The List Of The  Dog Soldiers Of The Vietnam War Class of 1969 Expands-With The Art Of The Late Native American Artist And Poet T.E. Cannon In Mind.

                                     T.E. Cannon Self_Portrait 

By Si Lannon

Frank Jackman was confused, no, rather baffled, no again, was not sure that he should not take it for an omen. And he a man who laughed at omens, portents and other such mumbo-jumbo in his time, learned to be distrustful of such early on in hard knocks growing up day. What had him in a dither, what had him exercised as he did his morning toilet was how many associations with the year 1969, more specifically the Vietnam War Class of 1969 he had turned up once he had decided to “come out of the closet” (funny a term these days associated with gays and others proclaiming proudly their sexual orientations and identities) about his own battles during that period. The immediate cause for his consternation, for him thinking that maybe he should start to pay attention to the signs was that he had gone on assignment to the art exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem twenty-five miles north of Boston featuring the works of the late Native-American artist T.E. Cannon.

As Frank entered the exhibit area he noticed two things on the entrance wall describing what was ahead. The first was that while they were a million miles apart in a way with where they grew up, their racial and ethnic make-ups, and what paths they had pursued they were both members of the baby-boomer generation, more specifically for our purposes the Generation of ’68 which had come of age in that decade and went through all the ups and downs of that experience with which we are now being inundated with 50^th anniversary commemorations. An added signpost of Frank’s confusion. Both had ironically, or maybe portentously is a better way to put the matter, been born in 1946 at the very start of the generational curve that was to peter out late in the 1960s giving way to Generation X and millennials. The second, and again for our purposes probably more important is that Cannon had served part of his Army hitch in the year 1969 with the 101^st Airborne Division in 1969. That set off another round of explosions in Frank’s head about his own 1969 part of the equation since 1969 was the year he had accepted induction in the Army after being drafted. His story was quite different.            

Frank over the previous couple of years in the fuse over the 50^th anniversary commemorations had become more aware of the pivotal part the events triggered in 1969 by that induction (he would laughingly, later laughingly, called it his indentured servitude) had played in much of his subsequent life, for good or evil. Not surprisingly he had kept quiet about his own experiences like a lot of that Class of 1969 who actually had gone to Vietnam and were trying to live it down by drowning it out, drowning it out unsuccessfully as it turned out in many cases. As Frank talked to fellow veterans from that period while he was reporting on various anti-war political events for the on-line American Left History he found a surprising number of them had some relationship to 1969 and so that perked up his interest in telling his own story which was dramatically different from theirs. In the muddle of what he was trying to do he wanted by publicizing his own experience, and in quiet nighttime moments desperately wanted, to be part of that Vietnam War Class of 1969. His story has been told elsewhere in these pages under the title Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind and so need not detain us except that Frank too had orders for Vietnam but getting up his Irish decided to refuse to go costing him a total of thirteen months in an Army stockade and another six months of other kinds of restrictive movements.    

(Interesting there seems to have been something of a divide beginning with the Tet Offensive results in 1968 which set those from 1969 apart from earlier Vietnam War classes whom he found were less shamed or destroyed by their war experiences coming home. Nothing that he could put down as some sociological truth but with enough anecdotal force to take notice). 

Frank had written plenty about other cohorts of the Generation of ’68, the merry pranksters, not Ken Kesey’s originals but Captain Crunch’s whose led another cohort of mischief makers on their own yellow brick road converted school bus, from the Summer of Love days, the guys from the neighborhood, his corner boys who were a lightning rod from down at the base of society for what was going on in youth nation in those days and later, when he had had his own woes about fellow Vietnam veterans who had had a hard time coming back, of adjusting and had essentially dropped out of mainstream society. Had written about that band of brothers under the bridges of Southern California from inside reflecting his own turbulent war past and outside when he felt a very strong need to keep the faith with his brothers who had been thrown on the scrap heap by their government and the average citizen who di not give a fuck once the war madness was over.

But the 1969 guys were cut from a different cloth. Sure, they had many of the same PTSD symptoms of the lost boys out in the arroyos, the junkies on cheap street strung out on Golden Triangle dreams but somehow had survived well enough to get back in the real world. Sometimes it was, is a close thing with guys like Pat who went on to do work as an environmentalist after doing MAC-V military intelligence and who still is afraid to be alone in his house at night, like Dan who ran a successful logging business after running the rack on every known drug, legal and illegal reflected in five, count them five, marriages, beautiful Doc who had done triage with the 101^st Airborne and came home to work the public hospital circuit but who like some small fry McBeth stills see the blood red moons of field hospitals. Howie who didn’t go because of a childhood injury that never healed correctly but whose number came up in ’69 and damn if they weren’t so desperate they were ready to take him. Almost blind John the same way. Ian from up in Maine whose two ex-wives never ever knew he had been in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when all hell was breaking loose there.

But enough about those guys who have had almost as much ink spilled in these pages by others as Frank because his assignment and his thoughts too were on the remarkable works of Cannon who gave him a whole new perspective on what Native American art was all about beyond the ancient, so-called primitive stuff he had seen in most art museums. In line with that thought he had also recently gone to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where a newer, small exhibit in the American wing was paying homage to, and trying to correct, the long history of neglect and third-class citizen of Native American art in its own exhibitions which had been relegated to the dreary basement of that wing. Maybe that told the tale another way.      

(Frank had never been sure even when he had been acting site manager in on-line times and before that as managing editor at hard copy publications about what was the correct term in the age of identity politics in reference to what he had learned as a kid in school and through television and movies about what had been called “Indians.” Terms seem to drift between “Native American” the term used at the Cannon exhibit “indigenous peoples” and “first nations” so he would stick with the first which had been the case at the exhibit)

Frank had become increasingly aware especially through his associations with veterans who in 2017 had gathered to defend against the pipelines at Standing Rock out in the Dakotas that Native Americans had been disproportionally represented in the American military with all the pathologies connected with that experience which he recognized from his own personal observations of his friends and those he had met along the way. Some were proud in the ancient warrior traditions to serve in the military like it as somewhere in some hidden gene. Cannon seems to have gone for the simple reason that he had been called up and rather than be drafted he enlisted. He did his time as well as anybody else but like a lot of guys was ambivalent about the war he had participated in and about his won role in it. As noted above not an uncommon reaction from serious creative types who were baffled by what they had experienced, by what they and others did to people with whom that had no quarrel. People, mostly peasants, workers on the land like his own people who had the same reverence for what the land gave (and took away) as those far away peasants.

Cannon went no holds barred in what he saw in his Native American environment from the proud but beaten warriors who could roam the ranges no more to the women of steel who held communal life together to the wizen elder shamans and soothsayers who really did believe in the portents Frank never could get around his head to his secret dreams of Anglo girls fussing in the night with the son of then thousand years of warrior life. Frank had to laugh thinking about those infinite number of connections which bound him to one T.E. Cannon. Then he remembered the story the late Markin had told one fireside night out in California working their way south on the Captain Crunch’s mad monk caravan. Markin and a couple of other guys had been out in Joshua Tree and had been sucking down all the hallucinogenic drugs they could gather mostly peyote buttons and maybe some righteous mescaline and had started to dance, dance the dance of ten thousand years of canyon life and had worked themselves into such a dither that they thought there was some connection between what they were doing and the light flickering off the canyon walls calling them onward. Yeah, Cannon Frank thought would have appreciated that story, would have let Frank into that vaunted Class of 1969 on the strength of that story alone.