Stoned Trooper:
"1968 was a tumultuous year of change; Revolution Riot Revelation.
There was the Tet Offensive, the Red Guard, the Merry Month of May in
Paris, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Robert Kennedy &
Martin Luther King assassinated, 38 cities of ——— ? Across the USA. It
went off everywhere, vanguarded by a new wave of music and thought.
It was also the year that 18 year olds were emancipated. They got the
vote. Before that you could be drafted to serve and kill but not buy a
beer in a bar. In 1968 the ballot boxes went out into the field in Viet
Nam, the first time in a war.
LIFE magazine sent out 5 reporter/photographer teams to canvass the new
electorate. We all drew different units and specialists. I got a day
plodding the sodden boonies with the 9th Division, who were searching
for the V.C. teams rocketing Saigon from the south. The platoon I was
assigned to were virtually all stoners; growing the weed on the
perimeter of their base or getting it from cross border, nearby
Cambodia.
They thought that Nixon was a beggar and they would have voted for Bobby
if he hadn’t been assassinated - he promised to stop the war in three
months." - Tim Page
"Punk reigned in San Francisco’s Bay Area in the mid ’70’s. The hub of
the movement was the Mabuhay Gardens in the heart of North Beach. The
former Filipino café/bar became the prime venue for both local acts and
big visitors. The Dead Kennedy’s played their first gig there. It
became as famous at CBGB’s was on the east coast but with a stronger
political ethos. It’s small apron stage barely accommodated the Ramones
then at the height of their fame." - Tim Page
"John Steinbeck Jnr. Was quoted as saying ‘if all religions were rivers,
this is the sea into which they would flow’. The Daoist peace sect,
led by their master, a tiny hunch-backed old man, a former chemical
engineer, occupied the end of a sandbar island, mid-stream Mekong,
between My Tho & Ben Tre in the Delta.
The Neo-Catholic, Buddhist church of Dao embraced all the faiths of the
region into a Philosophy of bringing peace to Indochina. Backed by
wealthy Chinese trucking concerns, the Disneyland like edifice had an
expanded populace of 2k plus after the Tet Offensive deserters from all
sides and civilians seeking shelter with jobs in the mainland towns.
Everyone lived a macrobiotic life, the Dao Duo, the master, lived only
on coconuts; the name he had taken, the coconut monk. They prayed 24/7
for peace on a concrete dias with ornate towers and a view of the war a
kilometre away. There were no weapons and aviation flew around the
edifice. Modern Vietnamese socialism has condemned the island to a
tourist trap." - Tim Page
