It is said that history is defined by the things we never saw coming. I have found that to be true.

There was a peculiar feeling in the air that year, and it seemed to be seeping into every corner of our lives. Newspapers reported events using language that reeked of malaise, sapped of any revenant of the joy that had once accompanied the birth pangs of the Age of Aquarius.

The last of Americas soldiers were finally on their way home—Vietnamization—though they were coming home alone rather than together with their units, victorious brigades returning to home shores, as had been done at the conclusion of prior wars. These soldiers had been spat upon by protestors who gathered at airports and shouted insults and epithets and labeled the young, dazed soldiers as “baby killers” all while the stench of smoke and white phosphorous still permeated the fabric of the uniforms they wore; some not even forty-eight hours from the scene of their final firefight, nor more than twenty years of age. But lately it was as though even the hippies and freaks had lost their fervor for the end of this conflict, and no longer wished to celebrate the accomplishment by spitting on their victims.

To me, it marked the incipient mortality of the values that I had taken for granted as a younger man, when I had returned from my generations war. I feared what would come to fill the vacuum left behind.

I felt too young to be harboring judgments such as these; they belonged inside the minds of much older men, to the graybeards who gathered themselves in lodges that bore the names of animals, and who played checkers while complaining of physical maladies and retold stories of misremembered histories and tales of conquests that never happened at all. Like those men, I will always carry my war with me, but the marks that had been blazed upon the trunks of old-growth forests, the ones that branded the narrow line between passion and disaster, were beginning to fade away.

The shape and nature of war had changed.

As had the nature of peace.

My wife and I watched the ball drop in New York City where the murder rate had just reached an all-time high, heroin was the drug of choice, and teenaged prostitutes worked openly on every corner of Times Square. We watched it from the safe distance afforded by the television console in the living room at the ranch, while the fire in the hearth cracked and funneled fragrant plumes of smoke out into the snow-blanketed Oregon night. I popped a bottle of iced champagne and kissed her as the band played “Auld Lang Syne” and ’72 went into the books.

The old year was gone.

Nixon had gone to China, and Jane Fonda straddled a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun for the enjoyment of the press corps; in June, five Nixon campaign operatives had been arrested after breaking into the Watergate Complex, and by August, the last United States ground troops were promised to begin returning home from ’Nam; Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in a chess match viewed by millions all over the world, and American eighteen-year-olds won the right to vote and celebrated that newfound gift by delivering Richard Nixon a landslide second-term presidency that recorded the lowest voter turnout in nearly three decades.

Baby New Year had arrived, but we had no way of knowing at the moment that the restless little bastard had been delivered into this world with the myopic inclinations of a narcissist, and in possession of the heart of a cynic.

I cannot lay claim, with any specificity, to know what evil is. I had seen it in Korea and encountered its image and affect in the random acts of scared and desperate men. Sometimes they invaded my sleep and revealed themselves inside the rippling waves that rose from the flames of a human form torched in effigy. Other times, even on a bright spring day, with the sun burning warm and yellow behind a patch of cumulus as it floated above the valley, I could feel its foul breath against the skin on the back of my neck. These were the intrusions I had come to fear the most.