 11 o'clock rock, I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. Welcome to Creative Contributions here on a given Friday. Today we'll talk about a manuscript that defines a man I know and a notable period in American history which we should all know about. He and it, they are about the Piscorps. That means Peace Corps, the way you pronounce it in India in the 1960s. Right about the time when the Vietnam War was happening, with all those destructive implications, now the war was destructive, the Piscorps was just the opposite. When I graduated from NYU Law School in 1965, first I went into the graduate program there in that school, which was not protected from the draft. When they came for me, I answered with my own move, go into the service that saves lives, the Coast Guard. I could have done, I could have gone into the Peace Corps just as easily I think, and some of my friends I recall won, his name was Matt Seymour, I don't know if Peter knows him. He was my co-graduate counselor at the dormitory at NYU. I was dazzled with his move, but I love the idea that he went and today all I have is the memory of him in his 20s along with me and his name Matt Seymour. Now Peter Adler answered the call by going into the Peace Corps and it certainly changed him. More than that, he decided to write it up and we're here today to talk about his wonderful heart-rending lessons and experiences in living the life of the most exciting global adventure that came out of John Kennedy and the optimism of the early 1960s and global optimism that we can look at today. That our generation at the time could ever have, that was the time. Peter was at the core of it, incredibly lucky to be there in the mainstream of those experiences and we are incredibly lucky to be able to talk with him and soon enough to have the benefit of his recollections and stories and his manuscript and book about the experiences that defined his life and certainly have enlightened and do enlighten ours. Welcome to the show Peter Adler. Thank you, Jay. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's get started. Yeah. Tell us the story of how you got involved in the Peace Corps in 1966. Right. It's late 1966. I've graduated from college. I have a BA in history. I'm not clear about what I want to do, but I knew I also did not want to fight in that war. Not, I'm not against all wars, but that war, the Vietnam conflict, which is our era, which most people think could be like the war of the Turks and the Hungarians in 1500 these days. You weren't a wild activist or anything. You said I'm mildly. I protested and I was involved in that and active in that. But graduating, I wanted to do something different. The draft board was after me. I wound up applying for the Peace Corps. Didn't think I'd get in, got in and got a deferral for the time that I was in the Peace Corps. As soon as I finished, they came right after me again. Oh, no, of course. How unfair. Oh, gee, it was what it was. It was a service and they came for you. Oh, yeah, yeah. Gee so anyway, so talk about training and acclimation and immersion, if you will. Okay, so it's 1966, late 1966. I'm invited to participate in this training program for India in a place that I'd never heard of called Maharashtra State, which is between, this is where Bombay is the main city. And we were trained, going to be trained in construction and public works. I was a history major. I can do that. I can do that. If Jake can be a lawyer, I can do that. So when in the training, we spent a couple weeks in Milwaukee at a hotel and then took a train down to Zapata, Texas, which is right on the near Laredo on the on the Tex-Max border. And we spent two and a half months down there with our language instructors. We built our own, we were being taught construction skills, built these hovels, and got our instruction, and then went through the process of selection, had lots of interviews. Some, many of us got deselected at that point. And about 50 started in the program, 24, 25 actually made it through there. Exclusive. It was high expectations, high requirements. Yeah, but the basis of it, it was mysterious to all of us. It was like the end of it was the night of the long knives. Nobody understood exactly why. Yeah. So then we packed off to India in January of 1967 and spent the next two years in. I was in a village of about 7,000 people, kind of a county seat, if you will, that is now a commercial center of 35,000. I was back there a few years ago. What was the name of the village? KED, KED, H-E-D, KED. It was west of Mumbai? Well, it was actually between Mumbai and Goa. Okay, Goa is on the water? Yeah, it was close to the coast, about 10 miles from the ocean. You know, India is a lot different today than it was then. What was India like then? You know, having been back a couple of times in the last few years, today it's full of motorcycles, cell phones, high technology. There's still massive poverty there. There's probably more cell phones than toilets in India, but it's changed. And there's a very quick rising middle class. It's overshadowing caste structure, which was very, you know, old and antique. But people are on the move. This is a country on the move if they can overcome their corruption. Well, you gave us some photos. Let's look at a slight photo show over here. We have a few photos sort of to find the times. That's the picture of the cover sheet of your book, India 40 and The Circle of Demons. It is a manuscript by Peter S. Adler. It is a manuscript of 363 pages. All very interesting, by the way. Talk about the photos. Go to the net. Yeah, so this is the, there's kind of two pieces. There's the physical journey. What did we do? So the context, the war in Vietnam, I had a lot of friends that had been drafted. Some were being killed. Many were being wounded. I was clear that that's, if I could avoid it, I wanted to do it, but I wanted to do national service. I wanted to do something. 50 of us invited to train. That's a photo of the actual site we were in, this ranch, God forsaken ranch on the border. 24 of us started in January 1967 and 12, and we called ourselves the dirty dozen who actually finished. And we were kind of a dirty bunch to tell you the truth. You remember them? I do. We're still close. We're still alive. No, a few have passed away, but we get together at least once every year, year and a half. We just got together actually to commemorate the passing of one of our colleagues. You know, I judged from the book and the prologue and the epilogue and all that that this has to find your life. And I think I'm right no matter what you say. The question is whether it defined the other, the lives of the other 11 people than your dirty dozen. It was a very significant moment for all of us. All of us have done many other things. I mean, we have attorneys and we have executives and we have all kinds of people who've done a lot of other things. But this was one of those fork in the road experiences when you look back. You couldn't see it while you were there, but this is a moment when we're all going down a fork that becomes really important in hindsight. Yeah. Historical. Yes. Not only for you, but for the country. Because you were an extension of John Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. That's right. And, you know, perhaps to our generation, it was probably the greatest thing that he could do for us to give us this opportunity. Unfortunately, it went away. And that's another story we'll talk about later. But, you know, you mentioned an out of journey and an inner journey. Let's talk about the out of journey first. What was it for you? So that's the physical part of going to a new culture, having grown up in the bubble of American culture in Chicago, South Side of Chicago, and all of a sudden going out into a world that was completely new, a culture that was completely new. This wasn't culture shock. This was life shock. This is learning about death, disease, hunger, poverty. It wasn't all pretty. It wasn't all romantic. No, it wasn't. But you also get accustomed to it. And you have to work with it. And you have to get a few things done as best you can. Were you scared? Were you afraid? Were you, you know, concerned about your own health and welfare and survival? We all got sick, but kind of too stupid to be that concerned. I mean, we're just living it. You're all in your early 20s. Yes. We're all 20, 21, 22, and having a great adventure on one hand and the other trying also to get a few things done in a place that was hard to work in. How did you spend your time? You know, we started out attached to a kind of a public works program. The idea of which was to take off-season agricultural labor, put them to work on a public works project. And we were supposed to, you know, design and build projects. And we did. We did school construction, some market roads, little wells and community health centers. But the program was a bust, just to be clear. The program was a bust. So we all wound up also doing other things. So I wound up also raising chickens. And a kid from Chicago raising chickens. Why not? Yeah, why not? Talk about broadening your- Yeah. And killing rats. We killed lots of rats. Kill rats, you could. Yes, you could. So we wound up doing things. And then we were in a very heavy monsoon area. So 300 inches of rain in three months, four months. Most work stops. Most work stops. What do you do with your time then? Read a lot of books. I got the education that I'd missed in college. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You said the program failed. What exactly was the program? What are you supposed to bring in a program like that? What was your value added to the people in the village? Why did it not work? The theory of it was that we were to be attached to this rural manpower program is what was called. This, again, grabbing offices and agricultural labor, paying them a wage, putting them to work on building roads and schools and community centers. And the program was riddled with corruption from the top to the bottom. In all the Indian village. Yes. In the whole program nationally. And so in the Peace Corps program? Not ours. I mean, our program, we were simply attached to it as part of a political deal that had a mirror image. Indian program. The Indian program was a problem. Okay, got it. And, you know, here we were 22-year-old, you know, three-month wonder kids. And I was working for a very skilled engineer who became one of my closest friends. And he was underneath the political guys. And he was actually one of our guardians. He kept a peripheral eye on us, made sure we didn't screw up too badly. But the program itself was a complete bust. I mean, there was so much corruption. So one of the things we did was we raised some independent money to build schools, and we became the project managers. And they couldn't get their hands on it. But they loved it. They loved it. People, these little rural villages needed schools. And they needed you. Yeah. So in the building of the school, you brought them certain skills they didn't have. That's right. A lot of project management, project organization. And most of all, we brought some funding that we wrangled out of the United States. So interesting. Some time to time, we do a Loha medical mission. And they do these medical missions in Nepal and other places, and they run into exactly the same thing. They're high-minded. You know, they're totally common good. And yet they find that there's a mirror image organization that is corrupt and slows it all down. That's right. That's exactly it. And maybe in a certain sense, this happened elsewhere. You spoke in your book about the Peace Corps in Africa. I'll bet the same thing happened there. A lot of places. Maybe it was a failure in the original concept, not to be able to deal with corruption at a local level. So the Peace Corps had, you know, from the Kennedy point of view and Hubert Humphrey and Sergeant Shriver, the architects of it, they said, we wanted to do several things. We wanted to send young people abroad and good people who could do things and show people that we weren't just warriors in Vietnam and fighting a war. So we wanted to send people there to learn about their culture and participate in it. We wanted them to learn about us, the human exchange part. And those were core to the mission. And that was more important than building the school, as a matter of fact. That's right. So, you know, I mentioned I was just talking to the director of the Peace Corps recently and she said, yeah, so what? The fish died in your fish pond. Who cares? You did look at the great things you did. I mean, you know, I mean that we all have those failure experiences. We also have successes and that's all part of growing up too, isn't it? Yes it is. What a place to grow up actually. Nothing could be finer. We're going to take a short break, Peter. We come back and we'll talk about some of the, you know, more challenging things that happened while you were over there, some of the trouble you had and how you dealt with it. As Peter Adler, he is defined by his experience in the Peace Corps between 1967 and 68. And so when you look at him and shake his hand and say hi, always think of that. The piss corpse. We'll be right back. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu and I co-host Hawaii Farmers Series with Matthew Johnson of Oahu Fresh. We talk about Hawaii's local farmers and their supporters. In order to have a vibrant and sustainable local food system, farmers are always the foundation, but there's so many other people involved in the community that help support those farmers. So we bring those folks onto our show every Thursday at 4 p.m. We get their backstory, their history, find out a little more about them, and we find out why they love what they do and their perspective and their advice on how we can continue to have a dynamic and vibrant and sustainable local food system. So we, again, we broadcast live every Thursday at 4 p.m. And you can also catch us on ThinkText's YouTube channel as well as Alelo54. So we hope you tune in and join us. We're back. We're live with Peter Adler, a member of the Peace Corps in 1967 and 8, and a person who can tell us how it was like, what it was like in those days. It wasn't all healthy and wasn't. I mean, there were problems in those days. I mean, think of, you know, right across the bay, you had Vietnam with all those drugs and all the trouble that those young people were having. You also had trouble in India, you know, drugs. You had mental issues. You had some suicides going on there. Can you talk about the dark side for a minute? So we were a hard luck group, which is one of the things I wanted to write about because Peace Corps, everything's kind of noble and vaunted it up on a stage. And this was a very hard luck group. We had huge amounts of loss. One guy did commit suicide and we still get together in my group and we scratch our heads, what did happen? We had several guys who went home on drug overdoses or drug use. Everybody had a lot of sickness. I mean, we were, you know, from Chicago and New York and California and all of a sudden you're in what is basically a petri dish. And so we all had various germs and bugs and worms. Peace Corps doctors were very good. They tried to take care of us. One guy in our group, and there's a story about him, came down with an extraordinarily virulent hepatitis. His liver completely stopped functioning. He was expatriated to the Good Ship Hope on off-sea land. The medical ship. First complete blood transfusion, written up in time mazes. So there are individual stories about what happened. It was hard. There were hard moments, but there was also these kind of great joyous moments in your community with people. That takes us to the inner journey that you talked about. Can you talk about that for a minute? I can, yeah. So this book, you have to remember, this is both memoir and a little bit of a creative nonfiction. I've embellished some things and at the end I own up to what I've embellished. You noticed that? I thought that was very good of you. Yeah, I wanted to say, well... We have mostly nonfiction here, but Peter says in the book, well, in order to make it more readable, I had to add some stuff that I was a composite. You know, it turned into be a little bit fiction. Well, yeah. So I mean, I wanted to tell a good story. I mean, I wanted to also tell a pretty good story in this thing. So yeah, the inner journey was really understanding, not so much of... I came to understand not just Indian culture, but I really learned about how American I was and I wasn't aware of it. We think, you know, culture, we just adapt to everybody else or they adapt to us and I realized, oh no, no, that's not how this world works. I also went there full of dualisms. There's right and wrong. There's good and bad. There's a good war. There are bad wars. And that changed me. The Indian experience changed me to think of it much more nuanced and the shades of gray, which is important. As a mediator, I live in that world too. Yeah, that's true. I live in that world. And maybe that's one of the reasons you're a good mediator, that you learned about the shades of gray. It is. And it's about that. But that's the 22-year-old transition from, I know what's right and wrong, to, well, I'm not so sure about that and I better explore this. It's more nuanced than I thought. Yeah. That's a wonderful lesson for a young person to have. And I can just say in the book, one of the things I've done is created these dialogues, imaginary dialogues, with one of the main gods from India, Shiva. And I didn't grow up with lots of relatives. Love with the snakes. Yeah, he's the one you see in dancing, doing the cosmic dance, and he's going to... Many arms. He's a god of destruction. I mean, he brings the world, destroys it so a new world can be born every seven bazillion years. And so I have these dialogues in which he keeps telling me, you're pretty stupid. You don't understand this. You don't understand that. And you don't even understand about women. You don't understand about love. What's wrong with you? So there's these dialogues that... Can you read some of your stuff? Yeah, yeah, I'll read you one. And this is actually, in the chapter, this is the story of how I met my wife. And it's a dialogue. And it started actually first with a friend telling me about the meaning of that Nataraja, the dancing Shiva. And then he tells me that... You go to one of the pictures. Yeah, let's have a picture of Shiva. Yeah, I do. I have a picture there, and one of the steps. Okay, the inner journey. Yeah, and if you see on that Nataraja there, he's got one foot on this dwarf. And the dwarf is called Atsmara. And the dwarf is ignorance. And Shiva is all about bringing enlightenment. There are many things. It's not just destruction. He does that too. But so this is ignorance. So this is about learning a little bit about love and finding... Meeting my wife and courting her. She was also a Peace Corps volunteer. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I... Your life has been defined. It's still this in some ways. So here's this dialogue with Shiva. Because I had written earlier that he was kind of a bastard. He was kind of a war-like maniac and killing people. But you can learn from him. He says... So Shiva says, You really think I'm just an egotistical, murderous bastard? Me? Well, you've been eavesdropping on my conversations. Well, of course. I listen to anything I want. For an engineering man, your friend Bal Kelisker has some excellent ideas. But you are still an idiot. I keep telling you things, and you don't listen. Like what? I've said this before. Everything that commences must end. Anything born must die. Anything strong becomes weak. Anything that rises will fall. Well, what's so hard to understand about that, Mr. Shiva? It's what lies between the rise and the fall that you are completely missing, especially with women. It's because you're an income poop. You keep thinking everything is either or old or new. Well, I ask... And then I ask him, is that true with you? When you turn to love, all things in the world tremble. In fact, the world trembles. That's what you haven't yet discovered. Why is that? And he says, because you are uncommonly stupid. So there's these dialogues that go on throughout, as I'm trying to learn. You're writing them or someone else? I wrote them. This is yours, it's wonderful. You put yourself in the skin of Shiva himself. I'm trying to have a discussion with Mike, with the God, the local God. Could be any God. I love it. And that does give us an idea about the style of writing in your book. Give us another one, would you? Sure. Actually, I'll go back and read something. And this is just up at the beginning of it. And it's trying to capture a little bit about how quirky and interesting and strange and confronting India was. An Australian public health doctor I met in Japan on a hike in the Kiso Valley, told Carolyn and me that he'd been to India and worked there for several extended stays. Over dinner and sake, he exchanged peculiarities. He says, every day you are presented with something wondrous. One day there was a man standing in the middle of the road with two big bears on chains, holding up traffic until drivers would pay him money to move. Then he told me about the time he was on a bus going up a mountain and someone in the center aisle got sick and people passed him to the window horizontally so he could vomit. I mentioned a procession to the burning pyres along the Ganges with a dead woman on a plank wrapped in a white sheet, headed into the fire. And a hired band was following her, playing for, he's a jolly good fellow. So there's these just like, you know, mind benders. There's things going on there. So your whole book, your writing style, your references, you know, there are philosophical references and literary references all through this book. And what I get, I mean this as a compliment Peter, is that you're kind of a hippie come current, a hippie who read a lot in order to have all these references and literary, you know, It was a long monsoon which we had a lot to read. Really? Yeah. Once. So it's a very, actually sophisticated, just as the experience itself, was sophisticated. So let me, let me ask you this, and this is going to be hard for you, but how did it change you from what you were before to what you are now? And the book, if I read the book carefully, I think I can get my own answer, but how would you answer that? I think 22 years old, first you think you're immortal. Second of all, your cocksure about everything. And that changed. I knew I wasn't immortal by the time I came back. I knew that the world was more liminal and nuanced and subtle and that that's something that I can't hard to describe. But those lessons are useful right here in the United States of America. And they stopped. Anywhere, actually. And there were things that reinforced it. And so it's, not that I'm afraid to make decisions in life and not at all, but I just have been very patient and curious like you about the human condition and want to understand that some of the details and nuances of it. Okay. And those, those lessons, you know, that the study of patients, the incorporation of patients as an essential of character point. Have they helped you in dealing with your publisher? So the status of this is, it's a manuscript. I'm getting close to finishing. I have my friend and colleague, Katie Ranney, is doing a lot of editing on this. I've done lots of people have given me really helpful ideas and sometimes some scorching criticisms, all of which are useful. I plan to finish this up. I am in, I've got some inquiries out to agents in publishing houses. It's probably a dead end because the whole world of publishing is churning and changing. And in the end, I will probably publish it independent. So many people do these things. Yeah. And that's part of the change in the publishing world. Yes. That it's one of these trends. And as you guys know, stuff is migrated onto the internet. The publishing business is very different. Those big houses are consolidating or going out of business. Amazon is arising. Amazing. Yeah. And a few others too. And there are very few, the bookstores are going away with a few exceptions. There are some local niche ones, bookends in Kailua, and a few others that are neighborhood based. Who's your market on this book? That's really good. I think it's going to be Jay Fidel. It'll be Jay Fidel. Well, one copy. I can assure you of that, Peter. So no, I think it's going to be people who probably lived out in during that same era and are kind of looking back and thinking about it. It will certainly be former Peace Corps people who have probably gone through similar experiences. And guys like me who watched the Peace Corps, who wanted to be in the Peace Corps, you know, somehow, who admired the Peace Corps for all the years that it existed. You made a reference earlier to the fact that there still was a Peace Corps. Is there still a Peace Corps? There is still around. But it's not nearly as robust as it was in these days. It's still strong. And there's like two and a quarter of a million people have gone through the Peace Corps in one place, you know, in Latin America, Africa, Asia, South Asia. So it's still there. God knows what will happen to it in the next couple of years. Got to be funded. But it has survived. And probably because the core ideas are sound. It's had ups and downs. People have died in the Peace Corps. People have been lost for sometimes wrong reasons. It's still around. But the countries have changed. So India, for example, there were 5,000 volunteers that have gone through India. But India basically dumped the program. They said we don't need it. And I can understand that because they have their own country. They became more of a first world country. Yeah. Well, a little bit. So Peter, you know, I promised that we would discuss at least to some extent the notion of national service. You know, despite the fact that it didn't completely satisfy the draft authorities by going to the Peace Corps, you did do national service for sure. You know, you embraced national service and for lots of good reasons. And I did my thing. And some people, you know, in those days, regrettably, they did it by the draft. But could you turn to camera one here at the Enterprise show and talk about your view of national service, what it did for you, whether it's important for the country, what the country should do going forward about national service? Well, I actually have recently wrote a little op-ed piece with a friend of mine, a guy who was in the Air Force in Vietnam while I was in India. And we struck up a friendship and his name is Victor Kraft. And he and I wrote a little piece that said we really should make some form of national service mandatory. And part of it is the look back and you say, this was a way that people mature in our culture. You don't mature just by staying in, you know, just doing texting and that kind of stuff. You have to get out there. And whether it's the Vietnam experience that he had, saving pilots, or whether it was my work, and we realized there's a common under, under, you know, firmament underneath there. So I've become a big believer and I think we really need to create and urge and push for these national service. Do something. Do something that's not just about you, but it's about something bigger there. And you did it. And I did it. And Victor did it. Ask not. You may remember these words. What your country can do for you. That's right. What you can do for your country. Thank you, Peter. Sure. My pleasure always. Thank you, Jake.