On
The 50th Anniversary Of Tet- “What The Hell Are We Fighting For-Next
Stop Is Vietnam”-Never Forgive, Never Forget” From The North Adamsville Vietnam War
Class of 1969- Novack-Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” Documentary
For
“Mogie” Crocker and all the other brothers and sisters who laid down their
heads in that goddam war. Never forget, never forgive-Sam Lowell, Si Lannon,
and Allan Jackson-War Class of 1969
By
Sam Eaton
If
1967 was dominated by the Summer of Love (the 50th anniversary of
which was commemorated last year mainly on the West Coast which was the central
axis of the movement and which had a hell of a lot of space in this blog in
2017 since a goodly number of the older writers from North Adamsville were
involved one way or another) then 1968 was the Year Of Tet, the year of war,
real war for a lot of the same guys around our way who celebrated the “drugs,
sex, and rock and roll” cultural explosion of the previous year. You may wonder
why I, Sam Eaton am writing this piece since usually in this space I do a
little political commentary, mainly around war issues, books, and music and am not
one of the guys listed in the epitaph. That answer is simple and two-fold.
First, none of those North Adamsville guys after seeing the ten part Ken
Burns/Lynn Novack series and the memories it stirred in them felt up to the
task of actually writing about those old-time war experiences. (Even Frank
Jackman who was in his own way part of the North Adamsville War Class of ’69, a
soldier in the Army at that time but one who unlike them refused orders to
Vietnam and served some serious time in an Army stockade which will be expanded
upon below refused to write about his experiences.) Secondly, I too am a member
of the War Class of ’69 although I came from Carver about forty miles south of
North Adamsville and have unlike the other guys never mentioned that hard fact in
the public prints. Hell most of the people I know do not know I was in Vietnam
during that hellish war. In the Burns’ documentary very early on one of the
“talking head” ex-Vietnam Marines mentioned that a very close friend of hers
husband had been in Vietnam as well as her own husband but it was not until
twelve years into their friendship that the even knew that mutual fact. So this
is me coming out of the closet and so bear with me if I stumble a bit. (By the
way my association with the North Adamsville guys happened a few years later
after Vietnam when we were all way or another in Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, VVAW, mostly in Boston with former Secretary of State John Kerry and later,
and now too, with Veterans Peace Action, VPA)
One
of the big things that jogged my memories while watching the early parts of the
documentary was how very similar the backgrounds and attitudes of the various
“grunts,” the guys who fought the war on the ground, the mainly white working
class and black and Hispanic (Latino if that is the preferred reference) whose
stories were being told. How much of a true cross-section of the millions of
men who went to that war I don’t know but the stories “spoke to me,” spoke of
my own upbringing. Spoke too of a lot of the values and unquestioning
subservience that we all were brought up in during that heinous Cold War red
scare time. “Better dead that red,” “if your mommy is a commie turn her in”
real slogans that expressed the underlying terms which we dealt with for
anything that moved anywhere not 100 per cent pro-American “my country right or
wrong” another key slogan, could be construed as pro-Soviet or pro-“Red
Chinese’ an actual expression used to describe that country after the victory
of Mao and his brethren.)
I
will go into the very similar “life-styles” of the North Adamsville guys, the
“corner boys” which meant something in working class culture in the 1950s and
1960s but is something I was not part of down in Carver since in those days
before it became something of a bedroom community for the high tech industry
about twenty miles away it didn’t have anything like a corner pizza parlor,
bowling alleys or variety store to be a corner boy around. Or enough guys with
time on their hands to hold up the wall in front of the place. Carver in those
days was something like the cranberry capital of the world and those in the
town, including four generations as far as I can figure on the Eaton side and
three on the O’Brian side, who actually worked the bogs, were called derisively
“boggers” which defined the class division in the town. Including where you
lived, our section called the “Hump.”
For
our purposes though the “boggers” and the other cohort, the middle class cohort
called “the Pilgrims” since many of those families could trace their roots
pretty far back although I do not remember that any family could claim
forebear’s passage on the Mayflower
shared common patriotic holiday traditions with parades and other festivities
which is the only time there was social mingling. With the exception of a
couple of great bogger football players those lines held all through school,
most rigidly in high school where you had no chance with the Pilgrim girls and
either tied up with a bogger girl or looked out of town, something which I
tended to do since I couldn’t deal with what the bogger girl expected on their
guys, marriage right out of high school and some Hump small apartment.
The
big thing though is that in the Hump you went into the military when called up
by the draft, or more usually since the high school drop-out rate for boggers was
pretty high volunteer. In my own family, mostly uneducated, I would be the
first to actually go to college and get a degree, those four generations of
boggers all went to war when called going back to World War I. On the O’Brian
side likewise and my mother’s uncle, Frank, has a square still named after him
in the town common having died in World War I. So, and it came through loud and
clear in the various documentary interviews, where was there room for not going
into the military when I was drafted. Where was there a support system if I, or
anybody in town, had refused. At the time this town would have crucified any
young man who refused the draft, thought about Canada which was not even on the
radar, or even thought to express an anti-war opinion whatever they thought
instead and whatever doubts they had about going to war especially in my time,
my war class time of 1969 when all hell was breaking loose in Vietnam, and in
this country. So I went in, did what I had to do to survive and tried to forget
about the awful things I did, and had seen done to people I had no quarrel
with. It took a few years to shake that horror loose before I grabbed a
life-line from a bunch of guys, fellow veterans, who wanted to stop the war
madness- and still do.
The
impetus for my getting off my duff had been watching a bunch of Vietnam
veterans marching in silence (and in an orderly march manner something which
tended to be lacking up to this day in later anti-war veterans peace marches
and such), down a hot and humid Miami boulevard during the week of the
Republican National Convention in 1972. The sight of those be-medaled soldiers,
sailors, Marines, airmen, stirred something in me that no dope, no alcohol my
previous remedies of sorts could slake. Their rough treatment by the
Nixon-fired up forces of law and order further made something in me snap. Don’t
ask me now some fifty years later to explain everything I was thinking that
pushed me on to the brink of self-destruction and everything that pulled me
back any more than you could ask all those soldiers and Marines on the Ken
Burns interviews what moved them to anti-war action. Amazingly when asked to
articulate some of that experience and the why of it those interviewees stopped
and could not come up with an answer other than the very familiar “I don’t
know.” Except I knew, they knew, all roads led back to Vietnam, led back to
the bad stuff we did there, stuff that we could never live down.
Back
in 1972, maybe 1971 too I was living in Rhode Island to be away from friends,
family, girlfriends, everybody while I sorted things out. Didn’t let anybody
but growing up friend Will Badger know where I was since while he had been in
the Navy during the war shelling the hell out of places like Da Nang and far
from the daily butchery on the ground he was a troubled soul as well. He did
slip up one time and somehow my girlfriend who had been my fiancé before I left
for Vietnam but as was the nature of the times we decided not to “go bourgeois”
and get little white house with picket fence, kids, and dog married and wind up
like our respective parents followed him one day. After something of a
screaming match initiated by me we decided to keep company, be companions again
and I was glad of that in the end even though we drifted apart a few years
later when she wanted to get married and I was against the idea.
All
through those experiences I kept thinking about that powerful silent veterans
march and that fall of 1972 I went up to Boston once I found out where there
was an active VVAW chapter. (This remember before the days of the Internet
which would have let me find the organization in about two minutes. Then I had
to check the telephone directory and got no information since the phone number
was not listed as yet in that publication and only found out where they had an
office and telephone number by going to Providence and Brown University to a
Vietnam Mobilization office where they had such information about what was what
in New England.)
At
that first meeting in Boston two things happened which marked me then and to
this day. One was that in the political divide within the organization about
what is always an issue with left-wing groups whether to push the electoral
button or go for street confrontations I tended toward the street cred guys,
the flame-throwers against guys like former Secretary of State (and U.S.
Senator from Massachusetts) John Kerry who even then was looking for the “main
chance” which he sought with a vengeance. This issue tended to draw something
of a class line as well since those who favored the electoral essentially
reformist way to deal with social change, with the struggle against the
military machine and war tended to have been ROTC or OCS officers and from very
middle class backgrounds and those like the guys from North Adamsville who I
will discuss in a minute and me who wanted to “burn the mother-fucker down,” go
after those in the mansions.
The
other thing that has stayed with me to this day are the friendships, social and
political friendships, I struck up with the guys from North Adamsville and guys
they had gathered around them like Josh Breslin from up in Maine whom they met
out in California during that Summer of Love, 1967 that was the hot topic here
last year and Fritz Taylor and Ralph Morse met in the Army. Everyone was a
flame-thrower, a “burn the mansion down” guy then, and not far from that now
either although time has mellowed them (and me) personally-a bit. The basis of
that mutual attraction was the incredible similarity of all of our growing up
experiences, the white working class and white trash poor backgrounds whether
in North Adamsville, Carver, Olde Saco, Maine or with Fritz Fulton County,
Georgia, the unquestioning patriotism, the anti-communism culled from the red
scare Cold war night that enveloped us all, and the small town-ish values about
“Mom, God and apple pie” Fourth of July parade façade that we swallowed hook,
line and sinker.
Here
is an antidote from the mad wizard Seth Garth which kind of sums up the social
milieu around the war issue mid-1960s working class style which tells a lot,
maybe all you need to know about how Uncle Sam got the “cannon fodder,” not my
term originally but one that we all have adopted since back in the days, to
fight his wars then, now too probably even with an all-volunteer army, the
volunteer part subject to lots of social, class, racial, ethnic, and economic
provisos. Seth had decided to attend his fiftieth class reunion, the Class of
1964 but the other classes around that time produced the same fact once the
corner boys from different graduation years compared notes on the subject, a
few years ago and as a prelude to that the organizers of the reunion (not so
strangely the same “social butterflies,” male and female who were the “in
crowd” back in high school at least the ones who were still standing), set up a
class website to gather information about those still standing.
That
class, that heart of the baby-boomer class, had about five hundred members of
which about two hundred or so responded, about evenly divided between male and
female. (By way of comparison my whole combined junior and senior high school
had five hundred students to give another example of how small Carver was
then.) One of the questions asked was about military service which in that day
would have been a question asked and answered almost totally by males. Of that
one hundred or so respondents ninety of them put down some military service
from National Guard to Vietnam including a small clot of military lifers. That
alone tells the tale about who went and what the environment was like for
anybody who thought for a minute about resistance or even just questioning the
aims of the war, or of war.
We
still gnash our teeth over our collective naïve, our collective taking in the
bullshit without question and our failures to do something about the whole damn
thing long before we were drafted or enlisted. (That latter condition, drafted
or enlisted, the only thing that separated the entire collective which was as
much about personal circumstances as anything since it never entered anybody’s
mind, even special case, Frank Jackman, not to go into the military in our
youth.)
The
North Adamsville guys, I will deal with Josh, Fritz, and a couple of other guys
in passing, were cemented together by one thing, they all grew up in the
desperately poor working class and working poor neighborhood of the town called
the “Acre.” All were members of the North Adamsville classes of 1963, 64, 65
(the prime years for young men who would face the grist mill of Vietnam which
cut too many from those years in their prime). Josh was Olde Saco Class of
1967, Fritz Robert E. Lee High Class of 1962). More importantly the social glue
that kept them together centered in their high school days around Tonio’s Pizza
Parlor where they were the so-called corner boys, a mainly derogatory
sociological and cultural term coined by legal professionals, cops, and
academics who were worried about the angst and alienation of this swath of youth. The term fit so completely that they
adopted the expression for their own amusement. Mainly that amusement was
hanging around Tonio’s since they rarely had dough for dates and such or going
on what they called the “midnight creep,” grabbing stuff through burglaries to
get dough for dates and such. A hard
dollar any way you look at it and it was a close thing that they mainly
survived to tell the tale.
You
cannot, I cannot although I only him slightly personally and more through
endless talk of his legend, talk about the North Adamsville corner boys without
mentioning their “leader” Peter Paul Markin, always known as “Scribe.” (This is
the real Markin who died in the 1970s not the former site manager of this blog
who used the moniker on-line in honor of his fallen comrade which explains a
lot of that “leader” point just made.) The Scribe was not the leader, leader,
you know the one who kept things in order that was Frankie Riley who wound up
4-F (unfit for military duty) and who later became a very successful lawyer in
Boston, but something like the intellectual leader. He was the guy who got Sam
Lowell, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Allan Jackson, Seth Garth, Frank
Jackman, Jimmy Jenkins who would die in Vietnam in 1968, and Frankie all except
Frankie who would be drafted or enlist in the military to head out to
California in the summer of 1967 and get knee-deep, no, neck-deep in the Summer
of Love. (Other North Adamsville corner boys Rick Rizzo and Johnny Kelly who
lived right next door to each other and joined the Army together laid down
their heads in Vietnam in 1966 so never got the chance to experiment with the
“drugs, sex, and rock and roll” that drove those days.) Josh met this crew out
there as well before his military service. Fritz came into the group through
Sam when they were in the Army together.
Markin
too was the guy who probably was the most affected by his loss of innocence
from his Vietnam experience, by the shattering of his Summer of Love-like
dreams for a new world which he really expected to happen according to all the
guys. Like me his was “lost” coming back to the “real” world as we called it
after landing in the U.S.A from Vietnam. He would drift back out to California
and start writing for a bunch of alterative newspapers which were flourishing
out there for a while. Did some award-winning work when he found and joined an
alternative society of returned Vietnam War G.I.s who like him could not adjust
to the “real” world and lived along the railroad tracks and bridges of South
California doing the best they could. Singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen would
name a song later which would fit-“brothers under the bridge.” Markin wrote, or
rather let them tell their stories for a while.
Josh
who lived out in Oakland with him in a communal house then said he was starting
to come out of his shell with that work. Not for long though because later in
the mid-1970s he would develop a very serious cocaine habit which he fed by
dealing the drug, always a bad proposition and wound up getting killed,
murdered, down in Mexico after a botched drug deal with a couple of slugs in
his head in some back alley. Nobody knows to this day exactly what happened
although they still shed a tear every time his name is mentioned.
All
of that was a few years later though when it was unmistakable that the “newer
world” was not going to make it. In 1972
they were under Markin’s guidance members of VVAW and in attendance that that
first meeting I went to. They all had, except Frank Jackman who I will discuss
in a minute, various evidences of their service on. As had I. My 101st
Airborne patch on an old faded olive drab shirt with my name tag on it. Si had been
attached to the same division and was the first to welcome me. The meeting, the
long meeting as such things went in those days when in the interest of
“democracy” everybody got to speak for as long as they wanted and seemingly
whatever they wanted even if off-topic, went as expected as they were planning
an action on Boston Common in conjunction with the inevitable Fall/Spring
semi-annual anti-war mobilizations coming up a few weeks later. They invited me
to Durgin Park for some food and drink (mostly drink and later some dope).
During this meal/drink-fest Markin, who was back from California for a while
since he was looking for a couple of guys who he had met “under the bridge” to
get their “back stories” asked for my story.
Everybody
except me laughed when I had finished my seemingly sad little tale of a story.
Laughed a sardonic laugh when you think about it because Si asked me whether I
had grown up in North Adamsville. I didn’t understand the question until he
said that my story, like their stories, like the stories of Mogie, Mulgrave,
Sullivan in the Burns’ documentary, was too familiar. That the working class
from small towns and sections of cities and poor bastards in the ghettoes and
barrios bore the brunt of the crap that went down in Vietnam no matter what
happened at home (or among those groupings in Vietnam, not always brotherly, no
way, the racial tensions would sometimes get hot and heavy especially when the
mainly white officers overplayed placing black men on point or down in the fucking
tunnels but also when guys from small white bread towns like me couldn’t figure
out what made the black guys tick and the same the other way). So I was “initiated” and like Josh and Fritz
(and Remmy and Jamal, a couple of black brothers who have since died one of an
overdose of heroin started out in the Golden Triangle madness) became an
honorary North Adamsville corner boy. And I still am, proudly am.
The
Scribe was one end of what happened to some guys during and after the war but I
would be remiss if I didn’t mention the special case of Frank Jackman, another
North Adamsville corner boy. In the Burns documentary the famous Vietnam War
writer Tim O’Brien laments, no anguishes over the fact that he had not refused
to be drafted, not refused to go to Vietnam. Others both in that presentation
and in real life in the organizations I have belonged to most recently Veterans
Peace Action where there are clots of guys who anguished over those kinds of
decisions that young people, young soldiers are forced to deal just like Tim O’Brian had had to do. It may
be hard for the couple of generations that have now come of age since Vietnam
time to fathom what EVERY young male had to go through back then even those who
were gung-ho to go. Draft refusal, going to Canada or Sweden, going to jail,
going to the stockade, faking all kind of injuries that would make one 4-F
(unfit for military duty) some of them pretty gruesome, faking mental disorders,.
faking homosexuality then a way out, scrambling to get into National Guard or
Armed Forces Reserved units. I could go on but you get the picture, decisions
all around the subject. So plenty of similar stories and regrets. After the service,
after the fact. That was my case and the case of all the North Adamsville
corner boys, real and honorary, everybody except beautiful and righteous Frank
Jackman was did refuse to go, who let his conscience and maybe a few
generations of hard won integrity and thoughtfulness DNA guide his decisions. A
little balls too as we used to say back in the day when somebody did some
action worthy of such a note, jail time always a qualifier, once he had orders
to do so, to report to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam.
Now
we all know, and if the reader doesn’t then a run though this ten-part Burns-Novack
series will enlighten you to the fact, that during the American portion of the
war, the American War as the Vietnamese rightly called it, every and I mean
every young man had a decision to make, consciously or unconsciously, about
what to do about his participation in the war machine. Like I said above some
refused the draft, some went to Canada, some filed and received civilian
conscientious objector status of some kind, some when in the service went AWOL,
and a lot of other things. Maybe Burns could have spent more time on those
anguishing decisions and on the resistance in the military itself especially
after Tet, 1968. A few, and Frank Jackman was one of them, were of that small,
small as against a couple of million man army, category of military resister.
Went in like the rest of us did but at some point said no-no to Vietnam, no to
the killing the rest of us, anti-war and pro-war, proud of service or not, have
spent the rest of our lives trying to square up. Funny because of all the guys who
hung around the corner one would have expected the wild man Scribe, Markin, to
have been a resister if anybody was. Still Frank Jackman’s story can serve as a
very graphic example of the anguish of the generation of ’68.
If
you noticed the headline to this piece there is a reference to the War Class of
1969. That is because everyone who I have mentioned here from North Adamsville
to Fulton County, Georgia, including myself, served in the military during that
fateful year, the year after Tet proved to all who cared to see, all who had
anything but a hidebound refusal to see, that the war, the American war once
again as the Vietnamese correctly called it, was unwinnable. Meaning that those
who served in say 1969, who were the grunts, the “cannon fodder” were serving
for no reasonable reason except as we learned later through The Pentagon Papers and other Freedom of
Information documents governmental hubris. Only the names changed throughout
the changes in government the hubris remained until almost the very end. They,
we, all served and forevermore called ourselves the class of 1969. That class
included one soldier, Frank Jackman, who did not serve in Vietnam but who will
forevermore also be a member of that class of 1969.
Frank
Jackman had had orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to
Vietnam and through a rather long process including stockade time refused to
go. We would often talk, we still do although not when Frank is around because
he like a ton of Vietnam era guys, military guys, don’t like to talk about
those times even if he was righteous and as courageous as anybody who went to
death trap Vietnam, about how Frank out of the almost dozen guys was the one
guy who refused to go, refused to righteously go despite no support at home and
no history of there being anything like it done in his town, my town, our collective
clot of towns, before. Frank was not a leader among the North Adamsville corner
boys like Frankie Riley or the Scribe but a sideliner, a guy who was as
comfortable with a book as a jimmy for those infamous midnight creeps.
(Everybody, all hands, except the Scribe who planned many of the creeps but who
was totally incompetent to carry them out participated in every caper on
principal-or would have gotten the boot.) Make no mistake he had imbibed,
believed all of the stuff us other guys did about duty, patriotism and the like
but there was something of the quietude in him that spoke of something more, or
maybe as he pointed out when we discussed it later, that was so much eyewash.
Frank
like all the others accepted induction in his case after he finished college in
1968 and received his draft notice to report in January 1969 (he had received
four years of deferment for going to college standard at the time dependent on
decent grades but in a way the kiss of death for the army with smart civilian
citizens mixed in with the usual high school graduates and drop-outs). It was
about after three days down in Fort Gordon for basic training far from home that
he realized that he had made a mistake, that he should have refused induction. Being
isolated down in the South he waited until he got back home after receiving
order to Vietnam as an infantryman to decide what to do in August 1969. (Yes,
the August 1969 when half a million other kids, boys and girls, were like
lemmings to the sea to Woodstock nation and good luck.)
All
he knew was that the war was over for him. He made his way over to Cambridge
and the Quaker Meeting House where they were offering G.I. counselling for
those who were military refuse-niks. For years the anti-war movement had bene
centered on draft resistance and maybe rightly so but as the years rolled on
and the number of Frank-like guys started needing help organizations like the
Friends expanded their operation. There was a political component to it as well
since protesting government policy was leading up a blind alley and if the
natural objective of the anti-war was to stop the war then they had to get to
the troops. Get down in the mud at the base and stop depending on some politician-savior
to break the fall, to half-heartedly call the whole thing dust in the eyes.
Through
the counselling process plans were outlined, options presented the most
reasonable given Frank’s situation was for him to go absent without leave
(AWOL) for more than thirty days which would leave him dropped from the rolls
out in Fort Lewis (AWOL a chargeable offense itself although pretty far down on
the totem pole of penalties) and then turn himself to the nearest local fort,
Fort Devens about forty miles from Boston to put in an application for status
as a conscientious objector. A strategy while outlined which was aided by assigning
him a pro bone civilian lawyer. (Not all G.I.s sought, desired, or received
civilian lawyers partially because so few of them were familiar with the arcane
Code of Military Justice but the way Frank presented himself, presented the
case they thought he could use good legal advice and make some splash. That
turned out to be true on all counts.)
As
that time conscientious objector status for those who were actually in the
military was rare, very rare, and in due course he was turned down although at
every level those who interviewed him believed he was sincere which would help
him later when he got to civilian federal court. By a stroke of luck, and a
good attorney, he was able to get his case into the federal court in Boston
along with a temporary restraining order to keep him in the jurisdiction of the
court. (The stroke of luck was getting a notoriously conservative judge to see
that Frank had a case in civilian court that he could win. That too would come
in handy later. But that was only the surface, the technical stuff.)
That
is where that idea of whatever Frank had inside him, whatever grit the
generations had left in his DNA came to the fore. He decided that he would no
longer play the soldier and so one Monday morning when the weekly formation
came up he walked onto the parade field in civilian clothing and a sign “Bring
the boys home.” Immediately a couple of lifer sergeants grabbed him and that
started his road to the stockade. He would eventually serve two six month
sentences for refusing to obey orders to wear the uniform. For years he would
make the few people he told his story to laugh when he told them that if the
federal court had not granted his writ of habeas corpus he might still be in
that stockade he was so determined to fight the bastards to the end. So maybe
that story should have gotten some play, or stories like that when Ken Burns
was trying to tie the knot around what the whole thing meant. Might have
thought twice, as a civilian, about a remark attributed to him about “war being
in the DNA of the human species and hence all beyond the pale, all doomed to bloody
up the world and let untold number lay down their heads for some stupid cause.
Still and all Frank belongs in that small cohort of the war class of 1969 as
some kind of beacon. That says it all, all that needs to be said.
