Edward Abbey, his good friend a Vietnam PTSD Vet, a Grizzly Bear, My Lai, and more. Read, watch.

AMY GOODMAN: What was your tie to the My Lai massacre?

DOUG PEACOCK: OK if I have a sip of water?

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah. Please do.

DOUG PEACOCK: That is my day of the dead, March 16th. And it’s the anniversary of the My Lai massacre in 1968. It’s also the day that I buried Ed Abbey out in the desert. So I tend to go out to his grave on my day of the dead.

I was a medic in Quang Ngai province at a place called Bato, which is a little, you know, isolated Green Beret aid camp. You know, it was about ten Americans and 200 or 300 mercenary soldiers. You know, it’s how we operated. I built hospitals, trained nurses, so it was not just all war, though the war always got there.

I was ordered out of the field, because I had kind of gone native. And they were right. I was no longer an American over there. I really wasn’t. I didn’t speak any English. I identified with the people. I loved the people. I loved the land, too.

But anyway, the helicopter sent to pick me up to make me out of the country flew over My Lai, while it was going on. My Lai was like only about thirty-five, forty miles from my aid camp, even though you never got there, because it was like—we called it “Indian country,” but, you know, it was enemy country in between. And actually, someone shot at our helicopter, which was no big deal. They did it all the time. But that was from My Lai. And, of course, I didn’t know this, until a year later, when the LIFE magazine pictures came out. And that—those pictures really changed my life. They really hardened me to a place where I could not and did not want to come back from.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that further.

DOUG PEACOCK: Just my—you know, my attitude towards my own culture. You know, I don’t think it’s a very good culture. I think we—you know, we’ve done so many—I mean, here we are, you know, not just global warming is sweeping over, but, you know, genocide, starvation, war is all over the place. We haven’t gotten any better, in short. And, you know, I wanted to be a critic of that culture, and I could never be part of it. You know, I could never reenter society or anything like that. And it hardened my own militancy, which was a good thing, because the things I was really against are bad things, I think. And—

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AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about Edward Abbey, who you were with to his dying day?

DOUG PEACOCK: Ed and I had a really cantankerous relationship. He was the most difficult close friend in my life. And I was no prince myself, you know? I carried guns all the time. And, you know, the whole Vietnam thing was sort of a cross to bear. So it’s not like we had a perfect friendship, but when it—I mean, but we were, in the deepest level. If Ed wanted one person to come and get him in the desert, it was Doug Peacock. You know, no one else could find him. No one else would do that. And perhaps for the same reason, he entrusted his—the place where he was going to be buried and his burial to me, too. You know, the fact that I loved Ed, and always had, you know, I think I waited until four days before his death before I finally told him.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you tell him?

DOUG PEACOCK: I—just that, that I loved him, always had.

AMY GOODMAN: For someone who didn’t know Ed Abbey, tell us who he was.

DOUG PEACOCK: Well, he was one of the funniest writers I ever read, and I’ve read my share of literature. But Ed was—I mean, he was a drunk, he was a lecher, he was all of those things. But he cared so deeply, and he saw through the of human society. So either there’s no one he didn’t offend with his criticism—no one escaped him, you know? Knee-jerk liberals, you name it, up and down the political spectrum.

And, you know, he saw right off the value of wilderness. He said he thinks maybe the only thing worth saving—and he’s talking about the world—is wilderness. That’s what he came to, concluded in his last years. And, you know, for a lot of different reasons, I’ve always believed that, and that was our shared value. And the fight for that is what bonded us together forever.

I mean, we also raised children together. You know, my first and one of his last batches, you know, were really good friends. They all grew up together, camped out. You know, we’d go take all the kids out trick-or-treating on Halloween, and there would be Ed, you know, following slowly behind with our—you know, drinking beer, with pistols under the seat of the pickup.