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Throughout the month of May, in remembrance of Memorial Day, Open Road Media will share guest blog posts from some of our combat veteran authors. Today's guest, Michael Stokey author of River of Perfumes, comes to us from our partner, Warriors Publishing Group.
letter from my father when I was at boot camp, 5/8/66
Dear Mike,
Well…it’s a LITTLE better. I mean, it only took me 30 minutes to decipher THIS one. If those Marine D.I.s are reading your mail, I’m pretty sure they’re breaking the law; but then, no sentence would be as hard as any one of yours on them.
Just wrote your mother and sister and gave ’em your address. Hope you remember Mother’s Day. Or will, rather, since you didn’t have her new address.
It’s raining hard now, so I’m sure your D.I. has called all activities off and you’re lying around on your bunk reading pocketbooks and munching candy bars, downing a coke and listening to the hi-fi.
It wasn’t like that in the Air Corps, you know. We had to report to the Officer’s Lounge, rain or shine.
Well, enough cheering up. I’ll write more later.
Don’t get up,
Dad
reflections from the jungle, 1968
It was a simpler world in the rice paddies and jungle. Eat if you could, sleep if you were able, survive if you were lucky. The chaos was back home.
If it was war in Vietnam it was wargasm in the States. As the war heated up, so too did the passion and riots in the streets. Half a world away came reports of demonstrations around the Washington Monument. Activists waved North Vietnamese flags, burning the Stars and Stripes.
There were love-ins in the streets, sit-ins on campus and Laugh In on TV. Everybody had a cause or agenda, and it was heady and reckless and intoxicating. It was a time of great social upheaval, the decade of the pill and sexual freedom, and the struggle for civil rights. America was in flames. Young women burned bras, young men burned draft cards. It was the young against the old, and the old were barely thirty.
The country reeled from her second Civil War—even if fought in a far off land. It not only divided a nation, but friends, lovers, even families. As the hawks grew more passive, the doves screeched their heads off. The radical factions wanted revolution. Swabbed in the armor of moral superiority, the militants railed against the war, while the Establishment paid lip-service to the warriors. But the vets who survived were welcomed home by neither.
CLICK HERE to download an excerpt of Michael Stokey's River of Perfumes.
