New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
_____________________________________________
by Larry L. Dill
The Political Prologue
The weight of history is upon the American people once again and the presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush is being called one of the most important elections in American history. Issues are at stake on every major front in which a government (and its governed) could possibly have an interest: war, peace, international relations, cultural values, the economy, and the environment. Though some respected left wing writers like Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Claire, still believe there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Kerry and Bush, even Ralph Nader and his self-destructive “ex-wife” the Green Party, now believe there is. Be that as it may, it has evidently been determined by both major candidates and their parties in this election that when the stakes are high you play the “patriotism” card.
The Vietnam war was a genuine watershed in American history (the first of a one/two punch to which 9/11 was the second blow). Bill Clinton was the first Vietnam war era candidate for president. He avoided military service openly and legally with a student deferment from the draft to study at Oxford University in England. His opponent, the incumbent, George Bush, the elder, was a decorated veteran of World War II and in fact the youngest U.S. fighter pilot to serve in that war. Bush lost the election to Clinton, it is believed, because Clinton played the “It’s the economy, stupid!” card (after the phrase was coined by the irrepressible James Carville). Bush may have been able to beat that card with the “patriotism” card. But like another genuine military hero and fellow World War II veteran before him, George McGovern, who ran against Richard Nixon, a Quaker, in 1972, Bush chose not to play the “patriot” card and it may well have cost both him and McGovern their respective elections.
In this post 9/11, ongoing disaster-of-a-war-in-Iraq, ambiguous who-are-we-as-a-nation election, not playing the “patriotism” card seems not to be an option. John Kerry campaigning on an impressive Vietnam War record more than on his well documented and equally impressive anti-Vietnam war record is having both his warrior credentials and his ant-warrior credentials disparaged by right-wing worshipers of George W. Bush who has neither a war record nor an anti-war record. By playing the “patriotism” card, President Bush, calling anybody who doesn’t agree with him inside or outside the country a potential threat to homeland security, is transforming his Vietnam era record of desertion, debauchery and drug abuse into that of a latter day George Patton who believes in bombing the bastards first and asking questions later.
“Patriotism,” as Samuel Johnson is quoted as saying in 1775, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” His biographer, James Boswell, went on to elaborate on Johnson’s shocking pronouncement by saying, “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self interest.” Boswell added, “I maintained that certainly all patriots were not scoundrels.”—(from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations)
What is the alternative ideology of patriotism, pretended or genuine? Is their not a universal brotherhood of all mankind that trumps patriotism? Patriotism of course comes from the Latin for Fatherland. The question, I suppose, is whether or not in the end Mother Earth trumps Fatherland? Sadly, I guess, the answer is No.
Nationalism or patriotism (which is nothing more than loyalty to your particular governmental overlord) has been the primary element of social cohesion and personal identity for thousands of years. Its major obstacles have been tribalism, ethnic insularity, religious atomism and, at least since the French Revolution, social anarchism-- oh, and of course the nationalism of other nations. Much of recorded history is the history of attempts by power hungry individuals, institutions and corporations to integrate ethnic and religious identity along with territoriality and economic self interest into a patriotic whole called national allegiance. Success has often been nearly total. Sometimes even totalitarian.
In the end, though, nationalism (not to be confused with the nation-state itself) seems bound to fail as a human project. First of all because war continues to be the final arbiter between nations when nationalism rears its ugly head. War is tragic, inhuman, expensive, and since the invention of the atomic bomb, chemical and biological weapons and rogue terrorism, counterproductive. Secondly, those with money or power in a nation do not in the end restrict themselves to the rules of national allegiance that they seek to impose on the powerless masses. Even in the U.S. the world’s most vaunted corporations, General Motors, IBM, etc, etc, though they have used nationalism for their own purposes to serve their own interests whenever necessary, cannot and will not in the end be bound by the constraints of national loyalty. General Motors, for example, fought against worker’s rights in America and eventually, to save money, started building its cars overseas. IBM ( lip service to international human rights notwithstanding) was not able to pass up the opportunity to sell its technology to Nazi Germany when there was money in providing an accounting system for recognizing which Jews were to live and which were to die. Oil profits and arms sales to Iraq were a sufficient incentive to keep the U.S. government in bed with the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein for years until his liquidation became more valuable politically than his tyranny. Corporations, whether American, European or Asian, are ultimately only interested in making money and only seek nationalistic identity insofar as it provides economic advantage, military security, and positive public relations.
Nationalism is really just an embarrassingly unattractive broken down old emperor without clothes. It is, like patriotism, as patriotism, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Nationalism has never risen to anything much more than the way it started out: some local village leader trying to maintain power over his fellows by appealing, demagogically, to some rough sense of guilt and social responsibility (particularly helpful in pumping up men for recruitment into a war)-- the most aggressive, the most opportunistic, the most Machiavellian, the most articulate public speakers, trumping the more timid, the more thoughtful, the more compassionate among them. American history is the history of an idealistic attempt to transform the thousand year old ideology of nationalism into something better: The American Dream.
Do you think it happened? Do you think it is likely to happen? Do you think it is even logically imaginable without the entire rest of this small interconnected planet coming along with us? Don’t forget that we got within sight of an American utopian vision only through the systematic genocide of millions of indigenous peoples who were already here and through 300 years of the forced labor and terrorism of millions of African slaves. We’re not likely to have that kind of good luck ever again. When Native America had been duly subjugated and marginalized and slavery abolished through a long and bloody civil war, America’s captains of industry, those latter day utopian visionaries, turned their sights on farmers and factory workers. And the beat goes on in today’s surrealistic neocon dream factory of corporate tax evasion, outsourcing, and unilateral pre-emptive war.
Because the stakes are so high in this 2004 presidential election, the continued emphasis placed on military service (in the case of John Kerry) and continued war mongering (in the case of George W. Bush) as ways of indicating one’s patriotism, has caused me to re-evaluate my own patriotism and to revisit my own military experience. Bill Clinton has been going around the country lately proudly professing that avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War was not that hard to do. But for those who fought and those who died and for those of us with ambivalent allegiances to God, country, international cooperation and universal compassion it was a defining moment in our lives. This essay is an account of one man’s personal journey. May it help young men and women everywhere to understand the paths that may lie before them and the choices they have the right to make as human beings.
The Personal Prologue: An integrated historical timeline
June 6, 1944—D-Day, General Eisenhower, orders Allied forces to land on Normandy Beach in France, beginning the end of
World War II.
June 15, 1944—Larry L. Dill born in Wichita Falls, Texas where his father is a civilian aircraft mechanic for the Department of
Defense at Shepherd Air Force Base. His father was deferred from combat in World War II because of
an ulcerated stomach. Years later he would have 3/4 of his stomach removed and discover yogurt.
August 4, 1944—Anne Frank and her family arrested by the Gestapo in Amsterdam, Holland.
August 25, 1944—The Liberation of Paris.
April 30, 1945—Adolph Hitler commits suicide.
May 7, 1945—The Germans surrender and World War II in Europe is effectively over.
June 26, 1945—United Nations founded in San Francisco, California.
July 16, 1945—The highly secretive Manhattan Project culminates with the first US atomic bomb test at White Sands, New
Mexico.
August 6, 1945—First atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
August 14, 1945—Japanese surrender. World War II ends.
Or does it?
1945—The Soviet Union invades Manchuria and Korea, Korea is divided into North and South Korea, Ho Chi Minh
establishes National Liberation Committee of Vienam.
1947—Larry L. Dill, now 3 years old, moves with his family to San Antonio, Texas, where his father has been transferred to
Kelly Air Force Base, the largest aircraft maintenance facility in the world, to repair engines being shipped to the Far East.
The American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) receives the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian relief efforts since 1917.
The British grant independence to India, due in large part to the non-violent efforts of Mahatma Gandhi.
1948—Gandhi is assassinated by Hindu extremists. Israel declares itself an independent state in the Palestinian territory of the middle east, prompting
the first Arab-Israeli war. Truman signs documents recognizing Israel’s sovereignty.
1949—Mao Zedong formally declares the Peoples Republic of China a communist state.
1950—Chinese troops enter the Korean War, UN authorizes President Truman to send 300,000 American troops to South Korea under the command of
General Douglas MacArthur. U.S. sends money and military advisors to South Vietnam to help French maintain colonial control of Vietnam
against Ho Chi Minh.
1951—Truman fires MacArthur for going beyond his UN “Police Action” mandate to contain communism in North Korea, by publicly advocating the
dropping of atomic bombs on China. Larry L. Dill enters the first grade at Sam Rayburn Elementary School in San Antonio, specializing in
English, baseball and girls. He receives civil defense training. His next door neighbor builds a bomb shelter in his back yard. Larry L. Dill, age
6, begins long suffering writing career in a converted chicken house in his back yard.
1953—Joseph Stalin dies. Korean War ends with North and South Korea divided at the 38th parallel.
1954-- President Eisenhower offers the “Domino Theory” as a metaphor for the way Asian nations might fall to communism. Larry L. Dill, now
10, watches the Army-McCarthy Hearings on television. Geneva Convention divides North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
1955—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. joins the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott after Rosa Parks sits down in the “whites only” section of a city bus.
World War II bombardier, Joseph Heller, publishes the novel “Catch-22,” in which the catch is that since even the military itself recognizes that
participating in military combat is crazy, claiming that military combat is driving you crazy is proof that you are sane and therefore an
insufficient reason for relieving you of military duty.
1956—The French leave Vietnam. U.S. assumes training of South Vietnamese troops. Larry L. Dill’s brother (5 years his junior) begins first grade.
Their mother, Marie Wilson Dill, takes a position in Commissary Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force’s largest training center, Lackland Air Force
Base, Texas, next door to Kelly AFB where their father works.
1959—Martin Luther King visits India to study Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence.
1960—John Kennedy elected President. Larry L. Dill, age 16, earns rank of Eagle Scout and receives God and Country award from the Boy Scouts
of America. Reads Louis Fischer’s “Life of Gandhi” and declares to his parents his intention to become a Christian minister.
1961—Larry L. Dill, through an arrangement by his mother, hosts South Vietnamese Air Force pilot in training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas (See
photo above). Larry L. Dill is warned by his father not to see the Stanley Kubrick film, “Sparticus,” starring Kirk Douglas and Lawrence Olivier,
because the Department of Defense had branded the film “communist propaganda.” The screenplay was written by a blacklisted screenwriter
named Dalton Trumbo. With his girlfriend at his side, Larry L. Dill avoids contributing financially to the “communist
menace” by backing his 1955 Ford (with the lights off) into the exit of the Trail Drive-In Theater in South San Antonio to see the film without
purchasing a ticket ( a common practice back in “Happy Days”).
1962—Larry L. Dill graduates from Harlandale High School, San Antonio, Texas, elected by the faculty as the most outstanding male student in his
graduating class. Along with his 350 graduating classmates he receives a free copy of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti- communist screed, “Masters of
Deceit,” and preaches his first anti-war sermon from the pulpit of his local Methodist Church. “The Manchurian Candidate” opens at the
Majestic Theater in San Antonio. Larry L. Dill joins other protestors in picketing the theater for its segregationist policies.
1963—Larry L. Dill receives American Legion Award for outstanding community service and earns Scouting’s highest honor, the Vigil Honor in the
Order the Arrow for leadership and dedication to God, Country and Scouting. Martin Luther King is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for
demonstrating without a permit. Writes “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In the next year, Larry L. Dill reads King’s book and begins talking
about it in sermons he delivers at his local church in San Antonio and at Indian Creek Boy Scout Camp near Kerrville, Texas, where he served as
camp chaplain in the summer of 1964. His boss and mentor, E.F. Duderstadt, the camp director, calls the sermons “disturbing.” In August,
1963, the March on Washington draws 250,000 to see Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech. In protest against an American
backed Fascist regime in South Vietnam, Buddhist monks begin setting themselves on fire in public places. November 22, 1963, John F.
Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Larry L. Dill watches the news reports on a television set in the student union building at the
University of Texas at Austin.
1964—Martin Luther King, at age 35, becomes the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
And then the plot thickens
In May, 1964, I told my mother and father that I planned to marry my long time high school sweetheart in the coming fall--about 5 months away. They were shocked. I was after all at the end of only my first year away from home, a sophomore at the University of Texas in Austin and up until that point had laid out for myself a career plan to become a Methodist Minister. I was too shy to explain to my parents that the bottom line reason for the urgency of marriage was not that my girlfriend might be pregnant (which was the usual suspicion for unexpected wedding announcements in those days) but that on the contrary as a candidate for the cloth (and as just the honorable boy that I was at the time) I was unable to violate my belief that sex was to be reserved for marriage. My desire to have sex with the girl I loved had reached crisis proportions, however, and the only morally responsible thing to do was to get married. This was the truth that I was not able to tell them. I think my parents were as eager as I was to not talk about sex.
“But how are you going to live, son?” I remember my father asking me. And I remember that I had a yellow legal pad ready for that question on which I had outlined the budget plan I had for the rest of my college years and in fact the rest of my youth. Tuition, rent, food, transportation, etc. I would work as a camp counselor in the summers and as a part time fry cook during the school year (which I was in fact already doing). My bride would get a job in Austin as a secretary (she had already been doing that in San Antonio). Upon my graduation from college in 1966, I would go to seminary at Southern Methodist University in Dallas on a combination of scholarships (not uncommon for seminarians) and the same arrangement that would have gotten us (or me, that is) through undergraduate school. Melba’s personal sacrifice of her youth for my education was never discussed and I don’t think any of us, including Melba, ever thought, then, about the injustice of it.
When I graduated from Perkins Theological Seminary at SMU in 1969 (as I was imagining and earnestly explaining to my parents that I would surely do) I would join the Navy and go to Officer Candidate School and become a military chaplain (giving counsel, as I imagined, to testosterone soaked young men aboard great American naval vessels as we sailed the world’s seas, about life and death and the afterlife and about courage and honor and about resisting homosexual “impulses” and the importance of abstinence and absolute commitment to that beloved girlfriend back home. I didn’t discuss this last part with my parents of course.) My wife would meanwhile be comfortably ensconced in her quarters at a Naval base in California, New York or Florida, knitting booties for the two or three or four children I would serially impregnate her with on my shore leaves (all approved by God of course through the bonds of holy matrimony and paid for, thank you very much, by the United States Government.) I would resign my commission after my initial service commitment (around 7 years) and at that point, educated, world traveled, debt free, with a beautiful wife and perfect young family, I would sally forth into the world and take my first church as God’s minister for truth, justice and the American way. It looked like a piece of cake to me. My parents (both children of the Great Depression and at this point somewhere in their late 40’s, no doubt anxious about world events and my own growing social, though not military, radicalism) just sat there speechless as if I had just told them that my plan for financial security in life was to be abducted by aliens who for a few blood samples and a little probing of my body orifices would pay for everything in life that I had ever wanted.
I guess they had been around the block a few more times than I had. Two things in the scenario I presented to my parents did happen as planned. Melba and I did get married that fall (both virgins) and I did graduate from the University of Texas two years later in the spring of 1966. But after that it was all downhill (or uphill, depending on which metaphor you like to use to describe your loss of innocence and entry into a suddenly ambiguous and insecure moral universe). The most often quoted poetry of the time was Bob Dylan’s newly released songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times they are a Changin’” and the dark apocalyptic poetry of two of Dylan’s influences, T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” inspired the title for Joan Didion’s now classic history of the 1960’s, “Slouching toward Bethlehem.” In the preface to her book, published in 1968 as a kind of eulogy for the 60’s, Didion wrote,
…for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem…have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.
Here in its entirety is the poem that seemed at once a harbinger of the American 60’s and a eulogy for the decline of western civilization.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The dark drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats poem was written around 1919 near the end of World War I and unlike Woodrow Wilson’s “War to End all Wars” encomium, seemed a prophesy of darker days to come. Bob Dylan’s lines, recorded nearly 50 years later in 1964 when he was 22 and I was 20, are unambiguous and even more direct:
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
There were no less than four major strands of change that were taking place in my life by the time I was 21 years old and a senior in college: The religion of my childhood (and its attendant career plans outlined above) was being transformed into a secular ethical system articulated for me by the major writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Camus and many others. Through a newly forged intellectual prism of Evolution, Socialism, Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, everything I read, every event I saw happening around me, public or private, took on a whole new set of meanings that seemed to me to be antithetical to everything I had been taught by my parents, religious leaders, teachers and scoutmasters.
The second of the four strands of change overtaking me was the civil rights movement. Like a lot of earnest white youth of my generation I had viewed with unease the “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains in my local Sears store. And I had shuddered in wonder at how the magnificent Majestic Theater in downtown San Antonio where I first saw “Psycho” and “The Manchurian Candidate” had a separate, “Colored” entrance in the back that led up flights and flights of stairs to the “Colored” balcony, so far up in the stratosphere as to have been completely invisible even from the cheap seats in the mezzanine of the “whites only” great hall. Martin Luther King, Jr. had captured my moral imagination even before I traded in my traditional religious beliefs for modernism. In my last year as a boy scout camp counselor and camp chaplain, I had read King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” and was having no problem creating seamless sermons in scout camp and my local church back home in which I talked about the hypocrisy of people calling themselves “Christians” while passively condoning racial segregation. The negative comments I got from members of my local congregation and some of my scouting supervisors (not to mention members of my own family) turned out to be a concrete contribution to my decision to abandon my plans for the ministry and eventually leave the church all together.
The third strand of change that was revolutionizing my life in my 21st year was a kind of infectious pop cultural anarchism that turned out to be something of a turning point in American history. For shorthand you could just call it “Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll.” But in attempting to describe the phenomenal “children’s crusade” that was taking place all over America but playing itself out most dramatically in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the mid 60’s, Joan Didion put it this way in “Slouching toward Bethlehem”:
We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.
Robin Williams loved to riff on the bumper sticker quotation, “If you can remember the 60’s you weren’t there.” But it was just a joke about how everybody in the 60’s was allegedly stoned. It was a joke. But it wasn’t really true. All manner of people came to the “revolution” (or stood by and watched it happen) and they all came from different experiences with different perspectives and different values. Robin Williams notwithstanding, anyone who can remember the 60’s was there. In one way or another. Some were destroyed by the Vietnam War (or their own excesses, or both), some were transformed, some were repulsed, some dazed and confused, some unfazed. I lost my virginity and took my first drink on my wedding night in 1964. My first experience of marijuana came a year later, passed to me by the son of a prominent Methodist minister. The shades were drawn. The candles were lit. The Doors were belting out “Light my Fire” on the stereo. I could feel the innocence of my youth stealing out of my pores, out of my lungs, carried away by a ghostly incubus, fading away like the smoke that slipped behind the shades and faded through the open windows out into the night air.
As if religious skepticism, a growing sense of racial injustice and an experimental social hedonism were not enough, the fourth and most critical strand in my personal 60’s odyssey was the Vietnam War itself. And this, dear reader, is where the story really begins.
I can’t remember the exact year (maybe ’64 maybe ’65), but I can remember the day. It was a Sunday. A Sunday night. I was a member of an affinity group at the Methodist student center across the street from the University of Texas. “Affinity” is not the right word. That name was used by the Quakers then and anarchist cells today. This was something else, just one of many small groups of Methodist college students of 5 to 10 people meeting on a regular basis having signed a covenant, promising to attend the meeting weekly for the duration of the semester. A covenant group. That’s what it was called! It seems now as I remember it like a cross between Sunday school, an AA meeting or some other form of group therapy. There were no rules about what we were to talk about except that each week one member of the group could make a presentation at the beginning.
Someone that Sunday night brought a Time magazine in which there was an article about the escalation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Maybe it was about the first Marines landing in Vietnam. That would have been 1965 (though we had had “military advisors” there for more than ten years.) Maybe it was an article about the American bombing raids that had been taking place for quite a bit longer. Maybe it was about the Buddhist monks who were setting themselves on fire to protest what they believed had become an insupportable war of totalitarian repression by an American controlled puppet regime. Maybe it was about the first student protests against the war in New York and other major cities. That was probably ’65 too. In any event, this guy was very angry as he talked about the article and he was talking about how the war was wrong and how we all ought to be opposing it. And I remember my blood starting to boil as I listened to this guy speak and finally I just burst out in patriotic fervor about how important it was not to undermine the mission of American troops at war in a foreign country. Who was he? Who were we to second guess the judgements of our nation’s leaders?
I was shocked and bewildered by the audacity of this “traitor” in our midst. When a couple of other members of the group took his side against me, I stood up and walked out of the meeting, never again to return. I had been questioning authority all my life (at least in so far as I had driven my mother crazy with challenges to her authority: defying her sartorial, tonsorial and curfew mandates among others) But I had never before questioned the authority of my own government. And I had never before seen or heard of anyone else doing it either. The Civil War? The Civil Rights Movement? The Red Scare? They were not connected to this. This was treason. And I wanted nothing to do with it.
But I did start reading Time magazine after that. And The Nation. And Harpers. By the end of 1965 Lyndon Johnson had sent more than 200,000 American troops to Vietnam. About 500 American soldiers were killed that year. A year later, by the end of 1966, nearly 4,000 American servicemen had been killed (and more than 10 times as many Vietnamese). In the next 5 years, 54,000 more Americans would die. That’s right: 54,000. A total of more than 58,000 names are now engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.. And for what? The paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy? Dwight Eisenhower’s “Domino Theory” metaphor? The military posturing of Douglas MacArthur and William Westmoreland? The misguided zeal of the Vietnam War’s chief architect, Robert McNamara whose military leadership experience consisted of having been the chairman of Ford Motor Company for 6 weeks and who later admitted that the whole war had been a mistake? The cowboy machismo of Lyndon Johnson, who simply quit and walked away in 1968 instead of admitting defeat like a man and bringing his troops home?
In 1966 I was in the final semester of my senior year in college and about to earn my BA degree in English with minors in philosophy and radio-television-film. All that was on anybody’s mind was the Vietnam War (well, plus of course, as a necessary diversion, sex, drugs and rock n roll). “Teach-ins,” as the anti-war rallies were called back then, were frequent. My own professors that year, the French literary scholar, Roger Shattuck, who taught me Montaigne, Rousseau and Proust, and the old socialist, Dwight MacDonald, my film history teacher and then film critic for Esquire Magazine (with whom I had picketed the Short Horn Bar on the drag in Austin for its bigotry and racism) were speaking out against the war along with legendary U.S. senators like William Fulbright, George McGovern, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. The last two ran for the Democratic nomination for president against the incumbent Lyndon Johnson in 1968 on anti-war platforms. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Eugene McCarthy was a little too intellectual so Vice-President Hubert Humphrey got the nod after Johnson quit the race. Humphrey was defeated by history. Once a leader in congress for civil rights and social justice, Humphrey, with Johnson’s failed war legacy on his back, was equivocal and misunderstood much as John Kerry is in this election and was easily defeated by the “Quaker” anti-communist McCarthyite, Richard Nixon, who, while promising to end the war in Vietnam, after his election continiued to bomb North Vietnam and made secret and illegal bombing raids into Cambodia in the hopes that he might prove himself to be the American Caesar that Douglas MacArthur had wanted to be by bombing communism back into the stone age. In 1967 Martin Luther King spoke out formally against the Vietnam War, calling America, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the history of the world” and urging American youth to evade the war. In 1968, cultural luminaries like Dr. Benjamin Spock were being arrested for counseling American young men on how to avoid the draft. By that time I myself had already become a draft counselor for the American Friends Service Committee (The Quaker organization that had won the Nobel Peace Prize back in 1947). After a year of teaching high school English in San Antonio, playing it fast and loose, I traded in my third draft deferment, a teaching deferment (the first had been for undergraduate school, the second for being married before August 1965, for a 4th deferment. Back in Graduate School.
By the fall of 1967, I had quit the Boy Scouts forever, quit the Methodist church forever, quit high school teaching forever, and after only three months in graduate school, quit academia forever. I would have already quit my wife forever by then, but it hadn’t occurred to me yet. I had become (in my mind) a free spirit. A free-lance writer, a poet, a pilgrim, a warrior for peace, Don Quixote on the Colorado River. I sat on the banks of that river as it runs through Austin late that fall letting my hair grow and blow in the wind and churning out poetry like some Walt Whitman on the Hudson. By 1968 I had already worked as public school teacher, camp counselor, shoe salesman, hamburger cook, bookstore clerk, delivery van driver, television cameraman and Highway Department lackey. Interim employment, I always thought at the time, on the way to glory. A year earlier, in the spring of 1966, only a few weeks before my college graduation I had started down the path that Joan Didion (and Yeats a half century earlier) called “Slouching toward Bethlehem.” My childhood dreams (the ones I had outlined for my parents in great detail only two years earlier: marriage, college, seminary, the navy, children, family, career, glory, glory, glory, etc, etc, etc. were gone. At age 22, now working the graveyard shift at the Internal Revenue Service in Austin I wrote on a paper napkin the poem that remains (for me at least) the most important poem I have ever written.
The Fire of Distant Islands: notes written at the IRS, April 15, 1966
It is past now the point
That once wished for
Stood lurking
Not bright or graceful
In the darkened dream.
The sleepy clerk
Sat sipping black coffee
Sweet with sugar
Like the fire of distant islands.
Within his eyes floated
Forgotten memories
Of the days to come.
He saw not what was in the past
But what would never be.
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