Barbara Boxer and the Green Death

Child near Lake Titicaca, Peru - photo by JoAnn Sturman

W.R. Priskna
fliesinyoureyes.com

My friends O'D and Rizzo resigned from the Air Force Academy in January of 1970. Today's popular press places excessive emphasis on wealth, indulgence, and what’s right for me behavior, but anyone who has served in the military will tell you it's all about friendship and character. When a friend leaves for whatever reason, he takes a part of you with him. It is an ethos that creates life long bonds and a perspective about what is truly important.

O'D, a San Francisco native, enrolled at Berkeley and instantly doubled the number of conservatives on campus. That next summer I paid a visit to him and the city of peace and love. The City was an ethnic melting pot, and O'D's friends reflected this. The names they called each other would make today's politically correct wince, but there was no ethnic pejorative which was off limits. In fact it was more or less expected to banter in a way that an outsider would wonder why they did not come to blows.

O'D and several of his friends welcomed me in the customary fashion. We parked our car by the Bay and proceeded to get a “heat on” with the local favorite, Rainier Ale, the Green Death. It was an apt name for the beverage, for although it put the consumer rapidly in an adventurous mood, there was a price to be paid later for drinking a can or two too many.

When amply fortified, we decided to pay the hippies in Haight-Asbury a visit. Although past its glory days of the 1960's, the street was still the training ground for America’s future leaders. It was packed at night with disheveled, colorfully dressed “protesters” who were in varying stages of altered consciousness and taking advantage of new avenues of sexual expression.

We decided to interrupt their reverie and drive through the area and throw firecrackers out of our passing jeep into the crowd. It was a childish prank, but the Green Death made it seem brilliant. Sitting in the front passenger seat, O'D tried to light a strip of several hundred firecrackers but his coordination was impaired, and he fumbled with the matches. From the back seat I looked onto the street, thinking it well could be another planet compared to my native Wyoming. How many in the throng were activists or just thrill seekers or indulged adolescents with daddy’s trust account? Was that Barbara Boxer on the stoop refining her political skills with Jimi Hendrix?

Success! O'D finally lit the strip but his hands were slower than the mind, as he dropped the exploding firecrackers into the vehicle. What a surreal scene as the smoke filled jeep zoomed through Haight-Ashbury with firecrackers exploding on O’D’s lap, while the intended targets scarcely had enough interest to appreciate how the tables had turned. Ironically, 40 years later we work for them.