On this Day in History: November 15, 1969. The Moratorium March on Washington. A Million Reasons to End the War. . . Or So We Thought.

The First Time the Size of the Crowd on the DC Mall Really Mattered

On this day fifty years ago, the second phase of the hopeful Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam took place. Unlike the previous month’s event, it wasn’t a quiet series of strikes by students or others. It was to be a million marchers in Washington, D.C., right outside President Richard Nixon’s White House window. The portion of the divided country convinced it was time to stop this seemingly endless and pointless conflict was ebullient. We were confident that with numbers like these showing up, it would be impossible for the president to dismiss the will of the majority: the war had lost its objective; it was unwinnable; it was time to Bring the Troops Home NOW!

Like the first Moratorium that October, the march was to be inclusive of as many subsections of the country as possible—an unprecedentedly huge aggregate of voices all asking for the same thing. And, it was to be peaceful, to make a point without becoming who we were not, and without alienating those who’d like to join, but feared to in the shadow of the violence that began with the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial had just begun that September and was still going on. We were changing the image: There are so many of us; lots of us look like you; it’s safe to join us. You know we’re right.

We Had to Be There. And to Be Counted.

Young people were particularly activated and ended up comprising the majority of the marching crowd. The war affected them most, after all—they were the fuel for the new draft lottery, coming in just three weeks, that was to determine who would go to Vietnam at a time when that meant a death sentence.

College campuses, representing the largest concentration of draft-age men, mobilized. Across the country, buses and other transportation were arranged to bring flocks of students to the event. Preparations covered the scope of the guerilla marketing options of the day: posters were painted, banners made for display by marchers, armbands and pins created for every message out there, from the remaining vestiges of flower power, “War is hazardous for children and other living things,” to the clenched-fist yelp of the day, “Hell No, We Won’t Go.” 

We had to be there, somehow, we told ourselves. The numbers were important. A million marchers!  We had to be counted. That was the galvanizing cry—and so close to the December 1 lottery date that it was worth risking all. Like the main character in The Fourteenth of September, I was on a military scholarship, the only way I could afford to go to college. I was deep into plotting how to get out of it by this time, but I couldn’t risk losing it, which I surely would if I got caught traveling to Washington, thereby going AWOL (which I’d technically be, away from my “duty station” at school). But I felt certain this was a pivotal moment in history, and I had to be a part of it, or I’d never forgive myself.

And it was the most exciting thing to be happening so far in my teenage life: Genuine action, people from all over the country, a city I’d never been to. Above all, I was going to make a difference. It’s hard to describe how certain we were that we would be heard at last and that this would work. A million marchers!  We’d stop the war that was eating up our generation. It was easy, Kool-Aid, and I drank it down like so many others in the guilelessness of late adolescence. After all, we were right: people were dying without purpose; the war was bad; it had to end. Who could quibble with that?

Even my mid-size school, Northern Illinois University, was going to send three buses to Washington. It would cost $40 a head, which was stiff for students in those days. I got such a secret kick out of using my army pay to finance my rebellion. I couldn’t tell anyone, but I’d know. I made my plans. I left my army ID in the only locked drawer in my dorm desk, joined in making dozens of PB&J sandwiches for the bus ride, and set out to change the world.

Off on a Fateful Adventure with a Million Marchers

It was a long night’s drive, and we arrived late, after the famous “March Against Death” that took place the night before Saturday’s big event. Thousands of people had walked in single file down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, each carrying a placard with the name of a dead American soldier, presaging the eventual form of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. The placards were placed in coffins, and we saw them lying in front of the Capitol Building as our bus pulled into the city and dropped us off.

We hastily joined the other marchers, lined up for the main event. We jumped around to stay warm in the bone-chilling November cold, none of us dressed for the weather. We’d been more concerned about the message of the imitation fatigues we were wearing under our protest buttons—olive drab and khaki jackets we’d picked up at the army surplus store in our campus hometown. We wanted to look the part. We waited. . . and waited, only to be ultimately frustrated when city officials stopped the march on the stroke of the three-hour parade permit time limit, despite the thousands of us who had not yet put one foot in front of the other to make our involvement official.

We swallowed our disappointment and followed the crowd down the Mall, amazed at the sheer numbers of people, a moving swarm of protestors filling up every space between the white buildings we’d heretofore only seen in pictures or on television: the Capitol, the National Gallery of Art, and ahead of us the grand obelisk of The National Monument. We met people from all over, from pacifists to anarchists, but mostly just kids like us, totally psyched that we’d choked the streets and shut down the capital of the United States. Rumor was we’d pulled off the biggest protest ever. Of course, this would end the war. How could it not?

We were tired, hungry, and on the hunt for bathrooms but also riding high, eagerly joining in singing along with those ahead of us, who in turn were singing along with performers we knew were ahead of them but we couldn’t possibly see or hear ourselves—Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe and the Fish.

When we filed onto the buses after only six hours in the city and headed back to campus, we were exhausted but elated. We’d been counted, we were sure. The war would end. We gave them a million reasons why. This is what it was to be a responsible citizen. This is what it was to join the long tradition of activism in our country. This is what it was to be an American.

Read the excerpt about the day from The Fourteenth of September.

“Young Marchers Ask Rapid Withdrawal from Vietnam,” The New York Times

Media coverage and access to information was so slow back then. There were many “no-news” hours between boarding the buses and arriving back on campus, leaving us blind and deaf to the national reaction to the March.

By the time we returned, the newspapers were out, but the number was wrong— they were saying only 250,000 people had been in Washington. That number didn’t make sense if you’d been there. No one could imagine how they’d arrived at it. Someone suggested it was possible they’d only counted the ones who actually marched before the permit ended. It was the only reasonable explanation. Or was it an intentional plot—purposeful misinformation to show that though we boasted of having a majority we could only deliver a fraction of it?

And then there was the devastating caption that told us Nixon hadn’t been looking at a million marchers from his window. . . he had been watching a football game.

Dreams dashed.

“It Remains the Largest Political Rally in the Nation’s History,” Time Magazine

The numbers were revised with time to 500,000, but the damage had been done. We’d been so excited; I’d personally risked so much, and we were dismissed. To Nixon, we were a few thousand kids versus his great silent majority. His contempt for the concerns of our entire generation oozed over us. There were tens of thousands of faces who’d traveled from across the country over which he presided, beckoning for his attention in the freezing cold and he hadn’t even looked up from the television screen, or so he boasted.

We learned much later that this march had been historic, that it had had an impact, that it had been significant in the sequence of resistance that eventually led to the end of the war. In retrospect, we’d been an important part of the story of our country. Today, we smile and feel proud to read the fifty-year-old news accounts. 

But it sure didn’t feel like it at the time.

The war went on for another six years. Thousands more died. We felt the power we thought we had heading into the march begin to dissipate, sifting through our fingers. We were too young to know change was that hard, and would take that long. We thought we’d failed.

A few years later, that president, who finagled crowd numbers on the Mall, would become so cocky he’d push it to the point of breaking the law. He got his comeuppance with Watergate. 

We didn’t think it could ever happen again. We didn’t imagine we were in the first cycle of the hamster wheel of history.

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LATEST UPDATES & NEWS

When Integrity Trumps Consequences

“Consideration will change the world, and I’m ready for it. It’s time for change, and it’s the time to start being brave.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

Each person coming forward in the impeachment process has made a Coming of Conscience decision.

BOOMERS ARE OK

Two authors were pitted against each other at the Louisiana Book Festival on November 2nd—a military wife and an anti-war activist. Fireworks were assumed as Bev Marshall and I recounted our stories in Back Home: A Vietnam Veteran’s Wife’s Short Memoir about a Long War and The Fourteenth of September. But this “Yankee” and this southerner found common ground and became fast friends.

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October 15, 1969: The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. A Pause for Reflection in a Polarized America.

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The anniversaries of seminal events that rocked our world fifty years ago are coming hot and heavy this fall. Today, we remember a time when we tried a reasoned strategy to attempt to deal with a generation-defining issue in a country as divided then as we are now.

TIME Magazine Cover: Vietnam Moratorium — Oct. 17, 1969

By the time of the Moratorium, America had been involved in Vietnam, in one way or another, for nearly ten years. Any initial objectives for the war were long gone, the domino theory relegated back to the game it was named after, the war’s progress descended into body counts, the goal now so incrementally small that there was no big picture left or possible. Our defense secretary was telling us that if we killed more Vietnamese than they killed Americans, it was a good week. Period. The Killed in Action Numbers came out on Thursdays.

It was pretty universally agreed that the war was a disaster. What wasn’t agreed upon was what we were going to do about it. Half the country felt we should stay in Vietnam until we “won,” because America had never lost a war. The other half felt that we should cut our losses and get out—those losses being so obvious in the form of body bags containing young adults (many just teenagers) we were seeing each night for the first time on television, on the nightly news, just before dinner, when the numbers of killed and wounded on both sides were announced with a chart, like sports scores. No one could not know—or pretend not to know—what was going on.

On October 15, 1969, America was stuck in an existential dilemma. Who were we if we stayed in Vietnam? What were we if we left? Lines were drawn at the dinner table; people couldn’t talk to their own relatives; friendships were made or lost depending upon which side of the argument you were on. The country was at a loud and strident impasse—no one was budging. And the policies of our new president, Richard Nixon, despite campaign promises, were alarmingly close to those of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who’d abdicated the presidency because he couldn’t figure it out.

One Day in October, Two Days in November, Three Days in December. . . A Strategy That Should Have Worked

THE NORTHERN STAR, NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1969

A moratorium is defined as a delay, a postponement, to give time for reflection. The plan for the Moratorium that October was to apply this concept to ensure the country didn’t stumble blindly ahead in a direction that might be wrong. It was to be peaceful: to put the war on pause, while we reflected about how we had arrived at this point. How did the war begin? What were we trying to do? How could we bring it to an end? The theme was grief, sorrow, and solidarity, rather than anger and rage. It was important to demonstrate that a war protest didn’t have to be violent and destructive like the one at the Democratic Convention. Instead, the tent was wide and had room for anyone with doubts about the war and the direction of the country, knowing this cut across all segments of age, race, and economic status. The concept was to build a groundswell—to engage the widest representation of all groups and factions. You didn’t need to be a radical to be against the war. Your desire to end a war that had lost its way was the common thread.

And it worked—huge groups gathered in Washington (250,000), and cities across the country. The idea was to expand it month by month, to increase participation and demonstrate the widespread support across all subsets in the country—civil rights organizations, churches, business groups, universities, unions—to end this war that affected everyone. After all, who didn’t have a connection: a child, a boyfriend, a student, a brother, a cousin—some family, some connection, anywhere. A war experience enters the DNA of a country, our DNA. Our lack of power over its escalation gripped us all: it was time to build our side of the argument. What were Communist dominoes and saving the world for democracy, versus the loss of actual lives? Did we need new ways of looking at conflicts—of considering more carefully how we got into them, and the points at which we needed to get out? Just what were the ethics of unwinnable wars?

Students Went on Strike

The way this played out on college campuses—which represented the largest concentration of draft-age men—was in the form of “strikes.” Students were encouraged to skip classes and attend informal education sessions about the roots of the war, the options for protest, how they could regain power over their lives. Since Vietnam had been around through most of the students’ childhoods, they had grown up with it, and now were in it, without really understanding how the country had ended up where it was. It was time to revisit the Gulf of Tonkin, the French involvement, the anti-communist fear that ensnared John F. Kennedy. Or, to learn about them for the first time.

Ken Burns traces all this beautifully in his PBS series The Vietnam War, but back on October 15, 1969, no one was piecing it together, talking about what it all meant, what was really at stake, perhaps, versus what had previously been wagered in other wars. We needed new comparators.

Teachers were encouraged to suspend their syllabus of the day and discuss the war with students. The chemistry teachers balked, but the history and political science professors were in heaven. Students came, the straight (in the old definition of representing the norm) and the freaks. People were talking. Check out the excerpt from The Fourteenth of September that takes place on that date, and you’ll see that it was an opportunity for people to talk about what they felt, to finally ask their questions, to face their fears, to begin to understand rather than just react.

Time magazine said the Moratorium had brought “new respectability and popularity” to the antiwar movement.

The Aftermath

The Moratorium was a huge pearl in the string of events that eventually led to the demise of this long national ordeal, that would take until 1975—six more years—to conclude. Though the administration retaliated with Nixon publicly stating that “under no circumstances will I be affected,” he was. The event led to Vice President Spiro Agnew’s infamous speech when he called anyone against the war “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” (which would have made an exquisite tweet in today’s world). Significantly, it also resulted in Nixon’s defining “silent majority” address, asking for the support of what he assumed was the vast heretofore quiet bulk of Americans for his Vietnam policy—that we had to stay and win. Peace with Honor, he called it. He conceded the point that South Vietnam wasn’t important, the real issue was that America would lose face. This was startling. From then on, the country knew what it was in for, what side he was on. And each of us had to decide what was more important—an escalating number of soldiers killed with no objective or end in sight, or maintenance of a perfect victory record?  As a young person with your life or that of your friends on the line, you had to wonder if it was worth it when some old guy said it would hit us in our pride. We did not think this was a compelling case for the carnage, not a decade into this war, with a possible additional decade ahead.

Conversations were stirred up, assumptions were being challenged. It was a brief illuminating moment. We learned a lot. It was a start.

Power to the People

We all looked forward to the next phase of the Moratorium on November 15, 1969, which was to be the biggest March on Washington ever. We were empowered and activated to change the world. It felt so good, finally, to think that we could be heard. Illusions about this would be shattered as events progressed rapidly through the end of 1969/1970, but it’s instructive to remember that there are moments when progress did happen, and that it takes so painfully long. We paid a price for not listening to each other back then.

March at night to the White House, led by Coretta Scott King, part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

It makes you wonder if we need a Moratorium today—a time for reflection, to really think about the character of the country. Who are we if we continue on our current path? What are we if we choose another, hopefully better, one? We lose all when we stonewall and stop talking to each other. Perhaps our Moratorium is the impeachment process? It could be. Let’s be open. The sin of what happened fifty years ago was that we took so long to do what was inevitable in ending the war. The horrible price was in loss of life and damage to our national integrity. Our DNA is still frayed. There are echoes of what is at risk at present today in our country. There is a war going for our integrity. But there could be hope.

 Like Judy in The Fourteenth of September who went through a Coming of Conscience journey to a decision where integrity trumped consequences, there are a lot of people today who are or who need to make a similar Coming of Conscience decision. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to admire their willingness to risk personal consequences for doing the right thing. We need so many more of them. The country awaits how this current Coming of Conscience moment will resolve—not just how it will be written about in the history books, but how will happen right now.

We can still change the world. . . if we listen.

All power to the people.

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LATEST UPDATES & NEWS

Integrity Trumps Consequence

“I have learned that I am not afraid to stand up for others, even if that means standing alone.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

"I have visited nations ravaged by civil war. ... I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant."

— Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.

Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner

As I was about to cross the stage at last week's Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner I realized I should have provided period-specific music from The Fourteenth of September as background. Turns out I didn't need to—watch and see what they came up with.

Limited Time Only! If You Haven't Had a Chance to Get a Copy, Stock up Now for Yourself or Gifts.

She Writes Press has teamed up with NewInBooks and BargainBooksy in celebration of #NationalBookMonth. For a limited time only, from October 18-27 the eBook version of The Fourteenth of September price will drop to $0.99.

Coming of Conscience and Fighting for Roe by Rita Dragonette

Check out my latest op-ed for Ms. Magazine: “Fifty years from now, the future cannot look like the world we've already changed.”

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The First Anniversary of "The Fourteenth of September:" The 50th Anniversary of Everything That’s In It 🎂

It’s been a year since the publication of my debut novel, The Fourteenth of September, and I can’t believe it either. To answer so many of your questions, yes, it has done well (outperforming the average independent book, I’m told) and continues to be of interest. It’s fulfilled all my hopes and dreams, and I’m humbly grateful for the wonderful year I’ve had due to the support of many of you. I intend to continue the ride as long as it lasts, however wild. This last quarter of 2019 alone is filled with the fiftieth anniversaries of so many of the seminal events of the time that are dramatized in the novel: the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, the first Moratorium Against the War, the March on Washington, the first Draft Lottery. Their commemoration shows us how the decades can seem very long ago, and yet as short as a heartbeat, with in-your-face reverberations today.

To be honest, everyone is right when they say publication is not for sissies. Though incredibly affirming and rewarding, it’s also been, in the favorite words of the colorful Joe Dragonette, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” To my surprise, the part that gets so many writers, the marketing, was often overwhelming even to my PR veteran self. But the biggest challenge was always that my topic was so fraught on so many levels. Me, being me, I just couldn’t begin with a simple starter novel with a few characters and a feel-good climax. And that made the hill I had to climb pretty high, though a few major things did finally break in my favor.

 Following is top-line some of what I learned during the year of the launch of The Fourteenth of September.

Vietnam is No Longer the Voldemort of Wars

read the first chapter which takes place September 14, 1969

Timing is everything, and there was a long period when I thought I’d totally blown mine for publication. The book took thirteen years to write (and that’s once I actually put fingers to computer) and I suffered through many questions about why I was writing about Vietnam—a subject no one cared about, I was told. It was the Voldemort of wars, as one of my book-launch salon participants put it: We lost, there were atrocities, and we treated our vets badly. Nothing anyone wants to revisit. And besides, it’s the past, not relevant for today. Why waste your time?

Fortunately,my au contraire moment was created by Ken Burns (The Vietnam War PBS), Steven Spielberg (The Post), the writers of This is Us, and other popular culture curators who reminded us at the fifty-year point after the war that it was time to look back, learn, and even—be still my heart—be entertained. In addition, with the interest in women’s issues and diversity, there was increased openness to new points of view. As a result, once I published, I became part of the zeitgeist. In fact, the New York Times recently pointed out that three of the current bestselling novels are also at least partially set in 1969, with Vietnam themes or plot points: Summer of ’69, Mrs. Everything, and Chances Are…, the latter of which is actually about three college buddies whose lottery numbers pretty much determined their lives.

Unfortunately, world events have lined up to show that if not examined, history will always repeat itself. So alas, counterintuitively, what’s uncomfortable for the country makes The Fourteenth of September more relevant than ever. It was chillingly familiar when Pete Buttigieg reminded us in the second Democratic Debate that wars are “very easy to start and very hard to end.” He was referring to Afghanistan, but the echo to Vietnam, that limped on five years after Kent State turned the country firmly against the war, was loud and clear.

It’s time to embrace the subject of the Vietnam War as we would any in history. Check out the article I wrote about this for Independent Publisher: “Five Reasons Why It’s Okay to Write about Vietnam Today.”

Vietnam Is Still a Tough Subject, but Not One to Shy Away From

—People actually do want to talk about Vietnam, given the opportunity. In over thirty events during the past year, I’d say, men, in general, are eager to share their particular stories—how they did or did not get out of the draft, the near-miss life-saving efforts of helpful doctors, the miracles of lost or destroyed draft documents. They also remember where they were on Lottery Night—in a bar, huddled around a TV in a dorm, in a pool hall—afraid to listen, feeling powerless, their destiny out of their hands. They shared stories personal and painful as if they’d been just waiting for an opening. They talked about what got them through—tales and talismans. The real-life model for the character of Wizard in my novel pulled the remnants of his draft card out of his wallet and reassembled them on a countertop to show me they never left him.

—Women are mixed. They usually don’t feel they have stories of their own and start with those of their men: fathers, uncles, husbands, sons, students, relatives relegated to the dark and never talked about. Once they “claim” their experiences, their stories are as compelling. One woman told me she’ll never forget picking up the paper on the front porch the morning after the second draft lottery to read that if she’d been one of her five brothers instead of a girl, she, too, would have the lowest lottery number and been off to Vietnam. Many were apologetic—they’d been focused on raising kids, or writing papers at college amid the chaos, or just keeping their heads down and their lives moving forward as the world was blowing up. One of the most telling comments was from a seventy-nine-year-old woman in Wisconsin who came up to me after a book club. “I got married young and didn’t go to college,” she said as if I’d judge. “My husband was on the road as a salesmen five days a week and I was overwhelmed raising three kids. I thought all the protesters were entitled rich kids, causing trouble.” She thanked me for showing her their perspective as she revised her own.

—Young people are very curious. Not so much Millennials, who find it hard to relate, but Xers and younger who say they want to hear more about a subject no one talks about or teaches. They haven’t heard about the Lottery and have a hard time believing that it happened as it did—like a game show on television. They instinctively feel that Vietnam is an important part of their history and that others have decided it’s not to be shared. They want to understand why.

It Still Hurts. Time Helps but Doesn’t Heal.

—Vets are still angry. Some violently so. Several of the comments to my Facebook Ads were pretty hot, by vets viscerally reacting to nothing more than the photo of a protest sign and the name of a female author. I tried to engage with a few to tell them the book wasn’t anti-vet, and one did respond, thanking me. But I had to pull back on my audience target, realizing I was pouring kerosene on a wound that was still open.

—Vets are still profoundly hurt about how the war was conducted and how they were treated. Callers-in on radio shows spoke primarily about that. They were anxious to share. I was willing to listen. My attempts to donate some proceeds to The Wall or Vietnam Vet organizations were mysteriously rebuffed. One sympathetic man finally told me it was too much of a reach. The Vietnam Vets were focused on supporting vets of subsequent wars, so they wouldn’t be treated poorly like they had been. When I brought book copies as giveaways to my high school reunion, I had to start by saying the book was anti-war for that war at that time—not anti-vet.

When my publicist emailed with a link to a review of The Fourteenth of September in The Veteran I held my breath. To her, this had been an obvious media target, but I knew better. Now, I’m more proud of this than any other I’ve received:

Few books have taken the time—and space—to examine so thoroughly the collegiate antiwar movement in small-town America. The story held my interest and reminded me of what was going on in Pullman, Washington, around the same time. The tone rang true in every line.

I was interested in the impact that the draft lottery and its rippling effects had on a generation heavily influenced by the chance uncertainty the lottery had on hundreds of thousands of young people. I had barely paid attention to the lottery because I was one of the young men drafted before it was instituted.

This novel opened my eyes to issues that my thick skin and my age had protected me from. We are admonished to read this book and weep, and I actually did shed a tear or two of sympathy.

If you’re like me, after you read this well-written novel, it will be difficult to put it out of your mind.

We Can Still Be Surprised by the Past

In one of my book-launch salons, I met Pam Tarr, daughter of General Curtis Tarr, who was the much-maligned “inventor” of the modern draft lottery. I didn’t know her history but had been warned she’d attend and I should be prepared for tough questioning. That didn’t happen. She was open and sympathetic to the story of characters protesting what had been her father’s program. Later, she told me about how the objective had been laudable—to come up with a uniform, fair program versus the uneven and “bribable” local draft boards than in place. Her father and her family had been vilified and taunted. She told a story of how President Nixon had urged her to be brave. Her best friends were the daughters of Ehrlichman and Haldeman. It had been a hard adolescence and she felt it hadn’t been fair to her family. And, of course, she was right. War does so much unseen damage to so many unappreciated victims. Many of the overlooked are women and girls. I’m hoping she and I will be willing to work together on this story at some point.

Historical Fiction Is a Pathway to Understanding

I’ve always felt that we learn our history through facts and nonfiction, but we understand our history through narrative—where we can actually feel ourselves in the shoes of a character we can relate to and wonder what we would have done. Then, we can begin to know what it was like to weigh the stakes and dangers against the valor and objective, and consider what it was like to live in another time: to make a fateful decision in the narrow vision of a single person’s experience of the past without benefit of the panoramic reevaluation of the present.

Historical fiction typically takes place at least fifty years in the past. The Vietnam War, as a subject, is now just squeezing into that category by its chin hairs. It’s complicated. Living people bring the lens of their authentic, yet specific involvement to the story. Some feel that unless they had their own experience of Vietnam this story wouldn’t be relevant. This story is only for a Boomer audience of a specific age, in this micro-targeted world. Right? 

And yet, we openly welcome stories of topics of which we have no living experience—the French Resistance, German prison camps, home-front US—in stories like The Lilac Girls, All the Light We Cannot See, The Beantown Girls, The Lost Girls of Paris. Members of book clubs press novels on me about other wars they see as parallel and relevant. People send books, poems: Pandora’s box has been opened. Vietnam is as relevant as today, as nostalgic and fascinating as the yesterday of World War II and all the history that’s gone before. The stories the War has to tell are compelling, gut-wrenching, instructive, revelatory, and

. . . entertaining. The Fourteenth of September, for example, is full of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the time. It’s impossible to write about 1969-1970 without being a bit uncomfortable, yes, but also with singing and celebrating.

It’s time to open ourselves to the narrative. Over the next few months, as we commemorate the pivotal events of fifty years ago, this blog will utilize The Fourteenth of September as a lens to allow you to experience this chaotic and prescient time from the perspective of the nineteen-year-old you once have been, will be or still are. And, to consider what you would have done then, and may yet need to do, again in the near future.

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When Integrity Trumps Consequence

“If we strive to normalize courtesy, integrity and making moral decisions we can inspire others to act in a similar manner. I am committed to making these practices a standard of human experience: encouraging change one by one, creating a better world.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

Common Sense Gun Control

"Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore."

— Beto O’Rourke

Audiobook of "The Fourteenth of September" Now Available: Leave the Reading to Us

Now that I have your attention, I will fess up that the novel has been available as an audiobook via Amazon since the book launch back in September of 2018. However, since I didn’t do any specific promotion on the format, it has just been sitting around, quietly, with modest purchases by experienced audiobook fans who knew how to find it. It’s time I gave it some love.

The Casting Cloud

The audiobook deserves its solo spotlight, given all the time and attention that went into producing it, but also because its development challenged me as an author in ways I’d never expected.

Right off the bat, the process of choosing a narrator sounded like great fun, but in practice it was unnerving. I can see why authors so often hate the films that are made of their novels. As a writer, you spend years picturing and “hearing” specific faces and voices in your head, and it’s very hard to envision, if you will, a stand-in. Very. 

Though I was asked many times to narrate the The Fourteenth of September myself, I felt it needed a voice for my nineteen-year-old main character, Judy, that sounded the right age. The casting process for identifying potential narrators was exceptionally efficient. Over sixty professionals sent audition tapes based upon an excerpt I had provided. Just pick one, easy-peasy, right?

Hardly. I did have the foresight to hire an experienced producer to help me with the project—primarily because I was totally focused on the all-consuming production and promotion of the paperback and e-book. We both thought it would be a piece of cake. Not so much.

Thankfully, my producer winnowed the audition tapes down to a dozen for me to review to make it an easy afternoon project. Instead, it was... just... too much. All those voices—all good, all young, all saying the same thing, all sounding so... SIMILAR, but not at all like Judy. I felt instead that I was listening in on a gaggle of her friends at the Tune Room, the site of so much of the story’s action. I finally had to do what I’d been hoping to avoid—listen carefully to each audition over and over, trying to pick the voice I thought I’d want to listen to for hours on tape, but actually found myself looking for reasons to eliminate, so the last person standing (or in this case, talking) would be the obvious choice. It was a bit like shifting through great candidate resumes back in the day but with higher stakes for me and my story. I finally got it down to three, and the producer and I compared our choices and picked a final voice. Whew! I was ready to turn the nuts and bolts over to my producer to get back to the world of words on paper. But no such luck.

Nailing the Voices

Before I could walk away, the producer sent me the recording of the first two chapters, where each of the large cast of characters appeared at least once, to ensure the narrator had the voices correct. I was appalled. None of the voices matched the characters in my head. And all of them—male and female—had two things in common. They were PERKY, and the inflection of every sentence went up at the end. To borrow the vernacular, we SO didn’t talk like that back in 1969. We were happy or sad, sarcastic or whiney, enamored of the curse-word vocabulary we were trying out like truck drivers now that we had left home, but we weren’t full of endless pep every minute. We were never, ever PERKY. And, not being interrogative-loving French, we preferred to swallow the end of our sentences and let the words descend into unintelligible mumblings that our elders would struggle to understand perhaps, but we would never go UP. After all, that implied asking permission, and in Judy’s era we were more likely to be trying to disappear, be sullen, or have POWER. Oh, the Valley Girl of it all. I considered removing the word like from anywhere in my manuscript. It wasn’t there much, but somehow, after listening to the narrator, it sounded as if it were. I can fix this, I thought.

Author as Actor... Not

After years making business presentations, I told the producer I would settle this quickly. I recorded my own voice reading my own first two chapters, filled with my own intended tone and inflection, so easy then for the narrator to imitate, right? I was sure I’d be great. I’d once harbored an inclination toward the stage. The narrator would probably be in awe, and I needed to be prepared to keep her dauber up by reassuring her that she could do it, perhaps not as well, but she’d be fine.

Again, a surprise. I virtually slapped myself in the face. First of all, it was exhausting. Forget the character voices: I could hardly manage to keep the energy of my voice up let alone on inflection pitch for twenty pages in one sitting. And I... there is no more politic word to use... sucked. As the narrator might put it, “I am SO not an actress, ya know?” I couldn’t listen to myself, and above all, I DIDN’T SOUND LIKE JUDY. It was so hard to wrap my head around that. A few decades on or not, I deep down inside guess I thought the words in my mind would come out the way I heard them, sounding like Judy, and Wizard, and Vida, and David, and all my other characters. It wasn’t age, it was... like listening to your voice on the telephone. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Judy. Instead I sounded vaguely like a more nasal version of my sister and the guys sounded like cheery kids, not the voices I needed to communicate the sarcastic bravado in the face of fear that ruled the story’s Draft Lottery time frame.

I feared what the narrator would think when she listened to my version; suddenly I felt that I was the one auditioning. “You call this acting?” I could hear her complain. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to my producer in a middle-of-the-night, follow-up email. Too late. “It did confuse her,” the producer admitted. “I think her narration is fine,” she added after a long, diplomatic pause, asking how I wanted to proceed. Someone needed to listen to the narration chapter by chapter as it was recorded, to be sure it was accurate, words weren’t dropped, etc. “It was critical,” she said.

I humbly told the producer to take me out of the loop and just run with the project. Like Puff, this little dragon sadly slipped into her cave, realizing that there was a reason I had chosen the boardroom over the stage in my earlier career.

In the end, I came to see why movie directors ban authors from the set. We are pathetic, not capable of suspending our belief. We are in love with the vision we put in words, yes, but also the one in the netherworld between the words we write with our inside voice and how they are delivered out to the world. Mere mortal actors/narrators who cannot hear inside our minds will never rise to this impossible-to-articulate ideal. And in fact, once I was out of it, things proceeded just fine; as pointed out by my producer, the narrator may not be “me,” but she is Judy. And isn’t that the point? I was a bit taken aback—after all, there would be no Judy without me—but of course she was correct.

Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook.

A message from Marissa DuBois, audiobook narrator.

At this point audible Judy is doing pretty well. See listener reviews on Audible and Goodreads, and listen to the excerpt. And also hear the narrator, Marissa DuBois, talk about her excitement for the project in this interview. Then, check out the audiobook yourself, which is available on Amazon on the same page as the other formats for The Fourteenth of September. One tip, be sure to turn up the speed when you listen, Judy has a lot to say... she needs to talk fast.

Audio Is Cooler Than You Think

My first audiobook was my own novel and that helped me catch the bug for my long, fair-weather walks along Lake Michigan and car rides. The more you use it, the more you think about where to use it. My trainer listens to audiobooks while she cleans her apartment, an idea I can absolutely get my head around. I’ve begun to inventory life activities that don’t require paying attention.

Above all, to my friends and family who tell me they support my story but just aren’t “readers,” or who only read nonfiction: Please try The Fourteenth of September on audiobook, and Judy’s voice will make it all go down in an exciting way. Let me know what you think... and about new creative ways to listen. I personally, for example, think my brother should read it during those endless hours of home repair and tinkering in the garage. I mean, he’s already on engineering-genius autopilot—he can listen to a story at the same time, right?

Time flies when someone’s telling you a story.  For me, the audiobook experience is like Mrs. Sellen, my first-grade teacher, reading us Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Its like a personal movie. They talk and you imagine. You know, just like a book. Hands free. Enjoy!

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Book Cover of the Month Finalist

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A 48-Year Déjà Vu

The last time I was part of a massive protest march was November 15, 1969, in Washington DC to end the War in Vietnam. It was major. I wrote a novel about it. This past Saturday, I was in Chicago, part of the Worldwide Women’s March to maintain our hard-won rights.  It was bigger. It will be mentioned in inevitable books to be written four years from now. In both cases, I immediately knew I just had to be there, if for nothing else than to be counted.

The first song at Saturday’s rally was Let it Be and 48 years dropped away

Back in ’69 I’d arrived in DC sleepless, after an all-night trip on one of three school buses taking 200 of us from Northern Illinois University to what we were certain  would be the end of the war. I froze in a threadbare pea coat left over from high school and gym shoes that got so muddy I had to pitch them the minute I returned. I had three PB&J sandwiches in my paisley bag along with a knit hat to hide my red hair so my military mother wouldn’t see me on TV and realize that I’d gone even though she’d pitched that fit. “What do you mean you have to be there?”

We were full of purpose and joy –everyone was so friendly, eager to know where you were from, what protests were going on at our campus, to show off their homemade signs and share buttons. “I’ll trade you my green Texas SMC (Student Mobilization Against the War) for your blue SDS. We were walking posters of cross-country solidarity. The only tension was over how to greet new friends.  But soon, even if you got it wrong and they answered your peace sign with a clenched fist or vice versa, embarrassment turned to giggles and it didn’t matter. So much was going on. Though we were there to demand that Nixon end the war, there were lots of ‘isms” about other issues that blurred in the background—communism, Marxism-- debates about peace vs violence. I warmed my hands by a fire while listening to an anarchist. He was cute so I listened.  It didn’t matter. I was there and would be counted in the million plus number we were certain we’d hit and Nixon wouldn’t be able to ignore.

Pink Hats

The New Yorker called  Saturday’s pink sea “radiant with love and dissent.” It was equally full of purpose and joy. We snapped selfies instead of traded buttons, showed each other our witty—sometimes smutty--signs, marveled at how far people had travelled, asked each other what activism we had planned, and obeyed orders by staying off the grass. I was in a perfectly warm Cole Haan jacket and Mephisto walking shoes. The only tension was wondering how long my lower back would put up with standing on pavement. I was not nineteen any more. The message was equally messy. We were there to demand Trump not roll back our rights, but the speakers spilled over into calling for Rahm’s ouster… union rights. Someone was trying to give away a free pair of Ivanka Trump sandals. I laughed, having fun while knowing I’d be counted among the numbers that were escalating from 50,000 to 75,000 to 250,000. Who’d ever seen so many people in one place? I mean…not since ‘69. After, we stopped for lunch in a cozy spot over hip health food and reflected.

Had to be there

I was motivated in ‘69 to do whatever I could, including putting myself in jeopardy, to be counted as against a policy that simply could not stand. After that I moved on from activism. Nearly 50 years later I feel equally threatened.

My late mother often told my sister and I that she’d been certain we’d have so much more freedom than she’d experienced in career, marriage, family—all of it. She’d gone as far as she could in her day and wanted us to go farther and we did. But she was disappointed it hadn’t been more.  Yesterday, there was a post from my second cousin who is a diplomat in the foreign  service awaiting the birth of her second child, with no paid maternity leave. She has to decide to take either a financial or a professional hit over her “choice” to have a baby. She hopes her two-year old daughter won’t face the same decision.

The past is not past, it isn’t even dead. What I object to is the hamster wheel of things. I reject the way a new administration is coming into completely repeal the work of the previous one, and how that will tee up the next to do the same.  Massive programs like Medicare and the Affordable Care Act don’t arrive perfectly operable. There are a lot of moving parts. We start with what makes sense based upon what we know and then we need to work to make it better. Sure it’s messy. If we repeal instead of refine, they’ll be another plan with its own messes that will either be rejected or refined and we’ll keep going in the wheel of negative progress so my cousin’s daughter will still be fighting and being threatened by the repeal of Roe vs Wade. Just Let It Be.

That’s why, after so many years, the Women’s March has helped me come out of my radical sleep. The voice of my own novel reminds me. This time, my mother would have agreed it was worth it. She may never have understood the antiwar part, but the woman’s rights part, she’d SO get that. She would have come to the march. She looked great in pink.

She would have known it was important just to be there.