Peace, Love, Fort Ord (and John McCain)

Some of you will have seen, in yesterday's New York Times, another in a series of critical pieces about John McCain. This one focuses on possible favors McCain may have given to developers who supported him financially, in particular one Donald Diamond from Arizona. The article leads with an episode dated a decade ago, when Diamond wanted to buy a piece of Fort Ord, on California's Monterey peninsula, which had recently been closed. From 1969 to 1971 I was a GI based at Fort Ord, where I cooked for soldiers who were going off to Vietnam. But unlike John McCain, whose primary activity during that war was dropping bombs on North Vietnam, my main activity while at Fort Ord was trying to organize soldiers against the war. Back in 1993, when the closing was first announced, I wrote an article about these experiences (called "Peace, Love, and Fort Ord") in the now-defunct magazine Buzz. It is posted on the articles page of my Web site and you can read it at this link (it is a large pdf file, about 4 megabytes, so high-speed connection highly recommended.)