The fall of 1967, every morning before school, we listened to AM radio. My brother and I were both in high school, which meant we were on an early schedule, up before 7:00 a.m., grouchy and silent, worried about how our hair would look that day, about whether we had something cool to wear to school. While we ate cold cereal for breakfast, our mother got dressed for work. On the radio, tuned to WKNX or WTAC, they played “Chapel of Love,” by the Dixie Cups, “To Sir with Love,” by Lulu, “Something Stupid” by Nancy and Frank Sinatra.
They played “Ode to Billy Joe,” by Bobbie Gentry, a song with a haunting refrain: “Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” A small town kid, like us; a guy our age, dead. But why? The end of innocence–it was in the air.
We heard Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and Barrie McGuire’s gravelly voice on “Eve of Destruction,” and another Barry who was on the radio at that time, Barry Sadler sang “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
The playlist captured what I later learned to call the “zeitgeist,” the spirit of the time.
On one hand, there were saccharine love ditties; on the other hand, songs reflecting an emerging politics of race and war, of freedom and resistance.
At school, boys and girls held hands, they slow danced, they got married right out of high school. There were boys who were growing their hair out, wearing beads. Drugs were beginning to circulate. Mr. Haenke, the school principal, implemented a dress code. No blue jeans. No sideburns. No long hair. Your hair had to be off the ears. And he kept a ruler in the breast pocket of his suit. Hems on girls’ skirts, only so many inches above the knee. At lunch time he prowled the lunch room, keeping kids in line, on the lookout for public displays of affection.
There was a war on TV. My brother would graduate in June of 1968. Guys his age talked endlessly about the draft. What to do about it. We had grown up watching World War II movies, with portraits of bravery and glory, duty and patriotism. That’s not what we were seeing on the news every night. Vietnam was a meat grinder. Guys in our town were going. Some because they wanted to. Don Crowl signed up to become a paratrooper. Most went because they had to. The Hinkley brothers both went. Dave and Dick Coy went. Timmy Kipfmiller went.
LBJ had gone all in. There were 490,000 troops over there.
Sunday dinners at our house the war came up in conversation–the protests, Students for Democratic Society, the Weatherman, all the draft-age men who were burning their draft cards. The black and white nightly footage on television.
“I wouldn’t want you boys to go,” my dad said. His father, he told us, had always said to him and his brother Stanley, ‘I didn’t raise two boys to become cannon fodder.’”
He said that, but he and my brother Tom still argued bitterly about the war, about service. Tom said he wasn’t going. Period.
My dad couldn’t say, “You’re right.”
He had served in the Army Air Force in World War II. Before shipping out, he’d chanced to meet his cousin Dee on a troop train outside Chicago. Dee was deploying to the Atlantic theater; dad was deploying to the Pacific. They sat together on the train, they ate some fried chicken Dee’s mother, my dad’s Aunt Edna, had sent from home. I imagine they prayed. Dad was the last member of the family to see Dee alive. He went to Italy and was killed. Dad went to Guam, where he stayed out of harm’s way.
“I’m not going, dad,” my brother would say.
It was the resistance, the absolute refusal, I think, that dad could not accept; a repudiation of service and sacrifice.
“My cousin Dee died on the beachhead in Anzio,” he would say, sometimes choking on the words. As if Tom’s going or my going would validate that. He knew it wouldn’t, but that wound was so deep, it never healed.
On the radio, Barry McGuire sang,”The Eastern world, it is explodin’ / Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’ / You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’.” While Barry Sadler sang, “Fighting soldiers from the sky / Fearless men who jump and die / Men who mean just what they say / The brave men of the Green Beret.”
When we were kids, we played war down on the river flats. There was a popular television series called “Combat.” I watched it, Danny Leman watched it, Dean Gaul and Ronnie Fritz watched it. It fed into our pretend world. We picked up sticks from the ground that were just the right length to become rifles. Sergeant Saunders, played by Vic Morrow, carried a Thompson machine gun. That weapon required a slightly shorter stick. There were half a dozen recurring characters on the show, but we all wanted to be Sergeant Saunders. We had to agree to take turns. In battles we each had our personal submachine gun sound we made when we sprayed the pine trees with gunfire. In imagined conflicts, we imagined getting shot. Lying in the grass, holding our hands over imagined bullet wounds, we staged our combat deaths. After a short interval, we hopped up and continued the play.
“Okay, it’s my turn to be Sergeant Saunders.”
“No, it’s mine.”
“Can I use your stick?”
“Find your own.”
We watched all the war movies there were on network television–“Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Flying Tigers,” “The Fighting Seabees”–most of which dealt with the war against Japan. But those days down by the river, we fought the Germans. At school, boys drew swastikas on the backs of their notebooks. One day, Mr. Davis, one of the counselors, noticed one as he walked across the lunchroom. He stopped and pointed at the drawing. “Do you know what that is?” he said. “Do you know what it means?”
We shrugged. It was something we saw on TV.
He shook his head.
The Holocaust had not made its way into our consciousness. To us, Nazis were just the bad guys. Once we had played cowboys and Indians; now we played war. The Nazis were the Indians.
The band teacher, Mr. Nemvalts, who also taught German, was from Estonia. All we knew of his story was that he had fled that part of the world just as the war was breaking out.
On the school grounds there were a few portable classrooms. They were called “the barracks.” We didn’t know it, no one talked about it much, but during the war the US government, fearing an attack on Detroit, “the arsenal of democracy,” had stationed fighter aircraft at the airport in Freeland to intercept enemy bombers that might show up in Michigan airspace. By the end of the war in 1945, a prisoner of war camp out by the airport had housed 1000 German prisoners of war in 26 barracks.
No one talked about the war.
When we were kids, we asked our dad, “What did you do during the war?”
“I was in Guam.”
“Did you fight?”
“I was a radio operator.”
What did that mean? What did he do? I tried to fit this detail in with what I saw on television.
“What was it like?”
“It was hot.”
That’s about all he said. And that the days were long, that he slept a lot, that he ate a lot of mutton and broke his arm in Guam, that he had his appendix out in Denver. Upstairs in the attic was a footlocker with his military stuff inside. It remained closed.
Around town we’d see men with tattoos on their arms. Dad said one time, “A lot of men got tattoos when they went to war.” I remember thinking: I wish my dad had a tattoo.
One or twice, on a warm summer day, a uniformed man came to the house. He parked in the driveway, walked up to the porch, and said, “Remember me? I’m your Uncle Bill.” Her brother Bill, my mother explained, was a career military man. He had fought in the Pacific during World War II, then in Korea, and then went to Vietnam in the early days of that conflict. He must have seen terrible things. As far as I know, he kept it all to himself.
Eight miles up river from town, Dow Chemical manufactured women’s breasts and napalm. As we got older, as Vietnam loomed larger in our future, Dow took on stature, became part of the military industrial complex. On April 22, 1970, a few months before I graduated from high school, much of the student body in Freeland High School celebrated the first Earth Day by walking out of school. It was a glorious spring day, sunny and warm, a beautiful day for a protest. We protested everything. Maybe someone had a sign with DOW written on it. Our protest was a free day. Two years later the iconic photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc OOn, the napalm girl, would burn the appalling horror of Vietnam into the public imagination, the way photos of the Mi Lai Massacre already had.
Three weeks after Earth Day, four students were gunned down at Kent State.
On the radio WKNX was playing The Beatles’ “Let it Be,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Woodstock,” and Edwin Star’s “War” (“What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!).
What to do about the war?
In the summer of 1917, Woodrow Wilson signed the Selective Service Act, also known as the draft. Once a guy turned eighteen, he could be selected to serve his country in the military. During World War II, 10 million men were drafted; during the war in Vietnam, 2.2 million.
Where I grew up, if you were called, you went.
There was a guy you saw around town that walked with a limp. He had lank brown hair, a friendly face, and a ready laugh. When I saw him limping across the drive of our gas station once, I asked my dad about him. “That’s Ray Frost,” he said. “He shot himself the foot.”
It was not an accident.
At the height of the Korean War, to avoid the draft, Ray Frost had shot himself in the foot with a deer rifle. His strategy worked. He couldn’t go to Korea. He also never walked right again. I don’t know that you can call what he did cowardice. It takes a special kind of courage for a man to aim a rifle at his foot and pull the trigger. Maybe it was a special kind of cowardice. But the rest of his life he was disabled and bore the stigma, some would say the shame, of having let another man serve the nation in his place.
The military straightened guys out. That was the conventional wisdom back then. It is today too. You take a shiftless, aimless youth, one that may be inclined toward criminality, and give him to Uncle Sam. They cut off his hair, ram him through six weeks of basic training, a system that squashes the individuality out of him and teaches him obedience, then send him somewhere in the world where the US left its wide footprint after World War II to do relatively meaningless work. The process takes four years. The boy comes home a man. He stands up straight, he has self control. Maybe he has a skill. If he didn’t already know how, he has learned to smoke and drink. From that point on, he stays out of trouble. He gets married and has two kids.
The year I graduated from high school, you still heard this. There’s nothing wrong with a boy that the US Army can’t fix.
Young guys who acted on their criminal instincts were given a choice, jail or military.
The military also killed guys. The anti-war movement was in full force. Guys my age asked themselves, What to do about the war?
One night in the fall of 1968, I switched on the school Electrovoice microphone and introduced the next song we were going to play. I was wearing an orange Nehru shirt and a short string of colored beads. I had doubts about my hair, but otherwise felt pretty cool. This was the last band I would be in for a few years, the Sons of Sound, minus Brian Bennet, who had left the band to play organ for the Cherry Slush. Mike Ortega still played drums, Tim Shaner rhythm guitar, and a complicated guy we imported from Carolton named Dennis Wanzel played the bass. That night Dennis was wearing a decorated blue jean jacket he called his “colors” and treated with great reverence. It identified him with the motorcycle group he had recently joined, even though he did not own a motorcycle.
“This next song is by Jimi Hendrix,” I said into the microphone. “It’s called ‘Hey Joe.’ We think it’s a groove.”
I glanced at Doug Haynes, standing at the edge of the stage as I made this announcement, saw him shake his head and start to laugh. What made him laugh was the lingo, “we think it’s a groove.” And probably the Nehru shirt. And definitely the beads, which I knew were risky. Today we would say I was not authentic. That look, that language, was an act.
We played the song pretty well, but in Doug Haynes’ eyes I was just a kid who worked at his dad’s gas station in a one-stoplight corn town. Get real.
Doug was getting real. He talked about “the underground,” told me about WLLZ AM radio in Boston that had a program called “the underground,” after midnight. Summer nights lying in bed I held a transistor radio close to my ear, dialed in the station, and listened–The Amboy Dukes, “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” The Doors, “When the Music’s Over.” It was in Doug’s bedroom I first heard Jimi Hendrix, on his stereo system, and then The Incredible World of Arthur Brown, and then Pearls Before Swine, which featured art by Hieronymous Bosch on the Cover. (“Look,” Doug said, pointing at a detail on the cover, “here’s a guy shitting corn.”). Among my friends, Doug was on the front wave of whatever was happening. First guy my age I saw drunk. First guy my age to start smoking pot. (His nickname, thanks to the Booth boys, was Pots–pure coincidence.) First guy to go to the “head shops” down on Hamilton Street, the hippy section of Saginaw.
By 1970, the year I graduated from high school, pot just seemed inevitable.
That summer another early adopter, Philip Frost, asked me one night if I wanted to try the stuff. Philip Frost was one of those guys that didn’t fit in anywhere. He was brainy but not bookish. He wasn’t athletic, he didn’t work on cars. He was small and aggressive and tended to get picked on. If anyone was going to smoke pot, it would have been him.
We went around behind my dad’s gas station. He lit a joint.
“What you do,” he said, “is don’t smoke it like a cigarette. You inhale it directly into your lungs and hold it there.” He demonstrated, drawing on the joint, making a long airy hissing sound. By this time I was smoking cigarettes regularly. I inhaled the pot smoke and held it. Nothing much happened. I took a few more hits. Nothing.
“Do you feel it?” he asked.
“No.”
“You will.”
I didn’t feel it, unless a mild headache was it. But I didn’t give up and eventually did feel it. It felt pretty good. It felt daring. Like I was becoming part of the protest.
A while after that, one night in the Rat Hole, the local bar that my crowd frequented, Philip Frost sat down at the table across from me and pulled a handgun out of his coat pocket. He set it on the table. He said there was some weird shit happening. I had never seen a handgun. The fact that Phillip Frost was carrying one, it made perfect sense and was also pretty terrifying.
The next time I saw him, maybe a year later, he was wearing our country’s uniform.
In 1970 the war was still a hot mess. The draft was still in effect. That summer there were 350,000 troops in Vietnam. Around 175,000 men were selected that year. If you were selected, you would go to Vietnam. It was a virtual certainty.
The system, everyone knew, was rigged. The Selective Service Administration offered men deferments. Hurry up and get married and have a kid. You were deferred. Go to college, you were deferred. Get an “essential job” making war materiel like tanks or napalm, you were deferred. Demonstrate that you had a medical condition the military would not want to deal with: cancer, hernia, syphilis, asthma, deafness, club feet, flat feet, you were deferred. Habitual masturbation and homosexuality were frowned upon. You could get a deferrent. If you were willing to do the work–and they did not make this easy–you could apply for a conscientious objector deferment. All else failing, you could move to Canada.
Lacking a deferment, you went. You received a message from the President of the United States. “Greetings: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States, and to report to . . .” the nearest induction center.
And that was that.
On December 1, 1969, the first Selective Service lottery drawing took place. My number was 79. They were drafting up to the mid 100’s at the time. There would be no more deferments.
I said to my brother one night, “I’m thinking about joining the reserves.”
“No.”
“Yeah, like Doug.” One of our dad’s employees, Doug Anderson, a contemporary of Tom’s. Reserves meant six weeks of basic training, a few weeks of summer camp every year, occasion stints longer than that. Your term was six years. But you were out of harm’s way.
“I’m 79. That’s a bad number.”
He shrugged, said he wouldn’t do it. He’d go to Canada.
I started the paperwork, went to Detroit on a bus for a pre-induction physical and the mental exam. Nothing was final. It was like I was auditioning the military. They didn’t make a great impression. I spent the morning taking the physical exam, the afternoon filling in answers on multiple choice tests. All around me were sullen, frightened awkward men in their underwear, America’s plentiful raw material. Outside protesters chanted “Hell no, I won’t go.”
The following weekend I went up north with friends for our second annual summer of love music event. We called it Woodstick. We camped on a stream that connected Higgins Lake to Houghton Lake, slept in tents and vans, played loud music 24 hours a day all weekend. We drank Ripple and Boones Farm wines, beer and tequila, and smoked a lot of grass. Some guys were starting on chemicals, mescaline, psilocybin, and acid.
Everyone I knew had a good lottery number, in the 200’s, the 300’s. I broached the idea of joining the reserves to a couple friends. They thought I had taken leave of my senses.
They all said: Shit, man, you don’t want to do that.
I didn’t really want to do that. Neither did I want to GO.
October of that fall I got creamed in a car wreck, broke both legs, and had a long surgery involving metal plates and screws. The metal did it. It put me out of Uncle Sam’s reach.
