Monday, April 15, 2019

Reminiscences of a Canadian Anti-Vietnam War Activist


The Vietnam War lasted from 1965 to 1975 and sparked a generation of protest. Here, war resister, Carl Goodwin, a former resident of Thunder Bay, shares a few memories of  those years.


 Reminiscences of an Activist.
by Carl Goodwin

Fall 1969 September maybe October, at the University of Regina

“Hi I’m Fred from Chicago.”
“Karl Goodwin. Northern Ontario.”
We are two members of a four-member panel invited to speak on the politics of what came to be know in those days as the “New Left.”
Fred and I are both somewhat nervous. Both of us are trying to anticipate what we might contribute to the discussion.
Fred discretely covers the microphone and brings up the topic of fishing to ease some of the tension.
FRED: Here you got some good pike fishing out your way.
ME: Yup.
FRED: What’s the best pike lure, man?
ME: Daredevil. Big or small. Tripple hook. Pike hit ‘em. Taste OK. Boney though. Good fighters. Catch ‘em mostly in the reed beds close to shorelines. More familiar with fishing back home in Southern Ontario though. Catfish.

I was thinking back to earlier times under the willows in my home village in southern Ontario. A Huckleberry Finn like existence. A friend and I once found a half-sunken rowboat in that creek. Patched it up with roofing shingles, tar and nails. Fished from it all one summer.

In Regina, I think I spoke about Quebec nationalism and diversion plans for siphoning water into the US. Small potatoes really.

I came across Fred’s picture recently in a book, “Witness to the Revolution,” by Clara Bigham cataloguing the life and times of anti-Vietnam War activists. Fred Hampton was described as a charismatic and eloquent Black Panther leader.  Fred was an African American and Chairman of the Chicago Branch of the militant Black Panther party.

The Panthers had ten thousand members divided into thirty-two chapters. They provided hot breakfast programs in intercity schools. They were strongly anti-war and against black recruitment. They supported the pro liberation struggles in Latin America, and South East Asia. They were a militant organization.

On page 247 is a picture of Fred Hampton’s bedroom. The drywall is pocked with bullet holes; the mattress blood soaked. The pole lamp is broken sideways and reading materials are strewn on the floor.

On December 5, 1969, Fred Hampton, age 21, was gunned down in his sleep at 5 a.m. by the Chicago Police Department assisted by the F.B.I. The police claimed they acted in self-defense firing ninety shots into the bedroom with shot guns and machine guns.

April 30, 1970, the Vietnam War will expand into Cambodia with 3,369 flights dropping 110,000 tons of bombs.

May 4, 1970.Thirteen protesting students shot on the campus at Kent Stat in Ohio, four killed by the National Guard. Mary Ann Vacchio screams as she summons help for a fallen Jeffrey Miller. Twenty-eight guardsmen shot sixty-seven bullets in thirteen seconds. Seven hundred campuses were shut down and 2. 5 million students strike.

Forty-six or forty-seven years later, time has now scrambled the order of the Canadian anti-war resistance. I remember going to a demonstrations outside the US consulate in Winnipeg. It was late spring, too cold for our guitarist to play protest music. I should have dressed more warmly.

I remember a bus charter down to the nearest border crossing at the Pigeon River between Minnesota and Northern Ontario, a minor border crossing. One highway patrol man showed up in his cruiser, lights flashing. Got out, hiked up his gun belt and readjusted his Stetson. Someone said he waved. Someone swore he flashed a V for Victory sign before he drove off. No cars arrived to cross the border. We got back on the bus and went home.

May 2. Weather Underground issues a communiqué declaring war on the US government.

August 24. Sterling Hall Math Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison was bombed causing one death.

Four of us will pack ourselves in a dilapidated VW Beetle and head for Madison. We will drive all night, arriving the next morning and we’ll locate a pre-arranged contact in the student low-rental apartment area. (No need to pay for parking. All the meters have been smashed.)

Nighttime. The roar of helicopters coming in. Searchlights. Screams. Frayed nerves. Pepper gas. Bob Dylan’s “You Don’t have to be a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind Blows,” was blasting full volume out the window from someone’s apartment.

We will learn to protect out faces and cleanse our eyes with vinegar and milk of magnesia, soaked rags. I see some people wearing protective swim goggles and football helmets.
….
A war that will go on until 1975. Seven million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, twice the total amount dropped on Europe and Asia in WWII. 338,000 tons of napalm. 56,555 Americans were killed. 200,000 South Vietnamese, a million North Vietnamese, 500,000 civilians.

The Mỹ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by the U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as 12. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted.

The day after his conviction, Nixon will order that Calley be released from prison and placed under house arrest for three years. In 1974, Nixon will grant Calley a full presidential pardon. I think he went back to work in his father’s jewellery shop.

And from time to time, I’ll wonder what it might have been like fishing for catfish with Fred Hampton under the willows.






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