Title: When War is Over 1969 – 1975: Flower Children, Futurists,
and the Last Surprise of the Vietnam War: A Memoir
Author: Joseph Mark Glazner
Toronto. Copyright 2023.
Price: $15.99 (Paperback)
Like Glazner’s previous work entitled:California: 1963 – 1967 Spaceship Earth(2022) and Life After America: A Memoir about the Wild and Crazy 1960s (2017) this memoir is of particular interest to the “Vietnam Generation,” “The Woodstock Generation,” boomers, geezers, those of us who are old and about to die. But it should also appeal to peaceniks, and any remnants of the peace and love philosophy who still believe that it will survive well into this new millennium. Take note of the title which makes no mention of the war but only war meaning all war. Given the dates, the war in question, of course, is America’s “Conflict” in South Vietnam. When we last left the author in 1969 he was living the life of a draft resister, an American in exile versus the other alternative of quite possibly not living very much of life at all. This belief was not unfounded as America lost slightly under 60,000 lives in this twenty-year war, while North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and support troops from China lost over 2,000,000 lives. How can you ever win a war when your opponent is willing to throw away lives at a 33 to 1 ratio? Answer: you can’t. This was a very unpopular war, a war that America should have never been in, a war we could have walked away from if not for the hubris of men like Richard Milhous Nixon, a war that no one talked much about after it finally ended. In short, a war that brought about national amnesia, but in reality, for those who lived during its timespan, a war that deep down inside they can never forget.
Stranded in Montreal, Glazner was well aware of his new life circumstances:
If I crossed the border into the US, I would be arrested and offered a choice: a trial which could mean five years in prison, or induction into the military and a quick trip to Vietnam. The military didn’t like troublemakers and sent them to the front lines.
I was a troublemaker. A war resister.A peacenik. A flower child. A hippie. A draft dodger. An outlaw in America(p.1-2).
And he wasn’t alone. Statistics concerning how many draft resisters went to Canada vary wildly. Glazner himself estimates between 16,000 to 25,000 at most, while America’s drama-addicted news media pumped the numbers up to well over 100,000. As with everything else concerning the fog of war, the numbers are always skewed to support whatever point you are trying to make.
With a college degree in hand, an inherent writing ability, and an inner craving to pursue creative outlets, despite the odds, Glazner survived on meagre writing assignments while simultaneously living a Spartan existence. Every now and then he happened upon a break such as when Montreal’s newest newspaper, The Sunday Express, commissioned him to cover John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s famous “Bed-In for Peace” between May 27th to June 2nd, 1969, at Montreal’s luxurious queen Elizabeth Hotel. Occupying four suites, it was far from a low-budget or low-key event. Lennon was a master of self-promotion and not adverse to having a little fun while he was doing it. Glazner’s artistic abilities came to the fore when he produced a poster la guerre est fini [War is Over] which Lennon kept by his bedside and shortly thereafter turned into a full-sized billboard. For a young writer this was the holy grail – John Lennon – just imagine it, and in fact the former Beetle would cut his peace and love classic “Imagine” on October 11th, 1971.
Glazner suffered through a succession of beautiful model-type and hippy goddess girlfriends, never being lonely for long, while working for a forward-looking think tank that supplied abstracts to governmental leaders and heads of industry through a fast-paced newsletter called Changes developed by a group named Orba. The goal was to be ahead of the curve in predicting what future events would be economically and politically impactful. This was during the embryonic days of the computer, and their service was somewhat akin to the internet in a way that the Pony Express was akin to the modern-day Post Office. Orba lived in perpetual peril of going under and went through several staff upheavals, but one fact emerged from all the chaos, that being that Glazner could write under pressure and had real chops as an editor.
South of the border, on May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio, America’s National Guard troops gunned down peacefully protesting students killing four and wounding 11. The focus of the protest was the awareness that the war had spread into neighboring Cambodia. Those of us who thought the war would end anytime soon were sorely mistaken. Richard Nixon keep mouthing the oxymoron of ”peace with honor” as if there’s anything honorable whatsoever about war, and we all learned unequivocally that everything bad in a hippie’s life can be traced directly back to Nixon.
While America struggled with Vietnam, later that year the Quebec Province of Canada struggled with a violent insurrection between French-speaking separatists called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), and the overall English-speaking population. Political leaders were kidnapped and killed, Martial law was enacted in Montreal, violence begat violence. The “October Crisis” had a profound impact on Glazner. Wasn’t there anywhere on earth where peace and love could truly be a lifestyle? Would the war at home ever end?
The last surprise that Glazner mentions came when he discovered that he was no longer considered a draft evader and no longer pursued by the FBI. This came with a reclassification to 1-H in 1971, but Glazner did not become aware of it until 1972. The reclassification(s) were never announced by our government, which seems a little evasive in its own right and more than a little mean-spirited. Glazner questions if Jerry Ford’s pardon of 1974 and Jimmy Carter’s follow-up pardon of 1977 were even necessary.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche said that. “All truths that are kept silent become poison.” There was a lot of poison in Vietnam and a lot of it would not be expunged at the war’s end. When would the end ever come?
The war did come to an end when Nixon announced on January 23, 1973, that an agreement was reached whereby he had achieved his “peace with honor.” There was no celebrating in the streets, on many levels nobody seemed to care. For those that fought in it, there didn’t seem to be a lot of credit given for their service or their heroism. Glazner states:
I can only imagine the outrage that I would have felt if I had let myself be snatched up for that war to return to such silence after the then-longest war in US history. More than two million served in Vietnam – a half million of whom saw action. 58,220 Americans were killed in Vietnam. 303,644 were wounded in action including 153,303 who were wounded seriously enough to be hospitalized. 591 American POW’s were returned by Hanoi in February following the signing of the accord (p. 234).
…North Vietnam and the Viet Cong saw an estimated 1,100,000 military personnel deaths. By some estimates, as many as 2,000,000 North and South Vietnamese civilians died in the war(p. 235).
That was at the time of withdrawal, but the war still had a ways to go before becoming officially over.
The Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese). which began on November 1, 1955, ended on April 30th, 1975. That was the day Saigon was surrendered by the South Vietnamese Army to the North Vietnamese Army, and the US completed the evacuation of some 7,000 US troops and personnel from Vietnam (which began the day before on April 29), ending America’s then-longest war (p. 242).
Like all the battles and all the killing that preceded it, I watched the fall of Saigon on TV thinking, for what, for what?
Glazner sums up the futility of it all stating:
We were the first generation to grow up with the bomb and the reality that humans could destroy life on earth and television, the beginnings of the internet and the living proof that we lived in a global village and everything and everyone were ultimately interconnected. We were able to experience war [except actually bleeding] on the other side of the planet in our living rooms. We had access to information that cast doubt on the war our government was promoting. We witnessed an explosion in the use of illegal and legal mind-altering drugs and medicinal drugs like the birth control pill that accelerated a sexual revolution and anti-biotics that whipped out most sexually transmitted diseases until new ones came along. We were the first generation to begin to realize we were running the risk of polluting ourselves to death. I thought a lot about those times(p. 246).
As did I, and what impressed upon me is that we, as a society, had better start thinking a lot more about the times to come if there is to be a future in much the same way as the author did as editor of Changes. The thing about changes is that they never stop changing.
At its core, this is a book about the evolution of the hippie, flower-child lifestyle to the last roar of the war baby and boomer idealists. We can only hope that succeeding generations will learn from our mistakes and also learn from our greatest contribution to the family of man, that is, that peace and love can still be a noble lifestyle, and that live and let live is the only belief that will indeed continue to let us all live.
