Army field jackets, college campuses and Woody Guthrie Artwork

Reflections from the River

There’s something about that “Old Man River” which brings out the storyteller. Reflections from the River comes from the banks of the Mississippi River, upstream from Memphis, downstream from St. Louis, where the aircraft carrier sized tows negotiate the twists and bends of America’s artery. In these five to ten-minute vignettes a modern-day Mark Twain, with the occasional O. Henry twist to an ending, holds a mirror to middle America, its challenges and its strengths. Author and speaker, Bill Enyart, draws from the well-springs of working-class Midwestern roots, tempered by his rise from enlisted military ranks to Major General and then US Congressman to tell stories that reveal much of the American soul and the path American military men, women and their families tread. Humor, duty, grief and comradeship share the stage. Audio production by Tom Calhoun at paguytom.com. Cover photo by Staff Sgt Lally Laksbergs, Army National Guard. Email comments or questions to: bill@billenyart Billenyart.com

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Reflections from the River

Army field jackets, college campuses and Woody Guthrie

April 04, 2023 • Bill Enyart

1970’s College campuses, military field jackets and Woody Guthrie (This transcript is slightly edited from the audio.)

Returning veterans were easy to spot on college campuses in the early ‘70s. Shoulder length hair, beards, OD green field jackets with no rank insignia, no service label, but sometimes a name tag still sewn over the right breast pocket. We left the name tags on to prove we weren’t posers. OD green for you civilians means olive drab green in color.

We weren’t dust bowl refugees fleeing 1930’s Oklahoma Depression-era drought like Woody Guthrie sang about, but we were certainly fleeing something, even as we wore the insignia of what we were fleeing.

That insignia consisted of military issue field jackets and blue jeans. They were the de rigueur uniform and why not. They were comfortable. They had lots of pockets. They were durable and could take a beating, whether you were in class or under your old beater car changing the oil. Because the military had issued it to you they were cheap…unless you count the value of the time you’d spent on active duty.

Long hair showed the world you didn’t have to cut your hair anymore. Long hair had started becoming popular in the mid 1960’s with the Beatles and other rock and roll bands furnishing the fashion. As teen-age enlistees or draftees we all hated the short-cropped hair requirements enforced by lifer NCOs. Lifer was the ubiquitous term all junior enlisted used for anyone who had re-enlisted.

For most guys leaving active duty during the Viet Nam years, the beard began sprouting the minute we walked out the main gate with discharge papers in hand. Like the long hair, it symbolized that we weren’t in the military anymore and didn’t have to obey the stupid regulations. It only took me about four years to get over that little phase of my life.

The beard came off the summer after my first year of law school when I realized the sixty-something-year-old judge in the country courthouse where I interned probably wouldn’t appreciate my buffalo hunter look. Not to mention I’d gotten tired of grooming bits of lunch out of it. Oh yeah, and the John Lennon, rose-tinted wire rim glasses got swapped out for dark horn-rimmed studious looking nerd glasses.

Although the beard came off and the hair got cut, I kept on wearing that basic training issue field jacket with its liner. It was the only thing that kept me warm during the winter, driving the ten-year-old Volkswagen with its plastic bag and duct tape for a rear window to law school classes. Even with the two part-time jobs, it was the coat I could afford.

Much like the vets in law school, the vets in undergraduate school didn’t join fraternities. Nor did they bother to paint the rock in front of the student center. And we sure as hell didn’t join ROTC. We did drink beer. Lots of beer. We hung out in a corner of the student union. Some of us were just there to use up our GI bill educational benefits to avoid going to work. Others of us were there to get that union card, a college degree, as soon as possible, so we could escape the working-class existence most of us grew up in and continued in through that first military hitch.

The ones using the GI education benefits to avoid working were in that special corner of the student union my first day in school and were still there a year and a half later when I graduated. They’re gone now. Gone back to the steel mills, gone back to the chemical plants along the Mississippi River and gone back to the coal mines of Southern Illinois. Gone back to the places their dads worked. They’re gone from there now too. Gone from the shuttered steel mills. Gone from the coal mines now worked by machines that have replaced thousands of laid off union miners. Gone from the chemical plants bankrupted by executives who got their bonuses before heading to bankruptcy court. The labor unions Woody Guthrie sang about couldn’t help the workers fight those bankruptcy filings even as the executives collected their bonuses.

Some things don’t change much. The headlines for the last few weeks are all about failing banks getting rescued and executives selling their company stock and taking payout bonuses on their way to failure while the workers get laid off. How many times have we heard that story?

Let me get this straight. It’s ok to bailout banks. It’s ok for executives to take bonuses knowing their company is headed to a bankruptcy filing, but canceling student loans is socialism and God forbid we provide medical care for poor people. Federal and state governments closed mental institutions and fail to provide services for mentally ill people or drug addicts or alcoholics while our parks and downtowns fill up with them. Yet this country’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires pay no taxes.

God forbid we have socialism here, but it’s perfectly ok to have corporate socialism and coddle the wealthy while criminalizing the poor.

Where is Woody Guthrie when we need him?

Audio productions: Tom Calhoun, www.paguytom.com