Letter From Milo: Jimi Hendrix, War Hero

I guess I'm just an old rocker. My musical tastes were formed in the late 60s and early 70s. I still listen to the old warhorses - Dylan, the Stones, Janis Joplin, the Dead, Cream, Traffic, the Doors, Van Morrison. If I'm driving down the street and hear one of my old favorites on the radio I turn up the volume until the car vibrates.

That said, there is one musician I esteem above all others, a musician whose music still sends a chill up my spine, someone who took the electric guitar to places it's never been before and created sounds that have been copied but never equaled.

I'm talking about Jimi Hendrix, genius, guitar god and war hero.

I first became aware of Hendrix in 1967, the year I graduated high school. His first hit, "Purple Haze," was all over the radio. The sound was like nothing I had ever heard before - big, bold, discordant, but undeniably different. It was alien to my unsophisticated ears. I just didn't get it. But, you have to understand, I had not started smoking pot yet.

A year later I was in Vietnam and I got it. Boy did I get it. The Vietnamese conflict has been called the Rock 'n Roll War. Music was everywhere. It seemed that every soldier had his own cassette player and collection of cassette tapes. I remember my first day in-country. I had just gotten off an airplane along with 200 other new fish and was standing on the tarmac at the Da Nang air base, listening to a bored 2nd Lieutenant welcoming us to Vietnam. While the 2nd Lt. was droning on about the noble mission we were about to undertake, I heard music in the background, coming from a collection of raggedy tents just off the runway. It was the Doors.

This is the end/

This is the end/

my friend

Welcome to Vietnam.

Just like in the good old USA, there were racial problems among the American soldiers in Vietnam. If you recall, the late 60s were when King, Kennedy and Malcolm were assassinated. There were riots in the streets of our major cities. Students were forming revolutionary cells and plotting to overthrow the government. Lines were drawn between the races, the generations and the body politic. It was a time of supreme tension and nobody could say with certainty what the future held.

What was happening in the States was mirrored in Vietnam. It was like a bizarre reflection of what was occurring on the streets back home. Lines were also drawn, political and racial. Black guys hung with black guys, white guys hung with white guys and Latinos kept to themselves. There were actually mini race riots in some of the division base camps like Chu Lai and Da Nang. We didn't have these problems in the field because, as infantrymen, we had more pressing concerns, like trying to keep the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Regulars from killing us while at the same time trying to kill them.

It was a different story back in the relative safety of the division camps. The REMFS (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers) had more time on their hands. And they spent some of that time fomenting racial discord. I'm not saying that all the soldiers were like that, but there were enough of them, both black and white, to create serious and often lethal problems. After all, when you mix young men, ethnic strife and automatic rifles together, there are bound to be a few..., ah, misunderstandings.

Music played a role in the racial divide. The music you listened to defined who you were. Black guys listened to soul and funk from Motown and Memphis. White guys listened to rock and country. And some poor souls just paid attention to their own demons. There was one musician, however, who crossed all boundaries, someone who both blacks and whites idolized.

That was Jimi Hendrix.

Whenever you saw groups of blacks and white partying together, sitting around bonfires, drinking warm beer and smoking pot, the chances are that the music blaring from cassette machines was played by Jimi Hendrix. There were several reasons for this adoration of Jimi. The first, obviously, was that he was a supernaturally gifted musician. He simply had no equal. His audacious combination of rock riffs, deep understanding of the blues and soulful stylings (he once played guitar in the Isley Brothers band) spoke to everyone.

Another reason he was loved by the troops was that Jimi had once been a soldier himself. Before becoming Jimi Hendrix, he had been James Marshall Hendrix, a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. That simple connection made it seem that Jimi was one of us. We felt that he understood us and our terrible plights in ways that British fops like Jagger, McCartney and Clapton never could.

On Highway 1, near the South China Sea, there was a hill near the village of Sai Hyun called Hendrix Hill. This particular hill was strewn with huge rocks and boulders. On one of the largest boulders someone had painted, in letters that seemed 10 feet high, the word Hendrix. The boulder was easily seen from the highway and every time I passed it I couldn't help but smile. It was our Hollywood sign.

When Jimi came out with his "Electric Ladyland" album, there was a song on it that became seared into the mind of practically every soldier who heard it. The song was called "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)."  There's a line in that song that's guaranteed to bring a tear to every Vietnam veteran's eye. The line is:

Well, it's too bad/

that our friends/

can't be with us today

The line evokes memory, pain and loss. It brings back memories of old friends and comrades in arms, young men who died far too young, in a country 10,000 miles from home, often in circumstances too gruesome to relate.

To this day, when I hear that line, I have to stop whatever I'm doing and spend a few moments recalling those who made the supeme sacrifice. Faces and names run through my mind - Captain David Walsh, Sweet Jimmy Ingram, Stony Deel and many others whose names are etched on a granite wall in Washington D.C.

I'm going to wrap it up now. I'm going to put on "Electric Ladyland" and try to find some comfort on this rainy day. Jimi had a way of comforting a lot of souls. That's what heroes do.

Letter From Milo: The Fortunes of War

As I mentioned in a few earlier posts, I am a veteran of the war in Vietnam. It was an ugly meat grinder of a war, fought for the wrong reasons, against the wrong people, and, predictably, it all went terribly wrong. I'm not smart enough to explain the the political, ethical or fiduciary reasons for the war, I'd just like to relate a few odd incidents that you might find interesting.

Incident #1

We had a 2nd Lieutenant, let's call him Lt. Smith, who served as my platoon leader for several months. He seemed to be a nice enough guy, considerate of his men, easy to talk to and not too eager to cover himself in glory. He was an educated man, with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and when we had some downtime he would usually spend it reading paperback books. He seemed like a completely normal guy.

If Lt. Smith had a quirk it was that he was madly in love with his college girlfriend. Whenever I talked to him the discussion would invariably turn to the love of his life. He carried a photo album of her and would whip it out at the slightest sign of interest. The photos depicted an attractive young woman in a variety of settings, on campus, at the beach, on the ski slopes.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" Lt. Smith would always ask me, after showing me her latest pictures.

"Yeah, she's a real looker."

"We're going to get married when I get back to the world."

"That's great, sir."

"We were going to get married before I came in-country, but I thought it best we wait, just in case."

"That's real sound thinking, sir."

One day Lt. Smith got a letter from his beloved, which contained a couple of more photos and mentioned that she and a few girlfriends were going to spend the weekend in upstate New York attending an outdoor music festival. As it turned out, the festival was Woodstock.

Just to remind those of you whose memories are shot, whose brain cells are fried, or who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's, Woodstock was the blow-out party of the 20th Century. It was a life-changing event for many people, changing their attitudes, redefining their reasons for existence and altering the trajectory of their lives. Apparently, Lt. Smith's girlfriend was one of the people who went to Woodstock and never looked back. Lt. Smith, who used to get a letter from his girlfriend every other day, never heard from her again, at least while he was in Vietnam. I doubt I've ever seen a sadder or more forlorn man.

Incident #2

Packages from home were always a welcome treat. We called them "Care Packages" and they usually came from parents, grandparents, wives or girlfriends. The packages contained everything from homemade cookies to bottles of whiskey, porn magazines to editions of hometown newspapers. My father once sent me a wicked-looking Buck knife with a fine leather sheath. I lost it a couple of months after it arrived.

There was a guy - let's call him Freaky Joe - who received a package from his girlfriend that contained a DayGlo paint set. Readers of a certain age will remember that DayGlo paints were all the rage for a time, especially with the psychedelic set. The paints glowed in the dark and were used for decorating t-shirts, making posters and face painting. I knew a guy in college who liked to get stoned, use Day-Glo paint to paint all of his teeth different colors and then go out at night and smile at people.

Anyway, Freaky Joe spent one afternoon smoking reefer and painting a Claymore mine with his newly-arrived paint set. A Claymore mine is a plastic shell filled with C-4 explosives and packed with hundreds of BBs or ball bearings. It was attached to a 50-yard-long cord that had a manually activated detonating device at its terminus. When the device was set off, the Claymore exploded with devastating power, shredding everything in its range.

Freaky Joe was sitting with a goofy smile on his face, a Claymore in his lap, painting stars, half moons, polka dots and stick figures all over the mine's outer shell. When asked what he was doing, Freaky Joe replied, "Just fucking around."

That night Freaky Joe's squad went out on night ambush. This was an exercise where a squad of eight men went out in the evening and set up an ambush along a well-traveled trail. Anybody who came walking by was in trouble. To be fair, the other side did the same thing.

Freaky Joe had his own idea of how to run a night ambush. He hung the painted Claymore mine in a tree, about head high. Then he went off about 40 yards, found a good place to hide, and , using his night vision goggles, waited for some poor soul to come by.

A while later, a lone Vietnamese came strolling along. He might have been an NVA regular, a Viet Cong or just a luckless farmer. The man saw something odd hanging in a tree, something unexplainable. It was a group of stars, half moons, stripes and stick figures, all twinkling and glowing in the dark. His curiosity obviously piqued, the man walked up to the glowing vision and pressed his face close to see what it was. At that point Freaky Joe activated the Claymore and blew the man's head off.

"Curiosity killed the gook," Freaky Joe said. The boys got a lot of laughs out of that one.

Incident #3

Every couple of months my company would be taken out of the field and taken back to Division Headquarters in Chu Lai for three days of rest and relaxation that was known as "standdown." There was plenty of relaxation but very little rest. It was basically a three-day beer bust, with lots of reefer and opium to grease the skids.

One of the best things about standdown was that Division HQ provided live entertainment, in the form of rock, country or R&B bands. The bands were generally from Australia, South Korea or the Philippines. I don't remember if they were any good, but they were always fronted by attractive female singers.

One of the rumors going around was that these singers also doubled as whores. We had just finished watching a performance by an Australian group that featured three very good looking singers. They played mostly Motown stuff and did a credible imitation of the Supremes. When the show was over, I huddled with a guy named Duffy and a 2nd Lieutenant, whom I'll call Bruce Diksas to spare him any undue embarrassment. We decided to take a shot at the the Aussie Supremes.

Lt. Diksas, being an officer and a gentleman, was able to commandeer the company jeep. Then he, Duffy and I went in search of the women.

"Oh, man, round-eyed women."

"Yeah, and two of them are blondes."

"Shit, man, I haven't seen a blonde in eight months."

"Did you bring the weed?"

"Brought a bottle, too."

"Oh, man, this is gonna be great."

"Fucking blondes, can you believe it?"

We finally located the entertainers' compound. It was a heavily guarded area of Airstream trailers enclosed by barbed wire. The only reason we were able to get inside was that Lt. Diksas pulled rank, telling the MP at the gate that we in search of an AWOL and had information that he might be in the area.

When we located the Aussie Supremes' manager, a greasy looking guy who resembled a debauched Oliver Reed, we made our offer.

"We'll give you a hundred and fifty dollars each for the three girls for the night."

The manager lit a cigarette - I remember it was a Salem - and considered our offer. He pursed his lips, rocked his head from side to side, squinted his eyes, and then finally broke our hearts.

"I'm sorry, lads. That's a nice offer, but the girls are playing the Field Grade Officers Club this evening and I'm sure we'll get a better deal."

I guess the old adage is true - rank does have its privileges. With apologies to General Sherman, war is, indeed, hell.

Letter From Milo: Kingdom of Damaged Men

I was sitting in the admitting office of the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, waiting to set up an appointment for a physical. I had made the mistake of coming down on a Monday, which is the busiest day at the hospital. Thursdays and Fridays are best. There are generally no lines at the end of the week and you can be in and out in 20 minutes.

The reason I was at the VA was that I had given up my health insurance a while earlier. My wife and I are both self-employed and our incomes have taken a serious hit over the past year and a half. Along with the rest of America, we are feeling the effects of The Great Meltdown. We had to cut expenses somewhere and decided this was a good option. As a combat veteran, who was exposed to Agent Orange, I'm entitled to VA health care. After all, I risked my life, limbs and sanity in Vietnam (where, I believe, the USA won the Silver Medal,) why not take advantage of any perks the government might offer?

A veterans' hospital is a strange place. Like the late, great James Brown sang, This is a man's world. The only women in sight were nurses, doctors, and clerical workers. The patients are almost completely male, which makes sense when you consider that the armed forces, especially the combat forces, are predominantly male, too.

If a VA hospital is a man's world, it is a damaged man's world.

It is where soldiers who were injured in the service of their country come for treatment. One of the reasons they come to the VA is that most health insurance plans have a devilish stricture known as "a pre-existing condition." I'm sure I don't have to explain this asinine clause to any of my readers, but a pre-existing condition is enough to exclude most wounded veterans from traditional health care insurance. Many of them have no choice but to turn to the VA.

As I mentioned, the hospital was crowded that Monday. I couldn't help but notice that a surprising number of people waiting for treatment were maimed. I'm talking about amputees, double amputees, men with limps, men with walkers and canes, blind men, disfigured men, and a few who appeared to be insane: men who talked to themselves, made wild gestures, or drooled.

As I was sitting in the waiting area, a man in a wheelchair rolled up next to me. He was an elderly black man with a blanket covering his legs.

"How you doing, brother?" he asked me.

It was a question that veterans understand on many levels. It wasn't simply a conversational ploy. It was an existential question about the state of your universe - your mental, physical, and social well being. The old man was asking if I was eating well, getting enough sleep, making ends meet, having nightmares, or suffering from any of the horrors associated with war.

"I'm doing fine," I answered.

"Where was you at?"

"Vietnam."

"I was in Korea."

"That must have been tough."

"It was, brother. I never been so cold in my life. Lost all the toes on my right foot. Had a hole in my boot."

"Damn."

"I understand 'Nam was hot."

"Yeah, real hot. Rained a lot, too."

"I'd take hot over cold anytime."

"I would, too."

"You can hide from hot but you can't hide from cold."

"You've got a good point there."

"I live with my daughter. She always keep the thermostat too low. I tell her, 'Turn up the heat,' but she say it's gonna raise our electric bill. I tell her, 'Fuck the damn electric bill, it's too cold in here.' Man, I hate the cold."

A few moments later they called the old man's name and he rolled away to meet his appointment.

As I looked around the spacious waiting room, I noticed that it was a truly diverse place, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, young men, old men, middle-aged men, all in the same boat. I saw a white man pushing a black man in a wheelchair. I saw black men drinking coffee and chatting amiably with white men. I saw young men, probably Iraq veterans, companiably exchanging war stories with men three times their age. I heard raucous laughter, saw handshakes and high fives. I saw men comparing old wounds and scars. I saw a mixed race group rush over to help an elderly man who had fallen.

I saw joy, humor, and dignity among men, who by all rights, should have been in states of regret, sorrow and despair. I reflected on the fact that if it's true that the military is the least segregated institution in America, then a VA hospital proves that shared experience and shared adversity can often trump hatred and intolerance. That was the good thing about a veteran. It made you part of something that seemed pure, somehow divorced from much of the ugliness that pervades out society.

Despite the bitter cold of that March morning, I had a warm feeling when I left the VA hospital. I felt that I had somehow reconnected to the great and generous soul of humankind. But it was a long walk to my car and the cold started getting to me. I buttoned up my coat and put on my hat. Damn, I hate the cold.

Big Mike: Franny's Life

Written Saturday, February 21, 2009

Good old Franny. My sis. Died a little more than a year ago. A day like today makes me think of her.

It's windy, snowy, and cold. The lawns are turning white. Louisville drivers are slipping and sliding all over the road as well as any environs within 30 yards of the pavement. Franny loved winter. This weather would have made her smile. She'd wrap herself in a comforter, slip an old movie into the DVD player, and act as though she were appearing in a Swiss Miss cocoa commercial.

I, on the other hand, despise winter worse than all the other ills that have plagued humankind since the dawn of recorded history. I'd tell Franny that I dream of moving to California so I won't have to put up with snow and ice and the hour and half of daylight of a typical January day. I'd tell her I crave spring and summer.

"Oh no," Franny would say. "You can't really enjoy spring unless you've experienced winter." Which, to me, is like saying I can't wait to serve a 10-year prison sentence because I'll be elated the day I'm released.

Franny took her pleasures wherever and whenever she could. She came from that generation of women who were, well, screwed by society and the times. She was born in 1938 and attended St. Giles elementary school and Notre Dame high school for girls. She was the kind of schoolgirl the nuns loved to hate. Sassy, rebellious, free with her opinions, she listened as more than a few nuns predicted a dire future for her. The women of the habit were certain she was on a one-way ride to cigarette-smoking, hot-rod-riding, liquor-guzzling, girl-gang membership, and, for all I know, membership in the communist party.

Funny thing was, they weren't so far off the mark. She was among the first of her peers to light up, go drag racing down North Avenue near Skip's Fiesta Drive-In, and drink alcohol. She didn't join a girl gang only because she couldn't find any. As for the communist party, she didn't care one way or the other.

Despite her teenaged moral turpitude, Franny got married when she was 20 to a nice boy named Bob. All Bob wanted was a comfortable home and the company of scads of children. By the time Franny was 24, she and Bob had four of them. They added another four years later.

With enough progeny to field a basketball team, Franny entered the 1970s harried, exhausted, and feeling a profound sense of emptiness. She was smart and ambitious enough to have gone to college and made a career for herself. But that option was as anathema to her neighborhood and the nuns who schooled her as if she'd become the Premier of the Soviet Union. Maybe worse.

Franny yearned to be well-read. She began to admire Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, women who spoke up and did things. She found herself disgusted by the Vietnam War and racism. Only she was too busy wiping snotty noses to do anything about them.

When bright, accomplished women who were five and ten years younger appeared on TV, women who were able to take advantage of all the new freedoms of the era, Franny would sigh audibly. She wanted so much more than what she had.

Eventually, that longing morphed into a desire for change of any kind, no matter the repercussions. And believe me, there were repercussions when she took a part-time job as a bartender at The Foxy Lady on Madison Street to help pay the mortgage on a new home. The bar was in Chicago's all-black West Side. One night, a man named Julian walked into the joint as Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" played on the jukebox. Franny fell for him instantly.

Oh yeah, repercussions. Her affair with Julian cost her a husband, much of her childhood family, most of her friends, her neighborhood, and quite nearly her life. Soon after Julian had moved in with Franny on Marmora Avenue just off Grand Avenue, her home was shot up with high-powered rifles. It's 50/50 whether the shooters were local racists turned rabid by the presence of a black man on the block or the kin of the wife Julian had left behind in Cabrini-Green.

Franny and Julian got married across the street from City Hall in 1978 by a preacher wearing a white suit, white shoes, and a wide brimmed white hat with an enormous red feather in it. His "chapel," a cramped, dusty office in a building slated to be demolished, was wall-papered with aluminum foil and had immense pictures of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the front wall. A hidden tape deck played Marvin Gaye in the background. I was the best man.

Julian was gone by 1981. In the weirdest of ironies, he excelled in every vice that Franny's appalled, petrified family and friends had told her black men were known for. Franny never let on that he was a drunk, a philanderer, couldn't hold a job, and that he punched her like Sugar Ray Leonard when she displeased him. She never wanted them to think that they'd been right. She even hid it all from me.

She somehow rid herself of Julian even after he'd held her hostage at knifepoint one harrowing night. After that, Franny swore she was finished with men. She devoted the rest of her life to her kids and grandkids. She baked pies, cakes, and cookies enough to feed armies. She worked for days to prepare seafood gumbo, fried calamari, shrimp scampi, caponata, homemade bread and more on Christmas Eve and lasagna, ham, and lamb on Easter. She spent every dime she had on presents. Anybody who wanted could stay overnight. She was atoning.

When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer six years ago, she began to wonder if there's a heaven. If there is, I hope it's windy, snowy, and cold for her.