Peace Then, Peace Now, and Real Peace

04/14/2008

By Bob Gersztyn

Easter marked the fifty-year anniversary of the peace symbol. It was first unveiled by British artist Gerald Holtom during a march from Trafalgar Square to Canterbury Cathedral in early April 1958, but it would be another decade before the crow’s-foot symbol (or “sign of the American chicken,” as the John Birchers used to call it) crossed the ocean to become the predominant symbol of the anti-war movement. Country Joe McDonald had one on his guitar when he sang “Yippie, we all gonna die” at Woodstock, the most electrifying moment in that electrifying event, and it had been around long before that.

It was probably either Country Joe or Neil Young, who had a peace-sign guitar strap, who first exposed me to the familiar icon. By 1968, when I was a twenty-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Sill, it had become common enough that two guys in my unit were selling peace necklaces at a head shop they managed in the town of Lawton, Oklahoma (at least until the CO put the place off limits). I didn’t know who Gerald Holtom was, or that he had created the sign as a symbol of nuclear disarmament. All I knew is that I had to have one.

Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was all the weed that the new hippie draftees brought with them, along with their well-thumbed copies of the Berkeley Barb, L. A. Free Press and Paper Bag, but I decided to fashion my own version of the peace symbol. I took a coat hanger out of my wall locker, and using a wire cutter from the unit’s supply room, I cut it in four sections—one long, one medium and two short. When Holtom created the icon, he combined the semaphore signals for the letters “N” and “D” (for "Nuclear Disarmament"). "N" is represented by someone holding two flags in the upside down "V". The letter "D" is formed by holding one flag straight down and the other straight up. When the shapes of these two symbols are superimposed on each other, they form the peace symbol.

After forming a tear drop with the long piece of the coat hanger and soldering the remaining pieces in place, I let them dry and harden. The next day I took string and wound it around the entire icon. Then I took the remainder of the tube of silver solder and coated the string with it.

The day after that, when the solder was dry, I found some small-gauge chain link in the supply room, and threaded it through the peace symbol. I wore the symbol underneath my fatigues, which gave me a feeling of undercover rebellion, and occasionally I would even let it all hang out. I really didn’t know why this icon represented peace, but I knew that war and fighting were stupid.

I wasn’t the first, and certainly not the highest-ranking, soldier to make a similar gesture. Back in 1958, when I was ten years old, Commander Albert S. Bigelow had become the first American to fly the peace flag on the mast of his ship, the Golden Rule, as it attempted to disrupt an American nuclear test in the Marshall Islands.

A few years later, when I became a born-again Jesus Freak, I learned that there will be no peace until the prince of peace returns, so I threw away my peace symbols. Thirty-seven years have passed since that realization, and now we’ve come full circle. There isn’t a draft anymore, but there is another war, and another election promising peace. Now I’ve got kids a decade older than I was when I made my first peace symbol. Jesus hasn’t returned, and we’re still killing each other.

About a year ago I went to a concert where Country Joe McDonald was performing, and he was still doing the ultimate anti-war song, the “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” as captured on Michael Wadleigh’s Academy Award-winning Woodstock documentary, and when I saw him he was still including the X-rated introductory cheer. You’d be surprised how easy it was for Country Joe to switch “Vietnam” to “Iran” for the classic verse:

Come on, all you big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again,
Got himself in a terrible jam,
Way down yonder in Vietnam,
Put down your books and pick up a gun,

We’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.
And it’s one, two, three—
What are we fightin’ for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
The next stop is Vietnam,

And it’s five, six, seven—
Open up the pearly gates,
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Yippie! We’re all gonna die.

After the concert I talked to Country Joe backstage and he said he’d served three years in the Navy before writing the song, and he sings it today for the same reasons he sang it then. We talked a lot about hope, how you can’t lose hope. He has a new song about the Iraq War, called “Support the Troops.” He still has the peace symbol on his guitar.

Excuse me, I’ve got to get a coat hanger out of my closet.

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