The Winter Soldier

Oh Camil, tell me how do you feel? You fought for your country, for God and for war, now your heart tells you that can't be real. So you tell me your story from beginning to end, all the blood and the guts and the gore. Will you tell all the people 'bout the people you killed, not for God, but for country and war? -- Graham Nash, Oh, Camil (The Winter Soldier)

I met the overwhelming force of unveiled truth that is Scott Camil while volunteering on the Congressional campaign for David Harris in the mid-1970s. Harris had served hard time in a Texas penitentiary for refusing induction to go to Vietnam. Now he was running against a Republican in liberal's clothing in Palo Alto, and Harris (former husband to Joan Baez) called in the leaders of the more potent anti-war movement groups of the previous decade to work the streets.

Camil was a tall, muscular man in his thirties with a black pony tail and beard who had been twice wounded in Vietnam and once shot in the back by a federal DEA agent who left him bleeding to death in a Gainesville street just a year before I met him. The agent, working through Camil's girlfriend, grabbed Scott from behind as they were driving along, and the shot from the .380 Llama pistol blew Camil from the car with such force that his tennis shoes remained in the vehicle. The bullet damaged his kidneys, lungs, and liver. In the months before I met him, he had been acquitted by a Florida courts (which made no attempt to prosecute the agent for attempted murder), and had healed sufficiently to come work for Harris in the Bay Area.

Harris' staff put Camil and I together to canvas tough black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the otherwise shi-shi Palo Alto, and we drove in the van Scott brought from Florida, handing out leaflets and campaign walking papers. We ran errands for Harris, working late into the night sometimes buoyed by stimulants, sometimes accompanied by Scott's dog K-Bar, named after the Marine Corps killing knife he used in Vietnam. We both had been born in Brooklyn of Jewish ancestry, shared political views, but I had none of Scott's nightmares.

You didn't trade idle chit-chat with Scott. Having survived death times over, and living with PTSD and fully justifiable paranoia of authorities, Camil talked straight and blunt, and had utter disgust of political bullshit.

Justifiable. During two tours of duty in Vietnam, Sergeant Camil was awarded two Purple Hearts, nominated for a Bronze Star, earned the Vietnam Presidential Unit Citation, Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, and was considered an ideal soldier. "I made the decision that I was going to kill every Vietnamese that I came in contact with," he said. "That way, even if I killed a hundred innocent, good Vietnamese, and got one guilty one, it would be worth it."

There were atrocities that would haunt him on homecoming. He still had two years' of duty, so he became a lecturer for the corps, but his honest recollections troubled college students and he was assigned elsewhere. He went back to college himself after honorable discharge and once he heard Jane Fonda speak on campus, he took to heart her words that the government wasn't telling the truth about the war, so it was up to the veterans. He began protesting, spending time in jail, where professors brought assignments to his cell.

A founder of the infamous Gainesville Eight, Camil was arrested for plans to disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention by staging Vietnam-style guerrilla raids on Miami neighborhoods, power stations, and area shops to show what the war was like for people at home. He reportedly was part of a radical arm of the Vietnam Vets against the war that planned assassination squads to take-out pro-war Senators in their offices on Capital Hill. "I was serious," Camil later said. "I felt that I spent two years killing women and children in their own fucking homes. These are the guys that fucking made the policy, and these were the guys that were responsible for it, and these were the guys that were voting to continue the fucking war when the public was against it. I felt that if we really believed in what we were doing, and if we were willing to put our lives on the line for the country over there, we should be willing to put our lives on the line for the country over here."

FBI records show they considered Camil a "dangerous and most volatile person," and teletype to the Jacksonville office instructed them "to completely neutralize subject without delay."

But the more time I spent with Scott, the more I understood what it's like to devote yourself blindly to an idea--one which involved slaughtering the innocent--in the name of some abstract notion of moral supremacy, and in watching him, as he ground away on yet another set of false teeth, his unvarying courage to carry misery in a warrior's body while fighting for a just cause. I hadn't gone to his war, yet Scott and I were friends. And he was a powerful ally if you were on the right side.

In 1971, Camil participated in the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit, where Camil got honest about what he saw while in Charlie Company, 1/1, 1st Marine Division. The actual term "Winter Solder" was coined by revolutionary Thomas Paine, referring to troops who served past their enlistments and fought through a long winter to help win the Revolution and build our nation.

At the end of the Harris Campaign--he lost to the Republican--I drove back to Gainesville with Scott. We made it from San Diego to Florida in record time, stopping only for a steak dinner and a dip in a Texas motel pool. Scott drove fast, had a radar detector, a Bearcat police scanner, and a firearm in the glove compartment. At his home in sprawling acreage in the woods outside of town, he answered the front gate at night with a flashlight and a shotgun.

I recently saw a photograph of Scott sitting beside a young soldier who had been wounded in Iraq. They had recently returned from the latest incarnation of the Winter Soldier hearings where the young man had testified. Our troops were killing Iraqi farmers who dared to work their crops at night--at night because that was the only time there was sufficient electricity in the country to power irrigation and other implements and, in so doing, became violators of the curfew. Many were shot dead with shovels in their hands.

Gray now, but still sporting his trademark pony tail, Scott looked damn good. Both men were smiling. Both warriors. Winter soldiers. Brothers all.

Gonzo Instructs

Jane Fonda walked to where I stood in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room and put her hand on my arm. For a moment, I thought it was a kind gesture.

"Miss Fonda," I said, reaching for the notebook in my jeans pocket, "Do you have a second?"

"No," she snapped and used my elbow as a fulcrum for shoving past me.

At that moment it was clear that I was a nobody. We had driven five days across country, Proton and I, doing our best to stay loaded all the way. We were intent on mirroring our Gonzo journalist idol Hunter S. Thompson. No matter that we had gone to see Thompson at Stanford and the guy was too drunk to speak. He wobbled at the microphone, uttered a barrage of profanity in a garbled rant, and left early. Nonetheless, Proton (a fellow newshound from the East Bay daily where I worked) and I packed our clothes, an assortment of illegal drugs, and a road atlas into his Volkswagen van, and drove to New York City where we had press passes to cover the 1976 Democratic Convention.

Now, spun out in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room, I watched the aft end of Ted Turner's future bride disappear into the crowd and fell, crestfallen, into my seat. I wasn't much of a newshound anyway and the week of mindless driving had left me a dumb spectator. Proton had raced off after Candace Bergen, a strikingly beautiful actress who, cameras draped around her neck, was working the convention as a photojournalist.

I sat in my seat, listened to Rep. John Conyers review platform planks that in no way would ever be supported by Jimmy Carter. After the Nixon horror-show and brain numbing Ford years, you'd think the country was ready to try liberalism again, but the way the caucus was headed, it was clear that Reaganism was a suggestion away from reality. The liberals would have to accept a plate of leftovers here in New York, a reality that rinsed away whatever ambitions I had left to write anything of my experience.

I found Proton and we left to tour the streets of Manhattan. We went along the central post office, past buildings with lion statues and colonnades draped with patriotic bunting. We passed the throngs of protesters and lobbyists--signs proclaiming everything from legalizing prostitution to tirades against abortion--and made our way to Times Square. I had thought the convention floor a zoo, but walking the New York streets was more entertaining.

We came upon a movie theatre showing a crime drama. In those days there were no video trailers, so it was enticing to see a scene from the film played out on an outdoor screen. In the clip, a man had his victim pinned against a wall and was running the bit from a power drill in and out of his thigh. A closeup showed the bit corkscrewing into the man's bleeding leg.

"No big deal," said a passerby in a thick Brooklyn accent. "You see that stuff all the time."

Later in the afternoon we returned to the convention floor, sated with pizza and pretzels dipped in mustard that we rounded up from sidewalk peddlers. Reporters crowded around Senator Kennedy, who held forth, ruddy as a beet, at a corner of the hall. At the platform a speaker from Florida rambled along in tinny monotone about objections to the welfare plank.

That night in our motel room, Proton and I divvied up the four-way hit of paper acid that we had ferried out from the Bay Area. In the morning, Carter would announce his running mate, which everyone expected would be Walter Mondale, so there was nothing to miss. We would have breakfast, then gobble the acid and walk the convention floor for a while. I had already bought a ticket on the afternoon Metroliner to Washington, so I wasn't staying anyhow. I planned to take the high-speed train to D.C., where I'd stay with a member of Rep. Don Edwards' staff. Edwards was a powerful liberal--had led the Judiciary Committee's call for Nixon's impeachment. Edwards had an office in part of the Bay Area that I covered, and I had come to know his staff. In fact, I had come to really know two of his secretaries, which fully demonstrated my commitment to narcissism.

After breakfast, Proton and I loaded up the ponies of transcendence and went our separate ways. I would be flying home to the Bay Area while he would drive the VW to his family in Kentucky. I must admit, I never really liked LSD. The first hour of giddiness very much appealed to me, but the subsequent hours of melting at the whim of a drug I couldn't control scared me to death. I typically spent most of the time wishing it was over. But we had agreed to do Gonzo journalism and I wouldn't wimp out.

And during the hour of giddiness I found myself in front of the bank of microphones when Carter dragged Mondale on-stage. Mondale's face waxed and waned in acidic throbs. Mondale had a lion's head, huge and shaggy. My body rang like a struck temple bell. The blare of spotlights and the sudden bursts from motorized cameras made me dizzy. I had to go.

After a few hours wandering with dubious judgment through Times Square, I found my way to Grand Central and found my seat on the Metroliner. I had done well to book a plush chair by a picture window. Waiters came up and down the aisles with cocktails and snacks. And I raced along between New York and Washington at a furious clip, the countryside streaming out the window like a painting in rain. In fact, it had begun to rain. And when we pulled into D.C. there was a furious summer thunderstorm, lightening forking down atop the Capitol Building and all across the Mall.

I found the phone number to Edwards' staffer at the Rayburn Building and called from the station. Sadly, the staffer wasn't there. The Congressman himself answered the phone. I was dumbstruck. He was delighted to speak with me. He wanted to know the latest scoop from the Convention. I could feel another door of great opportunity closing on me, slammed shut by my own idiocy.

I told him I would come see him in the morning, that I couldn't talk now as I was under the weather, which was amazingly true on many counts. The storm crashed down around me and after I hung up, I took a cab to the staffer's home in the Virginia suburbs.

What had seemed so glamorous in Thompson looked shabby on me. Of course I would not go see the Congressman in the morning. I had nothing to report, save to say that in the name of God I would never try acid again. Even so, I still had plenty to experience in a long career of self-sabotage. It was July 1976, the nation's birthday.