Too close for comfort...

It's one of those stories that never goes away.  Every February, there comes a mention of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It was a moment in time near the end of the Vietnam War that summed up the frustration and anger that had built up during that futile conflict. Even my career military father, then working for the government as a civilian, was at his wits end trying to figure a way out to no avail.

Three of the Hearst kidnappers were in school with us at Indiana University. Bill and Emily Harris and Angela Atwood found each other in California being drawn into the movement known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Bill was a close friend of mine from high school who I helped coax into attending IU. Angela Atwood, or  Angel as we knew her, was a sorority sister of my wife Jane and sang in a campus band that I sometimes played with and managed for local gigs.

Bill and Emily and Angel were more like the rest of us at the time than you could imagine. We were all away from home, each beginning to find our way into the next part of our lives. Bill dropped out of school, joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. When he returned, he had indeed moved on but, unfortunately, the war sent him into a very dark place.

In the fall before the kidnapping, I spent some time with Bill at a campus outing and I could see the effects of his Vietnam tour beginning to bubble to the surface. He was very outspoken about the government and the affable personality that I had known from years earlier had been consumed by distress and negative emotions.

When the names of those associated with the kidnapping, who died in a house fire and shootout with the police, were released,  I had to listen twice to believe that Angel was one of those who was killed. And then in almost the same breath came the names of Bill and Emily Harris, who had escaped the fire with Patty. I simply could not believe what I was hearing. It just couldn't be THE Bill Harris...MY Bill Harris.  But it was.

The story goes on for decades. Initially, there were FBI phone taps, mail being opened and inspected, interviews with friends and family and regular check-ins with the agents in charge.Even midnight face-to-face encounters seeking refuge with some of us who were close to him. Then, two years later, Bill and Emily and Patty were captured.. There were trials and hearings and jail sentences all around. Pieces and parts of the story continue to resurface on a regular basis, even into the new millennium.

I wrote to Bill in prison during his first incarceration. His mental state at that time was still somewhere in the outland and clearly hard to track. Today, he is circulating amongst our old cohort from time to time, living now in Hawaii and seemingly doing fine.

The feelings and emotions that were in the heads of young people then were treading a very fine line. It was clearly too close for comfort. Our country is walking a line like that again today. And it's the young people who are a force to be reckoned with.  I hope we can get our priorities in focus and find our way down the right road. We are setting the stage for years to come..