In the late 60's and early 70's, my best friend Michael and I would drive to San Diego on Saturdays or Sundays to get away. For me it was cathartic when we would drive past the Edson Range training facility at Marine Camp Pendleton and the Marine and Navy Recruit Depots in San Diego. We soon even found our way to the Point Loma Military Cemetary. Besides the remarkable view of the city, the cemetary was a poignant reminder of our own mortality.
It was also a stark reminder of the casualties of the war in Vietnam. After every Memorial Day or Veterans Day, flowers would cover many of the graves. Some families and friends would place letters to the dead on the graves. Mike and I were in college then. Perhaps we had just turned twenty, not even old enough to legally drink. Yet this cemetary, or one very much like it in L.A., could be in our future if we were caught up in the war.
Coming up against mortality like that was terrifically sobering. These were young men of our own generation. That had not been true of the war in the beginning. But the conflict had continued, and even widened, throughout the 60's, so that some of the soldiers and airmen, sailors and marines, were now slightly younger than we. As I would feel more than a decade or two later when those of our generation began dying of AIDS, I had a trememdous sense of guilt, as well.
My family--consisting of my mom, my sister, and me--was lower middle class, living in a rented, two bedroom, one bath house in South Gate, CA, a suburb of LA; but I was able to work part time and pay my own way through college in those days. I had a used 1966 Mustang GT convertible that I also paid for myself (mom co-signed on the loan). I didn't drink or smoke or use drugs, and so I remember the '60's well enough. When I finally graduated from college in December of 1971, I owed no money to anyone. But I had to find my own way then, and the military seemed the only alternative while the war was going on.
Point Loma, on the slopes
No one seems to tremble.
No fear for what once was
when all ceased to be soldiers.
I am terrified,
yet even the graves assure me--
we are veterans,
we survived.
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