Loon - Jack McLean [0]
Martha Lamb McLean
FOREWORD
Valerie Solanis took the elevator
Got off at the 4th floor
She pointed the gun at Andy saying
“You cannot control me anymore”
I believe there’s got to be some retribution
I believe an eye for an eye is elemental
I believe that something’s wrong if she’s alive right now
—“I Believe” by Lou Reed and John Cale
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 3, 1968, IN NEW YORK City, Valerie Solanas, a rejected actress and a cult hero to a small segment of postmodern quasi-feminists, shot popular artist Andy Warhol three times in the chest at the Factory, his New York studio at 231 East Forty-seventh Street. She worked there occasionally. Solanas was the founder and sole member of a group named SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). When she was arrested the following day, she said, “He had too much control over my life.” She was later found to be insane and was confined to a mental institution for six years. Warhol initially was pronounced dead, but, after a desperate heart massage, he survived.
An hour later, sixty-five blocks uptown, at the magnificent Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue, history professor Richard Hofstadter was giving the Columbia University commencement address to what remained of a ragged collection of several thousand angry seniors. Most had walked out to protest America’s growing involvement in the war in Vietnam. Fittingly, Hofstadter’s subject was violence, more specifically the effect that the rapidly escalating war in Vietnam was having on the fabric of American society:
This misconceived venture in Vietnam has inflamed our students, undermined their belief in our political process, and convinced them that violence is the order of the day. I share their horror at this war. The deep alienation it has inflicted on young Americans is one of the staggering costs of the Vietnam undertaking. While this war has toppled a president, its full effects on our national life have yet to be reckoned.
The following day, June 4, 1968, a dozen United States Marine Corps CH-46 helicopters, two minutes apart, lifted slowly off the ground from their base at Quang Tri, Vietnam, and accelerated at an extreme angle to the west. Their destination was Camp Carroll. The mission was to pick up the one hundred eighty boys of Charlie Company and transport them, fifteen air-minutes, to the last piece of earth that many would ever see. On a map, it was called Hill 672, part of a rugged series of foothills southwest of Khe Sanh that protected the borders of both North Vietnam and Laos. For those of us who survived the coming three days of horror, it would become forever known as LZ Loon, or simply Loon.
On the following evening, June 5, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian national. Kennedy, a native of my hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, had enrolled at Harvard University only to drop out after several years to serve his country in the navy during World War II. To some, he was the best hope for a country that seemed to be in a spiraling decline. To many, his assassination was the last, unbelievably violent, straw. Among the stunned individuals that day were a growing number of the then 537,482 American boys serving in Vietnam who were fighting the very war that America was abandoning. A master politician like his brother, Kennedy knew that his best chance to win in November hinged on his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and so oppose he did, with a fervor that left Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy and other early political leaders of the antiwar movement far behind.
Robert F. Kennedy was forty-two years old. He died the following morning, on June 6, 1968.
Those of us in Charlie Company who survived LZ Loon would not hear the news for another week.
Many of us died that day as well.
1
JUNE 6, 1968.
It had already been a long day, and dawn had yet to break.
On his hands and knees, Bill Matthews scampered up over loose rocks and jumped into Bill