Bip!

Bip!

Just like that, right there on tv. Bip!

Some guy hand cuffed, right on the street in Saigon, forced to get on his knees. The other guy takes out a hand gun, puts it to the guy on his knees' head and Bip!

I'm in the living room, eating dinner on a tray table. We had a very loosely coupled family in those days - my sister off to college, my father working two jobs, my mother involved with Citizens Against Water Pollution and/or grad school classes, me fending for myself. I had been doing my own laundry and cooking for myself since I was 12, so it was not a big deal.

There I was, then, eating something and Bip!

WHOA! It was hard not to recoil. I didn't know it then, but at that very moment my whole perception of Vietnam changed.

Even with Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now, it's hard to explain to people who were not around back then how surreal Nam was. The hot war had been going on since 61 or so, and full force by 65. This was nearly 3 years later. Every night the news opened with Nam, segued into the Civil Rights movement and then, with the time remaining, focused on other stories that emerged from time to time - drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll...

Nam was the constant. It's cliched now, but there were body counts. The VC always lost like 2000 men, we'd lose like 250. In 67 it was clear we were gonna win, just a matter of a year or two. We always had, so there was no reason to expect otherwise.

But Nam was not like a real war, like THE war, y'know, the big one that everybody's father fought in. This was the GoGo Sixties, the time of great prosperity, of technological wonder, or leisure time, of the certainty of going to college if you had half a brain, of nice houses, bigger houses. The last vestiges of "Depression-itis", of that odd frugality and modesty born of the 1930s, were falling away. Middle aged women, like my mother and most of my brunette aunts, suddenly became blonds. Cellars became rec rooms, people got in ground pools instead of bomb shelters, every house had an attached two car garage.

Life Magazine had done a big spread about the Class of '65, how they were the best and the brightest in history and would remake the world. Hollywood put out movie after movie about Americans going abroad, basically to marvel at how backwards the rest of the world was and how it was our burden, our duty, to spread plastics, the frug and indoor plumbing.

In this time, Nam was half soap-opera, half sporting event. The country had become obsessed with keeping score, and body counts were just the ticket. The first Super Bowl had been played the year before; we had gotten our first color TV in time for it, with its massive round green picture tube. It was in a "console" - a six foot cabinet with big speakers, an AM/FM radio tuner and a turntable for both 45s and LPs. It was the centerpiece of not just ours but everyone's living room.

Nam was far away, and not just in distance. The current revisionism, also popular at the time with people like my Normandy vet old man, that the government didn't do a good job of propagandizing the war is just total crap. Nam was everywhere. Every night, every headline, every radio newscast. Nam was everywhere - everywhere but here.

In February of 1968 there were only two ways you could find yourself in a rice paddy - either you were too dumb to get a deferment, or you were dumb enough to enlist. I'm not talking academically dumb - that didn't matter. College campuses were places where Nam was opposed. Whether out of principle or recognizing an opportunity when they saw one, colleges bent over backwards to admit people to college. In those days California set the cultural trends of the nation and thus the world. Their public education system was the envy of every other state, if you can believe it, and they had instituted not just two large university systems but a vast community college and junior college system as well. If you got into college you got a student deferment, no questions asked. In California you were accepted as a matter of right, irrespective of your high school performance or abilities. No problem - in many junior colleges, remediative courses were the most well enrolled.

But I'm not talking academically dumb - you could get in. No, you just had to be dumb, like in head in the sand dumb, or like we said in our dialect, stunata. If you couldn't get into a 4 year college, fine - you could get into a 2 year, and for cheap - most community colleges cost less than $200 per semester. Two years and the war is probably over. But if you didn't wanna mark time in a classroom you had at least two other things to try.

First, you could get married. Back in those days, married guys didn't have to get assigned to combat. You could either get deferred, or at worst get drafted and go to Germany. Or Korea. Or Okinawa or the Phillipines. Even Guantanamo.

Another thing you could try - the 4F route, altho this was usually the province of the upper middle class. In the upper middle class town where my cousins lived, everyone had a friend who had a father or uncle who was a doctor who could find something to diagnose you with that would disqualify you - scoliosis, some respiratory thing or the ever popular flat feet. Many scions of doctors in the 60s became doctors themselves courtesy of a 4F qualification which allowed them to stay out of the heat and go to med school.

(Of course, few doctors would help low middle class kids like us get 4Fs. The attitude was that we were going nowhere fast anyhow, might as well join the Army and "become a man". Yeah, the Army was the perfect place for THOSE people. And many of those doctors had come from THAT side of the tracks, joined the military in WWII, become men, and gone to med school on the GI Bill. Didn't hurt them - in fact, it had given them a golden opportunity. So by not providing us an excuse to get out of service, they were actually doing us a favor. Funny, though, how it didn't seem proper to give their own sons that same golden opportunity...)

You also could get lucky - you might be the sole male survivor in a household. This was a big one in WWII, when so many families lost all their sons early on in the war. A more agrarian society back then, it was seen as destructive to family farms and small businesses to have all male heirs get taken out in shooting wars.

There were tons of ways in early 68 to get out of being drafted, but what made all the wheels turn in this industry of deferment was that at that time there was no pressure for the vast number of troops we would soon need to be drafted, and that was because there were so many enlistees.

In the mid 50s, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and the Wild One, West Side Story and even Marty, portrayed a lost generation of youths who found no meaning in the standard American model - high school, work, family, suburbs. Malcontented generations always sprung up after wars - consider the expats of Hemingway's movable feast - even the Civil War, where Go West Young Man meant getting out of having to conform to the expectations of a more rigid social, economic and familial set up. The Post WWII era was no different, and the nihilism portrayed in the 50s was real.

Nam provided a way for obstreperous, disaffected youth in the early to mid 60s to find adventure or at least escape the boredom and certainty of what was a fixed, predictable game for them. Enlist and you might see the world, maybe not, but you sure as hell would get out of your hometown, your old circle of boring predictable aimless friends, your semi-commitments to your girl friend and most of all, your family.

In my home town only about 25-30% wound up going to college anyway, so what were you gonna do? Get a job, get drunk, get laid, get in trouble. We lived in a resort area where most of the jobs were service jobs - not manly pursuits. The few factory jobs around required you to know somebody, as did the trades - electrician, carpenter, dry wall, plumber. Fathers, who had grown up in the aimless and hopeless unemployment of the Depression, had told their sons that the Army was the best thing that ever happened to them, despite the fighting. So many guys figured, what the hell...

In early 68, in a back water place like ours, there were no drugs really. The only ones who smoked dope (as we called it) were the ones that came back from college, where it was plentiful and readily accessible. If you wanted to get marijuana you had to know somebody on "the Ave", the main drag of the nearby black district a couple of towns over. Only the elite schools offered LSD and other psychodelics and there weren't any guys from our town who went to those places, so there weren't many who could come back to spread their gospel.

Booze and beers were the drugs of choice, or, rather, the only drugs around. The cops didn't mess with you as long as you weren't a complete asshole about it. Guys would get drunk, get in fights, get in trouble, but it was tolerated. A guy could work as a mechanic at a gas station, get paid, and on weekends get in trouble. Nobody sweated it.

But it was boring as hell...

No, if you weren't the type to go to college, and most of us weren't, the Army looked like a great way to get the hell out of there.

Nam was wallpaper. Nam was background. There was the GI bill, with its educational benefits, but more importantly its housing and training benefits. By 68 there had been a good 10 years of guys who had joined up, gone to Germany or one of those Asian outposts, had a piece of cake tour of duty, and comeback with honor, maybe some skills, and some cachet that employers loved. And you had gotten the hell out of here without having to sit yet again in stupid classrooms "becoming astronauts" - that is, taking up space.

What happened tho, was that occasionally Nam would reach out and tap you on the shoulder and remind you that it was there, still lurking in the shadows. Somebody would have a cousin, boyfriend, uncle - always from another town - get killed. When it happened it was surreal, like being struck by lightning. Unlike the stories we'd heard about every family losing someone in WWII, virtually no one had lost anyone in Nam. On those rare cases when it did happen, the grieving family was looked on as particularly unfortunate, and maybe even cursed. Not honored, but rather treated like lepers - unfortunate, but to be shunned, since their tragedy was so out of tune with the rest of what was going on, which was prosperity, upward mobility and by all means fun.

But by the beginning of 1968, despite perhaps a hundred of enlistees out of our little town, nobody had been killed. Enlisting was not seen as a risk of death really. You sign up, you do basic, they ship you somewhere, you do your tour, and you come back. Just like as if you had gone to college, but a lot more fun and mayhem.

Nam was solidly in the background of my life. Then, Bip!

It happened quickly. It was shown in a montage of the clean up after the so called Tet Offensive. The VC had launched a whole series of surprise attacks that shook everyone up, but by mid February it was clear things were back under control. At least that's what was said.

But there was something different now. The body counts continued, like the scores of an undefeated team, but there was a new dimension. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but the best I can do, even 40 years on, is to say that there was now a moral dimension.

God knows who that poor wretch was that was eliminated, "execution style" as they say, or what he had done. He might have killed babies for all we knew, drank their blood and used their bodies for sandbags. We had been continually told how savage and backwards the VC were, so nothing could be put past them.

Even still, we were the Americans, the good guys, the ones who treated prisoners well and helped rebuild our enemies after they were vanquished, even if they were as brutal and cruel as the Japanese and Germans. We were not like them godless Commies who were capable of tremendous unfeeling cruelty.

But even tho it was another Vietnamese who rubbed out the prisoner with so much dispatch and disregard right in front of us from Coast to Coast, nonetheless he was our guy, our representative, our ally, and to watch that happen sent several new and disturbing messages.

Were they guys we were fighting with, fighting for, just as bad as the bad guys? Were we putting up with this unacceptable, unAmerican behavior?

Or had things taken a bad turn? Were things really so bad that such desperate measures were justified merely to keep things under control?

Whatever it was, whatever the voice over and body counts said about our "victory", the emotional impact gave a very different message indeed.

Nam was not a soap opera. Nam was not a sporting event. Nam was spinning out of control, and about to enmesh us in its web in a way that threatened to take us way, way out of our prosperity drenched sunlight and into the fog of terror, tension and cruelty.

I was 15. I had 3 years of HS left. Three years is a long time and the war would certainly be over by then. I was going to go to college. I would not have to enlist, and I would not get drafted. Nam was far away, and like the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was just part of the furniture of the Cold War, which, by 1968, was a negligible part of the prosperity of the times. I had nothing to worry about.

Still, that image stuck. Bip! I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 seconds. Gone. Just like that. Right on the street in Saigon.

There was something wrong with this war. Something wrong, something turning us into someone we didn't want to be, someone we were not back here, back home, back in the USA. Maybe those college kids knew something we didn't, those kids going door to door for McCarthy in New Hampshire.

I didn't know.

All I knew was this guy threw this other guy down on his knees and then Bip!

And things would never be the same...