Medals II

     The monkey wrench in our lust for medals got thrown quickly. And from the other side of the world. Seemed some fools with silver or gold on their shoulders thought it'd be a good idea to have a parade. Or so the rumor told us. Just like WWII or WWI. Ticker tale and all that kinda shit. Heroes marchin' in formation, struttin' their stuff. Back from the jungles of Southeast Asia makin' the Free World safe from the Red Peril.
     Don't know if it woulda been different in any other city but San Francisco was a seriously bad choice. Two years earlier the Summer of Love had happened on the very streets the parade was 'sposed to hike down. And the U. of California at Berkley, one of the seats of the anti-war movement, was just across the Bay Bridge. Maybe even the song by Donovan, Universal Soldier, had something to do with it by putting the blame on the shoulders of us grunts. Yup, there were a lot of righteous I didn't go 'cause I'm a helluva lot more moral than you types in the area. And they knew for absolute certain the GIs marchin' down the street coulda stayed home if they'd been smart. 'Course they might have softened a little on the black soldiers 'cause they were just pawns in the game. As for us white GIs, no doubt we were all hawkish, kill 'em if you find 'em types. Maybe even unchained from the basements down in Mississippi where we'd been kept 'cause we weren't moral enough to be in the Ku Klux Klan.
     So the boys in green lined up and marched down the streets to the tunes of booing and shouts of, "Baby killers!" For sure some babies were killed 'cause we were there. Also for sure that none of the men I knew woulda done anything like that. We didn't even smoke dope. All we wanted was to go home.
     Like I'd said earlier, what we heard was through the rumor mill. But that didn't matter to us in the least. All we wanted now was to go home and be left alone. It'd been a shitty war, no doubt a shitty peace was gonna follow. And us draftees were caught in the middle between the pro-war side who we didn't much like 'cause they'd sent us to a war we couldn't win and the peaceniks who thought we'd sinned against humanity by going. We were screwed, glued and tattooed. And damned sure we never wanted to be in a parade. Welcome home, my ass.
     I feel about the same as I write this. Too late for anyone to say thank you now. And it was too late in 1969. It'll always be too late.