“Are we not men?”

Officially, for Americans, there were two wars going on at the same time in the sixties and seventies: the Vietnam War and the Cold War. But there was a third war, a crueler war, going on amongst friends, and against anybody who had the misfortune of having been patriotic enough, or didn’t  have the courage to resist the imposed obligation to serve in either of the official wars. Most of us who wore a uniform became embarrassed to be seen wearing them. Uniforms amounted to admitting that we were fools enough to throw ourselves in front of enemy bullets or supporting the machines of cold war instead of going into combat against our own corrupt government. Patriotism was a confusing issue then, still is, but the world would surely be a better place today if those 50,000 beautiful young men had died on the streets of Washington, D.C. instead of the worthless jungles of Vietnam. It’s easy to look back now and say these things. The only thing that was clear at the time was that whether you sweated in Asian jungles or became a slick on a nuclear submarine you got wounded. And the worst wounds, the wounds that never really healed, are the wounds you got from home.
My father was in the military during the Korean war. He wanted to make a career out of the military. After spending time in Korea he was then stationed on the cold war front in England where he took us to live with him.  Familiarity with military life made going into the Navy in 1968 on acceptable way to avoid probable death in southeast Asia. The cold war was based on the complete elimination of mankind so there wasn’t any reason to lament not living through it. Polaris submarines were the most beautiful manifestation of this kind of modern thinking: sixteen long range missiles on an undetectable nuclear submarine somewhere just of the Soviet coast, each missile with multiple nuclear warheads all of which could be launched in less than fifteen minutes at predetermined targets before the ship itself was destroyed by return warheads. I tried to imagine the fuckers who come up with these ideas (on both sides), going home every evening and chatting merrily with their kids about how things went at school that day, “Oh yeah, daddy, today we practiced ‘duck and cover!'” “Oh, that’s good, real good son.”

When on patrol we stayed submerged for no less than two months, during which time there was no daylight, only re-generated air and only  passive communication with the outside world. When we finally surfaced the light of the sun took some time to get used to and on first whiff you realized that the air of this planet stinks. And except for the married men with families perhaps, you also realized that the world just went on without you and didn’t much care that you weren’t there. You soon got used to that. I did a four year tour, all of it before I was twenty-two, during which time I made five patrols plus, with breaks in Honolulu where we made exaggerated efforts at something close to long-haired behavior, but the girls knew, so we spent a lot of time taking drugs, sitting in bars spending exaggerated amounts of money on bar hogs, and waking up alone on the beaches to spectacular sunrises. Anything to feel warm before the next patrol.  But there was no fitting in. I for one, felt that I knew too much for a kid. I especially hated seeing those army guys coming back from the jungles. There was this look on all their faces. We all knew, each to himself, we could say or do nothing, some of us even trying hard to believe that this was the only way to maintain peace and protect our loved ones. 

 

 

 

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Title from H.G. Wells, The Mysterious Island of Dr. Moureau. 1868.
‘Duck and cover’, a school classroom exercise practiced during the 50s and 60s in which children were taught to hide under their desks on alert of the impending arrival of nuclear missiles.

Slick. The engineering department on the ship that was responsible for all non-nuclear mechanical systems, including the hydraulics from which the name derives: always covered in oil.

Bar hogs. Women who work in bars and try to get men to buy them drinks, usually more than double the price, and sometimes solicited sexual activity.

 

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