For the 4th of July-An American Peace- Thoughts Of An American
Vietnam War Soldier
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area). Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before his scheduled retirement time the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.
So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam and Ralph’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper (and a serious Vietnam War military resister which will be detailed a little below) although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.
The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.
Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).
People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.
Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).
Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s).
No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change.
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces. Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic. Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).
Ralph Morris additional comment (Summer 2015):
[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area). Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before his scheduled retirement time the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.
So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam and Ralph’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper (and a serious Vietnam War military resister which will be detailed a little below) although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.
The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.
Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).
People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.
Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).
Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s).
No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change.
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces. Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic. Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).
See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war
movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the
war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s
term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s
ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams.
Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the
military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while
he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon
fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry
guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation
of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in
1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called
for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up
with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every
commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended
his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not
so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war
had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to
do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into,
nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When
he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by
Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication
even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn
thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking
part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.
Here is the way Ralph
told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty
of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being
arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high
compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van
Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as
the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on
purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but
with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and
signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still
patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything
like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to
a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to.
One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join
them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in
Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to
join his “band of brothers.”
Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington
had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW
supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little
sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was
the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed
away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s
print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later
open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack
Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the
1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph
the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative
indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his
closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central
Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had
been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that
he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than
he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people,
everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go
Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce
correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best
friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of
more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before
some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual
or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country
right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away
for no good reason as far as that went.
At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist
types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out
more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his
generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at
draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where
Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among
the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother
and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting
stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining
up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge
meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that
might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming
the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of
those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”
1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two
stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at
that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help
out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about
changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a
group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war
under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut
down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and
supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met
on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area
for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)
So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having
before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the
American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a
street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that
disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more,
and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular,
had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who
were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as
veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about
any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on
that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part
of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party
Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and
like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the
streets.
Ralph told Sam while
in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their
relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991
when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in
whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple
of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).
Ralph has like he
said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in
Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a
different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the
current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that
damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down
the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up
as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the
Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would
not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned
the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat
like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a
literary prize writing a book about, Armies
of the Night. Silly them.
They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching
for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those
few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started
what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation
between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater
social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping
wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after
a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped
that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side
exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got
out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later
to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red
collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same
kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with
over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s
had ebbed.
Old time high school thoughts
even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the
back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they,
were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an
icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes.
Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one
night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before
heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.
Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for
Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice
issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New
York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who
never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had
lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been
fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him a very angry young man
when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about
it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his
war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his
father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country,
right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to
the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did
it, for a while.
Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when
after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little
to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten
into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused
on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an
introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in
Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from
Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone
wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why
they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just
then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out
of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke
up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he
didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike
something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A
Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph
lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.
That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after
about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called
classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A
couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its
relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was
happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and
the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward
blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little
about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and
consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the
Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in
Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question,
not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets
in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe
others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state
came crashing down on them.
The biggest problem
though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist
movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing,
wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get
together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social
Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and
Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their
heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights
out.
All in all though
they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart
intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the
doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it.
Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they
would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve
million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a
stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had
stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a
Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time
religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on
the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for
a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as
committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it.
At the beginning in
any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s
old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy
stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling
for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision
although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and
kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing.
The Marxism did not
come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had
taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built
from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his
main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old
Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his
campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be
done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more
importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days
to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind
Marxism, that impossible to read Das
Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with
seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976
when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around
with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation
struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest
“socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their
socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed
fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.
After that time while
they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody,
some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they
would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered
back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly
a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term
picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an
almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking
their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that
had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red
collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed
just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor
once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.
Then the endless wars
came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and
Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your
country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the
disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled
Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in
place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that
despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for
“boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the
world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central
Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts
would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep
like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral
damage.
So the wars drove
them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession
(really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings
this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy
movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its
head publically.
More troubling
recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young
black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their
teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a
matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that
the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were
nobody’s friends, and should moreover be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber
of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how
were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement
driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for
the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black
Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about
the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full
force.
Everywhere they went,
to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of
the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam
thought one time, maybe more than one time that maybe those earnest kids with
their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of
them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep
showing up to support the “good old cause.”
Ralph Morris additional comment (Summer 2015):
This is my first effort at writing for a blog so bear with
me but I have been incensed, no, worse than that, in a rage, over the recent
announcement by the Obama administration that he is sending more American
“advisers” into the hell-hole in Iraq. The classic incremental mission creep
anybody who knew anything about the situation in Iraq could have told you was
going to happen after the last set of escalations Obama announced over a year
ago. My old friend Sam Easton whom I have worked with in the anti-war struggles
since we met in RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. when we were trying to shut
down another government, the Nixon one of unblessed memory, to end the bombing
escalations of the already lost Vietnam War, and got nothing but a few days in
the bastinado for our efforts is also livid about the latest Obama stunt which
has all the earmarks of previous “mission creeps”-escalations to call a thing
by its right name. Sam usually is the one who actually likes, if you can
believe this, to write his little pieces about what is on his mind and I
contribute on the ideas end but Sam has convinced me that I should go public on
this one.
See Sam is always one for symbolism, has been as long as I
have known him and learned why he was back in 1971 so incensed about the
Vietnam War since he had had an exemption due to the fact that he was the sole
support of his mother and four younger sisters. Actually I had met him first on
that May Day after my own arrest for trying to march with a group of
ex-veterans to the Pentagon to stage a symbolic shutdown and I had noticed him
wandering around the football field wearing a button as a supporter of my
organization, Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and asked if he was a
member since I had not seen him at any of our actions. Then he told me the
story about Jeff Mullin his closest high school friend being blown away in 1968
in some nondescript village near Pleiku up in the Central Highland not all that
far from where my unit was located for most of 1967.
He said that he had become an anti-warrior with a vengeance
and a supporter of VVAW in Jeff’s memory sitting in at draft boards, military
bases, recruiting stations and the like in the Boston area and had come down
with a group of radicals from Cambridge when they, he, had gotten totally fed
up with the Nixon government’s continuation of a war that could only tear the
country apart further.
My own story when I told it to Sam as we lingered in that
stadium for a few days before we figured out (based on somebody else’s information)
that there were some unguarded side exits in which to get out was not untypical
of a lot of guys, a lot of working class guys anyway, maybe a few college guys
too early on in the war. I had been working in my father’s high precision electrical
shop in Troy, New York which had a number of contracts with General Electric,
in those days the largest private employer in the area, who had a ton of
contracts with the Defense Department. When my draft notice came in late 1966 I
flipped out, decided that I did not want to be “cannon fodder” (I did not know
that term then or would not have used it then if I did, that came later) and
joined up, RA (Regular Army), figuring or rather my recruiting sergeant
figuring that I would get into electronics, something I could be useful at.
But see in 1967, 1968 what Uncle wanted was cannon fodder in
Vietnam to go out into the bush and kill commies. And I did, extending my tour
six months in 1968 to get out of my three year commitment a little early. But
when I got out I freaked out, freaked out about what I had done to those poor
villagers who got in the way, got in the cross-fire, freaked about what my
buddies had done too, but mainly was disgusted that the American government had
made animals out of us, nothing less. So sure I headed to VVAW like a moth to a
flame.
And not just giving a couple of years in my youth either
since Sam and I have been putting on the good fight against this damn
government’s endless wars, whoever was running it, ever since, especially since
the start of the 2003 Iraq endless war. So when a guy like Obama, a Nobel Peace
Prize winner if you can believe that (hell, whatever criterion they used on
that one probably George Bush I and II could have qualified too), starts
rattling off about how we need to go in and stiffen up the Iraq Army which has
this tendency to run the minute there is an conflict (heck, maybe they should
be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, or some prize for having sense enough to
run away from a fight that can do them
no good) then I dust off my “Not Another War in Iraq” sign and hit the streets.
Sam too.
You know why-because we have heard that one before, heard it
in the American death pits of Vietnam, know it is the same old government rot
with a new name, ISIS this time but Viet Cong then. We called them “Charlie”
amongst ourselves, at first out of disrespect since we figured we would have them
and their ticky-tack minimal military hardware wrapped up by the end of our
tours but later, later but definitely after Tet in 1968 we changed up a little,
showed more respect when we had to face his relentless fire and his coming on
forever despite the high casualty rates. Learned the hard way too more than
night when we got overrun that the “night belonged to Charlie,” hell, we could
have told the brass the whole damn day 24/7 belonged to the man. They would not
have listened though, they never do when they get the blood lust up. So Sam and
I urge you to get out in the streets-again. It is the only way to make them
listen. And if they don’t well remember May Day 1971 and maybe this time if we
have enough people who want to express the “better angels of their nature” we
can shut down the damn wars.
That is the political action part here is how Sam and I have
been putting our heads together over the last couple of years as we could see
with un-blinkered eyes the nightmare scenario which Obama and his military
gurus and hangers-on have unleashed. Listen up:
One night not long
ago when my friend from Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern
Massachusetts, Sam Eaton, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure,
having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston,
arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy
drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also
mentioned which is germane here in discussing the broader category of the
seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at
the close of our lives so that we never again utter the word “peace” with
anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of
Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and
civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam
War days. For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the
last couple of generations of America’s wars has for over a quarter of a
century been determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first
instrument, of American policy in what it sees as a hostile world (a view that
it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of
devastation brought forth has changed).
But Sam is nothing if
not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at
Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of
American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the
failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and with it whatever rationale
made the American government built a thing from which it had to run. Here is
some of our thinking as this damn Iraq War started escalating a couple of years
ago:
“Nobel “Peace” Prize
Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed
in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship
to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the
House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least
more vociferously so) and internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys,
etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the
north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred
at last count (but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and
mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other
tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti), to
“protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose
main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly
limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of
American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified
Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and
ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to,
quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation
mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).
Of course the
existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for
authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like
any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the
United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless
American blunders from the get go has helped create.
All these actions,
and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American
military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on
the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever
since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a
kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us
very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of
disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these
actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation
(and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes
puts paid to that thought).
And during all this
deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar
(Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning
no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone
Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have
already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually
non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they
want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?
Now not every event
in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States
Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang
around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners,
placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In
Iraq!–Stop The Bombings!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War
Budget Appropriations!
Here is something to think about picked
up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent [2014] small anti-war
rally:
Workers and the oppressed have no
interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary
Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However,
the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist
intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops
and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to
the world’s working people and downtrodden.
[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]
