Funny....last night I was just talking about when I was living in Los Angeles on Casa Grande Street. I was about 5 or 6 and I had 2 neighbor girls that I played with...they were sisters... whose brother had just come back from Vietnam. This was either 1971 or 1972. We would go down the street arm-in-arm (doing a sort of "dance") singing the following:

"hey hey get out of my way. I just got back to the USA. If you don't get out of my way. I'll kick you out of my way. So hey hey get out of my way...(repeat)."

I am certain this came from the returning brother.

My Uncle Dennis served in Vietnam but being tight-lipped Norwegian Lutherans not much was said to us kids about it...but apparently he had difficulty readjusting to civilian life. There were whispers of him shooting the family dog. I know he was more reclusive than the rest of him siblings until fairly recently.

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A deck of playing cards
Conical hats and grenades
coconuts and open markets with raw unknown animal carcasses near clear waters
jungle on fire

 

You know you are not talking to much of the Vietnam generation, all our images are going to be second hand.

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In the middle of a session of my seventh grade English class, one of the school's staffpeople walked into the classroom and asked my teacher (with whom I had a serious, unrequited crush) to step out into the hallway.

 

A few moments later, my teacher returned to the classroom clenching a piece of paper, completely distraught, and told the class that she just learned that her soldier boyfriend's plane had been shot down somewhere in Vietnam. The next day, we had a new English teacher, Mr. Matthews who had just returned from a tour of duty... but I never saw my beloved original teacher again.

 

p.s. Later in the semester, Mr. Matthews had me stay after class to ask me why I wasn't participating in class discussions. I said it was because I was bored... which led him to send a POOR EFFORT NOTICE home to my parents. I think I forged my mother's signature.

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ok.....some pretty grim things come to mind...the son of the woman across
the street went and disappeared and was never found in the years we lived in South Shore, but no one ever really talked about it except in hushed terms that made it very mysterious to a primary-school-age kid. I wondered about it for years and still wonder about it now. Only when I was 20 and had an ex-marine as a neighbor in the same house did I come to understand at least some of what might have happened to the son across the street. The ex-marine seemed like a sort of ordinary, pleasant person, but at night in the dark he would think that his wife was Viet.-Cong (she had black hair and was quite small) and he would freak out, sometimes beating her quite badly. They had an 8-year-old daughter whose face I can still picture. She looked a lot like the mom but fortunately had light brown hair. My landlord, who was a really kind man and a deeply religious Mennonite, did a lot to try to help them to make it, but I don't really know what ever happened with their situation because once again I moved away. Of course both sets of neighbors had to keep living with it all.

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Black and white: Numbers and names: Hearts and minds: Walter Cronkite and the day's casualties

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Vietnam was very far away and I did not know why America was there but even as a very small child I knew this was not the kind of defeat-a-bad-guy heil hitler war. I remember the crowds pushing towards helicopters--I saw that on tv, the crowds pushing, and crowds on the roofs, and what would happen to everyone when all the army guys left Saigon. I was sure all those people were going to die.

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I remember camping with my family, and an uncle crept out into the woods to surprise everyone by lighting off an m-80 firecracker, The bang startled everyone, but my cousin Burton hit the dirt, he dove into the dirt beside the campfire, when the firecracker went off, and when my uncle stepped into the light, chuckling, Burton said, How about I shove a firecracker up your fat ass, you fucker. The whole family was shocked, Burton started to sob, big heaving manly sobs, and my Aunt Doris said, he was in Vietnam, you know, while my uncle stared at the dirt and mumbled apologies

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The Vietnam war limbs the years of my adolescence, and my reactions to it mirrored the experiences of adolescence as a result. That is, it was a time when I was questioning authority, becoming aware that the official doctrines being presented to me by parents and teachers seemed oddly skewed from reality. It was a time when I became increasingly distrustful of both the government, but also big business, organized religion, and traditional models of sexuality.

 

I recall when the draft lottery was broadcast, and I had to wait anxiously for my birthday to be called. I was appalled when my best friend's birthday was the tenth number pulled. My anxiety continued to the end: my birthday came up 364th. Luckily, neither one of us were called.

 

My geographical knowledge of SE Asia was first fostered at this time: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and their relationship to Indonesia, China and Thailand, all became things I knew and understood. My involvement with the arts and culture of that part of the world followed.

 

For many people my age, smoking pot was something that we first did as a form of social protest. I think the first time I ever held a joint in my hand was at an anti-war rally in 1971. It was always transparent to me that the US Government's problems with marijuana had nothing to do with a concern about public health and everything to do with the suppression of alternative modes of thought, to say nothing about pressure from the precious tobacco industry, the people that brought us federally subsidized cancer in a box.

 

The central emotional conflict of the war: a political conflict that was reprehensible, being fought by children of the poor and middle-class, who had no choice but to serve a hideous political agenda not of their own choosing. Seem familiar??

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Linda Cianchetti and I found a peace sign made from twisted wire attached to the sign that denoted the boundary between the Town of Niagara and the Town of Lewiston. We took it to her house and when Linda's father spotted it, he got really incensed. He took it from her and while yelling about "Goddamn hippies," twisted it out of shape, broke it into pieces and threw it in the garbage.

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My ship, the US Navy Vessel "Alamo" LSD 33 (landing ship dock) had just completed a successful deployment of her compliment of Marines and Special Forces and was ghosting along in the South China Sea when she was knocked over by a rogue wave so far that we fell............not slid.........but fell thru the ship........we almost went turtle ................(the Alamo is 500 feet long)
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I was very young when we got involved in Vietnam. I remember thinking about whether it was better to born a boy or a girl. I reasoned that boys had to go to war but girls had to have babies. Not all boys went to war, though, but all girls had to have babies. So it was better to be a boy.

My oldest brother enlisted in the army after he got his draft notice. He said he thought somehow he would be treated better if he enlisted than if he got drafted. Later, he said it was the stupidest thing he ever did.

The Christmas my brother was in Vietnam, my mother left the wreath on the front door until my brother got home. In July.

I lucked out on the draft. Registering with Selective Service was suspended the year I turned 18, and not reinstated until after I turned 22. On a similar note, the drinking age was lowered to 18 before I turned 18, and not raised to 21 until after I turned 21. Fuckin' kismet.