High Seas: A Memoir of San Francisco, Vietnam, and Deadly Cargo
5 hours
From psychedelic explorations in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to navigating treacherous waters with a deadly payload, High Seas is the true story of an extraordinary adventure.
In the mid-1960s, before GPS and global tracking, a young man could walk into a shipping hall, sign a paper, and be bound for war by sundown. Roberto Loiederman did exactly that.
One day, he was dropping acid in a legendary San Francisco apartment called Cave 7, moving among the era’s most influential counterculture figures—including a turbulent friendship with Hunter S. Thompson. The next, he was on the deck of a freighter hauling napalm across the Pacific to Vietnam.
With no maritime experience—only youthful audacity and a newly minted Z card—Roberto traded his flower-power existence for life at sea. What began as an impulsive lark became the adventure of a lifetime, transforming a quintessential 1960s dropout into an unlikely witness to history.
Roberto’s world at sea was populated by weathered sailors whose outlandish personalities and hard-won wisdom shaped him in ways the counterculture never could. Their stories—hilarious, harrowing, and heartbreaking—form the backdrop to his own adventures as he navigated typhoons, foreign ports, spiritual awakenings, and the human cost of war.
In Vietnam and Southeast Asian ports, Roberto glimpsed societies torn between ancient traditions and modern conflicts, offering listeners a rare civilian mariner’s perspective on America’s most controversial war.
Through Roberto’s unique lens, High Seas chronicles both the drama of life at sea and thrilling adventures ashore in war-torn Southeast Asia. This is a story of drugs, danger, deep water, and deep questions—propelled by one man’s desire to “go everywhere, and be everyone.”
From dropout to sailor, from seeker to father, Roberto Loiederman’s memoir offers an intimate and extraordinary perspective on the Vietnam era, 1960s counterculture, and one man’s transformation in the most unexpected circumstances.
This story is a unique perspective on the Vietnam War—not from a soldier, but from the merchant marine’s invisible supply line. It is an unforgettable memoir of transformation, brotherhood, and the search for meaning.
Roberto Loiederman has been a journalist, merchant seaman, TV scriptwriter, kibbutz cook, deli owner, documentary film producer and writer, and some other professions he’d rather not remember. He’s had more than 200 articles and stories published in the L.A. Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Penthouse, Jewish Journal, and many others. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2014, 2015, and 2021. He is co-author of The Eagle Mutiny, a nonfiction account of the only mutiny on an American ship in modern times.