Marching with the Moratorium
November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.
On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.
The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.
As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.
Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!
Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:
[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…
That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.
The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."
What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.
Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
A Few Notes about Vietnam, Part 41
Linda and Washington. Peace marches, protests. Rock concerts and art museums. My VW convertible, my 250CC Suzuki, my MX-5. So much time. A bicycle in South Vietnam. A hitched ride in a deuce and a half. It all becomes mixed up somehow—time out of sequence. There is an old saying that life is motion, that when you stop moving, you finish dying. In my dissertation, written on the Vietnam War novels back in 1984, I wrote, and again this was many years ago, about the helicopters in Vietnam:
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Helicopters were used for almost as many purposes as there were missions in the war. They were observers, searching for the Viet Cong; destroyers, raining bullets from the sky; saviors, transporting the wounded to hospitals; hearses, carrying the dead to military morgues; status symbols, cadillacing for every field grade office in the American Army.
I used them to travel from place to place, most notably to and from Dak To in 1967. And, God help me, I loved them. I loved half standing and leaning out the side of the olive drab bird, hanging onto the strap a door gunner used, looking down on a green land that we were destroying, loved the almost vertical take-off and the slow, sometimes spiraling landings. Motion, movement! Hardly anything else matters, it’s reality and it’s a metaphor…if you think about it in grand enough terms. This is why Emily Dickinson has death come as a coachman to give us a ride across the fields and across a lifetime.
In another essay, published years later in Tattoo Highway, I wrote about a dream trip through Milwaukee, a city I have still never been in:
The bumper sticker on the car ahead says MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT and vanishes with its car heading down an off ramp to somewhere...or not. I am almost always happy when I’m driving even when I have no destination in mind, just wheeling off down a road that, with luck, I’ve never driven before. Like driving through Milwaukee on this particular afternoon when nothing happens except a few old friends appear, vanish, reappear. I am in the house on Nueces Street and I am in Milwaukee and I am sitting in an old chair. Laura, who never lived there, is on the floor, her cheek against my knee, her long dark hair flows down my leg as I drive past an exit sign that says Khe Sanh—20Km. We were never lovers, Laura and I, for some reason neither of us has ever figured out, but it’s right somehow that she is here in Milwaukee as the world is coming to an end.
I begin to relive a drive I took almost 40 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there.
When I was discharged from the Army back in December, 1969, I drove straight through, barely sleeping. The first two nights in Austin I rejoined Don and Allen and we crashed with Ann and her two room-mates. For a while the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago, almost alien to the way we all live now.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life instead of on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brief phone call and that time in my life, that time, deserved something more monumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the morning after I made that decision, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in my 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first eight or nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four to five states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia, top down, a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and seemed, also, to be below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out, nodding off from time to time, jerking awake. But finally, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours. After a few minutes,I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to.
This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive almost becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until nine that evening did Linda wake me up. The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her, after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye. I have not seen her again.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. Then, I drove back to Austin.
This was all part of the zeitgeist, part of the spirit of the age. Today, some people break up by texting; in those days, I felt I had to do the honorable thing and break up face to face. It’s not part of Vietnam, but it is part of what led me to do certain things: a sense, almost like Hemingway’s sense of “grace under pressure,” that here are things we must do to continue to be honorable people, to be able to continue living with ourselves.
The next blog entry will be about the great peace march of November 15, 1969, and we’ll be back in motion again.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam, Part 40
Moratoriums and Mobilizations
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
So, I drifted. Linda anchored me a bit, Linda and the twins. I suspect this would be a very different blog if she were writing it, but we can only always see things through our own eyes and even if two or more of us look at the same thing, we do not see the same thing. Thus, we get arguments about the massacres at Hue with some people not believing and others taking the killings as an article of faith. And how many different ways is it possible to lose a war and did we lose a war? Some people claim that because we left in 1973, before the war was over, that we did not lose the war, our allies, puppets, whatever…they lost the war. Those same people, at least some of them, claim the South Vietnamese would not have lost the war if we had continued to supply them and to provide at least aerial support.
By 1969, I just wanted the killing to stop. I wanted to pick up The Washington Post and read baseball scores and not body counts. That summer, 1969, I participated in a number of small demonstrations, usually outside the White House and always on weekends. It was illegal for me to wear my uniform while I was protesting against, but it was not illegal for certain officers to wear theirs while they were supporting, the war. Either both or neither should be illegal.
I remember quite clearly Linda and I walking with a few hundred people down Pennsylvania Avenue one Saturday morning. We were all holding hands and singing songs of peace. An older man walked up to me and said something to the effect that before I spoke out against the country’s war in Vietnam, I should go myself and see what was happening. I told him I had been there until a few months earlier, that I spoke Vietnamese, that I knew (with a conviction that comes only when you’re very young) that the war was wrong. He said that since I had been there, I should know better than to march in the streets.
A priori assumptions. We all grew up in some social milieu that shaped us, that, as we say in the Catholic Church, “formed” us and yet, somehow, we can break out of that formation, turn from what we absorbed in our formative years.
That was a very small demonstration and, afterwards, Linda and I went to the Freer Gallery where I liked to rub my hands over the belly of a small Buddha for luck and wander into the Peacock Room and admire Whistler’s art and very strange sense of style. I always preferred the small demonstrations in Washington and, later, in Austin; I have never much cared to be a small part of a huge crowd though huge crowds do get all the news.
And then, on October 15, 1969, Linda and I joined a few hundred thousand people for what was a truly historic peace march. Here’s how I wrote about it several years ago:
I marched in October and in November in Washington, but the October march, though smaller, is the one that has always burned most brightly in my memory. Picture 75,000 people, almost all of us carrying candles, walking slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, quiet, singing softly, serious, but deep down happy to be where we were. We passed the White House and turned to the Treasury Building. We let the candle wax drip down on the black, wrought-iron fence and left our candles there to burn. The sky around the building, lit up with the flames of thousands of candles, was liked the most magnificent Christmas tree you could ever dream of us and we, some of us, knelt down quietly and prayed for peace. [from From the Periphery: poems and essays]
That night was and remains holy, at least to me, and I suspect to a large number of those 75,000 people who marched. When you do something significant, something that marks what you believe, and do what those of us who were once Baptists call “giving testimony” or “testifying,” you quite simply feel good and feel a great rush of sheer joy. I do not claim that feeling just for the peace movement but for anyone who walks in company with people who believe as he believes and is willing to show that belief.
I would march only once again in Washington, a month later, in a march that was far larger and that would, the very next morning, see me under investigation by the CID and denied entry into the gray walls of the National Security Agency, more than the Army my employer for the past three and a half years.
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