An Encore Salute To The Untold
Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The 40th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho
Chi Minh City)-An American Ex-Soldier’s Story.
Greg Green, site manager
Introduction
[In early 2018, shortly after I had taken over
the reins as site manager at this on-line publication I “saw the light” and
bowed to the wisdom of a number of older writers who balked at my idea of
reaching younger and newer audiences by having them review films like Marvel/DC
Comics productions, write about various video games and books that would not
offend a flea unlike the flaming red books previously reviewed here centered on
the now aging 1960s baby-boomer demographic which had sustained the publication
through good times and bad as a hard copy and then on-line proposition. One
senior writer, who shall remain nameless in case some stray millennial sees
this introduction and spreads some viral social media hate campaign his way,
made the very telling observation that the younger set, his term, don’t read
film reviews or hard copy books as a rule and those hardy Generation of ’68
partisans who still support this publication in the transition from the old
Allan Jackson leadership to mine don’t give a fuck about comics, video games or
graphic novels. I stand humbled.
Not only stand humbled though but in
a valiant and seemingly successful attempt to stabilize this operation decided
to give an encore presentation to some of the most important series produced
and edited by Allan Jackson-without Allan. That too proved to be an error when
I had Frank Jackman introduce the first few sections of The Roots Is The Toots Rock And Roll series which Allan had sweated
his ass over to bring out over a couple of years. Writers, and not only senior
writers who had supported Allan in the vote of no confidence fight challenging
his leadership after he went overboard attempting to cash in on the hoopla over
the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in
1967 but also my younger writer partisans, balked at this subterfuge. One
called it a travesty.
Backing off after finding Allan, not
an easy task since he had fled to the safer waters of the West looking for work
and had been rumored to be any place from Salt Lake City to some mountainous
last hippie commune in the hills of Northern California doing anything from
pimping as press agent for Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate campaign in Utah to
running a whorehouse with Madame La Rue in Frisco or shacking up with drag
queen Miss Judy Garland in that same city, we brought Allan back to do the
introductions to the remaining sections. That we, me and the Editorial Board
established after Allan’s demise and as a guard against one-person rule, had
compromised on that gesture with the last of the series being the termination
of Allan’s association with the publication except possibly as an occasional
writer, a stringer really, when some nostalgia event needed some
attention.
That was the way things went and not
too badly when we finished up the series in the early summer of 2018. But that
is not the end of the Allan story. While looking through the on-line archives I
noticed that Allan had also seriously edited another 1960s-related series, the Sam and Ralph Stories, a series centered
on the trials and tribulations of two working-class guys who had been
radicalized in different ways by the 1960s upheavals and have never lost the
faith in what Allan called from Tennyson “seeking a newer world” would
resurface in this wicked old world, somebody’s term.
I once again attempted to make the
mistake of having someone else, in this case Josh Breslin, introduce the series
(after my introduction here) but the Editorial Board bucked me even before I
could set that idea in motion. I claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that Allan
was probably out in Utah looking for some residual work for Mitt Romney now
that he is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator for Utah or running back
to Madame La Rue, an old flame, and that high- end whorehouse or hanging with
Miss Judy Garland at her successful drag queen tourist attraction cabaret. No
such luck since he was up in Maine working on a book about his life as an
editor. To be published in hard cop y by well-known Wheeler Press whenever he
gets the proofs done. So hereafter former editor and site manager Allan will
handle the introductions on this encore presentation of this excellent series.
Greg Green]
Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction
[As my replacement Greg Green, whom
I brought in from American Film Gazette
originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on
editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes
of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s
upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his
general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an
encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph
Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why
this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass
movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly
made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were
like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also
somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which
emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which
represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under
ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’
ethos and fate.
As I said I will describe that
transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime”
I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over
the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green
has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival,
about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not
have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around”
something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as
well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend
Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The
Roots Is The Toots rock and roll
coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever
worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam
Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote
against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I
have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into
the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket.
(Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles
with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided
through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts
to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious
segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called
fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off
and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been
present at the creation.
That would have been the end of it
but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos
around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in
the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the
archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing
some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing
films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic
novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world
that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic-
driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another
series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore
presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again
attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I
meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series
citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact
that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.
This time though the Editorial
Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach
Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to
insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called
autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told
Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have
put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have
willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can
understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in
my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their
opportunity to move up.
That part I had no problem with,
told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend”
about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no
confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only
after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all
places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame
Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old
days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy
Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that
same town whom I also helped stake to
his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on
my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in
love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.
If the reader can bear the weight of
this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the
so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite
all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various
aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the
publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days
before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I
clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I
had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason,
although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a
brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.
Tapped out in the East for a lot of
reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I
ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody
there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the
whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his
white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate.
So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the
preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie
Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat.
Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these
Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith
days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the
religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph
Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.
The helping Madame La Rue, real name
of no interest or need to mention,
running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least
had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the
downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high
class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our
dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy
lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night
when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a
fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly,
said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place
for a while until I had to move on. Done
The whole drag queen idea tells me
that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and
had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking
with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to
slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is
the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old
neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual
identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front
gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had
lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money
to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to
stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East.
Done.
But enough about me. This is about two other working- class guys,
Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty
miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and
learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from
that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North
Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working
class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught
up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to
introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam
and Ralph in future segments.]
Allan Jackson Introduction To Sam
and Ralph-The Wild Boys of Cambridge When Cambridge Was Jammed Full Of Wild
Girls And Boys
[Some guys from the old days, from
the old growing up poor in the working-class Acre section of North Adamsville,
I still have contact with over fifty years later. Guys like Seth Garth who is
now in a “battle” along with his new protégé Sarah Lemoyne who looks for all
the world to be an up and coming contributor to this publication against his,
and my, old time friend Sam Lowell who promised me he would retire, especially
after he provided the key last and decisive vote when the younger writers rose
up against my editorship and forced me to retire. Forced me West seeking
another job to keep myself solvent causing all kinds of rumors and fairy tales
to enter the world which only muddied up the already murky waters. Other guys
like beautiful Si Lannon and generous benefactor to this publication Jack
Callahan also come to mind. Of course the elephant in the room has always been,
and probably always will be, one Peter Paul Markin, who taught us many things
before his sadly untimely demise caused by his own hubris many years ago. I
honored his memory for years using his name as my moniker in various publishing
efforts and will detail the genesis of that decision in the memoir of my time
in the publishing industry which I am working on and expect to complete by next
year.
I am proud to have had the chance to
keep so many friendships from the old neighborhoods days as I am a man who puts
a great deal into things like loyalty and camaraderie. Of course those
relationships do not exhaust the number of long friendships and close working
relationships. Josh Breslin met in the Summer of Love, 1967, Zack James,
youngest brother of my closest friend in high Alex, and Lance Lawrence come
readily to mind. Then there are guys, I am only talking guys today as I will
deal with gals in an up-coming introductory segment, like fellow Vietnam
veteran Ralph Morris from over in Troy, New York whom I met I believe down in
Washington, D.C. in 1971 a few weeks before we, Vietnam Veterans Against The
War (VVAW), did our part to try to shut down the government to shut down the
war on May Day -and failed. Guys like his friend Sam Eaton from Carver about
fifty miles from North Adamsville, not a
veteran since he was exempted from the draft as the sole support of his mother
and four sisters after his father passed away suddenly of a heart attack, whom Ralph
“met” after both had been arrested in those May Day actions in “jail” at the
RFK football stadium. They, Sam and Ralph, and I have stayed in contact over
the years and have worked on many political projects mostly against war
together.
That
brings me to the idea behind having Sam and Ralph as the central characters in
a series I helped plan around the story- and fate- of some working- class
radicals who for the most part had kept the faith, had not retreated to self,
had not given up the mist of change we were struggling for in those halcyon and
heady 1960s upheaval days. At the cost of over-generalization the thing that
united the North Adamsville remnant, including me, guys like Josh Breslin and
guys like Sam and Ralph was our working-class backgrounds. While the road to
new understandings of the ways of the world were different we all arrived at
some similar conclusions and since then have seen no reason to dramatically
change them if in the aging process we are less able to stir the old energies. Have
been ready to “pass the torch” for a while. The stories of the old North
Adamsville corner boys had by 2012 or so been done to death as had the stories
centered on other working-class guys like Josh Breslin from places like Olde
Saco up in Maine and so the natural place to turn was the long-time relationship
between Sam and Ralph. Things seemed right in the universe doing the series
then-and now with this encore.]
Allan Jackson’s Encore Introduction
to “An Ex-American Soldier’s Story”
Some generations are
driven by events that have world historic importance-Pearl Harbor, December 7,
1941 the day of infamy according to President Franklin Roosevelt, maybe not so
to others but that is for the historian to decipher and 9/11 2001 come readily
to mind. For the Generation of ’68 Peter Paul Markin’s designation for the
generation, or the best part of it that rose up to try and slay the dragon of
the Vietnam War that fateful April 30, 1975 when with a puff of air the North
Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front waltzed int
to Saigon, now rightfully Ho Chi Minh City after the great national liberation
leader, after a 10,000 day world, the bloodiest and most bloodthirsty part the
American invasion from say 1964 to that well-known photograph of the evacuation
of the U.S. Embassy by helicopter of the last remnant of the America hubris in
the area.
Not everybody,
soldier or civilian saw, sees that day as cause for some serious contemplation,
reflection about the borders of hubris. Some soldiers, some fellow soldiers,
and this is what I want to make sure I get clear in this introduction did their
duty as they saw it, came home and as best as they could got back to the real world, that was probably
a majority of the roughly two million military personnel who served in that
conflict. Another segment, smaller and more troubled never did get back to the
“real” world. Drugs, physical maladies, mental problems, and just getting back
the nine to five world they had expected to inhabit proved too much. Guys like
the guys who famously became the “brothers under the bridge” that I wrote about
for the East Bay Other after I had
come back from Vietnam and had had my own troubles getting back into that real
world. The epitome, the personal known to me epitome of that soldier though was
Peter Paul Markin, whose moniker I used for a number of years to honor my
fallen hometown neighborhood friend and brother who taught me, us many things
before he went under and who had done okay for a while but just couldn’t get
rid of the demons in his head, what Seth Garth, using a line from a Patty
Griffin song “put out the fire in your head” used to say.
Then there were the
Ralph Morris-types who came back ready to smite dragons, and is still ready to
do so, ready to take on all comers who want to get this country into yet
another war and who as a sidebar has fought under various banners for social
justice ever since. I met Ralph down in Washington in the spring of 1971 when
he, I, was red hot to express his outrage at the murderous actions of his
government against people with which he had no quarrel. We were linked up with other ex G.I.s in
various actions as veterans, as guys who knew and saw things up close and
personal and ready to do something, maybe give up our lives if it came to that
to stop the fucking war (that is still the only way I can describe it with the
“fucking” in front). Ralph knew the war
was fucked, knew it in his bones but it took the actual experience of going to
sort things out. Sure he had his problems coming home but he stayed the course.
A guy like Ralph would not have been as happy, if that is the way to put such a
thing, as the North Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese Liberation
fighters to have the damn war finished in 1975 but every year he, we reflect on
the day and are proud of our small part in helping try to stop the thing from
going on forever.]
Ralph Morris comment:
Yeah, sure I served
in Vietnam, served Regular Army, after I kind of panicked when I got my draft
notice from my “friends and neighbors” at the Troy, New York draft board in
late 1966 and enlisted expecting, based on a foolish belief in the recruiting
sergeant, that I would be placed in an electronics MOS by doing so. I can still
remember my G.I. dog-tag number RA038341396, that RA in front of the numbers
not like a lot of guys, guys who I wished I had been more like who had “U.S.”
before their dog-tag numbers signifying that they were draftees, maybe kicking
and screaming draftees like a guy I ran into in the G.I. anti-war movement in
1971, Fritz Jasper, who was a big guy in Vietnam Veterans Against the War
(VVAW) and who had served a year in an Army stockade before they let him out
for refusing to go to ‘Nam.
But what did I know
then. What did I know like Fritz who was one of those kicking and screaming
draftees out of New York City, Brooklyn I think, about getting with
Quaker-driven draft counsellors or military resistance counsellors once he knew
after about three day in the Army in 1969 that he was in the wrong place and
every instinct told him that year that he was going to ‘Nam if he didn’t do
something quick to get the military’s attention. So he did first by refusing
his orders and then by refusing to do a damn Army thing. They put his ass in
some damn stockade down South and were
going to throw away the key before some people he was in contact with, some
Quaker people or people who worked with Quakers got him some legal help and
they went to federal court to spring him. Remind to tell you some more of his
story sometime because it is kind of interesting when people ask me about
military resisters then.
That’s the big case I
tell them about because I know it cold although I know there were plenty of
others, plenty that got some coverage. Maybe better I will ask Fritz to tell
his story sometime because, guess what, that resistance/stockade experience
made a peacenik “lifer” out of him. He is working with Veterans For Peace down
in the city just like I am in Troy (really the whole North Country area and in
Boston when I visit Sam Eaton who has a big part in this story and the VFP
chapter there needs warm bodies for an action.)
And what if I did
know how to make those anti-war connections. What good would it have done me
since before ‘Nam I was enthrall to some pretty red, white and blue notions,
some ideas it has taken my whole freaking dead ass life to break from, and I
still breaking from. All I know is this, bloody, forlorn god forsaken Vietnam
changed my life, probably has been the number one experience that has kept me
going trying to light the lamp of peace. If I hadn’t I today probably would be
like a lot of guys and gals who were waving South Vietnamese National
Liberation Front (NLF) flags like I did later on when I got “religion” on the
war issue. Waved that flag at the end when the “other side” came down Highway
One in Vietnam in the Spring of 1975 like bats out of hell and resolved the
whole thing in a couple of months, stuff that had taken thirty years of their
blood and over ten of ours to conclude not to count the whole torn apart
countries left in the wake. Those others have now long past made their peace
with the American empire, made it quick and easy when the deal when down and
the American government pulled the hammer down and they flinched when it
counted a whole bunch of times since, times like Iraq 2003. Yeah, some people
learn the hard way but they learn the lesson well.
Yeah, what good would
all of that knowledge done me then. See my old man, Ralph, Senior, ran a high precision
electrical shop doing a lot of work for the big employer in the area, General
Electric, a company which had many big contracts with the Department of Defense
in those years and I worked for him a couple of years in high school and after
I got out so I expected that I could do something useful for the Army with that
skill. But see beside that little “error” in believing word one from that damn
recruiting sergeant, First Sergeant Riley, a good old boy, a “lifer” ( a very
different “lifer” from Fritz Jasper) from Arkansas who had already done two
tours in ‘Nam and had blessed the Army each and every day for giving him shoes
and three squares a day if I recall, the United States of America under the
benevolent guidance of some damn Texan, Lyndon Johnson, LBJ, to be exact in
1967, 1968 was looking for nothing but “grunts” to comb the bushes and jungles
of Vietnam. Looking for grunts to flush out every commie from every hut in
every hamlet in that benighted country no matter how long it took and how much “collateral
damage” ensued so I was trained as an 11B (Bravo), an infantryman, a “grunt,”
“cannon fodder” although I didn’t pick up that last term until later, later
when I got discharged, when people explained to me in concrete terms what I
was, all that I was, to the people who ran the damn war.
That discharge
business is important because unlike a couple of guys I heard about who were
raising hell about the war, in Vietnam if you can believe that, yeah, raising
holy hell, and guys I ran into later at Fort Dix who had joined the G.I.
anti-war resistance after I came back to the “real world” I didn’t raise any
hell while I was in the Army. (And knew nothing about Fritz’s case even though
as he showed me a copy later it was publicized at Fort Dix via a G.I.
newspaper, The Morning Report, run
out of one of the G.I. coffeehouses that were sprouting up around military
bases when the civilian anti-war movement, the radical students mainly,
realized they had to get to the grunts if they were going to end the war on
their terms not that of the American government.) Didn’t see the percentage in
it, didn’t want to wind up in Long Binh Jail, the LBJ as everybody in-country
called it, or worse, some long forgotten stretch out in the prairies of Kansas
at Fort Leavenworth, the place where they now have the heroic Wiki-leaks
whistle-blower Private Chelsea Manning doing a hard thirty-five year stretch
just for telling the truth about American military atrocities in Iraq and
Afghanistan since 2001. [Since has had her sentence commuted by former
President Obama before he left office in 2017-AJ] Although this piece is about
my own military service and what I did or didn’t about what was going on in
Vietnam, mainly didn’t, except a few words to buddies over beers at the PX or
over a joint in the barracks or boondocks the Manning case grabbed me, grabbed
me hard and I took her case to heart. [For those not in the know or who don’t
recognize the case by that name before her conviction and sentencing in August
2013 she was known a Bradley Manning before coming out as “tran” which makes
her being at the all-male prisoner Leavenworth that much harder.] I went to many rallies in her
support, raised money for the legal defense, circulated every kind of petition
to get her free, still do, and went down to Fort Meade where she was tried by
court-martial a few times. Yeah, call it guilt maybe, call it pay back, but I
was supporting a fellow soldier in her hour of need, something I didn’t do back
then. But enough of this.
In ‘Nam whatever I
did or didn’t do is where I got the “fire in the belly” to see that the whole
war was off balance, didn’t make the kind of sense right there in-country that
it did in faraway propaganda-drenched America, fighting commies, fighting dominos,
picking up on my father’s “my country, right or wrong” mentality or my corner
boys looking for some cheapjack glory learned from watching too many Green Beret-type movies. The reality:
picking off random peasants who got in the crossfire because we were too scared
to go forward if we thought VC was in the area or at night when we knew, not at
first but by 1968, that “the night belonged to Charlie” as we called him, first
as a term of disrespect but finally after Tet 1968 as an enemy worthy of
respect whatever the NCOs and officers said. Jesus. Yeah, that’s the patriotic
hogwash what I had to fight against, get rid of from my mind, and frankly it
has been a lifelong struggle on some things. (But get this who would have
thought that a sixty-something purple heart ex-soldier would be out on the
hustings to get a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, out of hard rock prison
back then, now even.)
But back in Vietnam
days, in-country not affected too much by reports of draft resistance in 1967
although I had had heard on Armed Forces Radio the bit about the student
radical trying to “levitate” the Pentagon (and thought it a weird thing to do
with gunfire all around me) and like I said a little about guys bucking against
the military system, mostly blacks who I got along with personally but there
was a lot of black nationalism in the air and we didn’t’ mix that much in 1967
(1968 yes after the Tet offensive showed what the hell we were up against we
made an “armed truce” to survive) but that was kind of so much air then. I had
been progressively getting more and more fed up with the war, with the killing,
with what it was doing to me, what it was doing to my buddies, and what the
United States of America was turning me and them into, nothing but animals.
I even extended my
tour from the usual year (thirteen months really when you figure in the 30 days
of R&R) to eighteen months so if I didn’t get killed I could get out a few
months earlier from my three year enlistment (and get as a bonus stationed at Fort
Dix at the end of my enlistment on the East Coast only a couple of hundred
miles from home). Well I might have had a death wish or something extending my
tour of duty but I made it out alive with only a small purple heart wound but
when I got out in late 1969 I joined, not right away but soon, that VVAW that I
talked about earlier. Yeah wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by me and
thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam is 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. I wound up
taking part in a lot of VVAW actions around Albany and New York City mainly.
Nah, I thought I was
going to but no I am not going to tell war stories here about what happened in
Vietnam, the “dog soldier” stories because you can read about them, or see a
movie like The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, films like that to get a
flavor of the heat and humiliation of battle or books by guys who did want to
tell “dog soldier stories” like Mike Caputo, and Phil Jackson. What I want to
talk about in this the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is the
“afterwards” part, the VVAW part, the May Day 1971 part, the “red collectives”
in Cambridge part with my old friend and political activist associate Sam Eaton,
and the part where I, not without some conflict came to cheer on the DNV/NLF
offensive in the Spring of 1975 which led to the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi
Minh City, and left ashes in American governmental mouths (and mine too but for
different reasons).
I didn’t really want
to tell any stories, didn’t want to think about Vietnam at all although that
experience one way or another touches my soul every damn day I live. I had in
fact for some years later denied to strangers that I had even served in Vietnam
including one girl, Joyell who I ran into at an anti-war rally on Cambridge
Common one time when I went there to visit Sam where she was waving a NLF flag
which made me wince at first but she was a beauty and very smart too so I took
a run at her and she at me, yeah, Joyell, a radical girl from Cambridge when
that was a cool thing to be in say 1972, 1973,
whom I dated for a year and had told that I had been a draft resister
and when she found out I was a Vietnam vet, even with the VVAW imprimatur, had
left me flat.
But see Sam, Sam
Eaton, and I had been talking one night a few months back after having a few
high-shelf whiskeys at our favorite watering hole, Jack Higgins’ Grille down
just outside the Financial District near Quincy Market when I had come to
Boston to see him on one of our periodic visits with each other and he said I
“owed it to the movement,” owed it to “the generations that came after” to
paraphrase a poem by Bertolt Brecht to tell how an average patriotic guy from a
sternly patriotic Cold War “my country, right or wrong” family, neighborhood,
city got “religion” on the issues of war and peace, and had kept the faith ever
since despite having to swallow some sad truths like that I had fought on the
wrong side of history in that fight, that whatever happened later the fight was
for the Vietnamese people to figure out without the mightiest military power in
the known world and in known history raining hell and damnation on those
benighted people.
See Sam, a guy who
didn’t go to war, didn’t have to go to war, because his draft board (his
“friends and neighbors”) in Carver, Massachusetts had exempted him on the very
reasonable grounds that he was then the sole support of his mother and four
younger sisters after his drunken sot of a father (Sam’s term) passed away of a
massive heart attack in 1965 is very keen on his history these days, has been
since the days when we got involved in those “red collective” study groups back
after the May Day 1971 fiasco. He had read that the United for Justice and
Peace (UJP) was hosting a series of events commemorating that fall of Saigon by
taking a retrospective look at what the American anti-war movement in general
did to aid that decisive event and how the various civilian and military
resistance movements, you know stuff like Fritz Jasper did by refusing to go to
Vietnam when under military orders to do so, did as well. So he dragged me to that
series and then bugged me for a couple of months afterward to write something like
a cautionary tale from a guy like me who was not a draft or military resister
but who nevertheless got “religion” on the war issue and unlike guys from VVAW
like the current Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry [2015]didn’t forget the
lessons when the “main chance” came along and he, Kerry, abandoned every decent
instinct he ever had.
So here goes. But
like I said I don’t want to, maybe can’t tell war stories except maybe a little
to show a point but no blood and gore stuff because all you need to know is
58,000 plus names on black marble down in Washington, D.C., hundreds of
thousands injured with small physical wounds like mine or grievous ones like
Johnny Jann from my platoon who lost both legs, mostly uncounted thousand with
PTSD, a mass of unnumbered suicides, tons of guys who never made it back to the
“real” world and wound up homeless living like Bruce Springsteen said like
“brothers under the bridge,” Vietnam bombed back practically to the Stone Age
maybe before if the Air Force generals had been totally unleashed, countless
hamlets, villages, towns blown to smithereens, millions of luckless innocent
people who didn’t bother a soul killed, almost as many “enemy” soldiers and
“friendlies” too. Yeah, that is all you need to know.
I remember commenting to Sam during the course of our conversations 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 we would not even be having the conversations we were having, not the two of us anyway, talking stuff about the virtues of the “enemy” which would have been treason talk if not legally then emotionally (both of also as we rattled on chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the black, gay, woman questions since lately we have 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).
I (and Sam too) had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread than among the working class 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, nothing but communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (I had stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with my 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 no too far from Carver 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 (me and my boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I 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 his boys had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity women, servile, domestic child-producing women like our good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot our whistles, attitudes which we had only gotten beaten out of us when we ran into our respective future wives (and me with Joyell too but don’t mention that to my wife Laura since all these years later she see red when I mention her name in any content) who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic types. 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 we had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in our eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around my way, my Troy hometown way).
See I, 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” (Sam’s
term). Like I said my story was a little bit amazing that way, since I had
served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam. But like I already told
you in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland
called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so I wound
up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every
commie I could get my hands on just like the General wanted.
After I got out I
worked in my father’s high precision electrical shop for a while to make some
dough and head west, head somewhere not stinking nowhere Troy, not the woe
begotten North Country. One day in 1970 I 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 I
thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found
out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in
front calling for “Immediate Withdrawal From Vietnam” in big black letters and
signing the banner with the name of the organization in red-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 and ties who had
never come close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something
defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to me 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 I needed, all
I needed to join my “band of brothers.”
Let me tell you thought how Sam and I met in Washington on
May Day 1971 because that will explain a lot of why I am writing this thing
that almost half a century later still hurts my brain. I remember that I had
first noticed that Sam was wearing a VVAW supporter button when I saw him on
the football field at RFK Stadium and I 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 also said 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 his high school friend Jack Callahan’s help
and which became Sam’s career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and
people started heading back to “normal” in the mid-1970s)
Oh yeah the reason we were in RFK was not for a football
game, the NFL Washington Redskins did not play that game in May, but because we
both respectively had been arrested along with thousands of others in a massive
civil disobedience action that I will tell more about in a minute. Sam told me,
since we had plenty of time to talk, 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, who like us had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had
written Sam 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 he said 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.
May Day 1971 was a watershed for both of us, both of us
before May Day having 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. I, in particular, had
been carried away with the notion that what I and my 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. I got “smart” on that one
fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it
that day, treated us like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention
in 1968, treated us like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and treated us just
like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the
streets.
I told Sam while were
in captivity that I had been working in my father’s shop for a while but our
relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991
when Ralph, Senior retired I took over the business). I would take part in
whatever actions I 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).
I had, like I said,
joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for that action down in
Washington, D.C. See 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 we were to end that
damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down
the war. Our group’s task, as part of the bigger scheme, since we 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 we figured (“we” meaning all those who
planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would not treat
it 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 us.
Sam and I after the fall-out from May Day 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 we had jointly suffered not
only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going
conversation between us over the next several years about how to bring about
the greater social change we sensed was needed before one could even think
about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story, in short, of how we 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 we had just
walked out. And got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to
Carver first, and me later going back 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. Collectives which we
would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years
before both of us 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 my mind when I first thought of Marx, Lenin
(I, we, 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 me
one night after a class and we were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge
before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying. That was the summer
of 1972, the year I broke from my father’s business and spent the summer in
Cambridge, the summer I first met Joyell, her waving in the breeze NLF flag and
her jet black hair and pale blue eyes.
I had gone out of my way to note in a blog entry for Fritz
Jasper’s New York VFP chapter that before I got “religion” on the anti-war and
later social justice issues I had held as many anti-communist prejudices as
anybody else in Troy, New York, not excluding my rabidly right-wing father who
never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had
lost the war in Vietnam. I had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed
was like the wind and my realization of that had made me a very angry young man from the time I got out of the Army
onward. I tried to talk to my father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up by
a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved
international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he
fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph,
Senior really wanted me to do ever was to get back to the shop and help him
fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And like I said I did it, for a
while.
I had also in that blog entry expressed my 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 when
me and Sam had gotten into a latter study group in Cambridge run by a “Red
October Collective.” That group focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an earlier introduction to the Marxist
classics. Sam was constantly trying to figure out why we were spinning our
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 so he
would drag me along half-kicking and screaming. At the end of each meeting we
would sing the Internationale before
the group broke up. At first I had a hard time with the idea of singing a
“commie” song (I didn’t put it that way but I might as well have according to
Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give
Peace A Chance, songs like that. As I, we got immersed in the group I
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 we began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called
classic Marxism strategy, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the
Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes had 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 neither of us knew
much about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes.
What caused the most fears and consternation for me was the
need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of
1905 and 1917. I 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 we had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971
when we were not thinking thought one about revolution (maybe others had such
ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down
on us anyway.
At the beginning in
any case, and that might have affected my ultimate decision, some of my old
habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff,
just like at first I had had trouble despite all I knew about Vietnam, what it
had to meant to me and my buddies, that the other side had the better argument
in history calling for victory to the Viet Cong. But I got over it, got in the swing, mostly.
Joyell and her energy helped a lot then too. And I still think that was the
right outcome. Enough said.
The Marxism did not
come easy, the theory part, maybe for me 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, our anti-war campaigns).
We got that the working-class, our 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
us both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide
really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see we hung around with the local
“reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and
political prisoner defense work.
Those were really our
earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked us for a model of what our
socialism looked like we probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed
fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats. Yeah,
those were heady times, we made a ton of mistakes but one that we didn’t make
was having silent thrills in our hearts when the DNV/NLF troops came swooping
down on Saigon April of 1975. Even if I gave the slightest pause at first
hearing.
