Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C Cannon In Mind

Searching 10,000 Years For A Hopi Warrior Dream-Once Again With The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.C

Cannon In Mind 

 

      

By Ronan Saint John

Gerald Scott was beset by ancient dreams of late, maybe not going back 10,000 warrior years like he liked to pretend, but maybe twenty years back (still you will know that he had ancient dreams, 10,000 year dreams when you bring a word like beset, his word, into the equation this early on). For back then, back in his youth he had dreamed the dream of 10,000 year warriors, along with his friends, Jack Lennon and James Lawson (not Jim or Jimmy not since childhood and mother’s call) when he first went west, went via some covered wagon dream as he and they, along with Sarah Mays (now Sarah Scott although she will when mad at Gerald revert to Mays but that is another story which she can tell at her leisure) landed in Joshua Tree out in the California high desert. The pack of them had just graduated from their respective colleges and as youth might do back then, now too, they decided to travel before settling down to whatever they would settle down to although college debt-bound these days probably not likely and rather work, work as a damn Starbuck’s barista if necessary to get the damn thing down before Social Security benefits come into play.

I won’t name the colleges, all four, since that too does not matter to our story and they can tell one and all about their four years at their leisure as well except that Gerald had taken a course in Native American history at his school. Had done so to fulfill an elective requirement at first but got so into what the real history of those many tribes were compared to the baloney he had been force-fed when he was a kid in school, on television and in the cinema when those benighted indigenous peoples were called Indians buying into the standard lie that these were the lost tribes of the Northwest Passage and Christopher Columbus’ misdirected signals to lay claim to the Americas (a name also reeking of illegitimacy but I will stop on this road for guys like Seth Garth and Frank Jackman of American Left History blog can run the rack on those injustices far better than I can). And so the trip with a few dollars, a few knapsacks, a few sleeping bags and a beat up but serviceable Toyota Camry purchased on the cheap from Sarah’s brother who was heading into the Army.      

I could probably spend a good portion of what I have to say running circles around how this quartet finally got to the high desert out in Joshua Tree but guys like Jack Kerouac, who influenced my father in his time to head out to California in the 1960s when he was young himself, Benny Gold, Lester Lawrence and a million other literary travelers have beaten the paths out to the west already. Like I say this is about a 10,000 year vision not some ill-begotten travelogue with AAA ratings. I do have to mention the last leg, the last leg before sunny and hot California desert because the route they travelled was through the states that are square, as the writer Thomas Wolfe put when he was noting something very different about the folk out there, the usurpers, those who stand on somebody else’s land and memory. They had done a circuitous route around the four states where Native Americans still had some existence, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona. At Gerald’s urging they stopped along the way at every reservation area they came across, especially the Hopi reservation which joins those four states together.

Gerald had told the other three that he had had a strange dream one night when they were outside Grand Island, Nebraska about a dance in which they, the three men, were participating in someplace in the West in some canyon where the night fire was flicking off the canyon walls and that flickering was driving the men to more fervent dancing. Beyond that Gerald did not, could not, find meaning in what that dream portended. Except he thought it had meant something about his growing affinity for those long-lost warrior kings who were crucified by the trail of tears the white man, he and his people, had brought upon some other people’s land. And so the search for what that all meant. Since nobody was in a hurry to get home or get to ocean California which meant at some point turning back East and whatever they were going to do lives, everybody consented to the route.             

That route would indeed portend something because along the way they wound up in Gallup, New Mexico during August and were just in time for the annual Intertribal gatherings at Red River Junction. They camped just outside the state park there on Friday and the next day spend the day learning about Native American tribal lore from the various tribes gathered at the site. One of the things that caught Gerald’s attention, as it did the others including Sarah, was the mesmerizing effect of the tribal dancing. Dancing that when it counted back in the day prepared the warriors to confront whatever enemy of the day was to be fought-other tribes or the encroaching white man with his womenfolk and youngsters. The rhythm, the warrior beat filled their heads, although this was not spoken of until later, until after they reached Joshua Tree, with their own warrior dreams, maybe pipe dreams is a better way to put the situation.      

Back at the campsite that night as the sun was setting and the heat of the dusty day was settling down when they came to their site they, Gerald first from the way I heard the story, noticed a medium-sized camper with many logos, or what looked like logos on it, a fire going and a few what looked like older men sitting around a big drum with sticks playing to a methodical beat and chanting something that he could not understand (and never did, then or later). They decided to get closer which none of the men around the drum objected to. When the men took a break one of the younger men waved the four devotees over and asked how they liked it, asked if they had gone to the Intertribal. Yes, on both counts. He introduced himself as Jack Two Feathers and asked their names, where they were from, and why they were there. Gerald explained the Native American interest part.

Then Jack Two Feathers mentioned that it was the tradition of his tribe, the Hopi, to enhance their drumming, enhance their connection with their ancestors, and, laughingly, just to get high to use peyote buttons. The Hopis had had trouble with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other law enforcement agencies over the use of the substance which they, the Hopis, claimed was part of their religious experience and thus protected under the white man’s United States Constitution. They would lose that argument in the United States Supreme Court but among the young, and some of the older fearless men they still carried out the peyote tradition.

Jack Two Feathers asked them if they had ever tried peyote and Gerald mentioned that his father had told him that he had as a proper 1960s young hippie type, but he had not. None of the others had either. They all agreed, once Jack Two Feathers calmed them down about the effects of the substance, to try some once he told them that it would increase their spiritual well-being to see what it was all about. Jack Two Feathers passed out some stuff that looked like mushrooms or something and told them to chew the stuff well. After about an hour, and after Jack Two Feathers had rejoined the older men around the drum who were ready to continue their drumming ceremony, the buttons began to kick in.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened that night except they were mesmerized by the beat of the drum, mesmerized by some younger Hopis who started to dance to the beat of the drums and would go into a fever pitch, and they did not come down from their highs to finally go to sleep until almost dawn. Packing up the next afternoon to head toward Joshua Tree via the Arizona desert and the Grand Canyon Jack Two Feathers came by their laden car and passed a small packet of peyote buttons to Gerald saying that maybe some time they too would see the face of sorrow, the faces of warrior-kings who had roamed at will in these their lands before the white man’s greed took it all away and left nothing good behind. Maybe even have a spiritual journey out of the experiences as well.               

Fast forward to Joshua Tree a couple of weeks later and a couple of late night until dawn peyote button rounds flames flickering against the grey, beige, red clay canyon walls, the three men bare-chested while some others met drummed and Gerald and the others finally found out what Jack Two-Feathers meant, felt that 10,000 year ancient warrior dream and would be forever changed by the experience. Gerald laughed as they started heading home about whether he should tell his father what happened. Nah, he would never believe the tale.

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

Once Again On The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969-When Frank Jackman Went Down In The Mud Refusing To Go To Vietnam-And Survived To Tell The Tale

By Frank Jackman  

[As some readers know Frank Jackman the subject of this sketch is a writer at this publication. Full disclosure taken care of on that score I was in a quandary about who should write the piece which concerns Frank’s actions in the military back in the 1960s during the height of the Vietnam War. The natural selection would have been Sam Lowell or Si Lannon both men who knew the details of the story intimately once Frank, a few years after the experience in maybe 1976 they say, felt he could tell the story to guys he had grown up with. They were, having also served in Vietnam, as perplexed as Scribe who had just passed away down in Mexico had been when he was in Vietnam and had heard what Frank been up to back home.

Moreover Frank, after years, decades really of being quite about his story just like a lot of his fellow veterans who did go to Vietnam taking a page from the way their fathers had dealt with their World War II experiences, had when he “came out of the closet” for his own reasons retold them the story one night a few months ago when they were having a few drinks after a movie. This all led me to think that somebody else had to do the job, had to tell the story from a fresh perspective but who knew enough about the military from his own experience to not have to run to Sam or Si every minute to see what this or that meant. As it turned out the dime turned to one Francis James Jackman to tell the tale, to get the nod. Greg Green]  

On Vietnam War Class Of 1969

Funny these days, this year every other day it seems we are being inundated with 50^th anniversary commemorations of a hell of a lot of events. A lot of events in rapid succession for those of us who are of the Generation of ’68 who won our spurs that year. Starting almost as a portent of things to come the year started out with the anniversary of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam with a combination of North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighters trying to decisively kick ass, kick the foreign presence out of their beloved country. Not succeeding in a direct sense, the war would drag on one way or another for another seven years but making it clear that there was no “light at the end of the tunnel” for the cocky American military commanders and politicians to crow about. Almost as an afterthought it forced the humiliating resignation of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States (POSTUS in twitter-speak), and war-monger in chief. Then the other shoe seemingly dropped on all our best dreams for a newer world. First Martin, then Bobby. The horror of the Chicago Democratic National Convention which made the whole world watch while the country turned in on itself. Picked sides, a process which still not has abated as we step into a cold civil war which on a dime under the current regime could turn hot in an instant, and then the final humiliation of Richard Milhous Nixon, a confirmed Cold War warrior as POSTUS.      

So yes, plenty for the Generation of ’68, those still standing and those who still give a damn about those bloated youthful dreams to think about but today I want to speak of another generation. The Vietnam War Class of 1969 which I am a proud member of although not the way you might think. This remembrance comes by virtue of running into an extraordinary number of fellow veterans, not all Veterans for Peace or others who still adamantly keep their anti-war credentials out front and in public, whose time of service in Vietnam was somehow related to the year 1969. There must have been something in that period, there was in the aftermath of Tet and no victory, which clicked with me since it coincided with my time as well. I have until the last few years never spoken much about my trials and tribulations about my service during the Vietnam War period.

Kind of had done my own version of what got me to write this piece. The direct impetus has been a remark made by a couple of Marine Vietnam veterans who had known each through their wives for a dozen years yet never mentioned that they had both been in Vietnam. Another is a remark made by a fellow peace walker on the Maine Peace Walk in 2017 who had gone through two marriages without his now ex-wives knowing that he had been in Vietnam. It was that kind of war. Even for those who resisted.

Hell, it was only few years ago and only when she asked that my wife, Cindy, found out about the details of my own struggles with the war although she knew I had been in the Army, and that I had been a military resister. Yes, my class of 1969 story involves my going to the stockade for over a year (not including times during the actual year and one half of the struggle when I was confined to base, barracks, orderly room) for what amounted to refusing to go to Vietnam as an 11 Bravo, as an infantryman, as what we called “cannon fodder” after I had been given orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transit to Vietnam.  I won’t go into the details of that experience for this sketch is about the class and not my personal travails other than this. I was never proud of anything more in my life than what I did with my “fifteen minutes” of fame and still feel that way as I hope the reader understands.  

Maybe I was quiet about my experiences since afterwards, and still somewhat today I think I made a mistake despite my personal pride in what I did, a political mistake in not going to Vietnam. Among other things 1969, maybe before but certainly post-Tet 1968 when even guys in the White House and Pentagon knew the game was up (they just dragged it out not wanting to be the guys who “lost” Vietnam a not unimportant consideration among that crowd), was a time when the American Army at home and in Vietnam started to see some serious blow-back from the ranks about what the hell they were fighting and dying for and getting kind of surly about it too. The more anecdotal evidence from guys who were there after they got back to the real world with everything from FTA on their helmets to not saluting officers( worse , worse for the officers, of fragging officers) to not going far when called to go on patrol to going AWOL in county to doing bags of dope to all kinds of individual acts of subordination putting them in jail harm’s way in infamous Long Binh Jail (LBJ after the POTUS), especially from that cohort that I have honed in on, guys from the post-Tet era the more I think I could have raised more than individual heartburn among the brass. Although half the brass at Fort Devens wanted to chew my ass in a grinder and tried to ship me out under armed guard but were folded by a judge in the Federal Court in Boston who granted a Temporary Restraining Order just as they were about to come after me. Even stateside I ran into guys who having done their tour in Vietnam were so angry about the deal they had been dealt they wound up in the Special Detachment Unit where I spent my non-stockade time for discipline.  So, yes, over the years I think I got a little quiet about the matter.   

Maybe ten, twelve years ago I started coming around Veterans for Peace, around after the second Iraq War when I had seen them on Armistice Day parading with their patented white on black dove embroidered flags flying in the wind going up Tremont Street in Boston and asked about why they were being separated from the main body of the parade by police motorcyclists, you know the average American Legion, VFW crowd that at least then formed the core of the march. The guy I talked said that the reason they couldn’t march with the main body of the parade was those guys didn’t want peace flags and “peaceniks” in their parade. Okay, my kind of people, sign me, well let me talk a while and then sign me up. The rest is history.

Well not quite because remember I am talking about the military class of 1969 which I am a part of. Over the years I found that despite my different Army experience that the guys who joined VFP were not all that different from me, from my growing up experiences and from my reluctance to resist the draft which I had thought about (although not Canada, not exile, I loved, love this country it is the damn governments I hate). Take Drew from Ohio who never told his two wives that he had been in Vietnam in 1969. Take David from out in Washington state, out in the Eastern Washington farm country part, apple country, who went into the Army in 1969 because that was the only way he was going to get to college. Take Peter from the corner boys down outside Philly who dropped out of college in 1968 and decided to join in 1969 to avoid the draft. Take Donald from Omaha who had never seen a black guy in person until the Army but who in ‘Nam, that is what they are entitled to call it not me, was as tight as tight could be with Tiny from South Side, Chicago until he got blown away saving Donald’s ass and whose name now is forever etched on a black granite down in Washington and forever in Donald’s heart. Take ‘Doc’ who in order to get his medical school bills paid got hoodwinked into going Army and wound up in a field hospital for the casualty-heavy 101^st Airborne Brigade. Sure, a ton of guys did what they did and came home and forgot it or tried to. Sure, a bunch of guys were proud of what they did and will let you know about it. But know this there were a bunch of  guys in that Class of 1969 who got “religion” on the questions of war and peace-and haven’t forgotten about that hard learned lesson.      

Updated Introduction to Frank Jackman’s Fate -In Honor Of The Native American Artist and Poet T.E. Cannon and All The Members Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969 Whatever Their Fate

Updated Introduction to Frank Jackman’s Fate -In Honor Of The Native American Artist and Poet T.E. Cannon and All The Members Of The Vietnam War Class Of 1969 Whatever Their Fate   

Jesus, Even I can’t believe this- An Introduction to the Introduction by Allan Jackson

Originally the “Introduction” to an encore version of Frank Jackman’s Fate below was to be placed as my introduction to a sketch in the encore edition of the The Roots Is The Toots rock and roll series. I had been behind the recreation of series after I had been dismissed from running this publication having been given what by all accounts was a vote of confidence by friend and foe alike to do the Introductions to the series having been the evil genie who sweated blood and tears and that of the writers to bring the original forth. That series   highlighted, mostly highlighted how a group of guys, guys we called corner boys among ourselves in line with what all the then up-to-date sociologists, academics and criminologist described our existence who grew up poor, came of age in the 1950s rock and roll night and took graduate degree courses in the blues, folk, acid rock of the subsequent 1960s where we called ourselves, proudly called ourselves the Generation of ’68.

Some of us kicking and screaming and some of us following gladly the lead of Peter Paul Markin (whose name I have used for years as my on-line moniker) who saw and heard the fresh breeze coming first among us. Like a lot of things thought that idea got waylaid when Frank Jackman did an essay/sketch centered on his Army experiences during the Vietnam War and his curious notion that he was part of the Vietnam War Class of 1969 after he was overwhelmed with the fact that many of his friends and associates had passed through Vietnam in that year. The straw that broke the camel’s back, the thing that got him to what I called “come out of the closet” about his Army service which had started in 1969 was his assignment to review the art exhibit of the work of the late Native American artist and poet T.E. Cannon at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Cannon had spent the latter part of his Vietnam tour of duty with the 101^st Airborne Division in 1969. Frank took that as the decisive portent. He would come out of the closet as described below in a very public way looking for recognition from his fellow veterans who had their own 1969 experiences. That change is what took Frank’s experiences out of that rock and roll series and removed it to an Introduction to a separate piece about an encore of Frank Jackman’s Fate  But even that now seems misplaced and so we will produce this as a separate sketch independent of either of the previous placements     

********

Originally Intended Introduction by Allan Jackson

[That Frank Jackman is a piece of work, a real piece of work. Many people know that he has worked as a political commentator for both the hard copy and now on-line version of American Left History (and before that both the East Bay Other and The Eye and before that an eye-popping number of publications as a free-lancer). And many know that he was one of the corner boys I grew up with along with a few other writers here like Sam Lowell. What many people do not know is that Frank back in the 1960s when every young guy patriotic, indifferent or protesting had some choices to make even if by ignorance, took a very different direction from the rest of us, from the corner boys, hell, from most of the guys facing the draft and facing orders to Vietnam. Took a different turn on military service during our generation’s, the so-called Generation of ’68’s, war, the Vietnam War. Sure Frank, kicking and screaming since he had lost a chance to go to law school when they stopped the draft deferments for law school students, allowed himself to be indentured (his term) when his draft call came in 1969, actually 1968 for his physical and 1969 for induction.

Frank told me once that after about three days in basic training down at Fort Jackson in South Carolina (I did mine at Fort Dix in New Jersey where most guys from the North went so I don’t, and neither does he, why he wound up there except that being far from home and resources freaked him out knowing that he had better not go crazy down there for he might find himself in some black box or worse) that he knew that he had made a huge mistake, had to let his basic genie, anti-war genie out of the bag, hell bottle, hell some container. Most importantly unlike the rest of us (including me who held my doubts in and did my tour like every other fucking stupid asshole who knew better, knew that our fellow corner boys Rickie Rizzo and Frank White had laid their heads down in 1966 for no good reason except getting etched in black granite but went anyway but this isn’t about me and that story can wait another day, maybe a decade since I still don’t fully understand it) Frank as was his wont when he felt deeply about something followed through, went down in the mud with mano a mano with the whole fucking Army establishment, Made as he said laughingly once it was over and we could talk about it since most of us corner boys who went like sheep to the slaughter were very ambivalent about what Frank did for a while, including the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin if you can believe that rue the day they drafted him.  One bastard colonel almost lost his rank for his efforts in trying to shut Frank up so that black hole idea was no joke. He won, won his freedom but it was a very close thing, close indeed. Funny, and not in a laughing way Frank suffered a lot of the same feelings that he no longer knew the old world we grew up in that the rest of us who went did coming back to the ‘real’ world after the Army.  

All the rest of us corner boys who were draft-worthy had either enlisted or had accepted the draft without murmur, including Rickie Rizzo and Frank White who laid down their heads on the plateaus of Central Vietnam and whose names now are etched in the town memorial and in black granite in Washington for eternity. We would have spat on anybody, Frank included, who actually would have even though about refusing induction whatever we thought of the war and most of us saw it as a big bother to whatever other plans we had had. We would all change our minds later and I and others have written about that sea change elsewhere. So the collective North Adamsville corner boys were not any different from the whole cohort of our generation who had decisions to make one way or another about what to do when the war dragged on seemingly forever.

Then there was outlier Frank, or what we thought then was outlier Frank, who would accept that crazed induction and then refuse to go to Vietnam as an infantryman, as a grunt as we called ourselves and as “cannon fodder” as we learned to call ourselves when we got smarter after our military service and after, as always, the late Peter Paul Markin,  forever etched in North Adamsville lore of a certain old time corner boy generation as Scribe, gave us the skinny on what the fuck we had been through, why and for who. Frank would flat out refuse to go when after Basic Training and AIT (Advanced Infantry Training which I also went through and which in 1969, and a few years before and a few years after meant only one desperate destination-Vietnam-as it did for me). Frank’s story which not all of us knew, including me, knew at the time since we were in Vietnam as part of what we, he would call the Vietnam War Class of 1969, either because we didn’t want to believe it or didn’t want to hear about it from our own guilt about going to war once we got in-country and knew we were fucked, had been fucked over royally.      

This is the way Frank told it one night in the early 1970s when we were all back and after we were able to listen to him since like I said not all of us we happy with him while he going down in the mud like some berserk lunatic, was fucking around with the Army, what (and we were being fucked). He had received orders for Vietnam down in Fort Benning in Georgia, had come home and immediately, or if not immediately since I think he said he shacked up with some young woman for some time before he did so since he had like the rest of us had a thirty day leave before having to show up at Fort Lewis in Washington, went to get some G.I. counselling from the Quakers over in Cambridge. Even the idea of checking in with the Quakers seemed strange when I first heard about it in Vietnam, about the service they were offering guys in the military in their peaceful bid to end the endless war. Whatever else we knew we knew that our church, the Roman Catholic Church, at the official level accepted the government’s version of the necessary defense of Vietnam as the key domino part of a just war in order to put its own stamp on it as such, supported it long after other religious groups turned away from support, except a few crazy renegades like the Berrigan brothers who Father Lally railed against in Sunday sermons from the blood-stained pulpit at Sacred Heart.

These Quakers were historically with some others like Mennonites known as anti-war people, as conscientious objectors to war (except I wondered at the time about Grace Kelly in her Quaker maiden role in High Noon since she did a rooty-toot toots on the bad guys when her man was in danger but that could have been self-defense and some such and not war). Quirky people who I never really had had truck with except knowing they were some kind of Protestant sect. What they had going for them was they had been deeply involved in draft counselling, in draft resistance which had its heyday in the Vietnam War for those who don’t know what I am talking about. Strangely while I was in college, working my way through since my family had no, nada money for such a cause, I serviced coffee machines and part of my route passed right by the Arlington Street Universalist or Unitarian Church this before they united later in the decade so I am not sure which in downtown Boston where the draft resistance was located, was a draft sanctuary and I would beep my horn. Such were the contradictions of Allan Jackson-hell Frank and every other corner boy as well. Hell Scribe lived for the contradictions that would finally lead him to an early grave.

What they, the Quakers started doing and I am not sure when, and I am not sure if I asked Frank if he would know either, was they started offering G.I. counselling at some point when it became clear that a small munity was beginning to form in the military by drafted citizen-soldiers and others, guys back from Vietnam too, who were looking for personal and political ways to oppose the war. How Frank found out about the service I don’t remember but somehow he got over there to leafy Cambridge and that changed everything.  

Hey, you should know this about Frank. He was/is a quiet guy, a bookish guy like Scribe except in the corner boy days Scribe had so many angsts and alienations that he was forever running his mouth. So Frank was no leader, not exactly a follower either but one of the guys, one of the guys who went along with every caper Scribe or Frankie Riley our acknowledged leader put to paper. If anybody figured to be a crazy anti-war guy it was Scribe not Frank. Scribe when he got what he called “religion” would become a fire and brimstone guy about war later but it was nobody but Frank who did what he did and had kept pretty quiet about it before he opened up to us that night.

What Frank learned from the Quakers was that he could put in an application to the Army for conscientious objector status. Yeah, I know what you are thinking because I thought the same thing too and as I am writing this down it still sounds implausible even though federal courts up and down have declared it a valid way to get out of the military. If you signed up for the Army or got drafted how the hell a person could be a conscientious objector-be what I thought and still think a little something like a Quaker. Here was Frank’s first hurdle though. Putting an application in at Fort Lewis where he was supposed to go was filled with some danger since they were dragooning such applicants in the dead of night and shipping them to Vietnam under guard after formally and quickly turning the application down.

That tactic would make it hard to get to a federal court in time to get a writ of habeas corpus on jurisdictional grounds (thanks Frankie Riley for that information). Another option and the Quakers were wise to give options and not orders even if with a Quakerly wink was to go AWOL (absent without leave) which means in military terms unlawful for over thirty days or so at which time he would be what was called “dropped from the roles,” essentially a free agent and turn himself in at the nearest army base which happened to be Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston. While waiting to have the AWOL litigated he could put his C.O application in without the Fort Lewis danger. (Frank also gave a bunch of other reasons why this strategy was good, but I forget them except it would be easier for his Quaker-provided lawyer to get to him which makes sense.)

Frank followed the second option (there had been a couple of others presented but this was the best of the bunch as far as I remember), went AWOL, turned himself in at Fort Devens, and while his AWOL case was being disposed of put in his C.O. application, got some minor punishment and a fine I think and, no capital AND, his application turned down within a few weeks. Done. Cooked next stop Vietnam. Well not quite. There were some changes happening in C.O. law since many applications, mostly civilian, were being turned down and being litigated in the lower federal courts and eventually a few in the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS in tweeter speak) some of which would be decided before Frank’s time was up and helpful to his case. His lawyer took that application to the federal court in Boston and on the basis of the merits of his case was able to get a judge to order a temporary restraining order (TRO) which kept Frank in the court’s jurisdiction pending disposition. (That legal maneuver turned out to be very useful later but also at the time since on the very day the TRO was ordered the Army was in the process of giving him another set of orders to Fort Lewis and then Vietnam-under guard, under the guard of two lifer sergeants-whee! Even I was impressed by the maneuvering on that one as Frank hid on base all day while the petition was before the court in Boston.)

During this time Frank was reading like crazy, reading radical anti-war stuff and the like and staying in touch with the Quakers whom he liked as people even if he did not always understand where they were coming from. I think, and I have mentioned it to him since that the Army’s whole treatment of him and especially that “under guard” maneuver broke something in him, broke him free maybe and I made him laugh once when I told him before I knew the whole story and before he had decided to resist what were they going to do –put him in the stockade. Once you get clear on that-once you face that dragon and don’t flinch then what the hell do what you have to do-which is what I would eventually come to see was my own attitude toward what Frank did and what the rest of us didn’t do. That was also the time along with the G.I. counselling that the Quakers and others (some much more radical and less committed to non-violence) were moving away from reliance on mass marches in place like Washington, D.C. and pleading with politicians and hitting the military bases with G.I. coffeehouse outreach nearby and smaller marches and rallies in front of the bases.    

These ideas sparked Frank’s imagination, got him into second gear in his defining his commitment to the anti-war struggle. Like I said something snapped in Frank, something of the old time stay cool and out of the firing line when the Scribe or Frankie Riley were in high dungeon which is my clearest high school corner boy memory of him, Now Frank was the heroic John Brown avenging angel that the Scribe kept talking what we considered his crazy talk about on lonesome penniless Friday night. In corner boy talk Frank did not give a fuck about what the Army did or did not want to do to him. One day when the Quakers decided to have a rally outside the gates of Fort Devens protesting the war (and trying to drum up interest among the soldiery there) Frank, Private E-1 Francis James Jackman (that E-1 the lowest rank possible for a soldier since he had been reduced in rank due to that AWOL rap) decided to leave the fort in uniform doing duty hours and join them. That night Frank, Private E-1 Francis James Jackman and you know the why of E-1, after returning to his barracks was picked up by the MPs and taken to the Provost Marshal’s office and from there thrown in solitary at the stockade.

That what they called “disobeying lawful orders," not being on the base during duty hours, would eventually lead to the first of two special courts-martial both which like I said technically were labelled as “disobeying lawful orders” and sentenced to six months on each rap. It was at that first court-martial that when Frank was asked if he had any words in his defense he took out a ragged piece of paper and read from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War. With his back to the judges and facing the courtroom crowd which included some supporters gathered from the Quakers and others who periodically showed up outside the fort to call for his freedom. That support was important as Frank found out during his jail terms to keep spirits up knowing that some people were outside rooting him on (not his parents or any relatives but he did not dwell on that when he spoke to us that late night but and we knew what was what about Acre families and the war who like Frank’s father had supported the war in many cases to the bitter end. He would be forever grateful to the Quakers and allies for that. (By the way if anybody is wondering why Frank was not shipped off to Fort Leavenworth the worse military facility out in Kansas and the one the drill sergeants in basic training kept warning every scared recruit was going to be their fate if they fucked up, or gave them any lip that TRO held him under the court’s jurisdiction in Massachusetts but also meant that they could not give him a general court martial with longer sentences  that the Judge Advocate-General’s Office wanted to impose.              

And so Frank did his time, read a lot, wrote some and talked a blue streak to the few other guys who he roomed with when he was not in solidarity. He never the whole time he was imprisoned there had been let into the general population and perhaps they, the  Army, showed a tad bit of  sense for their fears since he was on his righteous John Brown avenging angel high horse and Frank said he would have started an anti-war rally in the stockade if he had been out there. As it was he never had more than a couple of roommates at a time, I guess cellmates is a better way to say it, and never saw more than a few people when he was out playing basketball in the compound which was the way used his recreational time. (Truth; Frank was one of the worst pick-up basketball players of all time and was absolutely the last guy picked when we were bucking up for teams, one time we played short not to have to take him.)   Also took stock of his personal life when the wife he married, a college sweetheart, refused to come see him in the stockade despite her own anti-war views getting grief from her Marine Corps World War II Pacific War father. That would be the first of three marriages for Frank (and the rest of us, except Jack Callahan and his beloved forever Chrissie, not far behind in the marriage department). Took a look too at what he would do if he got done with his sentence before the judge ruled in his case. A definite possibility given the logjam in the courts as his lawyer made clear. He was also trying to chart out what he would do if the judgement came down against him while he was in the stockade and they tried to rush him out under guard to Fort Lewis and transport to Vietnam.

In the situation Frank need not have worried since judgement did not come down during the first sentence. Frank set up the next part of what he had to say by saying it was hard to explain but once you have decided to do what you had to do and faced the limit, faced jail then other things kind of fell into place. And so they did when Frank was released from his first sentence and decided his Army time was over, decided to refuse to wear the uniform. Did it with a flourish though worthy of Scribe since one Monday morning at Morning Report, the weekly parade field event to see who showed up and who was AWOL he walked from his barracks to the parade field in civilian clothes (he said he had bell-bottom trousers on which when I recall this now I have to laugh about oh foolish, funny youth except his G.I. boots). Walked with a sign calling “Bring The Troops Home. I need not detail that once again since you know as well as I do now that he wound up in the stockade again in solidarity. And again received that six months special court-martial sentence for his troubles.

For years after Frank would make us laugh when he mentioned that he could have kept doing those sentences until he was old and gray he had been so determined to run out his course. Fortunately toward the end of his second sentence, a few days before as it turns out the federal judge in Boston granted his writ of habeas corpus and a week or so later when the JAG decided not to appeal he was discharged, an honorable discharge just like the rest of us. So Frank was discharged not by the Army really but by that old cranky judge.                  

Funny after that night and maybe by unwritten agreement among ourselves since I know nobody mentioned for us to do this we kind of put Frank’s experience, put our own Vietnam War experiences in some deep recess of our brains. Just like our World War II fathers had done before us with less reason to be ashamed or humiliated. The only thing Frank’s father ever mentioned was that he had been ashamed of Frank, had had a hard time at work and among the neighbors for a while but after he finally got over those feelings he had a little unspoken pride that a Jackman had done what he thought was the honorable thing to do when he needed to his father’s mind do something. We went about our collective lives, drifted apart or closer usually depending on where we were in the marriage and brood raising merry-go-round.

Frank did mention to me when we were talking one night several years later that he sometimes had doubts about the wisdom of what he had done. Not that he wasn’t personally proud that he stood up when the deal when down but that maybe he should have gone to Vietnam and tried to raise some holy hell there among the growing disillusioned common soldiers there. I never said anything to him about it but in my mind,  I thought he was crazy to think that the Army which was willing to put him in a black box and was ready at a minute’s notice to ship his ass to ‘Nam was going to let him run loose among already mutinous troops. But there we left it.         

Left it until a few years ago when something began to stir in Frank about why he kept his anti-war fight on the low despite having spent most of the rest of his life actively opposing the wars of the American imperium (sometimes dragging us along as on the Iraq War in 2003, sometimes not as in the initial reaction post-9/11 to the war on Afghanistan). Maybe it was reflecting on age and mortality like many of us our types are finding we are doing more often. Reflecting on a worthwhile life, what we did and didn’t do or should have done differently. I ask him that question one night recently when we were having a few drinks at Jack’s in Cambridge and he surprised me with his answer.  Said what triggered him was running into a guy up in Maine who had served in Vietnam in 1969, the time when Frank was refusing to go to Vietnam, who said of his own experience that he had gone through two marriages and neither wife ever knew he had been in Vietnam. Talk about keeping it on the low. He would run into others who more or less shared that some silence about their Vietnam service. The kicker for Frank though was in the fall of 2017 when PBS aired the Lynn Novick-Ken Burns ten-part eighteen hour Vietnam series and in the very first episode a couple of Marines whose wives had known each other for over a decade and both couples had socialized frequently neither knew that the other had been in Vietnam. Weird vibes, very weird.

Those thoughts got Frank off the dime, got him thinking that he needed to let some people know that there had been resistance inside the military. Encouraged everybody to tell their story for the couple of generations that are now pretty clueless about what a hellish time it was to be a young man (mostly men then) facing all kind of decisions based on the mutterings of old men. Frank, as usual for him, got a slow start, let a couple of people know one time when he was going down to Washington for an anti-war demonstration. Talked about it around a round table one night with a bunch of guys who were in Vietnam in 1969. (Frank was developing a feeling that he needed to be accepted as a member of that class despite his own personal twist.) Frank came out of the closet for real though on Memorial Day of 2018 when as part of the Poor People’s Campaign’s War Economy Week he was asked to speak as somebody impacted by war. Impacted his way as surely as others were impacted in theirs. Felt good about it afterward, felt that maybe he really had been on the right side of the angels when the deal went down. 

The List Of The Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class of 1969 Expands-With The Art Of The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.E. Cannon In Mind.

The List Of The  Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class of 1969 Expands-With The Art Of The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.E. Cannon In Mind.

                                     T.E. Cannon Self_Portrait 

By Si Lannon

Frank Jackman was confused, no, rather baffled, no again, was not sure that he should not take it for an omen. And he a man who laughed at omens, portents and other such mumbo-jumbo in his time, learned to be distrustful of such early on in hard knocks growing up day. What had him in a dither, what had him exercised as he did his morning toilet was how many associations with the year 1969, more specifically the Vietnam War Class of 1969 he had turned up once he had decided to “come out of the closet” (funny a term these days associated with gays and others proclaiming proudly their sexual orientations and identities) about his own battles during that period. The immediate cause for his consternation, for him thinking that maybe he should start to pay attention to the signs was that he had gone on assignment to the art exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem twenty-five miles north of Boston featuring the works of the late Native-American artist T.E. Cannon.

As Frank entered the exhibit area he noticed two things on the entrance wall describing what was ahead. The first was that while they were a million miles apart in a way with where they grew up, their racial and ethnic make-ups, and what paths they had pursued they were both members of the baby-boomer generation, more specifically for our purposes the Generation of ’68 which had come of age in that decade and went through all the ups and downs of that experience with which we are now being inundated with 50^th anniversary commemorations. An added signpost of Frank’s confusion. Both had ironically, or maybe portentously is a better way to put the matter, been born in 1946 at the very start of the generational curve that was to peter out late in the 1960s giving way to Generation X and millennials. The second, and again for our purposes probably more important is that Cannon had served part of his Army hitch in the year 1969 with the 101^st Airborne Division in 1969. That set off another round of explosions in Frank’s head about his own 1969 part of the equation since 1969 was the year he had accepted induction in the Army after being drafted. His story was quite different.            

Frank over the previous couple of years in the fuse over the 50^th anniversary commemorations had become more aware of the pivotal part the events triggered in 1969 by that induction (he would laughingly, later laughingly, called it his indentured servitude) had played in much of his subsequent life, for good or evil. Not surprisingly he had kept quiet about his own experiences like a lot of that Class of 1969 who actually had gone to Vietnam and were trying to live it down by drowning it out, drowning it out unsuccessfully as it turned out in many cases. As Frank talked to fellow veterans from that period while he was reporting on various anti-war political events for the on-line American Left History he found a surprising number of them had some relationship to 1969 and so that perked up his interest in telling his own story which was dramatically different from theirs. In the muddle of what he was trying to do he wanted by publicizing his own experience, and in quiet nighttime moments desperately wanted, to be part of that Vietnam War Class of 1969. His story has been told elsewhere in these pages under the title Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind and so need not detain us except that Frank too had orders for Vietnam but getting up his Irish decided to refuse to go costing him a total of thirteen months in an Army stockade and another six months of other kinds of restrictive movements.    

(Interesting there seems to have been something of a divide beginning with the Tet Offensive results in 1968 which set those from 1969 apart from earlier Vietnam War classes whom he found were less shamed or destroyed by their war experiences coming home. Nothing that he could put down as some sociological truth but with enough anecdotal force to take notice). 

Frank had written plenty about other cohorts of the Generation of ’68, the merry pranksters, not Ken Kesey’s originals but Captain Crunch’s whose led another cohort of mischief makers on their own yellow brick road converted school bus, from the Summer of Love days, the guys from the neighborhood, his corner boys who were a lightning rod from down at the base of society for what was going on in youth nation in those days and later, when he had had his own woes about fellow Vietnam veterans who had had a hard time coming back, of adjusting and had essentially dropped out of mainstream society. Had written about that band of brothers under the bridges of Southern California from inside reflecting his own turbulent war past and outside when he felt a very strong need to keep the faith with his brothers who had been thrown on the scrap heap by their government and the average citizen who di not give a fuck once the war madness was over.

But the 1969 guys were cut from a different cloth. Sure, they had many of the same PTSD symptoms of the lost boys out in the arroyos, the junkies on cheap street strung out on Golden Triangle dreams but somehow had survived well enough to get back in the real world. Sometimes it was, is a close thing with guys like Pat who went on to do work as an environmentalist after doing MAC-V military intelligence and who still is afraid to be alone in his house at night, like Dan who ran a successful logging business after running the rack on every known drug, legal and illegal reflected in five, count them five, marriages, beautiful Doc who had done triage with the 101^st Airborne and came home to work the public hospital circuit but who like some small fry McBeth stills see the blood red moons of field hospitals. Howie who didn’t go because of a childhood injury that never healed correctly but whose number came up in ’69 and damn if they weren’t so desperate they were ready to take him. Almost blind John the same way. Ian from up in Maine whose two ex-wives never ever knew he had been in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when all hell was breaking loose there.

But enough about those guys who have had almost as much ink spilled in these pages by others as Frank because his assignment and his thoughts too were on the remarkable works of Cannon who gave him a whole new perspective on what Native American art was all about beyond the ancient, so-called primitive stuff he had seen in most art museums. In line with that thought he had also recently gone to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where a newer, small exhibit in the American wing was paying homage to, and trying to correct, the long history of neglect and third-class citizen of Native American art in its own exhibitions which had been relegated to the dreary basement of that wing. Maybe that told the tale another way.      

(Frank had never been sure even when he had been acting site manager in on-line times and before that as managing editor at hard copy publications about what was the correct term in the age of identity politics in reference to what he had learned as a kid in school and through television and movies about what had been called “Indians.” Terms seem to drift between “Native American” the term used at the Cannon exhibit “indigenous peoples” and “first nations” so he would stick with the first which had been the case at the exhibit)

Frank had become increasingly aware especially through his associations with veterans who in 2017 had gathered to defend against the pipelines at Standing Rock out in the Dakotas that Native Americans had been disproportionally represented in the American military with all the pathologies connected with that experience which he recognized from his own personal observations of his friends and those he had met along the way. Some were proud in the ancient warrior traditions to serve in the military like it as somewhere in some hidden gene. Cannon seems to have gone for the simple reason that he had been called up and rather than be drafted he enlisted. He did his time as well as anybody else but like a lot of guys was ambivalent about the war he had participated in and about his won role in it. As noted above not an uncommon reaction from serious creative types who were baffled by what they had experienced, by what they and others did to people with whom that had no quarrel. People, mostly peasants, workers on the land like his own people who had the same reverence for what the land gave (and took away) as those far away peasants.

Cannon went no holds barred in what he saw in his Native American environment from the proud but beaten warriors who could roam the ranges no more to the women of steel who held communal life together to the wizened elder shamans and soothsayers who really did believe in the portents Frank never could get around his head to his secret dreams of Anglo girls fussing in the night with the son of then thousand years of warrior life. Frank had to laugh thinking about those infinite number of connections which bound him to one T.E. Cannon. Then he remembered the story the late Markin had told one fireside night out in California working their way south on the Captain Crunch’s mad monk caravan. Markin and a couple of other guys had been out in Joshua Tree and had been sucking down all the hallucinogenic drugs they could gather mostly peyote buttons and maybe some righteous mescaline and had started to dance, dance the dance of ten thousand years of canyon life and had worked themselves into such a dither that they thought there was some connection between what they were doing and the light flickering off the canyon walls calling them onward. Yeah, Cannon Frank thought would have appreciated that story, would have let Frank into that vaunted Class of 1969 on the strength of that story alone.