Taking a short hiatus from posting political and/or religious topics on Facebook got me thinking about how I came to my world view. What makes me so different from so many of my friends and family? The answer will probably never be known but I'll try to deconstruct my life.
I think I was always a little different. My earliest memories don't seem so different but then who really remembers their life in the first two or three years? Life seems to have been idyllic for the first couple of years in New Britain but I know they probably weren't. My memories are of playing in the Buttercups and Black-eyed Susans in the field behind our temporary housing for returning GIs. I remember my mother singing to me, My Little Curly Hair In A High Chair. My memories of my father are faint.
I remember moving to Coventry and how wonderful and big it seemed. There were flowers all over and a giant Weeping Willow in the front yard, a cherry crab apple and large oak in the back yard. Life was pretty good I guess.
Somewhere along the line though I became aware of inequities in our country. I remember some of the voters' rights marches in the south, the standoff at Old Miss, things like that. I remember in either the 5th or 6th grade there were some of us who wanted to lawyers; we wanted to defend the wrongly accused. We watched Perry Mason, The Defenders and any other lawyer shows I've forgotten.
It must have been in the early '60s that I really became politicized (although I don't think I realized that was what it was). Things just didn't feel right. LBJ declare war on poverty and I, along with so many others, found it abhorrent that so many in this great country lived in squalor because they couldn't afford anything better.
By the mid-60s we were fully engaged in Vietnam, a war I just couldn't wrap my head around. First there was the self-immolation by monks. How could anyone do that? They must be desperate.
Then came the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam. Ultimately we found out that this was a CIA backed coup d'etat.
All of that is background to my own experiences that started with being drafted in February 1969. Drafted to go fight in a war I did not believe in at all. Drafted to be cannon fodder.
I'll admit that being drafted, being torn from my comfortable (more or less) left, was traumatic. I had no desire to go anywhere. My whole life was in east central Connecticut. I tried like hell to avoid going but it was to no avail. It seemed to me that my options were severely limited. So I submitted.
I figured what the heck I'd get an easy job as a mechanic or truck driver, things that I knew a bit about. But my Uncle Sam had a different idea. Vietnam was in full swing. The months of January, February and March 1969 saw the Army draft 30,000 men (boys really) a month.
The Army was worse than I expected but really no worse for me than anyone else except I was not athletic. Fate intervened and I became sick, well double-pneumonia. I then witnessed first hand the callousness of the Army. I passed out during morning inspection; a couple of guys including the one who caught me as I fell said I turned ashy white and thought I was dead. I just couldn't breathe.
But I passed out after sick call so I was on my own. I walked to the infirmary and after being berated for malingering I was told I had to go to the hospital for chest x-rays. Except I'd missed the bus so I had to walk. Which I did. And then I had to walk back to the infirmary where I was told I should have brought the x-rays back with me so I had to walk back to the hospital. Thankfully someone at the hospital took a look at the x-ray and I was immediately put into a ward.
During the time I was in the hospital there was an outbreak of spinal meningitis and soldiers died. There was a Congressional investigation. It made those of us in the pneumonia ward feel so secure.
The only good thing about getting pneumonia is that I got out of Fort Dix on a six week medical leave. That was the start of the next chapter in my life.
