Stephen Stills
Military
connection
Music
Before his arrival in Laurel Canyon, Stephen Stills was (*yawn*) the
product of yet another career military family. Raised partly in Texas, young
Stephen spent large swaths of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, the
Panama Canal Zone, and various other parts of Central America – alongside his
father, who was, we can be fairly certain, helping to spread ‘democracy’ to the
unwashed masses in that endearingly American way. As with the rest of our cast
of characters, Stills was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at
elite military academies. Among his contemporaries in Laurel Canyon, he was
widely viewed as having an abrasive, authoritarian personality. Nothing unusual
about any of that, of course, as we have already seen with the rest of our cast
of characters.
There is, however, an even more
curious aspect to the Stephen Stills story: Stephen will later tell anyone who
will sit and listen that he had served time for Uncle Sam in the jungles of
Vietnam. These tales will be universally dismissed by chroniclers of the era as
nothing more than drug-induced delusions. Such a thing couldn’t possibly be
true, it will be claimed, since Stills arrived on the Laurel Canyon scene at the
very time that the first uniformed troops began shipping out and he remained in
the public eye thereafter. And it will of course be quite true that Stephen
Stills could not have served with uniformed ground troops in Vietnam, but what
will be ignored is the undeniable fact that the U.S. had thousands of ‘advisers’
– which is to say, CIA/Special Forces operatives – operating in the country for
a good many years before the arrival of the first official ground troops. What
will also be ignored is that, given his background, his age, and the timeline of
events, Stephen Stills not only could indeed have seen action in Vietnam, he
would seem to have been a prime candidate for such an assignment. After which,
of course, he could rather quickly become – stop me if you’ve heard this one
before – an icon of the peace generation. PART 1
[2008] Inside The LC by Dave McGowan