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

of near deadly force using only and feet as weapons were legendary in throughout Saigon’s fight club scene. Dark smoke filled clubs in back alleys with South Vietnam banknotes called ‘dongs’ exchanged hands along with U.S. dollars as gambling was an integral part of the competition.

Joey always tested himself by taking on the most accomplished Vietnamese fighter, win or lose, do or die. Even if his cut face flowed with warm blood clouding his vision he carried on. It gave him the fortitude to be the point man on patrol where any minute from a sniper’s bullet from a MAT 49 or a newer Soviet made rifle. Joey had among other things a death wish he carried with him in the jungle as a junkie carries a monkey on his back.  

I could tell the changes in him from his letters and wondered how he would adjust to life back in the states. My other concern was the fact that he intended to desert the military high life and work with the War Resistance underground, not knowing then that I would also be swept up  in it in my own flight from the draft board.

The politicians in Washington  had begun planning for the big push with an ever increasing arsenal of death dealing weapons. It was the Willie Wonka Chocolate Factory of blood and guts.  Special  operations were designed to eradicate the enemy from around  Saigon.  Plans that would involve hundreds of thousands of soldiers, lead to the deaths of thousands on both sides, and bring soul shaking doubts about the war effort to a boil back home to mom and pop alike.

One of the first battles of the new agenda would occur at a village called Ben Suc, a Viet Cong-controlled village. Joeys unit on what many thought was a cake wake erupted in  firestorm of  small-arms fire pinning the troops down, but within a few hours, Ben Suc was under American control, and South Vietnamese troops were brought in to interrogate all men between the ages of 15 and 45 utilizing tactics that would make Gen. Patton cringe.
The troops determined that 30 villagers were Viet Cong. In their search of the area beneath the village they discovered a network of Viet Cong tunnels. By the end of the day remaining villagers and livestock, water buffalo being the holy grail of the village were relocated  When they were gone, the commanders ordered a large hole dug in the center of the village, and thousand f  pounds of explosives were detonated to destroy both the village and the tunnels beneath it. In a flash... Ben Suc no longer existed.

Operations intensified and over the next twenty days Joey and 30,000  fellow grunts in other units were responsible for  a “body count” of 750 Viet Cong and 280 prisoners . According to the nightly newscasts stateside, only seventy two Americans and eleven South Vietnamese were killed. The Pentagon body counts were later to be found inflated and weighted in our favor to keep the war fervor at a fever pitch until a time when Walter Cronkite would smash the pinata of illusion wide open.

Back in Saigon, now a short timer due to leave for the states, he resumed his R and R of sex and savate with a side order of drugs. In Vietnam there was no drug problem. In fact there was never a problem in finding it. It seemed to fall from the  heavens.

Joey wrote saying it was the strongest he had experienced. There was some laced with opium bits that was a real Alice in Wonderland experience. If they weren’t on patrol Joey and his friends would  sleep  until noon. Then like vampires, the  nights were spent in a sexual whirlwind. The clubs were stacked side by side like a sexual traffic jam on the LA freeway. The massage parlors and whore houses were also cheap and plentiful. Joey claimed .these girls were artists in the truest sense stretching your  canvas tight while they worked on creating masterpieces in the gallery of carnal arts.

My job now was to track down the War Resisters Organization, which I would do through a California chapter of the SDS on campus. Now I was doing recon of a different sort.  I, along with Olivia and Myrika decided it was also time to confess to him about Olivia’s pregnancy and my part in it, but Myrika had second thoughts. He was in a war zone, a hot zone and didn’t need any distractions that would dull his senses to react to danger. Better to wait until he came home then tell him when safely on U.S. soil….then the only possible casualty of war would or could be me...Hold on the body count Mr. Cronkite. We may have one more to bag and tag!

 

Chapter 11 - Sunset Stripped

 

 

 

 

If the grit stained streets of the dope and prosciutto infested Greenwich Village in New York City was filled to capacity with the leftovers in a  doggie bag of the Beat Generation, then the Sunset Strip in 1966 was the placenta of the next generation, our generation of peace symbols, LSD and free love being dispensed from a Gatling gun.

The Sunset Strip was  Sherwood Forest complete with Myrika, Olivia and  myself as two maidens fair and one hell of a merry man! The street scene itself was a colorful mixture of fresh Midwestern faces, fresh flesh prey really for the  nefarious predatory vultures who cruised the Strip luring  all the naive sexual carrion it could eat.

When a runaway ended up on the Strip, it didn’t  take long for the termites to start attacking the wood. Young girls and boys would be "befriended" and taken care of with a roof, food and plenty of booze and drugs, then before you can drop your drawers around your ankles you're knee deep on the street whoring for drug money or to make a pimp rich, while he kept you pumped with narcotics, your only reason for living  now was to get loaded, by having sex to earn your high, and avoid the the beatings by your pimp... and the beat goes on, and on, on, on.

Most of the Strips population at night was a forest of fags, johns, teenyboppers, and frat brats. Beer and grass and  an occasional piece of ass. The scene on the Strip was seamy, there is no question about it.  Pop culture was changing, experimentation in music, drugs and sex were keeping beat with the incessant movement of the times. East coast, west coast, there were a bevy of bi-caostal bisexual Eves that held out the forbidden fruit to the young Adams from the midwest...along with bisexual Adams ready to snake the Eves!

Myrika said years later in one of her writings back in Berlin before her death, “Life for the three of us transformed itself into a colorful sexual carnival and a carnal circus of sideshow belly dancers,  jugglers, mimes, barkers, sawdust, and  .25 cent peep show ladies with pink hair and purple eye shadow in too tight corsets, looking for all the world like Warhol's Divine or Joe Dellesandro in full trash bag drag. In general, we were surrounded by a cast of mysterious Russ Meyer misfits, which was OK as we were too!”

Then one night in November of 1966, our world exploded as the Strip ignited into a blue  inferno of police and riots. It began for us on that fateful Saturday as Myrika and I were at the local supermarket buying food when we were handed a flyer being passed out along the Strip inviting people to demonstrate later that day regarding a newly imposed curfew on the strip of 10 P.M. for all those under 18 years of age.

Let’s face it the Strip was alive with human electricity at night with eclectic crowds taking in the street scene, scoring drugs, hustling sex and immersing ourselves in the music at places like Pandora’s Box.
The schizoid dichotomy of the Strip brought two cultures to a line in the sand. It seems the “other” establishments were complaining about the phalanx of hipsters and noise, so the city of L.A. clamped down and imposed a 10 P.M curfew for those under 18, (Olivia was all of 16)  which didn’t go over well with those of us on the street out to sample life to it’s fullest. Hell, we were immortal after all.

The PR shit really hit the hip fan  when when just mere hours before the scheduled protest one of the rock 'n' roll radio stations announced there would be a rally at Pandora's Box, a club at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. The Los Angeles Times reported over  a thousand  demonstrators made a show of force. (Later we found out that in the protest that night were  celebrities such as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda who by the way was  handcuffed by police).


The mainstream unhip media referred to the reaction of the street people to the curfew  as  the "hippie riots", where police and street denizens on the Sunset Strip met in a head-on collision, a clash of cultures, law enforcement with billy clubs smashing skulls and arresting those who got in their way.

Police and sheriff's deputies tore into us and started making arrests. The only good that emerged was the song, “For What It’s Worth” written by Stephen Stills when the Buffalo Springfield were regular performers at clubs on the Strip...everyone thinks it’s about Vietnam...WRONG...Stills performed it at a club on the Strip a month later dedicating it to the Strip and the riots. Like Chicago in ‘68….it was more a police riot than anything else...doughnuts and steroids of today are a reminder of what can happen when a badge goes bad.

As the riots erupted, I quickly grabbed Myrika and Olivia and ducked into a doorway of the nearest store still open. Fortunately it was a head shop festooned with peace symbols and lava lamps and Pandora Box posters of upcoming shows. The smell of incense mixed with the drifting tear gas, while the music of the Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard” blended with the sirens and screams filling the night outside. The store owner took us to a back room and then closed up shop hoping his windows would still be intact in the morning.

I left my Nordic Viking and the pregnant Olivia behind and went out to survey the situation so I could dash off a piece to send back to the Village paper I wrote for when living there. I felt like a foreign correspondent...Walter Cronkite smack dab in the middle of a new Berlin on LA’s version of Krystal Nacht.  

I was no longer seeing a Grant Wood Sonny & Cher portrait of tranquility. It was now Dantes Gestapo Inferno….after that it was black, dark, as I was clubbed from behind and left to lie there in my own blood. Myrika witnessed it from inside the store as she was never one to stay safely where I asked her too. In a flash she ran out to my side after the shopkeeper reluctantly unlocked the door of Fortress Rolling Paper.  Together they managed to get me staggering inside to