Love is all you need
Vietnam vet Silent Thunder found his salvation through the Rainbow Family. Now he’s using the group’s hippie tenets to cope with emphysema.
Written by Lara Marshall
Posted November 17, 2005
Silent Thunder’s stepfather expected his son to get straight F’s in school. But one day Thunder came home with an “A.” The next thing he remembers, he awoke in a hospital room in Rushville, N.Y., with a concussion. Daddy was mad again.
The year was 1963, and Thunder was only 13. With a lunatic for a father and a mother who didn’t care, Thunder says he had no choice but to hit the streets.
“I slept under the best bridges in America,” he recalls of a life that consisted of abusing drugs and smoking pot and cigarettes.
Thunder, a self-proclaimed hippie at the age of 55, sits in his small living room in Ithaca, N.Y., and stammers through his life story. The man resembles a smaller Jerry Garcia. Crazy gray hair, glasses lowered to the tip of his nose, tight jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt hug his tiny physique. Bright rainbow paintings of women with flowing locks of hair, tie-dye tapestries and posters of the Grateful Dead speak volumes about Thunder’s lifestyle.
“You don’t have 500 sheets of paper to write down what makes me a hippie,” he says. “What makes a black man a black man? What makes a hippie a hippie?”
But around the corner, in a dark nook next to the kitchen, lie silent reminders that Thunder’s life may not be so peaceful and free-loving, after all. After 40 years of smoking, this hippie has emphysema, and the oxygen tanks and motorized scooter, which he has named Salvador, sit in his apartment to prove it.
Cigarette smoking causes more than 400,000 deaths in the United States each year. As the bumper sticker on the bottom of Thunder’s scooter states in bold white letters on a black background, “TOBACCO KILLS 3 TIMES MORE PEOPLE THAN AIDS, ALCOHOL, CAR ACCIDENTS, MURDER, ILLEGAL DRUGS & SUICIDE ALL COMBINED.”
Thunder is convinced he will not be one of these people, however. He looks to the struggles he faced during his rocky upbringing in an abusive family, on the streets and as a soldier in Vietnam to his final salvation through the peace and love of other hippies to guide him through his shaky future with an unforgiving disease.
The tumultuous years after the Vietnam War forced Thunder to change his idea of self. Like other poor, lower-class Vietnam veterans (who he refers to as the “throw-aways of the year”), Thunder was traumatized when the government threw him back in to the world after the war and expected him to lead a normal life. If he spoke 100 words in those first 10 years back on U.S. soil, Thunder says, he spoke a lot.
Thunder says legally changing his name was one step to finding peace in post-Vietnam life. Today he refuses to tell anyone his real name.
“That person’s long gone,” he starts. “My birth name relates to a period of my life where I was a killer.”
He can no longer relate to this man because he is now a caring human being, he says. Then the caring man begins to cry when he remembers the children of Pong Song.
“The pain. The pain, man” he repeats. “Can you see the pain?” His voice is getting louder.
Thunder never chose to go to Vietnam. It was a sentence.
“Twenty-five years to life in prison or the military,” the court told him after he was arrested for coming out of Toronto with 44,000 hits of LSD in 1968. He chose ’Nam.
“What’s the difference?” he asks.
With Thunder
A look in pictures of the life of Silent Thunder.
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