Authors: True Believers
That Bond conversation, our first extended one in years, was the moment the three of us became the four of us.
My journal entries petered out in the middle of October, then stopped. I no longer squirreled away every single stray memento. Partly, this was a self-conscious makeover, a decision to stop doing what I’d done as a child and
live life
instead of collecting its ephemera. Buzzy’s paranoia also had an effect: it seemed unwise to keep a record of what I and everyone around me thought and said and did every day.
So this 1 percent of my life, the last quarter of 1967 and first third of 1968, is uniquely underdocumented. As a result, it seems less a series of minutes and hours and days that flowed like all the others before and since, as implacable as a river. Instead, it’s more fantastic, like some story I once heard. I know I was not at all alone back then in experiencing life as simultaneously unreal and hyperreal. But even with the clarity of hindsight and the luxury of the long view, I can’t get over the feeling that this chronicle of this particular period feels more like fiction than the nonfiction it is. That Robin Williams joke—”If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there”—has some truth, and not even mainly because of the drugs. At some moment, Karen went through the glass and jumped down into the looking-glass room.
Harvard was constantly burning that year, and I don’t mean metaphorically. Every month a fire broke out in some dorm or academic building.
One afternoon in Chuck and Buzzy’s room, we made Magic Marker protest signs for our expedition to Washington. The Mobe—the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—had provided no signage guidelines. Alex insisted we be succinct, no more than five words per sign. We all agreed that peace symbols and
MAKE
LOVE
NOT
WAR
were “hippie clichés.” Chuck and I debated the comma between his
HELL
NO
and
I
WON’T
GO
. For his sign, Buzzy decided on
STOP
THE
WAR
MACHINE
rather than
US
OUT
OF
VIETNAM
.
We arrived in Washington on a Friday night. It was my first visit, and when I got goose bumps looking out the bus window at the Capitol dome, I told myself the feeling was not standard patriotic instinct but excitement that we were about to Confront the War Makers. We slept on the floor of a common room at an American University dorm, which Alex had persuaded Patti, his ex-girlfriend, to arrange.
We got to the Lincoln Memorial very early the next morning. Everyone was supposed to organize themselves into groups and gather near the appropriate two-foot letter near the reflecting pool—R for religious protesters, F for flower people, N for Negroes. We milled in the vast unlettered area designated for students.
The trees on the Mall were turning, the weather was sunny and cool, rock bands played, and my delight at being among so many people like me—a
hundred thousand kids
in jeans and long hair, high on their shared happy hatred for the war and the government and the status quo—was extreme, incredible, sublime. Most of the signs and chants were about peace
now,
peace
now,
peace
now.
Some people carried Vietcong flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” One kid was dressed like an old-time hangman in a hooded black robe, dragging an effigy of President Johnson in a noose. Another had a sign that said
WHERE
IS
OSWALD
WHEN
WE
NEED
HIM?
Alex panned the crowd with his movie camera and then zoomed in on me. “Why’re you grinning like an idiot?” he asked.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
I specifically recall the remarks by Benjamin Spock, the celebrity pediatrician whose dog-eared guide to childrearing had been a permanent fixture on my mother’s bedside table. With the giant white marble Abraham Lincoln seated in the shadows behind him, Dr. Spock reminded us that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were not bogeymen—the real enemy, rather, “is Lyndon Johnson.”
As the speeches ended, an older man’s voice came over the loudspeakers, sounding like a high school principal on Bizarro World: “Those who wish to proceed closer, and perhaps more militantly, to the Pentagon, may do so.” A large fraction of the crowd—the cool kids, the radicals, members of the resistance—oozed across the Potomac for hours, puddling at the northern edge of the huge, low stone building.
To Chuck, it was as he’d imagined the fortress of Isengard in
The Lord of the Rings.
Alex said it looked like the set for Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
that he’d seen in Budapest, “I mean
exactly,
with the looming wall and thrust stage”—the Pentagon’s deep flight of steps—”and the hundred spear carriers in white helmets all lined up downstage.” The spectacle of menace was perfect. It was a fantasy come to life. Helicopters hovered close enough for us to make out their insignia, their low-frequency high-decibel quarter-second thumps filling our bodies. Uniformed men with binoculars and rifles stood and crouched on top of the building, backlit by the setting sun, watching us watching them. The men on the steps in white helmets were U.S. marshals, each one holding a billy club in front of him. It was
The
Pentagon.
I remember hippies chanting “Ommmm,” which embarrassed me.
I remember watching, amazed, as actual soldiers ran out of the building and down the steps and formed a line just behind the marshals, and saying how odd it was that they were holding rifles and wearing
neckties,
to which Buzzy replied, “MPs, out of Fort Bragg.”
I remember people singing “America the Beautiful” and trying to figure out whether it was sincere or ironic—and then, when a couple of kids stepped right up to soldiers and stuck flowers, stems down, into their rifle muzzles, petals against bayonets, I understood it was a completely brilliant new kind of gesture that
combined
sincerity and irony.
I remember watching a girl right next to me open a zip-top Coke and guzzle it without stopping and then throw the empty can at the men with guns and clubs, and realizing that I needed a can of pop or something because I was low and had already shared my two candy bars with Buzzy and Chuck for lunch.
I remember the terrible sour smell that made me think I was at Centennial Pool the summer the chlorine machine went haywire, and I remember Buzzy saying
tear gas
as people began shouting and pulling their shirts over their faces and trying to run.
I remember feeling angry and frightened when a second wave of MPs trotted down the steps, and one of them, a dozen feet away, stared at me as though he thought he could read my mind.
I remember being pushed forward, and seeing the back of Alex’s head way over to my left, and wondering where Chuck and Buzzy were, and saying
Hey
when somebody shoved me again, and stumbling and falling to my knees, and grabbing somebody’s arm with both hands to try to get up, and being struck and seeing stars and saying
Fuck
—and then (I think) hearing the marshal who’d clubbed me inhale before he whammed me again on the head.
The next thing I remember is lying on cement, just apart from the crowd, looking up at Alex with my head on his lap as he carefully dabbed at my face and neck with the sleeve of his beige Brooks Brothers windbreaker, which was not quite drenched but much more than spattered with my blood. I felt incredibly pissed off and incredibly lucky.
I licked my lips and touched my fingers to my mouth. “I had chocolate milk?”
“A nice woman gave me her Thermos of Bosco for you. You were acting a little out of it, so I figured you needed sugar.”
“Thanks. Out of it how? Did I cry?”
“Uh-uh, you said, ‘I’m gonna bash that bastard in the balls’ like five times. It was funny.”
My blood sugar must have dropped really low. “Sorry about your jacket.”
“My property is your property. Plus, it’s old.” He was still dabbing my head. “This bump is
so
big. It’s like there’s half a golf ball stuck in there. The bleeding’s stopped, though, mostly.”
“Have you seen Chuck or Buzzy?”
“Present and accounted for,” Buzzy said, and when I turned to see him standing behind Alex, my golf-ball bump hurt. “But our boy’s in the brig. Right after you were wounded in action, the same Wyatt Earp asshole who decked you hauled him off.” Buzzy sounded very cheerful.
Alex explained, “When Chuck started yelling at the marshal who clubbed you, the guy arrested him.”
“Bravo Zulu,”
Buzzy shouted, which is he what he said when he thought somebody had performed well. “Chuck was very alpha male,” a phrase concerning wolves that Buzzy had just learned in his social relations class. “It’s all good training.”
After a first-aid stop at the American University clinic, we got back to the dorm. Surprisingly, thrillingly, Chuck was already there, freed, waiting for us. He had a black eye.
Before we left Washington on Sunday, Alex went off by himself to “visit some family friends in Virginia,” and then we all met up with Sarah Caputo and her NYU friends at Union Station for the ride home.
When we told her about Chuck’s arrest at the Pentagon, she wondered why he had gotten sprung so quickly.
Chuck shrugged. “Lucky, I guess.”
“Really lucky,” Sarah said. “Two people we know from NYU are still in jail, aren’t getting out until tomorrow at the earliest.”
On the train trip north, Chuck was reading a book of James Thurber’s short stories, including “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
“This is funny,” he said to me. “You’d like it.”
“Okay.”
“We’re not Walter Mittys, like Pusey said, because we’re not just fantasizing adventures. We’re having them.”
We stopped in New York to spend the night on Sarah’s dorm-room floor at NYU. Alex wanted to go to a theater see a new musical he’d heard about,
Hair,
but Buzzy and Chuck and I didn’t much like the sound of it. “If I want to feel like a far-out hippie,” Buzzy said, “I’d rather spend my two and a half bucks on a hit of acid.” Instead, at Sarah’s urging, we went to see a different political play in the Village.
MacBird!,
as Alex said at intermission, was a “pastiche and a burlesque” of
Macbeth
and other Shakespeare plays—the Lyndon Johnson character, MacBird, murders the President Kennedy character. Only because we’d smoked a joint before the play, I think, did we laugh, even at the sad and scary parts.
“Not to be paranoid,” Buzzy said as we walked back to Sarah’s dorm, “but I wouldn’t bet that Johnson
wasn’t
involved in Kennedy’s assassination.”
“I think that’s bullshit,” Sarah said. “I mean, the guy obviously doesn’t even like being president! And covering up a conspiracy like that? I don’t buy it.” The era and our age notwithstanding, Sarah’s reality-check instincts never wavered.
“In
Vietnam,
” Buzzy said, “Johnson’s
proven
he’s a homicidal maniac, right? And J. Edgar Hoover. Who knows?” He’d read that right after JFK’s assassination, Hoover buried evidence of Oswald’s Communist connections so the FBI counterintelligence unit wouldn’t be blamed for letting it happen. “Cover-ups are the Washington MO, man.”
Buzzy and Sarah did not get along. She was annoyed by his highfalutin New Left bluster, and unlike we Wilmettians, she wasn’t intimidated by his age or his military service. One of her older brothers and a lot of her high school friends were serving in Vietnam.
We were still a little high. Buzzy proceeded to describe, in the only vivid combat story I ever heard him tell, how he’d watched a napalm bombing run over of a Vietnamese fishing village “way out in the boonies, this mud-mover, an A-6, thunders in at like a hundred feet, maybe less, dropped his canisters, and just fucking smoked the place.”
“What
is
napalm?” Alex asked.
“Jellied gasoline and white phosphorus. Sticks to your skin and burns and burns at fifteen hundred degrees. It is literally hell.”
I must have continued taking tests and writing papers that fall and winter—I have the report card showing two B-pluses, an A-minus, and an A—but in my memory, the next six months consist of trying to throw monkey wrenches into the war machine and discussing the nature of effective rather than merely symbolic resistance to the ever more demonic national security state. Starting in October 1967, I was thinking about death, violent death, most of the time.
Our experience in Washington—facing down an armed battallion! beaten! wounded in action! arrested!—made the antiwar rally in Harvard Yard the day after we got back to Cambridge seem timid and useless, a few hundred kids and professors who wanted to demonstrate their
concern
for an afternoon, “everybody spouting this gentle frowning Quakery bullshit,” as Buzzy said.
The SDS action the following day against the Dow Chemical recruiter was much more our bag. Although the chapter leaders had decided against staging a sit-in—”Told you they were wankers,” Alex said—on Wednesday morning in the chemistry building, we four were among the mob who spontaneously turned it from a nice picket-line protest to an act of militant resistance. We decided then and there that tolerance had its limits, and we would suspend the bourgeois civil liberties of the manufacturer of napalm.
During the discussion, Buzzy took out his underlined paperback copy of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” and read aloud, telling the hopped-up, wide-eyed multitude that we’d been brainwashed to “ ‘protect false words and wrong deeds … Different opinions can no longer compete peacefully for persuasion on rational grounds.’ People, it’s time for the Great Refusal!” People applauded.
I agreed, but I got goose bumps when Chuck pointed out that Dow’s product was technically called Napalm B, and then asked, “If this were Munich in 1938, and the manufacturer of
Zyklon
B showed up, wouldn’t
stopping
him be the right thing to do?”