When All Hell
Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation
of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army
By Frank Jackman
Some
anniversaries like say the start of the French, American and Russian
revolutions are world-historic events and should be given a nod to every five
of ten years in a big way complete with updates on where they stand in the up
and down of human history. (I remember being somewhat shocked when Zhou-En-Lai the old Communist foreign minister under Mao
who never was on the losing side of a faction fight remarking that the lessons
of the French Revolution had not run their course in his time-today either.)
Same with specific events related to decisive political events like the
establishment (and demise) of the leftist historic Paris Commune of 1871 which
gets commemorated in this publication every year hence such awkward designations
as 144th and so on. Then there is the purely personal political
events commemoration like the one mentioned in the headline to this piece-the
also decisive 50th anniversary of my induction into the U.S. Army in
January 1969 which in its own way has reverberated unto this day. (Strictly private
personal events like birthdays, weddings, and new relationships are found in appropriate
places in stories written for this and other publications by me and others some
who like myself were “present at the creation” in 1974 when this whole business
got started.)
I was, frankly,
not going to make any effort to commemorate this personal event since the story
has been told several times by various writers here who know what happened, and
what by the same token, had happened to them in that unhappy youth time which ravaged
this country to the core and we have been fighting a rearguard action ever
since for not winning back then when the world was young and we were knee-deep in
seeking a newer world. That cohort of
writers among those who I grew up with in the desperately poor Acre section of
North Adamsville took different routes than I although we wound up in the same place
after the dust was cleared-forevermore hostile to wars, and rumors of war which
have plagued our existences since then.
The initial impetus
for deciding to “tell all” about that military experience had been oddly in the
response by several readers to a recent film review of the 2018 film The Post where I mentioned in passing my
own way of opposing the Vietnam War when it counted as did heroic whistle-blower
Dan Ellsberg in “leaking” what became The
Pentagon Papers to the public via
the major newspapers. The gist of what these readers said is that they were
unaware of my experience (a few related their own experiences at the time monotonously
familiar) and that I should tell my story on my own hook, as a cautionary tale
if nothing else.
That
readership urging would not have been enough though if on an assignment for another
publication I had not landed in San Francisco to follow up on that story (and where
I am writing this piece). As is not unusual these days San Francisco for me and
other old time Acre corner boys like Alex James is flooded with memories of the
late Pete Markin, another of the cohort I grew up with, who couldn’t go the distance,
who fell down for a lot of reasons including sheer hubris and wound up with a couple
of slugs in his head done in not so sunny Sonora, in Mexico when some
outlandish drug deal which was going to put him on easy street went very wrong
under circumstances which are still shrouded in mystery. Just the way the
bastard would have liked it. I was not
thinking so much of Pete’s military service where he was fatefully in more ways
than one drafted, also inducted into the U.S. Army about a year before I was but
the halcyon days of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he was the first to partake
in and dragged the rest of us, most of us I think except Brad Webber, out here to
the Western end of the world, to the place where everything goes to the China
Seas.
I won’t go
into detail on that 1967 experience, or on what amounted to Markin’s fateful
decision to drop out of college to see what was happening out here which in turn
led to that induction notice because I have, and others as well, especially when
Allan Jackson, also one of the Markinp-dragged crowd was the site manager before
being pushed out by the younger writers. The only thing I will say is that Pete
was really a prophet when he somehow sensed early in the 1960s when the rest of
us were worried about getting a car, getting laid, getting dough all mixed together
he kept harping that a new breeze was coming-and then it came. Too bad the silly
bastard that we still shed tears over every time we mention his name couldn’t
have gotten out of his own way. Yeah, the silly beautiful bastard who has left
us here to mourn him fifty years later.
Talking to the
guys I am still in touch from back in the Acre as well as the few who write here
on occasion, I have been taken aback by how much that whole period of the
Vietnam War affected every guy who came of military age. I have mentioned the
Acre already and the way the war devastated a lot of us. And not just in the Acre
but our generation, our baby-boomer generation, what Sam Lowell was the first
in our group to call the Generation of ’68 and that sticks out as the right way
to put the matter now with some pride. Most of the stories though from the Acre
are like Johnny Blade’s, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, 1946-1967 whose name is
forever on the North Adamsville town hall memorial and down in black granite in
Washington. Johnny could hardly wait to get into the Army, wait to get at the
commies the government was always talking about who needed some killing and win
himself some glory.
Johnny along with
the recently departed Jimmy Higgins, who we are still shedding a few tears for
our long last youth over, was the “muscle” for our corner boy corner in front
of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor a valuable asset when trouble was around. Johnny Blade
got all he asked for in Vietnam, and then some. Laid his head down, fell down
in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta for no good reason. After I did what I
did in the Army which will be described below it took a long time and the
intervention of our old corner boy leader Frankie Riley to get Johnny’s parents
to even talk to me, to stop disowning and disrespecting me in the neighborhood
even after I long ago left the place.
It is hard even
now to overestimate how strong the ethos of the Cold War Red Scare night which
gripped the childhoods and neighborhoods of the Generation of ’68 brethren. The
Acre and as far as I can tell most neighborhoods in most cities we similarly
smitten. We believed in whatever it was our government, mostly when it counted the
WWII hero Grandpa Ike, POSTUS during the coldest periods of that freeze. Bought
into some murky variation of the need to kill every Red under the bed, to turn
in every mommy if she was a commie to keep the Russkies from our humble doors.
To keep the satanic beasts from letting us breath the fresh air of so-called
democracy and loveless capitalism. Even though we were literally the poorest of
the poor with Markin’s family, no, I stand corrected Jimmy Higgin’s family down
at the Bottoms section of the Acre near the river at the very bottom in a tiny
shack of a house with five brothers and how they moved in the place after a recent
visit for his funeral I don’t know.
This in the “golden
age of the working man” we hear about now in retrospect, but it never came down
to us, no way. Still we believed what we believed about whatever the civics and
history books said and whatever our leaders worked out over us. If you don’t believe
me ask your parents, grandparents but I hope not great-grandparents what it was
like come air raid drill time during the present at the creation nuclear weapons
time when we all huddled, worthlessly when you think about it, under desks, trash
cans whatever would “protect” us from the blast. Yeah, we had powerful enemies
and no quarter was to be given, none asked for either.
This is the set-up
for us, for the corner boys from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and a million other locations
like 125th Street in Harlem, the working-class quarters of Toledo in
Ohio, the wide swarths of the barrios of East LA, along the decimated and
dishonored Hopi trail of tears out where the states are square. The guys, maybe
not the smartest guys or the most well-read but at least not unpatriotic as we
knew the term then. When the deal went down, whatever our sympathies, whatever
we had intended to do- we went. My case was only slightly more problematic since
I had a girlfriend who was adamantly and fervently against the war while I was
more lukewarm in my opposition and needed the wake-up call of induction before
I figured where I stood. I was in 1968 more interested in the real chance once
Lyndon Johnson abandoned the field to get beautiful newer world ruthless Irish Bobby
Kennedy elected POSTUS and I could proceed with my childhood dream of being a
maker and shaker in the political world, what I would later call bourgeois politics
but then my “meal ticket” out of that poverty I knew only too well.
Things did not
work out that way in that endlessly action-packed year where decisions had to
be made on the fly or you would get left in the dust. Sure, when that notice came to take my physical
and then the notice to report for induction I had my doubts, had small, very
small thoughts of not going like a lot of guys, the draft resisters but I couldn’t
quite get there then. Besides, truth be told, where was I to get any support
for such a bold step. Not from home, not from the blessed Acre, and not from
the now mostly already in the military corner boys who were far from ready to
bring down the government if necessary-then. Certainly not in the ethos of the
neighborhood with a few guys, including Johnny Blade having already laid down
their heads in some godforsaken jungle or rice paddy.
Certainly not
in my family filled with veterans including my Marine Corps father having done their
duty when called if they hadn’t volunteered out of hand like my father did come
Pearl Harbor. It would be many years and much estrangement before my father,
and by extension my mother, would finally see for me what I did was right-and
honorable even if he, they believed in the war well pass anybody except may
Senator Henry Jackson and AF of L-CIO President George Meany. So I went, went
one cold winter morning in January very early and dark up to the Boston Army
Base for induction.
Inducted and sent
not as expected to Fort Dix in New Jersey where all the other corner boys did
their basic training but to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and from there
to Fort Gordon in the red clay of Augusta, Georgia home of the Masters golf
championship and ex-POSTUS Grandpa Ike’s favorite course, or at least that is
where they let him play. That distance from home and some resources would make
things harder in the end but let’s back up. Back up to that trip down to Fort
Jackson where I stayed for about three days, three days when I realized two
things, the obvious one that I had made a mistake by allowing myself to be
inducted and there was no way I was going to Vietnam which even then had my
name written in blood on it.
Being in the
South being far away from any support system, or advise I went through the
basic training and then when I was given AIT as my military career assignment,
AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training down in Alabama I knew the die was cast,
that I was up shit’s creek. Guys were being so chewed up and spit out in
Vietnam that every AIT guy knew exactly where he was going once the training
was completed. Vietnam just then was the only place in need of such services. Fortunately,
as I would learn later when I met guys in the stockade, my orders allowed me thirty
days leave before reporting to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transport to
Vietnam. Some guys were ordered immediately
to Vietnam with not much time to do anything but kiss their asses good-bye,
that is what one guy said. He had been sent under guard to Fort Lewis and left
there only to go AWOL and a bunch of other stuff once he was released on the
base. He went a different route for the same reason and would up as I in the
same place-the only virtuous place in the military-the stockade.
I didn’t know
it at the time, but I was somewhat lucky that my number came up in 1969 rather
than say 1966, 1967 since the anti-war movement in its radical activist end had
expanded from supporting and making counselling available for draft-resisters to
include military resisters as the war dragged on with no end in sight despite
grand illusion lies by high military commanders that there was some kind of
light at the end of the tunnel-and there was when the North Vietnamese pulled
the hammer down in, well, 1975 long after what happened to the Acre corner boys
happened. Between the citizen soldiers, the rough and tumble eyes at least half
opened draftees less and less eager to go to the quagmire as the reports came
back to the neighborhood, or as the funeral trains got longer who were being
impressed into the military and guys who had come back disillusioned or fucked-up
the Army was getting less and less reliable. The anti-war movement began to see
that you needed to get to the GIs if the war was going to stop. The government,
certainly the Nixon government, was not going to stop the damn thing, not with “peace
with honor” their eternal mantra.
That shift
helped me personally for when I got back to North Adamsville I immediately
contacted the Quakers at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Well not immediately
since I still had enough corner boy in me to check up with whoever was around
and have a few drinks to drown my sorrows, and theirs. Also, that pesky anti-war
girlfriend turned out to have, and I quote, a new-found respect for me now that
I had “gotten religion,” my term, on the war. Was ready to do something and so
was very, well very and let’s leave it at that. No, let’s leave it at a variation
of the famous photograph of three fetching young women, women dressed for the
times with the slogan “girls say yes, to guys who say no-to the draft. So yes, not
exactly immediately.)
Funny, being
in the heavily student Boston area a hotbed of anti-war sentiment where you
could go to an anti-war march, rally or something any day of the week I was not
sure where to go, who to see, and my girlfriend while an activist was not sure
either. By something like a default I turned to the Quakers since I knew they
were historically anti-war and had a vague notion picked up from one of the ubiquitous
anti-war posters plastered in Harvard Square that they were offering military counselling
to distressed G.I.s., to my situation.
I do not remember
all the details of the first meeting with the counsellor (who was not a Quaker
but knew enough about military procedure to be of great service to me and others).
Here is the outline of the plan he suggested as to options (“suggested” an important
word since other terms might have led to serious legal, and political, repercussions)
which should be enough to satisfy those who want to know my military service
story. Since I had orders to go to Fort Lewis and wanted to stay in the Boston
area to get help and be with connections that mattered, I had to go AWOL,
absent without leave, a military crime treated lightly or seriously depending
on the length of absence and other factors. Go AWOL for at least thirty days, better
given Army bureaucracy, hell, any bureaucracy, in order to be “dropped from the
rolls” out in Fort Lewis. Meaning I was essentially a free agent, free for a
minute from those orders hanging over me. Then I was to turn myself in for punishment
and reassignment. That turning in place by design Fort Devens about forty miles
west of Boston and so a good place to work out my plans from.
After turning myself
in I was, beyond whatever paperwork and punishment would accrue from the AWOL
charge, to put in paper work for a conscientious objector discharge. That a
hard dollar once you were in the military and not based just then on some historic
religion training like with Peace Quakers or Mennonites but not impossible.
1969, ,and going forward also turned out to lucky for me since various federal lower
court decisions and even an important Supreme Court one which basically set the
same standard for military COs as civilian were beginning to force the military
to be more serious about such applications. I put in the application although I
was too sanguine to expect much since a number of guys who I had met at Devens in
the same boat as I were being turned down. As I was, having based my argument
on a slight Catholic/ethical axis not what the tight-assed Army standard would regard
as a CO. Turned down despite, and this would be important later, being declared
by all the line of interrogators to be “sincere” in my beliefs. That negative result meant I was to prepare myself
for a reissue of orders to Fort Lewis and then to Vietnam.
Here is where the
Quakers, and I will always love Quakers whatever theological differences we have,
came to the rescue-they provided me with a lawyer, a lawyer who was building a
reputation for getting military guys out of one kind of trouble or another, a
new category of lawyer, a civilian lawyer going up against the Army justice system.
(Rather than depend on some Army JAG,
Army lawyer, who was strictly a company man.) Although it was a close thing, a
very close thing since there were those in the Army at Devens, lifers who hated
me and wanted to take me to Fort Lewis under armed guard that lawyer was able to
get a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) from a federal judge in Boston which
kept me under that court’s jurisdiction while the merits of the case were being
heard. Whee! (Those lifers were literally searching the fort for me to handcuff
me and sweep me away the very day the TRO was issued before it took effect.)
That lifer hatred
was not just happenstance. You see once I got “religion” I no longer feared
what would happen to me, no longer was a soldier, was an anti-war fire-eater. Once
the Army breaks its hold on you, that fear of the stockade that very basic
training sergeant warned you against anything was possible. One day before that
TRO took effect and while I was waiting for something to move on my case I decided
to join a Quaker-organized anti-war rally outside the front gate at Fort Devens.
In uniform and during duty hours. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six
months. Since my case was working its way slowly through the federal court system,
I actually served that six months minus some good time.
Once I got out
of the stockade on that charge I decided to continue my personal resistance and
refused to wear the uniform. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months.
Toward the end of that second six months (plus pre-trial time in the stockade
this time) that writ of habeas corpus came through and a few weeks later I was discharged,
honorably discharged if you can believe that since the judge had decided the Army
had screwed up not granting my CO application. Otherwise, who knows I might
still be doing an endless series of six month sentences. Tough, yes, tough for
lots of reasons, political and personal. But know this I would probably not fifty
years later still be fighting the good fight against the endless wars of our times
if I hadn’t had that baptism of fire. That can be the cautionary tale if you
like.
No comments:
Post a Comment