The Fire Next Time

10. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Fire Next Time · Categories: General, GWOT, War

Connie Willis wrote a haunting novelette, ages ago, called “Firewatch” postulating a future where students of history could actually go and do their finals as a practical exercise, in the past. The hero of “Fire Watch” finds himself in London in 1940, as one of the cadre of volunteer fire watchers, sleeping in the crypt of St. Paul’s , and working feverishly during air raids, to protect the great church from bombs— not the high-explosive, but the incendiary kind, defending it with buckets of sand and stirrup-pumps— all the while haunted by the knowledge that seventy years after his practicum, St. Paul’s has been atomized by a terrorist with a nuclear weapon. In his own time, all that is left of it is part of the memorial stone, dedicated after the Second World War, honoring the work of the firewatchers:

“ “Remember men and women of St Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.”… Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. “

So it appears this time we are saved, from the horror of airplanes falling out of the skies, spilling their contents prodigally over the earth, or as it seems to have been planned, over the ocean. Saved by watchfulness, and luck and dedication, saved by good policing, saved by those who know in their soul that we are at war, that there are indeed those few predators amongst us who are planning to kill, and kill and kill again, sating themselves with oceans of our blood, and the assurance of an eternity spent in the hereafter, rewarded as the clients of a particularly well-stocked celestial whorehouse. Perhaps this was the one big action, promised or threatened ever since 9-11, and perhaps it will take another five years to bring the next one to full and ghastly fruition, with another dozen small and ugly murderous actions in between. The saying is that the terrorists only need to be lucky, once… those who defend against terrorists must be lucky, over and over and over again.

We may continue to be lucky, and dedicated, and go on putting out all sorts of little fires with the equivalent of sand and stirrup pumps for many nights and for many years, but deep in my heart, I know that eventually there will be the day when we will not be lucky, and stome time, and in someplace… someplace that I may know, or someplace that I have only read about… will be gone, with nothing but a few blasted foundations left of it. Connie Willis wrote “Firewatch” in 1982, when the Cold War was cooling down, before the Wall fell, and it could still be barely credible to imagine a Communist as the villain, a nihilistic terrorist setting off a bomb to destroy the church of St. Paul’s, twenty years before we watched the towers fall in a shimmer of debris and a great cloud of smoke and fire, inspired by a terrorist of another horrifying and more potent ideology.

“We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell.”

Beginning in 3…2…1

10. August 2006 · Comments Off on Beginning in 3…2…1 · Categories: General, GWOT, sarcasm, War

In light of news reports of British authorities’ disruption of a terror plot, I should like to say that I hope they have got irrefutable evidence… like the perps on tape, or caught red-handed, or something.

Otherwise, we shall all be deafened by unimaginable levels of whining about how a certain community is being unfairly targeted, and how it is all a worked up plot by running dogs/minions of the “BUSHITLER junta” anyway.

Said seething, whining, and excuse-making to commence in 3…2….1…minutes after they wake up this morning.

Progress Report

07. August 2006 · Comments Off on Progress Report · Categories: Domestic, General, Working In A Salt Mine...

So, another day at work at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, the largest three-dimensional Skinner-box in the world. This being my fourth time out there, I am able to easily find my car at the end of the work day.I took a short assignment to pay the bills… it looks like one of the cats may have cystitus, so there may be a vet’s bill to add to it all. This assignment is a short one, and may even become shorter, should anyone find out that my Excel graphing skilz are not that mad, that I am almost completely innocent of interest in banking and insurance (other than my own accounts, that is) and would much rather be at home, writing.

Yesterday, I printed out six chapters of the latest Book… yes, that one, the story of the greatest frontier era emigrant party that no one has ever heard of, and send it off via Fedex.

I hope to hear something by next weekend. I have really been spoiled for office work, the two weeks of staying home and writing, writing, writing.

Vino, Veritas and Lucky

05. August 2006 · Comments Off on Vino, Veritas and Lucky · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game, Stupidity, Wild Blue Yonder

Unaccustomed as I am to giving a good goddamn about the blatherings of movie stars and other reality-challenged morons in the entertainment industry— we pay these people inordinately large salaries to dress up and pretend to be other people for our amusement, and I have always just tried to think of them as a breed of well-trained performing monkeys— I am a little surprised to find myself even considering a blog-post about Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and his subsequent widely publicized anti-Semitic outburst, recorded apparently in its very ugly entirety. It’s been all over the entertainment industry media, to which I never (well hardly ever) pay attention, but Blondie does – and if her reaction to the whole thing is anything typical, the very photogenic Mr. Gibson may have a big-post rehab problem. She was honestly revolted by the whole nasty diatribe, will probably not see whatever his next movie is, and is even put off by the thought of watching any of the old Mad Max movies again. In vino, veritas, you see, truth at the bottom the wineglass; she and I have been around long enough to know that an over-sufficiency of alcohol doesn’t really change a person. It just loosens inhibitions, and their grip on whatever façade they maintain over their true personality. Everyone knows people who are kind, funny and amusing sober, and even more so when smashed – and conversely, at least one individual who only appears to be kind, funny and amusing, when sober. When that kind gets a skin-full, the real underlying person comes out, and it is usually a memorably nasty piece of work. So, while drunk on his ass, a movie star who has a public persona of being a rather genial, fairly devout sort of family man is revealed to be – well, something rather less genial, to put it kindly. And since he is in the entertainment business, this has implications for more than just his family, circle of friends and therapist.

It’s enough to make one madly nostalgic for the old studio morality clauses, actually. On the whole and over the long run, we rather prefer our entertainers to have a private life pretty much be congruent with what they play on the screen, assuming that we have to know anything about their personal lives at all. Frankly I’d rather see someone like Meryl Streep or Judi Dench spend three decades or more playing a great many different and interesting characters, and living a dull and blameless personal life out in the suburbs between movie shoots. Or even a Robert Mitchum, who seems to have in real life been pretty much the same kind of two-fisted, hard-drinking brawler he often played. I’m fairly sure that Rock Hudson would never have been as big a movie star as he was, if everyone had known that in real life he played for the other team, although we can now appreciate him being a much better actor than we thought back then, playing all those love scenes with women. If he had been outed in the 1950ies, Rock would have been dropped – er, like a hot rock. What he was in real life, was just not congruent with the roles he played, and the public personality he appeared to be. I get the giggles myself, picturing him in a passionate movie cinch with Doris Day, knowing what I know now. So, how many people will giggle cynically when they see Mel playing a regular guy?

As I wrote here last month, anti-Semitism in the US never quite has attained the virulence that it has in Europe, for a number of likely reasons. Not to say it anti-Semitism never appeared in the American cultural or political body politic; there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But set against that are even more accounts of how in a lot of places, and on a lot of occasions, it was something that, to use an English expression, was just not done, being neither condoned or approved of, and on one famous occasion, it brought down a bigger hero than a movie actor, a man whose credentials for being an American hero were somewhat more substantial than being able to recite lines in front of a camera; Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy himself, who by 1941 had spent nearly two decades in the public eye, after his epic crossing of the Atlantic, solo and non-stop in a single-engine and the ghastly kidnapping and death of his first child and the resulting investigation and trial. Aviator, writer, scientist and traveler, he had become a passionate speaker, and one of the leading lights in the America First Committee, a group formed to oppose any American involvement in what would become the Second World War. Many of the founding members- intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians alike- were honorable, and passionate patriots, who were convinced that the war in Europe was none of our affair, and that involvement in it would not end well or to American advantage, and had the example of the first war to go on. Conventional wisdom of that time had it that America had been suckered into participating in World War One by an unholy cabal of slick politicians and greedy arms merchants, and as war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans very rightfully felt they’d better not get fooled again. But there were other, less honorable motivations motivating members of America First, traditional dislike of Britain’s imperial and financial powers, admiration for or fear of Germany, deep dislike of President Roosevelt – and as historian David Gardner wrote “Anti-Semitism was the most inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason to hate Hitler… Jewish interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to sacrifice American lives. The fact that interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population, had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the drive for war.”
And by the fall of 1941, events had skidded way beyond anyone’s control, least of all the passionate anti-interventionalists of America First. Rooseveldt had won re-election the year before, a military draft had been instituted, Lend-Lease aid and volunteers flowed towards Britian, along with considerable American sympathy. After a U-boat fired on an American destroyer, President Rooseveldt authorized the US Navy to shoot back. Passions ran high, as events converged, and Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in De Moines, saying “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire … These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence … it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany … But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences� Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government…”
Lindbergh had long been a hero to most Americans, even as he had become so deeply involved in America First, and certainly viewed by many, especially in the Rooseveldt administration as an admirer of Hitler, and the Nazi Party, but this speech— described as intemperate and inflammatory — brought down a storm on his head. The America First Committee, fractured and was made irrelevant by Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh himself was all but made a political outcast by the opprobrium that descended upon him.
Curiously, the speech that killed his political career was made on September 11th.
(More fascinating stuff about America First Committee… much of which seems curiously relevant, these days)

General Education

03. August 2006 · Comments Off on General Education · Categories: General, GWOT, Working In A Salt Mine...

Geneva Convention.
In the general interests of reader knowlege, this link is posted.
Do particularly note the bit about taking hostages, and the bit about engaging in directly war-supporting work on the premises of a hospital.
And also the bit about uniforms, ID, orders of a clearly-identified superior, etc.

I am off tomorrow, back to the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, on a well-paid temp assignment for the remainder of the month, which will keep the wolf from the door (or at least, at the bottom of the driveway) while an interested agent looks over the first third of “To Truckee’s Trail”.
Ta, then!

In the Season of Butterflies

01. August 2006 · Comments Off on In the Season of Butterflies · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Funny old world, that… what with everything else going on in the world, this part of south Texas is being overrun with… butterflies, more of them than I have ever seen in any other year. First it was swarms of small, drab brownish and dark orange things, with wings about the size of a man’s thumbnail. They are called snout-tailed something or others, or so my neighbor Judy told me; not the least bit spectacular, but they are everywhere in perfect swarms. In the evenings, they cover certain trees and shrubs to the point where they make the tree look as if it is entirely covered in small, trembling leaves, and gather around shallow puddles where anyone has just watered. The dogs and I have run thru a perfect whirlwind of them during the morning for the last few weeks, but this last weekend we noticed more than the little drab things.

We walked by a bed of gerbera daisies in a neighbor’s front yard on Sunday, on our way to get the newspaper, and a perfect storm of sulfur-yellow and creamy white butterflies rose up from it. These new interlopers are several times the size of the snout-tailed something butterflies, and much more discriminating. They very much favor the flowering bushes like the gerberas, and the rosemary bushes in the front of my house, which are now covered in spikes of tiny blue flowers and fairs of butterflies. The firebush next door is orbited by a constant mob of yellow, like an animated flock of postit notes. At the DIY home warehouse store on Sunday, we spotted a gold and brown Monarch with wings a big as my hands, lazily orbiting over a table of flowering annuals, along with all the smaller brown, yellow and white sorts.

We have never seen so many, in the time we have lived here, and have no idea why: it’s been hot, but not as hot as some years, not as rainy as others, there are just about as many flowering plants in bloom this year as others… it is a mystery.

Another mystery: one of my neighbors, several blocks up the road have suddenly, and horrifically contracted the urge to decorate their garden with a huge variety of healthy flowering plants and shrubs in an array of containers which have absolutely nothing in common, aesthetically speaking. It is almost as if they hit every nursery and DIY store in town, impulsively buying hand over fist every plant and pot that caught their eye, without consideration of all the stuff they had bought previously. About the only thing to hold plants that they haven’t bought so far is that nadir of low-rent taste, the automobile tire turned inside out, laid on the side, and the top edge cut into zig-zag shapes and gaudily painted. No, the assortment of pots would be quite striking of itself, but the statuary puts it painfully over the top.

Not gnomes, but all those elaborate , sentimental cast-plaster, or concrete statues of Victorian children, sitting on benches, or under umbrellas, or playing with the bunnies and duckies… dozens of them, and Blondie swears there are more of them, mysteriously appearing every day, as if they were replicating themselves in some revolting and not-to-be-closely-considered-by-the-squeamish fashion, partaking in mysterious rituals performed during the darkest hours of the night…. No, the thought of all those statues of creepy children coming alive at night, and throwing off their pinafores and trousers and tormenting the bunnies and ducks with… no, no, no. I’ll bet that when they smile, though, they have needle-sharp teeth, like the little gnomes on that planet in “Galaxy Quest”. During the day, the serried ranks of statuary make it look like a monumental graveyard for hobbits. And that’s the front yard, we don’t like to think of what might already be in the backyard, because at some point, the statuary will overflow their yard entirely, and come marching down the road, and then where will we be?

On, the other hand, the horrible marching army of statues will have to come by the house with the tree full of wind chimes, the place where they have ripped out the lawn, and covered it all pavers, and raised beds full of native flowering shrubs, whirligigs, painted sheet- metal flowers and crystals on metal poles…all very pleasant on a mild day, but what it must be like during a wind-storm, I shudder to imagine. Probably no one can hear themselves think, for the clamor of wind chimes, let alone call City Code Compliance to complain:
“Hello (bonnn-ggg! Bo-nnnn-g!) Code (Bonnnnnnggggg!) Compliance, how may we (BOOOONNNNNNGGG!) help you? (BONNNNNNNNGGGG!)…. I’m so sorry, ma’am, (BOOOONNNNNNGGG!) but I can’t hear you (BBBBBOOOOONNNNNG!) over the wind chimes!” (BBBBBBOOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGG!)

I love the look of the wind-chime place, but personally, I’m happy to be living a good distance away. I think it would drive my dogs and cats into nervous breakdowns. I blame global warming. Or global cooling. Or climate change, or Al Gore, or somebody. Maybe even Martha Stewart, whom I am happy to blame for anything.

Soooo, What About That Book?

29. July 2006 · Comments Off on Soooo, What About That Book? · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, Site News, Veteran's Affairs

It’s going rather well, which is the reason I have not posted much over the last week…umm, since being let go from the last installment of pink-collar wage slavery. Timmer has been writing about that still little voice that whispers “It’s time”, when you have to let go and move on… and I just kept thinking, as I was driving home with my personal stuff thrown into a cardboard box (and it took about five minutes to clear out all of it from my desk) “Whoopee! I can stay at home tomorrow, and finish that chapter!” Maybe it’s time to do what I really, really love doing!

They gave me a decisive push, just as I was working up the nerve to jump, and I have hardly thought of the place at all this week, although I did wonder on Monday if anyone could call the house, asking if something had been ordered, or delivered, or whatever; although frankly I can’t see how they would have the nerve, and they can figure that out from my files anyway. And I swear, I was that close to snarling, the next time someone asked me for copies of this or that, “The copier is over there, and your legs aren’t painted on!” No, time to move on.

So, another milblogger, blessed be his name, referred me to a literary agent, who read the chapter and loved it, extravagantly. (I googled him, of course… do I look like a fool? Me, who worked for an intellectual property firm for three years?) This agent wants to see more, basically about a third of the projected work, just to be assured that I can, actually carry through with it. It seems that a discouragingly large number of first-time writers have a failure of nerve at about the 15,000 word mark, and as I have mapped out an outline for “To Truckee’s Trail” of 19 or 20 chapters of 5,000 to 6,000 words…. Well, that works out to 100,000-120,000 words. Or more, if I really start to get into it.

I am working full time at this, and if I keep to my schedule and detailed chapter outline, I will have six continuous chapters by next Friday. Half a chapter a day of at least 3,000 words of polished prose, witty conversation, exciting narrative, and vivid descriptions. Piece of cake, people, piece of cake.

So, that is where I have been, back in the 19th century, coping with flooded rivers, recalcitrant ox teams, quarreling emigrants, cooking over smoking campfires, and generally keeping everything moving; all those cute children, brave women, and gallant men… and there’s a bit with a dog, too. Everyone likes a funny bit with a dog.

Just Call Me Martha

26. July 2006 · Comments Off on Just Call Me Martha · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General

This is what I have been doing on weekends for the past couple of months, in the name of a more beautiful and dog-proof backyard, with really rather striking results, once the finished product is set on a layer of sand, and surrounded with pea-gravel.

Go to a craft supply store like Michaels’ or Hobby Lobby, or even the aisle at Walmart where they have the flower-arranging supplies. Buy a couple of bags of those flattened glass marbles, or the sea-shell shapes, ornamental polished pebbles, or the pieces of tumbled sea glass, or little square tiles, or whatever, in whatever colors work for you as a truly creative human being.

Go to Lowes’ or Home Depot, or whatever they call the home DIY outlet in your neck of civilization and buy:

A bunch of those heavy, clear plastic plant saucers… the 14” to 21” ones work best, but last weekend Blondie and my neighbor Judy from down the road seriously came down on me for wanting to buy a 30”+ one! I wanted to seriously create! Help, help, I’m being repressed! The best ones are about two inches deep, or have regular ridges along the sides, which allow you to easily set a level.

As many sacks of mortar mix as the back of your car, and your own back can handle. It comes in 40lb bags which tend to leak, somewhat.

A bag of those rubber gloves they sell in the paint aisle. Seriously, working with mortar mix is not something you want to do with your bare hands. If you don’t have a large bucket or some kind of cement-mixing trug at home, buy one of those, too. I have a large bucket which once held about 10 gallons of kitty litter, and a small GI-issue shovel, which works for me.

A couple of stiff plastic and/or wire brushes. They have inexpensive ones in the same general area where they sell paint-stripper.

Set out the plastic plant saucers on a level surface.

Mix the mortar mix with water— generally about one quarter to a third of water, to the amount of mortar mix. It should be just damp and slushy enough to stick together. (Do not use too much water. It will not work well, trust me on this.) Stir well with whatever you have, and only handle the stuff with gloves on.

Slop enough gloppy mortar-mix into each plant saucer, and slap with your hands to pack into place. Don’t worry, if it seems too dry, at first. The water will rise to the surface, and saturate the whole mass of stuff in the mold.

When the mortar mix is packed into mold (one forty pound sack fills one large, two medium and a couple of small saucers, although your mileage may vary) level it off, and set the marbles, glass, pebbles or glass onto the surface. Slap it gently to embed them in the mortar. Be creative, this is when you let your inner artiste have free rein. Don’t worry if some of the mortar slops over the glass a little bit.

Allow to sit for at least 6 hours. If you haven’t added too much water to the mix, it will be solid enough to un-mould. Let them sit for another six hours, or overnight, and brush the dried surface with the wire or plastic brushes, to clean off the glass inserts, and make a nice roughened surface of the mortar.

These will look really cool. You can also lay flat leaves onto the wet mortar, and press them in just enough to make leaf-printed stepping stones.

Note: I have used purple and green marbles, and real grape leaves to make a lot of stones with bunches of grapes set in them. But remember to wear plastic gloves, this stuff is hell on your hands, otherwise.

A Taste of the Good Stuff

23. July 2006 · Comments Off on A Taste of the Good Stuff · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff

This is tasty sample of the latest book, tenatively titled “To Truckee’s Trail”, the one for which I have a complete proposal all ready. The select few who have seen the story so far are fascinated, and I myself think it could be very, very big… could it be “Gone With the Wind” big, or “Harry Potter” big? Let’s see if the blogosphere can make it so…
I want to be able to sit at home and write the rest of it, I am deeply interested in the people I am writing about, enthralled by the process of working out how they pulled off their very daring adventure. I have had enough experience as an amateur “unknown” to know that just sending the proposal off to a handy selection of publishers listed in the Writers’ Guide is a waste of time and postage. Been there, did that, have a large collection of impersonal rejection slips that gave no indication that my submission envelope had even been opened.

I am posting this to show it off, and to get a serious publisher interested. I am bouyed by optimism, and the knowlege that big money has been paid for stuff that IMO is much, much worse than this. (Oh, and I have copyright protection for this. I did not spend three years working for an intellectual property firm for nothing.)

From Chapter 11, “To Truckee’s Trail”.

From Dr. Townsend’s Journal: “14th November, 1844 In the wilderness at the fork of Truckee’s River. This day, I can scarce put pen to paper, being distract’d with grief and worry. Our party is split yet again, this again being of our own decision. My own Dearest Darling is gone ahead with five others, judged fit and sound, and without the care of little ones to attend. Yesterday, our labors brought us to where a tributary came down from the mountains, athwart our path, and leading to the south…We made camp in late afternoon, and Captain Stephens called a meeting….”

“We can’t take the wagons much farther,” said Young Martin flatly, as if daring anyone to argue with him. “Unless we follow the west tributary.” He dropped down onto an upturned cask that he was using as a stool, and wincingly pulled off his waterlogged boots. He peeled off his socks, which were also soaked.
“Out of our way,” murmured Old Man Hitchcock, looking into the fire, past his eternal whittling, and the knife-blade. “The long way around.”
“The long way around, may prove the shortest, “said Stephens gently. “We done well before, always heading straight west. At the Green, and again from the Sink. I’ll wait to hear what Isaac says.” He sat a little way back from the fire on a half-rotted fallen log, Dog at his feet. Her great fawn and black head lay on her forepaws, golden eyes going back and forth as if she was paying intelligent attention to the conversation. The fire was the smallest of the three outside the circle of wagons and tents, set up on the lee side a barrier against the icy breeze roaring down from the high mountains, and the cold that came at sundown, the cold that was most particularly felt when the exertions of the day were over. Allen Montgomery, and the Murphy brothers, Jamie, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny hunkered around the fire. It had the air of an informal meeting of the men, while the women cooked a sparse, but much anticipated meal. The horses and Hitchcocks’ precious two mules were close-picketed for the night, just on the other side of the wagons, inside the circle jostling each other for mouthfuls of tall dry grass bristling up from the day’s accumulation of snow and armfuls of green rushes cut from the riverbank by the women and older children,. Around that fragile shelter of canvas, brush and fires, the snow was trampled to a muddy slush. At other fires, Isabella and Sarah, and the Murphy women moved in an intricate ballet, skirts, shawls and sleeves carefully held back from the fire, as they cooked the evening meal: stew and cornbread that tasted like sawdust with no butter to spread richly on it, dried apples stewed with a little spice Even Isabella’s milk cow had gone dry, months since. Mary-Bee Murphy sat with Mary Miller on a wagon-bench, dandling the baby Ellen, while her sons and Willie Miller and their cousin Mary leaned on Old Martin’s knees, or sat bundled in shawls at his feet as he told them another endless story about miracles, and goblins and old heroes of Erin. It was hard to judge by a casual looking, John thought, of how far along Mary-Bee was, all bundled in shawls as she was, but she still walked lightly. She was not far enough gone in pregnancy to be awkward, but she tired easily.

His glance was drawn finally, as it always would be, to his own Liz, her hair silver-gilt in the firelight, wrapped in two shawls and the buffalo robe that Old Man Hitchcock had traded for her at Fort Laramie, from the tribes. Sitting on another wagon-bench, she had Sadie in her lap, Nancy and Eddie leaning confidingly against her, under the shelter of that buffalo robe. Poor Liz, she had never been any shakes as a cook, had never even had to be, let alone over a campfire. But to do her fair, she tried her best, at a cost of some burnt fingers, scorching her own apron, and upsetting a pot a beans and near to putting the fire out, whereupon Isabella spoke out in tones of mixed exasperation and affection, somewhere back along the trail when the three families had begun to share a campfire. Elizabeth would do them all favors if she could but stay away from the fire and the hot kettles; chop the vegetables, if she would be so kind, and read to the children, give them lessons and keep them out from underfoot. In that mysterious way she had, of seeming to know when he was gazing at her, her eyes lifted from the book and met his for a smiling moment, quiet communion among the crowd around the campfire. He was here, she was there, and yet they were alone together. And then she went on reading to the children, and he was supposed to be also paying attention to the needs of others in the party.
They had all become a tribe, John realized, a tribe of nomads as like to any of the Indians, bound together, sharing hardship alike with those moments in the evening, those rare moments of rest. Across the trampled circle, Moses and Dennis Martin stepped out of the darkness between two wagons, each with an armload of firewood. They piled their burden roughly beside the largest of the fires, and a storm bright burst of sparks flew up like fireflies meeting the stars overhead.

“… tonight, after we’ve supped,”
“A meeting?” John was startled back from his nearly simultaneous contemplation of his own dear Liz, and of Young Martin’s left foot, dead white, nearly bloodless, propped up on his knee. “Pardon…I was lost, considering this interesting combination of foot-rot and frostbite. Dry socks, Martin, dry socks and liniment. And contemplate sealing your boots with tallow and paraffin… other than that, consider staying out of the water, as much as you can…”
There was a dry laugh, shared around the circle around fire. In the last three weeks, they had been forced into the river-bed time and time again, as it provided the easiest, and on occasion, the only passage for the wagons.
“We must consider what we should do now,” “Stephens said. “We might send a party ahead, along the south branch…” He fell silent, as Mary-Bee Murphy came with a basin and a steaming kettle and Isabella, bearing a dry cloth and her box of medicinal salts.
“Doctor, tell him to soak in this for a bit, and dry them carefully. We’ll bring a set of dry stockings, presently, and dry his boots beside the fire.”
“Mrs. Patterson, you are a tonic, “Extravagantly, John caught her hand, and took it to his lips.”And an excellent nurse; I shall see that the patient follows your advice to the letter.”
Isabella gave him a very severe look, as Mary-Bee awkwardly set down the basin and filled it with steaming water. Isabella added salts, and gathered up the socks and the sodden boots. Mary-Bee looked as if she would say something more, but she merely patted her husband’s shoulder and followed in Isabella’s wake.
“See that he does then, Doctor Townsend, see that he does.” Isabella shot, over her shoulder. When she was gone back to the cook-fire and out of hearing, Stephens remarked,
“A good woman is above the price of rubies.”
“I long to meet the man who would play Petruchio to her Kate,” John said, just as Greenwood appeared as silently as a ghost in the circle of firelight, shadowed by Britt, and heralded only by the scent of tobacco smoke. Stephens grinned, a flash of teeth in his whiskered face. “Nearly as much as I’d like to be warm again, and over those pestilential mountains; he must be a formidable man… I imagine a very Ajax.”
“Not so,” said Hitchcock seriously. “M’son-in-law’s a very mild-tempered man. Never has much to say for hisself.”
“Married to her, who’d wonder?” ungallantly ventured Bernard Murphy sotto voice, as Greenwood sank onto his heels, and held his hands to the fire, looking every day of his four-score. Britt took up a seat next to Stephens on the log, and casually gentled Dog’s alertly-raised head. She lay down again, with an inaudible “woof”.
Stephens merely lifted his brows, and Greenwood sighed;
“Not so good for wagons, Cap’n. Not ‘less you had a month of good weather and a hundred strong men and them with an ax in either hand. Horses? Yeah, easy enough. We blazed it, two, three miles, far as we could, ‘fore sunset. Horses and pack-mules. It looks right promising, otherwise… but I’ve always said if you want to be over these mountains by Winterset, you’ll have to leave all your traps and ride hard.”
“No.” It was Isabella’s voice. She had returned unobtrusively to the fire-circle, joining the men, as was her right as a wagon-owner and the head of a family. ”We cannot just leave our traps, as you say. We have chosen out all the most valuable and useful of goods, and brought them all this way; we cannot just drop them by the wayside as things of no consequence. ”
Greenwood shrugged. “They’re only things. You can get back things, or something like them.”
“Things?! Things, as you say, but they are our things! We considered them very carefully; these are things that are not only valuable to us, but things that we need! They are not frivolous possessions, but necessary tools to earning our livelihoods… without those “things” we should be beggars, dependant upon charity.” Her keen hawk-glance went round the circle of faces, and John thought of his books, the case of surgical instruments… Liz’ precious china tea set, that came from her grandmother, whose family had brought it from Germany and cherished through generations.
“And what about the children? Can they ride hard? Can Mary Miller ride, with a baby at breast, or Mary-Bee Murphy, so close to term? The wagon is our shelter, our home! I’ll not be a beggar, I’ll not be destitute. What if any of us fall sick, though lack of shelter? What do you say, Doctor? How many of us would be fit to leave all behind and ride hard?” Her hard, inimical hawk-glance pinned him, challenged him to speak, to venture his opinion.
“The very youngest or those of a weak constitution could not endure very long in such conditions as this without shelter, “John stammered. As many times as he had talked this over with Elizabeth in the privacy of their bed, be was still stuck on the two-horned dilemma, having never come to any conclusion in his own mind, “Nor the very old…” Old Hitchcock snorted derisively at this, and would have said more but for his daughter’s fierce gaze swinging around towards him. “The wagons… they are at least of some shelter. I would not choose to leave them.”
“I do not think we could carry enough food and blankets and tents on our backs for the weeks of traveling we still must endure… not if we had to carry the weakest of us, “ Stephens sighed, lines of weariness and responsibility harshly grooving his features in the firelight. “Our supplies diminish every day that we spend, this side of the mountains… I know that my own do, so I assume the same of you all. Old Man, how far do you think we might be from Sutter’s Fort?”
“I do not know for sure, “Greenwood said, bluntly. “Maybe a week’s journey on a good horse to the summit, maybe longer. Sutter’s place is down in the flatland, on the river, a good piece from the mountains on the other side.”
“What sort of man is he? If we sent for aid for ourselves, would he send it?”
“Aye, he would. I know nothing of him at first hand, though. But he is accounted to be generous, and he has ambitions.”
“As do most men… I’ve a hankering to know what he has ambitions for…” Stephens stood, wearily and stretched, “Doctor, I’d like to call a meeting… not now, after we’ve all supped. Not just the wagon-owners. Everybody. Tell them it’s to consider sending out a small party ahead. He saluted Isabella with a touch to his hat-brim, “Pardon, all. I shall check on the stock. No, “he added as Greenwood looked to get to his feet. “You’ve earned some rest, Old Man. ” Dog’s eyes had snapped open as soon as Stephens moved, and now she lurched to her feet and padded after him into the darkness outside the firelight. John sighed; he was wearied to his very bones, how Greenwood must feel after his long scout today, he could only imagine. The old man must be made of iron and buffalo sinews, to have endured this kind of odyssey for years.

“Supper’s ready,” said Isabella abruptly. “The table is set… that is, if we had a table.”
John stood, and bowed, elaborately offering her his arm,
“My dear Mrs. Patterson, may I then escort you to… our lack of table and our evening repast?”
Isabella nodded, regally, her lips twitching with her effort not to laugh.
“How very kind of you, my dear Doctor.” She took his arm with a flourish, and they moved with elaborate gentility across the trampled mud to their own fire, where Elizabeth watched them, laughing, while the children stared in baffled astonishment.
“La, Mrs. Patterson, I fear you are flirting with my own husband!” she said, while Isabella dissolved into hearty and infectious giggles.
“My dearest, I am wounded at the heart!” John slapped his chest theatrically, “How could I consider being unfaithful to you, even in thought!” He sank onto the bench next to her, as the children had sprung up to help Isabella pass out tin plates. He added in a low voice, “Although I confess, Darling Dearest, I now can see how Mr. Patterson’s affections might have been drawn towards our own Kate.”
“Because she is altogether splendid, “Elizabeth replied, “But too many men are fools. A pretty face and a kind regard is all that is necessary for their attentions. A strong mind and a stout heart are not obviously apparent.”
“I am properly rebuked,” John said, and they sat together in perfect companionship under the buffalo robe, while Sadie brought around the tin plates and her brother a pan of cornbread. Isabella carried an iron Dutch oven, from which the most savory scents emanated. She carefully doled out a ladle and a half to each. Across the fire, John noticed that Allen and Sarah sat next to each other, but separate. Elizabeth followed his gaze, and intuited his thoughts, perfectly.
“They are not happy, Dearest Darling. I doubt they will ever be. They married in haste, thinking they would come to love each other… but I cannot think how that will happen, under the trials of such a journey as this.”
“Perhaps when we get to California…” John ventured, “It may yet work out….” He took a mouthful of the stew. “Oh, this is truly succulent fare… or am I just amazingly hungry?”
Elizabeth twinkled at him.
“It is a most Luccellian feast, is it not?”
“This cannot be a potato, surely? I thought we had eaten the last of the potatoes months ago… Murphy made such an event of it; I made a note in the trail diary.”
“No, “Elizabeth replied, serenely. “Those things that taste somewhat potato-like are roots of water-reeds. The Indians eat them, even dry and grind a sort of flour out of them or so Mr. Hitchcock says. And we found stands of wild onions when we first came up into the mountains. Truly, this wilderness is a garden if you know where to look.”
“Ah, well… “John looked with new interest into the contents of his tin plate. “We are well served, and well fed, Darling Dearest. I could not ask for better companions in all the world.”
“So…” Elizabeth ate with renewed interest, “What does Mr. Stephens think we should do next?”
“He wants to hold a meeting.” John replied, “I think he wants to send an advance party, following the creek towards the south, whilst we move the wagons west along the main body. We cannot spare too many men, or horses, though. But at least, they could bring fresh supplies and teams from Sutter’s.”
“Who will he send?” Elizabeth looked around the camp. “Who can be spared? Who can be asked to leave their families behind?” John followed her gaze. Across the fire, Moses and Allen laughed together. Sarah’s back was to her husband; she talked quietly with Isabella, who seemed to be listening with half an ear while she supervised the children. A tiny line worry-line appeared between Elizabeth’s level brows.
“He’ll ask for volunteers, first.”
“Moses will ask, I am sure of it.”
“Darling Dear, he is not a child any more. He is a man, or close enough to it. And we will talk it all over tonight after we have supped.” Elizabeth’s merry mood seemed to have fled, though, and they ate in companionable silence, until they could see that other men were drifting to Stephens’s campfire, carrying benches and stools; Old Martin Murphy and his sons and James Miller, Patrick Martin and his boys, young Sullivan, and the various drovers. Sarah and Elizabeth hastily scoured the plates clean, and followed Isabella. John clambered up into the wagon for his little writing-case; he had a sense that he ought to be taking the minutes.

The wagon-owners settled themselves in the first circle around the fire: Stephens and Greenwood, Isabella and her father, Allan, Martin Murphy and his sons, and James Miller, John Sullivan and Patrick Martin. Wives, and older children, brothers, and the hired men filled in the spaces, and spilled over to a second circle, and stood in the gaps behind benches and chairs brought out from the wagons. Coming to the confluence of waters meant a very real decision about what route to take now, a decision with nearly unbearable consequences, now that snow had been falling for weeks. No wonder Old Martin looked particularly worn, and cosseted his grandchildren. Fully half the party was his blood kin, and he the person most responsible for bringing them here, too.

“Aye, we must send for assistance, while we can, “Old Martin agreed. Like Isabella, he would not countenance abandoning the wagons; consensus regarding taking the slightly more open but possibly longer route along the creek was complete. “And how many shall we send? And who can we spare, when we’ll need every strong man to move the wagons, hey?”
“No more than six, “Greenwood replied. “Strong riders, with little gear and just enough food. Eight of the horses are in fair condition, still— six to ride, two for spares and packs.” He cleared his throat and spat thoughtfully into the fire. He seemed almost to hesitate before saying more. “Whoever they be, ‘twill be six less on the foodstuff left to the main party. And they need not all be men, either.”
That was a notion to cause an intake of breath around the fire, and a sudden, thoughtful silence. Old Martin was the first to break it.
“I’d not countenance asking a mother or a father yet, to leave children behind in a place such as this… no, no, never, ‘tis an unnatural thing you would be asking. Not even the heathen savages would ask such.”
“No,” Agreed Old Man Greenwood, “But among the tribes, women without children commonly ride with the hunting parties. They do the butchering and dressing out, and cooking and all.”
“What a wonderful time they must have, doing all the work of it!” Sarah said, in a voice that carried just far enough, and there was a rustle of wry laughter from the women on the edge of the campfire.
“So how do we choose the six; should we draw lots from among those of age, young, fit and without children?”
“Aye,” agreed Old Martin readily, “But it is in my mind; we should first pledge to assist the families of those chosen, in whatever they may require. Our needs might leave them short of a provider, and ready hands.”
“So… are we agreed on that, then? To draw lots for a place and to see to the needs of any family left short.” Stephens’ ugly, lined face appeared more than usually like a grim, fire-gilded gargoyle, looking around the circle. “We are agreed then? Are there any exceptions?”
“None but you, Captain…and the Doctor. You are more needed here with us.”
“I had no intent of leaving this company, until we are all safe,” replied Stephens, dourly. “Nor does Doctor Townsend; so, how many will draw?” He leant down and began pulling stems of dried grass from the brown tufts which were still un-trampled around his log seat.”
The quiet murmurs ran around the campfire, quickly tallying names; Alan and Sarah, Greenwood’s two sons, and Stephens’ young drover, Tom Flombeau, Oliver Patterson, old Martin’s youngest children, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny, and their sister Helen. The four drovers, Edmund Bray, Vincent Calvin, Matthew Harbin, Oliver Magnent, and Francis, John’s own hired man. Joseph Foster, and Moses’ close friends, Dennis and Patrick Martin. Not the Sullivans, though, after some discussion, since John and Mary had the care of their younger brothers. But that left Moses himself… and his Elizabeth. John’s heart seemed to turn over in his chest; all of them, fit and strong and young, and childless, twenty of them, nearly a half of the party. Stephens cut twenty straws, and then cut six of them in half. He set them in his palm so they were all level, and then closed his fist. He held out that fist towards Allan Montgomery first, then Britt and John Greenwood. Allan and John Greenwood drew long straws, and so did Britt. Moses also drew a long straw. His disappointment was obvious, but John hoped that his own relief was not. The hired men drew in a body: the Irish drover boys and Stephens’s drover lad, the dark Louisiana French boy whose name was such a tongue-twister, all drew long straws, but Oliver Magnent, and Francis Deland both drew short. Joseph Foster stepped forward to draw: another long.
“Ach, another two months of this!” he said, in good-humored disappointment. “And all on short rations, too!”
“Daniel… Johnny, ye and Bernard step forrard… and where’s Helen?” Old Martin chided his three youngest into the circle and looked on with a deathly countenance, when Helen, Johnny and Daniel all drew short straws. Oliver Patterson stepped forward into the firelight to draw, and Stephens looked at him with a particularly severe and interrogatory frown.
“Boy, are you of age for this venture?” and Oliver blushed deep red as Isabella said, white-lipped.
“He will be eighteen in three months.”
Oliver drew a long straw though, leaving a pair of wispy straws in Stephens’ fist; Sarah and Elizabeth stepped forward, and John’s heart felt like was turning over entirely within his chest. Sarah drew a long straw, and could not hide the disappointment on her face. And Elizabeth then took forth the last of the straws from Stephens’ hand: a short straw for the horse party.
Elizabeth, not Moses; John was shaken down to the soul. Old Martin looked hardly better. Stephens let the murmurings of excitement and sympathy die down and quietly said,
“Doctor, take down their names into the trail journal… I’ll want to talk to them, all together. They must leave in the morning, as soon as we are ready.” He spoke a little louder, to the gathering at large. “Thank-ee all, sitting out in the cold for this. It’s only trail business we had to settle tonight.” Taking their cue, the women began chivvying away the children who already had not been settled to bed. The younger men and the families of those who had not been chosen drifted away from Stephens’ campfire in their wake; after such a day of travel, a warm bedroll had a powerful and irresistible allure. As the evening meeting broke apart, Greenwood thoughtfully sized up the six chosen.
“You were well-guided, Cap’n… they are well-suited. Among the women, Mrs. Townsend has the best seat, and little Helen is young and strong. It is good that her brothers are among them, they are both good hands with the beasts, and fearless about venturing into wilderness. Magnent and Deland are good shots, and as trail-wise as they come, besides being used to the cold and the snow…”
“For myself, I am glad Mrs. Townsend is amongst them.” John said. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. “The cold and the hardships are so extreme, I fear for her, under these circumstances, and welcome any means for her to escape farther exposure.”
“Aye, it may be best at that.” Old Greenwood sighed, grimly. “Would that I could urge all to travel so light, and escape these mountains. At least, they will be six less appetites upon the supplies we have left.”
Old Martin and his children, Elizabeth and the two French lads, all of the chosen lingered by the fire as they were bidden. In the firelight, Elizabeth looked as young as they; all of them so eager, fired by the prospect of adventure, just as they all had been six months ago at Council Bluffs, when the grass was lush and deep, escaping the drudgery of a mundane existence. Now they looked fair to escape another one, of everlasting cold, and the brutal labor of moving the wagons another mile or so farther up the river, the river whose jaws were closing in on them like a trap. Stephens looked at them, and smiled, wryly,
“No great words… wish I did. Ride hard. Look after each other and the horses. Get to Sutters’ place and bring back help.”
“We shall!” Elizabeth’s chin lifted, and her eyes were fired with determination. “We are leaving our kin and dearest ones, and our friends, knowing that their very salvation depends on us. Depend on us, Captain Stephens, we will not fail.”
And even if Old Greenwood seemed to hide a half-cynical smile, the others; Helen and her brothers, the two Frenchmen, all shared the same look of bright dedication. They could not fail; they would throw themselves at the high mountains, the rocks and rivers and the ice, they would win through it all, they would come through, rescue their families, and John’s heart felt as if it would burst with a combination of pride and dread.

“And we will not fail, “Elizabeth whispered, when they lay tucked together in their bedroll of blankets and quilts, and the trusty buffalo robe, all spread out on top of the platform of boxes and flat-topped trunks in their wagon. The drawstrings and flaps were drawn tight against the cold, and a kettle of coals taken from the fire lent an illusion of warmth to the tiny, canvas-walled room. A pair of flat stones heated in the fire, wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the bottom of their bed produced a slightly more convincing degree of warmth, together with the warmth of each other, curled into each other, spoon-fashioned. Around and outside this fragile shelter, came the quiet, near-to sleep voices of Isabella’s children, Allan Montgomery’s irritated voice, raised and quickly hushed, a quiet crunch of regular footsteps in new snow, the horses pawing the frozen ground, searching for more of the thin dried grass. Under it all, a nearly-imperceptible yet menacing rustle, the constant sound of more snow falling, brushing the canvas and pine branches; fat flakes like feathers, like falling leaves.
“I wish…” said John, into her hair, hugging her dear and familiar self into the shelter of his own body, “…I wish that we…”
“Had not taken this journey?” Elizabeth picked up the thread of his thoughts as expertly as she had always done. “Dearest Darling, never wish that. No, never. For I am glad that we have, even if this would be the last night we spend in each others’ arms… and it will not be, “she added firmly, and took his hand in hers, and held it first to her lips, and then her cheek. After a moment, she continued, thoughtfully. “I almost feel as if my life before we started this journey was lived in shadows, a sort of half-life, and then I came out into bright sunshine. Did not we decide upon this great adventure partly because of my own health? And now I am in good heath, and have shared your life in a way that I never could before… in our present emergency, I am accounted strong enough to be given a great task, a responsibility? There should be no greater reward, I do not ask for any such. My Dearest Darling, there is nothing to regret… I love you all the more for having made this possible. Have no fear for me… I will be safe, and we will not fail.”
“I pray that shall be so, “ John tightened his arms around her, at once wishing for this night with Elizabeth never to end, full knowing it would be the last they would spend together for months, and yet wishing that it were tomorrow already, and the agony of parting already over. He was torn between pride in her courage, and worry for her that shook him down to his bones. “We should go to sleep, Dearest Darling, you’ll need as much rest tonight as possible.”
“Mmmm. Don’t stay awake yourself, watching over me, “Elizabeth said, teasingly, but John did try to fight off slumber for a while, until sleep claimed them both. And then too soon it was dark morning, and snow still falling, and he was standing, wretchedly tongue-tied in front of people, for once. He had promised Elizabeth, back in the desert, that he should not have to go on a long scout again, and be separated from her. And now, ironically, she was riding on a long scout, leaving him to plod behind. “Promise me rather, that wherever one of us will go, the other will follow after in a little while,” she had said, and so he would be following after, but it was bitter, bitter. Moses and he had saddled Beau, had rolled up the buffalo robe and two or three blankets around a pitiful bag of dried meats and hard-tack, and a little ground coffee and strapped them behind her saddle. Isabella and Sarah had fussed over what to send with her, just as the Murphy women had fussed over Helen, Johnny and Daniel. Old Martin had tears rolling down his cheeks as he gave his youngest daughter a boost into the saddle. Daniel’s paint pony danced impatiently, crunching the fresh-fallen snow underfoot; the lads were eager to be away.
“Dearest Darling, I must go now.” She leaned down from the saddle, and brushed his cheek with her lips, and then she was gone, following the rest of the mounted party. They were veiled in falling slow before they reached the first bend and were lost to sight, but he was almost sure she turned in the saddle and lifted her hand in one last farewell.

Adventures in Unemployment

20. July 2006 · Comments Off on Adventures in Unemployment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, this is one of these good-news, bad news things— I was let go this afternoon from my latest job. I am wondering it it isn’t a case of cosmically being pushed before I could work up the nerve to jump, because for the last two months or so, I have been thinking constantly about how I didn’t want to be doing this, and I didn’t want to be there. The whole place and the duties inolved it bored me rigid … and I would rather be at home, writing.

I had worked up a proposal for a book, and I was spending every minute that I could working on it. The “book” is something– and about people that I would just rather be spending time with. I’ve been thinking about this— how increasingly discontented I have been with the pink-collar wage slavery. I am at a stage in my life when I want to do what satisfies me, what I feel good about doing 24-7. I hate the thought of stealing a little time to work at what I am good at and keeping it as a sideline, a hobby, when I know that working at something boring keeps me from what I am good at, and could concievably earn a living from.

Well, I need that living, now. I have a severance, and a pension, but I am just old enough to want to spend my time and energy at what I am really rather good at, and want to spend my time doing. Any good offers will be carefully considered, of course. And I have a Paypal account. Writing prospects greatfully accepted, or at least carefully considered.

Don’t worry about my long-term economic survival, I have a spare job and an AF pension and am hooked up with a couple of temp agencies, who offer me enough of a paycheck… I just would like to spend time, doing what I really want to be doing. I went to a sort of executive job counselor last year, when my last job went under, and the counselor there told me flat out that I should be doing what I really love, and am good at.

At this point, I really agree.

(Additional Note added the following morning)

Looking back on my most recent stint of employment, it strikes me now that there were a lot of people let go, while I was working there. Whenever the combination on the employee entrance was changed, we’d all be looking at each other and whispering, “OK, who got the chop this time?” One of the last things I took off the fax machine was a couple of resumes… it appears that a new receptionist was being advertised for. And I completely overlooked one of the key warning signs: a great deal of turnover in the position I held until yesterday afternoon, and none of them staying in the company or moving up. Hmmmm…

More Stolen Kisses at the Skylark

20. July 2006 · Comments Off on More Stolen Kisses at the Skylark · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Iran, Pajama Game, Veteran's Affairs

Our TI, Sgt. Petre’s pre-liberty lecture as regards the possibly alien mores and amorous intentions of various foreign military members that we might encounter was all of a piece with other informative lectures, mostly tinged with a certain air of dark warning. The famous Dempsy-Dumpster story was featured prominently, presumably as a cautionary tale for those of use whose lusts were so uncontrollable and whose aesthetic senses were so un-fastidious as to pick exactly that venue for a tête-à-tête. The choice of venues for engaging in sexual congress were pretty slim, on Lackland AFB’s training side, where total privacy was by practice and edict impossible. For that substantial portion of the world who has not gone through USAF basic training during the last four decades, the Dempsy-Dumpster story involved a male and female trainee who chose one of those enormous metal industrial trash containers for their particular brief encounter, only to be brutally interrupted in coitus by one of those enormous trash trucks, mechanically picking up the dumpster, and dumping all contents into the back of the truck. Hilarity ensued, along with least one broken limb, a considerable amount of embarrassment and a folk-tale for the ages. It might even have really happened, sometime in the early 1970ies, but I myself would have to see the contemporary incident report to believe it.

Anyway, we were forewarned, and presumably forearmed about the dangers posed to our virtue… although I thought it was very amusing that we had the birth control lecture a couple of days before we had town liberty, by an NCO who frizbee’d a diaphragm the entire length of the classroom, by way of catching our attention. Which she certainly did for some of us; that was the first time in my life I had actually seen any such thing. It was probably lost on others, though; one of our number included the wife of an E-6 who had four children. Others women were married, or had been married, or hoped to become married, and had practiced a bit… but we didn’t have much in the way of illusion about some of the foreign troops, after what happened to four of us, one drear December day.

It was at the point in our training when we were allowed in pairs and fours to go to various places on base by ourselves, on formally sanction errands… after overcoming a certain amount of disorientation. Like: how the hell can you find your way back to a place when all you have ever seen of the way there, is the back of the neck of the girl in formation ahead of you? And what the hell do you do, when the four of you are marching along, two and two— as you have to, because your TI said so— when you are about to intersect with a full flight of fifty or so other trainees, with their TI and guidon and all the pomp and majesty of a flight of trainees marching on their way to somewhere or other? Why, of course, just has you have been told— stand at full attention, until they have marched by, and then you can go about your own business.

But this flight was a flight of Saudi tech school trainees, and I had the dubious honor of standing at rigid attention on the sidewalk, while an entire flight of them marched by, making every sort of vulgar comment, sotto voice out of the ranks; bird-whistles, crude suggestions, rude noises, low whistles… the entire armory of disgusting guy behavior, all in one fell blast, on four female Air Force trainees, who were under orders to stand there at attention, without responding, in obedience to military protocol, as we were verbally treated like whores in a particularly disreputable neighborhood. Sgt Petre looked particularly black, when we reported this to her, afterwards. We were distraught, and particularly outraged that this would happen to us, on a military base, and when we were constrained from showing any kind of reaction. It was a thoroughly nasty experience, and during twenty subsequent years in the military, nothing quite equaled it for the feeling that it gave me of slugs crawling over my bare flesh. We all agreed that if we were ever out and about again, and spotted a Saudi flight, we would turn around and go a couple of blocks out of the way. No one wanted to repeat the experience, although Airman Duncan— tall, gawky, plain and outspoken— was haunted for the rest of her base liberties by a short, squat and silent Saudi student who magically appeared in any place were Duncan was, and spent the time watching her yearningly from across the room. We couldn’t figure out how he always knew where she was. Efficient information pipeline among the male students, I suppose. I had developed my own admirer, but at least he could bring himself to make pleasant conversation.

On Christmas Day, we had liberty base liberty for all of that afternoon, but no better place to spend it than the bowling alley. The snack bar was open, and a half dozen or so of us were making the most of a couple of hours of freedom; free to drink soft drinks, to laugh with the usual constellation of male trainees. After a certain point, I noticed that one of the Iranian trainees had been drawn into the happy little group. We knew he was Iranian because his uniform was hung with a lot of ornament, and in two clashing shades of blue. Oddly enough, he reminded me of Kiet, my Vietnamese foster-brother; the same air of gentle diffidence, even shyness. He lingered on the edge of the group, not speaking very much at first, but eventually he began talking to me. His name turned out to be Nassir. He had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and one of the Empress Farah, too. We pointed out Dunc’s admirer, watching her as per usual from across the room, and Nassir laughed and told us how the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as uncouth and ignorant country bumpkins— hicks from the sticks, with no culture.

We met a couple of more times, after that, and spent some pleasant hours in the darker corners of the Skylark, holding hands and kissing shyly, while he paid me elaborately flowery compliments… which amused me no end. I had never met a man in real life who could unreel yards and yards of it, like Elizabethan love poetry. I never took this gallent compliments seriously, being fairly level-headed about my own attractions; knowing that my own citizenship probably featured rather highly among them. No, I took his attentions not the least bit seriously, but I liked him and wished him well. He wrote to me a couple of times, after I departed for tech school and that real world outside from those stolen hours of base liberty. I fell in love with someone else, and went on to Japan, and about four years later the whirlwind of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution swept away the Shah’s government. I’ve always hoped that Nassir was able to avoid being caught up in that, or the war with Iraq that followed; it would have been such a bad place for a gentle, courtly poet, who was so proud of being a Persian, and had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and stole kisses from the girl I used to be, in the shadowy corners of the Skylark.

Natural Sympathies

17. July 2006 · Comments Off on Natural Sympathies · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Israel & Palestine, Pajama Game

I suppose a lot of midnight oil is being burned, in the Manchester Guardian editorial offices, at the UN and other various Euro-Transnational entities, the various offices of CAIR, and departments of Middle East Studies at universities everywhere, where the denizens thereof are trying to figure out and explain just why the general run of Americans— despite every inducement; intellectual, political and economic— continue in their stubborn, sentimental and persistent attachment to the State of Israel, and ensuring it’s continuing, if perilous existence. (Hey, wow! Totally complicated sentence— do I get any prize for this from the 19th Century literary appreciation wonks? No? OK, then, on with the explanation.).

I think there are a great many reasons for this; chief among them being that Jews have been part of the American scene, and more or less integrated into the great nation-building adventure since Colonial times. There has always been— depending on the time, place and social caste— a certain degree of social anti-Semitism, but generally achieving nothing like the degree of virulence it takes to achieve a pogrom, a Dreyfus Affair or a Holocaust. Congress making no law respecting a particular religion left us in the habit of seeing ones’ particular religious beliefs as a personal one, however outre they might be. Frankly, more political outrage and general suspicion was expended on Catholics— Popery! The Bishop of Rome! The Whore of Babylon! — at the time of the great Irish migrations in the mid-19th century. It was pretty difficult to work up much alarm about off-standard religious beliefs when Jews were compared against groups like the Shakers (no sex, communal living, workshops and free enterprise!) and the Mormons (plural marriages, communal living, free enterprise and separation!) and a whole other range of non-standard and extremely creative social and religious communes. All our base impulses leading towards rioting, lynching and intermittent attempts at genocide were pretty much focused during the 19th century on parties other than those of the Jewish persuasion; towards blacks, Hispanics, Mormons, and Native Americans, mostly. From reading various 19th century American writers, one gets the general impression that they knew of anti-Semitism, but didn’t quite grasp what all the fuss was about and relegated it to the intellectual back burner. Some time ago I had read of a famous American literary personality — I believe it was General Lew Wallace (the author of “Ben Hur”) who was asked what he felt about Jews, and he replied in all seriousness (IIRC) that Jesus had been born a Jew, and for him that pretty much settled the matter.
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So, Here It Is…

13. July 2006 · Comments Off on So, Here It Is… · Categories: General, GWOT, Israel & Palestine, War

Here we are then, with things happening too fast and close together to keep track, and the definite feeling that all most participants can do is tighten grip and hope to hold fast, as events gallop towards an abyss. Hezbollah picking a fight with Israel, and Iran holding their coat, and f**k all the UN or any other internationally based busybodies will ever be able to do. I was resoundingly chided by some of our international commenters last month for voicing my personal and inchoate feelings of dread… I am drinking some cheap Chablis this evening, and I do not feel any better than I did when I wrote this.“Events and portents appear, flashing like lightning in one of our summer Texas thunderstorms, finally occurring so frequently that the sky is continuously lit with an eerie blue-white light…”
See, here’s an analogy about co-incident and co-dependent states who have a certain history; it’s not a perfect analogy because there’s only a few features that the Independent Entity of The Gaza Strip has in common with Mexico; a lot of acrimonious and co-dependent history, and a lot of back-and-forth familiarity. Sort of like a lot of countries in Europe, come to think on it in my naïve American way.
Suppose, just suppose that — just by way of example, a group of Mexican narco-traffickers (who are a powerful influence in the borderlands, and perhaps not entirely de-linked from the official Mexican establishment, such as it is) decided to pop across the border— after months of lobbing a lot of indiscriminate and indifferently aimed rockets— say into Brownsville and Laredo, or El Paso and Yuma, where they had succeeded in doing nothing much except make local residents extremely nervous about loud noises, and extraordinarily prompt about hitting the deck— and snatched a couple of soldiers from Ft. Huachuca. Suppose they took them back over the border, and demanded that the federal government immediately free any Mexican nationals held by the various American law authorities. Imagine how that would go over?! And just to extend that simile— how would it go over, if Basque separatists in Spain did the same to soldiers of France? Or any other irredentist European community to a neighboring state… and consider that all any other such group would have do thereafter to extract concessions would be to go on a brief cross-border shopping trip for human capital.

No, d’huh. I do not have a good feeling about this.

The eastern world it tis explodin’,
violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
you’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
you don’t believe in war, what’s that gun you’re totin’,
and even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’,
but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say?
Can’t you see the fear that I’m feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no running away,
There’ll be no-one to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy,
but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”

Stolen Kisses at the Skylark

13. July 2006 · Comments Off on Stolen Kisses at the Skylark · Categories: Air Force, General, Memoir, Military, Pajama Game

There has always been this stereotype of the women’s services as a stronghold of lesbians; and there might, I say just might sometime in the distant past, have had some validity to this stereotype, depending on the times and in some places. There was a gay activist I recollect reading some years ago, who insisted that 100% of the women in the WWII services were lesbian, a dubious factoid that may come as a considerable surprise to male veterans of that era, especially those who romanced and/or married a pretty nurse, typist or vehicle driver whom they met whilst both were in uniform. I would tend to agree that during the long decades after WWII when female service members were forbidden to marry or have children, those women who decided to devote themselves to a military career may possibly have contained a slightly higher proportion of those whose amours were of the Sapphic variety… or possibly just unenthusiastically heterosexual.

In my own service, I was acquainted with a bare handful of women who I would not have been surprised to learn that they were gay… frankly, I preferred not to know, and refrained from speculating, lest I ever be hauled up before the local AFOSI and asked point-blank and asked to choose between either lying outright, or narking out a friend. And the services did embark on those lesbian hunts, vigorously, thoroughly and with every evidence of keen enjoyment. A number of my female mid-rank and senior NCO friends all thoughtfully agreed during the early days of the Clinton administration, that “don’t ask-don’t tell” banished that particular nightmare for us. Frankly, I was surprised as hell that I was never accused of being a lesbian— there certainly were people that hated my guts and took note of my conspicuously unmarried state. I can only suppose I was saved by my notorious disinterest and demonstrated incompetence at any sort of organized team sports.

It would be my personal, scientific wild-ass-guess that the lesbian proportion among women serving in the US Armed Forces these days is no more than the representation in the general population— and that would be the 3% that is the small “c” conservative estimation. It may even be less than that, actually. I’d be basing this on the admittedly anecdotal experience of basic training, and a good few years of living in the barracks, where there are no secrets. Let me reiterate: thanks to thin walls, shared rooms and gang latrines, there are damn few secrets in a military barracks, least of all about ones’ sex life.

And for Air Force basic military training, about the only thing the women in my training flight had in common aside from XX chromosomes and a taste for adventure, was some kind of interest in the male of our species, ranging from the intense to the mildly intellectually curious. (Or as my daughter would put it; “strictly dickly”.) Guys, guys and only guys; and watching the other girls put on full-date makeup, carefully arranged hairstyles, and most perfectly arranged Class-A uniforms on the occasion we were allowed to go down to the training-side BX annex… on liberty… by ourselves (or in pairs, anyway) for the period of one hour to purchase such small personal items as toothpaste and deodorant was sufficient to convince me of that. Other girls in the flight became ostentatiously and suddenly religious… because we could go to services on Sunday, and at least sit in adjacent pews. As we advanced in training, we were permitted certain periods of base liberty, to frolic chastely and pursue and be pursued in such venues as the bowling alley, the library, the BX annex and snack bar, and the Skylark Recreation Center.

Prior to being allowed such dizzying freedoms, we were given a stern lecture about the guys… well, those that we would be encountering. Not the usual common or garden American guys, though. There would be foreigners… with strange and potentially alluring ways. Or maybe not, since there were some very, very different cultural differences involved.

Lackland AFB was, and still is a major military training center for more than just Air Force basic. The AF security police tech school, and the basic officer training course were there…. And there was some kind of tech school training course for foreign military enlistees, distinctive by their somewhat colorful uniforms and occasionally very crude behavior in formation and out of it. Our TI, Sgt. Petre, kept an admirable poker face when she gave us the lecture; no, some of the strange stories we would hear about the Saudi Arabian and Iranian students were absolutely not true. They were strangers in a strange land, and we should be polite, of course, but we should keep in mind that as far as cultural mores went, as military women we would be even stranger to them. And we should be careful about giving any encouragement, because the gentlemen trainees from Saudi and Iran had a tendency to assume a great deal from it. Sgt Petre told us about a female trainee who collected such a single-minded and persistent admirer that he was camped out on the sidewalk in front of the squadron training building waiting for her every time her flight had base liberty, which so rattled the poor girl that she stopped leaving the building at all.

(to be continued)

Random Thoughts…

09. July 2006 · Comments Off on Random Thoughts… · Categories: General, Good God, Rant

…in the wake of this weekend’s Protein Wisdom-Deborah Frisch blog-swarm du jour:

1. Life is short, and the blog-universe is huge.

2. If you are not interested in what you are reading on a particular blog, move on.

3. If you get off on arguing in the comments… well, that’s your hobby. Mine is gardening. No one gets paid for a hobby.

4. Being the object of a blogswarm is about as much fun as being repeatedly stung by a swarm of African killer-bees.

5. There is a lot to be said for veiling certain aspects of your personal life in your blog. Like your children, your home address, and where you work.

6. Implied threats and sexual aspersions about someone’s immediate family are beyond the pale. So are DOS attacks on their site.

7. This is one for the theory that people who study psychology have a shaky grip on their own sanity.

8. What the &$%# do we have to *%^$ing do to get some &$%ing civility between people who disagree strenuously?

9. Frankly, I am glad that the biggest problem I have with comments here are the torrents of automated spam. Getting the sort of comments that some other bloggers get would make me pretty sour about the whole open comments concept.

KoreaTown

07. July 2006 · Comments Off on KoreaTown · Categories: Fun and Games, General, N. Korea, Pajama Game, War

About the first thing I ever noticed about Korea— during the bus ride from Osan AB to the Yongsan Garrison bus terminal in Seoul— was that it didn’t look a thing in like M*A*S*H… even allowing for the whole show being unconvincingly filmed in the wilds of California, on a set built out in a valley between very obviously chaparral-covered hills … and hills that were dark sage-green, and gently rounded— not the steep and bright green hills, painstakingly terraced that I could see from the bus. And also nothing like the distant mountains visible all the way round Seoul on clear morning, chipped and jagged, like something cut from jade-green glass, just like the mountains in ancient oriental prints. Seoul, cut through by the wide silvered loops of the Han river did rather resemble Los Angeles, in that it went on seemingly forever, flowing around hills and tracts of parkland, a jumble of high, low and medium-rise buildings and which offered pretty much everything a reasonably cosmopolitan person could want. Myself, I loved the retail and wholesale fabric market, near to Tongdemun Stadium… not much harked back to what Korea had been half a century before, unless it was the porters who carried enormous burdens on their backs up and down the tall staircase of the fabric market building. No, South Korea had moved on, since the days of M*A*S*H.

So, NPR did an interview this week with the two apparatchiks who came out strongly in favor of blowing up the Nork’s Two-dong (or whatever name it has that is a natural fodder for more sophomoric jokes than mine) long-range missile on the launch-pad as some sort of crushing pre-emptive strike to send a serious message to the Norks about what happens when you threaten America. They were quite airily confident not only of our ability to do this, neatly and effectively (which is actually a rather comforting thought) but seemingly quite careless of the risks to South Korea if we had done so— which is not. And since the gentlemen in question are of the party that currently seems to be getting off 24-7 by condemning George Bush being pre-emptive, unilateral, careless of world opinion, and barging straight on to the main point of actually blowing up stuff, rather than sitting around and talking about it until everyone has gone mad with boredom, and issuing a strongly worded memorandum… well, it had the charm of the unusual. I wondered if somewhere, there is a Rovish political consultant, thinking agent provocateurish thoughts. (And if either of the gentlemen concerned were acquainted with the old saying about sending a message and using Western Union— probably not, since it has to be explained carefully to anyone over the age of 50-ish— none of this awareness showed in the interview.)

Well, never mind— they just struck me as being quite chipper about “doing something!” and quite horribly casual about possible Nork reprisals. No veteran who has ever served a tour in South Korea can be entirely insouciant about that— not with knowing how close Seoul is to the range of Nork artillery fire, how close to the DMZ, and how bat-shit insane the self-isolated regime to the immediate north has demonstrated itself to be, in all sorts of large and small ways. Well-meaning and intelligent people usually do not advise intentionally pissing off a deranged street-person holding a hand-grenade with the pin missing. I have probably just horribly maligned all deranged street-persons with access to personal explosives here… but what can you honestly say about a mini-nation who kidnapped Japanese citizens in order to force them to train spies, and South Korean movie actors to force them to make movies, confiscates the Chinese trains which are shipping them relief supplies, fields a diplomatic corps which deals in drugs and counterfeit money in order to make their budget, honors the family of the founding leader in a manner usually confused in the outside world by worship of a deity— and that would be the outside world of circa 1st century Rome.. except assume that someone with a Pythonesque turn of mind has made this all up.

Alas, North Korea is all too real; a small nation with delusions of adequacy about being a military power despite not having fought a serious, balls-out, all hands on deck war since the 1950ies… and them with the aid of the Chinese, who must seriously be having doubts about now. Yes, North Korea is their dog in this dispute; a small, hyper-active, bug-eyed, noisy and incontinent dog, of the kind that make people itch to kick into the next dimension, and I so wonder if the Chinese are getting pretty testy with their bad-tempered, and vicious little pet. When desperate refugee Nork citizens are taken pity upon by the stereotypically hard-off Chinese peasants along the China-Nork border, you really have to wonder about how things are, in the last rigidly Stalinist armpit of the world. Especially when young refugees from the North are clearly recognizable in the South, because (thanks to the juche and economic independence, all-around socialist superior spirit and the resulting endemic malnourishment) they are very obviously shorter, thinner, and weedier looking. And I do not forget for a moment, that these are still the same human stock— the same jolly, tough and resourceful people who on the south of the DMZ, worked themselves out of a Third World, war-torn, desperately poor UN-dependent basket-case that they were in the mid 1950ies. South Koreans built a shining and modern city out of the wreck that it was when my father passed through there at the end of the Korean War.

What their kin have built out of the North may be a country-sized concentration camp, and every dreadful story that has managed to leak out, against brutal control, will likely prove to both the gospel truth, and the least portion of the horrors. So, there you go. North Korean may have the Bomb, and more distressing still, be able and willing to sell it to anyone with the wherewithal. And the assumption has always been that Seoul is in range of whatever violently explosive munitions they have. So, what really can you do, knowing what is at risk? Do you openly provoke the violently insane, and one with a proven track record of being totally immune to shame, or wait until they melt down entirely? I read a comment last week (Can’t remember who— Angie at “Dark Blogules” maybe… who said that her enjoyment of old episodes of M*A*S*H had been forever ruined by the various characters’ blathering about how useless, pointless and aimless the “war” was… when it had been in retrospect a successful effort protect the South Korea— now a vibrant, successful and interesting place, from becoming the dysfunctional horror of North Korea.

Interesting times, people, interesting times. Discuss.

The Lit-Major’s Game

02. July 2006 · Comments Off on The Lit-Major’s Game · Categories: Fun and Games, General, That's Entertainment!

When I was whiling away a couple of years at Cal State, earning a professionally useless but amusing degree in English, my classmates and I used to entertain ourselves by working out what certain towering figures in literature would be doing, if they were professionally functioning in the arts and letters of the present- or just the last quarter of the 20th century. What would they be writing, and what sort of writing— and given that movies and television would be in the mix— what variant of creativity would be within the scope of time-transplanted literary talent?
There aren’t any definitive answers, of course; the only requirement is to be able to extrapolate amusingly. Herewith some of the proposed 20th-century career paths:

William Shakespeare: Actor turned writer; the movies, of course. Wildly popular, prolific and all over the map, quality-wise, over a long, long career.

Mark Twain: Reporter and writer of very fine magazine articles on popular culture and commentary, and the occasional book. Pretty much what Tom Wolfe, or PJ. O Rourke does now.

Henry James: Still a novelist, producing exquisitely wrought and finely detailed novels. Very high-brow, lots of literary prizes, but not very widely read. Never an Oprah Book Club selection.

Edith Wharton: Ditto.

William Thackeray: Witty, roman-a-clef novels, about people on the fringes of power in various establishments. The public is vastly amused with every one, trying to figure out who they “really” are about. Threatened with legal action on occasion, which just boosts sales figures.

Charles Dickens: Writer and producer of very long, and involved, and wildly popular TV series/miniseries. All of them have long story arcs, many eccentric characters, and enough turns and twists to keep the audiences’ attention riveted for years.

Rudyard Kipling: Also a newspaper reporter turned novelist, poet and short story writer, and entertainer. Doing what Garrison Keillor does now, even to the radio show.

Sir Walter Scott: Enormously popular writer of historical adventures based on historical figures. James Michener, only shorter.

Louisa May Alcott: Empowering chick-lit. Frequent Oprah guest, and Book Club selection.

Jules Verne: Science fiction, of course— but through the medium of interactive video games.

And to cross over into classical music, Richard Wagner would be doing movies too: very elaborate, special-effects laden, Kubrick-ish blockbusters, with thunderous musical scores and eye-catching set-pieces. They would be very popular, and the critics would come away from press showings bubbling over with ecstatic praise, even though they wouldn’t quite understand a lot of it.

Add your own, elaborate on or propose alternatives for mine: just be creative and above all, amusing.

The Fine Old Art of Shark-Jumping

30. June 2006 · Comments Off on The Fine Old Art of Shark-Jumping · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game

Seriously, I really think the NY Times has done it this time. The Times, and a fair number of other old-style media have been puttering around in the lagoon, testing the engine, measuring the angle, paying out the tow rope, contemplating the shark… and with this compromise of the Swift program…The good old Times has taken a dead set at that puppy, roared up the ramp and gone sailing into the air, to come down again who knows where, although I personally think they are still tumbling in free-fall. The last couple of days have reminded me rather of the dissection of the infamous 60 Minutes-Bush-AWOL-Memo story, only in slow-mo. People who knew about typefaces, and how Reserve units operated back then and what official documents look like took a long, hard look, and got angrier and angrier about how a clumsy and nakedly political hit piece was perpetrated by an ostensibly respectable, big-name media showboat.

And now, personnel who have worked with classified materiel and operations, who know anything about classified, who deeply care about classified are becoming angrier and angrier about the revelation of a legal, useful and productive effort was blown by the newspaper of record— another big-name media showboat, the so-called “newspaper of record”— for nothing more rewarding than affording the “newspaper of record” an opportunity to preen themselves ostentatiously on their wonderful “scoop”. The NY Times response to criticism for doing so appears to throw gasoline on a smoldering fire, for the sheer lordly arrogance of deciding extravagantly that the “public” just had to know all the details of a war-time effort to prevent terrorists from transferring funds… the funds that buy enormously loud explosions in a variety of public places, explosions that potentially turn an assortment of random human beings into so much bloody mush.

I can only assume that the editors of the NY Times are operating in the happy confidence that none of those potentially and so suddenly transformed will be those known personally to the grandees of the “newspaper of record”. It must be marvelous to live on such an elevated plane, to be totally removed from consequences. Now, I am not so far gone in brutal cynicism as this gentleman to assume that this whole thing was done out of a particularly ugly fit of pique— “You stupid red-state proles had better vote as we tell you to vote, or we’ll blow the gaff on every secret plan we can find until you do, and damn the consequences!”… but I am of a sick enough humor to think that spilling the details of the Swift project is a win-win for the NY Times, all the way around. It means Pulitzers for all, and the fawning adoration of the usual suspects for their courage in speaking truth to power, or at least biting it in the ankle. The odds are increased that they will be able to cover the next terrorist atrocity in really splendid, breathlessly late-breaking-development style, milk a couple of tears for the resultant obituaries, and get at least three or four hard-hitting exposes of the various government departments or persons who “allowed (insert meaningful date or place name here) to happen”… which will result in at least two more rounds of Pulitzers. Think of the New York Times as the gift that keeps on giving.

I try never to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity… or at least, a horrible sort of tone-deafness on the part of the major media, first articulated by James Fallows in “Breaking the News” (And here I am again, plugging his ten-year old polemic… honestly, the man ought to be giving me a commission.) His point then, and one which I have come to see validated over the last four or five years, is that that the elite media seem to increasingly see themselves as some sort of aristocracy, floating serenely above the vulgar hurly-burly, and dispensing their magisterial pronouncements from on high, with little care for how they may affect— and sometimes they do affect, markedly and even horribly— and it matters not to our aristocracy of the media, for they float imperiously away, on to the next big story, the next big scoop, and the next breathlessly-detailed horror of the moment.

Mr. Fallows intuited that the discriminating news-consumers were on to the media grandees, and felt considerable contempt for them, based on how they were increasingly portrayed as buffoons on movies, and in television. Reporters were once portrayed as rough-hewn heroes, competent, well meaning, and worthy of respect— but even as Woodward and Bernstein were still respected as selfless heroes of the newspaper reporter profession, we were laughing at the chipmunk-brained Ted Baxter, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Over the next decade, the lake of contempt has deepened and broadened; perhaps television, books and movies have caught on to something, in advance of our so-sensitive news media. Reporters are more like to be portrayed as a Ron Burgundy clown than a hard-working and ethical Edward R. Murrow, or an Ernie Pyle type.
This is not to say that all major media reporters have sunk to such a sad state— those who hold to the old standards are perhaps as much distressed as I am about the spectacle of a major newspaper trading the security of their fellow citizens for a mess of Pulitzer pottage. But this whole Swift thing does not reflect well on the NY Times, and their pretensions of being the major American paper of record.

It does not, and they are richly deserving of all the contempt and cancelled subscriptions thrown in their way.

Cats & Dogs

29. June 2006 · Comments Off on Cats & Dogs · Categories: Critters, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense

(The following is one of those e-mail things that go around: it just seemed to be an interesting coincidence that a friend sent it to me, just when Timmer’s Miko re-appeared, and my own Spike and Percy seemed to be fast becoming very, very good friends… not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

EXCERPTS FROM A DOG’S DAILY DIARY:

8:00 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!

9:30 a.m. Wow! A car ride! This is a blast

9:40 a.m. A walk in the park! Ate some crap…Delicious!

10:30 a.m. Getting rubbed and petted! I’m in love!

12:00 p.m. Lunch! Yummy!

1:00 p.m. Playing in the yard! I just love it!

3:00 p.m. Staring adoringly at my masters…they’re the best! I’ll wag
my tail in joy.

4:00 p.m. Hooray! The kids are home! I’m bouncing off the walls!

5:00 p.m. Milk bones! Great!

7:00 p.m. Get to play ball! This is too good to be true!

8:00 p.m. Wow! Watching TV with my master! Heavenly!

11:00 p.m. Sleeping at the bottom of my master’s bed! Life is soooooooo
great!
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Pax Romana

25. June 2006 · Comments Off on Pax Romana · Categories: General, History, Military, Pajama Game, War

The stone ruins of Imperial Rome underlie Western Europe and the Mediterranean like the bones of a body, partially buried, yet here and there still visible and grandly manifest above ground, all but complete. From Leptis Magna in North Africa, to Hadrian’s Wall in the contentious border between Scotland and England proper, from Split in the Former Yugoslavia, to the 81 perfectly preserved arches of the ancient bridge over the Guadiana River, in Merida – that part of the empire called Hispania –and in thousands of lesser or greater remnants, the presence of Rome is everywhere and inescapable. The same sort of cast- concrete walls, faced with pebbles, or stone or tile, the same sort of curved roof-tiles, the same temples to Vesta, and Jupiter, to Claudius, Mars and Mithras; the same baths and fora, market-places, villas and apartment buildings, all tied together by a network of commerce and administration. Goods both luxury and otherwise, adventurous tourists, soldiers and civil administrators— the very blood of an empire, all moved along the veins and arteries of well-maintained roads and way-stations, of which the very beating heart was Rome itself. Carrying that image a little farther than absolutely necessary, I can visualize that heart as being a human, four-chambered one; of which two— the political/imperial establishment, and the flamboyantly military Rome of battles and conquest— have always rather overshadowed the other two in popular imagination. Commerce and civil administration just do not fire the blood and imagination – unless one is wonkishly fascinated by these things, and it would take a gifted writer to make them as interesting as imperial intrigues and soldiering adventures.

But close to the Palatine Hill, where the sprawling palace of the emperors looked out over the linked fora, law courts and temples in one direction, and the Circus Maximus in another— Trajan’s concrete and brick central market rambled over three or four levels, from the great hall of the Corn Exchange down to the open plaza of the meat market at the level of the forum below . Here was the embodiment of the great hearts’ economic chamber. Every sort of imaginable commodity moved from one end of the empire to another and from parts outside the Roman hegemony: corn from the Egyptian breadbasket, silk from faraway China, spices from India, African ivory and gold, olive oil, oranges and wine from the Mediterranean to everywhere else. And that trade was enabled by law and technology. Roman roads, waterworks, and civic infrastructure like harbors, lighthouses and bridges would in some cases, not be equaled or bettered until the 19th century. While emperors and soldiers came and went, sometimes with messy and protracted splatters of blood, the unspectacular and dull work of the empire went tirelessly on and on, little changing from day to day, decade to decade, until Rome itself seemed eternal, fixed forever, immutable like the stars in the sky.
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Memo: Reciprocity

22. June 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Reciprocity · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Iraq, Military, War

To: Amnesty International, the IRC, Human Rights Watch and other professional international worry-warts
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Treatment of POWS:

1. So, once the oozing layers of condescension and spurious moral equivalence are wiped off, this guardian of the imprisoned and mal-treated is on the record as condemning the treatment of Privates Menchaca and Tucker. Ummm. Yeah. Thanks. Heaps. I am sure their families will be really appreciative of your concern. You probably will want to remove them from your mailing lists for the immediate future, though. Don’t thank me for this bit of advice, I live to serve.

2. I am sure the above-named parties would have been assiduous, tireless, noisy, and above all, effective in protecting the basic rights of all Americans, military and otherwise, who were taken captive by insurgents, free-lance Jihadists, Talibanis, Baathists… or whatever we call the gentlemen with the mad enthusiasm for the “Religion of Peace”, depending on the week, and the location. Oops— they would have been, should those various captives have… you know… lived long enough, after having been taken captive.

3. Tortured, decapitated, eviscerated, mutilated to the point of having to resort to DNA analysis to make a positive ID… sort of puts that whole panties on the head, dog-leash, kinky humiliation games, locked up in Guantanamo and having your Koran flushed in the crapper into a whole ‘nother perspective, doesn’t it? Reminds you of what you were all about, once upon a time? Maybe? Just a teensy bit?

4. Frankly, I rather think your dilemma as regards this matter may be rather short-term: it’s pretty well acknowledged among military circles that there is no surrender in this war. There just is not. There is a Marine axiom to the effect that an enemy may kill you with your own weapon, but they’d have to beat you to death with it, because it had better be empty. One way or another, there will be no American POWs. No retreat, no surrender.

5. And after this episode, there may not be many of the insurgents taken prisoner, either. Think on that, gentlemen; think on WWII in the Pacific theater, once it got around what kind of treatment the Japanese accorded to prisoners. Surrender was neither offered, nor accepted. You might be able to work up some sort of retroactive campaign about this brutal disregard of human rights, but you might want to hurry, since most of the participants are well into their third quarter-century.

6. Thanks for your expressed concern, though. We shall take it into active consideration. (Which is military code for thrown into the recycle bin, wadded up, and with great force.)

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

PS—a note to the usual commenters, you know who you are. Please consider very carefully, any response you may make to this post. This is a matter I feel deeply and personally about, ever since my daughter told me about the conference she and the other female Marines had at their base in Kuwait, after the capture of the Army convoy which contained Pvt. Jessica Lynch, and other female Army personnel. Please do not try to provoke me on this issue, I will delete the comment without a backwards look, and if I am sufficiently offended, I will blacklist the commenter. Word to the wise, chaps, word to the wise.

Later: Additional words from New Sisyphus, via Rantburg and Daily Pundit.

Asymmetrical Weevils

17. June 2006 · Comments Off on Asymmetrical Weevils · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

The Lesser Weevil – who I dearly wish had not come already named and accustomed to it so I could have named her Fluffy- and Spike the pocket-puppy , dwarf Shi-Tzu, have most amusingly become the best of friends. Weevil being now about a year and a half, and a large breed ( certain knowledgeable neighbors have speculated that the non-boxer half is Rhodesian ridgeback) and Spike being about 8 months old, they are both essentially puppies together. The only thing that Weevil refuses to share is food out of her very own personal food dish; the growl out of her when Spike tries to snatch a mouthful or two just as a tease, is quite blood-chilling. But Weevil casually empties out Spike’s dish without a moments’ hesitation, and both of them vacuum up any and all contents of the cats dishes’ without a moment’s hesitation, unless carefully watched. They share everything else in the best communal tradition, though — the chew-toys, the crate and the various comfortable spots around the house. They would like to move in on the cats, and share more toys, dishes and comfortable places, but the cats unsportingly refuse any of this.

The original trio of Arthur, Morgie and Henry do not care for the dogs and ignore them as much as possible. Sammy and Percival tolerate the Weevil— who is huge in relation to them, and plays too rough, but freely romp and wrestle with Spike. Spike will never grow any larger than she is, at about five pounds and change, which must be much less intimidating to Percival, at eight pounds, and Sammy, at fifteen or so. Nothing at all intimidates Spike. Of all the real and imagined faults of little dogs, she really has only one— that of yipping frantically, when over-excited during an energetic romp with the cats or Weevil. Well, that, and the whole house-breaking concept, which is still a little unclear… and the chewing thing… but hopefully these are temporary failings.

There was one of our wonderfully noisy and productive thunderstorms this morning, rumbling in around sunrise and dropping generous quantities of rain, just when I had about despaired and set out the sprinklers. It seemed to actually be cool, afterwards, when I leashed up Weevil to her heavy choke-chain and leash, and put Spike into her harness and light-weight cord leash, and they were so happy to be out and about. Usually Weevil begins to wilt after four or five blocks, and begins to wheeze dramatically and look at me with huge, tragic eyes as if asking me “why are you torturing me this way?!” when she was the one dragging me all over the sidewalk until that point. Spike bounced energetically along, tail and nose up, fur flapping all the way. I usually have to pick her up and carry her, when she begins to wilt, but today she trotted along all the way, neck and neck with Weevil. Spike may be small, but all heart.

I think she is good for Weevil, who desperately needed another dog for companionship. She was nearly uncontrollable whenever we encountered another dog, until now— even just going past a house where there was another dog in the yard meant a prolonged wrestling match, and me practically strangling her with the choke-chain, but she behaves herself now… well, mostly. I have also nearly gotten her trained to sit down when she meets someone; although this meant me telling people NOT to pet her, until she did sit down. She had a bad way of jumping up on people— not good, when she is sixty pounds of hard muscle. She still tugs at the leash when she sees a cat, though. The cats may not know that she really, really just wants to see if they will play with her, but the cleverer cats, the ones that we see every morning hanging out in their accustomed places, have figured out that she is under restraint, and no real danger to them. They watch her with wary eyes, but they do not move an inch. Most mornings, there is a tiny Russian Blue who looks enough like Percival to be from the same litter, lurking behind a large ornamental rock, right by the sidewalk. A month or so ago, Weevil lunged at him, and he scrammed at top speed, but she has behaved herself since. The young Blue favors that place, because whoever lives in that house scatters bits of dried-out toast for the birds, out in the street… and he watches the birds from behind that rock, in the morning. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess, even the cats and dogs.

The neighborhood was pretty quiet this morning, because of the rain, and eight thirty is pretty early as Saturday morning goes. I did notice the same battered pickup truck two or three times, with some odd junk piled into the back, and only realized after the second time that they were out junking. Next week is bulk-trash pickup, when we can put out anything and everything (except concrete waste, topsoil and dangerous chemicals) and the pickings have lately become pretty good. A better class of homeowner must have moved in— they’re throwing away some very good and useable things. Last month I picked up a nice glazed plant-pot, and a small wooden box that looks as if it were a presentation case for a set of silverware. (Look, I can paint and decoupage it— Blondie wants it as a writing case.) Last week it was a good-quality brass lamp stand, with a broken shade— do people not know how to re-wire lamps these days? Or replace lampshades. Day before yesterday, a perfectly good and originally expensive bird feeder. One of the unsung benefits of running in the very early morning— first crack at the excellent stuff put out for the trash. I have four or five chairs in my house that I picked up in Spain, and repaired and refinished, after beating the junkers and the trash men to them. I’d be embarrassed about this, but not after we caught an episode of Antiques Roadshow, where a gentleman showed up with a 18th century sideboard what he bought from some neighbor kids who were going to break it up and burn it in a Guy Fawkes’ Day bonfire. Recycling … it’s a good thing….

Small Technical Notice

15. June 2006 · Comments Off on Small Technical Notice · Categories: General, Site News

As some of you have noticed, we have a moderation queue, where comments that contain certain words go, until one of us can review them, clear legitimate comments to be posted, and consign the usual spam to oblivion.

There is also an option for blacklisting certain words— which when incorporated into a comment— will instantly, and without appearing in the moderation queue— result in that comment being “vanished”.

Being wearied to death of the current torrent of spam from idjiots too cheap to like, just buy an ad! I have finally taken the step of entering certain terms into the blacklist; terms such as the common names of certain games of chance, the common names of prescription medication, and certain less common terms for various sexual practices and perversions; all of which— based on my experience moderating comments, and emptying out spam by the trailer-load on a regular basis— probably won’t turn up in comments posted by our regular commenters; most of whom, I would assume, are not gambling addicts, sexual perverts, or addicted to prescription drugs.

And if they are, they are kind enough not to share the details with us.

Which is my round-about way of saying if you legitimatly do need to incorporate names of prescription drugs, casino games, or sexual practices into your comment, you would best be advised to either put dashes in between the letters, or astericks, or something. Otherwise, it goes straight into oblivion.

Memo: In Answer To Your Three Questions

12. June 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: In Answer To Your Three Questions · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Rant, sarcasm, War

To: NPR’s Daniel Schorr
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: The Answer to Three of the Lamest Rhetorical Questions I have ever heard

1. The questions that ruffle the magisterial mind and furrow the brow of old-line journalism’s greyest eminence are, if I understand tonight’s commentary correctly: (a) how could a squad of Marines kill 25 civilians in vicious house-to-house fighting, (b) why did we drop a pair of 500lb bombs on Al-Zarkawi’s hideout, and then administer medical care when in turned out that the head-chopping psychopath wasn’t quite dead, and finally, (c) why were the three suicides at Guantanamo described as being aggressive acts, instead of being acts of despair at being held indefinably without trial (insert obligatory moaning here… the man reminds me of no one so much as he does of Eyore, gloom, despair and agony, wall to tall and treetop tall.)

2. Here are the short answers, Mr. Shorr; read and heed:
(a) Tragic and regrettable collateral damage, caused by the insurgents’ well established habit of not wearing recognized uniforms, and hiding behind non-combatants. Be a sport, and inform whoever keeps track of stuff like this, during a war… isn’t that supposed to be the Geneva Convention something or other? Someone has been remiss in their duties, I look forward to whatever moaning commentary you have to make about this. Please also exercise some proper journalistic discipline and skepticism with anyone who tells you that the Marines lined up all twenty, or twenty-five, or however many civilians, and executed them point-blank. (See rape victims at the New Orleans super dome, refrigerators full of bodies, massacre at Jenin.)

(b) Ok, so we’re softies. Our bad. We should have dropped a pair of thousand-pound bombs. Wouldn’t have made such a nice, clear post-mortem picture, though. I don’t care how nice the gold frame was, a bucket of blood and dismembered body parts wouldn’t have had quite as much convincing power at the press conference. It wouldn’t have wasted quite so much of the duty medic’s valuable time and effort, though.

(c) Because, as much as one might wish otherwise, there is a war on, and Gitmo is the POW camp? And the commonly accepted practice is to keep POWs until the war is over? This does mean, given that interpretation, that the Gitmo internees have an excellent chance of eventually creaking their way out the front gate on walkers, and hauling little tanks of oxygen after them, on the day the war is over. We’re just grateful that at least they managed to off themselves without taking anyone else with them, as is the jihadi custom in this degraded age.

3. Finally, I wonder how much longer you can milk out having been on Nixon’s Enemies List as the central jewel in your major-league journalism crown. Nixon has been dead for years, and major-league journalism is hardly looking any healthier.

4. Hoping this has been of help to you, in your search for enlightenment.

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mom

Most Deeply, Sincerely Dead

08. June 2006 · Comments Off on Most Deeply, Sincerely Dead · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, War, World

That head-chopping psychopath, Zarkawi – and his aides and so-called spiritual advisor. It must be excellent news, as NPR has been banging on about nothing else for the last two hours. Haditha was only mentioned only once.

I’d wish they had mentioned how the tips about his location came in from local Iraqi nationals just a little more… and perhaps explored how unpopular his tendency to blow up school children, police recruits and the odd passing stranger has made him among ordinary citizens. I hope the bounty on him is shared out fairly among anyone who had a hand in narking out the murdering freak.

Discuss.

Trans-Dimensional Poop

05. June 2006 · Comments Off on Trans-Dimensional Poop · Categories: Domestic, General, Pajama Game

Blondie and I are convinced that there is something very strange going on at my house, where the Lesser Weevil, and Spike, the Weevil I Know Nothing Of, are getting along famously with each other, and on terms of moderate familiarity with at least two of the cats, Sammy and Percival.

The Lesser Weevil is crated at night, and let out into the yard during the day, and seems to both rather like the shelter of the crate, and to have grasped the whole concept about the proper disposition of body wastes— that is, outside the house. After all, Mom and Dad’s dogs always caught on, without a great deal of fuss and hyperventilating. Alas, the tiny Shi-tzu Spike (or Spike-ette, or Spike-arella) is innocent of the whole concept, in spite of our best efforts at monitoring and control. For a very small dog, about 5 pounds when dripping wet, she generates an amazing number of small piles of poop on an erratic and wholly mysterious basis.Said small piles suddenly and magically appear in areas where she has not recently been for twenty minutes or half an hour. It is most completely mystifying to have a small, well crusted (and therefore aged) pile suddenly appear in the middle of a stretch of carpet, which was pristine five minutes previously… and when Spike has been curled up blamelessly on a folded towel in the other room, dead asleep for the past half hour. Blondie and I are neither blind, nor unobservant, or that indifferent to housekeeping, but we have yet to account for this phenomena. I postulate the existence of a small, erratic wormhole in the local space-time continuum, with one end fixed on Spike’s nether regions, and the other opening erratically at various points around the house, depositing poop which has spent any number of minutes or hours in limbo in trans-dimensional space, before emerging into the here and now… usually just when we are within a hairs-breadth of stepping in it. Blondie is convinced the cats are plotting a feline coup de pussy-tat, conniving to undermine Spike and pay her back for snorkeling through their litterbox in search of unspeakably canine gourmet delights. Little Arthur, Henry and Morgie therefore must be concealing Spikes’ output, and then placing it strategically, as some disgusting sort of poop-mine. So far, there is no evidence either way, although our neighbor Judy has pointed out that she has observed Spike doing her business on top of the magazines and newspapers piled on the lower deck of the coffee table… and the feline element might be doing their bit to move it on to a location slightly more noticeable. The jury is still out… as are the paper towels, disinfectant and the carpet-scrubber.

Aside from this, she is quite an endearing little dog, feisty and fearless, in spite of her small size, and— aside from the housebreaking issue— outgoing, affectionate and not the least bit neurotic or snappish. Blondie insisted on us getting away from the house and yard and all that on Memorial Day, so we drove up to Fredericksburg, and took the Spikelette with us. The toy breeds are supposed to be the ultimate porta-puppies, who live for nothing else than to be Velcroed to their chosen human 24-7. Spike’s notion of absolute nirvana seems to involve being draped across either one of our laps, or tucked into our elbows like a fat, furry little football. We put her in a harness and under leash and walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, and went to the Herb Farm, and enjoyed the day immensely. We had to carry her after a block or so; she was at a hazard of being stepped on, or leash-entangled in someone’s legs, and of course we carried her into the shops we were interested in. I thought sure we would be kindly asked to leave with our dog from some of the very high-toned places, but it looks like the fashion for tiny pocket-puppies is well established in Texas; I’d not be surprised to hear that Shi-tzus as a fashion are so very much last year, since everyone— especially those inclined to coo over Spike— seemed to have one, or know someone who had one. A lady from Austin who gave us her card and was especially admiring, runs the local breed rescue chapter. There is a horrible fate in store, we are certain, for people who get pure-bred dogs because the breed is the latest craze, and then decide it just doesn’t work for them, although the lady from Austin said, comfortingly, that it was a good thing that Spike’s original owners took only two weeks to decide that she wasn’t working for them, and pass her on to someplace where she had a chance for a happy and affectionate life, full of play with other animals. Spike was so happily drained by this adventure that from Monday evening, she slept motionless and exhausted, like a scrap of limp black and white fur on the folded towel that is her bed for most of that night. Yes, she is a happy little dog, and will have a wholly happy life.

It is the funniest thing, to watch the Lesser Weevil walk through the living room, with Spike’s jaws firmly clamped to her jowl or ear, like some furry body-piercing. The two of them are tussling under the bed as I write this, and the Lesser Weevil is as indulgent and long-suffering as if Spike were one of her very own puppies. Now, if she would only grasp that whole eliminating-out-side concept… but I am suspecting there may be a very real reason for the breed name being commonly pronounced as “shit-su”!

Changes

03. June 2006 · Comments Off on Changes · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Pajama Game, World

In the air, in the water… oh, sorry, flashback to last weeks’ post. Changes, they come thicker and faster. There was an article posted about the six most important strategic overseas bases last week, and none of them any that I had ever served a tour at— and I think I clocked duty time at about every major overseas base there was, even if it were only to pass through long enough to get a soda from the machine and admire the gooney birds.

1. Andersen Air Force Base & Apra Harbor, Guam;
2. Balad Air Base/Camp Anaconda, Iraq;
3. Bezmer Air Base, Bulgaria;
4. Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory;
5. Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba;
6. Manas Air Base, Kirgizstan

Three old, three new, and none of them the old, stalwart long-established bases, the very anchor of service in the Far East, or in Europe— Clark AB, in the PI is long-closed and buried in volcanic ash. Yongsan Garrison in Seoul is for the chop also; transferring all functions to the Hump may turn out to be more of a hassle than it’s worth.

If the Cold War is over, South Korea might have nothing more urgent to deal with than their starved and retarded cousins to the North, and much joy of that may they have of that. No mention of Okinawa on the list… and none in Western Europe. The Cold War is truly over, there. The chain of kasernes and camps in Germany is much reduced—one senses only little removed from having the last floor swept and the last light turned off, and generations of American military and dependent family members who rotated in and out, and raised their children, and developed a fondness for German beer and gemutlichiet, volks-marching and sightseeing among the castles of the Rheinland – all will soon be only a ghostly memory.

Harry’s in K-Town, the Kino in Landstuhl, the McDonalds on the 40-Mark Strasse, and a thousand other retail establishments who counted very much on the GI dollar may look back ruefully on what will seem a golden age in retail sails and services. Hellenikon and Nea Makri in Greece are long closed: some years after I drove away down the road towards Patras and the car-ferry that would take us to Italy and points west, my next door neighbor sent me a clip from one of the English-language papers that catered to the ex-pat community: a story about taxi drivers and owners of bars in Sourmena and Glyphada, lamenting their personal economic woes after Hellinikon AB closed. The final paragraph of the story was the kicker; across the apse end of a church that faced (across an barren lot) the front gate on Vouliagmeni, which had long born a bright red spray-painted memo “Americans Go Home!” someone had spray-painted an addenda: “And Take Us With You!”

Zaragoza reverted to the Spanish Air Force Air Tranport Service; even while I was there, I escourted a party of Spanish officers on a property survey through the EBS buildings, pointing out the equipment that was ours, and would be going with us, and what we would be leaving to their use with our best wishes. Not a whole lot, actually, three ancient Quonset-huts, only one with indifferent plumbing, but all of them with electrical conduits up the wazoo, and they were welcome to it. It was already evident that the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Menace had crumbled, and what we were still doing there was still a matter of debate. Anderson and Guantanamo are long-established, with a permanent infrastructure and corporate memory and all those habits that this implies, all the employees, all the structures… but the other four are new and raw, and where the action is, in this new war. The military moves on, as we are not mired in old habits and the practices of the war before the last war, clinging on to them like a child with a well-worn security object. I do wonder what the ville outside the gates of Bezmer and Manas are like, though… but I would advise everyone not to get to used to it all.

One of the saddest conversations I ever had was sometime before I left Spain, when Zaragoza was already scheduled to be closed down. There were a scattering of retired Air Force men who lived in my neighborhood, or worked at EBS, who had married Spanish women , and made their homes in Spain, for decades in most cases. They had raised their children in Spain, had jobs on base, had boxes at the post office, and/or BX privilidges, health care through the base hospital and by extension to the major military hospitals and specialists in Germany, they had NCO club memberships, they managed to reconcile two different worlds, and the imminent closing of the base meant that they had to live entirely in one world without any of the accustomed support systems… or uproot their lives, and live in the other.

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