1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  God said, Abraham, kill me a son.

  Abe said, Man, you must be puttin’ me on.

  God said, Abe?

  Abe said, What?

  God said, You can do what you want, Abe, but . . .

  next time you see me comin’, you better run.

  Abe said, Where you want this . . . killin’ done?

  God said, Out on Highway . . . 61.

  A young Jew in Hoosierville had faced tough questions from tough, inquisition-hearted people: What is a Jew? Why are you Jewish? Why does anybody need Jews? Why did you kill Jesus? Oh, yes, the little playmates at Hoosier Elementary had wanted to know, had wanted to fight, had wanted blood revenge. Everybody knows now where this line of questioning is headed, or they should know, if they’re Chewish. The answers often began with er . . . uh, well, it’s like this . . . Maybe it was only imaginary that things changed when Bob Dylan captured the essence of Jewish history in a few lines of lyric. But concise, eloquent language down at street level can change perspective and understanding. The Jews were the first culture/tradition/belief system to codify behavior on human sacrifice; it was not cool or good. It was bad—thirty-seven hundred sixty-one years before Jesus H. Christ it was bad. God delivered the message by example to Abraham, who proved himself devout but would have been wrong. Such is the beauty of Judaism, with its unique flexibility allowing the rules to be bent in times of extreme circumstance. Rules? What? Rules. Sacrificial offering from that time onward was deemed best made with a goat, a scapegoat who would carry the burden of our sins. The irony of the beauty of Judaism is the practice of scapegoating Jews; they’re so convenient.

  These and other orbital perspectives drifted on out to Highway 61 where thoughts got splayed like offspring on the sacrificial block to the deity of altered consciousness. Those days and clouds and camels and new friends and family and Bob Dylan took us farther from suburban influence than we’d been or imagined. We’d smoked too much dope, and many days of it made for a paltry deposit in the memory banks. Yet we became vested on a heady accumulation of feelings of well-being, of fulfillment in fun—and in the most important component of those years, no matter how lost it now seems: the love all around us.

  We lived with abandon in a spirit of accepting the whole wide world, celebrating its many-faceted freedoms, its layered realities, its amazing quirks and beautiful blemishes, and yes, its endless opportunities for goofing. As in all cultural phenomena, the clothing, nuance, body language and behaviors of the time were a demonstration of who we were and what might be—faith in these things felt natural. Many souls remember that faith, those wild times and amazing scenes. We did not ponder the poor guys in the jungles trading fire that very moment. We did not resent them or dislike them in any way. We heard, like everybody else, that we’d spit on them, as if spitting on the Viet veterans was aligned with our views and feelings. It didn’t sit right; so hostile and warlike in a crowd committed to peace.

  Decades later we learned how freedom of speech is easily abused—nobody spit on homecoming vets. The spitting story was a pioneer effort of warring interests to influence perception and mold collective consciousness into mob rule. Modern attempts of the technique include Kenya, socialism in the White House, death panels as part of health care and a range of vitriol to remind us of our roots in the 60s, when we got grounded in truth.

  We didn’t know reality as perceived by the Viet vets, because they went, so they weren’t like us. We sympathized, especially with those who realized too late the difference between martial law and civil law, and that they should have declined when they had their civil rights.

  Those who made it back were viewed curiously at first—keep in mind that the My Lai massacre occurred in March of ’68, and the military covered it up for over a year. Up to five hundred unarmed villagers of all ages were raped, otherwise tortured, murdered and mutilated. The direct cause presented by the military: war stress on valiant troops who broke with so much evil coming at them. In the end, events at the village of My Lai were deemed a massacre, all the murderous carnage pinned on one soldier sentenced to twenty-two years for so much mayhem. He served three years of house arrest.

  How could anybody participate in a massacre? Oh, wait; they weren’t feeling quite themselves. They’d become killing machines by necessity, and you’re bound to have a massacre or two in those unfortunate conditions. Or some such.

  Concurrently emerging in those pivotal years, two other events eliminated the tiderip between the two major war resistance camps. The first of those events was general. Fragging occurred frequently as a quirk and soon becoming a pattern, then a phenomenon, then an explosive act of opposition. Wikipedia today defines fragging as:

  In the U.S. military, fragging refers to the act of attacking a superior officer in one’s chain of command with the intent to kill that officer. The term originated during the Vietnam War and was most commonly used to mean the assassination of an unpopular officer of one’s own fighting unit. Killing was effected by means of a fragmentation grenade, hence the term.

  The jungle war spawned movies of profound impact—Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and many more, including the benchmark of reasoned insanity, Apocalypse Now—

  . . . suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, ‘Do you know that if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’ . . . I mean I’m . . . no, I can’t . . . I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s . . . he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas . . .

  Dennis Hopper found himself in a character truest to type, and Apocalypse Now was rendered in masterstrokes, adhering to a tried and true literary gem, Heart of Darkness. Touching on Joseph Conrad’s key characters and lines—like The horror, the horror, the horror—Apocalypse captured the drift of reason from secure moorings in war. Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz pegged Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz but then stepped out—and up to sainthood with the most reasoned defense of men engaged in violence. Such a lengthy statement seemed like a monologue or worse, a diatribe. But drastic conditions in war called for drastic measures in drama, and Marlon Brando delivered the message of the ages adapted to the age:

  I’ve seen horrors . . . horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that . . . but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror . . . Horror has a face . . . and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces . . . seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember . . . I . . . I . . . I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it . . . I never want to forget. And then I realized . . . like I was shot . . . like I was shot with a diamond . . . a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God . . . the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men . . . trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love . . . but they had the strength . . . the strength . . . to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral . . . and at the same time who
are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling . . . without passion . . . without judgment . . . without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

  The jungle war classic movies were still a few years away—gestating as we watched events unfold, as the madness of the moment became known, widely viewed in thirty-minute segments each evening on three networks. But specifics beyond geographic coordinates and body counts remained sparse, until fragging. Fragging was an act of refusal, the ultimate rendition of: Hell no, we won’t go. Well, the poor fucks were already there, a tad late to say no, but they did what soldiers do, distracted by evil in critical mass, killing commanding officers who insisted on another night patrol. The most frequent victims of fragging were first lieutenants. James Calley, the single conviction from My Lai was a first lieutenant.

  On college campuses across the nation young men were offered military advantage in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Only a few hours of military education each week could teach many useful things about weapons, marching, chain of command and war. It could earn a few bucks monthly and give a guy that certain leg up as a first lieutenant. After all, college grads were smarter, and the smart guys should call the shots, so to speak.

  Fragging was war resistance and military breakdown with a uniquely American spirit, far removed from the Nuremburg defense, that ve vass only following orders. Our guys were better than that. Lyndon Johnson felt the pinch and bailed out on another term as your President, live on TV. His heir would be Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, a skilled politico who may have stopped the carnage but was hamstrung on Johnson’s graces, such as they were. The end result: riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Chicago looked more like Dresden than a windy city, more like a repressive regime than an urban center—but tear gas, rubber bullets and billy clubs were a walk in the basil next to the jungle war. And who showed up on the Chicago front to defend the country they loved? The Viet Vets.

  Spit on them? The fuck you talking? They were part of us, bearing witness as only they could do. The Doors put a heartfelt tragedy into a lyrical love ballad, The End, lamenting the love lost between a generation and its country. Whether love gone awry is better or best or even comparable to Rosie the Riveter and a kinder, gentler patriotism is infinitesimally incidental to the hard cold fact that we felt this sentiment. Viet vets against the war lived this loss. So when anybody calls “the 60s” a lost opportunity, he does not reflect the true loss that defined the greatness of those years for what they revealed.

  Another Vietnam classic decades later weaved a compelling thread of Viet veteran opposition. Sir, No, Sir shines a light on American military might and what it still wants to keep in the dark. Viet vets pushing seventy share the truth of the country they loved and fought for without question.

  Many draft dodgers saw the truth first or were afraid. In any event, even if young, naïve and drug-addled, draft resistors knew that Vietnam had no link to the USA or its defense, that “winning” the war would warrant occupation, billions more in defense contracts and a corporate/cultural beachhead to make Southeast Asia free for consumer products. Hail, Coca Cola and Big Mac.

  Losing the war would make the world no different than it had been, except for making it more peaceful.

  And so it came to pass.

  It’s not fair to criticize anybody for missing the point and the action, even a career-minded journalist with impeccable credentials and potential. By the same token, a network up-and-comer cannot criticize his government or the leaders he must interview objectively on any tender subject, especially a jungle war with no clear objective. But the inference is clear on a book entitled The Best Generation, and that gets tricky for Tom Brokaw. The WWII guys were the best, and so were our guys, with a challenge uniquely layered and complex, with a cultural rift demonstrating the weakness and strength of America in a topsy-turvy reversal of power in regard to guns and flowers. We were not meek and did not turn the other cheek or inherit the earth. The war protest was both violent and disobedient, running the gamut from Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. They blew up buildings to let us know which way the wind was blowing

  So many fragmented groups had it up to fucking here that incendiary exchange could happen as soon as not. Sticking a flower up your gun barrel or flashing a peace sign to a hardhat were taunts, so a few hippies got clobbered, proving the hippie point. Fringe extremes were most often embarrassingly violent or soft and felt as stupid then as they still do today, maybe more so, because that was an original time.

  Yet through the din came Donovan’s soft, sweet dirge in a lyric so poetically removed yet specifically compelling that it soothed the aching spirit of a generation in a lullaby with a heady downbeat. Yes, the elders of our time had chosen to remain blind, and way down below the ocean was where we wanted to be—she may be.

  Undulating rhythm over the pulse of the revolution affirmed the value and victory available to those who would tune in, turn on, drop out. Psychedelic drugs likely influenced more people outside the military than in, but that’s conjecture, and the demand for psychedelics in Vietnam was formidable. Who of the right mind or whatever mind remained wouldn’t want a change of mind, away from the jungle war? Vietnam soldiers were swamped, fighting for life in a hostile environment. They needed time away, to see a reality above and beyond a chronic reality of extreme violence—the world they’d been drafted into. Who wouldn’t rather gaze on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds than kill or be killed?

  A milestone was the baby boom transit from adolescence to adulthood. It came fast and slow, with the best and worst the world had to offer. Lasting impressions formed from the crucibles of limitless fun and horror.

  What was manhood? It was a toughness that few boys were up to but all were required to attain. Manhood got knocked down on all fronts. In some quarters it got back up. We were warned to trust nobody over thirty. Thirty was out of it or worse: thirty took its marching orders from the most extreme military/industrial mentality America could conjure, beginning with Lyndon Johnson, ending with Dick Nixon, suffering William Westmoreland on the way. Johnson got duped; Nixon and Westmoreland were dupers.

  That was the world unfolding in the summer of ’69.

  David, Bruno and I hitched a ride to a kibbutz that made knives—stamped steel butter knives you might see in any diner. The place was nice enough and hospitable, even welcoming with open arms, embracing, nearly grasping. The managers reminded David and me that we were landed citizens in Israel, because we’d been born Jewish by definition, meaning that our mothers of record were Jewish. A Jewish mother could be verified and, mazel tov, qualify us for Israeli passports. We could stay for life and do God’s work, if we chose to do so. David pondered the offer. I thought, ho boy.

  Our host seemed giddy with prospects and further assured that Bruno’s lack of a Jewish mother was not a problem. Bruno seemed like a good boy and a hard worker and would be welcome, and immigration would not be difficult, if we chose to stay together. It felt like another draft.

  We stayed a day and a night and hit the road with no real objective but to find a kibbutz with less fervor and more females. We found another kibbutz a bit higher off the desert floor, a cooler place with fewer dorms and buildings but much more land. More greenery at elevation felt more inviting than the desert floor. We spent three days pruning, aerating, tending and picking the acres of pear orchards on this second kibbutz. Hard work was rewarded with three squares daily and a bunk bed with clean sheets. A bonus was a warm welcome to social events, including group discussions on God, the State of Israel, the meaning of Jews who live in the land of Zion or elsewhere, the ways of the world and working together. Then came the naked swim.

  The kibbutzers loved us, mostly as a polite means of loving Bruno, the exotic Roman Catolica; he was so strong, warm and hard-working that his other talents boosted his stock to new heights. In mere days he already exchanged words and phrases in Hebrew and actually attempted jokes by twist
ing the language incongruously in a way that made people laugh. Was that accidental? He did it at will, in a language he hadn’t heard till last week. Some people stared; he was so hung and uncut.

  In three days came a memorable event, unanticipated as a sudden turning point and no big deal really, except that it was, when Bruno realized he was home. A seeker for years who couldn’t resolve needs with skills had finally arrived. He stayed. He may be there still. David cried in farewell. Then Bruno cried too. I told them to get a grip and didn’t look back.

  David and I caught a bus back to Tel Aviv after being warned about hitching. Wha? Two Jews from America? Are you nuts? We stayed one night at the King David Hotel, and it didn’t blow up.

  We flew back to Rome the next day and got a huge room with an incredibly high ceiling in a massive pension with Doric columns surrounding an interior courtyard where a writer in exile surrounded by Italian antiquity could knock back espresso and Fernet Branca and table-grade Chianti that went down like lemonade.

  The next day I picked up the money old Mom had wired to the American Express office. At the moto shop in the alley, my BSA 650 Lightning Rocket sat out front looking brand new and ready to go. I kicked it over to hear it rumble sweetly.

  David said he needed to go north into Germany. I didn’t want to press him and knew his motivation, his morbid—to my mind—drive to visit some concentration camps. Okay, maybe morbid is the wrong word, but I didn’t need to go and didn’t want to go. I was born a few years after the camps were shut down, and for all I knew, what with Buddhist inclinations, I’d been there already. The dormitories, work places, showers, ovens and mass graves made me shudder and resist.

  He said nobody was required to go, meaning he wouldn’t insist, and he wouldn’t mind riding on back if I wouldn’t mind. We’d both grown, successfully avoiding condescension.