There's Something Happening Here
On May 4th, 1970, my first semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas in Austin, I was so out of everything having to do with Vietnam, with the National Security Agency, with the protest movement. I was living in the moment, taking classes, meeting young women, growing my hair long, reading Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and poets like John Berryman, Richard Wilbur and, well, a whole new/old world was opening in front of me. And then on May 4th, the world of the past few years crashed back into me. The news rocketed around the campus…four students killed, nine wounded…Ohio National Guard…the students, some of them at least, protesting the Cambodian incursion. [See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]
I had not joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War though I had actually received a written invitation to become a charter member. All of us who had signed that petition that had appeared in the New York Time the previous semester, damn, I was already thinking in terms of semesters!, had received charter member invitations. I decided not to join. I was proud to have marched with GI’s United Against the War and was now a doctoral student, a path I had started down when I had been drafted four years earlier. I didn’t want to join any veterans groups, not VVA, not VFW, none of them. I was a student and that was enough.
But the day after the Kent State killings, and I do not really care who was at fault, the Guard should not have fired, I joined thousands of other students from the University of Texas and marched in Austin, Texas. We finally squatted on “The Drag,” Guadalupe Street in front of the University of Texas. Austin police had snipers on the tops of the building—it had not been that many months since Charles Whitman has killed people from the UT Tower, which we could see from the street. Now, another sniper was on top of the Tower. That was the only demonstration I ever marched in where I was tear-gassed.
That night, we gathered together again under the Tower for an all night sleep-in. Those of us who taught either canceled our classes the next day or had what we liked to call a “teach-in.” I used my class that day to introduce anti-war poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. A few years later, I would have included Seigfried Sassoon, Wildred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; several years later and I would have added Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komuyakaa. That night was beautiful: crisp, cool. I zipped my sleeping bag together with my then girlfriend’s, and someone in the tower played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the great carillon. Hundreds of us sang the songs. The bell tones drifted out over Austin until someone in authority shut it down.
The next morning, we marched again. And then, things settled down. We went back to our classes, to our studies, to other things we were passionate about. Moments in time, memories. And yet four people even younger than I was then, four undergraduates, cannot look back on those days. And the Guardsmen who fired, I wonder if they can ever forget or even want to do so. Ten days later, two other students were killed, this time by the police, at Jackson State University. When I think of these things, I’m always reminded of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Friday, June 24, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Just a Few Notes About Vietnam #43
I Get Kicked out of the National Security Agency (Gently)
I should, I suppose, mention the huge march again. . .the one on November 15, 1969.
More than 500,000 of us marched through the streets of D.C. and gathered on the national mall to protest the war. As I have said, I found the October march more significant, almost spiritual in its quiet solemnity, but the November march was impressive for sheer numbers.
Finally, people seemed to get it. Please, don’t get me wrong. among the more arrogant things I always disliked about the “Peace Movement” was all the verbiage by 18- to 20-year-olds about the necessity to “educate the people.” The people were really no less educated than you or I; they merely disagreed with us. Well, that’s what I thought in the late 60s and early 70s, but the rise of the so-called “Tea Party” movement and the far right wing-nuts, of the "birthers" and "Fourteenthers" might mean that I should reassess my thoughts about that. In spite of that, I will always look back on both of those marches as important and memorable moments in my life.
Part of the sheer joy of those marches for me might have been that I knew I was getting out of the Army before Christmas and had been readmitted to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin for the spring semester. Part of it was having all of that to share with Linda Casson, being young and in love, marching against the war and making love: the sixties! Judy Collins was wrong: I was in the sixties and remember it all. I was living in D.C., commuting to work like a regular working stiff, enjoying life, living in my twenties. Nothing could be better! Elena Poniatowska, the great Mexican journalist and writer was absolutely correct: Doing what you believe in, especially if it is tinged with some modicum of danger (and love), makes you become more alive, more aware of everything around you, casts some small amount of light in dark corners.
And then: Monday morning after the march, I returned to work at the National Security Agency, the quintessential alphabet agency, the NSA, The Building, and Don and I were stopped from entering by the Marine guards. Why? I had not read The New York Times on the morning of November 19, 1969, but I was in the newspaper.
If you’ve read earlier entries in this blog, you may remember that the previous summer my friend Don Mohr and I had driven in my little VW convertible down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to participate in a march against the war sponsored by GIs United Against the War. My friend Allen Hallmark was one of the organizers and had invited us down. While there, we had both signed a petition of active duty soldiers opposed to the war and demanding that it stop NOW!
The actual petition was divided into military posts by alphabet and then by names of active duty troops, alphabetically. Even NSA was sharp enough to go down the list to Fort Meade and pick out the two names there. Let me say right now what I said in my first chapbook of prose and poems, From the Periphery, that my name on that petition remains one of the publications I am most proud of.
We were taken from The Building to a small cubicle (I forget where on post) and interviewed (no enhanced interrogation measures were used) by an officer from CID. It was actually fairly pleasant; perhaps because the ACLU had made it public that they would defend any of the petitioners against anything that might affect our futures (e.g., withdrawal of our security clearances, felony charges, etc.). So, we were asked if we could give the names of other employees of NSA who had participated in the anti-war movement. We both, in different rooms, said "no" but that we would ask them if it was okay. A bunch of people who had participated wanted to be named; some who had never participated wanted to be named. I decided not to name anyone.
What happened as a result of all this was that I was denied access to cryptographic information and access to The Building, but I did (thanks to the ACLU) retain my security clearance. For the remainder of my stay in the U.S. Army, I defended our rights to freedom of speech and petition by painting rocks blue and white around the company area and filling in for the clerk/typist when he was on leave.
I was at the time of all this, 27 years old. The captain commanding “C” Company, ASA, Ft. Meade, was 24. I have forgotten his name. But the First Sergeant was a very nice guy named Zeigler. Sergeant Zeigler was approaching his twentieth year in the Army and retirement and asked me all the time if I thought he could find a job in the private sector. I remembered my days working at Sear and told him they hired a lot of retired Army sergeants but recommended that he use the GI Bill and go to college. he was a bright guy (unlike some of my drill instructor sergeants at Ft. Leonard Wood). Odd, I thought, to be giving advice to a man in his forties.
I found the captain somewhat disturbing as he frequently asked me what these kids were so upset about these days and why we were marching and demonstrating. I mean, he was younger than me!!!
My next blog entry is going to be about what everyone except the Army called “gas masks.” They called them something like “protective masks, OD” or some other nomenclature.
I should, I suppose, mention the huge march again. . .the one on November 15, 1969.
More than 500,000 of us marched through the streets of D.C. and gathered on the national mall to protest the war. As I have said, I found the October march more significant, almost spiritual in its quiet solemnity, but the November march was impressive for sheer numbers.
Finally, people seemed to get it. Please, don’t get me wrong. among the more arrogant things I always disliked about the “Peace Movement” was all the verbiage by 18- to 20-year-olds about the necessity to “educate the people.” The people were really no less educated than you or I; they merely disagreed with us. Well, that’s what I thought in the late 60s and early 70s, but the rise of the so-called “Tea Party” movement and the far right wing-nuts, of the "birthers" and "Fourteenthers" might mean that I should reassess my thoughts about that. In spite of that, I will always look back on both of those marches as important and memorable moments in my life.
Part of the sheer joy of those marches for me might have been that I knew I was getting out of the Army before Christmas and had been readmitted to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin for the spring semester. Part of it was having all of that to share with Linda Casson, being young and in love, marching against the war and making love: the sixties! Judy Collins was wrong: I was in the sixties and remember it all. I was living in D.C., commuting to work like a regular working stiff, enjoying life, living in my twenties. Nothing could be better! Elena Poniatowska, the great Mexican journalist and writer was absolutely correct: Doing what you believe in, especially if it is tinged with some modicum of danger (and love), makes you become more alive, more aware of everything around you, casts some small amount of light in dark corners.
And then: Monday morning after the march, I returned to work at the National Security Agency, the quintessential alphabet agency, the NSA, The Building, and Don and I were stopped from entering by the Marine guards. Why? I had not read The New York Times on the morning of November 19, 1969, but I was in the newspaper.
If you’ve read earlier entries in this blog, you may remember that the previous summer my friend Don Mohr and I had driven in my little VW convertible down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to participate in a march against the war sponsored by GIs United Against the War. My friend Allen Hallmark was one of the organizers and had invited us down. While there, we had both signed a petition of active duty soldiers opposed to the war and demanding that it stop NOW!
The actual petition was divided into military posts by alphabet and then by names of active duty troops, alphabetically. Even NSA was sharp enough to go down the list to Fort Meade and pick out the two names there. Let me say right now what I said in my first chapbook of prose and poems, From the Periphery, that my name on that petition remains one of the publications I am most proud of.
We were taken from The Building to a small cubicle (I forget where on post) and interviewed (no enhanced interrogation measures were used) by an officer from CID. It was actually fairly pleasant; perhaps because the ACLU had made it public that they would defend any of the petitioners against anything that might affect our futures (e.g., withdrawal of our security clearances, felony charges, etc.). So, we were asked if we could give the names of other employees of NSA who had participated in the anti-war movement. We both, in different rooms, said "no" but that we would ask them if it was okay. A bunch of people who had participated wanted to be named; some who had never participated wanted to be named. I decided not to name anyone.
What happened as a result of all this was that I was denied access to cryptographic information and access to The Building, but I did (thanks to the ACLU) retain my security clearance. For the remainder of my stay in the U.S. Army, I defended our rights to freedom of speech and petition by painting rocks blue and white around the company area and filling in for the clerk/typist when he was on leave.
I was at the time of all this, 27 years old. The captain commanding “C” Company, ASA, Ft. Meade, was 24. I have forgotten his name. But the First Sergeant was a very nice guy named Zeigler. Sergeant Zeigler was approaching his twentieth year in the Army and retirement and asked me all the time if I thought he could find a job in the private sector. I remembered my days working at Sear and told him they hired a lot of retired Army sergeants but recommended that he use the GI Bill and go to college. he was a bright guy (unlike some of my drill instructor sergeants at Ft. Leonard Wood). Odd, I thought, to be giving advice to a man in his forties.
I found the captain somewhat disturbing as he frequently asked me what these kids were so upset about these days and why we were marching and demonstrating. I mean, he was younger than me!!!
My next blog entry is going to be about what everyone except the Army called “gas masks.” They called them something like “protective masks, OD” or some other nomenclature.
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