When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
--John Keats
I was just going to give you the first two lines of that fine sonnet by John Keats and then felt that would be unfair...to Keats and to you.
At some point, at some time in my life, for some reason, my existence stopped revolving around Vietnam. I don’t know exactly when and, quite certainly, Vietnam has not receded into some quiet place, some framed photo to place on the corner of a table and watch while people pick it up and nod. Vietnam remains a visceral part of me and, I suspect, everyone who went there.
But it is no longer the central part of who I am. I keep thinking that some day in what I hope is some remote future, the headline of my obituary will read: VIETNAM VETERAN AND POET DIES. That’s okay if that’s how I defined my life, but it really isn’t. Somewhere in that brief notice, I would hope some acknowledgment might be made of my service and even of my later opposition to the war; I just don’t think it’s central to my life. This is more than a little morbid and I do apologize for that.
It’s just that I don’t believe I fit the image that headline would foist upon me. You see, we all do have a stereotypical image floating back in the back of our minds that the words Vietnam veteran conjure up. Right now: grab a pencil (or use your computer) and write ten words or phrases that come to mind when you hear those two words! Well, “old” might be one of them. "Bitter" could well be another. Perhaps, "mercurial and violent."
I’ve been back from Vietnam, and I do mean all the way back, since 1968, a little more than 44 years ago. Vietnam was one year in my life, marching against the war was another six years. So, seven whole years thinking about the war in some way or another. And a few more, cumulatively, writing about it.
Part of this is my own damned fault. I have written about the war since I started writing poems, essays and short stories. I don't regret that. I once wrote a really, really bad novel about it, A Position at the Rear. Okay, I’ve read worse, but it was still pretty bad. Next month even, I have an essay coming out in Voices de la Luna about the death penalty in Texas and how we in Texas are all responsible for the close to 250 killings perpetrated by Rick Perry and his cronies and the other killings by his predecessors. You know what I’m talking about: the killings applauded by the Tea Party crowd. In the essay I link those killings and the sense of group responsibility to the death of a young man I located in the hills surrounding Dak To, Kon-Tum Province, Viet-Nam, Republic of. So, yes, I am somewhat responsible.
But I have written almost as much about the brutal killing of James Byrd, Jr., and last week’s execution of one of his killers, Lawrence Russell Brewer. And I have written about a pond in Africa and nature essays and poems about the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas and the area around Wakulla Beach, Florida. Lately, I have been focusing a lot of attention on completing a book about the Old Spanish Trail Highway. It became US Highways 90 and 80—way back in 1927. So, why focus on one part of a person’s life? Aside from all that, I have had a long (and continuing) career as a librarian and English teacher, and as publisher of more than 125 books from Pecan Grove Press. I have recently celebrated the 38th anniversary of my marriage with Susan and have a son, 31-years old, who is a successful computer programmer/developer.
Uh, believe me, I am okay. Just thinking, reflecting. I've been writing this kind of stuff for forty years!
I was profiled in the San Antonio Express-News a few years ago. The writer was supposed to write about the 25th anniversary of Pecan Grove Press but focused pretty much on me instead. The phrase I kind of objected to was “crusty veteran.” Well, yes, I might be a little crusty and I am a veteran, but I preferred the rest of the article. Marian Haddad wrote a really nice profile of me for The Texas Observer a few years ago and did mention my Viet-Nam year but focused on other things I consider more important. She started with Reflections from Pete’s Pond (in Botswana, Africa) instead of with the Viet-Nam material. Marian referred to me as a “literary icon” of San Antonio and I had a plaque made for my office door: “H. Palmer Hall: Unknown Icon.” It's still mounted there.
Well, I really don’t care all that much. And I am, in fact, fairly proud of what I've written about that tragic little country and our part in its tragedy though I haven't made any of the anthologies of contemporary war poetry or, even, Viet-Nam War poetry. I won’t be around to read whatever is written anyway.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (#47, the last at last)
Afterwards
Eventually, the war ended. For most Americans, that end came in 1973 when almost all of the American military packed up and went home. For others, it ended in 1975. If you are old enough, you’ll remember those striking pictures of South Vietnamese citizens trying to get into the American Embassy to make their escape before northern tanks rolled into the city or of South Vietnamese helicopters being pushed off the decks of American ships. However you look at it, whether you were for the war or opposed to it, the damned thing ended badly.
As I watched the end of this very televised war, I was more sad than happy. The students my friends and I had taught at that little language school sponsored by the Air Force were still in Pleiku seven years after the classes ended with the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I have often wondered what happened to them. I suspect most did get jobs with the U.S. Air Force Base in Pleiku. And I suspect most were sent to re-education camps after the South fell. Son, Le-Linh, Xuan…all should have been offered relocation in the United States. We left much too quickly, without an exit strategy for our friends: not that we should have left later, but that we should have prepared sooner. The Green Berets have long felt that we deserted our Montagnard helpers though many of the Hmong have come to the United States. Many of the Vietnamese also found their way here, to our country, the Land of the Big PX, boat people and others. But too many were left behind and the victors did not treat them well.
Time passes and, off and on, I read about the Vietnamese immigrants to our country. Sometimes, because I live not far from the Gulf Coast, I read about Vietnamese shrimpers and the problems they have had with Texas- and Louisiana-bred shrimpers. Sometimes those problems have involved gunshots and shrimp boat burnings. I read about California’s attempts to cut back on the number of Asiatic students admitted to the University system because they out-perform “American” students though they are themselves “Americans.”
Our war keeps on getting fought.
And I still recall, quite clearly, the Vietnamese hooch maids we had, squatting in front of large metal pans to wash our clothes and shine our boots. They are speaking in Vietnamese, high, lilting, musical sentences. They do not seem unhappy for the most part, but how can we tell. I remember the two bar girls named Xuan in our EM/NCO Club, serving drinks, wiping the bar, men playing grab-ass with them.
I remember the whores of Pleiku, out in the streets, chatting with big men who carried M-16s. They’re like Maggie in the Stephen Crane story, only, unlike her, they spent their time going along to get along, to survive. They, too, seemed happy enough. But I also remember the children, so resolute, laughing for the most part as older men with stumps instead of legs wheeled by, palms open, begging, children who sometimes forgot to be happy.
War. Our war. We have to wonder why. And there is no real answer; instead, we get a multiplicity of attempted answers: standing up to the Commies, protecting American interests, domino theories, SEATO treaties, invitations, whatever. There is no answer, no good reason.
We don’t even know when it really started though everyone has an opinion. Americans were there in the 1950s, spooks mostly—read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Read The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson (1967). Watch almost any of the films from Go Tell the Spartans to whatever Vietnam War film is most recent. No answers, only questions. Take a trip up the MeKong River with Apocalypse Now and get into that Heart of Darkness at the end.
Questions. Nothing else. Hemingway's great NADA.
We had a little war and hundreds of thousands of people died. It would be pretty, as Hem might say, to think there was some good reason.
That’s it. Het roi! Hoa Binh.
Eventually, the war ended. For most Americans, that end came in 1973 when almost all of the American military packed up and went home. For others, it ended in 1975. If you are old enough, you’ll remember those striking pictures of South Vietnamese citizens trying to get into the American Embassy to make their escape before northern tanks rolled into the city or of South Vietnamese helicopters being pushed off the decks of American ships. However you look at it, whether you were for the war or opposed to it, the damned thing ended badly.
As I watched the end of this very televised war, I was more sad than happy. The students my friends and I had taught at that little language school sponsored by the Air Force were still in Pleiku seven years after the classes ended with the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I have often wondered what happened to them. I suspect most did get jobs with the U.S. Air Force Base in Pleiku. And I suspect most were sent to re-education camps after the South fell. Son, Le-Linh, Xuan…all should have been offered relocation in the United States. We left much too quickly, without an exit strategy for our friends: not that we should have left later, but that we should have prepared sooner. The Green Berets have long felt that we deserted our Montagnard helpers though many of the Hmong have come to the United States. Many of the Vietnamese also found their way here, to our country, the Land of the Big PX, boat people and others. But too many were left behind and the victors did not treat them well.
Time passes and, off and on, I read about the Vietnamese immigrants to our country. Sometimes, because I live not far from the Gulf Coast, I read about Vietnamese shrimpers and the problems they have had with Texas- and Louisiana-bred shrimpers. Sometimes those problems have involved gunshots and shrimp boat burnings. I read about California’s attempts to cut back on the number of Asiatic students admitted to the University system because they out-perform “American” students though they are themselves “Americans.”
Our war keeps on getting fought.
And I still recall, quite clearly, the Vietnamese hooch maids we had, squatting in front of large metal pans to wash our clothes and shine our boots. They are speaking in Vietnamese, high, lilting, musical sentences. They do not seem unhappy for the most part, but how can we tell. I remember the two bar girls named Xuan in our EM/NCO Club, serving drinks, wiping the bar, men playing grab-ass with them.
I remember the whores of Pleiku, out in the streets, chatting with big men who carried M-16s. They’re like Maggie in the Stephen Crane story, only, unlike her, they spent their time going along to get along, to survive. They, too, seemed happy enough. But I also remember the children, so resolute, laughing for the most part as older men with stumps instead of legs wheeled by, palms open, begging, children who sometimes forgot to be happy.
War. Our war. We have to wonder why. And there is no real answer; instead, we get a multiplicity of attempted answers: standing up to the Commies, protecting American interests, domino theories, SEATO treaties, invitations, whatever. There is no answer, no good reason.
We don’t even know when it really started though everyone has an opinion. Americans were there in the 1950s, spooks mostly—read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Read The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson (1967). Watch almost any of the films from Go Tell the Spartans to whatever Vietnam War film is most recent. No answers, only questions. Take a trip up the MeKong River with Apocalypse Now and get into that Heart of Darkness at the end.
Questions. Nothing else. Hemingway's great NADA.
We had a little war and hundreds of thousands of people died. It would be pretty, as Hem might say, to think there was some good reason.
That’s it. Het roi! Hoa Binh.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (#46)
On the Damned German Language!
In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878
Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.
A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.
At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.
Vietnamese Years Later
I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.
Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.
Back to the Subject
I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.
I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.
That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.
In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
-Mark Twain, Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878
Vietnam is the war that never ends for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived it; we breathed it. We participated in it and marched against it. We saw it every evening on the news and heard about it on the radio. Some of our friends died there and some burned their draft cards as others went to Canada or Sweden. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, wrote “Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.” He was wrong, but I know what he meant. Vietnam colored our lives whether we spent a tour of duty or more there or not.
A large number of us both went to Vietnam as soldiers, Marines, whatever, and came back and protested against the very war we were a part of. Some of us who went feel we betrayed them. I don’t think we did. It is not a betrayal to come to the realization that a thing is wrong, even a thing that we became a part of, and then shout out loud that it was wrong. I think we have a moral responsibility to do so.
At any rate, in the summer of 1973, I enrolled in a quasi-submersion intensive German class. I’ve written about it before in an essay called “The Woman of My German Summer” (published in Eclectica and revised for The Texas Review), an essay probably much more interesting than this blog entry since it was filled with romance and loss, learning the vocabulary of German love while staying up late at night in bed and using the point and touch system. What a fine way to study a foreign language! Neither of us knew German when we started and both of us were pretty good when we finished the course. Fifteen hours of language credit for one summer class and we earned every bit of it. I am no longer very good at what Sam Clemens called the “awful German language,” just as I am no longer a good Vietnamese translator/interpreter.
Vietnamese Years Later
I did, at one time, dream occasionally in Vietnamese but that was decades ago. I dreamed, once, that I was moving from one place to another in Austin and had a U-Haul trailer fastened with bungee cords to the back of my VW convertible. As I drove through the streets of Austin, the trailer kept stretching farther and farther behind me. As if it had a mind of its own, it veered from right to left, lept curbs, over-turned people’s propane barbecue pits, took down mail boxes. And then we, the trailer and I, were driving down Highway 14 in Pleiku and over-turning vats of nuoc mam, chased by hordes of Vietnamese women with betel nut-blackened teeth. And then we, turned west onto Highway 19 and I careered on up the hill, the trailer setting off land mines. You should be aware that not once while I was stationed in that area did I ever even see a mine explode! I pulled into Engineer Hill and woke up.
Another time, in San Antonio, I was able to use what Vietnamese I still retained. I was in a Stop ‘n Go (Shamrock gasoline) when the San Antonio Police brought an old woman into the store. She was lost and they were trying to find out where she lived. Bright guy that I was at the time (I make no such claims now), I realized that she was muttering in Vietnamese. I introduced myself to her with words much like these: “Ten toi la Hoang…toi giup do ba duoc?” Okay, no tones because I don’t know how to make them here. I told her (I think) “My name is Hoang.” (That was my Vietnamese name back in Language school and in 1967-1968 in Viet-Nam.) “Can I help you?” I suspect both the tomes I used and the words were not correct, but she stopped muttering and looked up at me. “Ba song o dau?” I asked. (“Where do you live?”) She told me…and I told the police. They took here there. That is, I think, the last time I ever used Vietnamese seriously though I have said Hello,. how are you? in Vietnamese to a few of our international students from Vietnam.
Back to the Subject
I am very much off the subject of this blog. Back to Germany! Back to language study. One afternoon, the students growing restless, student activists on campus called for another march down Guadalupe street. Our German class was meeting that day and one of the team of TAs teaching the class started mouthing off about the United States. We were going to cancel the afternoon session (class met from 9 – 12 and from 1 -4 every day) so we could all march against the imperialism that was American foreign policy. That was too much for me. A German national lecturing us (five of us were graduate students, two of us Vietnam veterans) about imperialism!!! I made a few mild references to the Franco/Prussian War, to WWI and to WWII, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan that had helped get his country on its feet and him to the U.S.A. to criticize the U.S.A.
I would not have done that with Frau Hilda Schucking, a fifty-year-old TA who frequently talked to me about the Lost Generation of young German men from WWII and how it had affected young German women like her: lack of young men when she was coming of age. That afternoon, somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to him, I caught up with Gerhardt on the march and shook his hand, said We’ll just have to disagree about some things.
That march was somehow not as memorable for me as the march that ended up as a sleep-over under the UT Tower when a young woman and I zipped out sleeping bags together and lay down under the stars while someone in the Tower played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” on the carillon.
Friday, July 15, 2011
A Few Notes about Vietnam #45
The Case of the Missing Gas Mask
Right off the bat, you need to realize that there was a principle involved. I would not have threatened my getting out of the Army on time for anything less than taking a principled (if somewhat trivial) stand about something. It all started on about December 12, 1969:
I was out-processing (wonderfully awful hyphenated word) and the supply sergeant (an overweight lifer who had, for some reason I cannot fully understand, never really liked me, grinned and said, “Your gas mask is missing.” Now, the sergeant did not say “gas mask,” but used military nomenclature that I cannot recall, something like “protective face gear, AR-M-40pcuwhatever.” I said I had not seen it, that we didn’t keep the gas masks but that they were stored in his supply room at all times.
While these were not his exact words (they would have been much more colorful and I wish I could recall them), he said something like, “Specialist Shit-for-Brains, you owe your fucking Uncle Sam $27.95 for losing your protective face gear.” I informed the sergeant that I had no intention of paying for a piece of equipment that had never been in my possession. He glared at me and I left.
That same afternoon, I got permission from the boy captain to visit the Judge Advocates Court and consult with a military attorney. One of the truly great things about military attorneys at the lower ranks is that most of them dislike the military viscerally. They shouldn’t since most of them had their law school expenses paid for by the military but they still resent having to put in some years of service to repay their tuition and expenses. Some are there because they couldn’t pass state bar exams and the Army is the only place they can practice law, but that’s another story and is not mine to tell.
I lucked into finding an Army attorney who wanted to use me to get back at the Army. Mind you, now, I had nothing against the Army (he said with a straight face), just did not want to pay for something I had never seen. My attorney advised me to ask for a “report of survey” of the company. A “report of survey” [RoS] is a process that requires the company to search diligently to try to find missing equipment. That took two days and my ETS of December 19th was getting closer. The RoS did not turn up the missing gas mask. The supply sergeant said, Pay, asshole.” I said no.
I went back to my attorney. He laughed and said, ”Now request a RoS for the battalion.” I did. Nothing. The whole regiment! Nothing. My attorney told me that, eventually, we would have the entire 1st Army, headquartered at Fort Meade, searching for one $27.95 gas mask. A day before my ETS, the boy captain, evidently pressured by superior offices (and who was not?) informed me that an anonymous person had paid for the missing mask and that I was free to leave the Army the next day. I almost regretted having to tell my attorney that that had happened. He had calculated the man hours we had cost the Army and they were enormous. Much more than $27.95.
The next morning, I packed up my VW convertible and drove home to Texas.
Het roi! No more about the army. One more post about peace marches.
Right off the bat, you need to realize that there was a principle involved. I would not have threatened my getting out of the Army on time for anything less than taking a principled (if somewhat trivial) stand about something. It all started on about December 12, 1969:
I was out-processing (wonderfully awful hyphenated word) and the supply sergeant (an overweight lifer who had, for some reason I cannot fully understand, never really liked me, grinned and said, “Your gas mask is missing.” Now, the sergeant did not say “gas mask,” but used military nomenclature that I cannot recall, something like “protective face gear, AR-M-40pcuwhatever.” I said I had not seen it, that we didn’t keep the gas masks but that they were stored in his supply room at all times.
While these were not his exact words (they would have been much more colorful and I wish I could recall them), he said something like, “Specialist Shit-for-Brains, you owe your fucking Uncle Sam $27.95 for losing your protective face gear.” I informed the sergeant that I had no intention of paying for a piece of equipment that had never been in my possession. He glared at me and I left.
That same afternoon, I got permission from the boy captain to visit the Judge Advocates Court and consult with a military attorney. One of the truly great things about military attorneys at the lower ranks is that most of them dislike the military viscerally. They shouldn’t since most of them had their law school expenses paid for by the military but they still resent having to put in some years of service to repay their tuition and expenses. Some are there because they couldn’t pass state bar exams and the Army is the only place they can practice law, but that’s another story and is not mine to tell.
I lucked into finding an Army attorney who wanted to use me to get back at the Army. Mind you, now, I had nothing against the Army (he said with a straight face), just did not want to pay for something I had never seen. My attorney advised me to ask for a “report of survey” of the company. A “report of survey” [RoS] is a process that requires the company to search diligently to try to find missing equipment. That took two days and my ETS of December 19th was getting closer. The RoS did not turn up the missing gas mask. The supply sergeant said, Pay, asshole.” I said no.
I went back to my attorney. He laughed and said, ”Now request a RoS for the battalion.” I did. Nothing. The whole regiment! Nothing. My attorney told me that, eventually, we would have the entire 1st Army, headquartered at Fort Meade, searching for one $27.95 gas mask. A day before my ETS, the boy captain, evidently pressured by superior offices (and who was not?) informed me that an anonymous person had paid for the missing mask and that I was free to leave the Army the next day. I almost regretted having to tell my attorney that that had happened. He had calculated the man hours we had cost the Army and they were enormous. Much more than $27.95.
The next morning, I packed up my VW convertible and drove home to Texas.
Het roi! No more about the army. One more post about peace marches.
Friday, June 24, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam #44
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
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
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.
Friday, April 15, 2011
A Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 42)
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.
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.
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