Nancy

During the Paleolithic era, when I was a child, my best friend was Nancy Ling. I lived across the bay from San Francisco and she lived in Santa Rosa. Despite the distance, we saw each other often. Our fathers had been fraternity brothers at UC Berkeley and reunited regularly to recall innocent antics ten years earlier, a kind of carefree merriment that would completely disappear ten years later.

Nancy and I were like most girls in the 1950’s. We played with Betsy Wetsy dolls and jumped on Pogo Sticks. We crouched under our school desks during air raid drills, with lunatic faith that if an atomic bomb went off nearby we would be safe. We watched The Mickey Mouse Club and Queen for a Day, the most depraved, abusive, and slimy program in the history of television. And we rode around with our mothers in wood paneled Mercury station wagons that comfortably held 12-15 kids without seat belts.

In 1956, when I was eight, my family moved to a small farm town in western Michigan. I left behind everything I loved — my grandparents, my house, the hills, the bay, the fog, the bridge, and a way of life that could not be replicated anywhere else. It didn’t help that I grew into a freckled, slightly pudgy, frizzy-haired and deeply neurotic clump of a girl.

Nancy and I stayed in touch, but she didn’t grow up the way I did. She had thick, dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a beautiful face. She was less than five feet tall and weighed 98 pounds. She was a cheerleader, taught Sunday school, and was a campaign worker for Barry Goldwater. She was the perfect early 1960’s American girl, vivacious, gorgeous, polite, and conservative.

Nancy went to Whittier College in 1965 and I went to the University of Michigan a year later. Our friendship slipped away after that, the natural victim of time and geography. I didn’t find out what happened to her until years later.

Bored and restless at Whittier, she transferred to Berkeley in 1967. Like so many students who were there at that time, Nancy got involved in liberal politics that became increasingly extreme.  She married an African American jazz musician named Gilbert Perry. From then on, and especially when she was in the headlines, she was known as Nancy Ling Perry. She started using hallucinogens and amphetamines, and for a while worked as a topless blackjack dealer in San Francisco. She became a street person, crashing occasionally in dingy apartments in Oakland and selling juice from a small stand on the fringe of campus.

When one of her friends, Donald DeFreeze, escaped from Soledad Prison in 1973 he became the leader of a radical political organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Nancy joined immediately, helped create their manifesto of revolution, and trained in guerrilla warfare with other SLA members.

About 9:30 at night on February 4, 1974 Nancy and two other SLA members broke into the apartment of Patty Hearst, a Berkeley undergraduate and heir to the Hearst publishing fortune. They dragged her out to the street, tied her up, blindfolded her, and tossed her into the trunk of a car. Then they drove to a safe house where other SLA members were waiting. For almost two months Patty was kept in a closet, physically and sexually abused, sleep deprived, and frequently threatened with death.

This was a high profile kidnapping that drew international attention. Nancy and the other SLA members became federal fugitives and moved from one hideout to another as national and local law enforcement searched for them.  In May, the Los Angeles Police Department, acting on a tip from the FBI, learned that an unspecified number of SLA members were hiding out in a yellow stucco house in South Central LA. On May 17, 1974, 500 policemen, as well as FBI agents, a SWAT team, the LA Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and 10,000 shouting spectators surrounded the house. The six SLA members were armed with M1 carbines converted to fully automatic weapons and they also had a stockpile of homemade grenades. Gunfire erupted from both sides, but the SLA refused to surrender. For most of the day, it was a standoff, all of it televised live across the country.

Late in the afternoon a violent gun battle began. It lasted two hours and as many as 5,000 rounds of ammunition were exchanged. When the SWAT team fired tear gas into the house, it caught on fire. To escape the flames Nancy and Camilla Hall ran out the back door. They were met with a barrage of bullets and killed instantly. The other four SLA members stayed in the house and burned to death.

A week later my mother talked to Nancy’s parents and told me what had happened. Clearly, Nancy was not innocent. She was an accomplice to murder and guilty of kidnapping, arson, sedition, grand theft, assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering, extortion resisting arrest, and coercion. She deserved severe punishment but not necessarily execution. As I considered her sad, gruesome death, I was certain of one thing: it could have been me. Absolutely, easily, and but for a wisp of circumstance, it could have been me.

Like many other Baby Boomers, Nancy and I went to college in the mid 1960’s from stable and traditional upper middle class families. Once there, we were exposed, often for the first time, to the miseries of minorities, the poor, the uneducated, the unlucky, and all the others who never had our privileges. It was, in part, middle class guilt. But it was also an earnest impulse to address these injustices, and the beginning of a movement, led by students, to change them. At first, there were strategies for reform, meetings to raise awareness, campus fundraising, and volunteer services, all well-meaning efforts to correct the imbalances in society.

But in time, helping the victims of inequity seemed less productive than targeting the sources of inequity — greedy corporations, corrupt government, the military, racism, and an indifferent citizenry, often including our own parents. These enemies were so enormous and so pervasive that changing them was slow and uncertain, probably impossible. This overwhelming frustration became anger. And anger became resistance, civil disobedience, protest, and angry mobs. From this cynicism and desperation came the ideologies of violence.

UC Berkeley was the gold standard for student activism, and that’s where Nancy got trapped in a tempest. Berkeley’s political passions spread to other universities where they thrived. By the time I was a senior at Michigan, aggressive dissent was normal. To me, there was nothing unusual when classes were disrupted, University offices were shut down, students stormed ROTC buildings, central campus was clogged with screaming students, protests became unruly and dangerous, the National Guard showed up, and revolution seemed likely.

So Nancy’s life at Berkeley — and the mindset that created it — was both familiar and reasonable to me. Hers was merely the extreme version of pervasive beliefs at that time. In those chaotic years, there was a very fine line between those who walked into the darkness for a while and those who never came back.

I know every step Nancy took from her comfortable home in Santa Rosa to the shabby house burning down around her. But there is one thing I will never know. What was she thinking in those last moments before she opened the back door?

Did she think that by running out she could save herself? Or did she already know she would die that day? Did she look at her friends for the last time and still believe their cause was worth dying for? Did she have a shudder of heartache for her parents and two younger brothers? Did she regret the choices she made that tossed her into a tumble toward the abyss? Was she at last just so weary of running and hiding and scrounging, the endless burden of being a criminal, that she no longer cared what happened to her? Did she wince remembering dolls and pogo sticks? Or was she so engulfed in terror that she had no thoughts at all?

All of that happened decades ago. My college experiences are now studied in history classes. When I think of Nancy, I think only of our shared childhood. I avoid the shadow and ashes of her final years. For if I don’t, an old anguish invades me and I am haunted by the despairs of an inevitable doom.