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It takes only a familiar song to get my mind wandering. Music is not only the soundtrack of our lives, it is our lives. Tim Buckley’s ethereal voice returns me to a bewildering time. Nightmarish times. Buckley’s “Once I Was.” Once we all were quite different, those of us who lived through the Vietnam War era. Dates all jumbled in my brain.
A Sunday afternoon. The Villanova campus. My young idealistic cousin and I. Phil Berrigan speaking to us from his anguished heart. Father Phil. Hating the Vietnam War, not just against it. Followed by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They had lived the nightmare we only opposed in theory.
“Once I was a soldier and I fought on foreign fields for you … do you ever think of me?”…
Another night. August. Steamy August. The Democratic Convention. Robert Kennedy murdered just months before. The tribute would happen in just hours. Grief. Untold grief that it could happen again. Guests for dinner. One of them kept using the N-word and made the most horrific comments as if to bait me into an argument. Became too much when he claimed he would rather have his daughter marry James Earl Ray than Martin Luther King. Tossed them both out. I was a poor host that night.
“I Ain’t Marching anymore …”
George McGovern rally at 15th and Chestnut streets. Phil Ochs singing. Not a prayer for McGovern to beat Richard Nixon. Didn’t seem to matter to us. Still believed in miracles back then. Happy endings. The crowd surges. Moment of panic pressed against the Jacob Reed building, stately men’s clothing store where a CVS now stands.
“Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards everyone. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
“The Armies of the Night” by Norman Mailer. War protesters beaten up on the steps of the Pentagon. The Democratic Convention of 1968. Riots outside. Protesters having the crap knocked out of them in Lincoln Park. Emotional riots inside. Ex-Marine Dan Rather punched in the stomach by a security guard. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley spotted giving the choke sign to Sen. Abe Ribicoff as he was calling out the violence onstage. The Democrats finally nominate Hubert Humphrey, a decent man caught up in the maelstrom. Nixon’s the one.
“Well, it’s 1-2-3, what are we fighting’ for?”
Taylor Grant. Broadcast Phillies games at one point. Innocuous enough. Turns to news. Takes it serious. Moves to WPEN. Things change. The war deepens. Grant’s fiery radio commentary excoriates the war and its supporters. The sponsor, PGW, whom Grant calls “the kindly blue flame.” He ticks off someone important (Frank Rizzo?) and suddenly, Grant is gone. His kindly blue flame flickers out.
Pete Seeger. Shirtsleeves rolled up, acoustic guitar in hand. Sings an old folk song with new meaning. We are knee deep in the Big Muddy.
Woodstock. Yasgur’s Farm. Wanted to go, but had one kid and another on the way. Three days in mud. Peace and love also pot and lots of rutting. Had to watch it on film in a movie theater. Seems that’s how I spent that era as a concerned bystander. Just a bystander while good Americans fought and died on foreign soil and some got their heads cracked here at home. Curtain opens on the immense crowd. Jimi Hendrix plays the hell out of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Oh say can we see”… can we see a way out of here?
The unthinkable. Kent State University. Kids toss rocks at the National Guard. Nobody knows who gave the command. I thought I heard someone say “fire,” says one guardsman. Four students dead. Showcased on the nightly news.
“Tin soldiers. Nixon coming. We’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio …”
Rallies in Center City. New York Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, but for the first time, baseball seems insignificant. Kids burn draft cards. I am in my early 30s. I hold on to mine. Meaningless gesture? Act of cowardice? Another example of being a bystander? Meanwhile I’m writing angry stuff in this newspaper. Emotional stuff against the war. I get angry phone calls at home. Number listed in the Yellow Pages. Last time it ever was. The mail brings crazy stuff. The writings of Chairman Mao Zedong. Picture of Nixon with implied threats scribbled in red.
Skinny harmonica-playing kid calls himself Bob Dylan and sings “In the nineteen sixties came the Vietnam War. Can somebody tell me what we’re fightin’ for?”
Anti-war students and construction workers shout at one another across generational and cultural lines. The streets are on fire. Families fight at the dinner table. Hair grows longer and ticks off some. Even my sideburns creep down my face and some of my old friends stare at me thinking maybe I’ve gone daft. A family doctor asks me whether I can tie those sideburns under my chin with a bow. Walter Cronkite turns against the war.
And Ochs laughs away on the draft dodger rag. “Oh I’m only sixteen, I got a ruptured spleen and an old maid invalid aunt.”
The real heroes fought and sometimes died or became maimed for life. Some of the heroic survivors got greeted with jeers here at home. Our ultimate shame.
Tim Buckley — “… do you ever think of me …”
Thinking of you today. In strange lands. Fighting in wars we still don’t understand.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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