I graduated from Saint Peter’s, a working class Catholic High School in Worcester, in 1966. The build up to that event was tumultuous. In 1962 my parents divorced in a particularly hostile fashion, leaving my mom, two brothers, sister and myself in a small apartment. I could have chosen a different path but chose, instead, rebellion against my mom, my absent father, society and began drinking on a pretty regular basis, getting in trouble at school and generally everywhere else. In 1964 the police arrested me for drunkenness and carrying a concealed weapon, labeling me a juvenile delinquent. There were lots of fights, petty thefts, school detentions, minor run-ins with the law. The yearbook committee did what they could with a class clown and didn’t play sports or participate in school activities; those years were spent hanging out, skipping school, chasing pussy, and drinking.
Vietnam was on the TV every night. Walter Cronkite commenting over grainy films of soldiers firing weapons, bodies lying along roadside ditches, jets dropping napalm. The war was escalating but it was background noise to life. There was a joke in senior year that all the boys, at least the ones I hung out with, were headed to Saigon U. Little did I know how true that was for me. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. As the class of ’66 graduated that June, 268 American soldiers died as did 4805 Viet Cong and 468 civilians.
That fall I was accepted to the University of Massachusetts more in part to my mom’s connections than my mediocre grades. I went but I really wasn’t into it. At the time, the only building was in Park Square—the old Boston Gas building. It was a shabby urban relic turned liberal arts university. Right next door was a gay bar called The Punch Bowl, it backed up to Bay Village; the Hilly Billy Ranch and the Combat Zone were right around the corner. It definitely wasn’t upscale.
My homeroom was the cafeteria (was it on the fourth floor?). It was a tiny place with awful food and institutional colored walls but it was a place to hang out and play cards (spades and hearts the whole day).
The only class I remember was the physics class I took only because I met a girl in Professor Frieda Salzmann’s class. I would later marry her and have three beautiful kids. I had gone to school knowing not a soul; Sheila McCarthy introduced me to packs of her friends from Watertown and Waltham. Unlike most kids, I had an apartment. It was over on Gloucester Street in the Back Bay. It was a two-room basement level hovel that opened out to an alley. Then the Back Bay was more of a student ghetto than a rich neighborhood. Having the apartment made me very popular and by November parties ran from Thursday to Sunday, sometimes 50 to 75 people crammed in my little place. I passed one or two classes the first semester, at least enough to allow me to stay, but I didn’t make it through the second. Partying had taken over my life. By March I got a job in construction with a friend’s father out in Waltham. I stopped going to class. I went back to take the finals but it was a joke. When the Western Civilization professor, shocked that I was there, told me he didn’t have enough copies of the exam, I just said oh well and walked out.
Leaving school meant losing my draft deferment, I knew that was going to catch up with me quickly. In June I got a notice to register and I did. I knew Vietnam was escalating; one of my girlfriends had a brother who had come back from Vietnam. He and a buddy of his stayed at my apartment for a week. The three of us drank like fish the whole time, partying like crazy, drinking rum with total abandon. I could hardly keep up with them. They talked very little about Vietnam except to say it was nasty. The only thing I remember is one of them telling me he had been assigned to the morgue just before coming home, putting the dead into body bags for shipment back to the United States. After hanging with them in a drunken stupor for five days, I was sure I didn’t want to go. In June of 1967 the war spit out 443 US dead alongside 9808 enemy combatants and 1607 civilian fatalities. I put Vietnam out of my mind and went on, thought about trying to get into the National Guard to avoid the draft but that required connections, which I didn’t have. Only rich boys had that option.
I liked construction… being outdoors, learning a skill and money good enough to drink and eat and consider paying the rent. The last of which I was not good about. I came home one day to find I was evicted so I moved into a friend’s car. That got old quick. The neighbors on his street didn’t take well to a 17-year-old living in a car parked at the curb in the middle of an old mill town street lined with triple-deckers and two family houses. I decided to go back to my hometown in Nantucket and live with my grandmother and uncle and spent the summer drinking and partying, had numerous girlfriends and generally only worked enough for beer money. Life was good until one afternoon I hit a car with my girlfriend’s car and then proceeded to sideswipe cars down the road. She told the cops and, my uncle being one of them the chief of police took my license and told me not to be caught on the streets after ten. That was an advantage of having an uncle as a cop. It kept me out of court but it didn’t end my wild nights and within a few days I went on a bender partying from Friday until Sunday morning. The police picked me up on Main Street Sunday morning when we were looking to raid a restaurant for liquor. They gave me an ultimatum: leave on the mid-day boat or face a laundry list of charges in court. I took the boat option. They took me in a cruiser to the house, watched me pack with my grandmother crying and berating them, brought me to the boat and watched it sail away.
The next day I was in a recruiter’s office. The recruiting offices for all the branches of the military were all on the second floor of the main Post Office in Worcester. I only ended up in the Army because the recruiter was standing outside his door, I had to walk by the Navy and the Marines but he beckoned and I was so hung over I really wasn’t thinking too clearly. The recruiter, a sergeant, promised me I would go to Germany. That, he said, was the only place the job he talked me into went. I didn’t really think it through I just did it. After all, why would a 26B20 MOS “aerial surveillance and target acquisition specialist “ be headed to Vietnam? A corporal in Basic Training cleared things up—the only place I was headed was Vietnam. No one went anywhere else. On Mother’s day 1968 I shipped out to Vietnam. In the first month I was there 556 US troops died, as did 8168 enemy troops and 882 civilians.
Vietnam turned out to be a shit hole. I survived it but was deeply scarred by a war that was waged by my government against the people of Vietnam. I quickly learned that I was on the wrong side. Half way through my tour I read a book someone had smuggled into a box coming from a church group. Probably those damn Unitarians. It was a paperback called the “History of the Vietnam War”. That book, whose author I cannot recall, was probably the first history book I really read in my whole life. It gave me an understanding of the imperialist nature of the war. That book made me determined not to die in a colonial war. I knew from the missions I flew on a daily basis that the entire countryside was hostile territory. Even most of the villages were on the side of Viet Cong. The village right outside our base camp was half controlled by the government and half by the Viet Cong.
By the tenth month of my time in country I refused to fly anymore fully expecting to be court marshaled. I quit flying not for any political reason, but because on a morning mission a hotshot pilot took us into the range of a known 50-caliber machine gun emplacement. I had done that before: on a prior mission a 50-caliber round passed through the fuselage just behind my head; it didn’t bother me. But now I knew I could not die for a war I saw was wrong. My time left in country was short, less than 60 days. I was through. I spent the last two months driving a fuel truck—turned out that you had to volunteer for flight and you could un-volunteer. The officers harassed me for a bit and some of the enlisted men gave me grief. I spent my last two months fueling planes and playing dominoes with two black men from Georgia. But ay least I wasn’t going to die for that shit.
June 21, 1970 was my ETS (estimated termination of service). Three long years in the army and the tour in Vietnam left me eager to get out. The GI bill promised me $800 per month cash for four years and the state of Massachusetts had a free book and tuition program and a cash bonus for vets. I even got three months off my time to start school early. I showed up again in the first floor lobby of UMass in late June 1970 eager to get on with my life. I didn’t know I had PTSD; there were no classifications for that then. I just wanted to bury my time in Vietnam but it turned out that was going to be hard to do. The walls of the lobby had posters from the spring “Strike”. Large black fists with the word strike were everywhere it seemed. I just kept my head down and applied myself to the classes I took. It was summer and the university was lightly populated. I got a job in shipping and receiving at Shreve, Crump and Low, a luxury jewelry store over at 330 Boylston Street and my wife took a job at New England Life on Arlington Street. We had an apartment out on the Newton-Watertown line and we took the express bus in everyday. It was a hot summer and the work and school kept me busy. I was mostly interested in the biology and science classes and getting core requirements out of the way. I had vague ambitions of being a biologist or maybe a doctor.
It didn’t take long for me to become active against the war. Part of it was being in the atmosphere of UMass, post–Kent State shootings. I knew about the shooting of 4 students on May 4, 1970 because we had been training for riot duty in Arizona. They were telling us that they expected Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from the University of Arizona to try to storm the gates of Fort Huachuca. This was hardly a very serious threat but we trained out in the desert as if it was, but some of us were more interested in knowing who these SDS people were than the training which we thought was a joke. Four of us rode up to Phoenix to hear Santana in concert and we tried to find SDS but their office was closed. We got seriously high on hash and forgot about it after that.
The student world had exploded in May and strikes broke out on campuses everywhere. UMass, I learned, had been a hub of activity. It was into that atmosphere that I reappeared into civilian society. It was intimidating at first, me being one of the “ killers”, one of the bad guys. Little did I know how soon I would be a voice for resistance to the war. I still have one of the strike posters. I just wanted to get on with my life, forget Vietnam. I didn’t tell people I was a vet; I didn’t talk to anyone about the war. I kept my mouth shut and closed it all out of my mind with drugs and alcohol, work and school. I think my grades were excellent at the time.
And then I saw a little Boston Globe article about a group meeting in Cambridge called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, I found their meeting place and instantly felt at home with other vets who had come to hate the war and what it had done to them, to their buddies and to the people of Vietnam.
I joined in and helped to bring a chapter to the UMass campus and from that point on there was no more looking for a career. There was just learning about what had happened to me and resisting the on going war. I came to hang out and work along side the finest group of veterans and other students and professors who cared about crazy concepts like equality, freedom and democracy. People who understood concepts like imperialism, colonialism, racism and capitalism. They were times almost as exciting as being shot at .
I soon dropped the science courses except Science for the People with Professor Salzman and I focused on the history and sociology courses. I took courses with Professor David Hunt who taught me not to trust second hand interpretation but to look at the actual original documents and decide for myself; classes with Professor Paul Faler who gave a bottom up interpretation of history and made me look at American working class history; and Esther Kingston Mann who taught me to pay attention to geography and the culture of a society, in particular it’s literature, as a way to see into the past. I thank all of the professor’s who put up with me. They imparted a deep respect for the importance of history and for the ability to think independently. There are too many to mention and too many whose names I now no longer remember. To all of you I extend a heart felt thanks.
I became very active in the politics of the campus always passing leaflets out, running speaker programs with the likes of Dave Dellinger from the Chicago Seven and Howard Zinn, the BU professor of history and avid social critic. We showed films on Zimbabwe and South Africa and Argentina. I remember two students from Argentina who asked me to run a film speaker session for them because they were afraid agents of their government might find out if they did it and disappear them or members of their families back home. I thank them for the lesson in bravery.
And I met characters like John and Doug Clifford, both active vets who opposed the war and educated me about the American class system of education and the reasons behind the move to Columbia point. They were strong advocates for equality. To them I say thanks for lots of adventures on the Park Street campus.
I met Ed Winborne and Debbie Levenson who taught me some things about US imperialism and the power of sticking to one’s beliefs. I thank you for being the radicals who called us all out in the face of our own liberalism .
I met hundreds of other who were against the government’s policies and took time from their lives to resist the endless wars and attacks on working people.
I worked my way through UMass living on the GI bill and working construction. Thanks to Joe Power who got me a job on a framing crew one summer. He sent me on my way to a career I never would have guessed at. And got me a union card through a strike on a non-union construction project in Cambridge.
Later I joined more radical groups hanging out with Progressive Labor Party members, running with members of the October League and the Revolutionary Communist Party finally settling into a small radical group out of East Boston, by that time I was working in a rubber factory over in Cambridge. Life got tough when I was arrested for assault on a picket line. ThenBy that time I had two kids and the radical movements that had come out of the 60’s started self destructing with the help of government infiltrators but mostly just out of the frustration that nothing was changing. The movement ate itself alive. It ate me up and drugs and alcohol and PTSD all took it’s their toll.
After the blizzard of 78 I had had it. There was no work; I didn’t see any sense in finishing my degree. I abandoned courses that were almost complete, lacking some small piece of work to get a grade. I was disillusioned with the revolutionary movement. I had all but been barred from the political group I was in for being a “petty-bourgeois adventurer”. All the sacrifices the “revolution” had demanded seemed to be for naught. I had no hope nor did I believe I could work in any professional career so I thought a degree couldn’t matter to me. I took off to Arizona with no money. I barely had enough to buy gas on the way, slept in the car with my tools in the back. I had left the wife and kids on welfare while I went and found a job. I had a union card in the Carpenters Local out of Brighton and the union in Phoenix was hiring out of their hall. I let my degree go. I had enough credits if I finished two or three classes but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What was the point?
I worked in Arizona for a year, got back on my feet financially, and decided after hurting my back that a degree might be a good idea, so I sent letters asking professors what I needed to do to get a grade. We worked out deals and they gave me final grades. Sometime in 1980 I received a degree in the mail. No ceremony just a piece of paper, an end to a long road. I took from 1966 to 1980 (fourteen years) for a BA magna cum laude. I thought my carpenter days were over so I applied for a slot in the Masters Program in Archives at the Columbia Point Campus. What other practical job could a history major possibly get? I was accepted and reappeared as a student in 1980. I went through that program in a year and wrote the archival guide for the Merrimac Valley Textile Museum. I got a job with the Museum before the masters program was over and worked for them until the project was completed. By then I knew that I made more money as a carpenter than the museum director did. I had a third kid with my wife and my back was better so I was off without completing the required thesis, back in construction and I never looked back.
These days I run a small construction company out on Cape Cod in a little town called Truro. I have lived here almost thirty years; I am a well-known local with a long history of radical action. Arrested multiple times for antiwar activity, and recently for anti nuclear actions in Plymouth. I am more convinced than ever that the empire is imploding and that the decline in this country is due to the militarization of all aspects of [society.
I resist in the ways I can but mostly I think it will be up to my children and my grandchildren to wrestle the beast to the ground. I keep on “truckin” with a lighter heart knowing that I only have to do what is in front of me. I am a long time member of Veterans For Peace and do things and continue to advocate, with them and others, for an end the militarization of our society.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the University staff. From you I received a first class education. You taught me to be curious and to think for myself. You gave me the ability to think critically. I was just a punk kid when I came there and I left an educated young man.
You taught me to be a radical; I am still a radical. I oppose the wars and corporate policies with an active political life and hope to do so for the rest of my life. I recently went to jail for trespassing on the Pilgrim Nuclear Power plant and intend to do so again. I have been arrested in actions against the World Bank and the Iraq war. My politics are open in my community and I have won respect from people who have hated my positions especially after the attacks in New York on 9-11. I believe that people are waking up from the fog of lies and propaganda they are bombarded with daily.
My education did not get me success in the career world but it gave me success in life. I am a thorn, maybe a small one but a thorn nonetheless, in the side of the American Empire.
UMass-Boston was set up as an experiment. It was an attempt to prove the American myth that an equal education gives anyone an equal opportunity. That experiment backfired on the ruling class. UMass-Boston became a radical center resisting the war and economic policies that attacked working people. The experiment failed. It only proved that an educated working class was a dangerous working class.
I can’t end this on a negative note as I am really an optimistic person. I knew so many people at UMass: political activists, students in my classes, just plain old friends, so many good people . Many who I came to be very close to and who I think of fondly from time to time. To each and everyone of you I say thank you for making my life at UMass exciting and meaningful.