The Night The Birds Screamed

The Night The Birds Screamed

©2014 by John LaTorre

It was on a Friday evening that I heard a thousand birds screaming. Blinded by tear gas, they were screaming in pain and terror; their sightlessness prevented them from flying away, out of the toxic air. I could hear them, but I could not see them, because I was blind, too.

The place was somewhere in downtown Washington, D.C. I can't remember exactly where now. In fact, I wasn't sure where I was at the time I was gassed, although it must have been within a few blocks of Dupont Circle, in the north-west quadrant of the city. There used to be slaughterhouses there in the nineteenth century. Now it is a gentrified neighborhood, with boutiques and coffeehouses and comfortable old row houses. But on the night of November 14, 1969, it was not a good place to be.

The occasion was a massive protest against the Vietnam War, called the Moratorium March on Washington. The first Moratorium demonstration was a month before. It went peacefully enough, with no violence reported. Its success prompted a second, larger demonstration a month later. This time, people were expected to be coming in from all over the country. and its promoters had hopes that it would be as peaceful as the other demonstration. We hoped so, too.

By “we,” I mean the Langley Hill Friends Meeting, a Quaker congregation I was worshiping with at the time. Our meeting house was open to those who wanted a place to stay during the demonstrations, and the basement had been converted into a sort of dormitory. Several anti-war groups had made contact with us to arrange for space. That Friday night, I was on hand to make coffee and soup, and to offer whatever I could in the way of support.

When I arrived at the meeting house, I immediately noticed a tension in the air. Several people were crowded around a television set, which was reporting riots in downtown Washington. According to the news reports, some of the protesters had attacked policemen and the policemen responded with tear gas. “It looks like Chicago all over again,” one person said. It might be worth explaining that he was referring to the demonstrations that were attacked by policemen at the Democratic national convention the year before, an action later referred to as a “police riot” by those who were there.

The phone rang and rang and rang. We were getting calls from some of the groups whom we were to host. They had been separated from their parties and were lost in an unfamiliar city. We decided to drive some of us who were somewhat familiar with the area into the city, where we would meet up with these groups and guide them home somehow. I was assigned to a group who said they had a van, but whose driver didn't know the area. I was given the name of an intersection to report to.

When we got there, the car I was riding in couldn't approach the corner where I was to find my group. The streets had been blocked off to traffic. They let me out as close as they could, and I proceeded on foot. When I got there, there was no van. There were only hordes of people running toward me. They were escaping a tear gas barrage a block away. When they got to my location, the cops came and fired more tear gas canisters at us. It appeared that the cops had decided that the best way to control the crowd was to keep it moving and disorganized, and the best way to do that was to fire tear gas at anything that looked like a massing crowd. It was not the first time the location had been teargassed, I found out later; the first barrage had driven away the people I was supposed to rescue, and traffic barriers prevented them from returning once the gas had dispersed.

Well, I got gassed. I followed the crowd to another intersection, and got gassed again. That was when I heard the birds screaming. By that time I was pretty much blind myself, so I was aware only of the vague shapes of trees and cars and people and such. I realized that the birds were in as much pain as I was, but their terror was compounded by the fact that they couldn't escape it. Because they were blind, they couldn't fly. They could only cling to whatever perches they had found and scream in pain and fear and frustration. There were thousands of them. This was not birdsong, but an unrelenting howl of noise that waxed and waned as the clouds of tear gas drifted to and fro. I could no more escape that howl than they could escape their pain. Years later, I would hear the drone of cicadas as they emerged from their sleep. This noise was like that, but multiplied to almost deafening levels.

I'm not sure how long I staggered around the streets of Washington listening to that ghastly wail. It might have been an hour, maybe two. Somehow I made my way to a place where there wasn't much tear gas. Somebody put his hand on my shoulder, and asked me, “Are you all right?”

“I can't see,” I replied.

“Do you know the area?”

“I don't even know where I am right now, except that it's somewhere downtown. But, yes, I'm from around here, more or less.”

“Maybe you can help us. We have a problem.”

They turned out to be a busload of people who had come from Ohio. They had made arrangements to stay someplace in the DC area, but the guy who was supposed to guide them there had been separated from them by the tear gas attacks. They didn't know how to get to their assigned quarters, or even where or what it was. They'd been looking for their guide for an hour with no success.

I told them that I knew of a place where they could find shelter for the night. I couldn't drive the bus, of course. But I might be able to direct the driver there. I would sit behind him and listen to him describe where he was, and I would use that information to chart our course. All he had to do was follow my directions. That turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, because the traffic by then had been so thoroughly disrupted that neither I nor the bus driver was sure where we were. He was following traffic far out from the Dupont Circle area, reading out names of streets where he could glimpse them, names which meant little to me, as I had never been in that particular part of Washington before. Somehow, I got them to the Key Bridge, where we could get over the Potomac River into northern Virginia. I told him to steer his way to Falls Church, where I was living at the time. I knew that area fairly well, and could easily direct him to Langley Hill from there.

We spent the next half hour driving around aimlessly. He would describe what he was seeing, and I'd try to make sense of it. If there were any signs directing him to Falls Church, he missed them, and we ended up circling Arlington Cemetery and getting lost in the area just west of the cemetery. But then we crossed a road that was labeled with a route sign: “244.” That was Columbia Pike. I didn't know where we were along that road; nothing he described seemed familiar to me. But I had lived for a couple of years in an area just west of Arlington and a few blocks off Columbia Pike, and was sure that if we traveled west, we would pass some landmarks I recognized.

At this point, the driver must have lost any faith he'd had in my knowledge of the area. But he followed my directions, and as we drove down Columbia Pike he described what we were passing. Suddenly, it all made sense. I knew where we were. We were about a quarter of a mile east of a neighborhood called Bailey's Crossroads, heading west.

I told him to take a right onto Leesburg Pike, and described the businesses he would see on the corner there. (That place looks like a freeway intersection now, with cloverleaf ramps and all, but back then it was a simple crossing of two main drags.) I remember the relief in his voice when he answered that the intersection was just as I described it. We turned right and made our way up Leesburg Pike through Falls Church and onto Great Falls Street and Chain Bridge Road and finally to Langley Hill, with me describing from memory the landmarks we would pass and the turns we'd have to take. It took my mind off the pain in my eyes, and eased the mind of our driver. And that was how we navigated for the next half hour, with me referring to my mental map of the area and identifying the landmarks he would need to make his way to the Langley Hill Friends Meeting.

My vision had started to return as we approached the meeting house. I couldn't see stuff in the distance, but I could hold my eyes open long enough to make out my immediate surroundings. The driver parked the bus in the parking lot of the meeting house and guided me inside, where I explained his predicament to our hosts. It turned out that the van I'd been sent to guide had called the meeting house again, and another guide had been despatched to steer them back. The Quakers hadn't planned on my bunch, of course, but space was made for them. I spent the next half hour rinsing out my eyes, and then called home to tell my folks that I'd be very, very late. I spent some time listening to the radio and television reports. From what I heard from them, there was no mention of the tactics the police had used. I'd expected that; it had taken months for the truth about Chicago to come out. It was another hour or two before I saw well enough to drive home, even on the empty back roads I knew I'd be using.

I had planned on attending the Saturday demonstration, but felt that I'd already had enough excitement for one weekend, and spent that day instead at the Friends meeting after getting a good ten hours of sleep and letting my vision return to some semblance of normal. As it turned out, that day's demonstrations went off without a hitch. The crowd was estimated at about a half a million people, perhaps twice as many as the famous civil rights march in 1963. It was peaceful. There would be no repeat of last night's police riots with its throngs of tear-gassed, bewildered people and its thousands of shrieking birds. One of those nights was enough.