Markin comment:
Private First Class, United States Army, James O’Brien would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown private soldier’s name? Well, here is another clue. Jimmy O., who was a few years older than I, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreal and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy O’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth into, and in disproportionate numbers its working class and minority youth.
My first dozen years, or so, were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day (that day and this one as well), or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy O’Briens all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos was in no way superior to “the projects” except that the tiny ill-thought out and benighted houses were, for the most part, single dwellings on minuscule plots. And I really only knew the real Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy, well Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. Jimmy’s name brought terror to some, consternation to others and the plague to the rest. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, heroic sacrifice for great principles, or larger than life battles against great odds, for sure.
See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies”. Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent or older immigrants, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.
And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth that I alluded to before? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old-time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine gun. Everyone, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical wild one a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in James Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.
So who was this Jimmy? Not a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes as well), tee shirt in season (and out, with jacket, although not a leather one). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, including my own brother as well). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and the older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Always cherry Chevy’s (as my brother put it). Employment: unknown (or, maybe, better, don’t want to know).
That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor operates right at that point where it meets the lumpen-proletariat (the dregs, the criminal element that feeds off the working poor first, and then, maybe seeks “greener” pastures elsewhere) and links up with the demands of the American military, almost automatically. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known bad–ass offense, real or made-up, wound up at his doorstep. Some of it rightly so, as it turns out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also had plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate to us younger kids. Well, as anyone devoted to a life of crime, including me in my own very small and short-lived early teen criminal career, can testify to when you tempt the fates enough those damn sisters will come and get you. The long and short of it is that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.
Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for “voluntary” military service, even in such guaranteed ill-fated war time, because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this notion of an “economic draft” in a different sense, a class sense, a sense that I am familiar with from those 1960s times, although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. Jimmy, moreover, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several serious counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy, offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison’s name now) or the Army. He, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother, with less fateful results).
Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags and character assassins had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy then. Of course, his mother also came in for higher esteem for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once Jimmy had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood in the neighborhood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood regularly when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated as something like a solemn state function. The shawlies, in any case, were out in force and heaped the flowers and Mass cards for the dead to the high heavens.
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Postscript:
As we all know, or have heard, later in that 1960s decade all hell broke loose over the seemingly endless and purposeless continuation of that damn war. In the old neighborhood, as was related to me my parents and others, there were the beginnings of rumblings against the war as more and more boys didn’t come back, or came back grievously wounded, or became part of the lost legions who ended up in the VA hospitals, the half-way houses and flophouses of this country. Yes, but hear me out on this, those rumblings, real enough, never transcended that social-patriotic belief that the sacrifices, the sacrifices of their sons (and daughters, indirectly) were right and held that belief through to the bitter end. And, moreover, those rumblings seldom got beyond person murmurs of despair, certainly never to the level of hitting the streets to express their opposition. And, most certainly, never to condone the opposition to the war by those in uniform while they were in uniform like one neighborhood boy, Private Markin.
And know this, ex-Private Markin cries out, and cry out to the high heavens in the name of Private First Class James O’Brien (and the legion of others from the old neighborhood)- Down With Obama’s Afghan And Iraq Wars!-Troops Out Now!-Join Me!
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