Loon - Jack McLean [85]
I never felt a thing.
Home in New England, the Newport Folk Festival was in full swing. The launching pad for Joan Baez and Bob Dylan years before was now featuring the young son of American folk icon Woody Guthrie. Arlo Guthrie seemed a whiny cross between his father and Bob Dylan, although he could play the guitar and he had a gift for storytelling—long storytelling. On July 24, 1968, he debuted his twenty-minute ballad “Alice’s Restaurant” to rave reviews.
“Alice’s Restaurant” is a song about dodging the draft and the ridiculously humorous lengths to which someone might go to do so. To many boys of that generation, however, no length was too ridiculous. The draft was a deadly serious sword of Damocles that hung over the head of every healthy boy in America.
I, however, was on my way home.
Shortly I would become the only person I knew, or that anyone that I knew knew, who was older than eighteen, male, and of sound body and mind for which the draft was not a major obstacle that had to be managed.
The radiant early-morning California sun shone brightly over Travis Air Force Base as our loaded troop plane touched down in the continental United States. The groggy group quietly applauded and, with the opening of the doors, inhaled the sweet fresh air, and bustled down the ramp with a mixture of cheers, back-slapping, and tears. Several kissed the tarmac.
Hardly a one had reached his twenty-first birthday.
The evidence of our year was now on our chests—rows of battle ribbons indicating wounds, heroism, and, above all, dedicated service. It seemed so pure at that moment. So simple. We had served. We had defended liberty on freedom’s frontier. We would now receive the kudos of a grateful nation and purposefully get on with our lives.
But there were no crowds.
There were no parades.
Perhaps, we thought, all of that would come later.
So all waited.
Several million of us.
It never came.
Our group quickly scattered. Some stayed to make connecting flights to new duty stations or home. Others boarded troop buses for the Oakland or San Francisco airports. There were hasty good-byes among new friends from the flight, along with promises to stay in touch, but the real parting had occurred days before, in the field, when the extraordinary Charlie Company bonds that had been forged over the past year had been broken—most forever.
I was to be processed for discharge over the next several days at the Treasure Island naval base in San Francisco Bay. I called and woke my sister Ruthie who was living in San Francisco with her husband and newborn daughter, Gretchen. My brother, Don, was there as well, having come out to greet me and, no doubt, send reports back to Brookline on the state of my mental and physical health. Ruthie said they would come pick me up, but it would take several hours to get there.
Now what?
Alone, weighted down by my seabag, I slowly walked outside of the now-deserted terminal building and found the section of curb that was closest to San Francisco.
I sat.
The sun grew warmer on my back as the first hour elapsed in silence. There was not a soul in sight. My senses were overcome, working in an overloaded state to reprogram my brain to its new reality. Most apparent at first was the silence—the deafening silence. For nearly a year, there existed an explosive norm of noise coming from twenty-four-hour-a-day bombing, outgoing and incoming artillery, choppers—constant choppers—and the everyday sounds made by two hundred fifty boys living in very close quarters.
Now there was silence.
I tried to return my mind to the present, but the past became more awful with each fleeting recollection—images of the hundreds of grotesque enemy bodies still