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The Late, Great, '68 - and a Public/Personal Anniversary

By Horace Coleman

When my "Freedom Bird" left Tan Son Nhut that night, I saw artillery pieces firing flames. Firefights spitting jagged red light. Shells and mortars falling like rain. Bombs blasting. Parachute flares drifting like unstained jellyfish in ink.

But I wasn't going to heaven, just "back to the world." Where James Earl Ray would hack down Martin Luther King. Where frustrated people in Detroit, Trenton, Newark, Baltimore, P-burg - and a few other burgs - would do a poor VC imitation. Just like Nam, the Palace Guard would rush to the Capitol.

I was going where Sirhan Sirhan would X Bobby Kennedy; where Mayor Daley's cops decided, since the streets were full of people raising hell, they should raise hell too. Thereby helping Nixon - he of the "secret plan" to end the war - win the presidential election after expanding it and then abandoning it.

No wonder Mick Jagger was in the studio cutting "Sympathy for the Devil"! They'd get theirs - but not until they'd given us ours. I went, so to speak, to the dock of the bay, and let the smoke out of my ears. I felt, through the grapevine, that people got to be free. Even if they might jump in your game occasionally. Check out the way the European party called the Prague Spring got broken up by the Warsaw Pact police.

It's all '68 to me since then. The longer I was home, the more I saw and thought the way the U.S. is run really wasn't that different from how the war was run.

As the country moved from love-ins to live-ins and from LSD to Prozac, I got my own personal Vietnam anniversary. I was born in Ohio, went to college in Northwestern Ohio. After exiting the Air Force, I was back there. Going to the same university on a downsized GI Bill. I was celebrating my birthday when Kent State went down. May 4, 1970, "four dead in Ohio . . ."

Naïve college anti-war protesters weren't always well-informed, well-behaved or pure in motive. But a campus shouldn't be a free fire zone. The Ohio National Guardsmen were in no danger. The nearest kid shot was 71 feet away. The furthest, 745 feet. Four KIA, 9 WIA. No weapons captured, no secondary explosions, no hootches destroyed. Poor After Action/BDA. We did better at My Lai.

Of course the fix goes in. Students - not Guardsmen - are indicted. The rumor mill gins up stories about the girls being whores and the guys being strung out druggies. Hippie, commie trash. Even the student just walking out of class when she was wasted. Nixon and Ohio's Governor, James Rhodes, throw their weight around and hem and haw.

Four years after the brave deed's done, eight Guardsmen are finally indicted; seven take the Fifth. None are convicted of anything nor pay damages. In fact, a judge dismisses all criminal charges. Nine years after the bloodletting, the state coughs up a whole $675,000 - to be split 13 ways - and a half-assed apology. Which the defendants and their attorneys dispute. That's $675K for the kid they put in a wheelchair, the other eight they shot up and the four KIA.

Yep, My Lai all over again. I know these people. By type if not personally. Same mentality, same motivation. Bring the war home, right? We're here and so is it. So are they. We have to fight differently now.

I wrote this poem, originally published in the journal Vietnam Generation, about the birthday present I got when I was 27: the image of that dark-haired screaming girl kneeling over a body.

Horace Coleman is a veteran, poet and writer living in California.

Still Life With Dead Hippie

It's all in the point of view. Suppose you have your
sophored out sophomore slumped on the sidewalk
in the foreground. Never made it to the bar.
His buddy's embarrassed, his girl outraged.
No fun tonight, Hon!

Or, maybe this feminist witch is exercising her anger
on this newly stricken MCP (male chauvinist pig).
As the stunned bastard in bellbottoms looks for reasons.

It could be a pink-faced VC broad trying to grasp the life that's just flown
from your unfavorite dumb son. And,
she has no right to cry out in plain sight. To be so
full of pain. You have to blame her for the cluck's bad luck.

Of course, what it was, was these dirty, rotten,
vicious whore kids - standing around watching the
overarmed, undertrained National Guard about to go wild.
And, yeah, those kids were fools.
Some of them believing in democracy & free speech & other book stuff.
As if they belonged in the real world.
Out there chunking rocks & flowers & slogans & curses.
Full of dope, sex, & unAmerican anti-war ideas.
They were coming out of class, out of their stupor, sitting on & smoking grass.
Reminding you! something's wrong & someone has to do something.
So, it's their fault it's not their fault!

Then we find out: there were no snipers or
syphilitic commie call girls recruiting on campus.
And that one girl was just a terrified 14-year-old runaway.
Barely old enough to bleed but the right age to understand the deed.

And, did you ever notice how that cheap statue,
down there in Columbus, of that used car salesman
toting forged registrations past the Capitol building
looks just like Governor Rhodes?