Old Surfer part 2

I was watching "St. Vincent" yesterday with a friend and noticed my tears streaming down my cheeks. I recognized many friends now long gone and dead from the 1960s and 1970s who were surfers or who got drafted and are no more. Some of the reasons I gave up board surfing around 1969 were that my friend got run over by a skeg or fin on someone's surfboard likely on purpose. There were just too many surfers and a lot of them started to compete and were not nice anymore sort of like in Gangs protecting their surfing spots. Surfing stopped being fun then for my friend and I.

And when he recovered he soon joined the Air Force so he wouldn't get drafted into the Army and put on the front lines and get killed. A lot of smarter people did this then to avoid death. So, he had a jet engine certification so he worked on fighter jets and bombers in Thailand that flew into Viet Nam to bomb and strafe there.

So, after my friend had to join the Air Force to survive the Viet Nam War I felt sort of guilty because I had had Childhood Epilepsy and had been classified 4F which means you only get called up for the draft if the mainland gets attacked which never happened then or in World War II either except in Hawaii which at that time (World War II) sort of like Alaska. Hawaii and Alaska became states in 1959 and 1960 I believe.

So, I was despondent that I didn't have a good friend to surf with and he was gone to Viet Nam and so I started climbing mountains and doing Rock Climbing with another friend instead and also started Skiing more too.

So, eventually surfing was replaced (caused by the Viet Nam War and other things) with Skiing Mountain Climbing, Rock Climbing and other things. The world was changing.

So, the movie St. Vincent depicts many people like I knew in the 1960s and 1970s whether they went to Viet Nam or not. Vincent reminded me of so many young men I knew then that were acquaintances or friends then. They mostly were survivors with big hearts. So, in emergencies they would die for their friends or help people whenever they could in any way possible. This was the way it was then with people caring a lot more about each other than now.(even if it killed them).

Some people think that Everyone hated the troops for going to Viet Nam. However, this was mostly kids who had no experience in living in the real world whose lives hadn't really started yet so they had no experience with the harsher realities of life. Most people just felt very sorry and sad for the returning troops that came home all messed up in the head or in their bodies. They wondered whether dying over there might have been better than coming back just so messed up that they weren't themselves anymore. So, soldier after soldier then killed either themselves, their families or both. It seemed like this happened hundreds of times then in the 1970s and before because PTSD wasn't really understood that well yet. So, when violent flashbacks occurred soldiers would think their families were the Viet Cong fighting them still and murder their families in their dreams and flashbacks. This was really awful for the world to deal with then.

Remember there were 250,000 wounded in Viet Nam that were American soldiers and an uncounted number (likely a million or more men who had some kind of permanent PTSD as well from Viet Nam). So, everyone was sort of scared of Viet Nam Veterans then on multiple levels. Also, 50,000 of our boys died over there as well.

So, I never really went back to surfing after my friend went to Viet Nam in the Air Force. However, I continued to body surf and Boogie board which is less dangerous than board surfing and I also continued to SCUBA dive and to free dive with a mask and snorkel in the U.S. mainland and on Hawaii whenever I lived there or went there. However, the only time I used a Sailboard (a surfboard with a sail) was in Thailand in 1985 on Koi Samed Island near Bangkok, Thailand.