So Much Older Then. (eBook)

Coming of Age When the World Is Coming Apart.

Paul Kuehnert (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-5809-9 (ISBN)

Infos

This memoir relays the experiences of Paul Kuehnert, a Midwestern teenager in the late 1960's who tried to follow his conscience at the height of the Vietnam War. After a little more than a year of increasing involvement in the burgeoning mass movement against the war, he determined that his conscience demanded total non-cooperation with the draft. He took the path of resistance, declaring publicly to his church community that he would not register for the draft when he turned 18. And now, some 50 years later-living once again through times of great division, moral outrage, and protest actions taken by thousands of ordinary Americans-his memoir challenges us to reflect on the impact of bold, personal actions and our willingness to take personal risks to a secure a better future.

Textauszug

Chapter 1:
Vic is Dead

As I left homeroom and joined the surge of students in the hall, I heard a voice calling my name: “Paul, Paul, PAUL!” I looked down the hallway and saw a chunky guy with glasses motioning to me with the hand that was not holding a load of books. It was Steve Musko, once my closest friend and now pretty much a stranger, a varsity football lineman and a part of the jock crowd that I had nothing but contempt for.

I glanced briefly over to my friend Tim, who had followed me out of homeroom, and jerked my head in Steve’s direction. “I have to go see what this guy wants. I’ll catch up with you.” Tim nodded and went on his way. Steve was now about 15 feet away and he said, “Come on, man, I have to tell you something important. Pick it up!”

I pushed my way through the crowd and stood in front of him, the flow of students eddying around us. I was considering some sort of smart-assed comment when I looked into his face and saw his mouth in a tight grimace and his eyes welling up. “It’s Vic,” he blurted, then continued in a trembling voice. “Vic. Dead. Over there. Fucking stepped on a mine or some shit like that, I don’t know. But Vic is dead.” He took a deep breath, sighed, and continued: “I thought you should know and you probably didn’t. I ran into Renee and her Mom last night. It just happened, like, last week or something …”

“Vic? Vic? Jesus,” I croaked and stopped. Vic was one of the neighborhood kids. Although he was older than we were by a couple of years, we had spent countless hours with Vic over the years.

Steve’s eyes searched my face. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder, taking in the thinning crowd as the last few students were now scurrying to beat the bell marking the start of the first class period of the day. I stared into the same space over his shoulder, saying nothing. “Look, man, I’m sorry,” Steve said, “but I had to find you and let you know. It sucks. I guess I better get to class. Maybe I’ll see you later or something.”

Steve strode away quickly while I stood there for another half-minute, realizing that before this morning, Vietnam had been abstract, something I read about in Newsweek and watched on television. Now it was real. Vic’s life was over. I jumped when the bell jarred me out of my reverie. I shuffled off to class, recalling all the years I’d known him.

Vic—Victor John Cartier—had lived with his mom and sister, Renee, three houses down Summit Avenue from Steve. Vic was one of the two dozen or so kids who gave substance to the baby boom in our neighborhood in Webster Groves, a leafy middle-class St. Louis suburb. Over the decade-plus of our early and middle childhoods from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, in larger groups we played endless hours of baseball, football, and kickball. In smaller sets of two or four, we roamed in and out of each other’s homes, playing games, watching TV, and eating lunch and dinner with each other’s families. Because of the age difference, Vic wasn’t a significant part of Steve’s and my life until we reached middle school. By then, Vic was going to the all-boys Christian Brothers College Prep school—a powerhouse in St. Louis high school sports—where they wore military uniforms, marched and drilled. Vic always had really cool cars: first a Pontiac GTO and then an MGB convertible. We hung out and watched as he and his best friend, Bob, worked on their cars. We ran errands for them and sometimes got to go for rides, speeding through Webster’s sleepy streets and listening to Vic and Bob talk about their adventures that always involved some mix of football, girls, alcohol, drag racing, and cops.

By the time I was in high school myself, I had pretty much lost interest in hanging out with Vic and Bob, and even Steve. When I saw Vic, we would stop and talk, but we had less and less in common and little to talk about. Still, I wasn’t totally surprised when he joined the Marine Corps right out of high school in late 1967. Over the next several months, while Vic was in basic training and then advanced infantry training, I had been reading everything war-related in Newsweek and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and listening to Walter Cronkite give voice to his own disillusionment on the evening news. Antiwar protests were growing, and my parents, sisters, and friends had all been reinforcing my growing belief that the war was wrong.

By the time Vic came home on leave in early 1968 and was walking around the neighborhood in his uniform, the Tet Offensive was underway, and I was feeling more and more disillusioned about the war. It just seemed wrong, to me, that so many lives were being lost and a country was being bombed to pieces. I had no idea what to say to him when he told me he was going to be going to be shipped out to Vietnam after his leave. I didn’t want to get into an argument about it, but I thought that if I were in his shoes, I’d be trying to get to Korea or Germany – anywhere but Vietnam. On the other hand, Vic was doubt-free about it. In fact, he said, this was what he had trained for, and he was looking forward to fighting.

As a 16-year-old living in Webster Groves, I found it exciting to learn about something important, happening in real-time and affecting our country and the world—and it was safely half the world away. But when Vic stepped on that mine on April 8, 1969, Vietnam became real. And very personal.

I realized at that moment that, in a little more than a year, I would have to make my first choice about Vietnam: What to do about the draft. Would I actually register? Or would I take the dangerous step of resisting? The growing antiwar movement had within it a faction that advocated for active non-cooperation with the draft by not registering, or, if you were already registered, burning or turning in your draft card. I had read a number of firsthand accounts by self-described war resisters, and I was drawn to their clear sense of responsibility, conscience, and action.

Right then, it did not strike me as being terribly odd that, as a 16-year-old, I was contemplating some kind of action that could land me in court and in prison and, ultimately, shape the rest of my life. No more odd, I thought, than a decision Vic and many others had made to fight and that, ultimately led to their deaths.

***

My involvement in a youth-led movement that challenged my church’s leadership the previous summer, in 1968, had made it possible for me to experience Vic’s death as not just as a sad personal moment, but as a catalyst of my personal commitment to stop the war.

That year, I had turned 16, and I’d been confused by all I was living through. I was confronting my own wildly fluctuating moods and intense sexual attraction to girls and a few older women. I didn’t know what to do or how to act. My internal turmoil was further compounded by the raging war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the riots in the cities, and growing protests on college campuses. I didn’t know how to make sense of it all, especially in terms of the Christian faith I held so dear and had been the principal means I used to make sense of the world.

With all those thoughts and feelings swelling inside me, Sunday mornings, in particular, became an agony for me that summer. Everything was so family-oriented and it all moved in slow motion. After getting up early and putting on dress clothes, the four of us—-my sister and two brothers—Susie, David, and Steve—ranging in age from 18 to 10, were crammed into the back seat of our white Ford Galaxy 500 and driven slowly, methodically, by my father, the three miles over to Concordia Lutheran Church in the neighboring suburb of Maplewood.

After either Bible study or Sunday School, we had to meet up and sit together for the hour-plus church service. If my father wasn’t sitting with us, it was because he was singing in the choir. He kept an eye on all of us from the choir loft and, on the drive home, would share his critical comments regarding our behavior. Once we were home, the second act of the Sunday drama opened, involving one of us boys riding along with Daddy to get Grandma from her downtown St. Louis apartment some 30 minutes away.

On one particular Sunday, I rushed upstairs to my room, hoping against hope that David or Steve would get the call. Instead, after about 10 minutes I heard:

“Paul! PAUL!! PAUL-O!”

“What? What? WHAT!?”

“You know what. Let’s go, get a move on.”

“Take David.”

“David doesn’t need driving practice. You obviously do, Mr. Yellow Light! Now! Let’s go!” His sarcastic name-calling was a reference to my running a yellow traffic light when I had taken (and failed) my driver’s test earlier that summer.

I slouched down the stairs, moved past my father and out the front door to the car, and got in the driver’s seat. He came out five minutes later, saw me and started motioning with his hand to move over to the passenger side.

“No way am I driving with you on the highway, going downtown. Get over there!”

“But you said…”

“No. You watch me and learn. I don’t want to risk it with you right now.”

“But how can I—oh, just forget it!”

I scooted across the seat, buckled myself in, and stared out the side window. My father mumbled something, turned on the ignition, and backed out of the driveway. After five long minutes of driving in silence, Daddy turned the radio on....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.3.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-5809-0 / 1098358090
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-5809-9 / 9781098358099