The Army Diaries by Mike Marino (book recommendations based on other books .txt) 📖

give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!"

It was clear by now that the race for space and nuclear superiority here on Terra Firma, and the rush to stop any more dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia was coming to a confluence and creating a fissure in the divided camps of Them and Us, whoever Them and Us were. By the mid to late 1960's the lines that were once blurred were now clear and concise, and both sides were now ready to get down and dirty and downright bloody. This time the bloodshed wouldn't be confined in the faraway fields of Vietnam, but right here in the streets of America.

The Democratic Un-Convention in Mayor Daley's Chicago in 1968. A police riot and rampage of pissed off proportions, of such billyclub violence and teargas intensity, it could only be measured on a Richter scale, went unabashedly unabated for hours. Provacateur provocation was a possibility, though not proven, but the end result was an inevitable headbangers ball that left the Left dazed, pulp beaten and left to bleed on the proletarian pavement.

The PTA seemed meaningless anymore, as the schoolbell rang and announced to all that it was now time for class to commence in the school of the streets, and the Parent Teachers Association was surreptiously replaced by the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse rode off into the sunset, disappearing into the ghost mists of the past, and on their hooves, emerged the Chicago Seven.

In the words of the protest parlance of the day, "you don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 and the United States gave up the battle in 1973, and, define irony, as America was celebrating it's 200th Anniversay, a unified Vietnam was also declared. I did see a bumper sticker recently that said, "My Dad Beat Up Your Dad in Chicago in '68." A sign of the times.

It was twenty years ago today, but long before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play, and well before Lucy launched herself into the sky with her diamond powered rocket, the Cold War Warriors were already altering the states of mind of the unsuspecting in uniform in 1953. The US ARMY was experimenting with LSD, a drug originally developed as a blood stimulant in 1936 in Basel, Switzerland. The mindset of the military saw it as a mind control drug for use on the enemy, any enemy, at any cost in a covert CIA project codenamed MK-Ultra.

Forgettabout NASA, Albert Hoffman is credited with being the first psychedelic astronaut to be put into tie-dyed orbit in inner space in 1943. Writer Aldous Huxley earned his chemical wings in 1955, and by 1960 Dr. Timothy Leary doned his spaced suit and became the equivalent of the first man on the moon with sustained flights over a long period of time.

If the 1950's gave us Disneyland in Anaheim, then the 1960's made it's contribution in the form of the Haight Ashbury amusement park of acid in San Francisco.

The dialated denizens in denim migrated to the new drug in synthesized form in 1965 and by 1967 the Fed's got fed up and declared war on the un-Fed meds. The White Rabbit had met it's share of plasticine porters with looking glass ties.

The Music too. It changed, thanks in large part to the choreography of Cold War politics waving it's conductors baton of social change. The brilliance of the Brill Building bards of the late 1950's soon lost it's shine and pop luster, and made way for a crowd of coffee house poets and songwriters trying to wake up the sleeping giant of social conscience. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, along with the New Christy Minstrels and Phil Ochs revitalized the Woody Gutherian spirit and made us all agree that it was ok to disagree, but in fact, this land was our land, America that is, and not Vietnam.

The bugle sounded, and we took our ragtag army of lost souls into the streets, street fighting men and women under a rock n' roll banner. So you say you want a revolution? Yes we did say that.

Che, Ho and Mao, had taken the place of Larry, Moe and Curly, and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became the concrete court jesters of political change, and the decade gave us something else. Another McCarthy, Eugene was his name. Two decades had produced three prominent McCarthys just as the 1940's gave us Edgar Bergen's southern pine alter ego, Charlie McCarthy, proving without a doubt, that America was truly the greatest of all super powers.

In what other country could a ventriloquist gain fame on radio!
Reagan asked Mr. Gorbachev to tear the wall down, he did. Sgt. Pepper was shot down in cold blood on a grey New York City street in a psychotic grab for eternal fame, and people now book vacations to Vietnam.

The "enemy" can bring down twin towers with flying jet-fueled projectiles and blend into the national fabric and remain unnoticed and anonymous. The sand of the middle east has replaced the jungles of southeast Asia, and there's nothing to defoliate in the vast desert expanse.

Today the vision of direction may seem out of focus, cataracts obscuring the image, and a new catechism of catharsis has set and hardened like concrete in a driveway. Whirling dervish frenzies drive us damn near to madness as we try to pinpoint and figure out just who "they" are, and who "we" are anymore. Yes, it is difficult..like children playing pin the tail on the donkey, we have to be careful whose bottom we stick the pin in. It's a new era with new possibilities and new fears thrown in just for laughs.

In the Sixties, Mike was saying things, like "wow" and "groovy" and "spare change" and "peace and love", recently in the digital age of computers, cell phones and the Twin Towers, Irag and Afghanistan, he was heard to say, "Damn! I miss the Cold War! "

Chapter Two

1968...the summer after the summer of love, and 12 minutes before the eve of destruction, or at least until the song would upchuck from the bowels of analog radio's amplitude modulation.

The Sixties were a time of psychedelic prophets, psuedo-peace (What was Vietnam, chopped liver?) and lust disguised behind a mask called love. Riding shotgun with Flower Power, was a heavily loaded weapon with buckshot pellets of gloom and doom. The folk music scene...the Mugwumps...Dylan...Ochs... Sebastian...Seeger...Baez..you know, folkies...Greenwich Village, North Beach, for years the folkies had us fucked up chasing answers blowing in the wind, never finding them.

We were chasing kites cut loose from the hands of children and we watched, and the children watched as they disappeared sky-high into the atmos-stratos-spheres of fears, meanwhile, not astronauts, but held in place by gravity, we were trying to ascertain for certain just why Phil Ochs ached and we stood on the distant shore and watched helplessly as Barry McGuire was itchin' and a bitchin' with his trigger finger on the nuclear button, while a doctor with some very strangelove and a black glove was ready to SAC us with a doomsday machine. Mike had not been very political in the past, in fact never gave it a thought. He had been bum beached and sun bleached on the wiki-wiki- shores of Waikiki, when he had to ask himself, 'Why, Kiki? Why me? Why a'mia (Italian).

Mike was older now, and political waves from distant lands were cresting and crashing on his own personal shores. Vietnam...and a lot of Americans were morphing into Canadians...the eagle in a capitalist cocoon transforming into a socialist beaver with a maple leaf branch in his teeth, a rose in the furtive grinning mouth of a dangerous, fandango dancer with bananas and fruit adorning her head as a crown of jewells upon the royal head of Antoinette...before it got ginzu'd on the guillotine.

Other kids Mike's age were bobbing in the water, Halloween apples in body bag rubber rafts, and as they went into boot high muddy jungles full of Vietnamese patriots on opium, well, these American boys (patriots from the other side that also claimed righteousness, got shot down, shipped back home to be burried six feet deep in home town ground. Tri-fold flag, "Here tell he was a fag," said someone in the back row far from the open grave. "Maybe he was, but, he was an American fag! Now buried, wrapped like a sandwich in an American flag baggie.. The fag flag, but damn he could shoot them commies, left and right, bang, bang, you're dead you red! Damn shame it is, but we have to draw the line, pinko's or faggots? Cain't have neither one amongst us, so just as well they kill each other...what did ol Merle say, oh yeah, if you don't love it leave it goddamn it! Now that is as American as it gets boy! Damn that Haggard, he he, he shore knows how to sing a dang song that makes sense!"

Resolving, with the leverage of surrealistic reality, and his own drug addled mind at the helm, all reason blurred, obscured and hindered by his altered states alter ego..he became in myth and not reality..the Scarlet Pimpernel...Leslie Howard! How-weird is that Howard?

Look, he kept explaining to himself, something had to be done to stop the war, the carnage and the killing, and Vietnam was a carnival of carnage with a circus of circumstances that drew America deeper and deeper into a La Brea tarpit of politics He also looked at it as a trade off of astounding win-win proportions. He, on one hand, would be infused with just enough discipline to corral his stampedeing use of psychedelics, a roller coaster he had ridden for the past 5 years at his own private Coney Island amusement park. In exchange, he would throw himself on the sward of logic, become a cancerous and a deliriously deliterious and detrimental instrument of peace and prosperity through social democracy. The army would understand in time that he was indeed right, pin a medal on his noble Nobel chest and in the end pack up all their B-52's and go back home to Gary, Indiana and leave Saigon sighing and Hanoi less annoyed.

If you want to bring down the beast of war, and it was a beast, it had to be from the inside of the behemoths belly. It may be Godzilla, but Mike would assume the role of a khaki Ghandi, an even match (he felt at the time) against gargantuan guns and highly polished brass. Little did he know that a long strange military road lay ahead of him.

One that would be at the same time dangerous and ridiculous (as only the military can be) but never ever boring, no siree, never boring. Besides it was the Sixties...nothing boring there Amigo.

It was the Decade of Assasinations, the JFK bridge in the gap from FDR...from the New Deal to Dealy Plaza...the Sixties were shedding their cheap off the Montgomery Ward rack three piece suits faster than a three piece jazz combo could tune up in a sleepy lounge. Italian rifles had become a forensic fashion statement, that is if you're out to whack a president from the sixth floor of anywhere. Nothing at all appeared as it seemed, nothing at all was real....so just raise your right hand, repeat after me, and you're army bound boy...army bound..what a glorious day! A day to die for boy, a goddamn day to die for and you should be