They Marched Into Sunlight (54 page)

Next came a few brief denunciations of Dow and napalm, followed by an existentialist rap from Cohen. “Now we have the corporate structure,” he said. “We have uni-processed students. You go work for them. You bring home your bacon. Nine to five every day. Pay the mortgage. Let yourself up. You’re a lawyer, doctor, teacher, what have you, and are now set to accept this society. What I’m saying is we’ve got to understand that society, we’ve got to analyze it, and indeed we’ve got to negate it. That society is keeping two-thirds of the people in the world in the Stone Age. It’s keeping us from relating to one another as human beings. It’s alienated us from ourselves. It’s gotten to the point where we can’t even think in terms of what this reality is. Where we can accept expressions like ‘clean bombs.’ How can a bomb be clean? Luxurious fallout shelters. Comfortable poverty. Escalation is peace. All the contradictions. They’re all contained right there within our language, right within the modes of our thought, and they just slip right past us. We think of things statically, not in process. We think in value neutral terms. We don’t evaluate. We don’t criticize. The role of the intellectual should be critical. We are so dominated by these modes of thought, by this system, that we become totally receptive and we walk along like sheep.”

And then Stark delivered what he later called “one of the best speeches of my short career as a student leader.” He even had a title for it: “Why the Wisconsin Football Team Is Losing.” The Badgers were losing football games week after week, Stark said, just like the peace movement seemed to be losing in its struggle to stop the war in Vietnam. “It might have to do with the same thing, the fact that we were all accepting the rules of the game as they were dictated to us. In the case of the football team, through mechanical means out on the field, in the case of students, through the mechanical rhetoric of our faculty.” The time had come, Stark argued, “to really burst this spectacle that had been created for us…. Everyone talks about the revolt of youth. Sociologists and psychologists study it. It is a spectacle like a football game or a movie. Soon there will be so much talk about the revolt of youth that people will forget to participate in it. We must stop looking at events as pictures on a wall and enter the arena of action to make the kind of history we want.” In his use of the word
spectacle,
Stark drew on a new vocabulary that was becoming popular in New Left intellectual circles. In France the cultural philosopher Guy Debord was just publishing
The Society of the Spectacle,
in which his first postulate was that “the whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles.
All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

Assistant Dean Cipperly was in the crowd, looking around and occasionally listening. “Mr. Cohen and Mr. Stark spoke at great length regarding their personal philosophies related to the nature of present day American society,” he later wrote in a memo to Dean Kauffman. “Since I had heard both of them expound their maxims before, I must truthfully say that I did not pay particular attention to the specific contents of their statements.” Cipperly did perk up near the end, however, when Stark announced that the time of the Wednesday demonstration had been pushed back an hour from 9:30 to 10:30.

People were handing out the latest anti-Dow leaflet during the speech, a sheet that was distributed not only outside Commerce but across the campus and all the way up State Street to the Capitol Square, where Republican State Senator Walter Chilsen had one stuffed in his palm as he strolled to lunch. It was a call to physical resistance that could serve as a time capsule of radical sensibility in the fall of 1967. The influence of feminists was not yet evident, as demonstrated by the use of the word
men.
Any signs that the antiwar movement had entered the mainstream meant not that it was on the verge of ultimate success but that it had sold out and was ineffective. And counterbalancing the anger was the dream of a revolutionary socialist ideal.

Like other large corporations, Dow is a political institution. 75% of its business is with the military. [The statistic was exaggerated; Dow records indicated that 5 percent of its total sales were to the government.] Dow makes the napalm used in Vietnam. Recruiting for Dow is recruiting for the war. Being against the war is not enough. Last year 61% of the students on this campus indicated they opposed the war. National polls show more than 50% of the American public oppose the war. But opposition is not enough. Even on this campus, opposition has become ‘in.’ Not one faculty member in a hundred will defend the government. But the war effort has not even slowed down. Opposition must move against the forces which underlie the war…. On Wednesday morning, we will meet on Bascom Hill, enter a building in which Dow is recruiting and stop them. We will not beg the Administration or Faculty to do our work for us. Corporations do not disappear upon request. Neither will the war. If Dow is to be removed from this campus and if the war is to be ended, all of us must do it…. Let us break through the spectacle and become people who act!

Stopping Dow will not end corporate imperialism. It is merely a first step in that direction. Like those fighting tyranny throughout the world, we must build as we resist…. To those who plead neutrality, we say there are no neutrals. We are not neutral. Not only do we oppose the war and the corporations that make it and the university that feeds it, we are also for a society in which men control their own products and in which men make themselves and are not designed by other men.

Three in the afternoon brought a spectacle of another form, an absurdist scene that might have been scripted by Samuel Beckett. In room 105 of Commerce, next to where the Dow interviews had been taking place, twelve students from the ad hoc protest committee sat down with Chief Hanson and the task force of assistant deans, including Bunn, Clingan, and Cipperly. Hanson was under the impression that the meeting had been arranged by Evan Stark, since Stark had approached him earlier in the day and suggested it. Bob Swacker, who had served as the student intermediary for weeks, was there, along with Bob Cohen and William Simons, who had been the bearer of the bullhorn most of the morning, and a few students connected to the alternative newspaper
Connections.
But Stark was notably absent. The administrators wondered why the students had asked for the meeting. The students thought the university had called the meeting and wondered what the administrators wanted. Had Dow agreed to leave? Had someone told the cops to back away? Had the students decided not to force the issue? Could there be a compromise concerning the next day’s protest?

These questions were not on the agenda. There was no agenda. It was not a case of miscommunication so much as no communication. “Bunn made a few friendly overtures,” as
Connections
reported later, and then there was silence. “Complete silence,” according to Chief Hanson. Silence for “approximately five minutes, but it seemed much longer.” Finally the students got up and left, having uttered not a solitary word.

When his task force reported the strange nonevent to Dean Kauffman, there was some discussion about sending a delegation down to the Union again to try to find some of the students and determine what had happened. But Kauffman decided not to press the issue. Hanson, taking note of the communications breakdown and the forceful rhetoric in the noon speeches and leaflets, said he would need to bolster his police corps for the planned obstruction the next day. Kauffman agreed, and Hanson placed a call to Chief Emery downtown. He told the Madison chief that he wanted twenty off-duty officers, double the number he had used that first day, and suggested what Emery and officials at city hall already knew—that the rest of the police force should be ready just in case.

I
NTO THIS UNSETTLED PLACE
rumbled the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Having bought another cheap used car in Minneapolis, they drove down from the Twin Cities that afternoon in a three-vehicle caravan led by a blue-paneled truck carrying the stage, sets, equipment, and costumes. The performances at the Firehouse had gone well—packed houses, throatily supportive audiences that were in on all the inside jokes of this ribald Vietnamized version of
L’Amant Militaire.
Ron Davis, the troupe’s director, was feeling better than ever about his “rambling wild and talented” ensemble. On the theatrical side, he considered this the best commedia dell’arte his group had ever performed, with five first-rate actors out of the seven on stage. And on the political side, the traveling show was precisely the “stimulant” that he had hoped it would be. Free and easy, determined to raise hell and move on. “We are now outside agitators,” he wrote in one of his frequent notes to the troupe. “This is what we are supposed to be doing.”

The atmosphere on the way down State Street to the Union reminded actor Peter Cohon, aka Peter Coyote, of “a crammed Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.” In Madison, he later wrote, describing that trip, “there was music in the air and revolution in the air. You could crash, get weed, meet great girls who would talk with you about books, music and politics, and sleep with you if they felt like it…. The student radical cafeteria, the Rathskeller, was full of old army jackets, long hair, beards, levis, and fur coats. It was dark, the food was bad, the crowd was intense.” All interesting, but not a place to relax or prepare after a long day on the road, so the troupe escaped to the second-floor rear balcony, with its serene view of blue-green Lake Mendota and the surrounding canopy of elms and birches splashed by the autumn paint box in deep reds, oranges, and yellows. Then they made their way to the fifteen-hundred-seat Union theater and began setting up in preparation for that night’s performance.

The rehearsal was interrupted once by the appearance of “a few curly-haired, old army jacketed kids,” as Coyote described them, who asked if the mime troupe might be so accommodating as to conclude the show with a general announcement from the stage about the demonstration against Dow Chemical the next morning.

No problem, said Davis. Not only would they make the announcement, they might participate in the protest themselves.

When the curtain rose at eight, the theater was full. Morris Edelson, the
Quixote
editor and campus impresario, moved around like an expectant father, whispering invitations to an after-party at his pad on Charter Street. Paul Soglin decided not to go. He reasoned that the next day would be hectic and he should take this time to study. Also he had an uneasy feeling about the outsiders, preferring to think that “local agitators could get the job done.” Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern were there. Rowen felt the electricity of the moment, a connection to the West Coast, to San Francisco, to the larger movement, a sense that right then, right there, was where it was happening. The atmosphere lifted the spirits of protest planners, who had trudged down Bascom Hill that afternoon in an anxious mood, fearful that the obstructive sit-in the next day would fizzle, with only a few dozen participants. This crowd, buzzing, pulsating, ready for action, gave them hope. Maybe they could burst the spectacle.

The performance was full of knowing references to LBJ, Westmoreland, Dow, even Joe Kauffman. (The troupe made a point of finding out who the local villains were and inserting their names into the script.) The audience delighted in the irreverence, all the way to the end, when Sandra Archer declared, “If you want something done, do it yourself.” The ensemble then took off its commedia masks and “marched in a line, cast of seven, stamping and clapping together downstage, full phalanx,” and Davis addressed the troops. “We are from another area, but would like to help you all here,” he said. “We were told there will be a demonstration against the Dow recruiters tomorrow and we thought that you and we might all be there. We have learned through our experience that, after all, this country is our country and if we don’t like it, then we should try to change it. This is your school, and if you don’t like it, you should try to change it. And, if you can’t change it, then you should destroy it. See you at the demonstration.”

And that was it, the way the seventeenth came to a close at the University of Wisconsin, with an audacious call to rebellion and the echoes of a standing ovation lingering in the sweet, dark October air.

Chapter 20

“That’s All There Is?”

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE BATTLE,
Vo Minh Triet and his aides in the First Regiment awoke early to survey the damage and prepare for the march east and north toward Cambodia, away from the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. Big Red One howitzers had pounded the jungle and American high-performance jets had swept overhead late into the night, leveling trees and rearranging the landscape with napalm and fragmentation bombs, but most of the Vietnamese soldiers by then had withdrawn into deep bunkers and tunnels. Near Triet’s command post, all the tall trees but one had been destroyed. High in that tree, clinging to a branch, was a monkey, the kind that lives in the treetops and never touches the ground. When Triet noticed the solitary monkey atop the lone standing tree, it reminded him of himself and the existential isolation of a single living thing. When his soldiers saw the monkey, they thought of something more basic, food. They were still famished. They asked Triet to give the command to shoot the monkey for a meal.

Triet declined. “Forgive it,” he said of the monkey. “His life is miserable enough already. Let him live.”

Soldiers from Rear Service Group 83 were also active early that morning. Nguyen Van Lam, the local farmer who commanded C-1 Company, took some of his men to the northeastern edge of the battlefield. They had constructed a concealed water hole within yards of the biggest tree in the area, likely the same tree that American troops remembered so vividly, the one under which Major Holleder had died. As they approached the water hole, Lam came upon an American corpse. It was torn in several pieces, shredded, it appeared, by a fragmentation bomb. The largest section was a white torso with arms attached. There was a shattered watch on the wrist of one hand. The flesh was raw and freshly ripped. Wild pigs, Lam realized, had found the body before he did.