Written by Terence Ford
Chicago. O’Hare Airport. It was 1972, maybe 1973. I’d left the States, I think, in January 1969, on the day Nixon was inaugurated.
All my American clothes had more or less disintegrated in Nepal during the monsoons. I was wearing those funny Indian pants that look like pajamas and a safari jacket with a Tibetan dragon printed on the back.
The first things I remember in Customs were huge pictures of Richard Nixon and Mayor Richard J. Daley and thinking, I was going to get fucked by the government men in uniforms. After all, I was a draft dodger and in the days before I left the country I was quite sure the FBI was looking for me. I had stopped cooperating with my Draft Board in Des Plaines, Ill, almost four years ago. Yup, I’m gonna get busted, on the spot, at the O’Hare Airport for flipping off the Johnson/Nixon War! I was sure the federal jails where filled with my fellow draft dodgers and that the anger in America behind the war in Viet Nam was still raging.
My passport was filled with entry and exit stamps from all the druggie countries on the planet. Morocco, India, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I wasn’t holding any dope but having been hassled from one end of the planet to the next, I figured they’d be going thru my duffel bag and checking for my name on their lists of people to arrest.
The Customs guy took a quick look at my passport and said, without looking up,
“Welcome home.”
Really!!?!
Walking thru O’Hare Airport I saw a large number of soldiers in their ‘Class A’ uniforms. In those days, the Army had their people in uniform when they traveled on commercial airlines on leave, or orders. And then I saw the Hare Krishna’s dancing around the baggage carrousel, chanting, drumming and hustling folks for “donations”.
“What The Fuck!”
The taxicab ride to my folk’s house on the Near North Side was all deja vu. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been in this City before except I knew I had grown up here. But now, I knew I’d never belong to this place ever again. And I began to remember why I left in the first place…
The shit people would throw at you during an anti-war or civil rights demonstration. The ease with which the cops used their Billy clubs on people during the 1968 Democratic convention. The endemic racism in the city. The anger Americans, as a people, seemed to hold on too so tightly. Kent State. 50,000 KIA’s in Viet Nam. “Bomb them into the Stone Ages!” Getting tear gassed in Griffith Park during a peaceful “Be-In”. My gay friends hiding in their closets. “Love It or Leave It!”
I remembered the night in 1967 I went to pickup a date and she told me she wanted to introduce me to her brother who was home on leave from the War. She lived in a typical railroad apartment on the top floor of her building in Old Town. At the back of her apartment, in the kitchen, were two rather young looking ‘kids’ in their Army ‘Class A’ uniforms. They told me they had just spent a year in a Muong Special Forces camp in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. They also said that they’d been “over run” a whole lot. They told me they’d had their assess kicked frequently by the Viet Cong, but when their leave was up, they were going back for another year.
On the table in front of them were two bottles of Jack Daniels bourbon. One was empty; the other was half gone. They’d been in the kitchen most of the afternoon. They also had some rather surprisingly pleasant marijuana they’d brought home with them. The weed had been carefully stuffed into Marlboro cigarettes after the tobacco had been removed, re-shrink wrapped and in the cartons what had also been re-shrink wrapped. The weed was some good shit! Some enterprising folks in Viet Nam did all the work by hand and then sold their handiwork to the GI’s on the black market. Judging by the number of cartons of the converted Marlboro cartons they had, they planned on staying fucked up for their entire leave.
Here’s the thing I remember most about my meeting with these two young soldiers. As far as I could tell they were stone cold sober even after the entire afternoon of Jack Daniels and the Marlboro weed.
The other thing that I remember was they were just twenty years old. I was maybe a year or two older than they were, but they seemed age’s older than I was. Their eyes were dead, they didn’t move much, just sat there, in their stoned, drunken stillness like I’d never seen before.
I also remembered during the taxi ride to my folk’s house that afternoon, the looks of anger, fear and loathing in the eyes of the soldiers at the Pentagon in Washington in 1967 when I joined Abbe Hoffman’s “Levitate the Pentagon” protest. I remembered the tear gas from that day and the bruised and bloodied friends from that day which now seemed like a very long time ago.
I remembered the British Army officer who I had meet in Gibraltar who treated to kill me when I told him I thought the war in Viet Nam was bullshit.
After a short, bizarre reunion with my folks and my brother and his family, I remember leaving Chicago, finally, for California. I was broke but wanted to get back to the West Coast to catch up with the Hog Farm who I had travelled with from Sunland in Los Angeles, camped with in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico and trekked with in the Kali Grandhaki Valley in Nepal.
Being broke, I certainly couldn’t afford to fly but I wasn’t up to hitch hiking across the country. I checked the local “alternative” newspaper and found an ad for a ride share to San Francisco. There would be three other men and all I needed was my share of the gas money. Perfect.
My dad and brother drove me to the south side of Chicago to hook up with my ride. The three men I met that day had all just been discharged from the Army after their service in Viet Nam. They were young, about my age. Their clothes reflected the time they’d spent with in the military. Fatigue jackets, jungle boots and hats. And I saw the same look in their eyes I had seen in my girlfriend’s brother’s eyes back in the day; what I could only describe as the “Nobody at Home” look. Their “ride” matched their clothes and eyes. A beat up panel truck, worn out paint with a cracked window or two, but it ran like a champ.
We traveled west that entire first day, no stopping. Finally, we stopped at an empty campground that night. Silently we produced our sleeping bags and crashed on top of the empty picnic tables. It was then that I began to feel some sort of a bond with these three soldiers. We never talked about their experiences in Nikon’s War. I don’t remember that they talked that much at all.
The police stopped us several times during our journey. The first time was somewhere for a license plate that wasn’t attached correctly to our vehicle. It was bullshit but the cop made sure to tell us to “keep moving”. In Flagstaff, AZ, taking a break from being in the car all day, we went for a walk to stretch our legs. We didn’t get very far when a city cop stop us and asked for ID’s. He then threatened to arrest all four of us because none of us had Draft Cards! We were told that we could avoid jail that night if we left town, immediately.
During our four-day drive across this country, no one ever thanked them for their service or welcomed them home. It was all just make sure you move on!
We finally made it to San Francisco and went our separate ways.
I have always wondered what their lives ended up being like…