Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

99. I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYING BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN (nyc, 1968):

It was somehow always a situation of 'I know what you're saying but I don't know what you mean' - with weird twisted humors and stories concocted seemingly of the moment and one guy I heard made mention of his just-completed Vietnam experience saying like 'never again' for him he won't ever again go near the place and didn't even want to talk abut it and then he began talking comically like he was mad or something - about how they used to say at base-camp that the 'only way to remedy napalm from off the skin was to burn it off' and that was some huge joke and then he talked about bombing runs and how they'd go out in groups of low-flying craft and just drop the stuff onto anyone and anyplace they saw and it wouldn't ever matter because the 'gooks never knew what hit them and no matter they needed a good cleaning anyway' and they'd watch everything - the screaming people running off the ones aflame and the ones wailing until they crumpled and died and the huts torching up one after the other and the funny ways people would scurry out of burning huts set aflame from the just-previous hit and how it was all like a comical funny movie cartoon you'd see in the theater before the real show started and how on land-patrol missions the locals would be rounded up and tied with wires and then stretched between poles until they said what they were supposed to say and how they'd cut off tongues or testicles and the women and girls who were stripped bare and then bent over and checked for 'worms' which could only be done by 'injection' and that again meant more work HARD work because endless fucking was difficult but someone had to do it and if they wanted to call it 'pacification' it was OK by him because by the time they were all done he was always 'pacified' for sure - until the next time - and how he was glad to be back here in the 'land of the brave and the home of the free - where the less you know the better off you'll be' and he even got that backwards and that was that - or as he put it 'here I am brother a trained killer sent home to forget all I learned - now what d'ya think of that? and ain't America great?' and the more I heard stuff like this the more I realized how much I actually hated people who could think in those categories and how I hated the sort of guys who would even deign considering this to be some form of right outlook or proper behavior and I really was disgusted over and over a million times by the sorts of people I saw who took willing part in this - the draft boards of course were humming and the entire place was afire with people being sent off to war - but in spite of the draft there were actually people enlisting (for whatever 'benefits' that brought) and I could never figure them out but soon realized I shouldn't anyway because it's simply a certain mindset or a certain sort of person who holds out a possibility for military life or enlistment or order and there's simply no other means of behavior open to them - they surely were NOT cut out to be artists and such - so I simply let it go : regimentation always attracts more regimentation and the people who think along with that : so no matter what it all had to take its course and whether they came back in body bags or came back with hundreds of their murderous tales to tell - either way - here they were and a good number of them in those days tried to get back into civilian life by melding into this new and burgeoning concept of hippie life - free loose easy sexy and expanding - and with it came their drinking or smoking pot and much of their foul outlook and abusive behavior and in point of fact their psychotic and repressed and intense and explosive mental set often brought out rages and violence of a sort not before seen in this supposedly 'serene' atmosphere of enlightenment - thus there occurred murders and beatings on a surprising scale and along with that most especially and repulsively came the sex crimes and brutalities that went with it but everyone washed their hands of what was occurring and simply did not address it - which then became even more a part of the sickening behavioral environment that war caused and by 1969 and after it had become an egregious offense against humanity itself - here AND there USA and Vietnam - because these sickening people knew no limits and were simply being dropped back on our shores after their enlistments and service times ran out - pure psychosis let loose upon the streets (the resultant debacle of 1970's NYC quality-of-life was too easy to see building).