Beach Music (95 page)

Then, General Elliott spit in his son’s face and the world they had in common went into sudden, irrevocable eclipse. The war and what it did to the soul of America played itself out in that brief encounter between father and son. It was the undoing of Jordan Elliott. He crossed over into a borderland of hurt where no one could follow. In jail he forgot all about Vietnam and turned to what he could do that would most hurt his father. What could he do to break him? I had never before heard anyone pray with greater urgency, and Jordan was praying for the death of his father.

When I was released into the custody of my parents, my father rose to the occasion of my defense. The legal peril I had brought down on myself inspired him to sobriety, and he handpicked the best criminal lawyers in the state to defend me. In private, he and my mother fought ferociously over our methods and tactics in protesting American involvement in Vietnam, but in public they were just as vehement in supporting my actions against all comers. The more they studied the Vietnam War, the softer their defense of those policies became. By the time my trial began, both Lucy and the judge had turned indefatigable and fierce in protecting me. Shyla’s parents backed her with the same quiet zeal. Though Capers’ parents disapproved of his every move, they too stood beside their radicalized, long-haired boy.

Among the students arrested at the Russell House, almost every parent showed up to support their children when the gathering of lawyers, prosecutors, and judges took place in the high-windowed courthouses. Every single parent, except for General Elliott.

To him, the matter was a simple one. We were all guilty of giving comfort and aid to the enemy; we were guilty of treason.

When Jordan walked out of jail, the general was waiting for him, but this time he did not strike Jordan in front of the cameras. Instead of driving home to Pollock Island, General Elliott drove Jordan directly to the grounds of the South Carolina State Mental Hospital on Bull Street. A military doctor, an associate justice of the State Supreme Court, and the general himself all signed a document declaring that Jordan Elliott was mentally incompetent to stand trial and was to be hospitalized for mental observation starting on that day. South Carolina had the simplest rules in America for locking up its incompetents and lunatics.

The trial took place in Columbia in early December. The passions loosed on America by the killings at Kent State had vanished and were replaced by an exhaustion that settled softly into the body politic. The whole country felt worn down and handicapped by years of force-fed tragedy.

Outside on the courthouse steps, the last great antiwar rally in South Carolina was in session as I drove up with my parents and brothers to face the consequences of my actions the previous May. No matter how hard I tried to re-create those events in my mind, I could not figure out what drove me to such egregious defiance of authority. I had been called an all-American boy for so long that it was part of my own secret self-image. I had never received a speeding ticket in my life, never flunked a pop quiz, and never given my parents a moment’s worry about my grades. After leading an exemplary student life, I now faced a thirty-year prison sentence. I had thrown my diploma down the toilet because I had gotten angry at the deaths of four students I had never met, who went to a college I had never heard of, in a state I had never driven through in my life. The trial simply terrified me, and even Shyla’s bravado could not dim the sense of indistinctness and flatness I saw when I looked to the future.

But under the harsh light of cameras again, outside the court with my father looking magisterial, my mother beautiful, and my brothers loyal, I whispered thanks to my family for sticking by me.

When the bailiff cried out for the court to rise, Judge Stanley Carswell walked out of his chambers with long, deliberate strides. He looked severe until he sat down and smiled. He studied us for a
brief moment, shook his head sadly, then got down to the business at hand. He entertained several motions, then said, “Will the prosecution call its first witness.”

The prosecutor was a veteran of the pure Southern textbook variety. He was portly, loquacious, and had one of those midland accents that conjured up salted hams hanging from dark rafters in a smokehouse. Sitting between Capers and me, Shyla elbowed both of us when the prosecutor’s sweet tang lifted through the crowd. He began, “Your Honor, I would like to call as the first witness for the State of South Carolina, Mr. Capers Middleton.”

In South Carolina, whatever infinitesimal, barely breathing, white-knuckled spirit of the sixties still existed died at that moment. Capers turned state’s evidence against us. He named every name, told every secret, turned over every file, revealed every conversation, noted every date and expenditure and phone call in his diary, sent dozens of people up and down the East Coast to jail by the power of his testimony. The local chapter of the SDS folded during the first hour he spent in the witness chair. Carefully coached by the prosecutor, he described how J. D. Strom, the head agent of SLED, had recruited him to infiltrate the antiwar movement at the end of his junior year in college. Capers admitted that he had used his friendship with his childhood friend, Shyla Fox, to gain access to the inner circles of radical activity on campus. If it had not been for Shyla, Capers felt that he could never have won the trust of the true believers like Radical Bob Merrill. It was patriotism of the highest order and a fierce anticommunism that caused him to become an undercover agent for the state. His family had descended from one of the oldest and most distinguished in the South and his love of country was second to none. He believed that the radicals he met for the most part constituted no danger to the state whatsoever. In fact, he still loved his friends Shyla, Jordan, and me with all his heart and thought that we were simply immature dupes who were highly suggestible to inflammatory rhetoric we could not understand. During the course of his five-day testimony, Capers used the word “sheeplike” enough times that Shyla wrote a note to me saying Capers was making her
feel like a rack of lamb. It was the one note of humor we managed during the course of the trial. And it was that same trial that changed everything about how we felt concerning friendship and politics and even love.

The counsels for the defense tore into Capers Middleton with all the scorn and contempt that the judge would allow. They scoffed at his sincerity when he claimed he acted as he did only because he felt his country was in grave jeopardy. They taunted Capers by reading back the words of his own speeches and by playing videotapes of Capers denouncing the war in the most cutting, withering phrases of mockery. By trying to make a laughingstock out of his masquerade, they only succeeded in bringing out the bristling patriot in Capers. He matched the defense lawyers in their disdain during the taunting sessions of his cross-examination. He refused to acknowledge that he had betrayed us in any way, but sadly would admit that we may very well have broken faith with America.

Then Capers spoke about Shyla without being able to look her in the eye. Above everyone he met in the antiwar movement, Shyla was the most passionate, articulate, and committed opponent of the war. Her idealism was unquestionable; she had served as his chief lieutenant and he depended on her for an innate genius for strategy and for her fearlessness. He told the court again and again that Shyla was the one person who acted from a deep sense of moral outrage against the Vietnam War. He attributed it to a longing for some earthly paradise that she had developed growing up with a father who had survived Auschwitz and a mother who had watched her family murdered by the Nazis.

Capers saved his most savage offensives for Radical Bob Merrill, the outsider from the great, yawning beast of New York City. Employing the ancient Southern fear of the carpetbagger and the scalawag, Capers wove a damning testimony about Merrill’s subversiveness, his maladroit attempts to get them to move toward more and more radical acts. Bob’s secret blueprint always called for violence. His voice was soft, but his ideas always ended with policemen dead and squad cars on fire. Radical Bob’s most
incantatory thought was thrilling and insurrect. His bottom line always was that the antiwar movement, if they were serious, should plan an incursion against the base at Fort Jackson itself.

“These antiwar people are all phonies,” Capers told the court. “Even though I personally thought Radical Bob was crazy and out of his gourd, he did make a valid point. If people really are opposed to a war, they should be willing to give up their lives for that belief. All these folks wanted to do was march with signs, smoke dope, and get laid. My ancestors fought against Cornwallis and Grant. They fought against the Kaiser and Hitler. They fought, they didn’t talk. They took up arms, they didn’t write speeches or compose slogans. Though Radical Bob’s dangerous, he showed me what was wrong with this whole antiwar movement. They have no guts. They lack the courage of their convictions and I’m happy to be the one to expose them for the cowards they really are.”

The second witness for the prosecution did much to change the worldview of Capers Middleton. If a gasp of surprise went up among the shocked remnant of the Columbia Twelve when Capers revealed that he had worked as an agent for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the earth itself seemed to open up when Radical Bob Merrill lifted out of his seat among the accused and took his place beside the judge as a witness for the government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had recruited Bob as an informant during the troubles at Columbia University, and he had proven so valuable in his infiltration of that uprising that he was the natural choice when the local chapter of the FBI began to worry about subversive activities that arose when the UFO coffeehouse was founded to recruit young disaffected soldiers into the movement. Neither the FBI nor the state of South Carolina had any notion that both had insiders passing out information from the same feebly populated SDS chapter.

Though our defense proved that every illegal action we had participated in on the night of the break-in had been planned by either Capers or Radical Bob, we were found guilty of illegal trespass, breaking and entering, and malicious destruction of federal property. The judge sentenced us to a year in prison, but suspended that
sentence due to our youth and obvious idealism. With quiet generosity, the judge gave us a real break.

W
hen Capers came to the witness chair in the Dock Street Theater, all of us were silent as he picked up the story of his involvement with the trial. Though he told his side of the story well, I could still feel his uneasiness over his part in bringing down his friends. One minute would find him defensive, but in the next he would grow thoughtful as he tried to recall the passions and fears set loose during those harrowing days. With high-strung, nervous advocacy, Capers defended his actions as a form of patriotism and service to his country. When he signed up to work as a government agent, he had no way of knowing how Kent State would draw his closest friends into the trap he had set for the enemies of America.

“Shyla loved you, Capers,” I heard Ledare say. “Why did you pretend to love her back?”

“I didn’t pretend,” Capers said, looking over at his ex-wife. “What I felt for Shyla was real. I never learned so much from anyone, never met anyone with such fine instincts for politics. She understood media, always made it work for us. I thought that later I would be able to explain to her what had happened. You know, on some occasion like this. My love for her was perfectly real—hell, we all loved Shyla—we grew up with her. But I was looking at a bigger picture. I thought our country was in trouble. I knew that Communists had infiltrated the antiwar movement. Unlike the rest of you, I had access to the agents.”

“Your friends weren’t Communists,” Jordan Elliott said. “Jack and I weren’t even political. Mike and Shyla were just against the war.”

The general answered his son sharply. “You did your duty to your country, Capers. You’ve nothing to answer for.”

“Capers has always been proud of what he did at Carolina,” Ledare said. “We used to argue about it during our marriage.”

“I wasn’t proud,” Capers corrected. “I was reconciled. There’s a big difference.”

“If it wasn’t for you and Shyla, Jordan and I wouldn’t’ve even noticed Kent State,” I said to Capers.

“I take full responsibility for what I did,” Capers said. “I suggest you two do the same.”

“You kept me out of the demonstrations,” Mike said to Capers. “You made me the photographer. Said I should record history. Was that because you were protecting me?”

“You were too impressionable,” Capers said. “I was protecting you from Shyla and your own worst instincts.”

“So you were setting Shyla up?” Mike asked.

“She had set herself up. Shyla helped shape the form my radicalism would take. My main focus was Radical Bob.”

“Ah, the irony,” Bob said.

“It’s what always happens in bureaucracy,” Capers said.

“Were you paid a salary?” Jordan asked.

“Yes. Of course,” said Capers as if surprised by the question. “And I earned it too.”

As I listened to Capers and the others, it came back to me again how long it had taken me to recover the equilibrium I lost during that trial. I discovered that I did not have a revolutionary bone in my body and if the judge had sentenced me to the front lines of an incountry unit in Vietnam, I would have accepted my duty with gratitude. The prosecution had accused me, day after day, of not loving my country, and that left deep marks on me. My country was what I woke up to every day, what I saw and breathed in around me, it was what I knew and loved without putting a tag on it, and what I would die for if it were ever in jeopardy and I heard it call my name. In the stronghold of my realest self, I was forced by the trial to confront the man I was and the one I was on the way to becoming.

After the trial ended, Mike had met Capers Middleton outside the courtroom and had taken three photographs of Capers with his arm around Radical Bob. Then he had set his Nikons down carefully and had punched Capers in the jaw. Onlookers had needed to pull Mike off his old friend.