Introduction

“An involving, thoughtful tale that explores America’s tectonic shifts leading to Vietnam.” – KIRKUS

From the war-shattered jungles of Vietnam to America’s burning cities, near-death in Tibet, peace marches, the battle of Hué and the battle of the Pentagon, wild drugs, rock concerts, free love, CIA coups in Indonesia and Greece, the Six Days’ War, and Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign, Freedom puts you in the Sixties as if it were now.

Mick leaves for the Himalayas while Troy heads to Vietnam with the Marines. Daisy starts her PhD in brain research, and Tara battles heroin as her rock band reaches stardom.

Troy is soon caught up in mind-numbing combat in Vietnam, while Mick returns to the States to lead the antiwar effort. Tara’s band signs a Motown contract amid the Detroit riots. At Stanford, Daisy expands her study of the human brain under LSD and other mind-altering drugs. Troy falls in love with a Vietnamese teacher and is slowly losing faith in the War.

Freedom ends the night before the Tet uprising in Vietnam that will change the War, and trap Troy and his beloved in the fires of hell.

MIKE BOND is the author of nine best-selling and critically acclaimed novels, an award-winning poet, ecologist, and journalist. He has covered wars, revolutions, terrorism, military dictatorships and death squads in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Africa, and environmental crises worldwide. His novels place the reader in the world’s most perilous places, “in that fatalistic margin where life and death are one and the existential reality leaves one caring only to survive.” (SUNDAY OREGONIAN).

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Excerpt

Dump Johnson

HUÉ WAS A TROPICAL PARIS, the loveliest city Troy had ever seen. Its ornate boulevards and wide French homes in expansive gardens and palm groves, its classic stone buildings, its bistros, sidewalk cafés, parks and open-air markets all seemed part of a civilized and stable union of east and west far wiser than either by itself.

Like the Seine, the Perfume River cut the city’s middle, the ancient stone Citadel and its more ancient Imperial Palace and the Palace of Perfect Peace on one bank, and on the other bank a younger city with a French-designed capitol building, resplendent university, wide-lawned country club, and tree-shaded streets of red, orange, white and yellows roses, purple bougainvillea, lotus and orchids.

Along the many canals the straw-roofed huts clustered under papaya and mango trees with boughs spread over the water. Blue age-silvered sampans floated in their silver-gold reflections; on the streets and alleys the myriad bicycles clanged constantly, with baskets on the front or over the rear wheels, and ridden by lovely girls in white gowns or by grizzled old women selling oranges.

Statues of meditating Buddhas smiled like Mona Lisas over yellow-robed barefoot monks holding out brass begging bowls on sidewalks where uniformed school children filed solemnly, each clutching the back of the shirt of the one ahead, shepherded by slender lovely teachers in ao dais. Old women with wide earrings and betel-nut teeth, their faces maps of many lives and places, chatted with him toothlessly and cackled at his pronunciations.

Even the birds’ cries seemed familiar. People here seemed freer, as if the War were far away. Often he felt pointless guilt for being here while his platoon waded through paddies and humped through leafless forests stinking of Agent Orange that made them nauseous and gave them harsh headaches. Even after a week in Hué the ache had persisted in the middle of his forehead, a chemical tartness on his tongue.

His Vietnamese was still rudimentary but people could understand, were shocked he’d tried to speak it. And each day he was getting better. How could you win their hearts and minds if you didn’t speak their language?

In a shady street a girl was trying to start a Vespa, her sandaled heel angrily banging the starter, her yellow straw hat sideways. It puttered helplessly and died; she thumped her fist on the handlebar. “Can I help to you?” he said in Vietnamese.

She glanced up shocked then faced away, an impassive perfect face with almond slanted eyes and thin deep lips, little ski-jump nose and long neck down into a willowy body with high small breasts under a pale pink blouse, slender arms and long fingers. She shook her head not looking at him. “It’s your carburateur,” he said, the French word. “It’s under water.”

She giggled, then looked away and wouldn’t speak or acknowledge he was there. He knelt beside her and turned off the key. “Give it some minutes.” He popped open the engine compartment and wiped the carburetor down with the tail of his shirt and blew it dry. He shut the clutch and started the engine. “To not go fast.”

“I’m late –”

“Hurrying makes you later.”

She gave him a foreign glance as if surprised by some species of insect that had shown a hint of vestigial intelligence, then twisted the throttle and spun away, her yellow hat vanishing in the crowd.

He stood on a bridge over a canal remembering the curve of her back and her slim buttocks, her long rangy arms and wind-trailing ebony hair, how she leaned the Vespa into a corner like a jockey on a fast horse. A sampan full of long green stalks slid under the bridge, the man’s dark bony knees apart, the leaves of his conical hat visible from above, his long slender pole trailing drops along the water.

The Vespa had only gone a few streets. He walked toward the last sound he’d heard, past thick-trunked massive trees and high stucco walls with little front gardens and two-story houses behind them. She was pushing the Vespa, head down, forcing it. “I’m glad I came back,” he said in French.

“You didn’t fix it very good,” she said in English.

“WE’RE GOING TO DUMP Lyndon Johnson,” Al Lowenstein said. “With a student movement. Based on the campuses. To stop him from running next year.”

“I don’t think anybody can stop Lyndon,” Bobby Kennedy said. “The War’s still approved by fifty-nine percent of Americans. Sure, there’s Wayne Morse and Bill Fulbright and Gene McCarthy and a few other senators speaking out. But who’s listening? Come on, Al, you don’t depose a sitting president within his own party.”

“Even Martin Luther King has finally come out against the War. Says it’s immoral, and risks revolution at home. These young black men who don’t get a fair shake here then face death over there supposedly for freedoms they don’t have at home – it’s true.”

They sat on gilded couches in the vast, corniced library of oriental rugs and oak herringbone floors in Lowenstein’s apartment on Central Park West. Al made his pitch, pacing, leading with his Yale lawyer’s logic to an irrefutable conclusion: the antiwar movement had the strength and the energy to depose a sitting president. But it needed an alternative candidate.

Bobby had been Senator for over two years. He had hardened against the War but didn’t know how to stop it. “If you decide to,” Al said, “you can do it.”

“Me?” Bobby chuckled. “I couldn’t touch Lyndon next year. If I had any thoughts of running it’d have to be in seventy-two. If I had such thoughts.”

“In the meantime,” Al said softly, “how many thousand American boys are going to die who wouldn’t if you won in sixty-eight? How many million Indochinese?”

“Al,” Bobby snapped, “don’t throw that shit at me.”

AT SIX A.M. the alarm rang, the girl beside Mick mumbling. Furious he’d set it so early, he reset it for six-fifteen and fell asleep. An instant later it buzzed. He forced himself awake thinking if he was late Ephraim would make him do something dangerous, out on a beam with no tie-in.

Barefooting round roaches he washed his face and brushed his teeth in the tub, not bothering to shave, doused his dirty underwear and the armpit of yesterday’s blue work shirt with deodorant, asked the girl to leave the key under the doormat and raced to the subway.

He hung to the strap half-seeing the ads for secretarial schools, life insurance and breath mints, the downturned faces of the other passengers wasting their precious lives by marching clockwork from one hive to another. And he too. Termites, rats in a cage – is that what Sabrina had meant? Where was she?

Life so short even if you lived to old age. And he could die now – anyone could – any second. A quick slip off a beam and twenty stories down. This amazing mystery of consciousness, how crazy to squander it. And a major way of squandering was mindless labor, lugging concrete all day, setting bolts into steel to create more air-conditioned boxes for people to get trapped in. Why was he doing this?

Most of the other people traveling this subway seemed resigned to squandering their lives. He imagined them sitting all day at their desks then going home to watch television. They complained about having to work but went shopping for things they didn’t need and so had to keep working. Half-lives, the walking dead.

But the antiwar effort was wasting time too, the constant meetings chewing over the same issues till the more reluctant groups came aboard, the constant need to grow through unity by bringing in more people, diluting the message to include all.

The problem was he was alone while others had a fabric to their lives, nice apartments and friends. He was a failure: didn’t have relationships, structure and meaning. Just like Cousin Johnny – caustic and indifferent, vaunting solitude because it was all he had? Was there more than one kind of heroin?

Peter and Lois, Seth and Miranda, other couples he knew had all found each other, sexually alive, casual nakedness and breakfasts together – when would he stop refusing love, running away? He envisioned a girl, long dark hair, slender face and body, a fine and sensitive awareness, someone with whom meaning could be discovered. Somebody like Daisy Moran had been, once.

Yet the girls he met he wanted to leave once they’d made love. Till then he’d feel full of interest and charm, wanting them with the deep unpurged hunger of a monk. Then he’d find himself beside a sticky disheveled stranger, conscious of her emanations and distasteful odors, her moles and imperfections. The breasts that only minutes ago had so excited him now seemed ungainly, or the nipples too large or too dark. Her lovely soft-haired pubis and the deep hot slit within her now seemed less interesting. He wanted to be alone but the intimacy he’d been so hungry to create was now fraught with duties of affection and respect.

He’d pace the floor naked, get dressed, not wanting to hurt her, castigating himself for lacking tenderness. He’d always be alone, too immature for deep, enduring love. “I have to be at work in four hours,” he’d say, or pretending some suddenly remembered task, kissed her unwillingly and descended into the damp echoing midnight filling his lungs with the fetid reek of freedom.

The next night he wanted her again, or another. He’d meet her in a bar or playing guitar or on the street. If she smoked grass with him she’d sleep with him – grass a little sin to loosen the feelings, excite the body, open the thighs to greater sins and excitements. With grass she lowered her guard, was intimate already in another way, and its sensuality made her want to fuck. Priming the pump, lubricating the piston of love.

“Damn you,” Rachel said, “you dance the best, take the best drugs, climb the nastiest mountains, fuck the hardest, fight out there in the night alone . . .” she smiled, looking down at him, his prick in her hand. “And you have the body of Michelangelo’s David. So of course we want you. And you’re hot because we can’t really have you, not like we want. Your damn freedom enslaves us –”

Sex throbbed in him with the steady heavy thrum of an electric guitar and he had to purge it as the guitarist does with every song. The girls with spread thighs and aching breasts, slippery in their own lust and sweat, their hair in his lips and their nipples supple hard as he plunged into their volcano of life. Then the dream unsatisfied, the grail lost, he awakened in a stranger’s arms.

But a day or two without sex and he’d burn inside. In political meetings or in the streets and bars he ached for every lissome girl. All the supposed raptures of religion, he now understood, were claimed by those who feared or hated sex. Religious passion was nothing more than ersatz sex, a blowup doll for the soul.

And sex was a good religion, built on the naked flesh of girls and women, on lovely salacious pleasure and deep aching joy. The lovely moment when a girl slid off her clothes – slender and silvery in streetlight through the window, kissing her fragrant body and sinking into her slim velvet heat, her cries and moans as she drove her body against his – was the deepest, loveliest, most fulfilling joy he knew. The closest you could get to God, why so many people said Jesus or Oh God when they came. And the deep glow inside afterwards, as if closer to the hearth of life, the eternal fire. Door to the spirit world, the body’s pulse, the love of mystery and adventure.

Each girl a new country, some long-legged, narrow-bellied and too deep to reach completely, some wilder with a thick red bush, others blonde, distracted and sylphlike. Each unique and infinite, the taste and texture of her hair, and scent of crotch and skin and underarms, the softness behind her ear and the roughness of her soles, the way her breasts hung and how she bit her lip or moaned or swore, her undisclosed thoughts and reservations, a half-candid laugh or flash of anger – how was the great city of the world seen through her windows? What was it like inside her skin?

This most essential act for life, Rachel had once said. A perfect Darwinism: the greater the urge for sex the more likely the species survives. Why then did we so shame and denigrate it? As Miranda had said long ago, one dusty afternoon in Mick’s dentist’s office in Williamstown – why do they hate it? Why do they fear it? When it’s so much fun?

Why fear and shun it when it was one of life’s deepest joys, brought happiness, serenity and health? There seemed no answer other than a rote Freudian: it’s only by controlling lust that we’ve evolved. Or that humans take more joy in pain than pleasure.

One night late on Second Avenue the woman of his dreams came toward him – tall, slender, dark-haired, pretty, but weeping. Instantly he wanted her to know her, comfort her. Her weeping made her more approachable, vulnerable, making him ache to talk with her, hold her, love her. “Hey,” he halted in mid-street. “You okay?”

She tossed her head and kept going, an unmanned vessel heedless of shores. He walked with her for two blocks, begged her to talk, trying to show he’d give her more than she’d lost. But in her total absorption in her own pain he did not exist but for the furious heartbroken shake of her head signifying he was another pretender, another predator so far below the man for whom she sorrowed as to be unworthy of response.

THE GIRL WITH THE VESPA was named Su Li. She was a teacher in Bach Dang, a quarter of Hué between the northeast wall of the Citadel and the river, and lived with her mother and two younger brothers in a two-room house with a storefront where her mother sold rice, dried fish, vegetables, Coca Cola, coconut candy and anything else she could find. Su Li’s father was dead and her income as a teacher was the major support for her family.

At first she had almost refused to speak. When her Vespa had broken down again he had cleaned the carburetor again and told her to empty the gas tank. “Nu-oc,” he said, then in English, “You have water in your gas tank. You have to empty it and fill it with good petrol.”

She nodded tugging aside a wisp of sable hair, watched him without expression as he tipped the Vespa and let the gas run iridescent into the mud, then walked silently beside him as he pushed it to a godown where an old man sold gas out of five-gallon tins. Refilled it ran perfectly.

She faced him, distant, nearly hostile. “Cam on” – Thanks.

He held the handlebar. “I should go with you, make sure it doesn’t stop again.”

“No.” A sideways shake of the head, cold utter refusal.

He gripped the handlebar, afraid, indecisive, then dared: “Have tea with me?”

She lifted her chin in a brief laugh as if he’d asked something foolish and illicit. Emboldened he added, “If you don’t, the scooter won’t run.”

She cocked her head sideways, not understanding.

“Si vous n’avez pas tra avec moi, la machine ne va pas –”

She giggled, slim fingers over her lips, eyes suddenly black. Fearing to do it he took the key from the ignition and put it in his pocket, nodded at a café tilting on rotten posts over the Perfume River. “Hai tra?” – two teas?

She scanned the roofs of shacks and shanties and the low white clouds and piercing blue sky, him. “You are officer?”

“Second lieutenant.”

“Oh-kay,” she smiled, face bright as the sun.

He felt outlandish in the little café with its tiny tables and tipsy stools, the thin-whiskered old men tipping faces into their cups, the proprietor’s wife staring at him with undisguised hate then grinning gold teeth when he caught her glance. His pistol felt ungainly on his belt, his uniform too hot, the girl across from him more beautiful than a lotus, than the sky itself, and more remote. He was trembling – why? I can have ten of you in a whorehouse for a hundred bucks, he told her silently but that didn’t change his excitement, his fear she’d walk away and he’d never see her again.

At first he talked foolishly of wanting peace, seeing as he spoke the napalmed bodies and phosphorized villages, realized he was being an idiot. Her long fingers laced round her cup, her small breasts beneath her pink blouse, her full lips like some flower about to open, the arc of dimple on each cheek as she smiled – he was stunned by them all. Again she flitted from somber hostility to a kind of teasing grace, as if trying out attitudes with him to find the right one, sometimes bantering in Vietnamese he couldn’t follow then translating in schoolgirl English with here and there a word of French, “We have bonne chance, that you Americans save us from Communists.”

It’s not that simple, he wanted to say. I’d be a Communist too if I was a peasant here, a factory worker, shocking himself with the thought.

His tea reflected a fighter group crossing the blue sky, their roar eclipsing her words. In her simple cotton blouse and black trousers she seemed proof of all he’d lost, never had. Insanely he wanted to ask her will you marry me, knowing in some deep place if they did marry he’d never regret it. He resettled the pistol on his belt. She rose. “I go now,” held out her hand. “Tam biet” – Goodbye.

Suddenly nothing seemed more important than not losing her. His mind scrambled for ideas. “I must go with you, if Vespa is lazy again.”

Slender as bamboo she seemed taller than she was. “If you go my house, Communists make trouble my family.”

He tried not to tower over her. “Please, come with me to finest dinner in Hué,” aware of speaking pidgin, easy to understand. “Tonight, tomorrow?”

Again she looked away, as if calculating a sum. She looked into his eyes with that distant nearly hostile gaze. “Where?”

He didn’t know, had never eaten here, knew only C-rations gulped down between patrols. “Where is best place in Hué?”

She grinned at his innocence. “Tomorrow, six in night? We meet here? Then we go Chez Henri – you like French food?”

He felt she was slipping away but had no room to argue. “Please come. Please don’t stay away.”

She smiled pure white teeth. “If I say, I do.”

“IT’S PISSING ON YOUR COUNTRY,” Al Murillo said as they sat on an I-beam thirty-six stories up eating lunch, “to turn in your draft card.”

“If the War was right I’d be the first to fight,” Mick answered. “But I won’t kill people for no reason.”

Murillo balled up a tinfoil wrapper and dropped it into the void. “What kinda freedom you think these Vietnamese will have, them Communists win?”

“Al, are you ready to die for their freedom? If you’re a grunt with a girl and a ’57 Chevy waiting for you back home, are you willing to die in a mudhole, your chest or balls or head blown apart? When it’s a lie and you know it?”

Murillo spit. “When you put it like that –”

Looking down on gray Manhattan it occurred to Mick his country had become the specter of itself, I Want to Hold Your Hand replaced by Eve of Destruction – a new dark vision of Amerika where automatons goose-step to mindless verities and steel bombers unleash fiery death on distant peasants. But what if we’d always been this way? Though too young, too much a product of it, or too damn dumb, to realize?

“You and me riskin our lives,” Al Murillo swung one leg over the girder and sat sideways. “On these skyscrapers, to push them up into the blue, huh?”

“Yeah?” Mick waited.

“You start with a piece of land then these architects plan how to squeeze the last bit of space onto each floor, push higher till the damn things bend in the wind like bamboo, huh? And the bankers change the zoning so you can go even higher and make more money squeezing more and more people into less and less space, huh?”

Murillo adjusted his seat on the cold girder. “Well, it’s you and me riskin death so the big guys can make money. So I think, how is that different than this War, huh?”

ON JUDGEMENT DAY Mick woke early, took two tabs of acid and lay beside Rachel waiting for it to hit but it didn’t. He’d had nightmares again of Troy wounded, of himself hunted in Bali. Rain hammered the window-panes and sloshed down the downspout. Rachel fumbled for her watch in her clothes on the floor. “Hey it’s eight-forty.”

In the Lex train going downtown he couldn’t tell if he was stoned or not. The weird advertisements, the drum and shriek of wheels, the gently rocking passengers, were clearly hallucinations. But there was no disconnect between what he thought and did: he wasn’t stoned. Damn. He tried to think how to raise his blood pressure.

The doctor sat at his metal Selective Service desk scorning petitions of malady from a line of supplicants. Implacable and lethal, he had literal power of life or death over his cringing naked subjects. He said you were 4-F and you were out on the street, free forever. He said you were 1-A and you climbed on a bus to Fort Benning and in three months could leave your brains and guts on some Vietnamese hill.

He scanned Mick’s file, took his blood pressure. “You don’t have hypertension.”

“It says right there –”

“I said you don’t have it. You’re headed to Vietnam.” He stuffed Mick’s file back in its folder, cocked a thumb at the induction room. “Get in line.”

Mick stood in a line of young men in a dark corridor, all naked, feet cold, soles dirty, clasping their folders before them like fig leaves. Not sure why, he stepped into the john. It had two stalls, one with no door. Holding his breath against the smell of shit he waited for the one with the door, locked it and scanned his file. Everything was there.

Terrified at what he was doing he ripped the first three pages to small pieces then the rest, then the folder too, flushed and flushed again till all were gone. Sure that abject terror would show in his face, he stepped into the corridor and joined the line going the other way of young men who had been rejected and had their files turned in.

Wouldn’t the Selective Service know it was gone? Or would its absence simply make him invisible? When they checked on the draft status of Resistance leaders wouldn’t they see it was missing? With shaking knees and a hollow stomach he dressed and stepped dizzily out the heavy door into bright midmorning sun.

“IF YOU’RE NOT WORKING,” Thierry Gascon’s voice crackled across the undersea cable, “why not come to Paris and work on Gisèle’s campaign?”

“I can’t hear you,” Mick said.

“There – is that better?”

“You don’t have to yell!”

“If you have no work on skyscrapers in winter, and you’ve decided not to join the War . . .”

After two years teaching at Williams, Thierry had returned to Paris to teach medieval lit at the Sorbonne. Gisèle Halimi was running for the French Senate, a brilliant and beautiful Socialist lawyer, a friend of Sartre and de Beauvoir. A defender of the poor and oppressed, she had represented Algerian revolutionaries in military courts and had become notorious and widely praised for exposing the Army’s torture programs.

Mick had saved good money from steelworking all summer and fall. Al Lowenstein wanted him to work full time for the antiwar movement, live on what he’d saved.

Or he could take some time off from the meetings, rallies, phone banks, all the intensity.

Plus he’d just torn up his draft file. If they came after him, he’d be a lot harder to find in Paris.

“Election’s next March,” Thierry said. “Gisèle could win. Imagine, the first woman senator in France . . .” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions written by the author:

Sex, drugs & rock’n roll: Did they have long-lasting effects on our culture?

The 1960s were a revolution in America’s history. For the better or worse?

Is fidelity necessary in a close relationship?

Have women really progressed in the last 50 years?

Are racial divides worse now than in the 1960s?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's book info
»	Spotify Playlist for FREEDOM compiled by the author

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