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				The Crossing by Larry L. Dill Seoul, Korea, December 28, 1969 "The Crossing," an excerpt from  the forthcoming Chapter V--The Conclusion--of "What did you do in the War Daddy? Confessions of a sort of a conscientious objector,"  was written two days before I was discharged from the U.S. Army "Under Honorable Conditions" at Ft Lewis, Washington, January 1, 1970. The main body of Chapter V (including the protest documents that led to my premature discharge from the Army) should be completed some time next year, thanks to research assistance from my friend, research librarian Robert Salmon. I am about to leave Korea and the Army, and the 60’s and, in a way, my youth.  At 25 I will be entering a new decade, a decade that Mark Rudd calls the violent 70’s.  He called the last decade the troubled 60’s and for me the political and cultural revolution that has taken place in the last 10 years has been symbolic of my own coming of age. During that period of time I graduated from high school as the “most outstanding student” in my class.  I left home, married and graduated from college in the 60’s.  I fought the draft and while doing so began and left behind me my two most viable professional careers—teaching and the ministry.  And finally in the waning of the troubled 60’s I left my wife and eventually joined the army. All of this—from BMOC of high school innocence to the ultimate despair of conscience which lead to my discharge from the Army for “unsuitability,” has happened during the “troubled 60’s.” Yes, it has been a troubled decade.  And not for me because Mark Rudd has said so, but because all that has happened culturally and politically to America has happened culturally and politically to me.  All that has happened in my life in the past 10 years has been a microcosm of a larger, more dynamic revolution in the conscience of America. I entered the 60’s believing that Jesus saves and that Elvis Presley said all there was to say about music.  Virginity was next to Godliness and alcohol a necessary evil in a complex world.  I entered the 60’s a virgin and left an infidel.  Every single religious and philosophical ideal I held as a sophomore in high school I have since left far behind.  My concepts of peace and beauty and “eternal life,” my thoughts on monogamy and suburban provincialism are but vague memories of a half forgotten childhood.  My governmental theories changed from conservative democracy to liberalism to anarchy.  God died during the 60’s.  Nietszche predicted it.  But Altizer told us about it the moment it actually happened here in America.  And literature ,too, changed from the stilted poetry of ivory towers to the poetry of “innocent flesh on the bone.”  Bob Dylan rose “like a fire in the sun” and taught the Beatles how to make rock music into the liturgy of my troubled years. Ten years ago I was 15.  The age of innocence.  There are some who are 15 now who experienced the same 60’s as I did who will enter the 70’s not as innocent as I was in my 3rd decade.  They are young, yes.  But those who are most like me will not be building toward the “most outstanding student” of their graduating class of 72.  Instead, those young Beatle born souls will barely finish high school because they will have realized at age 10 as I did at 20 (half way through college) that sometime, somewhere, someone started a chain reaction of hypocritical tyranny that has ended in an explosion that might well be compared to the atomic bomb that sponsored the decade's revolution. _________________________________________________________________________________
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