By Ed Staskus

   The year my senior class graduated from St Joseph’s High School was the high point of the Vietnam War. It was the low point of the American War, which was what the North Vietnamese called it. It was 1968, the year nearly 600,000 American troops were battling the enemy up and down the country and the year 80,000 of them struck back during the Tet Offensive. They hoped to ignite a popular uprising. It didn’t happen. Their hopes were dashed. During the month-long battle for the city of Hue, the city was destroyed. The residents rose up and fled.

   In 1964 the undeclared war got up to full speed with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Just ten-some years after the end of the Korean War, the United States military began pouring back into Asia. By the time the war ended in 1975, nearly 60,000 American servicemen lost their lives, along with 250,000 South Vietnamese troops, as well as a million Viet Cong and North Vietnamese combatants and more than two million civilians.   There was no use trying to count the maimed, shredded, and burned by napalm. Eight million tons of bombs, two-and-a-half times as much as were dropped on Europe from 1940 to 1945, were dropped by the United States Air Force down onto Vietnam. Who knows who was down there?

   I didn’t know the Gulf of Tonkin from the man in the moon the summer before my freshman year. I barely knew anything about Vietnam. I had a vague idea about where it might be, which was somewhere near China. I had never heard of the domino theory or the idea of dying for it. Four years later I knew more, although sometimes it did me more harm than good. I learned enough to stay away from the principal’s office and the kind of trouble officialdom could bring to bear, which was at least something.

   Many of my friends at St. Joseph’s High School, on the east side of Cleveland, were Lithuanian Americans. The neighborhood was crawling with us. We were all Roman Catholic and the school was Roman Catholic, within walking distance for most of us. We were taught math, history, science, civics, religion, and English. There were vocational classes and there was an honors program. The football team was big and bad, playing for titles. We were taught to be good Catholics and good citizens for God and country.

   None of us worried about the Vietnam War as freshmen and sophomores. We had other things to worry about, like getting to the next class on time, homework, pep rallies, school assemblies, dances in the gym, our status and looks, part-time jobs, outside activities, and summer vacation. The greasers had cars and we could only look on in envy. The jocks had good looks and never mind getting a good look at their girlfriends. The honor students had brains and were looking towards the future.

   It changed fast our junior and senior years. President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address in 1967 was bleak. It was bad no matter if you were the parent of a draft-age young man or if you were the young man. “I recommend to the Congress a surcharge of 6 percent on both corporate and individual income taxes, to last for 2 years or for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam continue,” LBJ said. “I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony.”

   Adults didn’t like the cost part. The White House proposed a record-breaking $135 billion-dollar federal government budget. My father, an accountant, was shocked. I didn’t know how to count that high and kept quiet. I didn’t like the agony part and said so.

   Our last two years in high school nobody wanted to not be going to college. A student deferment wasn’t a sure thing, but it was better than nothing. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson ordered the country’s young men to get up, stand up, and fight. It didn’t matter that twenty-five years earlier LBJ had largely avoided World War Two except for a couple of months of make believe. What mattered was what he said now.

   Lewis Hershey, the head of the Selective Service, ordered draft boards to stop granting deferments so that more men would have to join up. College students found themselves being reclassified. When the Selective Service Qualifying Test came into play for anyone who wanted to keep their deferments, students took to the streets. The next year “Hershey’s Directives” ordered draft boards to punish anyone who protested against the Vietnam War. After that the shit hit the fan and kept hitting the fan until the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in 1973.

   The year after we graduated was the year the Selective Service started drawing lottery numbers determining who would or would not be drafted. The drawing was televised live. Everybody aged 19 to 26 stayed glued to the tube. If you were born on September 14^th then your number was number one and you were going to be drafted the next day, or sooner. If you were born on March 14^th, like me, your number was 354 and you weren’t going to be drafted and weren’t going anywhere more dangerous than your own backyard. No Viet Cong were going to be firing hot lead dominoes at you napping in your backyard.

   I was dismayed when I found out the lottery in 1969 didn’t apply to me. I had entered high school early and wasn’t quite 19 years old. I was going to have to wait a year for the sword of Damocles. I was worried lightning might not strike twice. Was it possible to replicate the good luck of landing a number like 354 out of 365?

   Two of my friends, John Degutis and Algis Karsokas, were shipped to Vietnam as riflemen for tours of duty fighting Commies in God-forsaken jungles. They didn’t know what they were getting into until they got there. When they came back, they weren’t the same. Joe McCarthy, another friend of mine, came back undamaged in 1971. He came home with a Zippo lighter engraved with an epigram. The epigram said, “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.”

   When Mark Rudd, a national leader of the Weathermen, snuck into Cleveland for a February 1970 meeting with the local boys and girls, he said they were going underground for “strategic sabotage against all symbols of authority” according to an informer. He called for urban guerilla warfare.

   A fellow Viking at St. Joseph’s High School, John Skardis, who was a National Honor Society student, enrolled in Columbia University and joined Students for a Democratic Society. He later joined the Weathermen and then the even more radical Weather Underground. He thought he knew the approach for fighting the man, but he was wrong.

   From 1965 to 1972, 150,000-and-more men of draft age lived in Cleveland and within surrounding Cuyahoga County. About 60,000 of them served in the military, many of whom enlisted, while the others were drafted. More than 90,000 never served in the armed forces. Nearly 4,000 of them were draft dodgers and the rest deferred, exempted, or disqualified from service. Of those who served 47,000 never went to Vietnam, 3,000 were stationed in Vietnam but saw no fighting, and some 10,000 experienced combat. 427 of them were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded.

   The odds weren’t bad, but who wants to roll snake eyes in the crap game of a meaningless war? By 1970 slightly more than half of all Americans believed troops should be pulled out of Southeast Asia. Kent State happened in May 1970. The spring quarter was coming to an end. Warm weather was busting out all over and everybody wanted to be out in the sun. Some three hundred students were protesting the war when Jim Rhodes, the four-term “Get It Done” governor, had enough and ordered the Ohio National Guard to put down the disturbance. When they had enough, they started shooting. Four students were killed and nine wounded. 

   Before the shooting the Tower of Rhodes said the protestors were “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” After the shooting he said, “We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others.” The bloodshed turned the mess into a place on the map busting out across the country. Crosby Stills Nash & Young wrote a song about it. “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own, this summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.”

   Gerald Casale, who later became the lead singer and bassist for the alternative rock quintet Devo, was there. “All I can tell you is that it completely changed my life. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeff Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. I was a hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles on two people I knew. We were all running our asses off. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition, none of us knew, none of us could have imagined. They shot into a crowd that was running away from them. I stopped being a hippie and started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.”

   The shootings ignited outrage on campuses around the country. More than 4 million students participated in walk outs at hundreds of high schools, colleges, and universities. It was the largest student strike in the history of the United States. Everything at Cleveland State University, where I was a student, stopped dead in its tracks. We all thought it was a horrible thing. Everybody knew Kent State University, 30-some miles away, was a chill campus, and even though somebody had burned down the ROTC building the night before, the demonstration was civil as far as riots go. Some coarse words and Billy clubs would have done the trick.

   I was dumbfounded the next week when a Gallup Poll revealed that 58% of respondents blamed the students. Many people confuse feeling with thinking. 11% blamed the National Guard and 31% expressed no opinion. I was surprised that one out of three people didn’t know what to think about what happened. Didn’t they even feel bad about what happened?

   The tabloids sided with the military, but the national press didn’t agree. “It took 13 terrifying seconds last week to convert the traditionally conformist campus into a bloodstained symbol of the rising student rebellion against the Nixon Administration and the war in Southeast Asia,” wrote Time Magazine. “When National Guardsmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing four students, the bullets wounded the nation.”

   Newsweek Magazine was more analytical. “The National Guard insisted that their men fired as they were about to be overrun by the students. But if the troops were so closely surrounded, how was it that nobody closer than 75 feet away was hit? And if the rocks and bricks presented such overwhelming danger, how did the troops avoid even one injury serious enough to require hospital treatment?”

   The average distance from the soldiers to those killed and wounded was the length of a football field. It was a turkey shoot, especially since the students didn’t have two toy guns to rub together. In the end, none of the National Guardsmen took a dead undergraduate home for their roasting pans, turkey shoot or not.

   Less than a week after the shootings 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., protesting the war and the killing of unarmed if unruly students. “The city was an armed camp,” said Ray Price, Richard Nixon’s chief speechwriter from 1969 to 1974. “Mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. That was the student protest. That’s not student protest, that’s civil war.” President Nixon was whisked away to Camp David for two days for his own safety.

   John Skardis went on the run after he and a band of Weather Undergrounders rampaged through a gleaming new indoor mall in Cleveland Heights, smashing plate glass windows and terrorizing mid-day shoppers. He was arrested, but after his parents made bail for him, he fled the state. The FBI got involved, naming him a fugitive charged with “Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution.” 

  “Attended Columbia University in1968 and 1969 and was involved in student disorders,” said the dryly worded wanted poster. “Joined the revolutionary Weatherman group and took part in several violent demonstrations in Chicago and Ohio. Entered the Weather Underground in early 1970. He has used the alias Jonas Rytis Skardis,”

   In 1975 he was named by United States Senate investigators as one of 37 members of the Weather Underground who the FBI were still looking for after 19 politically motivated bombings since 1970. The year before the group had managed to plant a bomb in the State Department building in Washington. Although they avoided blowing people up, they scared the hell out of a lot of people in power suits. When John Skardis and a companion surrendered the following year, they had been globetrotting for months in several European countries with passports issued in false names based on false ID’s. After he was extradited he disappeared down the by-the-book rabbit hole. 

   Although I went to a couple of anti-war demonstrations on Public Square, I avoided the clouds of tear gas and confrontations with the Cleveland Police Department, especially the police on horseback. I bided my time until next December and the next Selective Service drawing. When the time came, I found my hopes for another draft-defying lottery number were fool’s gold. My number came up 12. I was going to Vietnam to fight in a failing war that most people, whether they said so or not, didn’t believe in anymore. In 1965 about 80% of the American public supported the war. Six years later it was down to 40%. By the end of the war, it was 30%.

   I had to appear at my draft board for a physical, which went well, thanks to my having been a Boy Scout for many years. But I was determined to not go to Vietnam. “Hell No! We Won’t Go!” was the handwriting on the wall. I was willing to volunteer if the Viet Cong invaded the United States, but I wasn’t willing to put myself in harm’s way in anybody else’s civil war, especially not nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia where they had been fighting for self-determination since 1943. It didn’t seem like they were about to give up anytime soon. 

   Young men coast to coast were burning their draft cards. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. I didn’t even have a lighter. I had to pull out all the stops. First, I declared myself a conscientious objector. The draft board laughed it off. Then I told them I had been an altar boy and objected on religious grounds. They laughed that off, too. They were church-going men on Sundays but not any other time. Finally, I told them I would frag an officer the first chance I got if I was forced into poplin fatigues and sent to Vietnam. I wasn’t trying to be mutinous, but I wasn’t prepared to be crippled or killed keeping somebody’s dominoes in place. That was no laughing matter to them.

   They sent me to a Master Sergeant who chewed me out for being unpatriotic, who then sent me to a commissioned officer who chewed me out for being unpatriotic, and finally to an indifferent psychiatrist who wrote me up as hopeless. He gave me a 4F deferment, meaning I was “physically, mentally, or morally unfit to serve.” I was OK with the snub.

   In the meantime, my father, who was  a God-fearing Republican, and I got into several belligerent arguments and I moved out. I dropped out of Cleveland State University for half-a-year and discovered the Upper Prospect bohemian enclave on the city’s near east side. I had grown up from one end of high school to the other, but I hadn’t grown up as much as I thought. Cooking and cleaning, making the rent, and meeting new kinds of people in my new place outside of my old world was a kind of coming of age.

   The war in Southeast Asia went on without me. I stopped reading the news about it. I hoped when Johnny came marching home he came home in one piece, but got to thinking that marching in lockstep might not be the best and brightest way for me to make my way when on the road ahead.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication