We stopped in Abilene on Monday night to hear Jenna sing with her new old band, Krypton 88. Reconnected with left handed drummer, Dana Gregory, from my high school days and asked Jim Via if he was nervous before going on. He laughed and said he wasn’t.
Jenna and the band sounded great but we had to leave before their set was over in order to catch the PBS show on the My Lai. That doesn’t sound like much, fun does it? I had read an intriguing review of the show in the morning paper. US soldiers under Lt. Caley’s command were interviewed and Vietnamese survivors told their side of the story.
I was so out of it in high school that I chose “Hawk” when asked to write a short essay on whether we were a Hawk or a Dove. It was my junior year and the war was raging. That summer Doug, who had already graduated and gone off to war, showed us a belt of gook’s ears that he proudly wore on the plane on the way home. End of tour senior year Rex’s dad wanted his son to go in the army before college. My mom wrote me at school that Rex had been killed, shot in the back by friendly fire. Tom, who lived down the street from my family, came back on leave and I asked him what he did over there. He said he sat in a helicopter and kicked napalm canisters out without even looking at what or who was was below.
I think Kim took this photo at a demonstration in IU’s Assembly Hall. I got arrested at another anti war demonstration (above), eventually dropped out and was reclassified 1A. I was considering my options when they decided to institute the lottery draft system. I watched them pick my ping pong ball in Kenny Macher and Dave Jolly’s apartment. I think Rich was there too. My number was in the two hundreds.
Later I worked with a guy named Paul who wept when Viet Nam came up and I’ll never forget him describing how they were so scared they shot at anything that moved and one time it turned out to be a bunch of kids. And then John the postman, who used to come see Personal Effects, got his Viet Nam photos out and shot himself in the head.
The PBS show was very well done, as good as Hurtlocker which we watched last night, better in fact because it didn’t try to wrap things up with a hokey scene with a soldier talking to his infant son.
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