The reason that hanging out with a bunch of temporarily insane Viet Nam vets fresh back from combat was a new phase in my own musical experience, aside from the fact that I’m obviously using music as a ragged thread to tie together utterly unrelated themes, is the importance of music to some of those vets, and to the era that was just winding down in the early 1970s.

Music was part of the Revolution, the anti-war protests, the hippie movement, all of it. One of my coworkers, the assistant director of the place I did archaeology, was a Rolling Stones fan. This big, scary guy all tough and shot up from the war, this thuggish guy from a tough neighborhood in New York where being Jewish meant you had to learn to fight, this guy who had the swagger walk down cold and carried a crowbar in the front seat of his car and knew how to use it, once told me that he “cried and screamed like a girl” when he saw The Stones at the ball park in New York.

“You saw The Rolling Stones live?”

“I cried like a girl, no kidding.” He was getting teary-eyed again as he sat behind the desk in his office, his head covered in most spots with randomly placed and pointy tufts of flaming red hair, and his smuggish face pointing nose first at the object held above the desk in his hand. He had used the intercom to call me into his office a moment earlier and was showing me an album he had just acquired…a Rolling Stones album…and was telling me about the concert and the album at the same time. I did not fully understand why we were having this conversation.

“So take this and fill it out,” he suddenly said, thrusting a small square of paper in my general direction, a piece of paper that looked like a postcard on one side and a form to be filled in on the other. “As soon as you can. Do it right now.”

So my boss had just forced me to join the Columbia House Record Club so he could get a free album by getting someone else to join. I had to pick five albums from this list of mostly totally stupid stuff. The bottom end of the picks I chose to give to my mother as a birthday present, and it was an album by Jim Neighbors, the enigmatic actor/singer. The other, at the top end of the picks, remains today as one of my favorite albums of all time, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

So, now that I had albums coming, I had to get…a record player. So I consulted with Carl, and we managed to dig up a tuner and a record player and set it up in my room. I scavenged my parents’ old speakers from The First Stereo. I dug deep into the pockets and searched for change in the couches and got enough to buy a new needle (that’s the device that reads data off the album on the record player). And the records came and it was good.

The other benefit of the stereo was the built-in radio. Not very many months later, I moved from my parents’ house into my own place. My girlfriend at the time, Leslie, just recently told me (yes, we’ve “reconnected”) that she thought it was SO cool that her boyfriend had his own place. Now that I think about it, that would have been pretty cool for a couple of 16-year-olds. She reminded me that we would get together and tune in the radio to listen to The Fourth Tower of Inverness…indeed, we did. Now that I think about it, holding hands with Leslie and listening to The Fourth Tower of Inverness was even better than Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Which brings me right up to the present. Since I mention my first girlfriend, I will also mention my last girlfriend, Amanda. There are a number of things that I’ve always liked but no one that I was “with” (as it were) also liked, or at least, such things were not important to them. For instance, I’ve always wanted to own a Subaru. No one I was “with” ever wanted a Subaru, so that never happened. Amanda strongly prefers Subarus. So now we have a couple of them. How cool is that?

As I say, there are a number of things like that with Amanda and me. And it turns out that even though she did not really know Joe Cocker when we first met, one of her favorite songs is “Feeling Alright”…the version done by Joe Cocker.

Amanda was somewhat ensaddened to learn that the song is not about feeling all right. It’s about how, “You are feeling all right because you’re a thoughtless bitch, and I’m distinctly not feeling all right at all. In fact, I feel trapped and I’m having nightmares and I dread the day you dump me for some guy with a different name, a different face” (I paraphrase).

But who cares what the song says. It’s how it makes you feel that counts.

For Memorial Day, I’ve decided to rewrite and repost an item that was initially inspired by attacks from the self-righteous right on Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and Jane Fonda. This concerns the war. Which war? Well, pretty much any war. All wars are unjust, even the just ones. But mainly this is about the Viet Nam War.

This photo is a hoax

Where was I during the Viet Nam War? Too young to serve or not serve. I missed required registration by literally a few days, but the war was over by then anyway.

But from a very young age I was politically active. I worked for Ted Kennedy during one of his bids for president. I worked for both McGovern campaigns. I led an organization of high schoolers called “Impeach Nixon Now” (as well as the not very famous “Nature Conservation Club”…whose third member to join was Pete Seger! I wonder whether he still has his membership card).

There were a few reasons for my political activism (aside from the obvious need for political activism!). One was coming from a politically active family, both in traditional politics (my parents’ generation) and as anti-war activists (my older siblings, especially my sister Elizabeth). Also, I went to a school where the middle ground was fairly radical (Milne, now defunct) and from there transferred to a different school that was very very strict…in its sustained radicalism (The Albany Community School, one of the brainchildren of terrorist professor Bill Ayers).

I also had another kind of engagement with the war, besides the politics and activism against it. When I was just a teenager, I got a job that I kept for several years, working for a city agency funded entirely by the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. This was, at the time, a make-work federal program for returning Viet Nam-era vets. The agency I worked for was divided into two parts: the guys who “worked” in the attic of City Hall–they were mainly heroin addicts who slept most of the day except for the occasional trip to the hood to get a fix–and the rest of us, who had our own offices in a separate building. We were archaeologists and historians, and we were very productive and active.

So during much of my teenage years, I spent hours every day working with a group of people that included several vets. There was a core group that ran the place and a constant stream of vets who would come into the agency then move on. Our boss was a professional soldier who had been in Viet Nam at the very beginning…one of Kennedy’s “advisors”…and subsequently for a couple of tours of duty, as well as other parts of the world as a soldier of fortune. He and I became very good friends and remain so today. A few of these guys were “Viet Nam era” but had not been in combat, or even near Viet Nam, but most were wizened and wounded, both physically and mentally. It got crazy now and then (now and then meaning about once a week) and was an amazing learning experience for me.

I remember a few years after all of this watching the movie Platoon. Most likely I saw the movie a couple of years after it was out, because that has been my life-long pattern. I can count the number of movies I’ve seen on opening day on one hand. Anyway, Platoon as I remember it was a series of vignettes of bad things happening in Viet Nam, each and every one of which I had heard about already from the guys I worked with. Every one of them. In fact, one of the guys I worked with was at Khe Sanh with the Marines under siege, and another guy was with one of the relief and clean-up units. My point is, there was very little of what happened in Viet Nam and experienced by the US soldiers there that was not somehow connected to the many different men I met and sometimes got to know well during that period. I got to experience the Viet Nam war vicariously, which, I’m sure, was a LOT better than experiencing it in real life.

Some years later I was the editor of a monthly newspaper published by a vet (whom I had known for many years). His story was interesting. On his return to the US, getting off the bus at the local bus station, he found himself encountering a group of anti-war protesters. He went over to them, talked to them for a few minutes, took off his medals and joined them. He has been with them (in a certain sense) ever since.

What is the point of all of this? I am a person who was against the Viet Nam War but who during the last days of the war counted among my friends many Viet Nam War vets. I never for a moment considered the possibility of blaming these men for the war. I don’t recall anyone I knew at the time doing this. Sure, it may have happened, but I think this was probably a hyped-up media scam promoted by war hawks at the time, or a post hoc reconstruction fostered (festered?) by the right wing. Many, many of the people I worked with in various organizations against the war were vets, many former officers. This view that it was the protesters against the vets is nothing I ever saw or heard of at the time.

The question has been brought up, “What effect did the protests have on the execution of the war?” That is pretty clear. One president, who had been escalating involvement in the war, chose to not run again even though he was eligible to do so. Johnson bowed out of the election because of protests against him and his presidency due to his role in the war. Nixon was elected president under the pretense of having a “secret plan” to end the war, which was a position that was forced by the widespread (and getting more common) anti-war protests. When Nixon was president, he continued the war despite these protests, but there was de-escalation. Finally, in the the later parts of the war, the Nixon administration realized that they had to either win this war or get out. So they started to formulate plans to kick the shit out of the North Vietnamese, even considering nuclear weapons to do this.

In the end, the Nixon administration chose to not follow through with this large final push to win, and one of the main reasons they chose this course was because of the growing strength of the protest. This is well documented.

Forms of protest included things like what my father, a civil servant with a moderately high profile, did. He let his sideburns grow long. Other protests included peaceful marches and candlelight vigils. That was nice. The occasional one day student strike put an edge on it for the campuses. But the protests also included near riots, full-scale riots, occupation of college or government buildings, burning the occasional police car, and Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi.

It was this more extreme end that got Johnson and Nixon’s attention. Nixon was literally afraid of open revolution. It was not the fashion statements or the silent vigils that ended the war. It was burning flags, breaking some windows, and threatening to do more. That was what it required, that was what we did, and that was what worked. It was not the choice of the protesters to be “extreme.” It was the choice of the hawks in power to force the citizenry into something that verged on open revolt.

In this more genteel age of “code pink” and non-violent marches down at the college library, let us not forget that there have been times when our government needed to be threatened to do the right thing.

Go, Jane.