I was home on leave, early summer, 1968, only six months left on my three-year commitment to Uncle Sam. After Vietnam, they'd sent me to Fayetteville, North Carolina, Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, lord, another year-and-a-half, for a 21-year-old "cockroach" from L.A., a life sentence in the deep south. Might as well have put me on a chain gang.
Fayetteville was a real eye-opener, an American Tijuana. Soldiers were quarantined to a two or three-block section of downtown, a raucous area of raunchy topless bars, cafes, streetwalkers and drug dealers, all hidden from the eyes of respectable residents of the old Southern city, named after the French hero of the American Revolutionary War, the Marquis de LaFayette. For young soldiers, many away from home for the first time, Fayetteville was a feast of carnal delights.
In 1967, the army deployed a chunk of us, many who had been to Vietnam, to the mean streets of Washington D.C. to quell the riots after the assassination of MLK. We had itchy trigger fingers. We weren’t the National Guard. Nobody trained us in crowd control. Our language was “search and destroy,” "fire mission," and “shoot to kill.” I guess that’s why they ordered us to keep our live ammunition in our ammo pouches, unless told otherwise. Anyway, by the time we arrived in Washington, the trouble was pretty much finished, except for smoke coming off the burned-out buildings, Howard University to our front and U.S. capitol building behind us, one the seat of knowledge and the other the seat of power, both looking pretty bleak those days.
It was my last leave before my discharge. Soon, I’d be home for good. All I could think about was getting on with my life, which included a lot of partying. I needed clothes for school, so I headed out to Sears, in Santa Monica, breathing in the cool ocean air, the military the furthest thing from my mind. As I approached the popular West Coast department store, a guy sitting at a table called me over. “You registered to vote?”
“No,” I answered. Then, I realized. I’d never voted before. I was too young in 1964 and didn't much care in 1968.
“You want to register? It will just take a minute. Do your civic duty.”
Civic duty? A year earlier, I was in Vietnam's jungles, not knowing from one day to the next if I’d ever see the sun rise. Hell, the war was still going on, and I had a lot of friends fighting. Civic duty? You want to talk to me about civic duty?
“Here’ s a registration form. Fill it out and you can vote.”
Why the hell not, even if part of me was jaded by the political system, most of it I didn’t really understand, but I was taught to trust them, men in suits. I did know it was this political system that sent me to Vietnam, and the riots in D.C. Why? It still wasn’t clear, communism? Sure, okay. Most of the people I saw in Vietnam, Buddhists, poor farmers and shopkeepers, barely surviving in corrupt urban jungles, had no idea about communism or Marx. They didn’t want war. They wanted peace and wished we’d go home. You could see it in their eyes.
A lot of guys, in uniform, friends, said they went into the army for no other reason than to keep from going to jail. Patriotism or fighting for liberty? Forget about it. We had no choice. Anyway, we figured we were doing our civic duty, even the guys who never made it home.
I’d grown up, some, since I’d joined the army at 19 and had long conversations with guys who knew a hell of a lot more than I did about the streets, politics, war, the ways of the world, like why did so many guys get out of serving while others had no choice, not really. Vietnam wasn’t like WWII, you know fighting Nazis and saving the world from fascism, if that was true. Vietnam was altogether different. Hard to explain. You had to have been there. Were we suckers and loser? A lot of people thought so.
I took the voter registration form and filled it out. When I got to the part that asked for political party affiliation, only two choices, really, fifty-fifty, pretty good odds at the track but not so much in politics. My dad was a lifelong Democrat, telling me, from the time I was a kid, the Democrats supported labor unions. The Republicans supported management. Easy enough. If it wasn’t for the union, my dad said he wouldn’t have a steady job or benefits, like health insurance, vacation, and a retirement plan. Even though he had a conservative streak, as well, my dad was always union man, Woody Guthrie all the way, "this land is your land," and all that, but me, my generation was in rebellion, even if I was still in the army. From where I sat, both Democrat and Republican legislators sent us to Vietnam, when most of their kids got college deferments and stayed home. I was learning fast.
I looked down at the party choices. The only one I liked, or sounded rebellious enough was called the Peace and Freedom Party. Cool, I checked that box, my first official party, Peace and Freedom Party, had a nice ring to it, and Eldridge Cleaver was its presidential candidate. I didn’t know much about Cleaver, something to do with the Black Panthers and his book, Soul on Ice. He was anti-war. That was good enough for me, so I became a radical Peace and Freedom Party person, the furthest I could get from the other two war-monger parties the better. Sure, I knew my new party would lose. As a Mexican in L.A., I always saw myself as an underdog.
That’s how I thought, at the time, anyway, even as I was still in uniform, a peace medallion under my t-shirt.
I went back to finish my time at Fort Bragg, once again, forgetting about politics and the war, getting caught up in the Caligula, Oscar Wilde escapades in downtown Fayetteville. In fact, I don’t even think I voted that year. Somehow, it all slipped me by. Hell, if the army didn’t care about us voting, what did that mean? The war trudged on for another seven years, piling on the lives of another 20 or 30,000 dead Americans, almost, like Congress was playing chess with real people’s lives, families crushed, a lot of Chicano, blacks, and Puerto Ricans in those body counts.
Anyway, that was how I registered to vote in my first presidential election. Once I received my discharge and arrived home, for good, I pretty much embraced the fine politics of anarchy, trusting nothing, especially after national guardsmen killed students at Kent State, and police officers killed students at Jackson State, kids protesting the war and the inequalities of U.S. society, all of it covered up by the military and government, until years later, the real truth revealed, too late to make much difference.
It all seems so long ago, another lifetime, but now, as a new election has passed, people are all riled up about democracy, and the morning after blues. I’ve calmed down a lot since then and come back into the fold, supporting labor unions, like my dad, who taught me the importance and dignity of working with my hands and respecting those who do.
Now that it's over, the voting, it’s time to see if the whole thing holds, has a core, a solid mass to keep it from falling apart. From the looks of it, this time around, I’m not so sure.
