Horizon

Yep.

They had this image in the SF Chron s'morning. It was a jolt to see it. There's a similar image deep in my brain of people grabbing onto the skids of a helicopter as it takes off. Don't know if I saw it on the news at the time (I was only six) or manufactured it in my head from reading descriptions later, but it sure is there. In my private vocabulary it's an archetype of desperation.

Weird thing is, I'd never thought before about the "last helicopter out" image having importance to my mental furniture, but it does turn out to be so.

I was twenty-one, but it was still so long ago that there are only unreliable memories. I think I was at my parent’s house that night (or maybe it was the next night or a few later). They still had a B&W television (my mother was a cheap old girl – I say old but she was younger than I am now), and my father and I sat up and watched a retrospective on the war. The house lights were all off and there was just that eerie blue television light and the smoke from my father’s cigarettes. There had never been much support for the war in our house, but none of us enjoyed the humiliation of defeat or the shame of leaving the South Vietnamese behind. I don’t remember my father speaking once.

This is going a bit OT now, but Douglas Adams once said that he had told the story of how he came up with the title 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' so many times that he could no longer remember the event itself but only the telling of it. In the same way I suspect that many of us don't remember famous events so much as we remember remembering them. I know from my own area of research that there are cases of elderly people 'remembering' Chamberlain's radio broadcast of September 3, 1939 even when there was demonstrable proof that they hadn't been near a radio set at the time.

I suspect that the chance to reconstruct what really happened at Dealey Plaza in November 1963 lapsed about an hour after the shooting. After that, witnesses were no longer recounting what they remembered: they were self-consciously Part of History, and their genuine impressions were being so swamped with extraneous gunk that they could no longer reliably separate personal memory from that History.

I was only one, so my memories of helicopters being pushed off of aircraft carriers must have been from later coverage.

There was an enormous population of Vietnamese refugees where I grew up in Southeast Texas. As a result my friends and I could never exploit our mediocre knowledge of French to tell dirty jokes in public because their grandparents could always understand. In retrospect, this was probably a good thing.

I'll take a nice, warm memory over a cold, hard fact every time.

Interestingly, I think the "where were you when..." memories may be in a different category from "I was a witness to the famous event..." memories because they're so individual. My parents were painting the interior of their house on the day of the Kennedy assassination. They have strong memories of stoically continuing to paint with the radio on for the rest of that day.

Bobby, your post went ker-thunk to my stomach. I am a child of the Depression, and my parents' were often stoic. But then I became a young adult Texan with four little children around my feet. And I watched TV from my ironing board as my responsibllities kept me at home. But my heart was often in the streets with the flower kids who were just a little younger (and of draft age!) For me the memories of years before ALL THOSE LOSSES are probably overly sentimental. Now the grief-work continues as we try to let go of the nation's pain around a lost war, awful assasinations, and a failed presidency. It's still hard.