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
It wasn’t until 1983 when Thunder was introduced to the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a peace-loving people with many Native American traditions who meet every summer in national forests to pray for the earth, that he felt he had finally escaped his sentence.
He was introduced to the Rainbow family by a man singing under a bridge in Oregon. Thunder would see the man on his way to work at a local saw mill, while he was wired on crank (a street name for methamphetamine).
“This guy was under that bridge for months on end,” he recalls. “So, I decided to meet the dude. It changed my whole life around.”
The “dude” told Thunder he was a man of Rainbow, so Thunder decided to hitchhike to Missouri and attend his first national annual Rainbow gathering. As he trekked through the woods down “hippie highway,” as the Rainbow members call it, he came across a grand piano. Thunder admits he’s seen a lot of strange things in his life, but never anything so strange as a grand piano in the middle of the forest, on a hillside, in Missouri.
“I decided at that point that these people were definitely my people,” he says laughing.
In the Rainbow Family, Thunder found a new way of life that taught him to love himself. Today, as he sits in his living room telling me his life story, Thunder raises his voice in excitement when he remembers “the family” that saved him. The little man bounces off his raggedy couch and pops in a videotape of a national Rainbow Family gathering in Arizona and listens to a young girl’s tale of heartache. She, like him, was abused, lost and without companionship before she found the Rainbow.
The values of peace and loving the Rainbow Family offered him are still very much a part of Thunder’s daily life. But after the morning of Oct. 24, 2002, Thunder knew he would never again be able to attend another Rainbow gathering.
At 3 a.m. Thunder awoke to his whole body tingling when suddenly he realized, he wasn’t breathing. The frail man, then down to 89 lbs, dialed 911 and used a pen to punch in the SOS code because he could not speak. “One…two…three. One. Two. Three,” he says as he taps a Coke can to emulate the slow/fast rhythm of the distress call. The dispatcher hung up on Thunder three times until the signal was understood and the call was traced. He was finally rushed to the hospital. At this point, Thunder was turning blue.
That day, Thunder was diagnosed with emphysema, or what he calls, “a death sentence.” At 2:30 p.m. the man smoked his last cigarette and called his closest friends to say goodbye. Thunder never thought he would survive this long.
Thunder was told by his doctors that he had less than four years to live. But now, 774 days later, or 18,918 hours to be precise, Thunder is determined to be the first person in history to beat the disease. In total, he has spent 1,012 hours off of his oxygen tanks, which is more than a month’s time. Since emphysema is a “downward spiraling” disease, Thunder says, it is a miracle he is regaining his strength and only needs his oxygen tanks for half the time he did before — 12 hours a day instead of 24.
It was mid-July at the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg, N.Y., which is 30 minutes from his current home in Ithaca, when Thunder first decided to go off his tanks. He had just suffered an accident in his scooter that left him unable to move his lower body, and he was scheduled to perform on stage with his mandolin a couple of days later. So, he underwent a few hours of a Japanese healing art called Reiki to restore his movement. The treatment worked, and just as Thunder was about to take stage with Keith Secola & the Wild Band of Indians, he took off his tank for the first time and played for two and a half hours. Thunder says he owed it to his fans that day to walk on stage and “take it like a man.”
His best friend, Eddie Lisbe, remembers seeing Thunder singing and dancing around on stage.
“It was being in the presence of a divine energy,” he recalls. “Before, Thunder couldn’t even breathe moving from his scooter to my car.”
Lisbe credits the scooter accident and Reiki treatment with giving Thunder the strength to realize he could breathe on his own.
And he has not stopped. A month after Grassroots one evening, as Thunder was still getting used to spending time off his tank, he gathered around a drum circle in the middle of the woods at a friend’s party. As Thunder watched the other hippies dance around the fire, he decided it was time to leave and get back on the tanks. Riding home in Lisbe’s son David’s car, Thunder admitted that he liked the straight-edge lifestyle emphysema has forced him to live. Then he asked David, “And do you know what I’ve realized?”
“What’s that, Thunder?” he asked.
“I think I like who I am.” - December 2004
Author’s Note
Since writing this piece last fall, Silent Thunder has had to spend more time on his oxygen tanks. In the spring, his doctors gave him three months to live and told him he would not make it through the summer. Once again, Thunder has defied the odds. I still see him strolling up and down Hudson Street on his scooter, Salvador, and I continue to spend time with him. Thunder is in good spirits. In addition to taking his medications and using his oxygen tanks, Thunder is actively partaking in alternative forms of healing such as Reiki, Zen and acupuncture — treatments he says are good for his soul.
I had the opportunity to read my piece to Thunder, and he was very touched. Tears came to his eyes, and he told me I had captured his essence. Though it is difficult for him to talk about Vietnam, he knows he must in order to shed light on the realities of war. Thunder says he is comfortable enough with himself to tell the world exactly who he is. In fact, when the time comes, Thunder would like this piece to be read at his funeral.
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