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Student protests, 1969
1969-10-15 ""The New Prairie Primer"" Page 5
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New Prairie Primer, October 15, 1969, Page 5 Blues of a Soldier VIETNAM G.I. I've been in Nam for 10 months now, and I think I have passed the 3/4's mark, and that any day I will fall over the end and never come back again. I'm talking about my mind, you know, losing my grips. I live with three pretty cool guys in a bunker. The one guy is from Miami; last month he was continuously high. He has this really paralytic growl, followed by a bark. Another guy is married, he has an M.A. from-----., and was a teaching assistant before he came here. He sneaks up on us at night and growls like a cat monster. Another guy is from Kentucky. I sometimes wonder if he isn't completely gone. He goes around sniffling people like a dog. He's always throwing his knife at walls and doors. He also howls like a hound lost at night. We do thing like, three of us are sitting together eating and another comes up to sit down and one of us gets up and starts a fight with the guy who wants to sit down, and once an officer starts to run to break it up, everybody laughs. It's hard to explain. The guy with the M.A. Dick, and I, though, it would be cool to make movie of it. It would only work as a play though. Watching us talking to ourselves, not to one another, all night long. It's hard for me to describe, but I sincerely feel I'm not what you'd call normal. I don't know, I'm so tired of it all I just don't care. I have never been so undisciplined. Big whooped flash, wow, we got busted. Monday night there was a shakedown. They went through everything. It was like the Gestapo. They lifted chairs for hollow legs, tore everything apart, looked behind posters on the walls, crawled on their hands and knees the length of the bunker to look under things, went through out letters. A few days ago. some guys blew up the orderly room of the company next to us (our headquarters campany) trying to kill their commanding officers. So they said they were looking for explosives, but it was a narcotics raid. I never keep any stash, so nothing happened, but the guy from Miami had a tobacco pouch and two bags about the size of grapefruits. They found them. We don't know what's going to happen. It's going to be hard for them to prove it was his, but the bummer is it will be a military court and if you're familiar with military justice, you'll know how shitty the whole thing seems to us. Fuck it, just fuck it. Things are really getting me down. Getting up in the morning is getting to be like starting on a twenty mile hike. I wake up and all I feel is the shit I have to put up with during the day. Mechanic -- fuck I'm going nuts, I hate trucks and grease and mud. Mud--where I work, everywhere you walk is mud four inches deep and like running shit, and I get it all over my whole body by the end of the day. Susan's been slacking off in her writing to me,. I guess it's really hard to keep it up. She says she's really busy, doing a lot of work over long periods of time. It's really strange, I know her feelings haven't changed, but the intervals between letters create a strange sort of paranoia. I no longer have the hardness I used to, things seem to get to me. For the last four nights I have come back to the bunker after supper, and just layed on my bed till I go to sleep. I think I'm in a really bad period. I really feel that if I don't get myself together it will have a permanent effect. That's all. Emigration (continued from page 4) fist and legal text, it would be by no means as simple as the "Up with People" sentimentalists seem to think. But its alternative is a continuation of the "Better Dead than Wrong" philosophy to the point of national suicide. So now we flaps down glide into our true blue denouncement, that being: Why Our Hero Wants to Bug Out. For lots of reasons -- among them that I like clean cities, the Montreal subways, low crime rates, a small defense budget, no draft, decentralized government, beautiful scenery that a Corps of Engineers has never heard of, and the climate in Vancouver. Most of all, I have to leave because if I stay here I will, by the age of thirty, be a neurotic radical with a broiled brain. I too have grown up in America and up until the last year or so was fantatically concerned with how to make things Right -- right now. It has only been the certainty of emigration that allowed me to cool off. (Even so, I was outraged because I couldn't prove in my B.A. thesis that the cause of all our troubles was our departure from the Articles of Confederation.) I can sit here in my room with my typewriter and tell you how we have to be patient and understanding of our fellow Americans. But let me get out in the street and hear one of those "workers" SDS wants to unite with talking about killing all radicals, or see the gaping maw of the lower middle class consumer, or just feel a cop in the vicinity, or hear some little old lady bitching about long hair, or listen to the latest horror story from the Pentagon, or just feel the oppresive necessity in the air to be Right-- man I get so involved I could just spit. So anyway, I would actually be willing to try. I could stick around and teach history in college -- which is a pretty good place to teach people if you want to do that. I would honestly give it a tru. But then some super stem face starts mouthing about my military "obligation" and I retch I will not kiss any flag or wear any uniform, or kill or be killed for any country. Even aside from my pacifism I just can't see that kind of compulsory dedication. So I'm sorry, JFK, but I'm one of the niggardly kind that asks what a country can do for me at the same time as I think about the converse. And right now America wants to stuff me in a uniform or a prison. My parting gesture is a flipped bird and a sincere no thank you. But maybe there are some (I'm sure there are) who can keep their cool over America, who could come out of prison with everything intact, and who have the dedication to spend their lives for the revolution (but gently) with little prospect for success. If you think you can hack it, good luck. I'll be watching with (hopefully) detached interest. Just don't try to export it to Canada. " I bet that Russian Army is jealous as hell. Our troops are here getting all this experience, we're learning about guerrilla warfare, helicopters, vertical envelopment, close artillery support. Those Russian generals would love to be here... Any true professional wants to march to the sound of gunfire." -- General William C. Westmoreland.
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New Prairie Primer, October 15, 1969, Page 5 Blues of a Soldier VIETNAM G.I. I've been in Nam for 10 months now, and I think I have passed the 3/4's mark, and that any day I will fall over the end and never come back again. I'm talking about my mind, you know, losing my grips. I live with three pretty cool guys in a bunker. The one guy is from Miami; last month he was continuously high. He has this really paralytic growl, followed by a bark. Another guy is married, he has an M.A. from-----., and was a teaching assistant before he came here. He sneaks up on us at night and growls like a cat monster. Another guy is from Kentucky. I sometimes wonder if he isn't completely gone. He goes around sniffling people like a dog. He's always throwing his knife at walls and doors. He also howls like a hound lost at night. We do thing like, three of us are sitting together eating and another comes up to sit down and one of us gets up and starts a fight with the guy who wants to sit down, and once an officer starts to run to break it up, everybody laughs. It's hard to explain. The guy with the M.A. Dick, and I, though, it would be cool to make movie of it. It would only work as a play though. Watching us talking to ourselves, not to one another, all night long. It's hard for me to describe, but I sincerely feel I'm not what you'd call normal. I don't know, I'm so tired of it all I just don't care. I have never been so undisciplined. Big whooped flash, wow, we got busted. Monday night there was a shakedown. They went through everything. It was like the Gestapo. They lifted chairs for hollow legs, tore everything apart, looked behind posters on the walls, crawled on their hands and knees the length of the bunker to look under things, went through out letters. A few days ago. some guys blew up the orderly room of the company next to us (our headquarters campany) trying to kill their commanding officers. So they said they were looking for explosives, but it was a narcotics raid. I never keep any stash, so nothing happened, but the guy from Miami had a tobacco pouch and two bags about the size of grapefruits. They found them. We don't know what's going to happen. It's going to be hard for them to prove it was his, but the bummer is it will be a military court and if you're familiar with military justice, you'll know how shitty the whole thing seems to us. Fuck it, just fuck it. Things are really getting me down. Getting up in the morning is getting to be like starting on a twenty mile hike. I wake up and all I feel is the shit I have to put up with during the day. Mechanic -- fuck I'm going nuts, I hate trucks and grease and mud. Mud--where I work, everywhere you walk is mud four inches deep and like running shit, and I get it all over my whole body by the end of the day. Susan's been slacking off in her writing to me,. I guess it's really hard to keep it up. She says she's really busy, doing a lot of work over long periods of time. It's really strange, I know her feelings haven't changed, but the intervals between letters create a strange sort of paranoia. I no longer have the hardness I used to, things seem to get to me. For the last four nights I have come back to the bunker after supper, and just layed on my bed till I go to sleep. I think I'm in a really bad period. I really feel that if I don't get myself together it will have a permanent effect. That's all. Emigration (continued from page 4) fist and legal text, it would be by no means as simple as the "Up with People" sentimentalists seem to think. But its alternative is a continuation of the "Better Dead than Wrong" philosophy to the point of national suicide. So now we flaps down glide into our true blue denouncement, that being: Why Our Hero Wants to Bug Out. For lots of reasons -- among them that I like clean cities, the Montreal subways, low crime rates, a small defense budget, no draft, decentralized government, beautiful scenery that a Corps of Engineers has never heard of, and the climate in Vancouver. Most of all, I have to leave because if I stay here I will, by the age of thirty, be a neurotic radical with a broiled brain. I too have grown up in America and up until the last year or so was fantatically concerned with how to make things Right -- right now. It has only been the certainty of emigration that allowed me to cool off. (Even so, I was outraged because I couldn't prove in my B.A. thesis that the cause of all our troubles was our departure from the Articles of Confederation.) I can sit here in my room with my typewriter and tell you how we have to be patient and understanding of our fellow Americans. But let me get out in the street and hear one of those "workers" SDS wants to unite with talking about killing all radicals, or see the gaping maw of the lower middle class consumer, or just feel a cop in the vicinity, or hear some little old lady bitching about long hair, or listen to the latest horror story from the Pentagon, or just feel the oppresive necessity in the air to be Right-- man I get so involved I could just spit. So anyway, I would actually be willing to try. I could stick around and teach history in college -- which is a pretty good place to teach people if you want to do that. I would honestly give it a tru. But then some super stem face starts mouthing about my military "obligation" and I retch I will not kiss any flag or wear any uniform, or kill or be killed for any country. Even aside from my pacifism I just can't see that kind of compulsory dedication. So I'm sorry, JFK, but I'm one of the niggardly kind that asks what a country can do for me at the same time as I think about the converse. And right now America wants to stuff me in a uniform or a prison. My parting gesture is a flipped bird and a sincere no thank you. But maybe there are some (I'm sure there are) who can keep their cool over America, who could come out of prison with everything intact, and who have the dedication to spend their lives for the revolution (but gently) with little prospect for success. If you think you can hack it, good luck. I'll be watching with (hopefully) detached interest. Just don't try to export it to Canada. " I bet that Russian Army is jealous as hell. Our troops are here getting all this experience, we're learning about guerrilla warfare, helicopters, vertical envelopment, close artillery support. Those Russian generals would love to be here... Any true professional wants to march to the sound of gunfire." -- General William C. Westmoreland.
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