In
1967, an ocean away from the escalating Vietnam War, the Summer of Love
bloomed with psychedelic colors in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury
neighborhood. Most of us remember the two events as distinct phenomena:
One was a story of firebases, napalm, jungles and the draft; the other
of communes, L.S.D., flowers and rock music. In fact, the two were
inextricably linked.
San
Francisco Bay was often the last place a servicemember would see before
heading off to war. By 1967, the United States commitment in Vietnam
had escalated dramatically, to 500,000 in 1967 from 23,000 men in 1965,
with more than 200,000 shipping out from the Oakland Army Base, an
enormous facility located just below the eastern end of the Bay Bridge.
It sent more than just men: The Oakland port also sent 37 million tons
of matériel to Vietnam during the first eight years of the war.
Young
soldiers passing through the Oakland facility often made time to travel
across the bay to catch a glimpse of the emerging scene in the Haight,
especially once the neighborhood began attracting national attention.
Among the hippies and gawking tourists, you might see packs of soldiers
and sailors, in town for a few hours on leave. The war infiltrated the
Haight in other ways, too — one participant in the scene, Reg E.
Williams, wrote in his journal that during an LSD trip, he thought he
glimpsed an armada, bound for Southeast Asia, passing through the fog
under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Others
saw a similarity between the military mobilization on one side of the
bay and the cultural mobilization on the other. Paul Williams, a young
rock critic who visited San Francisco in 1967 and would soon move to
Northern California, imagined the Fillmore Auditorium and other
psychedelic rock concert halls as “induction centers” just like the one
in Oakland that antiwar protesters targeted, except in these venues,
“the teeny-boppers, the college students, the curious adults come down
to the Fillmore to see what’s going on, and they do see, and pretty soon
they’re part of it.”
While
there were differences between antiwar activists and the less-overtly
political “freaks” of Haight Ashbury, the freaks also opposed the war.
Hippies in the Haight passed out flowers to protesters marching through
their neighborhood, when they didn’t join the marches themselves.
Psychedelic concert posters from the era show that many of the earliest
rock shows — including the one Ronald Reagan infamously condemned on
stump speeches when he ran for and won the California governorship in
1966 — were benefits for antiwar efforts. After a long day on the
barricades, it seems that even the political activists yearned to get
inducted into the Summer of Love.
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By
1967, the political and countercultural scenes of the Bay Area, always
closely connected, were merging in new ways. The organizers of the
January 1967 Human Be-In/Gathering of the Tribes clearly had Vietnam on
their mind. “The reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of
activities that the older generation are engaged in,” Jay Thelin, a
co-owner of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street as well as a member of
the Council for a Summer of Love, remarked to reporters, “is because
those activities are for us meaningless. They have led to a monstrous
war in Vietnam, for example. And that’s why it’s all related, the
psychedelics and the war and the protesting and the gap in the
generations.”
Thelin’s
brother Ron concurred. “Ultimately,” he wrote of the Human Be-In and
similar efforts, “the energy generated in gatherings like this could
shift the balances enough to end the war in Vietnam and revitalize many
dead hearts.”
When
life in the Haight worsened over the course of 1967, as hundreds of
thousands of young people made pilgrimages to San Francisco and as
harder drugs and hustlers entered the picture, the specter of Vietnam
appeared even more intensely. To Chester Anderson, who published the
Communications Company broadsheet, the Haight had become “a scale model
of Vietnam,” a place where “minds and bodies are being maimed as we
watch.”
Some
participants even imagined the hallucinogenic drug experimentation so
central to the mystique and experience of the Summer of Love as a kind
of parallel to the war in Southeast Asia. Darby Slick, guitarist for the
Great Society and brother-in-law of the singer Grace Slick, described
taking drugs not as a joyous experience but rather as “our Vietnam, the
Battle of the Brain Cells, and drugs were the weapons, the transport
ships, the airplanes, and people were the weapons too.” The war, present
in the Bay Area in a very concrete way, took on powerful symbolic
meaning. As a letter to the underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb
succinctly put it: “There probably would be no Haight Ashbury without
the war.”
Just
as the war became a central theme in the counterculture, the
counterculture became central to the G.I. experience in Vietnam. By
1967, military leaders were beginning to realize that they had a severe
morale problem among younger soldiers, many of them draftees who felt
alienated from their older senior officers and confused by the war’s
purpose. More and more took to drugs to escape the war’s pressures,
aimlessness and boredom. One Army report in 1968 estimated that
marijuana use increased 260 percent over the course of the previous
year. The armed forces tried to limit drug use through disciplinary
measures, but without much success.
More
successfully, they turned to a tactic that had worked well in the past:
They would provide troops with leisure activities from domestic life to
buoy spirits. By 1967, this meant welcoming the countercultural sounds
and styles of rock to Vietnam, with the odd result that as antiwar
protesters back in the United States tried to “bring the war home,” as
the slogan of the time went, the military brought peace, love and
flowers to the war.
Of
course, the Grateful Dead were not about to join Bob Hope on a U.S.O.
tour of Southeast Asia. To address the lack of available entertainment
in-country, Armed Forces Radio Vietnam added additional “acid rock”
programming in the years after 1967. The Pacific Stars and Stripes
correspondent Stephen F. Kroft reported in 1970, “The ‘Sergeant Pepper
Show,’ an hour and a half of ‘underground’ music broadcast on Sunday
evening over AFVN-AM, has been expanded to two hours” after survey of
troops in 1968 had revealed a hunger for the new, countercultural genre
of music.
The
Entertainment Branch of the Army also developed a program — the Command
Military Touring Shows — to audition, organize and support touring
soldier rock bands. Performing songs ranging from “White Rabbit” by
Jefferson Airplane to the overtly antiwar anthem “War” by the Motown
singer Edwin Starr (with its chant “War! What is it good for? Absolutely
nothing!”), bands like Fixed Water, Fresh Air and the Electric Grunts
delivered their fellow G.I.s a psychedelicized taste of home.
Fixed
Water was especially popular. In the summer of 1969, as Woodstock took
place in upstate New York, the band toured Vietnam. Ersatz-psychedelic
posters produced by the military made declarations such as, “USARV
Special Services Entertainment Branch is proud to present the
mind-bending psychedelic sounds of the ‘Fixed Water.’ ” The band was so
well liked that it went out on a second 60-day tour of bases that fall.
“Strong and heavy,” the poster read this time, “the ‘Fixed Water’ is the
ultimate in psychedelic now-sounds. Prepare yourself!”
The
Entertainment Branch even created an interracial “Rock ‘n’ Soul” band
clearly modeled on Sly and the Family Stone. Named after a song by that
Bay Area band, Everyday People performed around Vietnam during 1970 and
1971, garnering attention for its ability to bring servicemen together
for moments of solidarity and collective release despite the racially
charged tensions of the military at the time, when a disagreement over
whether soul or country songs should be played on a base jukebox could
lead to a race riot. In contrast, at an Everyday People concert,
“Performers were very ‘together,’ ” as one Entertainment Branch
assistant reported, “and succeeded very well in securing audience
participation.”
Here
was a profound irony: Everyday People and other C.M.T.S. rock bands did
indeed seem to raise morale in Vietnam, at least if Entertainment
Branch reports, Army newspaper articles, audience evaluation forms and
the memories of G.I.s are to be believed. But they did so by producing
mini-Haight Ashburys, tiny Summers of Love, within the sprawling
American military intervention overseas. Even as the sounds of the
Summer of Love were successfully imported to raise morale, never causing
G.I.s to stop fighting in any direct way, they also seem to have
intensified a profound disillusion with the Vietnam War. As one veteran,
John Imsdahl, remembered, “We listened to Janis Joplin and, you know,
home music — you know. So definitely, we were — we were antiwar. It’s
odd to say that.”
Whether
or not the cross-fertilization directly generated antiwar sentiment
among the troops or not, the links between San Francisco and Vietnam
produced potent contradictions. The photojournalist Tim Page caught
these strange intersections in a May 1968 photo: An American G.I. sits
ostentatiously on a tank turret, holding a pink umbrella. In his helmet
in large letters, he has labeled himself a “hippie.” Another iconic Page
photograph from 1968 crystallizes the paradox even more vividly: an
American soldier wearing a large gold peace medallion, but the symbol
dangles from his neck between a bullet-filled bandoleer. In Vietnam, as
in San Francisco, peace and war, dissent and continued American military
imperialism hung together — not apart — after 1967.
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