Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  My father, he stayed home; so he didn’t sit very well with me at all, because everybody else was a hero and my father is a turd sitting back. Later I found out that because he was the oldest son in the family, he had to go to work and support my grandmother because she was a widow.

  At the same time, Flanagan recalls the anxieties of the early Cold War years. For him, patriotic pride mixed with a desire to participate in correcting the problem.

  I vividly remember sitting on the stoop at my girlfriend’s house on Fourth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street. We listened to Kennedy talking during the missile crisis and having the sense that it’s going to blow up; we’re going to have a nuclear exchange, and that’s going to be the end. We’re going to die within two days. I remember those things and wanting to do something about it.

  I was very happy to be an American and I understood what it meant and I understood the freedoms that I got. I ain’t got much, but I got a lot of freedoms that other people don’t. I could do the right thing, I could protect people, and I could eventually get married and have some kids and a car and maybe get a house on the island like my brother did. So that’s where the patriotism came. Of course, growing up Catholic, every morning we said the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer; I mean, that’s just the way it is. You waved flags; you went to parades; you were proud to see your uncles marching in the Veterans Day Parade, and that … patriotism is there.

  However, given the family’s relative poverty and what he describes as a constricted sense of his personal horizons, he didn’t believe that he had much of a future to look forward to.

  My goals were so limited. What I thought I was going to be able to do was nothing. I remember the view of my life that I had in my head; I could see a block of, you know, eight years, which is elementary school, and then the four-year block that’s half the size as, you know, high school, and then it was just black. There was nothing—you know, nothing at the end; there was no mountain to go up; there was no “here’s what I want to be when I grow up.” You take a look; your uncles are cops and that stuff and you say, “Okay; I’ll probably end up being a cop.”

  By 1965, the military seemed a natural and appropriate way out.

  While the U.S. military sent advisers to Vietnam in the mid-1950s and there were more than sixteen thousand American personnel there by 1963, the American war effort significantly expanded shortly afterward. Following alleged attacks on U.S. Navy patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964, authorizing President Johnson to use force, at his discretion, to protect South Vietnam. As a result, the Selective Service began to conscript larger and larger numbers of New Yorkers. At the time, certain groups of young men, college students and parents of young children among them, were allowed to defer the draft. Those who had completed their high school education and had not enrolled in college (or perhaps had left college for one reason or another) were the first to be drafted.9

  After Flanagan graduated from high school, his certainty that he would be drafted increased. As the war in Vietnam grew, some friends and co-workers of draft age were maneuvering to get into the National Guard and reserve units. He and his friends took a number of the appropriate civil service exams. Flanagan did well but was told he would have to work on his physical fitness, not something he was inclined to do. Instead, he and his buddies visited various recruiters, because they were told that the recruiters might be able to steer them into their preferred branch of service. After listening to all the pitches offered, and hearing repeatedly that he would need to sign up for four years for the more interesting service options, including officers’ training, he decided to schedule a date for his induction into the military, effectively volunteering for the draft. As he writes in his autobiography, “This way I knew I was going to go soon, but that it would be only for 2 years.”10 Draftees served for two years; volunteers for three.

  Postwar baby boomers were influenced by a generation that had confronted incredible challenges. In 1932, as a result of the Great Depression, one-third of the city’s manufacturing facilities had shut down, and 1.6 million New Yorkers were receiving some form of relief.11 In a piece written in 1955, the New York Times writer Meyer Berger would describe a resilient city that had just gone through “the tensest quarter-century in her 302 municipal years. In that period,” Berger wrote, the city “struggled out of black depression’s pit to her greatest opulence. She maintained her population lead and painfully let out her stays to prevent utter traffic strangulation. She tore down more slums in those twenty-five years than in any other quarter-century in her history; replaced them with airier housing set in green playgrounds and doubled her park space.” In this era, the Lincoln, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels were dug, along with additional routes out of Manhattan. That quarter century also saw the construction of the George Washington, Triboro, and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges and the completion of the Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue subways. As the war removed the last vestiges of the Great Depression, it brought new tensions and fears, including worries about blackouts, threats of a water shortage, and a rise in delinquency.12 But there was work to be done and a hungry population willing to do it. Working-class New Yorkers labored in factories and served on the police force; they worked to keep the transportation systems running and the city sanitary. They would also become grandparents and parents, raising the generation that would eventually be asked to serve in Vietnam.

  Edward Blanco, a retired government worker, was born in Manhattan but raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My mother and father are from Puerto Rico, he says. They met here in this country. His father arrived in New York City after completing his U.S. military service in 1946, and his mother arrived in the same year. During that time, there was a surge of immigrants from Puerto Rico into the continental United States, New York City especially.

  Blanco lived on West Twenty-Ninth Street until his parents’ marriage failed, when he moved with his mother and sister to the Sumner Avenue public housing projects, in Brooklyn, where he lived until he went to Vietnam. His mother worked in the garment district as a seamstress. Many first- and second-generation Jewish and Italian workers who had dominated the garment industry until that time had retired or left the business. This meant new employment opportunities for minorities, including Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, and women like Ms. Blanco.

  Blanco recalls the projects where he grew up as a tough neighborhood.

  It’s low-income families. At that time, there were no doctors or lawyers or, you know, any professionals living in the projects. There were people who worked in factories; my mother worked as a seamstress. People were on public assistance. When I first moved into the projects, there [were] a few nonblack or Hispanic families, but very, very few. The projects were brand-new; they had just built them. And so there were a few Jewish families and a few Italian families, but within four or five years they were gone. There was a Jewish family that was there much longer. They were, like, older people, and I guess they didn’t have anyplace else to go. But it was mostly black and Hispanic families.

  As he thinks back, he remembers how he and his friends were outside all the time, playing in the parks—softball especially. There were a lot of drugs in the neighborhood, and kids occasionally had run-ins with the police and with the youth gangs in the area.

  My project had a gang. Just to give you an idea of what kind of neighborhood I lived in. All the projects had their own gangs, and the neighborhoods had their own gangs. And the gang that was in my proj-ect was called the Buccaneers—mostly a black gang with some Latinos and Puerto Ricans—and then there was the Chaplains, there was the Stompers, there was the Black Knights. The Buccaneers were a relatively small gang, but they were pretty fierce. And we would get invaded by Stompers and Chaplains in the nighttime in the summer and spring.

  One time the Stompers came to my project. There had been a gang fight, and [the Buccaneers] killed a Stomper in front of my project building, a seventeen-
year-old kid who had just graduated from high school that summer. He was supposedly the president of the Stompers. We had chains to separate the grass from the walkways, and people used to take those chains, cut them, and use them as weapons. And what I heard was they stomped and chained him and they killed him with the chain. Soon after that the Stompers lost another guy. He was knifed and killed by the Buccaneers. Now they had lost two guys.

  I wasn’t into any gangs, but I knew guys in the Buccaneers; it was good to know them. [Laughs.] And I saw this guy coming. I always remember because he’s got white pants on, a dark shirt, and, like, a little hat—like a straw hat, and he’s got a cane. [Gestures.] And I see him walking and he gets past the first light and then he enters the second light and he’s walking, but then as he leaves, like, the second light, I see in the first light where he has been about five, six, or seven guys. So I said, “Holy shit; I think these are the Stompers coming back and this guy might be with them. I don’t know who the fuck he is.” And he comes up and he says, “Do any of you motherfuckers jitterbug?”

  And I panicked … just took off because I … didn’t know what these guys were going to do. So he yelled out, “Get that motherfucker,” and I was running. I was like sixteen years old or something, and I was running like crazy. And they started chasing me, and I ran into a building and I ran up to my apartment and I didn’t have the key and they caught me. But when they saw me, they saw I wasn’t the Buccaneer. But they got pissed because I had made them run and chase me, and he said, “Let’s kick his fucking ass.” And the other guy said, “Nah.” Anyway, they argued about it for like a second or two, and they just took off.

  I knew people who died of ODs and stuff like that. But most of my closest friends and I stuck to playing softball. We didn’t get into any heavy drug use or gangs. We had a softball team, and we just kind of stayed out of that kind of trouble.

  Blanco attended the local junior high school and had the gift of a math teacher, Mr. Gibson, who had a tremendous impact on his life. Mr. Gibson wanted more minorities to get into one of New York’s selective high schools, Brooklyn Tech, in Fort Greene. So he identified several young boys to groom for admission into the school. He took these children under his wing and tutored them, gave them additional homework, and tried to push them academically. They took the admissions test in the eighth grade and failed. So he pushed them twice as hard. In ninth grade, Blanco and three others passed the admissions test and started Tech in the tenth grade.

  It was me, this guy Jeff, and Arthur; we went to Brooklyn Tech, which was a very good high school. I didn’t realize it at the time. I mean, I didn’t even think about those things. But it made a difference.

  While World War II stories did influence Blanco and push him toward military service, he remembers that his father’s story probably involved as much invention as truth.

  I would visualize that he was in action, but later on I realized he didn’t really see any close-up action. He may have been on an island that got bombed or something, but … he had a little vaccination scar here. And when I was a little kid, he told me it was a bullet wound.

  He also links the images of war on the silver screen to his own interest in the service.

  I would watch a lot of World War II movies, you know, John Wayne and everything. And then when the news started talking about Vietnam, it caught my interest and I was in high school. In ’65, I was just graduating; it was my last year in high school, and that’s when the Marines landed [in Da Nang] in March of ’65. And I was just paying attention to it, and even before that I was paying attention to it. I was just, “There’s something going on here.” And I kind of was getting interested in joining.

  By the time Blanco graduated, a lot of his slightly older friends from the neighborhood were already gone. They had either joined the service or been drafted. While Blanco could have gone to college, he decided not to. Everyone in his class at Brooklyn Tech was planning on college, and they thought he was crazy. But Blanco wanted to serve. At age seventeen he asked his mother to sign the papers to allow him to go into the military. She refused. He had to wait until he was eighteen.

  He got a job with ITT, bringing in $72 a week—good money at the time. He also took the test to qualify for work at the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), and while he did well on the exam, he found he couldn’t work there until he was eighteen. He returned to the MTA when he turned eighteen and got an offer for $112 a week (it was the starting salary), more than his mother was making. Thinking he ought to stay home and help his mother, he took the job but quickly began to reconsider his decision.

  The war was blowing up, and my friends were all there, two of them were already in Vietnam. And I said, “Nah, I’m going to go.” I really wanted to go there; I wanted the adventure of it, you know. Throughout the ages, young boys have been wanting to go to war for the adventure and the excitement; I’m no different.

  At first he aspired to be a Marine, in part because he loved those old movies so much.

  They ate up my mind. I wanted to be a Marine, and they were an elite unit. I was going to go into battle and be with an elite unit; I don’t want to be with some scrubs that got drafted, you know. That’s the way I’m thinking back then. I don’t feel that way about draftees now, but back then … But I said, “I’m not going to join for four years. I just don’t want to join.” So I did a lot of research, and I realized that Airborne to me was an elite unit, too, you know. And if I got drafted, I could volunteer for Airborne; that means I would be in an Airborne unit, like the 101st Screaming Eagles. And to me that’s as good as being in the Marines.

  I figured I was going to get drafted eventually; everybody was getting drafted—everybody. I was 1-A [immediately available for military service]. But I couldn’t wait; so I found out that I could volunteer to be drafted. I went down to the draft board and waited until they opened, got in, and volunteered to be drafted. I didn’t tell my mother or anything. I just made believe that I had gotten drafted.

  The Hamill family, from Brooklyn, are well-known in New York. Pete, the oldest of seven, is a widely acclaimed novelist and has had a long career in journalism. In 1965 he covered the war as a reporter. He went on to write for The Village Voice, New York Newsday, and the New York Daily News.

  Pete’s brother John, now in his sixties, works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a director of external affairs. He has a full head of gray hair and walks with a limp at times due to the shrapnel that remains embedded in his knee, a gift of the North Vietnamese. When we spoke about his Combat Medical Badge, John told me that it was the only medal I ever received that meant something to me. He wanted that badge for the hard-earned knowledge it represented, just as he wanted to serve.

  I met John through his younger brother Denis, who is a New York Daily News columnist. In 2004, Denis wrote a column about John’s service in Dak To in 1967—one of the bloodiest battles of the war. They agreed to sit down and talk to me about the Brooklyn they grew up in and the impact Vietnam had on their lives. We met in Denis’s home in Queens.

  John described himself as one of the lucky guys. I got to experience Vietnam and the ’60s both here and abroad, and I’m still on my feet. I mean, I’ve done some damage, you’d say, since, but I consider myself lucky.

  Denis explains further:

  I did a column about this a couple of years ago. I was walking with my little guy, and I stopped to look at this wall where we [his childhood friends] all used to carve our names in the wall with can openers. I was fifty years old, and I looked at it and I said, “Holy shit. All these guys are dead.” Glen blew his head off. Bat died on drugs, got hit by a car, you know. The Doyle brothers are all dead, about four of them. And there’s just an endless march of guys from AIDS and from shooting dope. And it is just an endless parade of guys who were my friends in the ’60s who are all gone.

  Denis described the Brooklyn he grew up in as a collection of small towns: a big, notorious place, with clearly delinea
ted neighborhoods, like the one he lived in. Now known as Park Slope, when the Hamills lived there it was simply called South Brooklyn. John says:

  It was a really small world. [The] same kind of hermetically sealed feel that you had in some bad ghettos, you know. So you didn’t feel poor, because nobody had much. I mean, you could play ball and make people move their car if it was on the corner.

  They lived and played on the street:

  John: The fucking house was so hot.

  Denis: There was no such thing as a playdate.

  John: [Laughs.] That didn’t exist. The playdate was “Get the fuck off of that.” My mother wouldn’t let us stay in the house, because we would wreck it. So we’d go out and come back in when it’s dinnertime.

  John continues:

  It was a neighborhood, as my brother Pete described—but it’s very accurate—that the Depression never left. It was a place that never got to boom time, postwar, or any of that. So it was factory and dockworkers, essentially; some civil servants. I mean, we didn’t know any white-collar people hardly.

  As boys from the neighborhood became men, they sometimes did better than their parents, moving into civil service or back-office jobs on Wall Street or becoming police officers or sanitation workers or taking other uniformed service jobs.

  Denis portrays his brother John as a young man who dreamed of moving beyond Brooklyn and beyond the Staten Island housing project where they lived for a time. He recalls John reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the New Left magazine Ramparts, and Paul Krassner’s Realist as well as newspapers like the Daily News and The New York Times. To Denis this seemed very unusual for a seventeen-year-old.