When you’re 20, playing college football, chasing girls and barely keeping enough passing grades to stay out of the draft, what could be better? That was this writer in the fall of ’70, at the height of the Vietnam debacle ( I never would call it a war). Just completed the greatest summer of my life ( even now 54 years later) and living at home with not a damn care in the world, other than how to get more weed for the weekends. My cousin Mick and I spent June and July in beautiful ( to us city boys) Virginia Beach, with our own furnished apartment, days at the beach and evenings working part time. The stone promenade and the white sands blending into the clean salt of the ocean was as close to paradise this Brooklyn boy could ever experience. And the girls! Unreal! We met girls from the South and Midwest who just wanted fun in the sun and male companionship. They sure got it from us.

In May of ’70 I had my first taste of protest. Up until then I was as naive as a guy could be. The Vietnam thing was just whatever the mainstream media would offer us at the 6 O’clock News. Eating dinner with my folks and viewing the news footage of rice paddy battles, along with hype and spin by LBJ and his surrogates, was still not in my own purview. After all, I had my 2-S student deferment that kept me safe at home in Brooklyn. It wasn’t until the war, as they called it, skirted close to me that I started to grow up. First it was when my neighbor Fran from across the street, when she married this ex GI who just returned from what he explained to me was ‘ The Shit’. His stories of being an infantryman there for his one year tour ( yeah, some tour) and how he spent every moment out on patrol being scared shitless. Then, our church’s crossing guard Mrs. L had her only child, a Marine, come home in a wooden box. All I could remember about her afterwards was that Mona Lisa look on her face. About the same time I heard that my friend David’s apartment building super’s son, Vito, a US Ranger, got killed on some hill in ‘The Shit’. His family were Poles who came to our country a few years earlier. I could never forget seeing him, home on leave less than a year before, standing next to me at Mass, dressed in his Ranger browns replete with beret tied outside his pants leg. Vito had a younger brother, 17, who I knew from the schoolyard where we played ball. Within a few years of Vito’s death the kid got into horse and OD’d.

I could have done more after this new political education… and chose not to. It was back to playing football, chasing girls, driving the yellow cab and smoking weed. I didn’t take part in the many marches and demonstrations against the phony war when I should have. Mea Culpa. I guess I made up for it when the Bush/Cheney Cabal did their illegal and immoral attack and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It took me over 30 years to finally grow up! And grown up I am now.

PA Farruggio
September, 2024