*** Of This And That In The Old 1960s North Adamsville Neighborhood-The Fallen Of The Vietnam War

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

In recent times I have spent not a little time touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville, Massachusetts Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies (some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information superhighway” that they have not been able to navigate), to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later. I noted in one sketch done previously about a guy who photos of my old childhood neighborhood drew praised comment praised from me that I had to marvel at some of the communications technology that makes our work a lot easier than back in the day. The Internet was only maybe a dream, a mad monk scientist far-fetched science fiction dream then as we struggle with three by five cards and archaic Dewey Decimal systems.

I admit that for most of those fifty years since graduation I had studiously avoided returning to the old town for any past class reunions but this one, the reasons which not need detain us here, I had wanted to attend. Or rather wanted to attend once the reunion committee was able to track me down and invite me to attend. Or a better “rather” to join a NA64.com website run by a wizard webmaster, Donna, who was also our class Vice-President to keep up to date on progress for that reunion. Now it was not a hard task for the committee to find me on the Internet these days since I belong to a professional organization where information on my whereabouts is public knowledge. What is impressive though is how simple that task proved since it would have taken much work, and probably fruitless work at that, to track me down for let’s say the 20^th, 25^th or 40^th reunions when they took place. 

Part of the reason I did join the class site was to keep informed about upcoming events but also as is my wont to make commentary about various aspects of the old hometown, the the high school then, and any other tidbit that my esteemed fellow classmates might want to ponder after all these years. All this made simple as pie by the act of joining. Once logged in one is provided with a personal profile page complete with space for private e-mails, story-telling, various vital statistics like kids and grandkids, and space for the billion photos of the that progeny, mostly it seems for those darling grandkids that seem to pop up everywhere.  Additionally, and sadly, there is a section, an “In Memory” section, on the website dedicated to those who have passed on from our class as well as a section, a “For Those Who Served” section, dedicated to those in our class, mainly guys reflecting the nature of military service back then, who had done military service. That combination is what drives this sketch.

Let me explain. A while back I went on to the class website to check out a new addition to the list of those who have joined the site recently. We can use our personal settings to be informed of that kind of information on a more or less frequent basis. The guy who had just joined was a guy I did not know but I had seen around the school (you would have seen almost everybody in the four years you were there with one thing or another even though the class had baby-boomer times over 500 students) and so I was ready to click off the site when I noticed that someone had placed a comment in the “In Memory” section about Jim Slater a guy I knew somewhat who had fallen in our class’s war, the Vietnam War. That notice got me looking over the whole “In Memory” section to see how many more of our classmates fell during that heinous war. It turned out that while our working-class town, high school, and class had provided its fair share of those who had served during the war only one other classmate, David Martin, had fallen in Vietnam. So we had lost far fewer that such other working-class areas nearby like the Dorchester, South Boston, and Roxbury sections of Boston that each have their own memorials to those who fell in those sections, or farther afield, Harlem, East Los Angeles, Steubenville, Ohio, Ottumwa, Iowa, El Paso, Texas, Topeka, Kansas and the like. Nevertheless given my own spotty military service, although honorably done in my eyes and the eyes of others, I felt some shyly kindred need to make a comment about my, our, fallen brothers.         

Although my military story might not reflect the average story about what went down in those tough 1960s times when every guy had to face, one way or another, the draft and what to do about it let me run my story and then maybe you can understand why I am shy about commenting on our class fallen and why I also need to speak of kindred now that the aches of that war have dissipated somewhat. My story about getting “religion” on what the American state was all about, about fighting the good fight against war when the deal went down.

 

Until my military service I had been an official member in good-standing of the working-class, of the Irish working-class, a heavy drinker, whisky mainly, with a beer chaser when I was frisky, water chaser when I was broke. I had a dream though, a child dream, a dream to escape the damn world that I was born into and hadn’t any say in creating, or being asked about. I would talk about my dream just like that, in that certain Jehovah righteous tone which may explain why I would be a prime candidate for some foreboding army stockade or the bastinado when the deal went down, although my decision to confront the Army head-on was a closer thing than one might think.  That “had not being asked about stuff in the way the world was run” had bothered me since about age ten or eleven. I was in a constant civil war about almost everything with my mother from as early as I could remember. My poor, hard-working-when-he-could-find-work father, with no breaks in the world, straight from the hard scrabble world of coal mine Appalachia via the World War II Marines, was a shadow figure somewhere in the background. The main bouts were with “Ma,” over money, over going, or not going here or there, of breathing, breathing too much to hear her tell it. Kids’ stuff but big on some kid horizon. So that “around ten or eleven” time I started dreaming, had first started dreaming about escaping from my tumble- down working poor boy fate, had started dreaming about the big jail breakout from the old ways.

Where I lived growing up in North Adamsville was near the water, near the Neptune River. I could see across to Castle Island on a good day and so I could see the tankers and other ships coming into the bay to leave off their product or pick up stuff. That is where I got the idea of building a raft to go out to join a ship moored in the channel and flee to the big wide world parts unknown. In the end it didn’t work out since my reach exceeded my grasp, I could not, not being very good mechanically even then, even with brother help get a sea-worthy, a channel-worthy raft together. But that escape idea, that idea of seeing the great big world, of seeing in person the places and persons that I had heard about, from teachers and others heard about, read about, big sassy book poured over and thumbed over until I was exhausted read about, and seen too on that old black and white television screen we all were glued to which had crowded my brain.

That failed raft experiment, in any case, was not the end of my strivings although it ended my attempted physical break-out for a while. I remember though one night sneaking out the back of the family house (better to call it a shack and when I took a special girlfriend there on one ill-advised meeting with my mother she had to agree with me although I sensed she was always hesitant to say anything bad about the place) on midnight runs to Harvard Square at sixteen. Of walking a couple of miles to catch a local all-night bus to then catch the subway at Fields Corner in Dorchester and to rumble, tumble, amble my way over to Cambridge to the all-night open Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria. Being there just to feel the air of the place when things were beginning to happen in 1962, to just be around the new thing, the jailbreak out thing that I sensed was coming. And then rumble, tumble, amble back on that subway before dawn to avoid mother worries, mother hassles and mother penalties. Thereafter though one thing led to another and I put the dream on hold, put it on hold through college, through hard whisky and women nights, through some personal political dream etched out in Kennedy days splendor, in short  “to get mine” while helping others to get theirs. And so my horizon narrowed, my fervent desire to see, hear, read, be with everything, everybody, to see how things ticked faded, childhood, young manhood faded.

And then came the Army. I don’t like to talk about it, talk about it all that much, especially when early on one post-military service girlfriend (and later wife), Josie, would go on and on about what the experience was like in order to get a feel for who she was getting tied up with, about what happened while I was in the military, the Army. I would cut her short with this- “I did what I had to do, did it, and I was not sorry, nor sorry for a minute, that I did what I did.” I would add to take the sting out of my remarks, chuckling, the worst of it was when they threw me in solitary for a while and wouldn’t let me smoke cigarettes in those days when I was a fairly heavy smoker (although the system worked out among solitary prisoners allowed me to cadge a few puffs while in the rest room, oh no what did they call it, oh yeah, the latrine). I had begun to smoke more after I was inducted when there was so much dead time that we trainees would just stand around smoking one cigarette after another to kill time until some jackass sergeant sadistically decided he wanted his charges to double- time with full backpack somewhere for some reason known only to that self-same sergeant, for some odd national or personal security reason.

Mainly after I got out though I would privately go back and forth in my mind about whether before I went into the service I should have decided differently and not allowed myself to be inducted. The back and forth really centered on that faded dream, that faded break out dream that I let fall on the back burner at a time when having it front and center would have counted . See, as you know, I came from working-class people, no, working poor, a notch below that, my poor be-draggled father, from down in Podunk Kentucky, down in white hillbilly Appalachia, down among the poor white trash of literature. The just plain poor that I knew needed help from when I read Michael Harrington’s The Other America for a sociology class that I took as an under-graduate where Harrington described the white folks left behind in the go-go America of the 1950s.

I had turned red one time when Josie mentioned that book and that she knew, book knew, of what my father, and his people were all about, “the wretched of the earth” in America. I related a story to her, a school story about a project that some classmates might remember, about how North Adamsville High was going to reach out to the victims in Appalachia by sending food, clothing and money down there, down to Hazard, Kentucky. Jesus, I said when the headmaster announced the project over the loudspeaker, that was where my father was born (I had shown her that fact listed on my birth certificate one day). In any case my father was always out of work, out of luck, and out of my frame of reference especially when I got older and started drifting away from the family and started to develop my own political perspective and my own jailbreak way out of the scene I grew up with.

But that was exactly the problem, that from hunger bringing up, that hand-me-down-where-is-the-rent-money-coming-from-keep-your-eyes-to-the-ground-shame and sorry combined with three thousand pounds of plain ordinary vanilla 1950s all ships rising teen angst and teen alienation, that came between me and all my decisions in those days. Along with some very standard American idiotic patriotic my-country-right-or-wrong local neighborhood mores and the drilled in customary Roman Catholic subservience to authority, Rome or D.C. (in this life, all was to be milk and honey socialism in the next) in that Irish neighborhood that I grew up in. That and my very real appetite for going for the main chance in politics. That was what I had been aiming for, a career, a regular career in politics, “helping my people while helping myself,” is the way I put it to Josie one time.

I told Josie that I had spent most of 1968 working that main chance idea as I was getting ready to graduate from college and had some time to “build my resume.” I started out that fateful year holding my nose and committed to backing Lyndon Johnson for re-election until Eugene McCarthy (Irish Gene, a poet and a dreamer and thus worthy of support) pushed the envelope and Johnson backed out. I went wild for Robert Kennedy, my idea of a beau political animal then, ruthless to political enemies, young or old, and not forgetful about old wounds either, and this beautiful patrician vision of “seeking a newer world.” When Bobby was assassinated I went over to Hubert Humphrey and would up there under the principal that Richard Noxious, uh, Nixon was the main enemy of the people of the world (and of my political advancement). So not then the profile of a guy who was going to chance charging windmills, or crush childhood dreams of bourgeois break-outs, no way.

So I went, sullenly went when drafted. After about three days I realized that I had made a mistake, a serious mistake and that I should have chanced draft- dodger jail instead. But see, it was hard for a guy hard-wired for a political career like me to shift gears like that so I fumbled and bumbled with the problem for a while. I had always been anti-war in kind of an abstract way; kind of an “all men are brothers” way. I told Josie that I had first expressed that opinion on the Boston Common back in the fall of 1960 when I attended a small demonstration at the Park Street Station with a bunch of little old angel ladies in tennis sneakers and stern-faced Jehovah-etched Quakers who were calling for nuclear disarmament. I also told her as if to express the Janus nature of the times, of myself, that the next week I was working the streets of North Adamsville passing out Jack Kennedy presidential literature. Jack who was crying out loud about the “missile gap,” arguing for more nuclear missiles. Still I tumbled and mumbled fitfully through the problem.

Of course if you were part of the military down in some boondock southern town, a town like Augusta, Georgia where I took basic training at Fort Gordon and later in Anniston, Alabama where I took AIT (Advanced Infantry Training so you already know which way the die was cast) at Fort McClellan out in nowhere far from northern gentility, even rough-edged northern working- class gentility, you knew you were up the creek without a paddle. And, as well, if you were also surrounded by guys, maybe sullen, maybe gung-ho, but mainly who like you were kind of committed to their fate (and afraid, afraid like hell of that constant threat, Fort Leavenworth, the main Army penal threat) then stumbling and mumbling is what you did, and did it for a while. But the military fates were not kind, not wartime kind, not 1969 wartime kind, when the Vietnam war was eating up men and material at prestigious rates, while the world clamored for shut-down and so my fate was to be a grunt, a foot soldier, and the only place that foot soldiers were being gainfully employed in those days was in sweaty, sullen Southeast Asia. In the normal course of events after training was completed I was so ordered there via the Fort Lewis, Washington transfer station after a short leave of absence to go home.

Before that though I still mumbled, stumbled, and tumbled on other fronts. I, political animal I, tried, frantically tried using many up many coins on one of the base public telephones at Fort McClellan in doing some, to work around it administratively, pulling some chips dues in with my erstwhile political cronies, no go. I tried to do an end- around by claiming conscientious objector status which held up my orders to Fort Lewis for a while as that process unfolded, although I was uneasy about doing so since I believed that there were some just wars and that position was not grounds for discharge at that moment, no go. Then one night, one night, a Sunday night, a hot and sweaty Sunday night, sitting in the base PX after the library had closed I decided to take a stand, decided that some form of resistance was the only way out. Personal resistance since I saw no other kindred.

I went out in the sultry night and started walking and planning, and half-hesitating. I would not do any action in the south where I know I would be swallowed up without a trace. That was not mere speculation either.  A few of us, mainly Yankee boys and a couple of Midwestern guys, had vaguely threatened to balk at firing machines guns at the range in protest and some stoolie must have told the command because we were threatened with the bastinado and having the keys thrown away, forever. That stopped us from any action then. Once I got home on leave to North Adamsville I went over to Cambridge over to see the Quakers, or rather their American Friends Service Committee organization that was offering advice to G.I.s, and G.I. resisters. As a result of the information options presented I determined that I would make a public display, a very public of my anti-war opposition so that I would not be left in some unnamed hell-hole and forgotten. The Friends and others were delighted. First though I would go AWOL (absent without leave, okay) and then make a splash at some public civilian anti-war rally.

That AWOL, absent without leave part, was important for me, and interestingly later Josie, since I had stayed away just long enough from the Replacement Center at Fort Lewis in Washington to be  “dropped for the rolls,” meaning that I could turn himself in at Fort Devens about forty miles from Boston and stay there pending punishment and new orders. The importance of that decision for Josie was, unknowingly, or half knowingly, that she had been one of the demonstrators clamoring for my release in a rally in front of the fort after I was incarcerated for taking part in a Quaker-led anti-war rally in front of the fort while in uniform and while on duty. I was to meet her later after I got of the military at an anti-war event in Cambridge. Other soldiers I had heard had done such actions prodded on by those same Jehovah Quakers who had formed the backdrop of my political coming of age in Boston Common as a boy. I had finally said a defiant no. That particular violation brought on my first trip to the stockade (with a stay in solidarity for a while but I was always in some form of isolation since the Army though I was contagious or something, and they were right since I was haranguing whoever was around once I got “religion.”) Because of a fair amount of publicity generated by the Quakers and some alternative newspapers looking for an off-beat story I received only a special court-martial (maximum six month sentence) rather than a general court-martial which could have given me an indeterminate sentence. I served five months on that one. As my resolve firmed up, first to do the first action and then to take the hard time, and as I got courage, got some well-spring of Appalachia hunker- down father genes- bought courage I thought later when I had plenty of time to think, I decided that I would make a showing in front of my fellow soldiers once I got out of my first tour of the stockade.

So one Monday morning in the late spring of 1970, having been assigned to Headquarters Company after being sprung from the stockade pending orders, as the base gathered for its weekly gathering of troops on the parade ground for inspection (and to see who was missing, if anybody) I walked out, walked out of my nearby barracks in civilian clothes, carrying a simple homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home.” I was immediately seized and man-handled by some what I would call ‘lifer’ sergeants (who, when I thought about it later probably didn’t know if I was a soldier or just a damn hippie protester trespasser and I therefore should have been in uniform with my sign).

The rest of the story after that was mainly legal military trial  proceedings (another special court-martial with six month sentence), parallel civilian court actions by my lawyer, and doing the hard time, doing the rest of almost a year in the base stockade. This the way the military part of the story ends. The outside civilian parallel legal proceedings on my behalf involved my civilian lawyer going to the Federal District Court in Boston to gain a writ of habeas corpus based the Army’s arbitrary denial of my conscientious objector application. The Army could not sent me to Fort Leavenworth without violating the civilian judge’s temporary restraining order pending disposition of my case. Strangely I finally was granted an honorable discharge through the civilian judge’s favorable granting of my writ. Like I said, I don’t like to talk about that time all that much, except I had plenty of time to think, think those ancient break-out thoughts that had had me in their thrall as a kid.

So now you can understand why I might be a bit shy about commenting on guys, on fellow classmates, who fell doing their duty the way they saw it, a way different far different than mine, in those bloody times. But listen, maybe Jim Slater and David Martin had the same kid dreams, the same trying to get ahead in the world dreams too. Over the years I have come to see that those fallen brothers are kindred like I hope a lot of people from our generation, the generation of ’68, that raised hell, or tried to against the monsters, against those who would hard-heartedly  sent young men, our fellow classmates now fallen, off on worthless adventures that proved nothing, do. I fervently hoped so when I put my comments on their “In Memory” pages. Here are Jim’s and except for personally knowing him and therefore able to make some specific comments I used part of the remarks David’s too. Here’s Jim’s:   

“I have held off from making a comment about Jim Slater assuming that somebody who knew him better than I would do so. Someone from his old neighborhood, from among his old corner boys, or maybe an old flame since a class yearbook photograph of him shows a guy who would have no trouble getting women to want to be around him. I knew Jim slightly in school and around North Adamsville. You know, maybe we played some pick-up game, maybe basketball down at the old Parker courts where his guys would take on my guys in three or five man ball or maybe slo-pitch softball in hot dusty summer at the local “dust bowl” and then adjourn for sodas (and later beers, illegal smile beers cadged from some father’s stash). Or we hung around together for a minute at some corner before that all got separated out in about ninth grade when he went with his corner boys holding up the wall in front of Doc’s Drugstore “up the Downs” and I, tied by a thousand strings to Frankie Riley, the king hell king of the corner boy night holding up the wall at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. Better yet let’s put it this way we gave each other the guy “nod” in the corridors at school, or maybe in the cafeteria. That nod, that eternal nod recognizing a guy’s guy-ness, recognizing a righteous guy, a straight-shooting guy without being a fellow corner boy. You know the nod, know it if you are a guy of a certain age.”

"So here goes for Jim- I agree with Professor Garfield (a fellow classmate who is a professor of education up at the University of New Hampshire and who knew David Martin, had been something like his girlfriend in high school, and had written something about the terrible cost of war on David’s “In Memory” page)  that my brothers, and they were mostly brothers then before everybody got a chance to go to war, who did not make it back from 'Nam (or name your war), or came back broken and hurt, or who could not adjust to the "real world " and took to drugs, alcohol, the road (and I don't mean the storybook road of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" but the Sally shelters, the railroad hobo jungle camps, the ravines, and under the bridges of this country) deserve respect and honor. As a result of my own military experiences, perhaps very much different from those of Jim’s, I am now an active member of Veterans for Peace whose goal is to make sure that our sons and daughters, our grandsons and granddaughters, Jesus, our great-grandsons and granddaughters in some cases from a glance at some of the profile pages on this site, are not used as cannon fodder for some ill-conceived military adventure. Whatever differences we have on the questions of war and peace it was guys like Jim [and David], guys from old working-class towns like ours, from the ghettos, from the barrios, and from the wheat fields of Kansas, who did their duty as they saw it, maybe kicking and screaming, maybe gladly, whose names are now honorably etched for all eternity on that black marble down in Washington and on the Adamsville Vietnam Veterans Memorial over at Marina Bay."     

I have posted a YouTube link to Bruce Springsteen's Brothers Under The Bridge that brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it in honor of our fallen.