Ducklings

"Half the world is crazy and the other half is scared."
-- Phil Ochs.

Shortly after the corporations found the Texas imbecile to represent their policies around the globe--to plump up their offshore holdings and cripple the American middle class--Dale was shipped out to Afghanistan. He was a monster of flesh, rising over 6'6", with a shaved, bullet-shaped head. Born and raised in the quiet towns of Oregon's Willamette Valley, Dale longed to do good for himself and his family. He'd flunked out of school, was arrested for alcohol-fueled pranks and misconduct, starred in football, but was a dismal failure in the eyes of his brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts.

I learned about his battlefield exploits in short asides that would leak out in innocuous conversations about weather or sports. He'd been home from the war and began anew the trajectory into rage and frustration, shoved out into the streets after battering holes in his father's living room walls with his fists. Alcohol steadied his nerves for an hour, but as he kept on drinking, he overshot the mark and began practicing hand-to-hand without discriminating between animate objects and just any old thing.

The Corps wanted nothing to do with him, kicking him out for alcoholism and mental illness. They washed their hands of him and turned their attention to fresh recruits. Dale said he had been prescribed depression medication in basic training but once they shipped him overseas the Corps decided either he no longer needed it or that it was too much trouble to find some for him. He said he felt excited when he killed, but sad and lonely afterward, that he could make up any number of stories in his mind about the women and children they killed. He said believed he was doing good, but was haunted. He and his fellows would kick dogs that lay in the streets, stupefied from concussions.

The stories slipped into conversations we had in coffee shops about recovery and how to live without alcohol. They slipped out when we sat in the park on summer mornings before the Sacramento heat took all energy out of you. We read the recovery books, swapping turns, and Dale stopped in the middle of his paragraphs because his mind went elsewhere. I'd sit and wait and smile at him. Told him how well he was doing.

He was living in a recovery home not far from where we held our meetings, sharing a house with a dozen other men who were trying to find a way out from a walled-up life. Dale had his own room now, decorated with posters of heavy metal bands and football players he admired. He had a devilish grin that flashed when you had no other indication he was in the same conversation, let alone the same room with you.

The fellows in the recovery home went everywhere together like so many ducklings in the road. In this war, you survived by safety in numbers and by sticking to the middle of the pack. It was more difficult that way to get picked off by the sniper in your head. Guys loved Dale and when I went over to read literature with him, they joked about his clumsiness drying dishes or how he'd scorched the macaroni dinner, mindlessly letting all the water boil out the bottom of the kettle.

On our happiest day, he came over to my apartment for the Fourth of July. It was brutally hot, so we strung canopies over the plastic patio tables and chairs that circled the swimming pool. He wolfed down ribs and chicken and chugged soda pop, and made cannonballs in the pool, his huge body a sudden flash in the air, then the center of rippling waves, his head pink in the sun.

In Sacramento, the locals were at odds about the war and a familiar chasm opened between us all. Guys in over-sized pickup trucks bearing flags roamed the streets, honking their horns. Across from the apartment complex, a Victorian house where a lesbian couple lived had a chart in their window, tallying the war dead .

At dusk we took the stairs to the roof to watch the fireworks explode over the fairgrounds. The roof had weak patches, which scared me, but Dale hopped up and down on them with sadistic delight. The fireworks flashed in his eyes. And as the party wound down, he was the last to go home.

It had taken me a long time to get over my own sense of shame of using a medical deferment to escape service in the Vietnam War. My draft number was among the lowest, which meant I was among the first to go. But I went to college instead and marched against the war, mostly for feeling at home among like-minded people, for the parties, drugs, and easy sex. Unlike many protesters, I did not resent soldiers who had been less fortunate with deferments or who had volunteered for duty, and I was not among the haters who spat upon them when they came home. I was mostly sad about the whole thing.

And when I reached recovery in Port Townsend, I was surrounded with vets who had returned to addiction and despair. I learned to shake their hands and welcome them home. I sat in coffee shops with guys who couldn't sit with their backs to the door, who had buried the living as well as the dead in trash pits in the jungle. With friends who had lost their hearing after manning cannons, or who now walked with braces on their withered legs and had no ill will after gaining traction in recovery. I made friends with the colonel who had come home in alcoholic rage and attempted to throw his wife through a high-story window. He had, at last, found an uneasy peace within our company. The military, I learned, had done little for them after their release. So when I learned that the Texas imbecile had not attended a single military funeral for Iraqi-war veterans, I had to redouble my recovery work to dilute my own rage.

The week after the Fourth of July, I went to the recovery house for a routine meeting with Dale, but he had gone. He had exploded again, this time ripping the kitchen sink from the wall, and had been dismissed. None of his friends knew where he went after he tossed his posters in the trash, rolled up his sleeping bag, and walked off into the night. He said he would phone them, but he never did.

Weeks passed and the ducklings continued to trail into our meetings. One by one, they graduated or were kicked out from the recovery home and went off into whatever lives they could muster. Eventually the last man who had known Dale was gone into the world.

The ones that live, they're amongst us now.

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.

Peace Is Hiding

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life. -- Gerald Stern

TD went to a different high school than I had, but was a dear friend through music. He was a tuba player and we'd spend hours at each others homes, playing 33 1/3 recordings of the symphonies we loved. I had my Russian phase, and we'd darken the room, put on Shostakovitch or Tchaikovsky and imagine the Tartar hoards blazing across the steppes. While our friends were tripping out to Cream's Disraeli Gears, TD and I would light incense, lie on our backs in the dark, and imagine the fat worlds created by Gustav Holst or the bubbling streams that ran through Elgar's lush England.

We ran with a crowd of devoted musicians and lived for the most over-the-top symphonies. Louder was always better. And while we loved rock n roll, too, we spent more time discussing The Merry Wives of Windsor--or even the advantages of Hurst shifters in your Chevy--than we did the British Invasion.

TD would catch fire over a hobby, then quickly lose interest in it. Once he bought a 16mm movie camera. We went to the desert and made student films. Then, one day, I found the camera on my doorstep in a cardboard box. It had been completely disassembled down to turn screws and springs.

After high school, TD and I took divergent paths. Frankly, he startled all of us by enlisting in the Army and shipping out to signal corps training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. I thought we were all in total agreement that the Vietnam War was illegal, immoral, and unnecessary, and that it was plain stupid to let yourself get drafted if you could get a student deferment. My friends were deferred, I was spared service because of a heart ailment, but TD followed the stern advice of his father, who believed the military would teach him proper discipline. His father said he needed straightening out.

TD shipped out and I moved into the only co-educational dorm at college, a three-story hall on campus so filled with pot that you got high just walking through the halls. It took a while before I joined in earnest, but when I joined, it was most certainly in earnest. And while I became drum major of the marching band, my interests had shifted to protest marches and rock 'n roll. I jammed on sax and flute with the dorm band and we covered anti-war songs: "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box."

TD's first letter from Fort Gordon arrived in my dorm mailbox in mid-year. It was a thick letter, stuffed into an envelope with a dove painted on the back flap with the notation: peace is hiding inside envelopes, let it out!

In sum, TD was completing training, preparing for an overseas assignment. He would not say exactly what signal school had taught him, and he was worried about shipping to the war. He asked questions about college life, what we were listening to in college, whether I had discovered pot, if I had joined the peace movement. Strange stuff, I thought, for a soldier to ponder. But that year, as we exchanged letters at least every two weeks, I realized I had become part of his lifeline.

The letters always bulged in their envelopes. He had studied photography and sent pictures of the Georgia countryside, inventive landscapes and experimental exposures. There were no self-portraits in uniform and anything in the letter to suggest TD was in the Army.

Then, early in the year, the first letter arrived from Garmisch, from a military base in Bavaria. The back flap had several doves and the words: Let It Out. He had been spared! The letter was thick with descriptions of German beer, photos of the rolling hillsides and woods, and descriptions of off-base food, how amazingly fast you could drive on the Autobahn. I couldn't tell what he was doing there, officially, or how he really felt about the Army.

I wrote about the marches up Highway 101, the demonstrations at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco with Joan Baez and Stephen Stills, the heady mead wine we squirted from bota bags as we walked along the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, the mounted police with long billy clubs and how it felt to have one poked into your back. There was nothing remarkable about what I was doing; it was what everyone did, wasn't it? Mid-week I was a college drum major in a uniform with bright buttons, and on weekends I smoked weed and wore blue overalls without a shirt and marched in protest.

By my senior year, there was something disturbing in TD's missives, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. His prose had gotten truncated, bitter, and stayed off topic. One envelope had a wad of hashish in it. Another came later that said he had been in a horrible off-base accident, that he had rolled a jeep off the road. His lip had been damaged and he might never play brass instruments again. There were no pictures inside, nor any tangible peace to let out. Our letters trailed off, then stopped entirely.

A few years later I heard from friends that TD had come home. In fact, he was moving to Davis with another friend, to live in the town where I was working as a journalist. We gathered together and got mightily high and listened to Pink Floyd. We especially loved Atom Heart Mother, which was a rock symphony done in atonal measures with brass, strings, synthesizers, and raging guitars. TD never spoke about the military. If I had felt guilty for not writing at his darkest hour, the pot took it all away, and he seemed to harbor no resentment. After a while, though, the blush had worn off. I had a reason to be in Davis, and they did not, and soon they went back to the San Fernando Valley.

Not long after that, I received a call that TD was in a bad way and I flew down for a visit. He was hearing things, saying things that did not make sense, and was flying off the hook at apparently the slightest remark, my friends reported. I could see it for myself, buy we seemed to be of little help. One of the fellows called county mental health and we got an appointment to bring him in. At first, TD got in the car, seeming happy to be getting help, and he walked into the interview as we took seats in the waiting area.

When he emerged, followed by the worker, he was all smiles. "There's nothing at all to be concerned about," the worker said. "There's no reason for him to be here."

I felt shaken to the core. But we walked with TD back to the car where he instantly turned on us as a stranger, threatened to get even with us, to teach us a lesson. We spun him around, marched back into the facility and reported his remarks to the intake worker who immediately found him a room. The last time I saw TD I brought him a paper grocery bag filled with his clothes. I had gone to his house and his mother would say nothing to me.

I flew home to my journalism job, still unsettled that we had done the right thing. And later, after Tim had gotten out, moved far away somewhere, we all lost track of him.

For the longest time I felt guilty for not going to Vietnam. But I also have befriended men who had gone, who told me I was lucky to have missed it, and that there was no sin in a medical excuse. To this day, Steve cannot sit in a public place unless he has a view of the door. In Vietnam he buried civilians alive. More recently, William came home from Afghanistan over a year ago and cannot keep from getting drunk and putting his fist through walls.

I don't know what you needed to get straightened out in Germany, TD, but wherever you are today, wherever it may be hiding, no matter how many pieces have come apart into so many boxes, I hope you've found a way to let peace out again.

Taking Cover

We had two drills at Kittredge Elementary school that were created to foster conformity--rather than panic--the moment the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles. The drop drill was a monthly affair that was meant to catch us unawares, but somehow it always leaked out that we would have one. The teacher would ask for our attention. Then she would shout, "Drop!"

We were to dive beneath our wooden desks and curl into a fetal position, cradling our heads in our hands so as to stave off the flying ribbons of glass. We were to hold the position until she had completed the tour of the classroom, correcting the slackers who used the opportunity to giggle. Then she would say, "All clear" and we'd climb back into our seats, all a-twitter and ruddy faced.

The second drill was called "Take Cover" and was held at irregular intervals, yet we'd know it, too, was coming. The teacher would shout, "Take Cover" and we'd push our desks to the center of the classroom, then run for the nearest wall, where we'd lower the shades and cower beneath the windows, backs to the imaginary blast.

The drills may have satisfied the school district administrators but did little to palliate my fears. I knew better. I had seen television clips showing classrooms and buildings swept away by the atomic thunderclap, entire walls and windows converted to a river of plasma that blew across the darkened landscape. I had nightmares of turning into a flaming corpse or a widening stream of particles into thin air. Neighbors were buying and burying atomic fallout shelters in their yards, but not our family. I never asked.

When Soviet ships carrying missiles sailed into Cuban waters, my mother joined the millions who raided supermarket shelves for powdered milk, canned soup and vegetables, and bottled water. We were as ready as we could be, although we knew we were only kidding ourselves....

* * *

The bullet train from Tokyo rocked gently along the Kansai plain, passing through flooded rice fields and small villages, hurrying along the countryside where Mt. Fuji rose white-capped and majestic into the pale blue sky, stopping briefly at at dusk in Nagoya, then in Osaka with its garish animated billboards for Coca-Cola and Toshiba, then sweeping westward through the quiet night to Hiroshima Eki.

I was there to take a teaching job with Junichi-san and his language school. The school was located in a bustling section of the city on the third floor of an office building. The school offered English lessons by native speakers to school-aged Japanese children, to businessmen, and to senior citizens. Junichi-san was working a ploy where he kept a line of plates spinning in the air, hoping that his dreams would come true. To me, he reported having secured a government educational grant to pay my wages. To the government, where he was but applying for a grant, he said he had rounded up a native English speaker for his staff. If the timing worked out, he'd have the teacher and the money to pay him at the same time.

It did not. Junichi-san advised me that it would be preferable if I demonstrated gratitude for the opportunity, agreeing to work only a few part-time hours until the grant came in. Slim chance of my affording big city housing, the expensive food, and transportation on the few Yen I'd receive for teaching an hour or two a week.

To try me out while I mulled over his skimpy offer, Junichi-san said I could take the Gray Hairs class. These were senior citizens--mostly widows--who were looking to increase their cache by learning some English. It was like a sentence-quilting class for seniors. But these were special widows, survivors of the first atomic bomb dropped on a human population.

Though I was ashamed to ask, my curiosity won over and after class I asked a woman in a violet polka-dot dress and matching hat with a spray of white flowers if she would tell me about that day. My Japanese was poor--considerably poorer than her English, which was limited to salutations, dates, and numbers. But she did take a city map from her purse and pointed to the A-Bomb memorial with certain insistence, and I got the message.

Hiroshima is home to a historical castle and a heritage dating back to 1589 A.D. Nestled in the Piedmont of the Seto Inland Sea, it is ringed by the Chugoku mountains and forms a delta for three rivers. It had been a manufacturing city on the morning of August 6, 1945, which made her a prime military target. The parts and machinery built there could be put on barges and shipped out to sea, onwards to the war.

The museum is located in a lush park at ground zero, at the confluence of the Ota and Motoyasu. The bomb went off around 8:15 am and for days afterward, thousands of newly orphaned children wandered the streets of ruins, many of whom would die of leukemia over the next 20 years. The numbers of dead were staggering, numbing. But it was the drawings made by children on the museum walls that ripped my heart out: painted scenes of blood-red rivers choked with bodies, a ceiling beam thrust like some mad atomic spear into the chest of a mother as her child weeps at her feet. Flesh running like melted butter from limbs, shadows of human forms burned into the concrete.

After a while, I just couldn't take any more. I went in search of a florists shop, found a bouquet of white lilies, and brought it back to the grounds where I knelt at a memorial shaped like a blossoming nuclear cloud. It was easy to cry, but it sounds cheap and insufficient, or self-aggrandizing, to say so today.

I wasn't there very long when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was an elderly Japanese man with a trimmed gray mustache in a tidy suit and polished shoes, holding an umbrella over his shoulder. I stood up and looked him in the eye. You can study literature for decades and not find words.

But he knew. "War is over," he said.

* * *

Before I left Hiroshima forever, I took a day-trip to the shore. You can board a ferry for Miyajima Island. So-called Shine Island, Miyajima is renowned for its temples, gardens, and thousands of wild, red-assed baboons. The vermilion gate that stands at the entry is considered one of Japan's Three Essential Views--luring students and native vacationers here all year round. You pass beyond the gate and land in a paradise of bamboo forests, hidden courtyards, and melodic streams trickling through granite. School kids in their black and white uniforms pass happily between tall rows of bamboo. They stop and take your picture. "Look at the foreigner," one says, pointing, shouting the Japanese word for beard. Then off they go along the stream, around the bend and into the woods.

Suddenly you're hit with a powerful force. How quiet it is!