On May 31, 1968, I received my B.A. diploma from the University of Northern Iowa. On June 1, 1968, I received my induction notice from the United States Selective Service. I was ordered to report for induction into United States Military Service (either Army or Marines) on 28 August 1968, congratulations.
I and a close friend had already arranged to hitchhike from Iowa to Battle Creek, Michigan to visit another mutual friend who had graduated the year before because . . . well, just because. There wasn’t anything else to do.
We left three days later. A number of entertaining incidents occurred along the way, including a three a.m. drive at 100 miles an hour through the deserted streets of Peoria, Illinois, with a drunk driver. But we survived, somehow. We arrived the evening of June 5, in utter exhaustion, and were welcomed with cold beer and a place to sleep on the living room floor of the friend’s apartment.
The California Democratic Presidential Primary results were being shown on TV, so we watched for a while, as Robert Kennedy came to the podium to acknowledge his victory, brush his hair away from his forehead in his customary fashion, and say, “Now on to Chicago, and victory there.” After which he walked off stage to the right, toward the hotel kitchen, and we turned off the TV.
I awoke around seven the next morning to find out that he had been shot about twenty seconds after we turned off the TV. I remember walking for some hours. At some point I stopped at a pancake place for something to eat. At one p.m., he died.
The rest of the summer passed in something of a stupor. I honestly don’t remember how I got back to Iowa. I’ve often wondered about that; maybe hypnosis or something could bring it back, but to this day, I don’t have a clue.
August 28 arrived, and I traveled by bus (that I remember) to Des Moines, about 100 miles away, to be inducted into the Army, and was dutifully examined and inducted into the Army. A midnight flight was arranged to take me and fifty or so other fortunate sons to Ft. Polk, Louisiana, for basic training. We all sat, still in civilian clothes and hair, in a cramped rec room where a black-and-white TV entertained us with images of what came to be called a “police riot” in Grant Park, Chicago, outside the Democratic National Convention, in which Hubert Humphrey was nominated President. He would lose to Richard Nixon, but at the time, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we could all see our country going to hell in that damn handcart, in front of our eyes. The country I knew had stopped working. We were being ruled by madness.
I completed basic training, and several months later got shipped off to Vietnam, to participate in a war that, by that time, nobody wanted to participate in. I got lucky, and scored a rear area job doing radio broadcasting work for U.S. Army Headquarters in Long Binh. Mostly it involved mundane nonsense, but every few weeks I got sent out into the field to do combat correspondence. For nine months it all went well, and I became convinced that I was bulletproof and would get back to The World just fine.
In early April, 1970, we invaded Cambodia. Three or four days after that, a helicopter pilot named William Lassiter showed up at our office, wanting to know if anybody would like to accompany him in the gunner’s seat in a two-seat Cobra Gunship, on a nice safe logistics escort run from Long Binh to the firebases northwest of Tay Ninh, along the Cambodian border. At this time, I was a buck sergeant, and the senior enlisted man among the three guys in the radio office. I would have jumped at the opportunity, but earlier that very morning, because I was the senior enlisted man, I had been ordered by the commander, a full bird colonel, to travel to Saigon to record a memorial service for an Army general who had been killed two days before in an accidental plane crash. This was the senior officer ever to die in Vietnam, and it was considered damn important that I go and get the audio, to be sent to his widow so that whenever she wanted to feel bad, she could listen to it.
So I was stuck, not being able to take the plum assignment. The juniorest guy in the place, a Spec-4 named Wiley Hooks, from Metter, Georgia, who had been there about three months, volunteered, and off he and Lassiter went. I went to Saigon and hobnobbed with high-level officers for the day, getting my audio.
I came back to find out that Lassiter and Hooks had been shot down that afternoon. There had been some firefight going on nearby between Viet Cong and Vietnamese Army troops, could they come over and provide air support. Hooks didn’t know how to operate any of the weapons, but the pilot, Lassiter, could fire rockets just by aiming the chopper. I heard a recording of radio transmissions in which Hooks gleefully agreed to go do it. I'd have done the same thing; hell, I'd been there nine months, I was bulletproof.
About ten years ago I visited the black wall near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and touched the names of Wiley D. Hooks and William Lassiter. If not for a general's memorial service, one of those would have been mine.
Tonight I got another vision of Grant Park, Chicago, on TV. A huge throng of people, celebrating in an orderly way the election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States of America. And the episode started 40 years ago reached conclusion. I didn’t know there was a conclusion to be reached, after all that time. But there was. Tonight Grant Park was a symbol of the country I knew having returned from madness. Tonight, in Grant Park, it was working again.
Barack Obama gave his victory speech. And as he finished, I had one panicky thought: For God’s sake, don’t go into that kitchen. I wanted to turn off the TV, but I couldn’t. Some things just don’t ever end, do they?
I and a close friend had already arranged to hitchhike from Iowa to Battle Creek, Michigan to visit another mutual friend who had graduated the year before because . . . well, just because. There wasn’t anything else to do.
We left three days later. A number of entertaining incidents occurred along the way, including a three a.m. drive at 100 miles an hour through the deserted streets of Peoria, Illinois, with a drunk driver. But we survived, somehow. We arrived the evening of June 5, in utter exhaustion, and were welcomed with cold beer and a place to sleep on the living room floor of the friend’s apartment.
The California Democratic Presidential Primary results were being shown on TV, so we watched for a while, as Robert Kennedy came to the podium to acknowledge his victory, brush his hair away from his forehead in his customary fashion, and say, “Now on to Chicago, and victory there.” After which he walked off stage to the right, toward the hotel kitchen, and we turned off the TV.
I awoke around seven the next morning to find out that he had been shot about twenty seconds after we turned off the TV. I remember walking for some hours. At some point I stopped at a pancake place for something to eat. At one p.m., he died.
The rest of the summer passed in something of a stupor. I honestly don’t remember how I got back to Iowa. I’ve often wondered about that; maybe hypnosis or something could bring it back, but to this day, I don’t have a clue.
August 28 arrived, and I traveled by bus (that I remember) to Des Moines, about 100 miles away, to be inducted into the Army, and was dutifully examined and inducted into the Army. A midnight flight was arranged to take me and fifty or so other fortunate sons to Ft. Polk, Louisiana, for basic training. We all sat, still in civilian clothes and hair, in a cramped rec room where a black-and-white TV entertained us with images of what came to be called a “police riot” in Grant Park, Chicago, outside the Democratic National Convention, in which Hubert Humphrey was nominated President. He would lose to Richard Nixon, but at the time, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we could all see our country going to hell in that damn handcart, in front of our eyes. The country I knew had stopped working. We were being ruled by madness.
I completed basic training, and several months later got shipped off to Vietnam, to participate in a war that, by that time, nobody wanted to participate in. I got lucky, and scored a rear area job doing radio broadcasting work for U.S. Army Headquarters in Long Binh. Mostly it involved mundane nonsense, but every few weeks I got sent out into the field to do combat correspondence. For nine months it all went well, and I became convinced that I was bulletproof and would get back to The World just fine.
In early April, 1970, we invaded Cambodia. Three or four days after that, a helicopter pilot named William Lassiter showed up at our office, wanting to know if anybody would like to accompany him in the gunner’s seat in a two-seat Cobra Gunship, on a nice safe logistics escort run from Long Binh to the firebases northwest of Tay Ninh, along the Cambodian border. At this time, I was a buck sergeant, and the senior enlisted man among the three guys in the radio office. I would have jumped at the opportunity, but earlier that very morning, because I was the senior enlisted man, I had been ordered by the commander, a full bird colonel, to travel to Saigon to record a memorial service for an Army general who had been killed two days before in an accidental plane crash. This was the senior officer ever to die in Vietnam, and it was considered damn important that I go and get the audio, to be sent to his widow so that whenever she wanted to feel bad, she could listen to it.
So I was stuck, not being able to take the plum assignment. The juniorest guy in the place, a Spec-4 named Wiley Hooks, from Metter, Georgia, who had been there about three months, volunteered, and off he and Lassiter went. I went to Saigon and hobnobbed with high-level officers for the day, getting my audio.
I came back to find out that Lassiter and Hooks had been shot down that afternoon. There had been some firefight going on nearby between Viet Cong and Vietnamese Army troops, could they come over and provide air support. Hooks didn’t know how to operate any of the weapons, but the pilot, Lassiter, could fire rockets just by aiming the chopper. I heard a recording of radio transmissions in which Hooks gleefully agreed to go do it. I'd have done the same thing; hell, I'd been there nine months, I was bulletproof.
About ten years ago I visited the black wall near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and touched the names of Wiley D. Hooks and William Lassiter. If not for a general's memorial service, one of those would have been mine.
Tonight I got another vision of Grant Park, Chicago, on TV. A huge throng of people, celebrating in an orderly way the election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States of America. And the episode started 40 years ago reached conclusion. I didn’t know there was a conclusion to be reached, after all that time. But there was. Tonight Grant Park was a symbol of the country I knew having returned from madness. Tonight, in Grant Park, it was working again.
Barack Obama gave his victory speech. And as he finished, I had one panicky thought: For God’s sake, don’t go into that kitchen. I wanted to turn off the TV, but I couldn’t. Some things just don’t ever end, do they?
