Summer of Love
Summer ’68: another Summer of Love. You couldn’t prove it by me, though.
Oh, I wasn’t totally chaste that summer. But according to their remembrances, everyone else was getting laid six times a day with at least four different people. Mostly of the opposite sex—at least if you were hetero.
No, that summer, like every summer before it and every one since, I was pretty much a bewildered bystander. I knew something was happening; just didn’t know where. And I was pretty sure that wherever it was happening, it probably wasn’t here.
Still, there is a degree of nostalgia about it. Frankly, though, for most of that summer, I was scared. Vietnam, you see. I was sure I was going. Sergeant Crispino said so. He was my Air Force Training Instructor. He told us all one night, “If any of you don’t think you're going to Vietnam, think again, because you’re all going.” Well, that settled that.
Curiously, while I was still not too crazy about going (read: quite frightened), a strange calmness came with the knowledge and the resignation. No need to worry any more whether it was going to happen because as surely as Sergeant Crispino had three stripes on his arm and no hair on his head, we were all going.
Months later, toward the end of my training to be an Air Force journalist, I called home. My mother accepted the collect charges for the unexpected call.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Well, hello! How are you?”
“Good, good. Umm, I got my orders…”
“Oh, you did?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh, I’m going overseas…”
“Oh?”
As it turned out, some of us were going to Vietnam, but I wasn’t. No sir, instead of sweating in the jungle heat, watching buddies fall face down in the mud, I was destined to watch them fall face down in the parking lots of English pubs.
So though it wasn’t exactly a Summer of Love for me, it wasn’t a Summer of Bullets either.
Not a bad trade.