The 50th Anniversary Of “Life” Magazine’s Bringing The Vietnam War Home With The Photographs Of The Guys Who Died During One Week In June 1969-Their Names Now Etched For Eternity In Black Granite Down In Washington, D.C.

The 50^th Anniversary Of “Life” Magazine’s Bringing The Vietnam War Home With The Photographs Of The Guys Who Died During One Week In June 1969-Their Names Now Etched For Eternity In Black Granite Down In Washington, D.C.

Clink on link to WBUR in Boston NPR segment on one Marine's story

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/06/27/life-magazine-vietnam-american-dead

By Sam Lowell     

This is a hard one, this fiftieth anniversary of the famous (some say infamous but they are wrong) issue of the now long gone Life magazine that would publish the photographs of those American soldiers, sailors, airmen who laid down their heads on the land, on the water and in the skies of Vietnam. I won’t at this late remove go over the controversy about what the magazine was trying to do by these publications which is in any case not my point today. I do want to as a fellow soldier (attached to the Fourth Infantry when they were creating hell in the Central Highlands in 1968-69) to put this particular anniversary in context with a number of other events we are commemorating 50^th anniversaries of this year.    

As dog soldier Patrick Riley (that is what he insists he calls himself to identify what kind o soldier he was and did as well working military intelligence in Vietnam in 1969) from Philly has so eloquently put the matter as a number of us have tried to sum up our personal 50^th anniversary memories of military service in and around that fateful year “when was the turning point that you turned against the war and did, or didn’t so something about that.” Patrick never did anything about his increasing opposition to the war while he was in Vietnam but “got religion” after returning home and finding himself stationed at Fort Holabird down in Maryland close by Washington, D.C. where his was drawn to the anti-war rallies which would become a permanent feature of his political life.

I confess that I too despite the blood and gore and stupidity did nothing in Vietnam except keep my head filled with whatever dope I could cadge on the open markets. Spent a few years after military service in the clutches of the “drug and music is the revolution” sphere and not until I got sober (after several unsuccessful attempts not unusual among addicts) did I start thinking about what I had done to people who I had no quarrel with. That “got religion” aided by the too young death of one of my hometown corner boys Pete Markin down in Mexico after some disastrous busted drug deal. He laid his head down there and lies in some potter’s field grave without us knowing squat about what happened except the Federales warned us off any serious investigation. Pete’s death in important because he more than any of us fell down after his experiences in Vietnam. Wound up living for a long while with what would later be called “the brothers under the bridge” alternative universe in California for those who could not adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam. (He did nevertheless some award-winning stories reporting what ex-soldiers told him in the various camps for various alternative newspapers in the Bay Area.)        

See Markin, Pete, was the great shining example of what he called (and got us to call) the new breeze coming over the land in the 1960s before Vietnam blew all such dreams to hell. Would push us to coffeehouses and folk music (which I still hate even though I have written many reviews of albums and artists who made their dough doing this kind of work) and later heading to California when the Summer of Love stuff was in full blossom. Had us going to freaking anti-war demonstrations even though, then, all we cared about was cars, girls and sex. Reflecting on what we knew about Pete’s downfall got me thinking about how much I hated war, hated the idea of what I had done and so like Patrick and a fistful of other ex-soldiers and veterans of other service branches I too have spent a lifetime trying to get on the right side of the angels on the pressing questions of war and peace.

I originally had not expected to be writing about the anniversary of the Life magazine photo spread but an WBUR in Boston NPR segment during Morning Edition on July 1^st which featured one of those 200 plus soldiers, a Marine actually, from Quincy, Massachusetts named James Hickey killed that week put my hairs on end. See that Marine whose story can be heard in the link I have provided above was also a member of the Class of 1969 who made a very different decision (along with some of his high school classmates from Quincy High School, a school we played in football back then). That town a working- class town like my own of North Adamsville was only about twenty miles away but the story is a million miles from the story which I wanted to exclusively mention, that of military resister Frank Jackman who had a very different Class of 1969 story.         

Let me take a step back though to see how those two, actually the many stories revolve around that idea Patrick Riley has been harping on about “the turning point” every young man of the Generation of ’68 had to work through, not all to their eventual benefit. One night a few weeks ago a few of us from Veterans Peace Action (VPA), an organization of veterans and supporters who by demographic happenstance are mainly Vietnam War veterans who served one way or another in that same 1969 Life was dealing with in their display. We had had a few drinks at Jimmy Jacks’ over in Cambridge where we find ourselves more and more these days drumming up opposition to the threatening war clouds around Iran. During that conversation we noticed that almost all the crowd had some connection with 1969, a few supporters with a very different connection via Woodstock the massive music festival also having its 50^th anniversary commemoration. That got us to thinking about putting together a booklet of remembrances, maybe a video for the historical archives.

A small group of us decided to check into doing the project. Most of us would be talking about our service or about how we were able to avoid it in the cases of some supporters (too many crazy ass stories to tell here from posing as mentally ill to various physical ailment  a la Donald Trump’s bone spurs or whatever it was that got him out). As part of our investigation though we had run across a project, a related project as it turned out, created and set up by a bunch of professors none of whom had served in the military but had been involved in draft and GI counselling. The project centered on the very real semi-mutiny in the Army, on the GI resistance in America and in Vietnam which got a head of serious steam during 1969 and which ultimately forced the military brass to realize that rather than a citizen-soldier operation an all-volunteer operation would be more reliable in any future wars.       

Linking up the GI Resistance idea with that of those whose service centered around 1969 (with a nod to Woodstock) naturally brought up the name of one Frank Jackman, also of my old corner boy neighborhood. Frank, unlike Pete Markin who talked the talk about being opposed to war and in favor of all kinds of good things but in the end couldn’t walk the walk (which we still shed real tears over), had been a quiet “back bench” corner boy who was just about the unlikeliest one of our crowd to buck the military, to refuse fucking orders to Vietnam and pay the price with a good deal of time in an Army stockade.

Frank’s story, a 1969 story, is very different from that of the young Marine James Hickey killed out in the boonies of Vietnam but don’t think they were from two different planets despite a few years difference in ages. Frank came from a desperately poor family who nevertheless were very patriotic including a father who was a Marine in World War II and who caught all the action any man needed island-hopping out in the Pacific War. Whatever qualms Frank had though and they were real including the loss of two neighborhood guys, Rick Rizzo and Donny White, who laid down their heads in Vietnam and whose names are forever etched on the town memorial and like that young Marine on that black granite down in D.C. he like the rest of us accepted induction, accepted the draft or enlisted to get a better deal than being a freaking grunt. About three days in, by the time he got to his first Army base down in South Carolina he realized that he had made a serious mistake, had even made at least the outline of decision that he would refuse orders to Vietnam which in 1969 were the only ones available since the Army needed  bodies there like crazy.

Frank might have been quiet but he had been to college (had stayed in school hoping that the war would be over by the time he graduate and lost his student deferment) and knew that trying to do anything down in the unknown South far from home was not a good idea (he had infantry training in Georgia and Alabama) so he held his fire until he was given orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transport to Vietnam after some time at home before he left. Unknown to us, and frankly when we heard about what he proposed to do we were, at least I was, very hostile to what he was thinking about (it would actually take a few years for us to patch things up). He had gone over to some Quaker Meeting House in Cambridge where they were beside draft counselling offering GI counselling to see what he could do. I don’t know how he got the information to check that out since I was in fucking Vietnam and at that point unaware of what he was up to. One of the options they had given him was for Frank to go AWOL for some time in order to be what they called “dropped from the rolls” at Fort Lewis (more than 30 days it was more like 45 before they did so) and turn himself in at Fort Devens closer to home (and to the lawyer the Quakers through their network provided for him) to put in an application for conscientious objector status. Having, like the rest of us grown up a Catholic and so subject to the church’s “just war” theory he did not think much of that option since he was extremely unlikely to gain that status, but he went along with the outline.

I forget or don’t know all the details but although various people who interviewed him on the CO application thought he was sincere, which would be important later his application was denied. This, strangely, knowing quiet Frank back then, got him on his high horse. The Quakers from Cambridge and their anti-war allies had decided to hold a rally outside Fort Devens to protest the war (and show general support for the soldiers who might join the cause). Frank Jackman decided that he would join them-in uniform- during duty hours a definite no no but he held firm. Needless to say, once he reentered the fort he was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in some separate holding cell (the Army was afraid to let him out in the general prisoner population so he spent all his jail time in that holding area location.

No need to go into the details but given the nature of the “crime” he was given a special court-martial and received the maximum sentence of six months. During this time his lawyer from Cambridge had put in paperwork, a writ of habeas corpus, in the federal district court and as a result he was granted a TRO (temporary restraining order) pending resolution of the case. That turned out to be important for two reasons-on the day he was granted the TRO the Army brass had decided to ship Frank out, under guard, to Fort Lewis for transport to Vietnam. That TRO saved his ass then. As the reader can imagine the courts take a long time on cases, especially non-criminal actions like the writ so Frank actually served his time. He was not done though, and this still seems crazy to me, one morning he went to formation with the unit he was assigned with a big sign-“Bring the Troops Home.” Needless to say he was arrested again, sentenced to the hard six months, again and it seemed like he would be continuing that road forever. Except the federal district court granted that writ and he was sprung.                    

That was one story, a story of a brave friend who I wish I could have followed back then. James Hickey’s story though should be noted too and it has been through this radio segment. I wish he could have lived a long life.