***From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series-Three Soldiers

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Note: Strictly speaking this following sketch is not properly part of the Brothers Under The Bridge series that was originally a series of sketches done for the East Bay Eye about forlorn returning Vietnam veterans who could not cope with the “real world,” for almost every reason imaginably, once they got back from ‘Nam and some of them formed a society of sorts, a brotherhood, mainly in Southern California, and mainly in the arroyos, culverts, ravines, riversides, and railroad sidings of that area. More recently Joshua Lawrence Breslin has “cribbed” some newly found notes from his attic to try to recompose more stories that were not published in the East Bay Eye before that publication went out of business. That said, this sketch is based on memory not notes but nevertheless stands in that tradition and rests comfortably within the concept envisioned for the stories in those series. Read on.

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Josh Breslin was walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, in Central Square near Prospect Park just outside the Redline MBTA stop, on a blustery April late afternoon when he heard a voice over a microphone pleading with the passing crowd to pay attention to the case of Army Private Bradley Manning a soldier who had admitted to being the source of some leaks of classified information about reports of American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and other materials to the Wikileaks organization and was being held in long term (over one thousand days )pre-trial confinement pending trial out in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. As he stopped for a moment to listen from some distance away the speaker stated there was a pressing need to do a number of things in support of a man whom he considered the poster person of the almost non-existent anti-war struggle in the spring of 2013. The speaker went on to enumerate the things that supporters could do, things well known to Josh from his own personal political experiences; sign a petition directed to the Secretary of the Army to release Private Manning from confinement; contribute funds to the legal defense; join the stand-out; call some general whose name he did not remember but who was the convening authority for the court-martial Private Manning was facing and tell him to drop the charges; and, something a little unusual in his experience call or write President Barack Obama and ask him to use his constitutional authority to pardon the private.

Josh admitted to himself as he approached the small demonstration more closely (the organizers called it a stand-out but he always, from way back in the 1960s when he had been involved in anti-war work, called everything more than one person a demonstration from force of habit. One person standing by his or herself with a sign, by the way, was termed a vigil in his book) of a handful of Manning supporters that he had not paid as close attention to the case as he should have, or would have in the old days when he had been actively involved in anti-war G.I. coffeehouse work around the East Coast and then later as a journalist when he had picked up an assignment from the editor of the East Bay Eye (Bay Area, California, long since gone) to cover some returning Vietnam veterans who had had a difficult time coping with the “real” world after service in Vietnam and were gathered together in a great hobo migration around the arroyos, rivers, and railroad sidings of Southern California. So he stopped, stopped to pick up some information about Private Manning’s current status, learn about the charges against him, discuss a bit with a woman supporter there his chances of beating the charges against him, sign a petition and leave a small donation (a guilt donation he would later think) and moved on about his business of the day.

Later though, maybe the next day he Goggled the Bradley Manning Support Network website to find out more about the case, and about a soldier who apparently was not too dissimilar in life history to some of the guys he had interviewed back in the day, back in the hellhole dregs of the Vietnam war days. They, like Manning, went in to do their patriotic duty, maybe get an education afterwards on the GI Bill and then move on. Guys who like Private Manning had some real qualms about what they were doing on-the-job and thinking hard about what to do about those qualms, if anything. That got Josh to thinking about a story one of the guys he had met out on the road in the later 1970s, one of the Brothers Under the Bridges brothers who told him a story about his experience, and that of two of his hometown buddies who had signed on to go fight the commies, or defend the country, or whatever back in the mid-1960s when all hell was breaking loose over in Vietnam, and starting to break up here in America too.

That guy, that story had been in the back of Josh’s mind, way in back for a long time, and got triggered by that little Manning demonstration. So this is Ralph’s story, a guy he met over at the Compton encampment after the cops had pushed them out of Westminster. The story of Ralph Lance, and his two friends, Bill Calloway and Sam Price, the story of three guys, three soldiers. In the old days and in his recent revival of the Brothers Under The Bridge series he liked to put each guy’s story under an appropriate sign. He fretted over this one trying to angle it a certain way but in the end he gave up. Simply put there was no other way to put this one but to put it under the sign of three soldiers.

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Sam Price had received his draft notice from his friends and neighbors at the Nashua, New Hampshire Draft Board first (that friends and neighbors gag was in the heading of his notice and even he chuckled at that one), being a little older than the other two and thus more draft eligible since he, unlike them, had not gone to college, and so he had worked at Joe’s Auto Repair over on East Main Street to kill time before the dime dropped. He would have gone in, gone in like that, enlisted right off if the job hadn’t allowed him to help out his mother a bit with her bills and expenses. Yah, he would have gone in hot to trot as he liked to say, to defend his country against commie rats, against whatever the President said the Russkies and their stodges were up to. He was that kind of guy, a guy like a million other guys who half-listened to what was said officially but that was enough, enough to get his blood up. And so he had no qualms about going in when his number came up in 1966 unlike those damn draft-dodgers and scumbags who were refusing to go defend their country (or worse, were egging guys on, guys like him, to refuse to go, while they hid behind their student deferments, mental or physical infirmities, or some other scam)

Now enter Bill and Ralph, who while they had gone college, had gone up to the University of New Hampshire for a couple of years, had been kind of restless, kind of got caught up in the angst and alienation that was sweeping campuses across the country and were almost as draft eligible as Sam. However whatever else their qualms about the world, about a world they had not created, and had not been asked about they were just as patriotic as their boyhood friend Sam. See although Sam was a year older, he had been kept back in first grade because of illnesses, they had all met up in first grade in Miss Winot’s class (they all loved her, all loved to talk about how nice she was even when they were older) over at North Nashua Elementary School and although they sometimes went their separate ways for periods of time there probably was not a month that went by when they didn’t get together at least to gather at Ricco’s Pizza Parlor and Pool Hall. That was their corner of the world, and they guarded it (with a couple of other guys) with all the effort that every corner boy put into keeping his corner. Moreover, additional glue that bound them together was Sam’s innate cosmic ability with automobiles, with “boss” automobiles to use an expression of the times. And so as they came of age they collectively did their “necking” with girls (and other things) down by the Merrimack River, hit the drive-in movies and restaurants, and did their Saturday night “cruising” on Main Street in one of Sam’s “hot” cars. So their friendships ran deep, ran as deep as friendship could in a 1960s male frosty old mill town. And then Ralph and Bill got their notices too (at slightly different times) from, well you know, their friends and neighbors at their local draft board.

So all three young men, all three friends, were drafted within a period of several months of each other. But that is where the common story ends. And also where their collective story stands as some kind of signpost for all that went on during the Vietnam war period, the drafted kids part, the soldiers part, not the other parts, the free love, drugs, alternative lifestyle parts which drew plenty of ink, but the parts about the guys who actually were called to do their duty, and went. Sam, as already has been suggested, was gung-ho, was ready to rip the commies from limb to limb. So once he got his draft notice he started thinking about his options, his real options, and so instead of bearing, to him, the stigma of having been drafted he enlisted, enlisted as an infantryman (the difference being at that point that being drafted meant a two year service commitment and enlistment three). And Sam turned out to be a hell of a soldier, a natural everybody in his command said (the Big Red One, the 1st Division), did two tours in ‘Nam, like many enlistees, did his fair share of killing, came home, went back to his old job at Joe’s Auto Repair and was last seen by Ralph (or rather Ralph had heard) sitting spending his off-hours at the Veterans of Foreign War Post bar regaling everyone who would listen to his blood and guts war stories. But enough of Sam, we know that story, that ordinary universal soldier story of song, film and book.

Bill’s was a little different, no, a very different story. Bill waited for his draft number to be called and when it did he wound up going to basic training at Fort Dix down in New Jersey. However after about three days, maybe four, once he confronted the reality of what he was expected to do-kill people, kill people that he said he had no quarrel with he got kind of politicized. Kind of politicized, according to Ralph, because while he and Bill had heard plenty about politics while in college they were not political guys. They were not exactly “frat rats” but they were girl crazy, drink crazy, maybe a few joints crazy, and politics, war, poverty or whatever was just like passing air to them. So Bill didn’t know, couldn’t figure out, what to do about his situation. Nobody to talk down in some strange fort before the anti-war bug started getting a hearing in the barracks. No known place to go to find some help to get out. No knowledge that he could file for conscientious objector status or that there was such a thing available then (not likely to be granted anyway to a soldier, a Catholic “just war” resister as he termed himself, and a former corner boy with a few youthful fist fights in his record).

All Bill knew was that he was not going to Vietnam, orders or not. So, as night followed day in 1966 America, when the generals were asking for more and more cannon fodder to reach that “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam Bill got orders for Vietnam as an infantryman- meaning, no question, he was going to be put in a situation where he was damn well going to be killing people, people he had no quarrel with. Ralph was not very specific, had not been privy to the details, but Bill, after evading arrest by the Military Police who were being ordered to escort him under guard to Fort Lewis, Washington and from there to Vietnam. Somehow he got off the base, went AWOL and headed to Boston where through the Quakers he was able to get hold of some anti-war lawyer who told him his options. One option, the one he chose, was to refuse to go and a splash about in it public. He did, and the long and short of it was that he did two years and three months in Allentown down in Pennsylvania and received an undesirable (not dishonorable) discharge. Ralph had heard that Bill had drifted back to school at UNH and was fighting to upgrade his discharge under President Carter’s amnesty program.

As for Ralph, well, Ralph too was drafted ,went to Fort Dix for basic training, and Fort Benning down in Georgia as a mortar man (basically an infantryman but with more firepower). After that he got his order for ‘Nam, and while he had some qualms, some Bill-type qualms, he felt he couldn’t let his country, his town, and especially his parents down and so he went. Went and was stationed up near Pleiku for most of his time, saw more of his share of his killing that he wanted to admit to, or talk about, and had done too much too, also kept vague, and came home, came home quietly and got his honorable discharge. He moved to Boston since he felt he had to shake the dust of Nashua off, got married to a nice college girl from Boston University for a while, got a fairly good job with possibilities of advancement in the newly evolving computer field and things looked up. Then, maybe a couple of years later, the nightmares started, then the drinking started, then the drugs started. His wife divorced him without a murmur from him, he lost his job through chronic absenteeism, and thereafter trying to get a new start he headed west, west to golden dream California. No luck, no luck until he heard about the Westminster encampment of brothers. He had found a home for a while anyway. No, he had not seen Sam or Bill since the old days, and he frankly didn’t want to, not the way he felt then. And hence this story, this story told under the sign of three soldiers.