At the age of 18 I fled suburbia, tripping into the dusty corrupting enlightenment of the bloody Vietnam War, like an Alice in an evil wonderland, never to return. Simply put, I was sent to Vietnam to defend a lie, to destroy those (the totalitarian commie "them") who dared oppose the "greatest nation" on Earth (the free democratic "us").
In the crazy confused Cold War '60s, my home county -- Orange County, Los Angeles -- was a bastion of rightwing war supporters. They were a proud, murderous bunch, who arrogantly supported the war. They hated, as one man told me, all those young men (those hippie yippie commie pinko bastards) who tried to avoid the war. They needed to be taught a lesson; so they sent as many as possible off to Vietnam to become men, like them. Very few excuses made it by these mad-dog keepers of American manhood and democracy.
The apron strings were slashed. That white middle-class innocence was yanked from my consciousness to be replaced by crimson pools of blood and a zonked-out nomadic mind, wandering through the dangerous fetid jungles of Vietnam. I gradually became gloriously free in this dead zone and began to wage a dangerous war of protest in Vietnam.