Flashback
"WAR, hoah, good God! What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING.
Say it again!"
recorded by Edwin Starr [War by Norman Whitfield
and Barrett Strong (1970)]
I was blind sided, never saw it coming. Oh, it's not like it
hasn't happened to almost everyone at one time or another. You
know what I mean, a sight, a sound or a smell that snatches you
out of the present and plunges you full force into a pleasant
memory or a cold sweat. I never expected it that night, or that
it would disturb me so much.
It started out as just a light hearted play, staged by a local
troupe of performers as part of a traveling Fringe Festival. The
play Streakin[1] was billed
as "A Musical Flashback Featuring the Hits of the 1970s"
with a little gratuitous nudity thrown in for fun, thus the name.
Well, having grown up in the '60s and come of age in the '70s
this seemed like a chance to take a pleasant stroll down memory
lane. The play was turning out to be rollicking good fun and the
performers were very good. The costumes were very authentic and
really brought back fond memories with more than a few laughs. Do
you remember bell bottom jeans, peasant blouses, tie-dyed shirts,
long hair, peace symbols, and platform shoes? Well they had them
all.
Up to this point the play had all been quite cheerful. The cast
belted out the tunes, from Pop to Rock and Bubble Gum to Disco.
The music prompted happy memories even if some of those songs
weren't really ever very good, then or now. For me, music has
always had strong emotional hooks. Songs have often acted as
anchors for my memories, helping to define events and milestones
throughout my life. The play kept rolling along full of light
hearted memories until they broke into "Tin soldiers and
Nixon coming, we're finally on our own. This summer I hear the
drumming, four dead in Ohio."[2] Then they went right into
"WAR, hoah, Yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely
NOTHING!"[3] I couldn't
breath. I couldn't see. My eyes filled with tears. Every hair on
my body stood on end, and my heart was in my throat. In that
instant, I was eighteen again with Vietnam in the news and on my
mind. I flashed back to the pictures of the war brought into our
living rooms each night on the TV. The news footage of GI's
taking refuge behind a wall during a fire fight and taking turns
firing their M-16's over the top of the wall while others
reloaded. The picture from the anti-war march on the Pentagon,
showing a young marcher stopping to put flowers into the rifle
barrels of the soldiers standing guard along the route. My mind's
eye filled with images of the protest against the National
Guard's presence on campus at Kent State; then the girl kneeling
and wailing over the body of Jeffrey Miller, who was one of the
students killed when that protest rally went tragically wrong. I
saw the medevac helicopters racing to save the
lives of wounded soldiers. I saw the little Vietnamese girl
running down a road naked and screaming, her back badly burned in
a napalm strike. I saw the Vietnamese policeman with his
outstretched arm, holding a hammerless .38 caliber revolver,
executing a bound Vietnamese prisoner on the street in Saigon. I
saw the explosions cascade in a wave across the land as the bombs
fell from the B-52's of an Arc Light strike. I
saw the surreal rain of fire in the night sky made by the tracer
rounds as an AC-130 Spectre gunship made its
pass over a target. I saw the charts and the graphs of the body
counts.
Then the wellspring of arguments that my dad and I had about the
war started to replay. He was a World War II veteran who had
enlisted in the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He
had been a pilot, flying his TBM Avenger torpedo
bomber off the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier in the
Pacific. He'd seen and experienced war first hand. He'd been shot
at and done his share of shooting, too. He was a "my country,
right or wrong" kind of man – not so much gung
ho, but more like "if our country's in a war, then it's
everybody's war, and if our president thinks war is the answer,
then war it is." I wasn't sure how I felt, except that I
knew I didn't think this war made any sense at all. I couldn't
understand how he, having seen the devastation of war, couldn't
even contemplate questioning the merits of the Vietnam War. We
argued about the Domino Effect, but I just couldn't buy
the idea of Vietnam being the keystone to the communist takeover
of the world. Sure, I'd seen Khrushchev on TV pounding his shoe
on a tabletop and telling us that our children or grandchildren
would live under communism. I just didn't believe that Vietnam
was a logical place to stop that from happening. Dad's war was
the response to a direct attack on our country and our way of
life. I loved my father, I was proud of and respected his
service, but I didn't think Vietnam was as clear cut and
compelling as World War II. Beyond that, I was scared and
confused. I didn't want to go to war, I didn't want to kill
anyone, and I didn't want to be killed. I'm sure that no one who
really has to do the fighting ever wants to go to war and I was
no different. I was flooded with memories of all the young lives
on both sides that had been lost, their promise and potential
never to be realized. We fought about other things of far less
importance, too, like the length of my hair and the clothes I
wanted to wear. We had always been close, especially when we were
building or fixing something, but the war tore at our
relationship during those years in the same way it tore at our
nation.
I had been awash in thoughts and emotions that I hadn't revisited
in over thirty years. Meanwhile the play had gone on without me.
Just about then they started to sing Who'll Stop The
Rain[4] and as I slowly emerged
from my memories of the past back into the present I wondered how
we as a world, had come so far and changed so little.
[1]:
Streakin by Jamie Rocco and Albert Evans, with Patti Wyss,
Ed Cionek, and Heidi Karol Johnson (1995 - 2001)
[return to text]
[2]:
Ohio recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; written
by Neil Young (1970)
[return to text]
[3]:
War recorded by Edwin Starr; written by Norman Whitfield
and Barrett Strong (1970)
[return to text]
[4]:
Who'll Stop The Rain recorded by Creedence Clearwater
Revival; written by John Fogerty (1970)
[return to text]
by Kevin L. Hoffman
... who is a professional artist, professor of art, and freelance
writer, with his essays and photography appearing in national
magazines and books; his writing has been previously featured in
this periodical.
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