When I see a Vietnam film, like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Coming Home, Good Morning Viet Nam, even Forest Gump, when I hear the sound of helicopters, when I hear that great music (the Dead, the Who, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, Simon and Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones) -- my mind and heart go -- immediately -- back to the 1960’s.
I go back to the spring and summer of 1968 – I see my family sitting in front of the TV news for hours, stunned that Martin Luther King has been assassinated (in April), and then in early June, (the day my sister graduated from high school) it is Robert F Kennedy. We are shocked. My mother is crying. We loved Martin Luther King. I had just weeks before seen RFK speaking in my town as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination.
I go back to my senior year in high school (1968-69) – I see us (the students) protesting against the Vietnam War, the dress code (girls had to wear skirts and dresses!), and the closed campus. Boys who weren’t going to college were afraid of being drafted. I see my young, cute English teacher (Mr. Baldwin) with his long blond hair, sitting on the desk, teaching us, along with Chaucer and Beowulf, the poetry of the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel (I am in love, and decide I will major in English when I go to college).
My best friends buy their first cars – Volkswagens, one a red beetle and the other a white van. We are free!
I go back to the summer of 1969 – my friends and I working, earning money and getting ready for college, wishing that August that we were at Woodstock!! (We were relatively close to San Francisco and Haight Ashbury, but miles and miles from Woodstock!). I remember sitting with my boyfriend’s family that same summer, watching on TV when Apollo 11 landed, and Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon.
When I watch those movies or hear that music, I go back to the fall of 1969 – I am 17 and going 500 miles from home to go to college. I see the world open up. Suddenly, there is no dress code (I took suitcases full of new skirts and dresses and high heels and came home at Christmas in blue jeans and a peasant top – and no bra!). The fraternities and sororities are dying, and suddenly there are co-ed dorms. Suddenly drugs are everywhere. Feminism is everywhere: we are reading Simone de Beauvoir, and later on, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem, the young journalist who, posing as a Playboy Bunny, infiltrated the Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Club! The birth control pill is available. Abortion is soon legal. I take a class (for credit) on human sexuality. The world has changed!
I take a class in Black literature and history – we read Claude Brown’s Manchild in a Promised Land, Stokley Carmichael’s Black Power, The Autobiography of Malcolm X; I learn about the Black Panthers. The white kids are intimidated in class – the black kids won’t let us talk.
My English professor wears blue jeans and has long hair (I am in love again). He is a friend of Ken Kesey’s. He went to the University of Oregon. We read Slaughter House Five, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; we read Allen Ginbsberg and Jack Kerouac. With the professor’s blessing, we skip class to protest against Nixon and the Vietnam War, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the Kent State Massacre. Anti-War demonstrations are more compelling than class.
Soon, college draft deferments have ended. Now even the college boys must face the draft. It is a lottery. We stay up all night when the numbers are drawn – every boy I know, including my brother, is listening for his birthday and his number – his fate. My brother gets a low number, and files for conscientious objector status. My father, a WW 2 vet, agrees – he too is finally against the War. The sons of too many friends are dying in Vietnam. He is furious with Nixon and the government.
I still love the music of the 60’s, and when I hear it – I think of all the good things about the 1960’s. When I watch those Vietnam films – and I do like to watch them – I have mixed feelings because that War was such a terrible thing for our country. But overall, I think of the 1960’s as a wonderful time of freedom, self-expression, and open protest and criticism of not only the government and our leaders, but of racism and sexism and materialism and consumerism. It was a heady time – and this is a fun opportunity to reflect on those complicated days!
-- Jill Goodman Gould
