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

Trang was only 16 when his entire family was wiped out by American GI’s in the village of My Lai. He managed to hide out in the jungle amidst the confusion of gunfire, screaming women and children. The jungle he hid out in had it’s own dangers. The jungle was home to snakes and of course, hungry hunting tigers. Every once in awhile some unlucky villager who dared brave the dense, humid heat and dark of the jungle would never return.

It was a fact of village life.  Now dangers to the small villages included napalm agent orange and worse, GI’s who had snapped or as we say today “went Postal”.

Trang stayed hidden for two very long, hungry days in the dangerous dense foliage fearful of being captured and shot at such a young age simply for being Vietnamese.

When he did finally emerge from hiding when all was quiet he  found only burning huts and the stench of  dead bodies strewn about, including his mother, father, two young sisters, aged 9 and 11. He also found the bullet ridden body of his girlfriend covered in blood and mud, probably the victim of rape by the platoon. He was walking among ghosts now. The town was erased. Even the livestock were slaughtered. There was nothing left.

He sat on the ground and began to cry his body convulsive, shaking, words not forming, hatred replacing sorrow, revenge rising to the surface as he sat alone in the world now surrounded by the bodies of his loved ones.

“Why, why” he said through his tears streaming down his young dirty cheeks...tears as thick as the Mekong River flowing in flood season.

He would only later after the war was long receded in the geo-political rearview mirror the “Why?”

The military machine of the Pentagon was getting frustrated at being stalled in neutral in the Vietnamese war. That and the fact the protest movement on the streets of the States was gaining momentum. An avalanche of anti-war protests were setting cities on fire. It wasn’t much help that returning Gi’s from Vietnam were joining  ranks with the radical elements, while others were getting spat on as they walked down Main Street in uniform.

The generals,  in their let’s get this cluster fuck under control, three star wisdom decided what Americans  needed now was a bigger body count of Vietnamese to show we are close to victory.  The American public was  tired of playing on  Country Joe’s game show trying for prizes if only they could be “first one on the block, to have your boy come home in a box.”

Young Americans, just out of high school some of them,  were bobbing in the rice paddies and Vietnamese rivers, Halloween apples in body bag rubber rafts, and as they went into boot high muddy jungles full of Vietnamese patriots on opium, well, these American boys (patriots from the other side that also claimed righteousness, got shot down, shipped back home to be buried six feet deep in hallowed home own ground. Tri-fold flag, "Here tell he was a fag," said someone in the back row far from the open grave. "Maybe he was, but, goddamn it, he was an American fag! Now buried, wrapped like a sandwich in an American flag baggie. Damn he could shoot them commies, left and right, bang, bang, you're dead you red! Damn shame it is, but we have to draw the line, pinko's or faggots? Cain't have neither one amongst us, so just as well they kill each other...what did ol Merle Haggard say, oh yeah, if you don't love it leave it goddamn it! Now that is as American as it gets boy! Damn that Haggard, he he, he shore knows how to sing a dang song that makes sense!"

Fill the young American troops minds with a mixture of  anger with angst, add a dash of red, white and blue patriotism, and you have the makings for one killer cocktail of a psychosis for the creation of the American killing machine who will go out waste a village of women and children, and all in the name of Old Glory, God and Country.

Go ye forth, and forget about multiplying, instead subtract, take the life of the enemy, who is whoever we say it is and for whatever reasoning we can drum up or make up or think up and kill them dead. Better dead than red! Kill a commie, kill Cong, kill raghead, kill, kill, kill, kill Bill!!

To motivate troops to aim and shoot (no pun intended)  for a higher body count, competitions were held between units to see who could kill the most. Rewards for the highest tally, displayed on "kill boards" included days off or an extra case of beer. Their commanders meanwhile stood to win rapid promotion. Very quickly the phrase - "If it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC" became a defining dictum of the war and civilian corpses were regularly tallied as slain  Viet Cong. Civilians, including women and children, were killed for running from soldiers or helicopter gunships that had fired warning shots. (3.8 million Vietnamese died including 2m civilians between 1955-1975.)

Trang never forgot March 16, 1968, when U.S. troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley Jr. carried out the village massacre in young Trangs village of about 500 unarmed men, women and children.

After an aerial assault, Lieutenant Calley’s 1st Platoon of Charlie Company led the attack on My Lai. Expecting to encounter Vietcong soldiers, the platoon entered the village firing. Instead, they found mostly women and children who denied that there were Vietcong soldiers in the area. The American soldiers herded the villagers into groups and began burning the village.

The New York Times provided an account of the massacre from a survivor in its Nov. 17, 1969, edition: “The three death sites were about 200 yards apart. When the houses had been cleared, the troops dynamited those made of brick and set fire to the wooden structures. They did not speak to the villagers and were not accompanied by an interpreter who could have explained their actions. Then the Vietnamese were gunned down where they stood. About 20 soldiers performed the executions at each of the three places, using their individual weapons, presumably M-16 rifles.”

“Lieutenant Calley gave explicit orders to kill and participated in the execution of unarmed villagers standing in groups and lying in ditches. There were also accounts of soldiers mutilating bodies and raping young women. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson watched the massacre from his helicopter. Realizing that civilians were being killed, he landed his helicopter near one of the ditches and rescued some survivors.”

Trang was now 17 and still hiding in the jungle, only this time he was armed with a Russian AK-47 and a machete sitting in the thick growth around him. He was now a Vietnamese irregular, he was now Cong, Charlie, VC.

He was not alone this time, but was part of a group of 20 others hiding invisible waiting to ambush the American patrol spotted a few miles away heading in their direction. Soon they could hear the Gi’s walking softly, wary of booby traps as they made their way quietly 300 yards away now  within sight, soon within the VC kill zone. Most of Trangs comrades had seen many of their loved ones die from mines, bombings and napalm...now….well...Paybacks are a bitch in any language...

True to form, Myrika was a Bavarian propelled,  fuel injected sexual whirlwind on our first night “incarcerated” on the “Rock”...someone said someday Alcatraz  will become a tourist attraction. At the time I thought someone had slipped him a dose of bad acid.

Myrika had a great idea, or as Ken Kesey said, “sometimes a great notion”

“Mickey, did you ever make love in a prison cell?” she asked with a devilish wink in here deep as the ocean blue eyes that were so large they could hide a flotilla of U-boats ready to sink merchant ships heading for England during the war/

Myrika had a thing about getting off in different places from a lean-to in the woods to a room full of beads and incense with a small audience to applaud her performance., and believe me her performances were standing room only!

“In a prison cell? Well, no Babe. My sexual proclivities have never leaned towards having  a 300 pound serial killer on the bottom bunk get in rut after shower time!”

She then Myrika’d me with that smile of hers. “I know that, but here we are...Alcatraz...prison cells. Let’s do it, c’mon. Maybe we can fuck in a famous person’s cell!” Her voice was so full of excitement I had to laugh, and with her mind made up, I knew I would lose any argument against the idea, besides, it did have a rather kinky edge to it I have been known to enjoy.

“OK, maybe we can do it in Baby Face Nelson’s...or Machine Gun Kelly’s or wait a minute. I got it...Al Capone’s. No, wait, wasn’t he the patron saint of syphilis or something?”

We..well, she decided, patron saint of all things genital or not we’d jazz up the sperm count while doing the bootleg boogie, with orgasm being her vagina hijacking a load of  my prohibition “booze” during the sexual version of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Great, now I could say, “I got my rocks off on the Rock.” Hell, if boatloads of camera toting tourists from Kansa and Japan were in the forecasted future, that slogan could be a best selling t-shirt. The only thing missing that night was a decent pair of handcuffs, a blindfold for that ever popular solitary confinement feel and a prison guard uniform.

Tomorrow we begin our journalistic foray…but for tonight...animalistic foreplay was the soup du jour!

I had already made preliminary notes on the Occupation. The  background or canvas as I referred to it. In all, the takeover would last 19 months and only end when the Indians would be evicted by the Feds, who became what you might say fed up with the whole thing.  

In a nutshell Indians of All Tribes claimed the island by citing the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 between the U.S. and the Sioux. The treaty returned to Native peoples “all retired, abandoned and out-of use federal lands.”

When Alcatraz closed in 1963, the government  declared the island as surplus federal property opening the door for Red Power activists to reclaim it. In a manifesto they released  they stated their intentions “to use the island for an Indian school, cultural center and museum.”  They also claimed Alcatraz was theirs “by right of discovery,” and sarcastically offered to buy it  in 24 dollars glass beads and red cloth, the same price that they  received for the island of Manhattan.

Government officials  journeyed to the island on multiple occasions to