Flashback to the End of a War That Really Did End
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs06122009.html
By RON JACOBS
June 12-14, 2009
April 30, 1975. The war was over. Really over. This wasn't like
the peace treaty all the leaders signed in 1973 that didn't really
end anything. No, this time it was over. The television in the
University of Maryland Student Union showed video footage of
helicopters leaving the U.S. embassy roof with a few remaining GIs
and other Americans inside while Vietnamese hung on to the
sides. Meanwhile the Vietnamese whose side had won were celebrating
the entry of NLF and Hanoi forces into Saigon, which was now Ho Chi Minh City.
My friends and I were exhilarated. A war we had known most of our
lives was over. A war which seemed an adventure when I was a young
boy playing Little League baseball and war games and had become a
source of fear and anger as I grew older. A war which took friends
of mine and killed some, made others killers and zombies, and forced
all of us to grow up before we were ready. A war which took my
father away from my family for over a year and had us wondering every
day whether he would come back. And had me wondering if my brothers
and I would have to go also. A war which showed Americans what
America was really about. An America which wasn't pretty, or even
honorable. A war which I had begun opposing as a 13-year old by
flashing a peace sign and singing "Give Peace a Chance" while my dad
was in Danang, and ended up celebrating the victory of America's enemy.
The night of the Vietnamese victory, Pat M. and I invited ourselves
to a Student Association-sponsored banquet at the University of
Maryland. Pat was a friend and reasonably well-known on campus as a
rabble rouser. He had recently begun attending meetings of the
radical group I was associated with--the Revolutionary Student
Brigades. Once he and I realized we shared a fondness for pot and a
passionate dislike of the system, we began to spend lots of time
stirring things up. Our roles as campus instigators had made us
friends with the more radical elements in the student government
which was run by a member of Youth Against War and Fascism at the
time. Consequently, we were often invited to members-only
functions. If we weren't, most of the time we went anyway.
As for this particular dinner, the food was good, but the wine was
better. So much better, in fact, we lifted a half dozen bottles
during the post dinner speeches and headed out to the streets to
celebrate. On our way to Route 1 and the strip of bars immediately
off the University of Maryland campus we stopped at a friend's dorm
room and drew up a banner reading, "Long Live the People of Vietnam",
and scored a couple tabs of acid and a corkscrew. After all, this
antiwar movement was about more than Washington's war against the
Vietnamese. It was a war of its own against the consciousness that
started the war in the first place. John Foster Dulles, Richard
Nixon, LBJ. The fear of communism, sexuality and marijuana. Many of
us against Washington's war for empire were fighting another war to
make our world a place where fear took a backseat to joy.
By the time we made it to the street the acid was edging out the fog
of the alcohol and providing a nice clarity to the night. Pat and I
opened a bottle of wine each, spread out our banner, and shouted some
revolutionary slogans about Ho Chi Minh and so on. After a half hour
or so, another thirty people had joined us. By then we were spilling
into the streets, drinking wine and smoking weed. Of course, the
police showed up.
The funny thing was, they didn't do much. After asking us what was
going on, they told us to stay out of the road and drove off. I'm
still not sure what Pat and I told them but, whatever it was, it
worked. In retrospect, I put it among those moments where the
clarity of psychedelic thought patterns befuddles the linear thinker,
the authoritarian, so much that they just don't want to bother with
figuring it out. So, instead, they left it alone and hoped we would
just go away. Later, we headed into DC to celebrate with a few
hundred other antiwarriors.
A couple weeks later, Gerald Ford ordered an attack on Cambodia after
the merchant ship Mayaquez was seized and released. A final flurry
of killing from a vanquished nation. A decade later, Ronald Reagan
was heralding CIA-funded right-wing contras in Nicaragua and Islamic
mujahedin in Afghanistan.
Now US soldiers fight the mujahedin's progeny in a war that
guarantees its continuation as surely as it spawns another generation
of hate. The forces represented by Reagan were the beginning of a
long march back to the world that the antiwar movement and
counterculture thought it could change. It's not that I'm saying
(nor am I convinced) that the forces of linearity and
authoritarianism have regained the control they had before the
1960s. However, they certainly have learned how to accommodate and
neutralize those strains in the US political and cultural spheres
that challenged them so headily back then.
The Democratic Party, which funds every war that comes along whether
it started under their watch or not, has become what stands for an
antiwar movement in the US. Meanwhile, in the United States, the
real opposition to imperial war speaks to an audience deafened by the
false hope of an Obama nation.
--
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs'
essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short
Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625@charter.net
.
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