during the turbulent 1960s. They are what might be called "spirits of the age", or what Gordon Lightfoot called the "visions of their days." But I like to think of these historical forces, each one, as collective "Souls. " For the decade in which I was a teenager, they are:

~Soul of Bounty

~Soul of Discontent

~Soul of Escape

~Soul of Anarchy

So that you can better understand my "Souls" concept, here are some earlier "Souls" that were dominant in former ages of the American Experience:

Soul of Exploration, Soul of Liberty, Soul of Slavery, Soul of Industry, Soul of Reform, Soul of Progress, Soul of Labor, Soul of Consumption, Soul of Entertainment.

As the story develops in my novel, King of Soul, the reader will detect in Donnie's experience:

~The Soul of Bounty, which thrives on security and wellness. It favors the individual, rather than a collective, although its community aspect is based on abundance: plenty for everybody. The Soul of Bounty values Family, Faith, and Work for Gain. Religion is beneficial. Heaven is a good ending. Hierarchy and authority contribute to Law & Order, sometimes at the expense of equality. Self-discipline and smart work are admirable.

It is a conservative attitude. Leave well-enough alone. Soul of Bounty manifestations for the 1960s may be: Republicans, the "Establishment", the "Powers that Be, Young Americans for Freedom. On its fringe are the John Birchers and the Ayn Rand group. Prominent movers in the Soul of Bounty during that time were: Nixon, Buckley, Reagan, Mayor Daley, Gov.Rhodes of Ohio, most suburbanites.

~The Soul of Discontent, which struggles toward justice and rightness. The collective will is higher than the individual; society is based on ideology, not religion. Activists within the Soul of Discontent are forever striving toward progress. Utopia is a real possibility.The Marxian version includes a dictatorship of the proletariat. Equality of all will be achieved at the expense of Order. These people are purposeful, existential in their motivation. Disruption of the established order is necessary for societal correction to be imposed. Organizations of the period include: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Free Speech Movement and the generally widespread Antiwar movement. Leaders of the 1960s manifestation include, among many others: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Joan Baez, the Berrigans, Daniel Ellsberg, Betty Friedan. The Soul of Discontent was most clearly expressed in: Civil Rights movement, Feminism, Berkeley, Chicago protests at 1968 Democratic convention, lethal uprisings at Kent State and Jackson State, student movements at San Francisco State U, Yale, Columbia, and eventually the Democratic party and 4th estate of 1970s-200. . .s

~Soul of Escape, which craves pleasure, ecstasy and distraction. Expressions of this Soul are both collective and individual. Community is hoped for to afford leisure, pleasure, celebration, art and expression. Minimal work is tolerated for the sake of these fulfillments. Utopia is cool, and Love-in is even better Serendipity is prized, at the expense of structure. Enjoy. In the '60s, these people were known as hippies, who followed in footsteps of their 1950s predecessors, the Beats. You know who they are, even if you were not one of them for awhile, because you read about them in Time and Life: Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, most rock musicians, but most notably Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead. They sought a trippy kind of stoned-out degenerative sensuality that occasionally masqueraded as spirituality. Summer of Love in '67 and Woodstock in '69 were their high points.

~Soul of Anarchy, which struggles to tear down the old order so that a new something can arise. Destruction is not only necessary, but cool and glorified. These people were the epitome of Shiva Rage: Panthers. Weathermen, Yippies on a bad day. The catch-all was "Revolutionary." John Lennon sang about them but only skirted along their fringes. ". . .but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." (They didn't make it.) Their flash in the pan came late, in '69 and the '70s. Heroes were Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael after he got tired of moderation, Rudd/Dohrn/Ayers. They were violent revolutionaries who might have done much more damage if the Establishment, personified by Richard Nixon, had not decided to wind the Vietnam War down and follow through with some serious programs to fulfill Johnson's Great Society before going down in a blaze of humiliating presidential glory.

In a turbid decade called "the '60s", my young protagonist Donnie attends middle school and high school, enters college in 1969, avoids the draft, checks out a few antiwar happenings and tries to make sense of it all, in a nation being torn apart by the interference patterns generated when these four (Bounty, Discontent, Escape, Anarchy) encountered each other. That's the scenario of King of Soul.

I should have it ready for you to read in a year or three.



Smoke

The Unfinished War

In one sense, all war is unfinished, because the political crimes that wage death between people groups inevitably come to the surface again. Like toxic waste, old atrocities bubble up from the depths of human strife to plague subsequent generations.

Now and then in history, a war will actually settle a divisive question. Our American Civil War established once and for all that American states of north and south would remain as one federation under a common flag, and that resolution has remained intact.

The First War was an unfinished war, because the issues that separated Germany from the rest of Europe resurfaced, zombie-like, about twenty years later as the the Second World War. Then the Second War resolved those divisive issues in a more effective way, and now Europe is reasonably, if not politically, united in peaceful coexistence.

Forty-nine years of my 63-year life have been spent in the twentieth century, which was a time period in which nations were generally at each others' throats over ideological differences. The basic conflict between freedom and slavery was continually re-inventing itself in various ideological costumes: libertarian vs. totalitarian, democracy vs. communism, communism vs. fascism, etc.

Now it seems the world reverts to religious identities to fortify the battlefields of the 21st century: Muslim vs. Jew, Muslim vs. Christian, etc. It's not really as simple as that, but you know what I'm talking about. The issue of whether the so-called Islamic State is actually representing Islam should be a serious point of debate among Muslims; but no matter how that identity pans out, the decapitative modus operandi of IS is undeniably a danger which is Islamic in its ethnic origin.

Furthermore, the ongoing contention between Israel and the Islamic states (with or without Caliphate) is, despite modern secularizing influences in both camps, a religious war the origin of which is shrouded in the dust of Levant history.

On a secondary level within nation-states, we see political divisions, which still revolve around ideological poles: left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, statist vs. libertarian, etc.

Within my country, USA, the time-honored catch-all labels "left" and "right" have lately morphed from "liberal" vs. "conservative" to "progressive" vs. "conservative." A subset of this ideological polarity is the "Occupy" crowd vs. the "Tea-Party."

"Tea Party" derives its philosophical roots from an emphasis on individual liberty. Its tactical roots are found in the Boston Tea Party of 240 years ago, which turns upon economic and tax disputes and government get out of the way attitude.

"Occupy Wall Street" and its progeny (Occupy Oakland, Occupy Vancouver, whatever) derives its precedents from the Civil Rights and Anti-war activisms of the 1960s, and before that the socialist ideal as developed through the French Revolution, Marx, the Russian Revolution, Alinsky etc.

David Horowitz, a (rare) seasoned veteran of both left and right activisms, has identified, in his autobiography Radical Son, this truth:

". . . conservatism was (is) an attitude about the lessons of the actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives was (is) directed toward an imagined future."

During the Vietnam war, a time when I was entering draftable age, the "left" was dragging our American sins of racism and napalmic militarism out into the streets for all the world to see. They imagined a more perfect United States that would successfully rid itself of the hegemonic abuses of capitalistic neo-colonialist empire-building.

Eventually the student-led antiwar movement was able to convince us to withdraw from Vietnam. But the more perfect United States they were dreaming of did not emerge. We are now still the same good n' bad nation we were then, manifesting a tri-part government of checks and balances that can, every generation or two, arrest our reprobate tendencies.

The activist left of the 1960s, of which I was (like many others) a curious, though non-involved part, also imagined an idealized Vietnam. But it did not materialize after we pulled out.

After the beginning of U.S. withdrawal in 1973, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (in whom the American anti-war activists had placed their hope) was crushed by the North Vietnamese army. Oppressive reeducation camps were set up and filled with hundred of thousands of prisoners. Tens of thousands were executed without trials. The bloodbath spilled into Cambodia. Millions were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

The consequences of U.S. withdrawal were tragic. More people died in the first two years of communist peace than had been killed during the U.S. war effort.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982

So distressed were many Americans who had formerly worked to get us out of Vietnam, that a group of high-profile war-objectors published an ad in the Washington Post protesting the arrests of "thousands upon thousands of detainees", who suffered enforced reeducation with starvation, physical abuse and use of prisoners as mine-detectors.

http://keywiki.org/Joan_Baez#Open_Letter_to_the_Socialist_Republic_of_Vietnam

While some leftists were grief-stricken at the widespread abuses in postwar, communist Vietnam, many more activists were not appalled. They blamed the aftermath on us--the United States, who were fighting to protect the Vietnamese people from the oppression that followed when the North Vietnamese took over.

That was a long time ago. There's been a lot of water under the bridge in our river of time, since then.

Now it's Iraq.

We have an eerily parallel situation in Iraq, with the IS attacking from Syria to enforce an "Islamic" Caliphate, just as the North Viet Cong descended on the South in 1973-75 with cruel, murderous intent.

And once again, the leftists want to blame us because we sent our troops over there and knocked the dictator Saddam out of power and tried to help them establish a just government.

But history, and prudent policy, does not hinge upon what might have happened or not happened because of the military assistance that came from the people of the United States, provided to the people of Iraq.

To those who want to blame us for the IS insurgency now threatening Iraq, we must say: don't even think about it.

It's time to subdue the beast that videos decapitations. No one in their right mind wants that kind of vengeful retribution, masquerading as "justice", established in the world.



Smoke