Pilger's Homecoming

On July 4, 1971, John Pilger, twenty-five years old, bedraggled, with unkempt long hair and beard, returns to Santa Teresa, California, a small town near the coast in upper Southern California. Santa Teresa is the town that John Pilger calls home, although he only began living there when he was in junior high school. Because his father was a doctor and colonel in the army, the family moved often and lived in several states before Pilger's thirteenth birthday. When in high school, he was "the all-American boy": smart, blond, good-looking, all-state quarterback. He has returned home from exile in Europe because of the death several weeks earlier of his mother, a school teacher in Santa Teresa. His father had been one of the early casualties of the Vietnam War. He was killed in a helicopter crash in 1963 as he was setting up logistics regarding field hospitals. In the summer of 1970, Pilger, a med student at the University of California, San Francisco, was falsely arrested for complicity in the bombing of an ROTC building at Berkeley. This phony arrest was an effort by the government to silence a notorious student radical. Ever since high school Pilger had been active in "radical" activities, such as editing and writing for an underground newspaper in high school, and later participating in anti-draft and anti-war demonstrations. While Pilger was in custody, police searched his car and "found" an ounce of marijuana, which Pilger claimed was planted. When several students arrested with him-the real perpetrators of the deed-were convicted in separate trials before him and sentenced to two years in prison, he decided to flee the country, first to Canada, and then to Europe, where he roamed around and eventually considered continuing his medical studies in Strasbourg, France. However, he soon thereafter received word from a friend that his mother had died. Upon his return home he is confronted by many issues: that the government will be looking for him; that he is returning as a long-haired "radical" to a fairly conservative town; that he must confront his own past, which his parents' house, his belongings, and the town and people of Santa Teresa represent; that a young woman enters his life who will later play a large role: Katie O'Hearn, who lives down the block and was a best friend of his sister Maria-Maria was killed by a stray bullet during a student protest in 1968 at the University of California.-Pilger now faces choices about his future: go to prison, which would end his medical career, or leave the country again, or serve as a medic in Vietnam, an option presented to him by a highly placed army lawyer in the Judge Advocate General's Office who seems to have mysterious connections to him and his mother. Pilger's Homecoming is a story of personal struggle, of coming to terms with one's self, of learning what a human existence consists of. It is also a love story, because for John Pilger love is what saves him. In Pilger's Homecoming: Chronicle of a Life and a Time, an unusual narrator depicts the life of a so-called "radical." He uses letters, diaries, popular songs, and interviews to show what it was like during the turbulent 60s for a politically-engaged young man whose life was certainly not an aberration. Pilger's Homecoming could attract a variety of readers across several generations, especially those who grew up in the 50s and 60s, but also the children and grandchildren of those who lived through that time, since many from later decades love much of the music from those years and are interested in what America was like in the days of their parents and grandparents.