If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Two)

If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)


Sorry for the long time between posts but I've been busy. Here is the newest installment of the trip to Washington DC for the great May Day action against the war in Vietnam in May of 1971.


As we finalized our plans for May Day I met Ted. Ted was a high school buddy to many of my friends and a Vietnam combat soldier who returned home merely days before we left. We'd rented a large U-Haul to accommodate twenty and bought gas masks and Mao buttons to theatrically enhance our weak credibility. Still, everything seemed surreal but for Ted. Ted was not a prop in the adventurous coming of age story I was living in my mind. Ted was real. And with his presence came insights for which I was not prepared. 

Ted was lean, blond and joyful, with a mildly somber undertow I am not sure was intrinsic or a result of the war. "When I landed in Saigon and the tarmac was covered with body bags," he told us, "I knew I had made a mistake." Ted arrived in Vietnam a couple days after President Nixon invaded Cambodia on April 30, 1971, almost a year to the day before we met. The war was going poorly and had not gone well for years, yet Nixon had expanded its carnage into still another land. College campuses exploded, hundreds of schools were shut down by student-led strikes, and protesters were slain by authorities at both Kent and Jackson State. 

Safely seated on plush leather couches in a quiet, sumptuous sitting room of Purdue's Memorial Student Union and listening to Ted intone, the war seemed so far away. It was late at night, and but for Ted's almost confessional tone, the only other sounds were the breathing of the four or five of us who were there, and the click, click, click of heels in the hallway outside. For Ted, though, the war was still more real than that room. Only days before he had been in Vietnam, and now he sat with us sipping a Coke.

"When I got home my parents gave me a gift," he said. "A push-button electric tie rack so you don't have to reach two inches around to get the tie you want. I didn't want to be rude but I told them I couldn't accept it and I had a hard time telling them why. I mean, is this what I fought for, to protect a country that produces something like that?" 

I didn't know Ted and had only just met him, but even without the huge disconnect this gift represented, he didn't seem like the kind of person that had much need for ties. How could his parents not know this, I wondered. How could they not seem to know him at all? Of course I knew my parents were no different. They held notions of who I was and what I should be like that were hugely variant from who I was and what I imagined myself to be. Life had changed so dramatically since they were growing up that our respective generations had been raised on nearly different planets. They knew hardship, the Depression and the war, and all we knew were the boom times that had followed. We had expectations  and dreams that could never be reconciled with their own. We just didn't know each others' experience well enough to really know each other well. We couldn't. And in addition to that already existing chasm, here Ted was, removed by mere hours from a war zone, and dropped back into a world that just chugged along indifferent, immersed in its baleful distractions, habits, and trivialities.

Ted spoke of how strange it was to be back home, in this room with us, and how present yet invisible Vietnam was to him still. I am proud of the questions we asked him that night. We didn't pry for painful details that no one should be asked to share. As it was he shared a lot with little encouragement, and as much as we ever could have wished to know. There was something sacred about it. He needed to talk and we needed to listen. We needed each other in a way that was bigger than us all.

"When I got my notice I had 30 days to report and I decided to go to Canada. I went to Detroit to cross over the bridge into Windsor and it was hard not knowing if I'd ever be able to come back," he said softly. "In the motel I was staying at I saw a John Wayne movie and though it sounds dumb I realized that I was an American and I couldn't risk never being able to come back home. So I traveled back as fast as I could and reported to basic training with only a few hours to spare."

He spoke of his best friend dying when he merely leaned his M-16  against a wall and it misfired. It went off, he was there one second, and then  he was gone forever. Ted fell into silence for a moment then began to reveal more. Some of these are things I could write about but I will not. They are too personal and would descend into voyeurism. Ted's words were only meant for us and I think they should remain that way, even though I have his permission to share them. I just don't feel right about it. Boundaries can be a good thing at times, and I think this is a good time to erect one.

Ted was both the first man I met that had been in Vietnam as well as the most memorable. I have met numerous others since and have never wanted to know their stories, not because I didn't really want to, but because I don't feel I have the right. Even though I knew all along that someone had to be doing the fighting, I was never really angry at our fighting men then and I am not angry at them now. I hope they are no longer angry with me. I was never one of the "hippies" Stallone's character Rambo spoke of who spit on returning soldiers at airports when they came back home. I try not to see the men who served in Vietnam patronizingly as victims or dupes, nor disparagingly as killers. Most didn't want to be there as it was. Perhaps I am in denial and want to hold my country's rulers accountable but not the people who acted on their orders. Still, I just can't judge these men. They probably judge themselves more sternly than I could anyway. I'm like that with myself and I don't think I'm much different from anyone else. 


And I was not far removed from my very small world as it were--the world of my parent's home and my small town--where I was used to doing what I was told because that was what I was supposed to do. No one gets much training in resisting unjust authority and knowing the difference between power that is exercised properly and power that is not. I was then no different from anyone else in that regard. I was making it all up as I went, on the fly, and reinventing the wheel every day. After all, I was wearing a Chairman Mao button without any understanding of the moral complexity that entailed. I was only 19 and the average age of a combat soldier in Vietnam was 19 as well. We were all just boys in too many ways to recount, and we were all doing things we could never take back.

So with all of this in mind as I wound my way back to my dorm room at Wiley Hall on that soft, spring night, past the school's red brick buildings and through a gauntlet of tranquil sorority houses with fragrant flowering trees, I slipped into a deep, dark reverie. I has just read George Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. The Spanish Civil War was one of the last places where the march of fascism might have been halted before World War II but that resistance had failed. In the last paragraph of the book Orwell recalls his return home to the safety of England writing, "It is difficult when you pass that way... to believe that anything is really happening anywhere...Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns [of Spain] were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood...all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs." And, of course, they were.

I started to cry. I thought of all the people in Southeast Asia at that very moment who were flinching and fleeing from the roar of our bombs, and of all the men like my new friend Ted who were forced to rain down these bombs upon them. I feared for the retaliation, for the justice, that might someday rain down upon my country for its arrogance. I was determined to throw my body onto the machinery of death to stop it, and in only two or three days I would. 


TO BE CONTINUED (no really, it will)