Land of the Free

Content warnings: war, drug use

--Day One--

Eddie March was alive and well. He woke to the smell of cow manure filling the car. The light filtering through the bug-smattered windshield was bright and pure; Eddie could feel it deep in his marrow as the car idled in a long line of traffic, flowing down that country road in Bethel, New York. It was August 15, 1969 and they were headed to a place that promised “three days of peace and music”. His friend Nathan Clark was driving the carload of people in his brother’s 1963 Ford Fairlane. Eddie was seated next to Nathan’s cousin, Maureen, who was fast asleep, exhausted from their nearly 900 mile drive from Milwaukee. In the passenger seat was Nathan’s girlfriend, Cindy, who liked to go by “Cin” because she claims that’s what she’s best at doing - sinning (she was an anti-war protester who had been arrested three times).

The county highway was jam packed and people began abandoning their cars, belongings slung over shoulders, hats pulled low to shield the morning sun, dogs on leashes squatting to urinate along the side of the road.

“Look at these cats,” Cindy giggled, pointing out the window and grabbing the hands of passersby. “Let’s do what they’re doin’. Let’s just get out here, Nathan.”

“Man, I don’t know, Cin. Doug will kill me if anything happens to the car.”

Cindy was halfway out of the car window now, sharing high-fives and peace signs with the strangers walking along the road. Nathan tried to pull her back in, but she was stubborn. “It’ll be fine, babe.” She opened the door and made to get out, grabbing a blanket and the big, brown suede bag she carried with her everywhere. 

Eddie pressed his palm against Maureen’s bare shoulder - she wore a simple blue peasant top which had fallen a bit - and shook her gently. She woke and took in the scene with a dazed smile.

“We’re here,” Eddie told her as he began to follow Cindy’s suit. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen to the car, Nathan. Look at all these other folks doing the same thing.”

They cranked up the windows and exited the car.

Eddie had purchased the tickets for Woodstock ahead of time at a Milwaukee record store, but it turns out they may not have even needed them. Men and women were flocking to the festival in droves and soon were entering free of charge. Eddie could’ve been mad, but mostly he thought it was a beautiful thing, the excitement for this chance at freedom.

Eddie liked to think he was among all of his people there - the freaks and the hippies and the Vietnam protestors, all fed up with the era of conscription. Eddie, who had recently turned eighteen, was a middle child, sandwiched between his two brothers. His older brother, Chuck, had willingly enlisted in the army and was somewhere over oceans, forests, and fields of rice paddies, wielding a weapon too heavy for his soul. But he was his father’s son. He wanted to please dear old dad and decided Vietnam was the opportunity to do so. It worked. Their father relished the fact that he had at least one son who “stood for something”, as though Eddie’s pacifism wasn’t itself an honorable stance. 

For all Eddie knew, Chuck could be blown to bits at any moment. Maybe they wouldn’t know about it for days after, but Eddie hoped he would feel it like he felt the late summer breeze as he and his friends made their way into the crowd. He hoped it would ring out loud in his subconscious like the amps and mics being tested on a stage in the distance. He hoped he would feel it in his bones and could say goodbye.

Cindy was skipping along in front of them, whirling in a circle of jet black hair and tassels from her vest. She screamed, “This is so fucking far out!” before doing a cartwheel in the grass. Nathan wrapped her up in his arms and lifted her onto his shoulders.

Behind them, Maureen looped her arm through Eddie’s and told him about how angry her mother would be once she found out she had followed through on her decision to come. She’d snuck out in the night to meet the group at the local Tastee-Freez.

“She just doesn’t understand. She never will.” Maureen shaded her eyes from the sun, even though she wore dark, round-framed sunglasses. “They just don’t get this, what’s being done here. They think it’s escapism, but it’s not. It’s not.”

“It’s just us being us,” Eddie responded.

She smiled, bright like the sky. “Exactly.”

As the hours until the opening act approached - everything was delayed at the festival - the group’s neighbors on the blanket next to them were already beginning to trip out on various hallucinogens. Some were rolling fat joints. A man next to Eddie passed him a one with a smile and a tip of his head that said, Go on, take it.

“Thanks, man.” Eddie and Maureen sucked on the joint a few times before passing it back to the man. He would never speak to him again, as they were soon lost in a sea of people speeding and tripping, unbound and unwound.

Nathan jogged back to their group, a baggie in hand. Likely some acid tabs that he had scored. He and Cindy placed one of the small tablets on their tongue, but Maureen and Eddie stored theirs in their pockets, saving them for later.

When Richie Havens began to strum away on his guitar, singing about giving love away, the somehow still patient crowd of festival-goers cheered him on. Maureen placed her hand atop Eddie’s on the old blanket. She smiled and sang along.

--Day Two--

The group of four had unintentionally split off, Cindy taking Nathan to one of the medical tents due to a bad acid trip. Maureen and Eddie avoided the tablets in their pockets that had probably disintegrated in the torrential downpour the night before. Instead, they shared hits off of blunts and revelled in the bliss brought on by the marijuana. 

Rain continued throughout the day’s events, but Eddie could care less. He and Maureen huddled under a blanket that would soon soak through.

Beneath the relative shelter of the blanket, she asked him, “Are you afraid?”

He didn’t need to ask her to clarify. He knew what she was referring to. The war. The draft. Being shipped off to who-knows-where to kill and maim. To be given a gun. To point and shoot. Point and shoot. Point and shoot.

“I’m fucking terrified,” he told her. “I don’t know how to do any of that, the killing, the bombing. I don’t think I can stomach it. And for what? What’s the point?”

The question lingered in the air between them. There was no answer that would satisfy him, or her, or anyone else in this place.

Later, after Santana’s set, Maureen led Eddie to one of the many open fields surrounding the festival site. Her clothes were stuck to her skin and she peeled them off in a languorous way. He wasn’t sure if it was the high he was still feeling or the fact that this felt positively out of the blue, but whatever it was, he found himself rendered speechless.

They made love in the tall grass. Soon after, the noise of a helicopter’s blades interrupted their revelry. Dry clothes were falling from the sky onto the wet hippies.

--Day Three--

Come on mothers throughout the land

Pack your boys off to Viet Nam

Come on fathers don't hesitate

Send your sons off before it's too late

And you can be the first ones on your block

To have your boy come home in a box

And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for

Don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam

And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates

Ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee we're all gonna die

Thousands sang along with Country Joe & The Fish. The song’s rhythm and melody felt upbeat, but the lyrics were anything but. The crowd roared, as if by singing loud enough, they could manifest an end to this senseless fighting. But much like their efforts that weekend to ward off the willful storms by shouting, “No rain, no rain!”, nothing could stop the war. Even though Eddie attended the protests and was involved with a local organizing chapter as a high school student, he knew in his gut that there was no hope for an end until someone held the winner’s trophy.

At the tender age of 18, he had been made to register for the draft just weeks earlier on his birthday, July 20. He hadn’t had any plans after he’d graduated, other than crossing his fingers and hoping against hope. No one in his family had ever attended college, and his grades were just barely good enough to see him across the stage to grab his diploma, let alone attend university. He felt doomed and defeated.

Still he sang along, knowing his fate was in the hands of a draft board.

--Day Four--

Three days of peace became four, rain delays having wreaked havoc on the festival’s schedule. Many of the concertgoers, needing to face typical Monday morning realities and responsibilities, had already left before Jimi took the stage and made what would one day become one of the most iconic performances of the Star Spangled Banner - mixed in with a medley of other hit songs - in history.

The festival’s ending sank in and Eddie felt a change in temperature. The once familiar highs - both literal and metaphorical - that had raged through him in the previous days were followed by the lowest of lows. As his friends cheered Jimi on, begging for an encore, to which he relented, Eddie was beside himself with grief. For his countrymen, the Vietnamese, the world, himself. He wanted love to be enough and naively fantasized about a day when everyone would see the light, feel what he felt amongst his thousands of brothers and sisters surrounding him: solidarity.

--December 1, 1969--

Chuck died in October of 1969, at the tail end of Operation Toan Thang III. Their father shed a single tear as the casket was lowered into the ground, along with his own grief, covered with dirt and worms, a box to keep closed and out of sight.

Nathan and Eddie were in a bar on that chilly December night. Lottery night. They consumed beer after beer as they watched the little men on the screen roll the spinner. The tumbling of the balls in the machine felt like an insult; as though it were merely a game of Bingo and not a sealed fate.

Numbers were read and the young men in the room waited on baited breath. When someone’s number was called, the reactions were varied: obscenities and spittle flying out of mouths, crying, the maniacal laughter of a man - barely out of boyhood - who had resigned himself to the bleakness of it all and in doing so, maintained a “fuck it all” attitude. But the bleakest reaction of all came from those who stayed silent, sipping their beer before quietly exiting the premises. 

In a moment of quietude, Eddie’s hearing went fuzzy and a ringing in his ears echoed for what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds. When the sound of the bar returned, Nathan’s hand was atop Eddie’s, consoling and comforting.

“Your number, man.” He pointed to the screen.

July 20, 1951. Number 187. Had he been born one day earlier, he would’ve been safe.

--December 20, 1969--

As Eddie basked in the vestigial quiet on the floor of his childhood bedroom - his parents out at a holiday party - he recalled the silence in the bar that day, the usually rowdy crowd restrained. He wondered what would become of those men whose numbers, pasted onto those little ping-pong balls, were called. Some were off to college, some to Canada, some to prison. Still many others were inevitably heading to foreign lands.

Eddie’s vision blurred and his arms felt like heavy weights protruding out of his shoulders. His naive, unassuming mother always left her sleeping pills out on her bedside table like a decoration for the mentally ill. He didn’t leave a note. He couldn’t find a pen. It was just as well. He had nothing to say. 

He dragged his finger across the shag carpet of his room. First a circle, then a few legs inside of that. Peace. His mother would weep. His father would hang his head in shame.

Darkness fell like the threat of the hydrogen bomb. He felt himself become airless. He shook with fear.

Eddie March was gone.