Flashing Back

For my friends and me, the event that would change our lives forever, which came to be known as “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident” took place with only a passing glance at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. My father and I were watching the news; while he sipped on his three olive Martini or lighter fluid, as I called it.

We 16 year olds were involved with more important matters, zits and girls. Zits do not need explanation other than to say that teenagers have zits and certainly how many zits and how big your zits are factored into the pursuit of sex with any willing female. To be totally honest, by my seventeenth birthday, my pursuit of the sex act was limited to thinking a lot about having sex with any willing female.

I’ll never forget that summer of ’64, when my Dad was 43 and sang in Saint Paul’s church choir. Mr. Glascock was also a member of the Choir and a Junior High School math teacher. Needless to say the man’s name was the subject of much talk between the guys at school. I am sure that in the seemingly more innocent years, most young men would have thought that his name was a hoot and his wife, Mrs. Glascock took a lot of verbal abuse from the guys in my 11th grade Civics class, where she was a substitute teacher. Anyway, apparently my father looked very young to Mr. Glascock, as one Sunday morning after church, he and my Dad were talking in the parking lot when my 18 year old sister and I approached them.

A look of something close to disbelief came over Mr. Glascock’s face, as my father said “Lindy and Rob, I want you two to meet Mr. Glascock, as he gestured our way, adding that these are my kids.” As I was the teenager who laughed out loud when my friend, Dave Huey, started to make fun of the Glascock name, I’m glad that the Glascock’s and my parents’ never socialized outside of the church. The Glascock’s were in their 20’s and my father and mother were in their early 40’s.

Anyway, I digress, The “Joy of Sex” had not been written, at least in print anyway and porn videos or videos in general had not been invented yet, so if you were lucky enough to see a porn flick, as we called pornography movies, it was more often than not shown behind closed doors in a seedy theater with sticky floors or in a friend’s basement as a bootleg 16 mm print that could be shown on a home movie projector. At that point in my young life, I had not been introduced to either venue. In that more innocent time for me, pornography was a form of entertainment for sale on “The Block” located in the downtown Baltimore striptease bar and theatre district.

The goings on of downtown anywhere was unseen but talked about a lot by my friends and me, who lived in the out of touch tobacco growing countryside of southern Maryland. Certainly my experience was not unlike the majority of any gathering of young men. My sexual thoughts, born in an occasional opportunity to see the wind catch a girl’s dress and blow it above her thighs, revealing a pair of panties and on a rare occasion no panties. Needless to say, the moment remains imprinted in my memory, as if it happened yesterday. The surprise of seeing what every girl hid under her skirt was far more exhilarating to me than seeing a girl wearing a bikini at the beach. The memory of that first glimpse between the legs of the 16 year old girl sitting behind me in English class stays with you. Surely, most boys know how to drop a pencil and pick it up in a way that allows them to see a pair of panties under the skirt worn by the girl sitting behind you in high school. Just thinking about that time that I dropped my pencil to look up Cheryl’s dress still seems to fill every cell in my body with a rush of adrenalin. I guess my libido is intact. As a 16 year old male, who felt and acted much of the time like I was hormones on two legs; there was no way I could begin to describe that feeling to my buddies; although I certainly tried to embellish the tale. Especially on the day after Laura let my hand explore the top of her nylons and on a rare occasion even beyond. Hour’s awake thinking about sex will lead to hours asleep thinking about sex and so it goes.

Later in life, I would find that day and night dreaming about having sex was far less complicated than having sex when you and your spouse are not interested in the act at the same time. At sixteen, my thoughts about a “Roll in the hay” would soon include thoughts of Laura, the girl next door, the girl down the street, the girl sitting next to me in math class, and of course the Playmate of the Month pictured in the Playboy magazine, that I managed to keep hidden in my closet. Needless to say, my imagined images of all those girls in my head most of the time meant that something had to give and it did, usually somewhere around 4 AM in the form of a “wet” dream.

It has been said that adolescence is a disease that you grow out of and so it was for David Huey, Vic Vance, and me. Later in my bed at the age of forty–eight, a wet dream had nothing to do with my sexuality but rather perspiring, as I restlessly slipped in and out of a reoccurring nightmare that would change my life forever. By fifty the wet dreams of my youth had been replaced with wet nightmares. Nightmares about Vietnam and the firefight for the POWs held in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. Nightmares about people ripped apart in the crossfire of blazing machine guns, red nightmares, blood red and surreal nightmares. Perspiration pouring out of every pore in my body, as in a restless sleep; I relived again and again the horrors of four nights and three days in Quang Tri. These post Vietnam War wet dreams were way beyond my wildest imagination in 1964. I recall my parents taking Lindy and I to see the 1953*** classic The House of Wax, which starred the actor Vincent Price. Not even my memories, as an 8 year old, of his horrific makeup, filmed in 3–D Technicolor would begin to match my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder “Red dream.”

With sweat beginning to bead up on my forehead, I knew that the war in that far away place called the Republic of Vietnam would begin to feel more real to me and my friends. Soon the war would be more important than even our sexuality. Later in 1965 I sat with my Dad in front of our black and white Zenith 27" TV and watched the unfolding story of an alleged pair of attacks by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. According to Mr. Cronkite, the attacks occurred on the 2nd and 4th of August in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Mr. Cronkite went on to say that this century’s Vietnam conflict began in 1961, when the Hanoi, North Vietnam–backed National Liberation Front took up armed struggle against the American–backed regime of President Diem. The U.S. also began providing direct support to the South Vietnamese in the form of military and financial aid and military advisors, the number of which grew from 600 in 1961 to 16,000 by the end of John F. Kennedy’s presidency in 1963.