For Millennials, Gen Y and Z, this will be lost on you. In fact, I expect it would only have relevance to Baby Boomers. Country Joe was THE voice in the late-Sixties-early Seventies for the Vietnam Counterculture. I got to see him that August in ’69. Woodstock tickets were a graduation present from my mother. I took a  friend I went to school with. We had a good time. It was the first time I saw a woman’s boobs. Two months later I was in Basic Training in Texas. And seven months later there I was.  Country Joe’s I-feel-like-I’m-fixing-to-die-rag was still being sung in Vietnam when I left two years later in ’72. 

The enduring song finally faded sometime after 1975. I’m surprised it wasn’t resurrected in 1991 or 2001 but by then America had developed more respect for us as servicemen and Veterans. Why, after almost twenty five years, folks began greeting us with “Welcome Home!” as if we’d just stepped off the Freedom Bird.  Now, if we can just convince our government to quit instigating intractable 20-year wars like Viet Nam and Iraqistan, we may even be able to trim VA’s budget due to a dearth of disabled Veterans.

Joe died of Parkinson’s. He was in the Navy from 1959 to 1962 but never was exposed to herbicides. Which brings up the question of what he might have come into contact with as an Air Traffic Controller that would give him Parkie’s. Or whether Parkie’s is just endemic in the general population. In his words “Ain’t no time to wonder why. Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.”

Either way, I salute him for his service and pray I get to live that long. It would seem logical that America is gradually reaching the bottom of the Viet Nam barrel as far as Vets go. Various numbers are batted about but it seems the calculator is stuck at 850,000. That’s what they said in 2008 and the number hasn’t dropped appreciably since in spite of the fact that I lose 8 per year on average. Reincarnation?

 

Perplexity tells me between 610,000 to 850,000 still walk among us. But then, the 2020 census results revealed that in spite of the known fact that only 2.9 million of us served in-country, a whopping 13.4 million folks endorsed that they, too, had red clay betwixt their toes. Do tell. I suspect these are the Vets who pronounce Bien Hoa as Bee-in Ho-wah. I even met one at the 1992 Republican caucus in Gig Harbor. I asked him where he served because he looked pretty young. He said he was born in 1957 and got there just before they rolled up. He disremembered the name of the place he served. Time does that to you. Maybe it was with Senator “Bien Hoa” Blumenthal…