Hippies

   

     Remember Hippies? I barely do because they were older and not that many lived nearby. Many imitators who wore the same clothes and had long hair but none that I ever actually spoke with.

     We did have Hippies on our Saturday morning lineup of cartoon. Scooby-Do and the classic VW Micro-bus. They were no more real than our neighbors but let us imagine the freedom of travel and the colorful clothes. We weren't old enough to feel alienated from society and to long for our own distinctive lifestyle. Give us a few snow days from school and a trip to the shore during the summer and we would be fine.

     Of course, we saw the body counts from Vietnam on our TV daily. They made one wonder why the war wasn't over all ready with the numbers always skewed in the United States favor. It became even more real when the TET Offensive in 1968 placed a friend of ours in a POW camp for five years. He's long gone now but I did speak with him at length about his time in Vietnam. He even let me kid him about making him a pumpkin pie, even when we both knew that is all he ate for five years.

    
     He wasn't bitter because that's not how his generation expressed themselves, when they talked at all about their war experiences. Ironic that he was a diplomat and it took him years to convince his captors he was with the State Department. They told him that is what all CIA agents said. Finally they got a hold of a State Department directory with his picture in it and they apologized. They didn't let him go until later, along with all the others. He did make it very clear to me that the flags we fly in honor of missing POWs are not quite accurate because there were no more POWs after his release in 1973. The country was just too poor to keep them and their was nothing left to bargain for by holding any of them any longer. He went on that it worked in their favor to return everyone and begin rebuilding their reputation on the international stage.