(gentle music) - [Narrator] On this episode of "Postcards."

- I got my certificate of apprenticeship program and I got a draft notice the next day.

So I get the letters within the day of each other and I can't believe it, but that's what happened to me about getting drafted.

- Meeting Peter was another (imitating explosion) where there was a different kind of life and not so much a life of glamour.

- [Nicole] Something about the prairie that I didn't expect is the heavy amount of solitude that I've experienced since moving here.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

- Twin, you add power slowly, gears down, two knots, flaps ready to go.

Sitting at 57, 59 mile an hour, I should be able to rotate, gear up.

Looks tall, miles out.

You can see the runway, you see the ground going by.

Creep close.

That's a tough approach here.

The lights should show up on the runway pretty soon.

Oh, I can't stop.

I made it, Chris.

- [Chris] You made it to the ground.

- That something?

That is so realistic.

This is where I do them all.

And you can see...

This one shows how they're not bad, even on the big screen.

This is how it starts out.

♪ One two three ♪ (upbeat music) - My title in Vietnam was, they call it Signal.

It was you were a signal guy.

It was photography, it was a division of the army in Vietnam.

In the division that we had, there were nine photographers, and that's all they had.

So you were assigned a job by the captain of the group and you'd log and you'd be on that assignment and try to get something newsworthy or human interesting to show that we were there for some good, not just everybody getting shot up.

We were to show that the United States was there to help the people.

I got done with a certificate of apprenticeship for photography, and two, three days later, I got a letter in the mail saying that you're drafted.

I went to the courthouse and I knew the people there.

The lady Lois said, "No, they're not drafting you, Gary.

You're too old and you've been married three years."

She said, "Just forget it."

The next thing I got was a letter to go in for a physical, and I went to her, I said, "What are they doing here?"

She said, "Just a normal routine, Gary.

They'll send you home."

So I went in to all these young, I was 24 years old, and these kids were, it was a big draft session at that time.

These kids are 18 years old out of school.

Then they take you in a room after a while and they're sitting in a room, all these guys and the captain of the Army comes in and says, "The Marine is gonna come in and pick who he wants for his troops for the Marines."

And then he leaves and he takes those guys out and the Army guy comes in and says, "The rest of you are in the Army."

I go, "Wait a minute.

I'm too old.

I'm not supposed to be drafted.

I'm going home tonight."

So he went out of the room and I mean I'm falling apart there because all of a sudden I'm drafted.

But I went home and I was in tears and I said, "Honey, I'm drafted.

I'm in the Army."

I'll be gone for two years.

Next morning I went to my boss, we had the school photography printing to do.

I said, "I quit."

He said, "Why?

I said, "They just drafted me."

He said, "They can't do that."

I said, "You tell them.

I'm gone in 30 days and I gotta get Carol settled someplace because I'll be gone for 30 days."

I have no choice.

You're not gonna change it.

So that's how I got drafted.

So it was a big surprise to me at that age to get drafted that old, because I was married three years, but we didn't have kids.

But they said it wouldn't have made a difference.

But generally, if you had children, they'd probably hold you back.

I got my certificate of the apprenticeship program, and I got a draft notice the next day.

I mean, they couldn't have timed it better because it took a while for the state to get my certificate, and in the meantime, the draft notice, they go, "Oh, this guy's free now, we're taking him."

So I get the letters within a day of each other and I can't believe it, but that's what happened to me about getting drafted.

In photography, our job was to go out and do things that the Army wanted to show is part of the history.

So they were gonna teach us that if you were in Vietnam, you didn't want to get captured.

And the way they would show that, they set up a mock prison camp and they had a guy come in and teach you.

They gave you supplies someplace in the prairie.

They had the trail there for you.

So we went into the base camp where they captured him.

First thing they did is took your clothes off.

You stayed in your underwear, but they laid you in a mud hole.

It was all wet with dead snakes and junk like that, all rats and stuff in there.

And then if you came by and asked you a question, he'd take his foot and put your head down in the mud because nobody could answer any questions.

They never knew anything.

So then they'd take you in the basement and they'd sit you on a barrel and you'd kneel on a barrel.

And then he'd ask you questions.

You couldn't answer anything.

And they'd have a cattle prod.

They'd stick them in the belly, and then they had a barrel they put over your head, a empty 55 gallon drum hung in a rope, and his hands were tied.

And they'd ask him questions.

He couldn't answer any.

So they had a big beam and they'd hit the barrel.

And then if he wouldn't answer questions they'd take a M114 rifle with blanks in it, and they'd blow it off right next to the barrel.

And the guys, their legs are shaking.

I've been going, I don't want to do this.

I know I'm gonna be, well, I'll do it.

I'm going, I don't want to do this.

And then at night, everybody had to stay.

It was cold in the prairie, yet you stayed in your underwear in a rabbit cage type thing.

They're all barbed wire.

Everybody was back to back.

You were tucked in this cage at night.

Well I took a photo of that, that went back to the base because we turned a photo in every night and the captain went to the general and said, "This is going bad.

They're gonna kill some of our guys."

So they shut down the camp so I never had to go through it, but I filmed everything.

(gentle music) We got to Vietnam, we landed, and they took us by small boats, and they load us in shore and we go, what's this?

And they load us on Jeeps.

We went on trucks and we went out to wherever our base camp was through the dirt and the dust.

We had no idea what was going on.

(helicopters whirring) We carried three cameras.

My camera's all taped up with masking tape because in Vietnam, the humidity, if you didn't put your camera in a little box with a bulb in it to keep it dry, your camera would be rusted and the film would get very sticky.

So everything had to be in a box to keep it dry.

All the black and whites here, they were sent in on a roll.

And we never knew what was good or bad other than they'd send, we'd get a stars and stripes flyer and they'd say, "Hey, you got your picture in there."

Otherwise, we never knew where anything went, and whether it was good or bad.

(gentle music continues) (light music) - And this is my dad and his brother, Eugene McCarthy.

And Gene was just recuperating after a year-long bout in a rehabilitation hospital.

My dad's older brother is Eugene McCarthy, and Senator Eugene McCarthy was the senator for Minnesota for 10 years.

There was a war that was raging.

Some call it the Vietnam War.

And the people in Vietnam like to call it the American War in Vietnam.

And it was coming to a time when there was a big anti-war movement growing in this country.

This is a sort of short history lesson, but when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lyndon Johnson was Vice President, and he was then sworn in as president from '63 to the elections of '64.

He was then elected for the first time in 1964, and actually was elected on an anti-war platform.

So four years later, as he started to inherit this war that was going on in Vietnam, and as it continued to escalate, there had been 15,000 young soldiers who had died from '64 to '68.

And Gene felt strongly that somebody from the Democratic Party really needed to challenge Lyndon Johnson on this issue.

Bobby Kennedy seemed like the most likely person.

But at that time, Robert Kennedy said that he did not feel that it was politically smart for him to do that.

And so in the end, Gene stood up alone.

And as the poster says, he stood up alone and something happened.

And he grew this small anti-war movement into a huge national movement.

The first testing of his challenge to Lyndon Johnson was the New Hampshire primary on March 12th, 1968.

And when Gene first went to New Hampshire, they thought he'd get maybe 2% of the vote.

Most people didn't even know who he was, but there was a movement of college students that was amassed that just went door to door and knocked on every house in New Hampshire, if not once, maybe twice.

And it turned out that Gene got 45% of the vote, which was just such a surprise to everyone, including Lyndon Johnson, who was the heir apparent of the Democratic nomination.

Well I came back to Minnesota thinking I would go to Wilmer Vocational School for the spring when Gene's success with the New Hampshire primary exploded.

And I, not being a political person, I called the St. Paul office and said, "I'd like to come down and do something."

And I thought I could stuff envelopes or address letters or do something nominal to help out.

And because I had the name McCarthy and because I'm a gregarious person, I was sent out on some of the smaller events and it gave people a connection to the campaign, to the family.

But I have to have somebody come along to talk about issues because if anybody asks me about policy and issues, I was a know nothing.

I was like "Alice in Wonderland."

And I really jumped down the rabbit hole following my uncle and this crusade, this campaign, and I learned so much.

And I came out the other door Wonderland a changed person.

- [Announcer] The contemporary urban folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary.

♪ Come gather around the people wherever you are ♪ - Peter, Paul and, Mary had been supporting the campaign.

They'd been against the war for years.

Peter had written the campaign song, "If you love your country and the things for which it stands, vote for Gene McCarthy and bring peace to our land."

But they had never actually met the Senator.

Well Peter, Paul, and Mary were coming into Portland as I was flying into Portland from doing some campaigning around the state.

And the people at the campaign headquarters wanted to invite Peter, Paul, and Mary to come to the campaign headquarters after the concert.

So before blowing in the wind at the last third of the concert, Peter said, "We have somebody in the audience with us tonight with whom we share a communal effort and a common cause, and I would like to dedicate this song to her.

And she is the niece of Senator Eugene McCarthy.

And so I was asked to stand and the lights came on me.

And then following the concert, we did go back to the hotel room where Gene was.

So we sat in his hotel room in one of these kind of magical nights that happen in these kind of situations where it was Gene and Robert Lowell and Peter and Paul and Mary and myself.

After that, they went to the headquarters to sing for the campaigners.

And Peter invited me to come to dinner.

I was gonna go to California to work in the California primary, and then I was coming to New York to work in the New York primary.

So Peter gave me his number and he said, "Call me when you come to New York."

It was a connection.

At first, well, it would really have been second meeting.

And a year and a half later we were married.

And a year and a half later, we had our Bethany, who, as Peter always said, had the audacity to be born on Gene McCarthy's birthday.

And then a year and a half later, Christopher was born in the Wilmer Hospital.

So he is a Wilmer boy.

(upbeat music) Meeting Peter was another (imitating explosion) where there was a different kind of life, and not so much a life of glamour, but a life of politics and a life of social justice and a life of really putting yourself on the line for causes and people that really mattered.

(gentle music) - [Nicole] I wanted to share with you a day in my life in the prairie.

(rocks thumping) I was so excited for winter this year.

We barely got any snow, but I was still able to enjoy this ice, this frozen river.

Something about the prairie that I didn't expect is the heavy amount of solitude that I've experienced since moving here.

In this video, I'm going to talk a lot about solitude.

My friend yesterday told me, "You should write a book about all of your ex-boyfriends."

But lately, my mind is not on ex-boyfriends at all or future boyfriends.

I live in my house and I live simply.

My house requires a lot of my effort.

I came to the prairie in a relationship, but I have been single for the past couple of years.

When I'm not with clients, I take care of these very important tasks.

And on this particular day, I wanted to get a lot of painting done.

(upbeat music) You don't realize the toll that it takes on you to be a single woman in the United States of America owning a house.

There are many tasks that require two people.

Everything that I'm doing in this video requires only one of me.

But normally there are a lot of things like hanging a light fixture in the adjacent room that require two people.

I did not expect to experience so much solitude here.

In fact, my plan was to move to this house and spend only a part of the year here.

But because of circumstances and because of the heavy amount of work it takes to renovate a house on your own, I've been here for two and a half years.

And since my standards for relationships have changed, I've been single for quite a while.

And I'm gonna talk a lot about that and what my new standards are later in the video.

So I hope that you will catch that.

(gentle music) And it's been such a weird winter this winter.

Normally in the Midwest, we have so much snow.

A lot of the winter tasks are shoveling snow, de-icing, cleaning off your car windshield, spending two to three times as long getting from place to place.

But that has not been the case this year.

And I honestly love snow.

It insulates things, it makes everything quieter, and it forces you to go ever more inward.

Normally in the winter, I write music, I wanna be extremely creative, I'll make art.

But because we've had this really weird, warm, snowless winter, I've been doing more spring, summer, and fall activities like fixing my house up.

And that is also why, if you've noticed, I haven't posted very many videos or photos or anything like that because I honestly just haven't felt that creative.

I talk a lot about peace and inner peace on social media and in my videos.

And I really haven't demonstrated it to you, but this is what it is.

Inner peace is being able to live in the middle of nowhere alone in a room by yourself, and to not feel miserable.

And in fact, to feel glad.

Inner peace is to be one with the silence.

(soft music) Inner peace requires stillness whether that is actually physical stillness or always stillness of the mind.

And sometimes these menial, like kind of dumb little tasks like this can really put you in that state.

(upbeat music) I grew up with three brothers and three sisters in a chaotic household.

And I've never really had a stable living situation since I was like a toddler maybe.

But even then, my parents got divorced when I was really young.

I either shifted houses every two weeks.

And the longest I've stayed in a place is around three months.

And if it was longer than that, the living situations that I've had have been very loud, chaotic, or dangerous.

So even though this solitude that I feel here in this house is very long, like it just seems like it's been so long that I've been in this state of solitude.

I honestly feel like it's been super necessary for me.

In fact, I think it's been incredibly healing and I think it's one of the reasons why I have experienced this inner peace, this inner peace that has led me to so much more self love, so much more self value, and so much more self worth, which is another reason why I am still alone because I actually have all of those values now that I didn't have before.

And I truly do enjoy just these simple activities like looking at the stars.

And on this night, it was actually a meteor shower, and I did not know how to use my camera yet.

So there's a lot of focused breathing, I think it's called.

I'm going to stop talking now, but thank you so much for spending a day of solitude and peace with me in the prairie.

(soft music) (indistinct whispering) (soft music ends) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music)