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

and one room as a nursery for Baby China.

I already in the past had gotten Olivia pregnant in a passionate moment driven by undulating  lava lamps, mescaline and weed. Baby China being the blessed by-product of our sexual attraction to each other. In our new setting, we’d find out pleased later that Myrika  too would get pregnant. I felt as though I were Fletcher Christian on my own fugitive island hiding out with the two grass skirt loves of my life.

One of my newly acquired  friends, Larry was an artisan and owned a leather making shop next door to our gallery. A real Wyoming cowboy sort with short beard and handlebar mustache. We’d get stoned some nights and head into the dark night of downtown wino alleys on rodent recon patrol armed  with his two .22 pistols where we would send Mickey’s relatives to Disney Valhalla. They would perch on dumpsters and metal bent garbage cans and were easy targets. Had to be careful though as one night one of Larry’s stray bullets grazed the leg of Crazy Stella, a local Greektown fixture who had live here for 40 years running a restaurant and bakery until her husband died I’m sure of an overdose of Baklava cholesterol taking it’s toll by clogging his arteries thicker than rush hour traffic on the John Lodge Freeway  on a Friday afternoon.

My parents, and Olivia’s knew where we were and would visit with a maze of routes taken that would have made the trailblazing last of the mohicans proud. Of course such precautions had to be taken. I was wanted for dodging the draft and my left wing resistance and journalism work...Myrika as a visa expired foreigner they would want to send back to Berlin from whence she came. We had a solution for that. We arranged hastily to get married on Belle Isle, a beautiful island in the Detroit River downtown.

As for Olivia, she was underage at the time of her pregnancy, that was our secret. She was mature for her age Your Honor, Honest. I thought she was 39 not 16. OK son, case dismissed..now about this draft card shit!

We went about our lives, or rather our one shard life as we viewed it. We made money at the gallery with rentals and performances and I was working on air at the Canadian radio station so that along with my growing writing career was all money in the bank.

The 60’s had made room for the emergence of the ‘70’s and life was good...no it was great. By 1975 two major events happened that gave a new direction to our lives...one….Myrika gave birth to our daughter, Alexia, or Alex as we called her...the other was the Fall of Saigon.

If the Sixties were  a cosmic dose of a lovin’ spoonful and a deep throat psychedelic lollipop of protest and pot, free love, free war, free death, then make way ladies and gents...I give you...ta da... the Seventies bringing with it the age of Disco and bubblegum pop on the music battlefield while some of us held out in the Canned Heat and Janis Joplin trenches trying to shield ourselves from the Disco Ducks and the Bee Gee’s weapon of pop “I could be dancing” destruction.  American Graffiti was revved up and ran over the Easy Rider faster than TV Tommy Ivo on the dragstrip, leaving Dennis Hopper  in a jumbled mangled wreck of  redneck retribution once again. The only well defined line of of decade decadence was the Kent State Massacre in 1970.  Gentlemen, start your engines!

While Myrika and I were forging a forgery of a life in our underground  enclave of Detroit...Springtime 1975 in Saigon was about to bloom and boom.

Tranq, now 21 had been with the Viet Cong ever since his family and village had been erased from the topo maps  by U.S. troops, but now revenge and victory were close at hand for him.  April in Vietnam brought more than spring showers. In fact, the pre-monsoonal final offensive was activated for the North Vietnamese capture of Saigon. Named the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, target date for show down show time was May Day, 1975.  

Each battle that spring brought the North Vietnamese  closer to the walls of Amer-Asian Jericho as the South Vietnamese forces, outnumbered and outgunned retreated from Xuan Loc, the last line of defense before the North would penetrate Saigon and her defenses. The South Vietnamese ARVN  forces were ordered to retreat and withdraw to Saigon on April 21. President Thieu resigned the same day reading the grafitti on the wall then fled to Taiwan. A true leader! See Thieu run. Run Thieu. Tea for Thieu in Taiwan.

Trang was in the front lines of the frontal assault. As a foot soldier he walked alongside the North Vietnamese Chinese supplied battle tanks at Bien Hoa as they headed out on the Yellow Brick Road to Saigon making a clean sweep of any South Vietnamese ARVN troops along the way. This was retribution for Tranq’s family, his fiance and his village.

By April 27, 100,000 plus, giver or take, North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong had Saigon surrounded as refugees fled the city spilling  southward from a political  pinata that had  just burst open. Outnumbered again by North Vietnam, the  ARVN forces  didn’t have a chance in hell or Hanoi to hold out. The North Vietnamese shelled the airport closing down any hope for fleeing civilians  to escape by flying  the friendly skies. They were trapped in a Kissinger Headlock.

Trang could taste victory. He taste closure. He could taste blood as chaos and panic lit the fuse of hysteria among Saigon’s civilian population. American helicopters were now instead of strafing rice paddies and villages were in full EVAC mode trying to get as many South Vietnamese, US Officials and foreign nationals to safety as possible. For the pilots and Marines still at the embassy, not one of them wanted to be the last American killed in Vietnam. Better to take your chances of dying in a car wreck on the Dan Ryan in Chicago or a drive by shooting in Detroit.  

In the United States, South Vietnam was unanimous….the country was  doomed. President Gerald Ford had given a televised speech on April 23 declaring an end to the Vietnam War and all U.S. aid.

The EVAC operation continued around the clock, as North Vietnamese tanks breached defenses on the outskirts of Saigon. As Morning dawned on April 30, the Marines uttered their last Semper Fi and were whisked away by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy, Now left unguarded,  the civilian population crashed the gates of the embassy….but unlike Woodstock it was not a free concert they would be attending. Instead...the American Dream forced on the Vietnamese was over. The nightmare was about to begin.

Tranq was swelling with pride as his troops on April 30 entered Saigon and quickly overcame all resistance, capturing key buildings and installations. A tank from the 324th Division crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace that spring morning and the Viet Cong flag was raised above it.

America had lost its first war..,and over 50,000 of its young men. The war that divided America as well as Vietnam from My Lai to Kent State was over...time to give peace a chance.  

The war in Vietnam officially ended in 1975...20 years later in 1995, Myrika and I had opened a larger live theater and performance venue  in Downtown Detroit in an area of old converted industrial brick buildings dating from the early 20th Century Motor City. We placed the venue, aptly Stage Fright  next door to the Juke Box Bar we had purchased 3 years prior.

My writing career was doing  well, off and running and money coming in steady flows, along with the cash from various radio and TV shows I was hosting in the Motor City. Myrika was producing records of many local Motor City acts and was known as Ms. Rock and Roll. That and her own art career along with my income was fueling our rocketship...Olivia eventually met a stockbroker, ten years her junior who knew nothing of her past nor had a clue as to what the 60’s were all about..Olivia said he was a member of the No Zen Gen…..today they live in Chicago and love the pizza and the Cubs. I eat Greek pizza  have season tickets to the Tigers.

The turning point in our lives came when we saw light at the end of our tunnel of plight in 1974 while still underground buried hiding under assumed names. That was the year President G. Ford offered amnesty to those who evaded the draft during the American Vietnam adventure in defeat.  He also granted amnesty to those in the military who deserted their duty while serving. However, the amnesty came with certain conditions, namely that those involved agreed to reaffirm their allegiance to the United States and serve two years working in a public service job.

Not bad...but by 1977 President Jimmy Carter made it crystal clear.  During his presidential campaign, Carter had announced his intention to pardon those who had failed to register for the draft or left the country to avoid service. In a televised debate with incumbent Ford, Carter proposed to implement a blanket pardon, in contrast to Ford’s more selective clemency plan. Carter interpreted pardon as meaning that what you did, whether it’s right or wrong, you’re forgiven for it. And his advocacy of  a pardon for draft evaders was to bring about an end to the divisiveness that had ripped the fabric of our country to shreds as a result of the Vietnam War.

On his second day in office, January 21, 1977, he followed through on his promise.

The pardon was unconditional and wiped criminal records clean, but it only applied to civilians, not the estimated 500,000 to 1 million active-duty personnel who went AWOL  or deserted during the war. Many supporters of Carter’s decision thought they too should be forgiven by the government in an effort to heal national wounds.

Finally we could emerge from the dark, assume our natural born names again and not live in fear of Leavenworth. Myrika, now married to me had taken the oath to  become a citizen and was safe from deportation. The war was finally