Relentless Resistance

Chapter 3 Total chapters are 13 plus Epilog.

                                            CHAPTER 3

“ Fucking liars,” Lindy sobbed to his mother, three thousand miles away, his hands shaking so badly the receiver vibrated.  “I’ll never go across the ocean to kill someone for nothing. And maybe most American’s don’t know this, but it’s an illegal war. Lots of guys that joined up are real sorry. They’re protesting and going to Canada,” he sniffled.
June, her own hands trembling, almost choked.  “Oh baby, I’m so sorry.  How can they do this?  Aren’t there laws or something?”
“This is the Army, Ma,” he sounded resigned.  “They can do whatever they want apparently, like Pop,” he added.  “No appeals.”
“I have my ticket.  When I get to California we’ll talk then.  Don’t despair, hon.” And with an “I love you” and a kiss blown through the wires, she hung up feeling weak in the knees and shot in the heart.  Seething, she thought, those sons of bitches.

Seeing her embark from the plane in late August of 1968, June’s worried daughter thought she looked tan, fit and strained.  “I’ve missed you so much,” Carol greeted, wiping away tears.
June, seeing her daughter, was shocked. Carol, always lithe, appeared downright frail. Pencil thin arms and legs betrayed the bravado she tried to convey over the phone and in letters.
This was not an ordinary visit, June was on a mission. As soon as her scant luggage was loaded and the car door closed, she asked Carol, “Where is he?”
“I don’t really know,” she confessed, while navigating the labyrinth of Los Angeles Airport exits. “He called me a couple of days ago, to ask again when you’d be here.  He’s OK. I have a contact number. That’s all I know”, she assured her.
Carol struggled to keep her eyes on the road as June’s body visibly slackened in her seat. 

After connecting, June met her troubled son at their favorite place of solace, Stunt Road.
“I’ve been camping here for a few nights,” he said, tears running down his face. As they embraced, each trembling, he stated what his heart yearned for. “This is my special place.  I don’t want to leave,” and added, “I just want to stay here forever.”
Too overwhelmed to speak, June motioned for him to sit on a streamside boulder. A deer, watching the two of them, quietly munched grass nearby, as she searched for something comforting to say.
Finally, sighing between sobs, she lamented, “This is so unfair and tragic.”  Clasping her hands between her quivering knees, she reached up and stroked his downward hanging head. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everything okay, but I really feel helpless too,” she confessed, then wiped the snot running from her nose. He slumped down further.
Heartbroken, seeing her strong smart son feeling so utterly defeated, she made a stab at optimism.  Smoothing his wispy blond hair, she gave it a go. “I see limited options, but this war can’t go on forever sweetie” With no small amount of anger she told him, “Every night on the news, the whole world watches from their armchairs. They see bombs being dropped on jungle villagers, and body bags being unloaded from military planes. They tell us we are killing the bad guys, but everyone looks the same, scared and suffering. Protests are growing, this must end.”
June then offered her next observation. “If you choose to make a run for the Canadian border, then what? There are so many unknowns.” Pausing to gather her thoughts, she swept a stray lock of hair off her forehead.  Trying not to scare him or maybe she did, she laid out the reality.
“If you do that, you will always be a fugitive.  You will never be able to come home.  You will never be able to enjoy the Hawaiian sunsets or smell the plumeria.” The tears almost choked her up and her heart pounded as she delivered her last pronouncement. “And you will always be looking over your shoulder to see who might be tracking you down.”
Curling his lanky limbs into a fetal position, through steady tears he pleaded, “Oh Ma, why is this happening to me?”
Crumbling to the ground next to him and rocking him in her arms, she struggled for a response. “Maybe there’s a reason,” she feebly offered.  “The religions of the East believe in a philosophy that there are reasons for everything. Karma is payback for past lives, maybe we can get a book about it at the library,” she weakly proposed.  She was grasping at straws and knew it but felt parents were supposed to impart solutions. 
After hearing his request for time alone to consider his fate, June honored Lindy’s wish. Returning to her daughter’s house, she awaited his decision. With no word that night, she fell asleep and was jerked awake when the phone rang at 3 a.m.
“You’re right Ma, I can’t run,” he informed her. “Can you take me to the airport this morning? I’m not officially AWOL until tomorrow so if I turn myself in today, maybe they’ll go easy on me.”
That morning, on the way to the airport, the silence between them was palpable. There was simply nothing left to say.

Upon his surrender the wheels quickly spun. Lindy was delivered via military transport to a base in Oakland, California.  The next morning, he disembarked from a van at the San Francisco Presidio.  By noon he was occupying a bunk in the stockade.

The San Francisco Presidio perches majestically on a peninsula overlooking a narrow entrance into the mighty sheltering bay.  The military complex encompassing 1,480 acres, anchors the city of San Francisco to the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.  In days of old, that bay’s narrow entrance offered safe haven for ships looking for trade or refuge. The Presidio enjoyed a sweeping unobstructed view of all coming and goings.  Any hostile ship sailing through that sliver of a gap became a sitting duck.
Spain, an early occupant of that jutting strand of land, stumbled upon it in 1776. Interestingly, the Spaniards set eyes on the wonder of the San Francisco Bay from an overland expedition, not from the sea. Intermingling with native peoples all along their route from Mexico should have sent bells ringing and whistles blowing.  Obviously, they were not the first to set foot on these paradisiacal lands.  Colonization, however, was the battle cry.  After conquering Mexico, they headed north.  San Francisco became their most northern outpost on the continent.
Crude buildings were constructed on sites using the only material at hand, mud.  Walls of adobe brick were whitewashed in the Spanish Colonial style and crowned with red clay configurations of roof tiles.  They were picturesque but required high maintenance.  Torrential rains coming from the north, along with gale force winds, caused disintegration requiring constant repair to the structures standing on the vulnerable barren hillsides.
In 1821, Mexico became independent again and took back control of lands previously dominated by Spain.
By 1846, American settlers began arriving and staged the Bear Flag Revolt, signaling the end of Mexican rule.
Under the leadership of a small American Army detachment, the Presidio was captured without resistance.  One of the first items of business for the Army occupiers was to turn the rolling grass covered hillsides into a shady parkland forest.  For their effort, today thousands of eucalyptus trees still grace the now iconic state park.
The Presidio quickly became the plum of deployment destinations.  Army personnel competed for orders. After a few years it resembled more of a country club setting than an Army base.  Repairs to old buildings and construction of new ones, all built in the same whitewashed style, offered a feeling of serenity and community.  Coveted officers’ quarters, almost regal in stature, tucked into grassy hillsides, provided secluded shady respites.  Facilities included commissaries, tennis courts, social clubs and a hospital, all of which enjoyed sweeping views of both the busy bay inlet and the glittering city lights.
Never designed as a prison, the stockade on base was built to confine a small population of servicemen gone bad until a court martial could be held.  The enclosure occupied a small rectangular portion of land set apart from the main buildings.  Fortified by a chain link fence crowned with barbed wire, it measured in total space a mere eight-tenths of an acre.  After subtracting the footprints of the two structures within, the yard’s open space equaled less than one half of an acre.  On the entire stockade premises, there were four toilets and two showers, often in disrepair.
Frequently latrines overflowed, covering the concrete floors in excrement. Anytime the numbers of prisoners swelled, they shared the food rations allocated for the maximum of 80.  When Lindy arrived, over 100 occupied the already cramped quarters.


1968 ………a dark and telling year. 

In January Vietnams New Year’s truce was promptly violated.
In February three college students were murdered in a Civil Rights Protest
In March U.S. ground troops killed 500+ innocent Vietnam civilians
In April Martin Luther King was assassinated.
In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
In September Linden Blake spent his 20th birthday in prison.
In October a prisoner is murdered by a guard at The Presidio
In November Richard Nixon is elected President and send 24,000 troops     back to Vietnam for an involuntary second tour of duty.
By December Lindy sits in prison sure that he will be there for another 20 years and fears his plight has been lost in the never-ending cycle of the country’s bad news. 

The Sixth Army Brigade, at the Presidio had taken the hard line of granting no exemptions for AWOL-ers.  The requests for more troops to report for infantry duty in Vietnam had soared, while recruiting bad become more and more difficult.
The tides ran against war.  The Army was in denial. Military courts were swamped.
Suicide attempts at the Presidio Stockade were on the rise.  In the previous thirty-day period, there had been twenty.  The physical and emotional strains of living in such tight quarters, compounded by mistreatment of the prisoners by the guards, fostered helplessness.  Incidents of harassment were commonplace.  If a prisoner got out of bed too slowly, they might be dragged down the stairs by their feet, their head slamming into each step. At the top of the prisoner’s shit list was a guard who delighted in filling water pistols with urine and spraying it on those he deemed cowards or defectors.  The black prisoners were treated worst of all.  Outside the walls, the Civil Rights war for equality was being bravely fought with minimal success.
When Lindy arrived in this hell hole, he heard that before his arrival a prisoner running for the gate in the yard had been shot and seriously wounded at a range of ten feet. Six other guards, in the cramped yard, had watched in silence.  Terror reigned.