Yesterday I was on a ride out to the eastern part of the county to an area called Sunrise Highway. It is in the Laguna Mountains near the Mexican border and defines the line between the western and eastern parts of San Diego with the Carizzo Valley to the east that runs down towards the Salton Sea. The high plains basin of Lake Cuyamaca and the ridge line to the east of that are some of the prettiest parts of the county and it had been too long since I had ridden these lovely and uncrowded roads. I was riding with one of my new riding partners, Gordon, who is about ten years my junior and who spent 17 years in the U.S. military, seven in the Navy and ten in the Army. I don’t think I have ever met anyone who served in two distinctly different branches of the service and didn’t even know that happened. He does not know the area very well yet, having relocated with his wife down from Northern California, so I was leading the way, thoroughly enjoying the lovely roads and perfect 70 degree sunny weather. It was a perfect riding day and I was cranking along with one of my favorite playlists Bluetoothing into my helmet. That playlist is something I titled “My Favorites” and it has a long and very random list of music that spans sixty years of whatever struck my fancy when I was compiling it. All of a sudden, The Ballad of the Green Berets came on.
“The Ballad of the Green Berets” is a patriotic song from 1966 (when I was 12 and living in Maine) that became a major cultural phenomenon during the Vietnam War era. It was written and performed by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler (U.S. Army Special Forces). It made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks that year and it sold 9 million copies, going Gold and becoming one of the biggest-selling singles of the decade. 1966 was a year when the country had yet to get too negative on the Vietnam War, which was still in its early days. It’s release was during escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and it contrasted sharply with the growing anti-war music movement. It was released before public opinion turned significantly against the war and represented a tribute to U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), portraying soldiers as heroic and noble, and emphasizing duty, courage, and sacrifice. It was also authentic since it was written by an actual Special Forces member, a guy who was a Green Beret medic in Vietnam and was wounded in combat. Let’s not forget that it was JFK, still very much our national hero at that time, who championed the use of Special Forces and even authorized the unique headgear. The song tapped into that magical mystique of Camelot. But then, things they were a-changing, right?
There were plenty of anti-war songs that came out following the Ballad including “Fortunate Son” (CCR), “War” (Edwin Starr), “Give Peace a Chance” (John Lennon) and pretty much everything sung by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. However, one of my favorites that was tangentially anti-war, but had a big impact on me and even makes My Favorites playlist is Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree from 1967. How can I like both SSgt. Sadler’s Ballad and Arlo’s Massacree at the same time? That is the schizophrenia of my youth and it reminds us of how quickly public opinion shifts with early war support moving quickly to anti-war sentiment. Some see the Ballad as an honorable tribute to soldiers and others see it as war glorification. Some see the Massacree as good-natured ironic fun about war and the draft, and yet others see it as an anti-establishment and counter-cultural song by a guy you would never want next to you in battle. It was a complicated time and my emotions about it are equally complicated.
In the late 50’s as a child of the post-war ethos, I spent many hours drawing battle scenes, particularly ones involving events like the Battle of Midway in the pacific with its dive bombers and warships. In the early 60s we played “Army” on the wooded paths near where I lived in Wisconsin. We would hide in the bushes along the horse path like commandos in the field, jumping out to attack one another as we walked by on patrol. We always wanted to be the attackers, not the victims. We set up elaborate war scenes in the dirt with little green army soldiers and strategically placed firecrackers amongst them, connected to go off in sequence and blow the hell out of the battlefield, sending toy soldiers flying here and there. It was all great fun…right up until it wasn’t. But there was something lost in that transition. I became fervently and permanently pacifist and don’t recall my war-mongering returning, even after 9/11 (even though I lived within sight of the twin towers). I had missed the draft by virtue of my age and yet I have always felt somewhat guilty for never having served. I am among the first to thank men and women of the military for their service…that respect has never left me and I don’t recall ever feeling any denigration for returning service members whether from Vietnam or Desert Storm. I have always felt that “I want them on that wall, I need them on that wall…”. But I have also been abhorrent of events like Abu Graib and Guantanamo. I want a peacekeeping military, NOT a warrior ethos military like Secretary of War Hegseth advocates. But what do I know? I was neither a peacekeeper nor a warrior…
When Gordon and I stopped for lunch in Pine Valley, about as close a town as San Diego has to the Mexican border, just north of Tecate, I had a serious case of Green Beret on the mind. I had just listened to SSgt. Sadler’s soulful Ballad and the day before’s events in Quantico, when Hegseth and Trump gathered the 800 top generals and admirals (and their top enlisted advisers) from the global military command, were all swirling in my helmet. There I was sitting down with a new riding friend who had served 17 years in the military. Surely he would have a helpful perspective on how to make sense of this all. I told him about the song on my playlist (he remembered it) and mentioned the Quantico gathering (he had watched some of it on TV). While he was explaining his impressions of the Hegseth and Trump comments to the gathered general staff, I noticed that he was wearing a t-shirt that said Alice’s Restaurant. I commented about the shirt and asked if it was from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Arlo’s Massacree took place. Gordon said no, that it was a watering hole for riders in the Bay Area. But the irony of the moment was not lost on me. Here was a long-time military man (an enlisted military man) who thought the Hegseth/Trump warrior ethos grandstand play was nonsense.
When I got home, I called my old college pal Debbie. Her father was THE Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force and she grew up as a global military kid. Most recently, she had been a medical professional for the Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment. She has been married for forty years to Jay, who is a retired four-star Marine Corps General who was Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps and Operations Officer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jay was down in Quantico that day for a change-of-command ceremony for some old friends and happened to breakfast the day before with one of his general pals who was sitting in the front row in all the pictures of the Hegseth/Trump gathering. The generals all sat on buses since Zero-Dark-Thirty to attend this Hegseth/Trump extravaganza (rather than being at their posts defending our country as they wanted to be). To say that Debbie knows the lay of the military land would be an understatement. I needed her help to sort out these mixed feelings I was having thanks to my choice of riding music. From what I could take of her reaction (and by extension, my sense of how Jay must feel), the whole Quantico gathering left her cold and troubled. She told me her daughter told her to listen less to the news and more to oldies on the radio. I told her to be careful about what oldies she chose to listen to.