Shooting the Moon 44 years ago today, I was sweaty, lying in my bed, and couldn’t sleep. It was the hot and dry season in Viet Nam. I was a 23 year old US Army Captain, a decorated combat veteran on my second tour of duty. I was a short-timer. I would be returning to the States in 54 days, and discharged from military service. I turned on my transistor radio and accidently found the moon landing being broadcast live on the Armed Forces station. I heard Neil Armstrong say his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Live. In a combat zone. I thought about how crazy it was. Here’s a fellow American, who’s on the surface of the moon, broadcasting his activities back to earth, and I’m listening to it in a Third World Country, while engaged as a killer in a dirty little war. How schizophrenic. The same society that put a man on the moon is also conducting a war that kills 4,608,000 human beings. A society that produced a supreme human achievement matches it by proudly stating they’re bombing a population back to the Stone Age. It was just one more event tossed into the bucket of crazy I had been carrying around with me. I’d try to sort it all out later. When I got back Stateside. Yeh. Back to the “Real World” as we soldiers would say. Back to normal. Only the Real World wasn’t normal anymore. It was schizophrenic as well. My first indication of that was in July 1967 when I was medivaced back to a Hawaiian hospital to recover from a gunshot wound I got fighting the Viet Cong. July 1967 was the middle month of the “Summer of Love”. Of Haight Ashbury….”Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”, as one song went. The Beatles had just released their new song, “All You Need is Love”. However, while I was lying in my hospital bed, watching TV news for the first time in months, I saw images of National Guard tanks patrolling Detroit, where race riots killed 43 people and injured over 2,000. Tanks were also patrolling the streets of Newark NJ, where 26 were killed and 1,500 injured. Rioters torched buildings and cars. They smashed store fronts and looted them. There were also race riots happening in Cairo IL, Durham NC, Cambridge MD, and Milwaukee WI. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy just a few months previously were blamed for these riots. It seemed I left one combat zone for another….no matter what side of the planet I was on, there were political assassinations, riots, fires, looting, and military maneuvers in city streets. I looked inside the bucket of crazy that I was carrying. I saw that I was nearly killed in a firefight supposedly defending my country in Third World jungles half way around the world. I also saw it was the Summer of Love….but how could that be? This summer there were tanks in the streets of Detroit and Newark! Two of our country’s prominent leaders had just been assassinated. Cities were burning across the US and citizens were being killed in the streets….all the while these events played out to a musical score of “All You Need Is Love”. Yes. Crazy indeed. However, it was just a preview of things to come in the decades that were ahead of me.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 22:47:59 +0000
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