I was born in the mid-20th century (the 1900s). About 1962 I began writing poetry and fiction. About that time Bob Dylan changed songwriting from Doo Wop to something old made new again, a folk filtering of current reality, love and life. He commented on the weirdities of our times, but he didn't mean to change the world; just comment.

I didn't know it then, but life on planet Earth was changing around us, him, me, you if you were born then.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 while I was in woodshop class at Harding Elementary school, Sciotoville, Ohio. I remember shutting down a saw to listen to the announcement over the loudspeakers. The teacher was out. They told us, played taps or something, and, when it stopped, we all went back to work for about 30 seconds before we stopped, like of one mind, and crowded together in the center of the room, just looking at each other. I don't remember what we said, if anything.

They dismissed school and I ran all the way home. I burst in the door and Mom was at the sink in the kitchen.

"Have you had the TV on?" I asked. She hadn't. I told her, "The President's been shot."

Your history book may not say so but he was assassinated. That's the best evidence of a conspiracy I've found, that they have the power to erase it from your history books and not teach your children about it. Kids tell me they never heard of it until they got to college.

The Beatles came to America in 1964 and expanded the possibilities for songwriting in a dozen directions. Anything was possible. Songs could be about love and teen angst, or anything you could tell a story about, anything you could imagine, and sung any way that was interesting to sing it.

I learned to like dancing with girls, holding their hands, their bodies, kissing, with the Beatles tutelage.

About 1965 I worked, tearing down a house where Route 52 was being widened to four lanes, Wheelersburg, Ohio. The $5.00 I earned for each weekend bought me a Norma guitar ($40) from B&B Loan, Portsmouth, Ohio.

I began to write songs. They weren't great but had enough merit to keep me playing. I'd play it in the morning and be late for school. I'd come home for lunch and be late getting back. I'd play it during commercials while I watched TV.

My brothers got into a tug-of-war over it and broke it.

Black Americans could not vote or even sit beside me in public places in some parts of the country back then. They were not allowed at Dreamland, a swimming pool open to the public in Portsmouth. I remember some kids put their money on the counter and ran on in. They called the police. There was a picture of one kid, fully dressed as I recall, jumping past a policeman into the water. It's hard to conceive that, in my lifetime, human beings had to resort to such tactics to be equal in the eyes of society and the law, right here in river city.

Hell, I couldn't vote either. "You're old enough for war, But too young for votin'," Barry McGuire growls in "Eve of Destruction." We began to question how the government was using us.

If you got in trouble with the law the judge might ask, "Would you rather go to prison or in the Army?" With little concept of what being used for the American war in southeast Asia would be like, many opted for the Army.

If the elite people of your local society who got appointed to your draft board didn't like your daddy's politics, economic status, skin color, whatever, they had the power to send you to war. It was like Hitler's 'Send me your undesirables' order.

In 1965, black Americans made up 20% of the front lines of the American war in Southeast Asia, far out of proportion to their numbers in the US population. The brothers called it 'Soulville' up there.

They served for patriotic motives, economic motives, and often as victims of institutionalized racism in their local, state, and national government.

The average age of the fighting man in Vietnam was 19. We were children, fodder for the cannons, meat for the dogs of war. "America is eating its young," the guy who exposed the fascists plan in "The Pentagon Papers" said.

At Glenwood High School, New Boston, Ohio, I took an aptitude test. It came back as a graph with a small spike for clerical work. I was literate. But there was a huge spike for the fine arts. I liked things artful, visual, musical, conceptual, words.

Black leader Malcom Little, calling himself Malcom X to discard his 'slave name,' tried to teach his people not to take 'the white man's drugs.' Brilliant. He was assassinated in 1965.

Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968.

His dream for humanity is alive still, in 2008 as Barack Obama runs for President.

Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968.

I remember questioning the universe, "What in the hell is going on?"

I had no idea. You probably still don't.

Life is what happens while you're making plans. Life happened. I was drafted in 1969, letter from fascist President Richard Milhous Nixon, "Greetings. Come and be used to some purpose in the American War in Southeast Asia, or else."

The Nazi Big Lie was that it was to stop communism, the 'domino' theory, 'If Viet Nam falls, other countries will topple, like dominoes.' Funny how that didn't happen.

But the government and companies were doing business with the Communists (1940's-1960's), just like the Reagan-Bush people did with Saddam Hussein (1980's).

The Big Lie was a lie of the variety damned by God.

But, when your country calls, and you believe in your country, you come.

I didn't find out 'til later "they" weren't my country; I was.

They still tell that Big Lie, with the latest updates.

'We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.'

Here's hoping 'they' don't figure out all they would have to do is ignore us 'over there' and come on over here and we'd be at their mercy.

I loaded bombs and missiles and aircraft guns, never making it to the war zone, but a short hop away, in Korea, and with occasional orders to that fate always canceled.

I loaded nuclear weapons too. We kept them ready to go if the President gave the order. That fascist, Nixon. One of my jobs would be to pull the safety pin just before the plane took off, opening the electrical circuit, enabling the pilot to arm and drop the bomb. That sure made me think, especially as it became apparent fascists had taken over the U. S. government, and the power to give ME that order to pull the pin.

They were exposed in the 1972 Watergate affair. It is an astounding crime much bigger than one break-in at a Washington hotel. Thousands of homes, offices, phones, cars, public places bugged. Infiltration of peace groups, environmental groups, unions, opposition parties, companies. False evidence planted and people jailed based on it. According to one conspirator, murders on orders.

The cover-up worked. They got away with it, and still do.

I survived mis-leadership of the fascist military-industrial-political-intelligence- underworld complex which was feeding American teenagers into their undeclared war machine in Southeast Asia.

Looking back, I realize the bastards tried to kill me and my whole generation. They did kill a few hundred thousand of us, and that's just so far. We're still dying from physical wounds, drug addictions and tropical diseases, chemical exposures, and psychological trauma.

I escaped when they said, "What day in April 1974 would you like to get out?" I said, "April 1st would be too cool man!" They thought it was too cool too. I got out some other day that month. Still, April Fool's was a fitting end to the farce.

I came home to find the 'drug subculture' I'd left four years earlier was now a 'drug culture.' Not just the young, hippies, those subject to the whim of their draft boards, but their parents and grandparents were using prescription amphetamines and barbiturates. Even the older folks were sharing and selling their prescription pills to other people. It seemed to be the intent of the government of the fascists to sedate America so they wouldn't protest, couldn't think through what was being done to them and their children.

The fascists were trafficking in heroin and marijuana, one of the real purposes of their war in Southeast Asia, taking the trade from French organized crime and giving it to American organized crime. A heroin epidemic hit the streets of the world, thanks to fascists using, as Nixon said, 'The apparatus of the government to screw our enemies.' He also said, 'The real war is over here,' meaning we, the people, of the United States, resisting being used by the fascists, were that enemy. And the fascists went to war on us, and have not stopped as of 2008. Nixon hired Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld hired Dick Cheney, and they began dismantling the Office of Economic Opportunity.

In Asia I always wanted to be helping the people there build something, even work in the fields or rice paddies, something helpful, productive, positive, instead of what I was doing. After I 'escaped,' I went to work in various fields, ending up in a 32-year career in that small spike I told you about. I was literate. In 2008 those bastards robbed me of that.

But I kept writing songs in the big spike over that 40 odd years, and they were odd.

The fascists struggled to maintain their status quo but freedom is hard to suppress when the 'free' don't know the fascists are trying to suppress it. They kept a low profile back then. In 2008 they're in-your-face about it, emboldened and unchallenged, aided and abetted by organized crime, entrenched in the military-industrial-political- intelligence-underworld complex their puppet President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about as he left.

Fascism thrives on public ignorance. It's hard to fool people who are well-read. Most people aren't well-read. They're busy trying to keep gas in the car ($4.09 a gallon), food on the table (milk, $4.39 a gallon) a roof over their heads ($425.73 mortgage), and not be poisoned by the tobacco companies' food takeover (1980's) and the pharmaceutical companies' chemicals; not medicine to cure, just chemicals.

Who the hell's got time to study what's going on around them?

Now, 2008, being pushed out of the little spike and scared by negative possibilities, I suddenly see outside that door, a new world of positive possibilities. It's out there. I'm sure of it.

And now, I have a couple hundred songs to play I didn't have back when I was trying to decide what spike to work in. Wait until you hear them. I hope to upload them and sell them for ninety-nine cents like others do. Let's see; that means, if I sell a million of them...oh well, one day at a time. They're all available if anyone wants to license them for recording or publishing. I could use the money.

Gary E. Andrews August 4, 2008 Email: garyeandrews@yahoo.com