CHRISTMAS EVE - 1968

I just got through reading Lucian Truscott’s excellent memory of his Christmas, 1968. If you’ve been checking him out and still need a reason to become a paying subscriber, this one’s the deal-maker. If you haven’t read him, this one’s the one that will have you going back for more. Read it and sign up, it’s really good. Christmas Eve in St. Mark’s on the Lower East Side, listening to Allen Ginsberg read poetry with a transfixed Jimi Hendrix sitting right beside, blown away by what he’s hearing.

Lucian's post in his newsletter

1968 was like that. I call it “The Year of the Mass National Nervous Breakdown.” That has a lot to do with why I remember this Christmas the way I do.

This memory of the same Christmas Lucian writes about is different, but they both make sense, put together. That was why 1968 was 1968.

I was in an unheated van with friends in the middle of snowy Wyoming, on our way from Denver to Berkeley, when we heard the first news on the radio of the Tet Offensive. Welcome to 1968. Turns out, it is possible to drive a stick-shift when you’re covered in blankets. And still cold.

My friend in Berkeley was just starting to work at a new “underground” newspaper over in San Francisco, “The San Francisco Express-Times,” whose editor and publisher was Marvin Garson, whose wife was Barbara Garson, playwright of “MacBird,” a popular anti-war entertainment, the proceeds from which he had convinced her to invest in the paper. My friend knew I could write and that I was good at getting through riots unscathed - the two of us having been at the Oakland Stop The Draft Week riot that really did stop the draft (for a day) - back in October 1967. So he suggested I come along with hm and see if Marvin might have some employment.

As it turned, when I told Marvin I had worked on my college newspaper, he decided that was sufficient “experience” and I was hired as a reporter. $20 a week, and more if I brought something in, on a sliding scale of “how good it was.” Believe it or not, in San Francisco in 1968, you could “get by”. And as it turned out there was a lot of stuff to write about in the Bay Area in 1968 and that $20 was the only week I only got $20.

I was with friends, having dropped acid together, on March 31, 1968. We had the TV on and LBJ was speaking, and all of a sudden one girl said “He just said he’s not going to run!” We didn’t believe her. It couldn’t be. She must have hallucinated that. The question of whether we hallucinated LBJ saying he wasn’t going to run for re-election was one of the more popular stories I turned in.

The night Martin Luther King was assassinated, a girl and I sat in her car up on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in the hills above the East Bay, watching Oakland and wondering when the fires would break out. As it turned out, they didn’t, but an article about sitting there wondering when they would break out, and then discussing why they didn’t break out, was another keeper.

Being in Union Square Park in May, when Bobby Kennedy made his last public speech in the Bay Area, and hearing him say “Some people look at things they way they are and say why? - I look at things that never were and say why not?” I got some flak from readers for saying I was going to vote for him in the coming California primary because if we were going to vote against the war, we should vote for someone who could win, and if he won, would do it.

The night of the primary. A party in Berkeley. I go through the empty bedroom, where for some reason the TV is on, and go take a whizz in the bathroom. I come back into the bedroom and glance at the TV and the guy on screen is crying and he says Bobby Kennedy has just been shot. I stand there. A long time. I remember five years earlier, when a Gold Braid Chief came running up to us on a street at the North Island Naval Air Station and telling us “The president’s been shot!” And we didn’t believe him.

Out in the front room, nobody’s paying attention to the TV that’s on. A girl looks up at me as I come out of the bedroom and sees the look on my face. She says “Who died?”

That was the night I just decided I couldn’t hang around observing 1968. I had to find a way to be in 1968.

The Berkeley Riots happened at the beginning of July, and on July 4 there was a street party on Telegraph Avenue to celebrate the “victory.” I was in the Caffe Mediterraneum. I came out and decided to sit down on the curb. When I glanced to the side, I realized I was sitting next to a nice-looking young woman, who was there with a couple of friends. We got to talking. She was interesting. They were from San Francisco. She was interested in what had happened the previous three days over here. She asked my name. It turned out she had read my articles on Bobby Kennedy. And liked what I had said.

Somebody announced there was going to be a service of thanksgiving at St. Andrews’ Episcopal church - the hippie Berkeley church - around the corner. I asked if she and her friends would like to go. They would.

I stood up and offered her a hand to get up. She kept Standing Up! I kept thinking, please! stop! soon! When she did stop, we were at eye level with each other (I’m six feet tall).

Over the next couple weeks, we got to know each other better. During that time, some people came in the Express Times office to do an interview about the antiwar GI coffeehouses they were setting up around the country. They were looking for Vietnam Vets who could staff them. There was one they’d just set up in Killeen, Texas, outside Fort Hood, which was an important one because it was where the Army was keeping guys who had three months or more left on their enlistment when they got back from Vietnam. “We think they’re going to try and use these guys for riot control around the country. We know the guys don’t want to do that.”

That night, over at Linda’s apartment (that was her name), I mentioned that. She thought it was an interesting idea. Cut to the chase: two weeks later we are in her car on US 101 headed south to LA, to hook onto Route 66 and head for Texas. She’d been looking for a reason to quit the crappy job at the big insurance company she’d taken since she’d dropped out of college the year before.

A week after we got to Texas, enough time to get used to working at The Oleo Strut on the corner of 4th Street and Avenue D, in the Army Town of Killeen, the shit hit the fan. It was the week before the Democratic Convention, and “they” were going to use the Vietnam Vets at Fort Hood for “riot control” at the Convention. We ended up making a little yellow 2 inch by two inch sticker, with a black fist, backed up by a white hand in the “peace sign” that we passed out to guys to put on their helmets when they were called out. I’ve later learned that the Army grabbed as many as they could, but knew they didn’t get them all, and because they weren’t sure the guys would follow orders, the troops sat on the Great Lakes Naval Training Station that week, while the Chicago Police were backed up by the Illinois National Guard who were stupid enough to scare an old lady by sticking the business end of a “blooper” (an M-79 grenade launcher) the size of a cannon in her face, and that’s how the “Police Riot” happened - because the cops had no back-up.

Also, that week, the “Fort Hood 43” happened. Forty-three black GIs refused to get on the airplanes to go to Chicago because they weren’t going to “whip heads” of their fellow citizens after what they’d been forced to do in Vietnam, as their statement read. They knew what was coming. That’s why the minimum requirement to be one of them was a Bronze Star for combat valor. They got what they expected. A General Courtmartial for disobedience of a direct order and ten years in Leavenworth, capped with a Dishonorable Discharge. Each. It was the bravest act I ever saw in the Vietnam War.

By December, after six months of this stuff every day, of going to the court-martials, of dealing with the arrests of the guys we were working with at the coffee house, Linda said she had to go back to San Francisco for Christmas. We told everyone we’d be back after New Year’s. We made the trip with three GIs who contributed gas money and the “stay awake” pills one of the medics slipped us.

We got to San Francisco on December 23. The sexual revolution had yet to spread to the Sunset District where Linda’s family lived, so I stayed with friends in Berkeley.

I came over the afternoon of the 24th. Linda and her mother were working in the kitchen. Her retired Marine father and I were in the living room. We weren’t doing much talking. He didn’t like what he saw when he looked across the room at me. I got up to go to the bathroom, and walked past a bookcase and noticed a book separate from the others: “History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II.” I’d read it back in Denver. I paused, picked it up, glanced through it, then turned to him. “How come you have this?”

“They gave them to us, all of us who were in Marine aviation, after the war.”

“Where were you?”

“Guadalcanal…”

Thirty minutes later, Linda’s mom came out to bring some snacks and was surprised to find the two of us in deep conversation. I was asking questions about Guadalcanal and he was answering them. A few years later, he told me that the fact I was the only person he’d ever met who hadn’t been there, who knew about it in detail and asked good questions, was why he changed his mind about me. “It was the only thing you could have done that day that would have done that.”

That night, we watched the Apollo-8 broadcast from the moon.

In the midst of it, I glanced around the room - three generations: Linda, her sister and brother, her parents, her grandmother and great aunt. All watching the broadcast from the moon.

I thought about the year I’d just lived through, and how it ended on this event, and with this response.

And I thought to myself that maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought they were. Maybe there was hope. “Down there on the good Earth.”

34 years later, I did an interview with Frank Bormann, the astronaut who decided to read from the Book of Genesis that night. I got to the end of the interview and told him I had something I had to tell him. I prefaced it by telling him “I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times,” and told him about that night and what it had meant.

He smiled. “Yeah, I have heard that. But it never gets old. It’s nice to know I did one thing completely right in my life.”

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