Loon - Jack McLean [55]
I was jostled by several of my buddies who pushed their way into the small hotel newsstand. We took a moment to recount the activities of the previous evening and to lay out our plans for the day. They were headed to the pool to nurse hangovers and suggested that I meet them there after breakfast.
I bought the paper and walked to the dining room. While being served a cup of coffee, I spread the paper out and looked again at the photograph. My Andover classmate Jim Kunen would be finishing his sophomore year at Columbia and, like many of my former classmates at colleges across the country, was certainly immersed in the antiwar activities that were beginning to explode across America’s college campuses.
While I was deep into the Shangri-La of R & R, Kunen and others on the Morningside Heights campus were engaged in the unlawful occupation of five university buildings—the result of a demonstration against the university’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses. It had morphed into a protest over a new gymnasium. Seven days later, police stormed the buildings and violently removed the students, Kunen included.
It had nothing to do with Vietnam.
It had everything to do with Vietnam.
Bloating battalions of baby boomers were bursting the seams of every college in the United States. Here would manifest the ultimate expression of the generation gap that was becoming systemic throughout the country. A million boys and girls were in search of a means of expression—a way to be heard. Increasingly, that way took the form of opposition to the parent-created war in Vietnam.
Sitting in a hotel coffee shop twelve thousand miles away, remembering my own forgettable experience at the Columbia University admissions office months before, I was silently hoping that Jim Kunen was burning the place down. Well, not really, but I did feel validated to see that others viewed the university administration with the same jaundiced eye that I had acquired during my interview.
Kunen did not burn the place down, at least not with fire. The following year he published a chronology of those April 1968 hours in a book called The Strawberry Statement. It subsequently was made into a movie. Both did quite well. He was dubbed “a radical with a sense of humor.” These were serious times. The mass market was thirsty for anyone with a sense of humor.
There was little humor, however, among most of the boys of Charlie Company when viewing the students involved in the uprisings that were beginning to take place.
They referred to them as “long-haired, privileged little shit-fuck draft-dodging motherfuckers.”
None of us could believe them or understand them.
On the morning of the fifth day of my R & R, I donned my Marine Corps uniform, bade farewell to my companion, and headed for the bus.
It was the pits.
I was headed back into the shit, and it was getting hot.
Two days later, I returned to the Washout to find myself embraced by a welcoming throng of squad mates.
“Where did you stay?”
“Who did you fuck?”
“What did you buy?”
“Did you get some music for the tape player?”
My bunker mates couldn’t get enough of every pearl that I had gleaned. As I started to tell them about the trauma of my first evening, I was immediately interrupted by Ed Finnegan.
“You asshole, McLean. Don’t you ever listen to me? Didn’t you hear me? I told you to get to the bar early. I told you that. Jesus.”
Each brief story received similar interruptions. They could not get enough and they couldn’t editorialize enough. It was, after all, their