Dark Side of the 60's Moon by Mike Marino (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

catch up  and send her packing for West Berlin to a small apartment with a stunning view of the Berlin Wall, barbed wire and Checkpoint Charlie.

Michigan’s northland is a Twilight Zone of unemployment, hunting, cinder block bars, hookers from Flint and Saginaw plying their trade quietly  in motor homes parked in the bar parking lots during hunting season at places like the Black Bear Inn, along with fist fights over pinball games and pool tables for no reason. The Northern Michigan male is always in rut and loves to show off his antlers after 10 Pabst Blue ribbon beers.

It’s  a wonderland of nature, bears, whitetail deer and wolves as well as the elusive food stamp which by the way is the official coin of the realm, while cold hard cash isn’t wasted on such mundane items as food and diapers.  Instead you try to earn just enough money to repair the chain saw for firewood season, or a new set of truck tires, or to buy a brand new auger for ice fishing.  These are  hearty souls of legend who are plaid and definitely proud and say things like "eh" to give a hard core Canadian reason to pause. It's Fargo, before there was a Fargo.

It's venison, shotguns, hunting tags, blaze orange, knotty pine, and ladies pool leagues all tight jeaned and camel toed,  hunching over a pool table showing a full round moon stretching the denim fabric beyond it’s limits, even tighter than the male imagination, leaving nothing to the imagination, and Lawdy, how she could handle a pool cue! Imagine the carnal possibilities Billy Bob...

It’s the promised land of knotty pine, white birch and yellow perch. Deer heads in the buckshot headlights look  mounted on the unemployed pine walls of the local  bars and bowling alley dives. They kept gaze from above, glass eyed gods of the art of taxidermy over the pool tables with the incessant cracking collision noise given off by the cue ball as it successfully sought out it's next ball/victim and sent it bleeding and slashed into corner pocket hell. A Jack the Ripper eight ball serial killer, if ever there was one.

It was a land of plaid shirts, tackle boxes, shotguns, beer and ammo, along with smoked meats and smoked cheese. Wicker swings on the porch and fireball sunsets. Black bears feeding at the dump, seagulls swooping overhead, all played out on a stage of trash, with an appreciative automotive audience in attendance at a command performance at the Carnegie Hall of Carnivores.

Myrika was mesmerized. Olivia was relaxing, glad to  back home in Michigan once again, while Joey and I, ever fearful of Johnny Lawdog kept our eyes peeled for any state troopers or sheriffs who may take offense to a hippie camper defiling their beloved Highway 2 along the shore of Lake Michigan as our compass was leading us east to St. Ignace and then onward to our new home and contacts on St. Joseph Island with work permits and jobs.

We were now firmly in the trenches of the anti-war resistance. Lock n’ load!

Chapter 26 - The My Lai Massacre

 

 

 

We were getting settled into St. Ignace which would be our temporary U.S. base before the four of us headed for St. Joseph Island, to begin the journey of our lives as “political refugees” from the belly of the beast in America. Plans had changed somewhat as well.
I had decided that Joey and Olivia would cross over into Canada at Sudbury, but not together. Too risky. Joey and I would scout head or in Joey's Airborne words, recon by boat from Detour Village in the U.P.the find the best deserted landing beaches on the southside and east side of St. Joseph Island then enter as simple fishermen who got lost in the dark in case we were discovered inadvertently. Simple mistake. We’d make our way to town with documents and fishing poles in hand.

Later Myrika would bring Olivia over posing as two females on a shopping lunch spree at the dock in Hilton Beach. Olivia would then meet up at our safe house where Joey I would be waiting. Together we would take them separately to disappear across the bridge into the bowels of Sudbury as two happy faux Canadians where they would be taken to an exile community and safety by our Canadian contacts.

This was 1968… a year that saw beauty and the beast. The beast of General Westmoreland’s military might was dealt a deadly blow to the propaganda balls when the NVA and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive which filled American television sets across the land from sea to not so shining sea anymore.

American forces retaliated with blood in their eyes including the poster child of wanton murder at My Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, soldiers of Charlie Company, a unit of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade arrived in the hamlet of My Lai in the northern part of South Vietnam. They were on a search and destroy mission.

The unit met no resistance in My Lai, which had about 700 inhabitants. Indeed, they saw no males of fighting age. They only found villagers eating breakfast. Over the next three hours they killed as many as 500 plus Vietnamese civilians. Some were lined up in a drainage ditch before being shot. The dead civilians included fifty about 3 years old or younger, 70 between the ages of 4 and 7, and twenty seven senior citizens in their 70s and 80s.

It was also the year the South Vietnamese went hell bent for leather to clean house in Saigon. I still have the photo saved of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a suspected Viet Cong on the streets.

The year was the Rolls Royce most expensive one in the Vietnam war not to mention the deadliest. In all, according to government documents, “27,915 South Vietnamese (ARVN) soldiers killed and the Americans suffering 16,592 killed compared to around two hundred thousand of the communist forces killed. The deadliest week of the Vietnam War for the USA was during the Tet Offensive specifically February 11–17, 1968, during which period 543 Americans were killed in action, and 2547 were wounded.”

It was the year Walter Cronkite said “the war is lost…..” It was lost a long time before that but now the God of Journalism called the game over.

That was the beast….the beauty occured in March in Ontario where Myrika and I made the journey to the town of St. Catharines south of Toronto in Canada’s Niagara Region where Joey and Olivia settled and had just given birth to my child. A baby girl they named China Moon. We arrived late in the day as the sun was setting in the west, gently so as not to disturb this new life that had entered a world of violence.

Myrika gave Olivia a hug a kiss that is the code of females bonded for life. A melding of souls that gave off a light so bright it would blind the devil himself. Joey and I did the manly short hug thing reserved for drunks in a bar after one to many and afraid to show any inkling of emotion, lest others question our masculinity. We’d rather die of an overdose of macho than to let that feminine soft side out of the cage running rampant through the streets!

 

I walked over to Olivia, who was breast feeding baby China. Both could be porcelain dolls on a shelf protected by invisible angels. The babies eyes were closed feeding hungrily on the young Madonna inner calm, peace and contentment known only to newborns or opium addicts in some Chinatown back alley.

Her ample breasts were filled out, milky white and eager to feed this new life who had entered our lives. Joey was beaming. I was a fish out of water. “When she’s done feeding, hold her Mikey. She’s yours as she is all of ours. Our bond. The root system of our family garden.”

I broke into a smile. A small tear started it’s trek down my cheek. Myrika came and kissed it away. She always said, “when you cry I will catch your tears”

This child China was life and love in a world of hate and killing as the year would also culminate in the death of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Violence would erupt in Mayor Richard Daly’s Chicago during the Democratic Tear Gas Convention where Yippies and Hippies and a candidate named Pigasus would meet Mr. Billy Club head on.
The killing in Vietnam would continue as would riots in American cities as the flames of protest grew with the intensity of a social firestorm…

But for now my world was one of calm and overwhelming love for Myrika, Olivia, Joey and a baby named China Moon. Vietnam was a million miles away from my thoughts that night. My only concern now was to protect a mother and child from that world of violence.
Myrika took me in her arms as I began crying uncontrollably. My heart was ready to burst with pride and love for these people around me.
So much for macho…...

Chapter 27 - You Don't Need a Weatherman

 

 

 

1968 proved to a prophetic year of political epiphanies for we the proletarians. Not only were Myrika and I keeping the torch of Canadian freedom alive for the American war resistance underground, but had picked up a few extra’s on the side. We had helped one Black Panther escape to Canada where I wasn’t sure how an Oakland, California Black  Panther would acclimate to a snowbound winter with Canada Geese, moose and Mounties. He said it beats a bullet in the back or solitary confinement in Soledad prison.

One other byproduct that blossomed into friendship was secured when we were asked by our Canadian counterparts to help Liam, an Irish Republican Army fugitive on the run from Mi-5 and Scotland Yard who had made it across the pond to Canada. Our job…get Liam across the border into the United States where he could be absorbed into the Stay Free Maxi-Pad of Irish Micks in Boston or Chicago. He chose Chicago. (we stayed friends for years, keeping each other’s secrets from Mi-5 in England and America’s FBI and Hoover’s  drag queens dragoons.)

The SDS was splintering and the Weathermen were foaming at the revolutionary mouth while Hip was DOA, but YIP was alive and well and placed the Chicago Democrat Convention smack dab in the street theater highbeams. We figured we’d take a