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

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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


So after the clash at Georgetown with the riot police, and thanks to the leadership of the movement heavies I was emulating, I made my way with my friends to the Institute for Policy Studies on Dupont Circle to regroup.  That night we would discuss tactics, sleep on their floors, and the next day attempt to bring Washington D.C. to its knees.


When we got to Dupont Circle we discovered a pleasantly green, round, tree-ringed park with a tall white marble fountain at its center. Wide walkways lined with flowers led to the hub where the fountain stood, and between them damp grass warmed in the sun. It was late afternoon, the rains had ceased momentarily, and light poured in between the clouds and through the trees. Three classical carvings representing the wind, the sea, and the goddess of the stars wound around the fountain's shaft. Water glittering in the sun poured over the sides of the imposing stone basin that the carvings and their shaft supported. The entire outside of the park's circle was lined with benches, and on one side of the park chess tables sat where a few brave enthusiasts played.

Scores of intimidating policemen also ringed the park, obviously there to keep people like me from camping out. They were not faceless riot police with their protective visors pulled down, but they were not meter readers either, and they struck a very disquieting pose. One of them kept eyeing me suspiciously for any hint that I might sit down in the park. All the while he observed me he was twirling a police baton with stickers plastered all over it that said "The King is Coming." Our eyes met and I was determined not to flinch. "What does 'the king is coming mean?" I asked, with my long hair, my red bandana, and my army coat with a Mao button on the pocket and a gas mask hanging off my belt. He narrowed his eyes and stared at me menacingly, "You'll find out soon enough tomorrow," he shot back. There was no token of respect in his bearing that opposing armies sometimes have for each other. It was obvious that he loathed me with every fiber of his being and it cut me to the core. In retrospect, I should not have expected anything less. I am embarrassed to admit that I really was that naïve.

The streets radiating like spokes from Dupont Circle were densely lined with tall attractive row houses, stores, and embassies. It was, and remains, one of the most impressive areas in Washington D.C. Our destination, the Institute for Policy Studies, was a left-wing think tank housed in a huge four-story Romanesque brick structure. It sat on the northwest corner of 20th and Q Streets amidst a profusion of tall, narrow dwellings exuding substance, history, and prestige. The Institute's building was the former home of George Alexander McIlhenny, the wealthy president of the Washington Gas-Light Company.

Mr. McIlhenny's old home retained much of its original appearance outside, but the interior had mostly been converted to utilitarian office space. It was crammed with people. It was loud and boisterous and a light scent of tear gas was in the air, carried in on those that had been gassed in the police assault in Georgetown that afternoon. These were not the mere concert-going hippies who had come to get high then had fled home when the police attacked and drove us from West Potomac Park earlier that morning. We were all volunteers and we knew what it meant. 


No one had conscripted us, or ordered us to be here. We were young and we were the shock troops you find in every revolution. People just like us had stood in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and dared them to run us over. We read Common Sense in 1776 and were winter soldiers with Washington at Valley Forge. We shouted ¡No pasarán! and gave our lives to halt the fascist advance in Spain in 1936. We read, we sang, we loved life and we wanted to live it fully, just as others like us do everyday in internment camps, in occupied territories, and behind barricades confronting both dictators and the tyranny of ordinary democracies that have betrayed their purpose and destiny. 


That night we learned that our affinity group and several others would be quietly winding our way to the Justice Department to block a nearby intersection around 4:30 AM. A few famous people came by to wish us us well and to talk to us. Nicholas von Hoffman, the well-known journalist and former activist-colleague of Saul Alinsky, stopped in as did a couple other men in coats and ties which I later learned were members of Congress. All these people had had a moment of great moral clarity about the war that cut through all the lies and obfuscations the government fed us to keep us believing that leveling South East Asia was both moral and in our national interest. They were much older than we were, and seemed to be a part of the "establishment," in some respects, but we were united in common purpose against the great evil this war represented. Our cultural and age differences were surmounted by this common purpose that might otherwise have kept us apart. 


I fell asleep on the floor of a small office that had room for only two or three others that night, the shade drawn to block out the street lights glaring in. I was unaware of this at the time, but at that precise moment 15,000 additional troops and police were arriving by convoy and airlift into D.C. to arrest us on-sight, with or without provocation. There were only maybe 20,000 of us left by then. Almost one heavily armed soldier or cop with the entire repressive machinery of the state at their disposal would confront every one unarmed activist that had only their bodies and their hopes for protection.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS


If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part One)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Two)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Three)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Four)
If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Five)

Jerry and I ran to the front because we wanted to be in the thick of it. "Hey guys, it's a women's march, fall back a bit OK?" said one woman with a wink. I got the feeling that there was a lot of conscious theater involved in this action and that these people were pretty skilled at what they were doing. The crowd chanted, "Run Yankee run Yankee run Yankee run. Women of the world are picking up the gun!" Toto, I thought, I've a feeling we're not in Indiana anymore.

Perhaps it is time to check in. Some may feel uneasy with what they have read. I do not blame them if they do. I feel uneasy writing it. Although this time in our nation's history was not entirely ugly--the sky was still blue and flowers still bloomed--the war and the rage concerning it were ugly indeed. It deformed us all. I, for one, am not comfortable writing about waving enemy flags, defying all decorum, and giving up on the hope I had been taught that America represents.  

I entered this great movement against the war far downstream from the purer well springs from where it had begun. This made a big difference. I had tossed my inner tube into a river that had once been fairly pristine, then had become magnificently swollen, but which was now receding by the time I had leapt into it from the shore. It had gathered a lot of debris and I was a part of this debris.  

I had earned the right to be personally alienated from our culture for reasons I do not wish to share, but I had not earned the right to be as alienated from my country as I appeared to be. Others had earned that right but I had not. That kind of alienation is something one experiences first hand, not something one adopts. This is a difficult admission to make. But I do not think that I was unique in this regard in relation to the people entering the movement at this time, six or seven years after it had begun. It was as if you knew something was surely wrong, but your recognition of this wrong was mediated by things you had imbibed second-hand, not through direct experience. 


I met precious few back then who could authentically articulate the horror this war represented, the evil our nation embraced in prosecuting it, and the despair they felt in being unable to stop it. The scope of my experience was very, very meager. Many did have profound moments of clarity about the war, but for that to happen you had to see what was really going on and to believe that what you saw was true--period. You had to be simple, in an almost meditative sense. I can't claim to have been one of those persons at the time.


When you saw the most powerful nation in the world destroying a small rural country that posed no threat, that is what you had to see. And you had to allow your heart to reverberate in the horror of this recognition unhindered. You could not see, instead, a great narrative about american freedom versus communist tyranny, when what was actually happening was an old woman running from a grass hut, her hair and clothes aflame, screaming to her grandson for help. 


What if she were your grandmother and you were her grandson and this was her last moment on earth? How could this be right? You had sat on her lap in that hut as a child and listened to her stories about the very fields in which you played, about sunny days and about her first kiss under that tree right over there, that now were all in smoking ruin. Her torturous death was not merely a result of "collateral damage," or an unfortunate mistake. Her suffering and your loss were not words; it was all real. It happened every day. This war took place in the neighborhoods of real people all the time and not on battlefields per se. How could her life, your memories of her, and your village that had been here for generations be reduced to nothing in an instant, by an "operation," staffed by young men who had pinned baseball cards against the spokes of their their bicycle tires to affect the sounds of motorcycle engines only years before? Multiply this by 2,000,000 times. This is what we had become.

You could not rest content with the phantasms of your mind alone. You had to see what was really there. When you realized that we had more respect for our garages than the grass huts of the people we burned to death from the safety of the skies, and that we valued our cars in those garages more than we did the people in those huts, that is what you had to accept. And when you saw a piece of rope on the ground, you could not mistake it for a snake, and magnify its danger beyond anything it could truly represent. 


I had not experienced this genuine moment of clarity at the time and I merely followed in the footsteps of those that had. Many of them had dropped out of the movement by this time, a movement which now had its own seeming momentum on which I was happy to be carried, unreflectively, and in faith that it was right. Just as those who supported the war had a duty to perform, a set of rules to follow, and a tradition to uphold, so did I. Both groups were on autopilot in a way.


I know I helped contribute to the next 30 years of conservative backlash by my actions. People like me alienated many. But we were never implicated in killing 2,000,000 people in Vietnam either. We were disrespectful and self-righteous and foolish often enough, but we never contributed to an evil of that magnitude and it is wrong to see a moral equivalence between the two. We never would have had high expectations for our country that could be violated if these high expectations had not been drilled into us our entire lives. We were taught and raised too well. The problem with principles, I guess, is that oftentimes people believe them and get angry when they are betrayed.


So after the clash at Georgetown with the riot police, and thanks to the leadership of the movement heavies I was emulating, I made my way with my friends to the Institute for Policy Studies on Dupont Circle to regroup.  That night we would discuss tactics, sleep on their floors, and the next day attempt to bring Washington D.C. to its knees.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS


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

Within twenty minutes we stopped and Scott opened the back door to the U-Haul. I could smell water immediately and hear flags cracking in the wind. It was like going from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. Light and color and the fragrant scents of spring flooded in, overwhelming the darkness and dread that had captured us for 15 hours or more. We were crossing the Potomac River and the bridge was decorated with red and black flags. Long hairs were everywhere, people had signs and banners, and joy had captured us all. We were driving into West Potomac Park, we had gotten to D.C.  safe and sound, it was morning in America, and we were going to make history.

West Potomac Park, adjacent to the National Mall, was filled with 45,000 people and it was a counter-cultural carnival of noise, color and excitement. A rainbow of people and issues were represented. The Beach Boys were rocking out on stage, there were men on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam, jugglers, movement heavies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, hippies galore and gay people of immense variety. Several men in one group wore fully loaded Boy Scout merit badge sashes. There were tents everywhere and flag poles defiantly flying what were considered the colors of this nation's enemies, mostly the flag of the National Liberation Front, commonly known as the "Viet Cong." It was not an ideal PR gesture to win over the uncommitted, nor was it a staid event managed by an old left vanguard party committed to minding its P's and Q's.  

The collapse of the more youth-led wing of the anti-war movement in 1969, represented by Students for a Democratic Society, had created an opening that was filled by more explicitly structured and disciplined groups. The weekend before May Day, a march in D.C. that had been largely spearheaded by the Socialist Workers Party drew 500,000 participants. This group opposed tactics such as civil disobedience or anything that exceeded the constraints of legally permitted protest. They even opposed linking opposition to the war with other social and political issues to avoid alienating anyone that might be against the war for any reason. This strategy was driven by what the participants in May Day saw as the futile hope that one more big demonstration might make a difference. But it didn't matter. 

"Most everyone I know is tired of demonstrations," long-time anti-war activist David Dellinger said at the time. "No wonder. If you've seen one or two, you've seen them all. Good, bad, or in between, they have not stopped the war, or put an end to poverty and racism, or freed all political prisoners."  

The May Day action, as its literature explained, was different from a demonstration where you marched down the street, listened passively to speakers and went home. It was about action not congregation, disruption not display. Its understanding of non-violence did not preclude creativity or militance. The goal was to blockade major streets and roads and to make the Monday commute in to D.C. impossible. The leaders of May Day 1971, the May Day Tribe as they were called, were generally spokespeople, and it was up to decentralized geographical regions and hundreds of "affinity groups" of up to a dozen or so people to locate their targets and decide how to act. 


Our one day in the encampment that Saturday was like attending a highly-politicized rock festival, with lots of people partying and getting wasted but with a far more serious intent underlying this fun than was usually the case. The idea that all these people would then change gears and clog up the streets and bring the city to a halt seemed brilliant. If the youth culture could take a political turn, this action could be replicated elsewhere with great affect. I of course didn't realize that things similar to this had been tried before, only with with less planning and militance. This time we were told, by the "movement heavies" we linked up with when we got there, it would all be different. 


As Jerry and I sat on the back of the U-Haul taking in the vibe, we were approached by a young guy with long hair and some oddly-wrapped PVC pipe. Jerry, smart, witty and strong, was a great friend I'd met at Purdue my first week there. The guy with the pipe told us that what he had was a pipe-bomb and that it was for sale. Now this was a militant demonstration, but it was non-violent for a reason. We automatically assumed the guy was a rip-off artist who thought we were stupid or a police agent trying to stir up trouble to entrap us so we could be arrested well before acting on our mission. We didn't know what that would be yet because the "heavies" hadn't told us. We told the guy to fuck off and leave us alone. This was not the last time we would encounter people like this.


Later, military helicopters buzzed low over the crowd, trying to intimidate us. It still amazes me that some people were so well prepared that they launched helium balloons with thick enough ropes tied to them that they could get snared in a helicopters' propellors. It was sheer genius. They drove the helicopters away. 


Finding it convenient to leave for a while, Jerry and I linked up with an affinity group from Connecticut and decided to take a look at their target intersection because we still did no know what we were really going to do. We left the park with them and drove over to an iffy residential neighborhood. It didn't seem like the kind of route someone would take to get to government offices and that we'd only be inconveniencing ordinary people in a poor neighborhood as they tried to get to work. For the first time I realized that not everyone we would stop from moving around was working for the war machine and it bothered me. As we poked around in a weed littered vacant lot we found numerous old telephone poles lying around. One of the guys from Connecticut, a sharp and funny man with a rapid-fire speaking style urged us to ally with his affinity group to block the nearby streets using these poles. It was a great idea, I enjoyed the energy of this new friend we'd just met, and my concerns about the people in the neighborhood subsided, perhaps too quickly. We we made plans to meet nearby early on Monday morning. Remember, this was Saturday afternoon.


When we got back to the park we told our friends about meeting the people from Connecticut and a number were interested; but it was mostly the friends we thought were not quite as heavy as ourselves. That worried me. The "movement heavies" we'd met in Illinois--and had gone out of our way to meet up with in D.C.--said there were bigger and better plans than that for us and that we'd all find out about it Sunday. I was not sure I liked these people that much anymore. They were such condescending know-it-alls and I liked the people from Connecticut much more. They seemed more like my friends and me only better informed. I preferred to cast my lot with them, but events conspired to create a different outcome. 


Sunday morning before dawn, rain was pinging on the U-Haul's metallic roof, and then we heard bullhorns. We awoke in haste to find line after line of riot police with nightsticks drawn and tear gas ready emerging from the trees. Armored with shields and plexiglass visors, several hundred of them ringed the encampment, demanding our immediate exit. Overnight the May Day Tribe's permit to stay in the park had been revoked. The police fired tear gas and started knocking down tents, but they left a gap for people to escape if they wished, and many fled in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool. Police were stationed in all the other city parks to keep affinity groups from coalescing elsewhere. In the end, probably half the entire crowd just left town and went home, significantly weakening our forces. From the looks of many of them, they probably were just there for the fun part anyway and had not really intended to stay to confront the war machine on Monday.

Actually, it amazed me that we were even allowed to be there as long as we were. Some people had been in the park for ten days. I did not realize however, that there were many supporters in local and national government--and elsewhere--who were just as disgusted by the war as we. They were responsible for the May Day Tribe being able to legally occupy the park as long as they did. We would meet many people such as these in the next couple days, but for now we knew we had to haul ass and get out of the park before our value to the movement was compromised through arrest. The heavies told us that we should head over to Georgetown University and that there was going to be a militant march we wouldn't want to miss. My closest friends and I grabbed our gear quickly, Scott left to return the U-Haul, and we hopped into some cars to head over to Georgetown for the march.


When we got to Georgetown it was total mayhem. Armed with NLF flags and banners, the crowd was screaming at the police and tear gas canisters careened through the crowd spitting toxic fumes. The police charged with clubs drawn and drove motorscooters through the crowd, running down protestors and breaking their legs. People were bloodied and shrieking in pain and it was my very first demonstration ever. I could not believe what I had gotten myself into. The action was led by the Gay and Lesbian contingent of May Day, a vital part of the advance planning for the event. These people just refused to be walked on any longer. They were tough. But while talking tough, they were not violent. Only the police were violent. Jerry and I ran to the front because we wanted to be in the thick of it. "Hey guys, it's a women's march, fall back a bit OK?" said one woman with a wink. I got the feeling that there was a lot of conscious theater involved in this action and that these people were pretty skilled at what they were doing. The crowd chanted, "Run Yankee run Yankee run Yankee run. Women of the world are picking up the gun!"


Toto, I thought, I've a feeling we're not in Indiana anymore.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS


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

And when the truck came to a complete stop then rolled backward, crashing into what had to be a police car, we were tossed against each other violently and the sense of panic really set in. We were near Richmond, Indiana at the Indiana/Ohio border and we were such losers that we had not even gotten out of our own state safely. In a few minutes the sliding door was rolled up, we were blinded by the head lights of numerous police cars and their flashing lights, and a cloud of marijuana smoke billowed out into the faces of half a dozen Indiana State troopers.

It was a flat, nondescript strip of Interstate that could have been anywhere. It was twilight and getting darker by the moment. Our doom seemed obvious. There was no way this could turn out well. The police cruisers were impressive stacked up behind us and the police themselves looked more impressive still, as the flashing lights atop the cars cycled across their faces.  For the sake of honesty, I will not exaggerate and tell you they had their guns drawn dramatically because they did not. They did not know what they were up against in this respective ship of fools we were, but they had thought we may be dangerous enough that they had arrived in force.

Amos had been driving the U-Haul so he had to deal with the police. Amos was a short, intelligent guy with long wavy hair who hailed from Israel. He had moved to England for several years then to West Lafayette, Indiana where his dad was a professor at Purdue. Amos' mom was very interesting. She was this small, unassuming Jewish mother who seemed like anyone else's mom only foreign. She had been born in Russia and had fled over the Ural Mountains to escape from the Nazis during the Second World War. She had spent two years in a British detention camp on Cyprus after trying to enter Palestine, something the British discouraged at the time. She had also been a member of the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group that operated in Palestine until 1948. I am certain she was the only mother of any of my friends who knew how to handle a Kalashnikov. She always offered us cookies when we came over for a visit.

With the harsh glare of the lights from the police cars trained upon us, the total darkness of the U-Haul's cargo area was dispelled in embarrassing fashion. The truck was a complete mess, as you would imagine, with all our gear haphazardly stored and pop bottles and food wrappers strewn about. We had sweated a fair bit so it probably didn't smell too sweet either. Putting our best foot forward always.

I could finally see Paul, who is now the director of research for a pharmaceutical firm, wearing his treasured jungle safari pith helmet to which he had affixed a red star. There was Maggie, with a red bandana tied around her neck, who became an activist-journalist covering the Intifada in the occupied territories of Palestine, and the Iraq War from the perspective of the Kurds. Maggie used to slip me free food at a grill just off the Purdue campus when she worked there, and she was for several years a professor who split her time between Cairo and the U.S. Maggie had raven dark hair and a light caramel complexion unlike anyone else in her family. She used to make jokes about her mother's one-night-stand with a tall dark stranger. And then there was Lucas, the slender hillbilly intellectual from West Virginia who sported a modified Ho Chi Minh beard and who hung posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in his room at school. Lucas and his farmer roommate--with the Budweiser posters--never really got along. Lucas later taught at Harvard and Duke. We also had four or five former Eagle Scouts with us as well as several former apostles of Ayn Rand. So we and all these others too numerous to mention had a front row seat as Amos and the officer in charge discussed our precarious situation.

"Do you know why we stopped you?" the trooper asked. "I have no idea," Amos answered innocently. "By the way, it's a bit smoky in there isn't it?" said the cop. "Oh, some people never took the Surgeon General's Report seriously, I guess," Amos panned. We all laughed. Oh, this was rich. Even though we were all going to jail we were loving this exchange.

"Well, we stopped you because you were gassing up in Richmond and someone at the gas station heard people talking in the back of the truck and someone else told them to be quiet." That would have been me. Damn, I suck, I thought. "So this 'someone' at the gas station gave us a call and we just had to check to see that you kids were all OK, and that no in this truck was here against their will," he said. "Oh, we're all peachy officer, and we're all here voluntarily aren't we folks?" Amos said laughing, turning around to address us. We roared with laughter again. "Things were just great until you stopped us," said Paul laughing. Paul always had the broadest smile and even when he was being a smart ass he was disarmingly charming about it. "Is that so," said the trooper, mostly to himself. "I bet you were." We were just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Although we were laughing we were really, really scared.

"So where are you kids headed?" asked the officer. "We're going to a demonstration in Washington, DC," Amos told him, without artifice, without flinching, and with pride. "Renting this truck is the cheapest and easiest way to get there and it keeps us safe from the dangers of hitchhiking." The cop stood there for a moment and just seemed to be taking it in, deciding what action to take next. Car after car and truck after truck roared by loudly as we sat there breathless, waiting for the hammer to fall. 

"Well, I'll tell you what," said the trooper. "There's certainly no law against against exercising your constitutionally-protected rights, but there are laws against drugs." He paused, and you could feel our collective spirits sagging so much I thought the truck's springs might break. Here it came. The search, the hassle, the humiliation, and jail. I had never been to jail and I don't think anyone else had been to jail either. Damn, and this trip had seemed like such a good idea at the time... I could hear Three Dog Night in the background of my mind singing, "That ain't the way to have fun, son..." 

"So, I'll tell you what," he said, his face silhouetted against the spot lights and head lights and flashing lights of the cruisers parked behind him. " I know you kids have a lot of drugs in this truck. I can smell the marijuana but I'm sure you also have a lot of acid, and heroin and speed and other kinds of pills in this truck and if you all just pass it forward to me I'll put it in a big pile right here in front of us and destroy it, then I'll let you go."

You have got to be kidding, I thought. How could he think we were such hopeless drug addicts? We just had a couple joints on us. We didn't do all that other stuff, except for maybe the acid on occasion and we only used speed to help us study for finals and even frat boys with "Love it or Leave it" stickers on their cars did that. No one did heroin or popped pills. We had read the Readers Digest while waiting in doctor's offices all our lives and we knew this stuff was bad. And no one believed this trooper was just going to let us go. We were in a stand off, but there were 20 plus of us and a half dozen of them and they thought we were crazy drug addicts and revolutionary firebrands. 


"Well," Amos said, "there's none of that going on here. But if there were I don't think that by now anything would be left for you to discover." The officer just stood there looking at us amidst all his lights and cars and the impressive array of force he had at his disposal. He looked at us long and hard....


"I think you're right," he said. "Just get the hell out of here and do it quick." We were happy to oblige. We were astonished. We had won. I guess he did a quick cost/benefit analysis and gave it up as a lost cause, especially given our numbers and his fear regarding our response. Not that we would have done anything, but he didn't know that. People like us had been pretty well demonized in the minds of some and we had willingly fed that image too often. I'm not sure what happened about the truck rolling back into a police car and not being nailed for that, but we were too damn happy about the outcome as it were to ask. 


"Call the FBI and tell 'em the hippies are shipping 'em to Washington in U-Hauls," he yelled to another officer, as if there were some Command Central of the anti-war movement that ran everything with an amazing level of precision from top to bottom anytime it wished. 


Amos shut the door of the U-Haul, then hopped in the cab and slowly pulled back on to the Interstate, heading out of Indiana past the "Welcome to Ohio" sign which we saw had only been only a hundred or so feet in front of us before we had been intercepted. 

We took turns riding in the cab with the drivers--three abreast--and my turn came as we crawled through West Virginia. I fell asleep on the shoulder of Chook's friend Mary, and she didn't push me aside. The fragrance of her patchouli oil filled me with wonder. Her soft shoulder and that scent made me feel happy and safe in an unsafe world. A couple hours later I had to crawl back into the darkness of the U-Haul and slept there as well as I could with 20 other people crowding up every square inch of space. Mary's shoulder had seemed much more inviting.


A few hours later Scott, a long-haired engineering student who had taken over the driving duties, started shouting hoarsely from the cab in front, "We're here, we're here. I'll open up the back door so you can see this place when it's safe to pull off!" We shook ourselves awake and the excitement built. The truck was pretty stuffy and we stank. We passed around the remaining water and some of us splashed a little on our faces to freshen up.


Within twenty minutes we stopped and Scott opened the back door to the U-Haul. I could smell water immediately and hear flags cracking in the wind.  It was like going from black and white to color in the Wizard of Oz. Light, vibrant color, and the fragrant scents of spring flooded in, overwhelming the darkness and dread that had captured us for 15 hours or more. We were crossing the Potomac River and the bridge was decorated with red and black flags. Long hairs were everywhere, people had signs and banners, and joy had captured us all. We were driving into West Potomac Park, we had gotten to D.C.  safe and sound, it was morning in America, and we were going to make history.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS


IF MY THOUGHT DREAMS COULD BE SEEN: MAY DAY 1971 (PART 2)

IF MY THOUGHT DREAMS COULD BE SEEN: MAY DAY 1971 (PART 1)



We lumbered out of West Lafayette, Indiana for the actions in Washington DC in a huge orange and white U-Haul truck filled with 20 plus people on Friday April 30, 1971. The truck, of course, was entirely enclosed and unless you were in the cab this trip would be taken in utter darkness. Yes, I skipped class that day. I had sort of given up on what many considered the real world anyway. There was so much drama going on, and meeting Ted had brought it to such a boil that I felt I had more important things to do. My thought dreams were simply larger than the world I had come to know. Ted did not come with us and no one expected him to. He had seen enough drama in Vietnam. 

Only a handful of us had attempted anything this ambitious or faced off against troops and police before except for our friend Chook. Chook was the oldest brother of our friends Steve and Doug. He was an intimidating anarchist wild man with round Trotsky-like wire-rimmed glasses and Medusa-like long blond hair. He looked like someone you wouldn't want to fuck with. Chook had briefly attended school in Illinois and got caught up in revolutionary direct action such as street fighting and other things that are best left unmentioned. When we visited some of his friends at the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois a few weeks before May Day, his friends had the impressive, wood-carved Chancellor's Chair in their dining room, having procured it in a raid on the student union one night some weeks before. It was sort of like Animal House only everyone carried the Red Book.

I was pretty much in awe of these people. They had an air of knowing things I did not and they were fully steeped in the anger of feeling betrayed by everything they had once held dear. Some had travelled to Cuba to cut sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade, a group of young Americans who defied the travel restrictions to Cuba to work for free in support of this thorn in the side of their U.S. government. Most of them were four or five years older than myself and had endured years of assaults on their idealistic notions of what America was or at least should be. They were what was called at the time, "movement heavies" and they were more than a little full of themselves. A couple of women Chook knew from Illinois, Shelley and Mary, were travelling with us in the U-Haul and my half dozen or so closest friends and I were going to meet up with the other movement heavies these people knew and ditch everyone else we'd come with once we got to Washington DC. We wanted to be heavies too, and we thought some of our travelling companions were not heavy enough for us cool kids. We may have been a bit full ourselves as well.

Keep in mind that the demeanor and appearance of demonstrators had changed markedly since the initial actions against the war in the early- and mid-sixties. In the initial stages of the movement men wore sport coats and women nice dresses to underline the fact that ordinary people opposed the war. As failure upon failure mounted and counter-cultural values came to predominate, demonstrators started looking like assault teams of mountain men and women.

The way a person dressed and groomed themselves carried profound symbolic significance. Just as demonstrators in coats and ties signified critical acceptance of society's rules, the counter-culture style signified a near total rejection of the entire fabric of what was taken for granted. Long hair on men and casual, oftentimes ragged clothing on both women and men, signified a refusal to being tamed by a society than no longer made sense or held your allegiance. What good was deferred gratification when you were being led to slaughter or you were slaughtering others on someone else's behalf? My closest friends and I were on the stern but wild and wooly side of this semiotic divide. We all had long hair but we didn't sport flowers. We wore olive drab army surplus coats and boots and red bandanas tied just beneath our left knees. The coats, boots, and bandanas inferred both an ironic rejection of a society that lived through the use of force and a warning that we might feel obliged to act in the same manner if pushed. There was also a lamentable machismo in all this that embarrasses me but which I must admit I found empowering.


But don't take all this dour heaviness too seriously. For all our hubris at the time and my hubris in this recollection, there was an undeniable innocence to this journey. Regardless of our posturing and all my passion, we were happy and optimistic and not terribly aware of what we were getting into. The trip to DC was going to take twelve to fourteen hours if everything went well. And here we were, locked in total darkness in the back of a U-Haul truck, singing, laughing, passing weed, and telling stories, just as if we were going to yet another rock concert. 


The brothers Steve and Doug and Chook, as well as our friends Amos and Joe, had all gone to high school together in West Lafayette where most of their parents were professors. Jerry and I, another close friend, had sort of joined their already existing world. We were as tight as any group of young men could ever be. We never would have used the term, but we loved and cared about each other and would have done anything possible to aid each other. In many respects we were a gang--a "collective" or "affinity group" if you want to get technical--though we were a rather benign gang as gangs go. The other fifteen or so people with us were also friends, just not friends to whom were quite as much attached as we were to each other. We were more political and aspired to a bit more than our friends whom we conceitedly imagined to be mere hippies.


But little over two-and-one half hours after our departure our entire trip appeared to end. The truck slowed down unexpectedly and pulled off on to the side of the Interstate. We started asking each other what was going on and the panic began to build. Between the cracks in the gigantic sliding door at the rear of the U-Haul we could see flashing police lights shining through. A collective gasp rose from us. And when the truck came to a complete stop then rolled backward, crashing into what had to be a police car, we were tossed against each other violently and the sense of panic really set in. We were near Richmond, Indiana at the Indiana/Ohio border and we were such losers that we had not even gotten out of our own state safely. In a few minutes the sliding door was rolled up, we were blinded by the head lights of numerous police cars and their flashing lights, and a cloud of marijuana smoke billowed out into the faces of half a dozen Indiana State troopers.

TO BE CONTINUED

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)