WARS

 If you hear or see me say something disparaging about our military, please know that I am not referring to the brave women and men who serve in the various uniforms of our armed services. Nor do I intend any criticism of the remaining conscientious officers who have chosen to serve in a noble career and to do it nobly.

If I grouse about the military, I refer to the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. These are people, companies, and institutions who must have wars, or rumors of war, to finance their insatiable demand for riches and power. Satisfying it is not an option. It will not be satisfied, cannot be satisfied. Like Monty Python’s famous character, it will feast until riches spout from every orifice and then demand more. And we will feed it while the last child starves, the last veteran dies from wounds acquired while serving it, while the last neighborhood withers from the effects of drugs and wars, while the last institution of learning smolders in ashes, while our planet burns, and while the last family stumbles from a collapsing home into a barren world.

DRUGS

 Long before I read “The Fort Brag Cabal” by Seth Harp I had determined, through my experience, study, and observation that drugs, illegally obtained and used, represent a top, if not the top, problem facing America. The book didn’t reinforce this. It only created a primal fear that my country has been elicit in teaming with international drug warlords. They help our government fight anti-capitalist regimes and our government allows them to amass fortunes by creating havoc in American neighborhoods.

Now it seems that havoc is even more pronounced in certain of our military units.

Thinking people with whom I discuss things tend to believe that the case of a majority of American voters choosing to elect a total charlatan, grifter, and demon as president of our country is a unique phenomenon.

My primal fear this morning suggests that maybe that isn’t true. I worry that the metaphor for the election of this monster is closer to the peeling of an onion. As each layer is removed, it reveals a rottenness that began when the first slave stumbled in chains from a prison ship to work lands obtained by murdering the original inhabitants.

I wish nothing more strongly this morning more than that I be proven wrong.

Honor

Off earning today. Here's a thought, though. Why, people ask, does the armed services have honor codes they live by? It's too complicated for me to answer but I might offer this. When all that we consider good and desirable in life is taken away: food, shelter, comfort, safety—the entire Maslovian Hierarchy in other words, life becomes precious. When all one has is the protection and support of the comrades nearby, it is honor that supplies the basic belief that that one will survive.

Everything that Donald Trump does or says is, and always has been, from a warm room on a full stomach as Alistair Cooke once said of H. L. Mencken. It is no wonder that honor is a foreign concept to the president of our United States. What is terrifying is that he is the commander-in-chief of our armed services, composed of brave and dedicated people he could never understand.

Honor

One morning about 0300, at the gate of a lonely outpost on Monkey Mountain near Da Nang, the radio crackled where I stood watch. It was transmitting among contacts from the main base below. A roving watch was stopped at the base of a tower where I had stood watch many times since I had been in-country, some at this very time morning. The patrol was receiving no response from the guard in the tower.

I listened to the exchange between the patrol and headquarters as a sailor carefully climbed the tower, expecting to find, no doubt, that the guard was asleep.

He was … forever. A knife still protruded from him as he sprawled against the very seat where I had sat so many times. I stood, chilled and shaking, thinking how it could be me there with my eyes staring, unseeing, at a starry sky.

The victim, a well-liked young sailor with only a few weeks left in country, would go home in a body bag like nearly 60,000 young American men. What was different about him? He would return home, NCIS determined, a victim of a fellow shipmate operating under an evil impulse.

The reasons for the murder have faded with time. Let’s just say the motive was evil, gross, and a blight upon the proud United States Navy. My point is this: not all those who serve or have served, in the military gain respect. The overwhelming majority do, a far greater percentage than the non-serving cohort.

But there are psychopaths and sociopaths who make their way into uniform. There are those who, when handed a firearm, turn toward dark impulses. I’ve seen men change, as Hemingway described them, gaining erections from the slap of pistol holster leather against their thigh. They’ve always been there. Soldiers returning from POW camps during and after WWII found their back pay stolen by paymasters. American veterans would tell of comrades picking off enemy combatants who were clearly marked as medics. When Robert E. Lee’s army marched into the north, he allowed his men to seize free African-Americans and send them south into slavery. General Pershing refused to stop fighting, as did all the other armies, on August 11, 1918, hours before the armistice, sending young men to kill and be killed for no reason other than bloodlust. General Almond, a MacArthur favorite, sent an entire Marine Division to destruction in Korea for personal aggrandizement.

Then there was Mai Lai.

My point? The military is like any great organization, or the human genome itself. There are mutations. Some benefit us, like those that produced an Audie Murphy. Some denigrate us and produce those who murder the innocent due to their personal demons.

What makes the military cohort produce such a low number of miscreants is a simple concept: honor. It produces greatness. It also allows the organization to self-police. Finding the aberrations and bringing them to justice completes the code of honor. It’s honor that sets them apart from ordinary people.

Until, that is, a president seeking to politicize the service and feed a base, many of whom have no concept of honor, intercedes for political gain.

Thus, is honor debased. The mighty infected by a common worm. 

Saying goodbye ....

Finally said goodbye to the brother today. Time to move on. I let go of a lot of stuff, junk mostly. What I kept were some memories of the best times we ever had together.

It was back in 1970. When I left Vietnam, I wound up on a Navy ship in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the meanest cities to strangers in the U.S. at that time. Meantime, he had enlisted in the United State Marines for reasons known only to himself. After boot camp and schooling, he ended up at Camp Lejeune in southern North Carolina for some sort of advanced training. It was close enough to where my ship docked that we got together weekends when we could.

The people and police in Charleston hated blacks, servicemen, and people who had come there since 1680 in pretty much equal proportions. Scoring two out of three, I needed all the friendly faces I could find. So, brother and I spent some weekends there, often in the company of James Huddleston from Thayer, Missouri and/or Sidney Bussey from Douglas, Georgia. My brother had no civilian clothes, so we all wore uniforms, which meant that it was best for us to stay out of sight as best we could. We three sailors had seen what the local peacekeepers could do to one of our breed after seeing a few of them carried aboard the ship after exceeding some local rule or other.

It wasn’t a pretty sight, so we avoided the good people of Charleston as best we could.

It was enough for us simply to find an affordable motel room and spend time just watching TV, drinking beer, and lying around without being yelled at during a weekend, quite suitable for lonely men far from home. You had to be there. It lasted for several months before an incurable allergic reaction to combat-boot leather ended his career with an honorable discharge, a promotion to Lance Corporal, and orders to Westpac, i.e. Vietnam, laying on the Personnel Officer’s desk.

Once, just the two of us had a little extra money and landed in a pretty nice motel with a friendly bar next door. Too friendly I guess. I woke up the next morning with no memory of walking back. With that great smile of his, he explained it. I had made it fine until we reached the bottom of the stairs leading to our second-floor room. Thereupon, I needed help up, like a sinner being led to salvation.

He wasn’t a big man, my brother. But with muscles toned by the Marine Corps, he was making steady but noisy progress until we were halfway up the stairs. When the manager of the motel came out to check on the commotion, he asked if help was needed.

According to a now long-time family legend, the response was fast and firm. “He ain’t heavy mister. He’s my brother.” I have no proof that it happened that way, but, as they said in the John Wayne movie, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It's one of the stories he would tell until he died.

So I leave you with this. It’s a song about a wandering performer, but it made me think of my brother and, given his love for all things Jimmy Buffett, I choose it with which to say goodbye.

Some stories are worth telling.
Some may not be.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 24 (Cont._3)

We reached Fayetteville after dark. As it was the spring of 1972, there were lots of Vietnam Vets enrolled, all celebrating survival, if you know what I mean. The semester was ending, but the town still bustled with students. Mike and Wayland were waiting for us. The first sign of oddity was that they had a pet.

It was some kind of small python that they kept in a closet, thank goodness. Brenda was not amused, but she took it all in stride. She warmed to Mike quickly, despite his strange choice of a pet, and they began what would become a lifelong friendship. If she was affected by Godshall’s charms, she never let on.

Fayetteville was still a quiet little place back then. We saw the area and I showed Brenda my name on the sidewalk that proved I actually was a graduate of that bastion of higher learning. Mike and I swapped war stories while she listened. Godshall was mostly out roaming about with his many female admirers.

Mike was enjoying himself. Actually, he would have stayed in the Army had he been allowed. That organization, however, had no use for OCS-commissioned officers after they had served their tour in SE Asia. Those who managed to come back whole or in part learned quickly that they were of no further use to America as far as the Army was concerned. Further, as we all learned, most civilians had little use for them at all.

The Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration were two separate organizations and gave no indication of communicating with one another at all. Once a soldier received his DD214, or condition of discharge, he no longer existed as far as the Army was concerned. As Eric Bogle described many of them, “… the armless, the legless, the blind, the insane,” they were left to fend for themselves.

College proved a good escape. As I noted earlier, the campus teemed with veterans, most in a continual state of panic over GI benefits that weren’t arriving on schedule or at all. It was better that their previous gig, though, and most prevailed.

We enjoyed our time there, hit a few of the old spots, laughed and joked with Mike, and enjoyed a couple of quiet walks around campus, holding hands. We talked about what a racket going to college was, though we hadn’t realized it at the time.

It was a good time. Actually, it was a great time, one of the best of my life. For you see, at one magic moment during the time there, while we were all alone, that woman—the one I had adored since the first time I saw her—looked into my eyes and said, “I love you.”

What now?

My Redacted Life: Chapter Thirteen

The year 1972 sort of eased in. I didn’t make a commotion, fearing I might wake up from a dream standing behind a bunker, rifle in hand, and staring into the jungle.

We were working on a number of planning projects. I spent most of my time working on a major project for the city of Hope in southwest Arkansas. Part of the project would be righteous endeavor, providing rehabilitation assistance to homeowners in a low-income section of the city.

Alas, the other aspect of the project would involve a misguided attempt to follow the advice of internationally known architect Victor Gruen, born Viktor David Grünbaum. He was an Austrian-born architect best known as a pioneer in the design of shopping malls in the United States. Yes, shopping malls. Once he had facilitated the downfall of downtowns as dominant retail centers, he had a plan for their salvation.

He proposed simply turning Downtown into another shopping mall. He should have stuck to designing buildings.

At any rate, I was becoming intimately acquainted with this charming town not far from the Texas and Louisiana borders. I doubted if anything or anyone of significance would emerge from within its borders, but it was a nice place inhabited by nice people. It was also the first city in which I worked that placed a female on its planning commission, alongside an African-American male who had preceded her by nearly a year.

It was a pattern that repeated itself countless times over the years: first a person of color, next a person of the female gender. Change comes slowly sometimes. Planning proved no exception.

I was enjoying my current apartment, though it was old and hardly sparkled. The landlord was a man called “Smitty,” who managed my building and the newer one next door. He was friendly, attentive, and was always pleasant, even if you interrupted him during a meal with some minor complaint.

Work was both fun and fulfilling. The new partner—the engineer—and I didn’t, as they say down South, “gee and haw” too well together, but that really didn’t affect my career. I avoided him and he quickly expressed the feeling that I wasn’t of significant consequence to warrant his attention. He didn’t mind expressing his opinion of planners, and I didn’t mind expressing my opinion of people who, as he had, joined the National Guard. At that time in our country’s history (it would change drastically and tragically much later), it was a move back then designed to avoid actual military service.

That’s all I’ll say about that topic.

Let’s see … oh, lest I forget. As I went home each day, there was a young lady with luxurious long hair and eye-popping beauty, in a city some 20 miles away who had just finished teaching an unruly band of third-graders in her hometown. She had friends in the apartment building next door and visited there often. I knew nothing about it. That apartment was as step up, socially, from mine, so I stuck with my friends in the opposite direction on Riverside Drive. Class is class, but benefits are benefits, after all.

As with many young teachers working for minimal wages, this young lady was still wearing her college wardrobe while teaching.

Given the then-prevalent style of mini-skirts for well-formed young college ladies, and remembering my lingering infatuation with a third-grade teacher named Miss Roundtree, I can only imagine the fantasies created. Ah, but that had nothing to do with me.

Or did it?

Waiting in ambush?

My Redacted Live: Chapter Nine (Cont._4)

In 1971, the Great Society Program was drawing to a close. It marked the end of a massive effort to address America’s problems with money. Some would say it was a great failure. Some would say it was a great but errant humanitarian effort to help the “least of those among us.”

A Truman-era bureaucrat named Rufus Miles perhaps stated it best in an observation that would become known as Miles’s Law: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” The poor are just poor, some would argue, nothing we can do about it. They deserve it. Over the years, though, I would find that it is easy to denounce our poor “from a warm room on a full stomach,” as Alistair Cook described the source of H.L. Mencken’s acerbic writing.

At any rate, I was learning to write grants. This is a procedure, as best I can describe it, that involves a highly sophisticated and literary begging technique. The trick isn’t to procure funds for a need, but to convince the dispensers of succor that history would judge them wise and proper for the grants they chose to issue.

At any rate, it would send me into some of the poorest and neediest neighborhoods in our state. I would spend many an evening in a small, white frame church building in the middle of an Arkansas Delta summer. There would be no air-conditioning and the mosquitoes would be flying through open windows in formation, like squadrons of the 8^th Air Force over Berlin. From time to time, one would accidentally hit the makeshift podium and knock in over. You had to watch out for them. There is a legend that one once carried off a baby, but I don’t think this is true. I heard it was just a small puppy.

Amway, I would be the only white face in the crowd of earnest folks in desperate need of a source of clean water or some other human need. It would be one of many communities in our state that history was passing over in the new age.

You can’t see those places from the towers of Manhattan or the fancy homes in Georgetown.

I was good at begging, and I was getting better at writing, so I enjoyed some success. I was still hitching rides to planning commission meetings with one or the other of my bosses. On free evenings, I was enjoying myself, mostly reading or picking guitar. Then there was my sometime friend Jackie with her wonderful singing voice and other special benefits.

Oh, and speaking of music, I was becoming a regular at the folk music gathering I mentioned before. This was the group called “The Rackensack Society,” a diverse group of amateur musicians ranging in quality from beginner to near-professional quality. They formed a jolly, welcoming, gracious group. After a few meetings, I even noticed something that struck me as strange.

Some background: There is a large Air Force base in Jacksonville, Arkansas, oddly named “The Little Rock Air Force Base.” There is an enduring legend that the state of Arkansas agreed to adopting modern city planning statutes only as a condition for its location, but that is a story for another day.

What struck me strange back then was that several airmen from that military base were regulars at the Rackensack meetings and that the other members welcomed them and treated them as equals.

Now one may wonder why I thought it strange that a social group of citizens would welcome military personnel into their midst. Just consider my background, particularly the fact that I spent the last portion of my enlistment at Charleston, South Carolina. Had I tried to join a social group there, I would have likely faced the wrath of the local police who hated African-Americans, servicemen, and non-tourist strangers in almost equal portions.

I was living in a new world and I was enjoying it. I had a good job, I felt I was doing some good things, I was making new friends, and Little Rock was a hell of a lot better place to live than Charleston.

I’ll get to the new friends later.  

Cool ... or what?

Morning Thoughts: November 20, 2017

It’s Monday, and not a great time for monumental thoughts. Thought maybe I would just “practice my ‘nalogies” for a while. That didn’t last long. It was like making love to a mannequin.

Mondays are like foreplay to a redneck, something that has to be endured in order to get to better times. All over America at this time, at least in the eastern half of the country, sour faces are filling rooms that rang with laughter at quitting time Friday. Comparing Mondays to Fridays is like saying that castor oil is like Stella Beer, they are both liquid and supposed to make you feel better.

Reading the news made Monday worse. Calling this “thing” coming out of Washington a “Tax Reform Bill” is like calling a hot dog eating contest a nutrition class.

After pecking away rather aimlessly, I walked around to loosen up a bit. I kicked a dog who was asleep in my pathway, not a mean-spirited act, but rather a gentle restatement of a long-standing philosophical example of the hegemonic positions of the two species. Even that didn’t make me feel better.

I considered playing the Jimmy Hendrix version, at top volume, of what we used to call in the Navy the “Star-Spangled Bananer” That brought back memories. On a Navy base, the sailors on watch had to play certain tunes at certain times of the day to accompany certain actions steeped in history, protocol, and regulations. They took it fairly seriously. Failing it any way would be like spitting on the grave of John Paul Jones himself.

The playing of the tunes was accomplished by finding a miniscule band of grooves on an old vinyl record that must have had every bit of music that the United States Navy had ever considered vital. I’m sure that “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” was on there somewhere, as was “Roll me over …, no, that was Army. Let me just assure you that finding the appropriate band for “Taps” or “Revile” wasn’t easy for a sleepy or hungover sailor whose indifferent attitude stood out like an “Irish Pendant” on the mainmast.

The punishment, however, for a mishap was offset by the jollity of hearing “Anchors Aweigh” blasted over an entire base at some ungodly hour of the morning in place of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or whatever. Sometimes a sleeping Officer of the Deck would jump to attention and start singing the words to beat the band. I think maybe they did that at “The Academy.”

The examples of such loose rigging (that’s what they called them in the Navy) paled in contrast with the act of misjudging the length of the country’s flag at end of day and becoming entwined within its folds to the point of twisting and turning—while it flapped in the wind—like a super patriotic Isadora Duncan. Base commanders in particular eschewed such scenes.

There, memories of sacrifice and valor have brightened my day to the point where I can cope. At least I think I can. First, did I ever tell you about the time, as coxswain of a rescue boat during a drill at sea, I ran completely over the “rescue dummy,” causing our Departmental Bo’sun to stage a mock funeral at assembly the next morning?

"Courage at Sea" and his buddy "Valiant Shipmate"

Morning Thoughts: September 28, 2016

What I know of Puerto Rico stems from the time our ship docked there for a few days back in the early 1970s. They range from despondency to awe.

I was coxswain of the Admiral’s barge so I didn’t have much to do at sea, and noncoms generally steered around me. I was free to wander up to the fo'c'sle when someone said land was in sight. Sure enough, one could see the dark outline of mountains rising on the horizon like a bank of clouds, and I thought of how the first Europeans must have felt upon experiencing that sight. Colors became pronounced as we steamed closer and the magnificent grandeur of the island showed itself like a young girl modeling her Easter finery.

The beauty faded as we docked alongside a greasy pier, watched all the while by a line of young boys sitting side by side with their feet dangling over the dock. Each had a paper bag which he would raise and pat from time to time, with the opening around his nose.

Sniffing glue, they were. That seemed to be a common pastime for many of the young boys. One of our more pompous officers yelled for them to leave. It only took one finger each for them to respond. Thus began our relationship with the locals.

My pals and I had liberty next day. There being no Bible-study outlets near, we opted for a tour of the famous El Yunque National Rainforest. A bus transported us there and we were able to see a great deal of the countryside on the way. What I remember was staring out the window at mile after mile of cardboard and barn-tin shacks interrupted from time to time by a long stretches of whitewashed masonry fences with brilliant green golf courses beyond. There didn’t seem to be much middle ground in the local society.

We were warned not to go into certain sections of the “Old Town” area. There were groups there, we were told, that didn’t care much for military personnel. This was nothing new to us, so many from or ship went anyway. There were no incidents with the locals, but a sailor from a German warship taught one of our guys a lesson about the myth of American invincibility. Boy, did he ever.

Our little group searched the historic district for museums, libraries, and monuments. I later recognized some of the locations when they appeared as substitutes for Havana in such films as I’ve Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. The beauty was breathtaking, the landscaping lush and rich. Do bodies still lie tangled among it now while our mainland government dawdles? I don’t know.

Our stopover ended quickly. On the last day ashore, we walked down to the local beach and ogled the girls in bikinis. We had no religious literature to distribute, so we just sat and watched while enjoying beverages of choice. My last memory of the island was of a young girl who appeared to be enjoying herself with a group of friends. She was quite gorgeous and curvy, the very image of a young, wholesome, fresh-faced teenager engaged in harmless recreation with her friends.

She would have fit seamlessly in any park in America. This was only natural, for they were Americans, just as we were.  She looked at us and one of the group smiled and nodded. She took us in, symbols of truth, justice and the American way, in our starched white uniforms and service ribbons, protecting her freedoms as well as well as those of all peoples.

“I hope you drown in the sea,” she said in perfect English. She nodded, her pals giggled, and they all strode away. At that moment, we felt as though we were back home.

Local hero … not.

Reconciliation: Day Eight

 Perhaps no topic is more controversial among Americans as taxes. We run a wide gamut of opinions, to say the least. There was the famous Civil War veteran and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who wrote, in a dissenting opinion while on the U.S. Supreme Court, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society … .”

At the other end, we have the work of political kingmaker Grover Norquist who states, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” He works at doing this by exacting a pledge from candidates who want the support he can provide. The pledge is, basically, never to vote on enacting or raising a tax.

So where does this leave a sensible person? My friends are free to make any decision they chose. I can only hope that decision is not based on a knee-jerk reaction fulfilling an allegiance to a person rather than the people as a whole.

Personally, I tend toward the Holmes version. He was a veteran of both our most divisive war and the Supreme Court. He must have spent long hours contemplating the complexities of both history and government. Analytical thought is good, I believe.

Does the government waste money? Oh yes. As I write this, our military is still trying to explain the evaporation of over a trillion dollars during our adventure in Iraq.

Does the government spend money on frivolous or unneeded projects? Oh dear. Does the term “pork barrel” ring a bell?

On the other hand, can we seriously contemplate such varied things as Hurricane Katrina, Yellowstone National Park, the invasion of Normandy, 9-11, Oklahoma City, Sesame Street, the elimination of polio, Social Security, Medicare, The Smithsonian, and a postal service that connects us to even the most remote areas of our country, without admitting the government can be a source of good for many, if not all of us?

Of course, some of those items represent programs that are more popular with our diverse society than others. Still, I’ve observed each of them providing great solace to our people, many of whom represent the “least of those among us.”

As complicated as the topic may be, and as elusive as answers may be, I choose, myself, to pay taxes willingly. I do this even when the paying may not benefit me directly. Though we have no children, we steadfastly support our public school system. An uneducated population, incapable of analytical thinking, may seem a worthwhile goal to some, but I beg to disagree. Does an H.G. Wells book called “The Time Machine” strike a chord?”

Let us each view taxes in our own way, each of us. I choose to not attack the concept, but to be on constant vigilance toward the administration of the concept. This is consistent with my belief that freedom, within the bounds of enlightened control and regulation, is truly what can make America great.

My country is too great ever
to become a place of depair.