The Sixties--1968 Poem by Sandy Fulton

1968
Eleven years in the Navy, nearly twelve.
The ideal life for me:
new jobs, new scenery,
new friends every two years,
yet always running into someone you knew.
The perfect career for a perpetual peripatetic.

But the war!
No longer could I abide
needless rows of tombstones,
villages crisped like toast,
a generation of soldiers who used to be promising young men
lost to death, drugs and wounds.

Why were we there?
No one could tell us
but Martin Luther King.
He knew, told the truth,
And later that year they killed him, too.

I wanted my discharge, put on my uniform with only
a desire to be free, marching—
but the Navy said not till December.

I spent time waiting in line five hours
for the White Album
(but Disraeli Gears was better)
and turning my dusty tropical fish tanks
into homes for lovely female white rats:
Kissy Suzuki, Ringnose, Popcorn.
Never will I forget your affection
and good humor.
Your entertainments kept me sane that long year,
you little fuzzy britches.
Each evening I sat at my electronic keyboard
with tape recorder and composition paper,
writing chamber trios,
chorales, a piano sonata,
an electronic symphony,
to forget my military obligations
and get the bad taste of violence out of my gut
while inflation and the national debt shot up
like fever thermometers
registering the nation's sickness.

"No new taxes! "
That became the mindless litany,
as if war cost nothing.
California hucksters began it, propositioning their people,
claiming that every ill was the fault of the greedy poor,
letting the old American demons loose:
racism, whining white privilege, gun-idolatry, chest thumping,
nativism, kicking the weak.
All in the name of Rugged Individualism
and Free Enterprise
they found a shabby formula to win Washington.

In December the Navy let me go, but the war dragged on.

Thirty-two years old, never married,
Out of the Navy for more than a week,
looking for work.
On another New Year's Eve
I drove to the New York Humanists' party alone,
danced, sang,
played a group game called "Trust Your Neighbor"
where you stand in a circle, close your eyes,
fall backward—

Into the arms of a big young man
I'd never before noticed
with curly dark hair and beard
and a profile like Emperor Trajan on a Roman coin.
We danced, played more games,
kissed breathlessly at midnight,
went to an all-night restaurant with checkered tablecloths,
ate pizza and talked till dawn.

Eugene was his name,
graduate student, physics instructor.
He was political.
He hated the war.
He admired me for resigning from the Navy.
I admired him for sticking flowers into rifles
at the Pentagon,
murmured his Italian family name into my pillow
and decided I'd like to wear it as my own.