From The New Soldiers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Soldiers- Brother Jacob’s Last Stand

From The New Soldiers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Soldiers- Brother Jacob’s Last Stand  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:

A while back, maybe a couple of years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches under the working title of Brothers Under The Bridge about guys, about war veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s under the title Going To The “Jungle, a title which reflected the jungles of Vietnam from where they had been and the subsequent hobo jungle where they wound up. I did not have a chance to complete that series since the publication that I was writing them for out in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience for such journals went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics. Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope with the “real” world after Vietnam and had built themselves an alternate “community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances later got called the “brothers under the bridge.”

Let me reproduce in part my motivation for that latter series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories about guys and gals from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like that long ago “brothers under the bridge.”:

“In the first installment of this series of sketches I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the mid-1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down Los Angeles way, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another one down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives on the Internet, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back to the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way…”

With that introduction now, after having recently as a favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question Brother Jacobs’s sign is the sign of the last stand.

This sketch is slightly different from a previous one about Private Jack Dawson’s private war in the aftermath of his service in Iraq and Afghanistan where I knew many details about his life from his father, an old high school classmate of mine, and later Jack himself when I found him down in Southern California. In the case of Brother Jacob I only know from a few chance meetings with him down at Fort Meade and what was presented in his on-line memorial from the Chelsea Manning Support Network about his life. I do know this though that Brother Jacob automatically rates a nod (the old school days “nod” that signified that a guy who you did not know, was not one of your corner boys but who you maybe played some pick-up game against, maybe had in class was “cool”) for his early and fervent support for his fellow soldier, Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley), who was in a heap of trouble with the American government and its military of which she was part for leaking lots of information about American atrocities in Iraq and other information that the government would rather not have us know about on the vital questions of war and peace.

Brother Jacob like many ex-soldiers, myself included, came to Chelsea’s aid once he got “religion” on what seven kinds of hell the American government was up to in Iraq (and Afghanistan).  Brother Jacob was, as we in Veterans for Peace and other ex-soldier supporters, just following the old adage learned early on in basic training-you do not leave your buddy behind. And Brother Jacob and the rest of us will not leave Chelsea behind to face that thirty-five year sentence alone. Now we have Brother Jacob’s memory to honor as we continue our work.

Brother Jacob, Presente!, yeah,  Brother Jacob, Presente !