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Rebellion in a Curious Way | Poem

REBELLION IN A CURIOUS WAY by Jodey Bateman
 

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
 
     Just then Ben stood up. "Before you start, Will," he said, "I’ve got a brief announcement. I’ve got to go back to the Field Board Hearing to explain to those characters that I can’t represent Will as a lawyer there if I’m not allowed to cross-examine the most important witness. So excuse the interruption, Will, have at it!" Ben gave a salute and walked out the door. 
     "Ben’s right," Will said. "We can’t conduct a defense where we can’t question witnesses against me. But the truth is, I already decided this past weekend - I don’t even want to try to stay in the army. I want to do everything I can to stop the war, but to do my best against the war, the way I know how, I have to be free of the army’s control. I have to be free of anybody’s control. I think Jan and Dale and some others here know what I mean." 
     Will took a deep breath and went on: 
     "I remember the first time I ever tried to make a speech. I was a forward observer in Nam. I was with a thirteen year old Vietnamese boy named Tommy who was my interpreter and he led me to a house in this village to introduce me to two of his cousins. One of them was called Blue Dragon and the other one was called Quyet Thang which means ‘sure to win’. Anyway those two guys got the whole village together and Sure to Win gave a little talk in Vietnamese. Then he motioned to me to step up and speak. And I said, ‘Look, the G.I.’s are sick of the war. So if you don’t fire un us, we won’t fire on you. Fair enough?’ Tommy translated and everybody looked pretty happy about it. 
     "Then Sure to Win turned to me and started talking in English. He knew English pretty good. All of a sudden I recognized him. He was a barber who came to cut our hair and shave us at the Black Hill Base Camp sometimes. And I asked Sure to Win what were you telling the people before I spoke?" 
     He said, "I tell them you are friend from progressive working people of American," then he pointed at Blue Dragon and said, "me and that guy, we are from propaganda team for Liberation Front. We know all about you." He had to say the big words a few times before I could understand him. 
     "But then I thought, Wow, here’s a real live Communist and he’s had his razor at my throat and all my buddies throats. And he trusts me not to inform on him! And we shook hands." 
     Right then a man with a thick brown mustache and dark glasses, with a boonie hat on his head stood up. He looked like he’d been out of the army maybe not quite a year. 
     "Hey!" he boomed out, "You say you met up with the Cong near Black Hill base camp. But that’s a secure area. The Cong aren’t there any more." 
     "Oh, they’re there all right!" Will said, "They’re watching you every minute of the day!" 
     The man sat down and Will continued: 
     "So I guess ever since then I’ve been an honorary member of the propaganda team. Only I’ve had to find my way to work with my own American people so I joined this thing called Vanguard Youth and the army both. There’s a job to do and I’ve got to find my own way to do it. 
     "Now Dale, and some of the rest of you don’t get me wrong!" Will held up his hand like-stop! "I got a lot of good out of the Vanguard. Clu sent me a lot of literature and I learned what was happening in the world from it. I was able to make connections I had never made before. I never knew before about the fight that’s going on in this world and how long it’s been going on and how hard! 
     "So the Vanguard taught me all this stuff," Will went on, "but now they don’t want me to talk about it. They just want me to tell the bloody, ghastly shit that goes on over in Nam, like ‘Wow, ain’t it awful what happens to those poor people over there!’ Then the Vanguard wants to come in after I give my rap, and they want to explain to people bit by bit the things they taught me. And when they’ve taught people enough, they’ll join the Vanguard. But I want to say some of these things up front because they made sense to me out of my own experience and you don’t have to be in the Vanguard to know them. 
     "First - the people who own the factories and the stock in the big corporations run this country. They also own mines, plantations, oil wells, who knows what else around the world. And if those things are in danger they’ll have the government draft us to make a war. It’s not very often for our benefit, but it’s always for their benefits and..." 
Just then the door was flung open and four MP’s marched in. 
      "Private Will Orry!" one MP shouted in a high-pitched voice, "you are under arrest for being absent without leave!" That MP took hand cuffs and locked Will’s wrists in them behind his back. Then they all walked out with him. He looked back over his shoulder at us and smiled. I walked up to the front of the room and faced the students. 
     "Will asked me to say a few words when his speech was finished," I said, "especially if his speech got finished for him like it just did. 
     "Will is right," I went on moving my glance across a roomful of faces still stunned by his sudden arrest. "We’ve heard about all the terrible things that go on in Vietnam. We could mourn all the people who have died there and never stop morning for them. But a very great man once said, ‘Don’t morn, organize’!" 
     At that moment a balding square-jawed man in a charcoal gray suit strode through the door at the head of two other men in suits. 
     "You!" he barked, pointing at me, "I’m the president of this college. Get off this campus at once or I’ll have you arrested!" 
     "Dale and Jan, come with us," Jim Ed said. "We can drive you to our place. Ben and everyone else will be there when the thing’s over at the Fort." 
     So I walked out of Conference Room B with Jan and Jim Ed and his girlfriend Lou. Behind us I could hear the college president shouting,     "Now everybody else get out of here." 
     Just as we were walking out of the building I could hear the president even louder, "Hey! Wait! Who has the key to this room?" 
     Jim Ed grinned and pulled the key out of his pocket and handed it to Jan. 
     "You forgot this, I believe," he said. 
     Jan and I jumped in her car with him and Lou and drove out of the campus area fast. We went to Jim Ed’s place. We had just gotten inside the house when two cars pulled up in the driveway - Ben’s rent-a-car and Clu’s drove up with Don, Marge, and Randy. 
    Jim Ed let the four of them in. Don shook hands with him briefly, then dropped heavily into an armchair gasping for breath. Sweat streamed down his face. He was sick the way he had been the night after Will’s first court-martial. 
     "Do you have any ice water and an aspirin for him?" 
 Marge called out to Jim Ed. Jim Ed ran into the kitchen and brought back a glass of ice water and a couple of aspirins. Don picked the aspirins out of her hand quickly and popped the aspirins into his mouth. Then he downed the glass of ice water in one gulp. 
     "More!" he panted and held out the glass. Jim Ed took it and ran and got another glassful as Don gasped for breath. He tossed this second glassful down and gasped some more. Finally he gave a half-forced laugh. 
    "Well, no press conference again, this time, heh-heh?" Then more seriously, "Dale, you should have told me what was going to happen. You too, Randy!" 
     "Will didn’t want us to," Randy said. 
     "I needed to know!" Don said. "I wasn’t going to bite Will’s head off - or yours either. It’s just - just - I am a little older than you and the Vanguard is a lot of work and my health is not that good." 
     "Just stay calm and don’t worry," Ben said. "Will’s going to be out of the guardhouse in twenty-four hours. It’s just now he’s going to have a court-martial instead of a Field Board Hearing. I’ll be there with him. All I’ve got to do is see that they don’t give him a couple of months in the stockade and a Bad Conduct Discharge before they kick him out." 
     "Sure, sure!" Don wheezed. "Ben, I don’t know what you think of the Vanguard, but we will help pay your expenses. We will defend him. The same as we would defend anybody who works against the war. I just wish he had stayed part of us." 
     "Dale," Don said, turning his sweat-beaded face to me. "I think you should understand this - you’re a young activist, still just starting out. We’ve been at it a long time, before you were born - so, just listen." 
     "Sure, OK," I mumbled under my breath, my head hanging down a little. 
     "I know it’s a big high, the wave of revolution all over the world," Don said. He took a few more deep breaths and then he was able to continue smoothly without gasping. 
     "Sooner or later this big wave will crest," Don said. "It may have crested already - when Che’s uprising just failed in Bolivia." There was a grimace of pain on Don’s face for a second. 
     "And this-uh-wave of revolution will be over," Don continued. "And Dale, you will grow older in a world where things will be a lot more conservative - until the next wave. Because I don’t think we’ll overthrow US capitalism this time. The most we can hope for this time around is for the US to be defeated by a socialist revolution in Vietnam. And that’ll make it harder for the US government to fight against the next big wave of revolution when it comes - more water!" 
     Jim Ed and his girlfriend Lou ran to the kitchen and brought Don back another glass of ice water which he gulped down at once. 
     "But every time there is a wave of revolution," Don went on, "among young people like you and Will, everybody rebels against everything. No one knows more than you do." 
     "I’m not like that!" I said quickly. "Some of the people I learned the most from were old black Baptist preachers in the deep south." 
 Don waved his hand in the air, impatiently. "Oh, you’re not as bad as a lot of them," he said. "Like some of these really freaky kids I see in New York. But we have to have a team with all the members responsible to each other if we’re going to preserve the gains of this time until the next big wave. I thought Will was going to be part of that team. Dale can’t you imagine what it would mean if we could get it officially guaranteed that soldiers can give out literature against the war they’re supposed to be fighting in? Why, the next time..." and he started gasping again. 
     Marge ran over and started patting him on the chest and shoulders and flung her arm around his neck and cried a little. Clu’s face was wilted with sadness. 
     "Oh, I’m all right now," Don said. Marge took her arms from around his neck and stood by the chair with one hand on the back of his neck. 
     "Will has done some good work," Don said, shaking his head dejectedly, "but he could do so much more if he just showed a little responsibility." 
     My head was still bent down. I stuck my thumbs in my jeans pockets as if to pressure each word out as I thought it out, real slow. 
     "I-I think Will is on a team," I said. "I think there is a team bigger than your Vanguard, but it includes the Vanguard. I think there is responsibility that is not just responsibility to your leaders." 
     "That’s why you’re where you are," he said. 
     "Yeah," I said and felt a smile starting on my lips. I held out my hand to Don and we shook hands. He looked like the heart flutters or whatever was the matter was over now. He smiled, and the gray of his face turned to a healthy pink color. 
     "Meanwhile," Ben Markovitz cut in, bringing his hands together. "I’ve still got to contact that black student and his instructor about keeping Douglass College from kicking them out for what happened at Will’s speech up at your university. Dale, I tell you, you guys breed cases for me like rabbits!" 
     And from that point on, the conversation went in other directions. Don and Ben chipped in money for Jim Ed to go get enough barbecue for all of us - it would probably give Don more heart flutters later on, but in those days most of us didn’t think of the quality of the food we ate. 
     That night we drove back to Clu’s. Randy was in the front seat with Clu and Marge. I was in the back seat with Don who kept spreading out taking up more and more space as he tried to get some rest to shake what was left of his sickness. When we got back, Don and Marge didn’t go to a motel. They used a mattress in one of Clu’s upstairs rooms. Don slept a lot. In his waking hours he seemed a lot less hard driving than usual. He got his rest for the next couple of days and early Thursday morning we started for the big national demonstration against the war in Washington DC. 
     It took us until late Friday night to get to Washington. Evie Fenwick from the Committee took another car load of demonstrators in her old car which broke down every few hundred miles so that we had to stop and wait for her. 
     In Washington DC we stayed on the floor of Warren Couch, who had been in the Organization in our state and was now on the staff of a big underground newspaper in DC. The next morning he and a couple of staffers from the paper drove us in a van to the great mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and let us out. All of us but Clu, Don, Marge and Randy. They went to the house of some Vanguard people to confer. As soon as I was let out, I was lost from the others in a huge rush of people. At times as I went around the reflecting pool, the crowd was so dense that my feet didn’t touch the ground. I had an anti-war sign scrawled on a big piece of cardboard, but most of the time I didn’t raise it over my head because the crowd was too thick. I have heard the official report is that 250,000 people were there. I could believe there were twice that many. The voices of famous speakers and singers boomed out over loudspeakers but their words and their songs were shattered into fragments by the echoes. Here and there I could see big banners, each one held aloft by two or three people identifying local anti-war groups like Clu’s Committee, trying to keep their people rallied together in the huge multitudes. These banners were swaying back and forth as the people who carried them were pressed by constant streams of other demonstrators going in every direction. 
     I have heard the official report is that 50,000 people were there. I could believe there were at least three times that many. 
     Finally we got going in one direction - on the bridge over the Potomac towards the Pentagon. The crowd had thinned out some and I even met up with a couple of demonstrators from Clu’s Committee. Then to my complete amazement I was walking right next to speed freak Les.
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