Rites, Practices and Legends: #12 “Uniform Combinations”

22. November 2004 · Comments Off on Rites, Practices and Legends: #12 “Uniform Combinations” · Categories: General, Military

It would seem that the US Air Force is set to perform that once-a-decade spasm of instituting (tah-dah!!!!) a NEW UNIFORM! I am so grateful to have been spared this latest manifestation, having been through no less than five of them— from the cute little WAC utility uniform to green utilities to BDUs, and from the little Jackie Kennedy/Chanel suit to the polyester horror. At least the Jackie Kennedy number was real wool….

This time it is a utility uniform, although the expense and hassle this will incur amongst service personnel will be about as great as it would have been if it were service dress/class A’s/whatever. I realize of course that this uniform issue thing is a mystery to the average civilian, but it has a great deal of importance to those in the military life. Uniform regs dictate what you wear, when you wear it, and the many variants and options available. The fact is that some people can go through an entire career and only very occasionally wear certain of the combinations— usually under protest, and after having had to go out and buy everything new because the uniform has been changed since the last time they wore it, and they would be Out of Regs, which is very nearly the military version of the Fate Worse Than Death, unless they run over to the BX/PX uniform sales and buy a set… or two.
(Thank the Deity for DPP, the deferred payment plan, or a sort of take-home lay-away extended to us by the Exchange.)

The Air Force, you see, is pretty well divided up between those career fields and people who wear the utility uniforms day in and day out to do their job— generally those who fix things, or climb around on top of things, or grub around in the dirt chasing after people, moving heavy objects, or blowing stuff up— and those who work in offices or labs, meet the public, and usually don’t have to worry about getting grubby. You are pretty much wearing one set of uniform requirements or the other, and it has advantages; the main one being that you know what you are going to put on in the morning, accessorizing is already done for you, per regulation and all you have to worry about is making sure that it is clean, pressed and polished. You will tend to put your attention towards what you wear most days, and let the other set slide, until you absolutely, positively have to pay attention to it. Many Class-A wearing shops attempt to get attention paid by instituting a BDU day for their troops, but a day for the utility-wearing troops to don their Class-As usually has to wait on things like a formal inspection, a promotion or a visit from a general, since it usually isn’t practical for them to do their jobs in something that has to be dry-cleaned.

The institution of a New Uniform is one of those larger lumps in the happy oatmeal of military life precisely because of the expense incurred, when the cycle of gradual replacement of what you were initially issued in Basic Training is disrupted. Part of basic training includes being kitted out in your initial uniform issue; a generous quantity of sets of utility uniforms, and Class-As, which are like a business suit with extras, plus the extras— shoes, hats, overcoat, boots, ties or tie-tabs, belts, gloves, scarf, a handbag for the women enlistees. Every year thereafter, as long as you are in the service, you receive a clothing allowance, between $100-$150 when I was in, which was supposed to be used to replace items which had worn out, or become unserviceable—stained, torn, spiked or mutilated, or to buy optional uniform items; that is, things which were part of the uniform, but not part of the initial issue. That would be attractive and useful things like the woolly-pully, the thick woolen pullover sweater, or the windbreaker jacket, the nicer trench-coat styled overcoat, the stylish and all-leather Coach-manufactured handbag.

The yearly clothing allowance is pretty much tapped out after three or four items. The authorities who dictate this have only taken the gradual replacement into account, not the expense of replacing two-thirds of your working wardrobe all at one time. This is a serious expense, and cause for most enlisted people to be a little restrained in their enthusiasm for a new uniform. Especially if it has been the cause for a lot of jokes, already. One naturally prefers the devil you know, to the devil unknown, especially if it is the devil that you have already faced every morning upon getting dressed to go to work.

Wee Paws for Station Identification: Why Radio DJs Like Long Songs

19. November 2004 · Comments Off on Wee Paws for Station Identification: Why Radio DJs Like Long Songs · Categories: General, General Nonsense

There was a noted tendency in modern pop music, for the selections played over the AFRTS airwaves to become gradually longer, as the decades passed. Selections from the 1950ies and early 1960ies generally clocked in at about two minutes, those from the late 1960ies and 1970ies averaged about three minutes. After the mid 1980ies, the top of the pop charts were often clocked at four to six minutes.

Why is this significant? If you were putting together an oldies show, you needed to pull fifteen or sixteen selections to fill out each hour of the show, rather than the twelve or so that would serve for more contemporary programs. Which would actually be 55 minutes, or an hour less the 5 minutes of news at the top of the hour, two or three minutes of spots scattered throughout, and the DJs own patter. Myself, when marooned in the wee hours doing midnight rock and roll—I played the game of seeing how few cuts I could play, without resorting to the champion long-wind “InaGaddah-Davidah” (18 minutes). Given a couple of concert renditions, and the “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” album, I had it down to 4.

Of course, there have always been exceptions to the general time rule, especially from the more adventuresome pop artists, and these exceptionally long cuts were esteemed and valued by working DJs for a very good and particular reason.

Which was, that during the course of a two or three hour live show, you might have to leave the studio, to pull news copy from the teletype… or as is most common— to use the bathroom! This could, at some stations, be rather complicated— I worked once with a woman whose first radio job had been at a station in a trailer around the back of a large, old-fashioned hotel… and the nearest woman’s restroom was in the lobby. She needed a record to run at least six minutes, which was just enough time for her to run out of the trailer, around to the front of the hotel, and into the lobby… and then back again.

With time, DJs develop a sort of internal clock, becoming excellent judges of exactly how much time they have to perform these and other chores, and still be back behind mike, perhaps breathing a little hard, ready to roll the next record. At EBS-Athens, I could put on a similarly-lengthy record during the afternoon show, cue up the next one, and dash across the parking lot to the Post Office to get my mail and collect any packages from the window. One of my supervisors at Misawa, TSgt Don, the Program Director took it even farther, when he was assigned to an AFRTS unit based in Teheran, some decades before the embassy takeover. The AFRTS station operated in a building across the compound from the AAFES cafeteria, and the young TSgt Don would put on the deathless “InaGadda-Davidah”, and gallop out of the studio, across the compound to the cafeteria, go through the service line, and hasten back to the studio with his meal. The morning guy, Dickie the Crazy Marine once spent most of a show in the can, the morning after the Marine Ball at Misawa AB, hung over and throwing up during a couple of hours of long songs, and speaking very little in between them. Emergencies do happen occasionally.

Technically, on-duty DJs are supposed to remain the area of the studio, if not actually in it, during their shift, and monitor what is going out over the air…. But the need for a meal, or to collect a much-anticipated package from the Post Office… or just to answer the call of nature… sometimes it is just too much to ignore. And when you hear something rather longer then usual on your radio station, now you know that there may be a reason for it… other than it’s position in the charts and place on the stations’ play list rotation.

And the title for this post? The first part is the answer to the riddle, “Why is it a prerequisite for broadcasters to have small hands and feet?

GMail Accounts

17. November 2004 · Comments Off on GMail Accounts · Categories: General, Reader Mail

One of our readers, named David Price, has ten g-mail accounts that he would like to donate to members of the military. He may be contacted at “daprice@gmail.com”. If you are not able to contact him via a “mil” address, be prepared to give some indication to him that you are, indeed, a member of the active duty military.

Thanks!
Sgt Mom

DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! AIIIIIIIII!!!!!

17. November 2004 · Comments Off on DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! AIIIIIIIII!!!!! · Categories: General, Site News

A quick head-up from the Office of Blog Management—

The name servers are going to be set to the new host tonight. There
might be a temprorary disruption of service during the next 24-48
hours and some odd bits might go wrong with the site as tweaking continues, in order to ensure everything works right.

So, anything wierd that happens on the site over the next two days? It’s not your fault. We… ummm… planned it this way.

Memo: For Those of Delicate Sensibilities

17. November 2004 · Comments Off on Memo: For Those of Delicate Sensibilities · Categories: General, Military

To: Those Inclined to write Letters to the Editor
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Certain Realities

1. It has come to my attention that a fair number of people have come unglued over the widely published photo of a young Marine in Fallujah, smoking a cigarette in a manner that would do Bill Mauldin’s Willy and Joe proud, and have written scandalized letters to the editors of their local papers expounding at length on how this is not a Nice Thing to Publish, not where the young and impressionable can see it.

2. My very dear, sensitive letter-to-the-editor writing people, I would address you all as “Noveau Victorians” except that the actual, historic Victorians— being hard-headed businessmen, and not nearly the sexual prudes they were reputed to be—had rather robust appetites for good food, lots of drink, and tobacco in several forms. While indulging in the pleasures of the table, tavern and pipe in public were generally restricted to the male of the species, the famous actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell summed up a certain attitude of toleration— and one that we might well take to heart in this modern age— when she remarked, “It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Smoking a cigarette does not frighten the horses. Please trust me on this.

3. Allow me also to acquaint you with the following: members of the military— an organization dedicated primarily to killing our enemies and blowing stuff up— often indulge in;

Consumption of tobacco products
Consumption of alcohol products (occasionally to excess)
Excessive f**king profanity
Flamboyant tattoos
The romantic (or otherwise) pursuit of members of the opposite sex
A fondness for guns, bladed weapons and things that explode

4. Pictorial evidence of these qualities should not therefore be a cause for alarm, and half-witted twitterings to the editor of your paper. Should you feel moved to do so, please lie down on the fainting couch with a handkerchief dampened with eau-de-cologne over your forehead until the feeling passes.

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

Hmmmm… We’re Being Studied!!!

15. November 2004 · Comments Off on Hmmmm… We’re Being Studied!!! · Categories: General, Reader Mail

This request was posted to my e-mail yesterday—-Indulge yourselves

My research partner and I are professors at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and University of Tennessee-Knoxville. We are conducting an online survey that examines the credibility of online and traditional media, and the motivations for accessing the Web, weblogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards and other Internet resources for political information

We are specifically looking for individuals who connect to online political information to fill out our survey. We’re collecting data through Tuesday 11/16. We are wondering if you’d be willing to link to our survey. All we are asking is for an icon that directs your readers to the survey URL.

Our survey has been approved by the University of Tennessee institutional review board and is being conducted for academic purposes only and follows strict privacy protocols. Additionally, all responses are confidential and anonymous.

Your help would be greatly appreciated and we would be more than willing to share our findings with you.

Survey URL:
http://apps.ws.utk.edu/politics

Sincerely,

Barbara K. Kaye, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Ghost City

14. November 2004 · Comments Off on Ghost City · Categories: General

I bought a copy of Robert Harris’ “Pompeii” last week… well, it’s better than “The Last Days of Pompeii”, which….to put it tactfully, is a pretty easy accomplishment. Actually, it’s pretty fascinating, on a technical level, with the accounts of the aqueducts and waterworks and all, the engineering which was the rock-ribbed foundation of the Roman Empire, although the characters are pretty… stock B movie. Cecil B. DeMille would be entirely at home with this concept and materiel.

My daughter and I passed through the Campania, early in September 1985, on our way in the VEV from Athens to Zaragoza. We were on the car-ferry from Patras to Brindisi, and I drove from there, across the boot of Italy, and my experience of driving in Greece emboldened me to attempt the drive from Salerno, along the Amalfi Coast to Positano, along a road which was a bare lane and a half wide, slung along about half-way down a 3,000ft cliff with a lot of hairpin turns. Enormous tour busses invariably came hurtling at me, around every blind turn, it seemed, and I was forced to hug the sheer stone wall on the right-hand verge so intimately, that I was astounded to emerge at Positano with any paint at all on the passenger-side fender. On the map, it looked like the shorter way, but it took me nearly three days at the Casa Albertina in Positano to recover from the experience, and continue the journey along the coast towards Amalfi, and the fabled ruin of Pompeii, the 1st Century provincial city preserved like an insect in amber by the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius. Everyone… simply everyone has had Pompeii on their touristic to-do list since the early 19th century.

My daughter and I walked up the ramp into the Porte Marina, once the main city gate, nearest the harbor and docks, under a blue September sky. It was cool in the stone tunnel, out of the morning sunshine, and the cobbled ramp sloped steeply upwards. When I had come here as a teenager in 1970, there had been a little museum in what had either been a gatehouse, or a structure built against the inside of the wall, and which opened into the tunnel. The cramped little rooms had featured some of the relics found over the years— among them a clutch of blackened eggshells in a pottery bowl, and two of the Henry Moore-ish plaster castings made wherever a hollow in the solidified materiel which had inundated the city 2,000 years ago had been found by excavators. The city was populated by those hollows, where people’s bodies had been, where they had fallen limp or in rictus, with a fold of cloth over the face, alone or with others, felled in a blast of super-hot air and a storm of ash and pumice. The flesh and fabric disintegrated, the ash solidified into something very nearly stone, until liquid plaster filled the space, and there was another pale ghost for the necropolis of Pompeii.
We walked out into the sunshine, into the ghost city, the walls around us up to first floor level, sometimes up to the second floor, a straight narrow avenue with lumpy sidewalks on either side. Iron wheels had carved narrow grooves into stone paving blocks, especially deep in the spaces between the stepping stones.

The curious thing about Pompeii is— although it is a tourist attraction, with fleets of tour busses drawn up in close-packed shoals every day of the week— that is it a huge place, street after street of tall, tightly packed walls, varied by open spaces, by courtyards, gardens and public spaces. It absorbs the presence of all these living people, smothers the noise and presence of them into a queer solitude and quiet. Walking along these once-peopled streets, venturing into the various houses and complexes, one felt very distant from al these other people, their voices and footsteps distant and muffled. In some places, the shades of the plaster ghosts felt somewhat closer than the living— in that private house where a metal faun danced joyously in the middle of a dry and dusty tiled pool, where now-crumbled walls afforded a view of the symmetrical slope of the volcano, at the nameless street-corner where a little café had a heated counter with inset wells for containers of food to be kept piping hot, to the walls of the villa outside the Porto Herculaneum with one of the rooms painted in black with elegant cameo-figures and motifs painted in pastels and gold… oh, yes, all these things speak to us, and we recognize them with because it is all so very familiar…

First, because this was a city, a city and a civilization with standards and facilities not very far removed from our own: running water, vulgar mass entertainment, a government administration, a common language, graffiti on the walls, bars and brothels and courtrooms, tenements and suburbs, all the rough messy business of living. It would have all been very familiar to us, although the smells of it all would have probably very nearly overwhelming— sweat and urine, horses and fermented fish sauce and all. Secondly, because a lot of it was handed down to us— the aesthetic of plaster and tile, pergolas and courtyards, domes and arches, the orders of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, all translated over the centuries to Classical and Beaux-Arts, and various sorts of Wren and Spanish Colonial. We knew the faces of many of the dramatis personae, for the Romans maintained a pitiless standard of photorealism in their busts of the good and the great; every wart and wrinkle and receding hairline, stern and unsmiling, like faces in Mathew Brady’s Civil War portraits. And we had their writings, as well—poetry, history, philosophy and letters, and in Pompeii, the actual physical streets and houses of one small city, tiny part of the whole that had been the Roman Empire.

We have been looking at the relics and variants of Roman architecture all our lives, here in our New World, two thousand years later, and titillated by accounts of depravity amongst the imperials and the violence of the circuses, which often lead us to overlook the underlying bedrock of Roman virtues; of service to empire and the Senate and People of Rome, the sheer technical knowledge and organization which made possible the great technical marvels of aqueducts and roads and bridges. The emperors and Cesars came and went, but the empire endured nearly as long as the stones that Roman engineers set in place in places as far apart as Leptis Magna, in North Africa, in Trier on the German frontier, along the lines of Hadrian’s wall in the far north of England, and into a bridge over the Guadiana River at Merida in Spain.

Rome drew the whole of the known western world into it, and sent out its engineers and merchants and soldiers, money, language and cultural dominion in return. Often berated for arrogance and corruption, and sometimes quite spectacular displays of depravity… yet the empire endured, because in the end, they were superficial things, laid over the bedrock of Roman virtues and dedication.

On the Lighter Side…

13. November 2004 · Comments Off on On the Lighter Side… · Categories: General, General Nonsense

I bought a copy of this from a catalogue because it looked amusing… and I confess to have once possessed and giggled frequently over a copy of National Lampoon’s “High School Annual”.
The Jetlag Travel Guide to “Molvania—A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry” is a perfect send-up of the modern travel guide. (Of which I have a shelf or two full, so I speak from experience). What more can you say about a guidebook with a map in the inside front cover which includes locations like the towns of Pysst, Drizl, and Katflaap, a place called Lake Skrotul and a capital city named Lutenblag, described thusly “Where old world charm meets concrete”.
Oh, wait— you could say that about Houston, too

E-Mail from Fallujah

12. November 2004 · Comments Off on E-Mail from Fallujah · Categories: General, War

Reader Michael Phillips forwarded this e-mail from a friend of his, a Marine currently serving in Fallujah. I have editied out certain identifying elements, in the interests of OpSec.

Hi Everyone, I am here in Fallujah and well. I have been forward for the last 36 hours or so and am back now in our camp for a bit before heading back out to the forward command post.

We are doing well… (the) Marines on our flank has taken some pretty good losses but we are killing the enemy in droves. They are hiding in houses that are heavily fortified and we just destroy the house with a tank shot or a bomb or missile. There is no negotiating or surrender for those guys. If we see the position and positively ID them as bad guys, we strike. When they run, we call it maneuver and we strike them too. Why? Yesterday the muj attacked an ambulance carrying our wounded. The attackers were hunted down and killed without quarter. These guys want to be martyrs…..we’re helping.

Don’t hear a lot of this on the news huh? Fox News is doing a pretty good job over here so stick with them for coverage.

This is the only way this place can ever be safe.

And in the midst of all this we’re helping to restore power and protect and feed and evacuate the ordinary citizens of Fallujah…..although most left the city as soon as the muj moved in.

And today is the Marine Corps’s 229th birthday. It is only fitting that we are engaged in combat and serving our country today . The beer, cake and steaks will flow once we’re all done…It’s one of my ! > responsibilities to see that they get just that. But for now it’s chow and water and fuel and ammo…..lots of ammo.

My thoughts are with all of you and thanks for keeping us in your prayers…..I’m sure God is around here somewhere, above all of this…keeping an eye on things and protecting the just and the angels…..that’s what our KIAs are referred to as…..but we all hope he turns a blind eye on the muj and their false beliefs as we find them and kill them.

And I’m just here doing my job.

C—–

Sgt. Mom—Virtual Book Tour!

11. November 2004 · Comments Off on Sgt. Mom—Virtual Book Tour! · Categories: General

The second stop on the “Virtual Book Tour” is here, courtesy of the Ranting Raven!

Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month: Great Uncle William

11. November 2004 · Comments Off on Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month: Great Uncle William · Categories: General, Memoir

It is a sad distinction, to be the first in three generations to visit France while on active duty in the service of your country, and to be the first to actually live to tell the tale of it. For many Europeans, and subjects of the British Empire— especially those of a certain age, it is not at all uncommon to have lost a father or an uncle in World War Two, and a grandfather or great-uncle in World War One. It’s a rarer thing to have happened to an American family, perhaps one whose immigration between the old country and the new allowed for inadvertent participation, or a family who routinely choose the military as a career, generation after generation. Ours is but lately and only in a small way one of the latter, being instead brought in for a couple of years by a taste for adventure or a wartime draft.

When JP and Pippy and I were growing up, the memory of Mom’s brother, Jimmy-Junior was still a presence. His picture was in Granny Jessie’s living room, and he was frequently spoken of by Mom, and Granny Jessie, and sometimes by those neighbors and congregants at Trinity who remembered him best. JP, who had the same first name, was most particularly supposed to be like him. He was a presence, but a fairly benign one, brushed with the highlights of adventure and loss, buried far away in St. Avold, in France, after his B-17 fell out of the skies in 1943.

Our Great-Uncle Will, the other wartime loss in the family was hardly ever mentioned. We were only vaguely aware that Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan had even had an older half-brother… a half-sister, too, if it came to that. Great-Grandpa George had been a widower with children when he married Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan’s mother. The older sister had gone off as a governess around the last of the century before, and everyone else had emigrated to Canada or America. I think it rather careless of us to have misplaced a great-aunt, not when all the other elders managed to keep very good track of each other across two continents and three countries, and have no idea of where the governess eventually gravitated to, or if she ever married.
“She went to Switzerland, I think,” Said Great Aunt Nan. “But Will— he loved Mother very much. He jumped off the troop train when it passed near Reading, and went AWOL to came home and see us again, when the Princess Pats came over from Canada.” She sighed, reminiscently. We were all of us in the Plymouth, heading up to Camarillo for dinner with Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie— for some reason; we had Great-Aunt Nan in the back seat with us. I am not, at this date, very certain about when this conversation would have taken place, only that we were in the car— Mom and Dad in front, Nan and I in the back seat, with Pippy between us, and JP in the very back of the station wagon. Perhaps I held Sander on my lap, or more likely between Nan and I, with Pippy in the way-back with JP. Outside the car windows on either side of the highway, the rounded California hills swept past, upholstered with dry yellow grass crisped by the summer heat, and dotted here and there with dark green live oaks. I can’t remember what had been said, or what had brought Great Aunt Nan to suddenly begin talking, about her half-brother who had vanished in the mud of no-man’s land a half century before, only that we all listened, enthralled— even Dad as he drove.

“He fairly picked Mother up,” Nan said, fondly, “She was so tiny, and he was tall and strong. He had been out in Alberta, working as a lumberjack on the Peace River in the Mackenzie District.” She recited the names as if she were repeating something she had learned by heart a long time ago. “When the war began, he and one of his friends built a raft, and floated hundreds of miles down the river, to enlist.”

(William Hayden, enlisted on October 13, 1914 in the town of Port Arthur. His age was listed as 22, complexion fair with brown hair and brown eyes— which must have come from his birth mother, as Al and Nan had blue eyes and light hair. He was 6’, in excellent health and his profession listed as laborer, but his signatures on the enlistment document were in excellent penmanship)

“He didn’t get into so very much trouble, when he walked into camp the next day, “said Nan, “Mother and I were so glad to see him—he walked into the house, just like that. And he wrote, he always wrote, once the Princess Pats’ went to France and were in the line. He picked flowers in the no-mans’-land between the trenches, and pressed them into his letters to send to us.”

(There is only one family picture of William, old-fashioned formal studio portrait of him and Nan; he sits stiffly in a straight ornate chair, holding his uniform cover in his lap, a big young man in a military tunic with a high collar, while a 12 or 13year old Nan in a white dress leans against the arm of the chair. She has a heart-shaped face with delicate bones; William’s features are heavy, with a prominent jaw— he does not look terribly intelligent, and there isn’t any family resemblance to Nan, or any of the rest of us.)

“His Captain came to see us, after he was killed,” said Nan,” Will was a Corporal, by that time… poor man, he was the only one of their officers to survive, and he had but one arm and one eye. He thought the world of Will. He told us that one night, Will took five men, and went out into no-mans’-land to cut wire and eavesdrop on the German trenches, but the Germans put down a barrage into the sector where they were supposed to have gone, and they just never came back. Nothing was ever found.”

(No, of course— nothing would have ever been found, not a scrap of the men, or any of their gear, not in the shell-churned hell between the trenches on the Somme in July of 1916. And the loss of Great-Uncle William and his handful of men were a small footnote after the horrendous losses on the first day of July. In a single day, the British forces sustained 19,000 killed, 2,000 missing, 50,000 wounded. Wrote the poet Wilfred Owen

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,–
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells…”

And that war continued for another two years, all but decimating a generation of British, French, German and Russian males. Such violence was inflicted on the land that live munitions are still being found, 80 years later, and bodies of the missing, as well. The nations who participated most in the war sustained a such a near-mortal blow, suffered such trauma that the Armistice in 1918 only succeeded in putting a lid on the ensuing national resentments for another twenty years. But everyone was glad of it, on the day when the guns finally fell silent, on 11:00 o’clock of a morning, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“Amazing, “Mom remarked later, “I wonder what brought that on— she talked more about him in ten minutes than I had ever heard in 20 years.”
I went back a few years ago, looking for Uncle Jimmy’s combat crew, and found them, too, but even then it was too late to look for anyone who had served with Great-Uncle Will—although, any time after 1916 may have been too late. But there is an archive, with his service records in it, and I may send away for them, to replace what little we had before the fire. But they will only confirm what we found out, when Great-Aunt Nan told us all about the brother she loved.

Deviant Sportuality

08. November 2004 · Comments Off on Deviant Sportuality · Categories: General, Military

Being that the military is almost entirely composed of competitive, healthy and extremely fit human beings, frequently stranded in locations singularly devoid of any amusements other than what they supply themselves, and that the standard military sense of humor (not to put too fine point upon it) tends towards the un-politically correct side of the spectrum, that sports events such as this take place should not come as a surprise. Why not a chariot race? The creativity of those who are inventive and extremely bored should never be underestimated. But whereas most anyone can come up with some sort of contest to relieve the tedium, leave it to the military to add that pinch of sneezing powder, that cream pie to the face (or better yet, down the front of the trousers), that touch of slapstick that will render the whole contest ridiculously enjoyable. With luck, the entire audience and most of the participants will be laying about laughing helplessly.

There have been races of cockroaches, of outhouses, gurneys and office chairs, with all the solemnity of the Olympics and probably the same level of good sportsmanship. In the 1980ies the JAG offices in Europe held a track meet for their lawyers and staff, and called it �The Ambulance Chase�, and in a major effort towards truth in advertising, had an ambulance slowly circling the track, just ahead of the front runners. Just before the start of operations in Gulf War 1, the combined American forces in Saudi Arabia staged, with great pomp and circumstance, a tremendously well-attended Army-Navy football game. All the football equipment and uniforms were imported in-theater, so everyone was well kitted out, when a team of women drawn from the Army and Air Force played a knock-down drag-out contest against a team of women from the Navy and Marines, while burly male cheerleaders in pleated skirts, and pom-poms screamed encouragement from the sides.

I was there personally, when a scratch team of broadcasters from EBS-Hellenikon— augmented with volunteers from the Public Affairs Office, the Commissary, and the head surgeon from the base hospital who pitched, dressed in scrubs and a long white Santa Claus beard and wig— took on the challenge thrown out by a team from the Army detachment, and fought it out on the dusty athletic field for the position of Worst Softball Team on Base. It started as a running joke on the morning show, and turned into a riotously funny game, with shortstops bring out folding patio lounge chairs, and taking their ease in the infield, and two of the unit wives and I selling large brown-paper bags with eye-holes cut in the front and the motto �OFFICIAL EBS FAN� neatly lettered below. The game had a serious underlying purpose, thought; raising money for a Greek teenager who played soccer for a local team which often played against base teams. He developed bone cancer, and had to have a leg amputated, so many of the American soccer players from the base had wanted to see him get a better grade of artificial leg than he would have otherwise had.

Of course, the EBS team won� er� lost, and took home the cherished Gold Cup, which the surgeon and pitcher had donated to the enterprise.
And yes, it was indeed a bedpan, painted gold. I have a picture of it, with the winning team, triumphantly arranged around.

(commenters are invited to add their own accounts of deviant military sports events. We understand entirely if you must be vague about identifiable details, especially if the statute of limitations hasn�t yet run out.)

Memo: All Over But the Shouting

03. November 2004 · Comments Off on Memo: All Over But the Shouting · Categories: General

From: Sgt Mom
To: Various
Re: Election Day, 2004

1. To: M.Chiraq, and the usual lefty-intellectual set—- try not to choke on the bile. It turns out that we don’t really care what you think of us. Really. Trust me on this one. We.Do.Not.Give.A.Rat’s.Ass.

2. To: All those Hollywood half-wits who threatened to leave the US if Bush were re-elected—Byeeeeee!! Don’t forget to leave your new address at the post office, and stop the paper delivery. Provence and Tuscany are lovely this time of year, but Northern Europe tends to get kind of chill and dreary. Tahiti is nice year-round, though. Drop us a Christmas card or something, once you get settled.

3. To: The White House Press Corps— four more Augusts (snicker….) in Crawford (giggle…..) Texas (snork!) the original home of hot, dusty and dull. (Bwah-ha-haha!!!!) You mopes haven’t figured out yet— he does this deliberately to yank your chain!

4. To: Michael Moore: Just one leetle, thin, thin mint… ju-s-s-st one more leetle bite…

5. To: Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: You have your senator back, with our regards and thanks. Please find him something useful to do.

6. To: Tee-ray-sa: Sorry, girl, it would have been fun for us observers, but four years of trying not to be a walking lighting-rod for political controversy would have put you into the Betty Ford Clinic for months at a stretch. Life is too short to squeeze yourself into a role you do not naturally fit.

7. To: Mainstream Big Media: Nice try, a**holes. The next time you try and wrap up the highest office in the land in a big pink bow and present it like a birthday present to the one you have pre-selected, try and pick a candidate who is a bit more than an empty and ornamental suit. Thanks for your consideration in this matter.

8. To: Osama bin Lade, Yassir Arafat, and Ayman al Zawhari: You guys are still alive??? Damn… oh, well— we’ll be seeing what we can do about that.

9. To: The Blogosphere; don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. Put on the pajamas and get back to work. We can take a break with some cat pictures, though.

10. To: The US Armed Forces: Whew! Dodged that bullet! Back to work, too— places to go, people to beat.

11. To: International/National Media: Guys and gals, you really need to get away from the coasts and check out the flyover country more. You are missing too much. Please be assured that us middle Americans are generally friendly, polite and well-behaved, and local food like breakfast tacos, tri-tip, Key lime pie, and barbeque is to die for. You don’t have to eat Jell-O salads if you don’t want to. Really.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

The Phantom: The 2004 Presidential Election is About the Blood of Heroes

02. November 2004 · Comments Off on The Phantom: The 2004 Presidential Election is About the Blood of Heroes · Categories: General

We have seen the last of the 3 Presidential Debates and the one Vice Presidential debate for the upcoming Presidential election. Opinions vary widely about who “won” and who “lost”.
Winning or losing a debate does not and should not have anything to do with one’s opinion as to who leads the United States of America. This is not about deciding who is more popular than the other in a high school vote for student council. This is not a beauty pageant where looks, posture and poise will determine the winner. One’s performance in a debate does little to reveal one’s character. And character is central to the ability to lead and govern.

I am certain many before me have written these words, but this election is about nothing less than the survival of the U.S. Similar words were probably written after 12/7/41. That day was branded as one that would live in “Infamy”.

That is the day the United States was attacked by a then unknown enemy. That was the day that over 2000 US servicemen and women lost their lives in a surprise attack. A devastating sucker punch from a power the US had negotiated with up until those attacks. There was no warning. There was no sign. Without provocation, thousands of men were dead or sentenced to death by drowning or suffocation in ships of steel which sank quickly and offered no escape.

Almost all of the US Pacific Fleet was destroyed or critically damaged. We were vulnerable. We were exposed, and we were reluctantly at war.

Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Fast forward 60 years. American resolve had been tested and was being questioned. George Bush took the helm of State facing a deeply divided nation. Just 8 months into his term, we were attacked just as we were in 1941. A divided nation, much to the dismay of our attackers, rallied in unity. We were a united force that nothing on Earth could reckon with. We were of a single mind and a single goal. Just as we were in 1941.

And here we are today, the 2004 Presidential Election. So what is this election about? We have debates on domestic policy, foreign policy and the economy. All news services, including the erstwhile claimed fair and balanced services, have treated the debates as if they were a beauty contest. The best orator takes all. I hope and believe we are not that shallow as a nation.

Unfortunately, this Presidential election has polarized this great nation. We are divided by rhetoric, not by ideals. We are divided by broken promises, or promises to be broken, not by a word given and kept. We are divided despite the forces that brought us together as a country and as human beings 3 years ago. We are a nation being urged to forget what happened 3 years ago and the lessons learned 60 years ago.

We are faced with an enemy the likes of which we have never seen. An enemy not constrained by the boundaries of rivers or mountains. An enemy that hides behind the guise of a religion, preaching hatred and prejudice to all within earshot. An enemy that uses our own freedoms, ideals and infrastructure against us. An enemy that publicly professes a ready willingness to die for their cause based on their beliefs, yet refuses to emerge from the false shadow of peace to reap their reward.

We are dealing with an enemy whose chief characteristic is cowardice. An enemy who, like the rat, will assume a parasitic role in a new place until such time as they can achieve domination.

They murder and prey upon the weak and innocent. For a time, no one notices the loss of the weak and innocent. They profess bravery and the desire to die for their cause, only to have countless others who accept their false beliefs to die in their place. They preach, but do not practice. They hide behind women and children, and sacrifice them without conscience, to further their wicked cause.

The enemy we face is nothing like we have ever encountered. They have no nation nor government. Yet they have hijacked nations and governments to further their cause. The enemy we face is not a party to the Geneva Conventions. The enemy we face is relentless in their professed desire to eradicate those of differing beliefs from the face of the Earth. The enemy we face is a quantum multiple of Nazi Germany – they will not save the camps of slaughter for only one religion; they will invite all to a tortuous death, all who do not submit to a reversion to the 12th Century.

In this election, we are faced with a very simple choice. Do we confront this religious reign of terror, or do we succumb through weakness or the perception of weakness and experience the slow death of our Country?

This Country begs for unity and a united path. But we have become victims of ruse and artifice that have been very effective in masking and hiding the only issue that counts. The clever and skillful efforts of big money for liberal causes and big media’s embrace of yellow journalism has been very effective. The Democratic control of our education system over the last 30 years and the elimination of responsibility and accountability from a teacher’s duties has resulted in a education system that graduates functional illiterates who rely on liberal media to think for them. The constant barrage in the press and on the airways of fictitious issues has diverted the attention of the American public. The focus of America has been drawn away from the only issue that really counts today and for the foreseeable future.

This election is indeed about economics. This election is indeed about domestic policy. This election is indeed about foreign policy. Yet all of these areas converge at one intersection. Unless we have leadership that can deal with the terror war, we will have no economy, no progress on domestic issues and a non existent foreign policy. And our Islamic extremist enemies know this very well. The destruction of the United States is a necessary step in their strategic plan.

The 2004 Election, and an individual vote, is very simple. Our collective memories just have to journey back a little over 3 years. And what happened then brings economic policy, domestic policy, foreign policy and survival into a four leaf clover of hope, or despair.

We are at war, and not by our choosing. Unless we have leadership that understands the difference between acts of war and criminal acts, and unless we have a leader that understands that we are not dealing with pimps, prostitutes, loan sharks or drug addicts, this great nation will take an irreversible step toward eventual annihilation. And what we need to do to understand what this election is about is to remember, just remember.

We must remember the blood of the innocents shed on 9/11. And we must also remember, and never forget, the Blood of Heroes. With the utmost respect, I have been granted permission to remind people just what the are voting for in November. My heartfelt thanks to Patricia de Jong, the webmaster, for her consent for the use of her gripping creative labors in producing something that words do not adequately convey. Please watch The Blood of Heroes in its entirety, and please pause for a moment of silence to pray for the victims of 9/11 and the sacrifices to date in our war against terror.

Everyone casting a vote in the 2004 Presidential Election should be required to view The Blood of Heroes prior to casting their vote. What happened on 9/11 is the truth. And 9/11 way a day of infamy that should be seared into our collective conscience as a nation.

This is a single issue election. Despite rhetoric to the contrary. Vote your conscience, but by all means, remember what is at stake.

(Forwarded to me from the author: problems with a persistent spammer seem to block him from posting directly)

Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

01. November 2004 · Comments Off on Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

With luck, by the end of the next 36 hours, we will have a definitive answer to the question of who will be President for the next four years. I had an e-mail last night from an occasional contributor which raised the issue of a Kerry victory, and how that would affect the military… and most importantly to me, the effect on this and other milblogs.

While this weblog tends toward the right-of-center, reflecting the makeup of the military in general, and I personally yield to no one (save perhaps the Swiftboat Vets) in my personal detestation of Senator Kerry and all his works and all his ways, the fact remains that once the confetti and the hanging chads are swept away, the military is (and should continue to be) apolitical, answering to the office of the Commander in Chief— regardless of who happens to be in that office from year to year. We are not a Praetorian Guard. We do not select the supreme leader of this country, save in our private capacity as citizens and voters along with everyone else. We’ll leave that sort of regime change to banana republics and third-world hell-holes, and if Senator Kerry is elected— by anything from a slim margin to a landslide—- he would then be the Commander in Chief.

Depending on the perspective, this is a prospect that ranges from the disastrous in every respect to the merely unappetizing. While I, and several other regular contributors are retired and well-beyond the reach of recall, even as members of the inactive reserve, others— Stryker, Cpl. Blondie, Timmer, ThePie and others are still serving on active duty… and as President, he would be at the top of their chain of command. We may not like it, but we at least have to consider the possibility, as well as our reaction to it— which should be to grit our teeth and carry on. If we could endure Jimmy Carter, practically anything is survivable, though I am not sure I could endure the gloating of, say…Michael Moore and the other Hollywood half-wits. A lot of red wine (non-French!) would probably help a lot.

The other unwelcome thought that occurred to me, was that perhaps weblogs run by military people have been leading a charmed and sheltered existence for the last couple of years. Run on our own time and our own dime, under pseudonyms, the milblogs offer a matchless view into the military world and experience from a perspective that even the most dedicated embedded reporter can’t begin to equal. Milbloggers— under no restraints but those imposed by the habits of OpSec, our own good sense and that of available technology— offer a strong blast of reality, undiluted by the watery constraints of a Public Affairs office.

I would logically expect that military public affairs offices would be onto milblogs like white on rice, even if only to read them, the way we used to go over the local newspaper with a fine-toothed comb, looking for news with a bearing on the military. I’d expect them to be in touch, as a valuable media resource, but that’s never happened. Last year, I detoured upstairs to the BAMC Public Affairs office after a routine appointment, and left my card and an offer to publicize any special appeals for the troops and patients. The GS employee I spoke with seemed interested and impressed with the possibilities, but I never heard anything more from that office.

After all the recent attention to weblogs, though, I don’t think any media relations professional could be ignorant of the effects that weblogs can have, and I think— though I have no definitive proof— that military bloggers are just being left alone, because what we do independently serves the military and even the political needs. We are getting the word out about what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, inside the military “other America”, and it suits the Public Affairs establishment just fine…. Because if it didn’t, I am positive that most military bloggers could be shut down in an administrative heartbeat. Those of us no longer bound by DOD strictures would still have to be very careful, in order not to endanger those who are. That they could regulate, and have not is rather telling, I think.

Would independent military weblogs serve the military Public Affairs needs of a Kerry Administration, especially if they appeared contrary, or critical of official policy? Those of us with long experience of this sort of thing have a pretty good idea. All the more reason to take the time— hours, if need be— to exercise your rights as a citizen. And one way and another, no matter who wins and looses, we’ll still be here

(BTW, I have a feeling it will be Bush, by a landslide… but what do I know?)

Trickertreat!

27. October 2004 · Comments Off on Trickertreat! · Categories: Domestic, General

When in the name of all that’s unholy, did Halloween turn into an extravaganza of coffins and mock gravestones set up in suburban lawns, and formations of witches plastered onto tree trunks and garage doors, great glowing hanging jack o lanterns, and ghosts and witches and skeletons and huge ass spiders (shudder!) and monstrous webs, and life-sized skeletons? When did decorating the house for the benefit of small children in dime-store costumes or something cobbled together from a stack of torn sheets and some Rit dye, panhandling door to door for packets of candy corn and little pastel rolls of sweettarts become almost as much a collective pain as Christmas? It probably happened about the same time that the pattern catalogue for costumes (costumes for all ages, yet!!!) at the yardage store became as thick as the Simplicity seasonal catalogue and stayed on the pattern table year around. I just know that Martha Stewart had something to do with it, the overachieving beotch, and it must have happened while I was out of the country during the 1980ies.

It used to be an innocent, home-made, modest little affair. Mom bought us each a pumpkin, and in the early days Dad helped us carve them with a kitchen knife and scrape out the mooshy tangle of seeds and stringy orange fibers. By the time JP and I were in junior high, we conducted the ritual pumpkin butchery ourselves, and assisted Pippy with marking out a scary face in straight-angled cuts. Fit the pumpkins with candle-ends, saved for this purpose in the drawer with the silverware, set them out on the front porch, and there we were, all set. Of all the neighbors around Hilltop house, only Wayne got ambitious, rigging a ghost of cheesecloth to fly silently down a wire running from the trees by their gate to just above the front door.

We made our own costumes, mostly, although Alan’s mother had made some elaborate ones for his older sisters, which I borrowed a couple of times. Mom’s contribution to our costumes mostly was to turn over the whole thing over to us, along with any sheets which had ripped down the center. With a couple of sheets and whatever we could scrounge around the house in the way of props, we’d have something that would hold up for a couple of hours of tricker-treating, and for the Halloween carnival at school. .
“Mom, can I dye in the bathtub?” I asked.
”Sure, but don’t expect to be buried in it.” She shot back. I was an artist with packets of Rit dye from the grocery store. I couldn’t do it in the washing machine after the first time we tried that— the dye stayed in the pipes for a couple of loads.

I outfitted Pippy that year as Mary Poppins, in a long dress and straw hat, carrying an old tapestry handbag of Moms’ and an umbrella. The handbag did double duty as a bag for treats. The year that I had read the entire Lord of the Rings to Sander, he wanted to dress as a hobbit— again with a tunic and cloak of dyed sheets, and a sword and shield that Dad roughed out of wood, and that I painted with semi-Celtic motifs. Another year, the sheets were worked into a long grey dress, and a white pinafore and headscarf with a red cross in grosgrain ribbon on the front—
“A Grey Lady!” said Great-Aunt Nan in delight, when she saw Pippy dressed up like a WWI nurse, holding Sander’s hand. Sander was a flying ace, in his ordinary school clothes and windbreaker jacket zipped up the front, with a long white silk scarf borrowed from Mom, and a canvas flier’s helmet and pair of goggles from the surplus store. The helmet fit him perfectly, leaving us to wonder when in history, exactly, were they recruiting dwarf aircrew.

Close to sundown, we would light the candles in the pumpkins— it was really, truly only tricker-treating, after it was at least decently dark, with smothered giggles coming from the front porch, and children in twos and threes working up their nerve to ring a strange doorbell. Usually, there was a parent or older sib outside the circle of porch-light, cuing the chorus of “Tricker-treat!” and reminders to say “thank-you” before they romped away, clutching their brown-paper grocery bags of treats.

Home-made, kid-made costumes, simple pumpkins, and brown-paper bags— all very simple in comparison, as shapeless and disorganized as a scratch softball game on an empty lot on a summer morning when school is out. Now that Halloween is all elaborate, and organized, like Little League, with uniforms and coaches and formal rules, it may be more spectacular, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may have been more pure fun for the kids then.

Memo: A Matter of Trust

25. October 2004 · Comments Off on Memo: A Matter of Trust · Categories: General, Military

To: The Small Group of Readers of TDB Who Have Never Had Anything to Do With the Military
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Trust Issues

1. More than anything else, the military runs on trust. It is axiomatic (a bit of a cliché, even) that members of a squad/unit/team/crew trust each other implicitly. Every sort of military training, from the basic up to the most sophisticated war-gaming at command level instills and reinforces the notion of trusting those who are in the stuff with you— practically every military movie ever made addresses this on some level, so the concept is very familiar to the general public.

2. The less familiar sort of trust, appearing very occasionally in comparison, is that two way trust between the commander and the commanded. On the surface of it, this would look like a fairly straightforward thing, enforced by the articles of the UCMJ, and by long established custom as outlined in the folksong;

Over the hills and o’er the main.
To Flanders, Portugal, and Spain,
Queen Anne commands and we’ll obey.
Over the hills and far away.

But there is a two-way trust involved here, and in most situations it must be nurtured as carefully as the team-building sort. It took me a couple of months to develop that level of implicit trust with the best commander I ever worked for. At the beginning, I would walk into his office saying “There is a problem, the solutions are A, B, C and D, I prefer Solution C for these reasons, which one do you recommend, Sir?” After a while, he would say “Well, do what you think best, Sergeant,” and after another while I could only get up to “Sir there is a problem,” before he said, “Deal with it, brief me later.” Delegating that sort of responsibility implied a great deal of trust ; the commander is confident that the troops will actually go out and do as he asks, to the best of their ability and last drop of blood, to risk their lives and sometimes lose them. And the troops must trust in their commander, be assured that their lives will not be thrown away for a bad purpose or no purpose at all.

3. I could be assured that my commander would back me, in whatever solution I chose to sort out a problem, that I would not be hung out to dry for doing my job and exercising the authority delegated to me. A commander who trusts the troops, and whose troops return that trust can make mistakes, can muddle through, can take casualties, can work with an imperfect plan that needs to be carried out now and not wait for that perfect plan to be put into place too late to do any good. That sort of commander can achieve much, and those in the command can at least feel proud of having contributed. We are even trusted enough to blog about it, on our own time and own dime.

4. Just too as there was that best commander, I had experience at a distance with the other sort; the ambitious, square filling user, who looked at the command only as a means of climbing to the next level…. And believe me, people, I can tell the difference. By tomorrow a week, we’ll know how well the voting public can.

Sincerely, Sgt Mom

The Use of a Dog

24. October 2004 · Comments Off on The Use of a Dog · Categories: Domestic, General

I am a cat person by default. That said, I like dogs and, and have had a dog, they take to me, and a couple of the neighbors’ dogs are openly adoring, but the fact remains that dogs are more high-maintenance than cats, more emotionally needy. They are like something that comes out of the box in parts, with a collection of tools and a twenty-page manual for assembly and programming, whereas cats arrive completely assembled, ready for instant use. They do not mind that you are away for most of the day, they do not need to be taken for walks, and they see life steadily and see it whole from a perch on the windowsill, or across the back of an armchair. They have their own secret lives and amusements, and while they are glad to see you come home at the end of the day, they are not neurotically overjoyed, like a dog is— for the dog, this is the high point of the day, and they have been waiting all day for the sound of your car, and the garage door rumbling open, and now the dog is trembling with excitement, their someone is home, homehomehome, and they begin to bark, ecstatically. It takes very little to please a dog, but still— their day must have been terribly dull, that this is the high point of it— and it is enough to feel guilty about not having come home sooner. I do not need guilt— I prefer my relationships to be with well-adjusted grownups. Cats fulfill that niche very nicely.

But I have had the use of a dog, without the upkeep, which is a satisfying compromise; these days, the dog is Polly, who lives next door with her people. She is a miniature dachshund, or as I call her “a cocktail wiener-dog”, a sleek and low-slung little doggie exactly the color of a fresh-picked chestnut hull, given to bark with soprano enthusiasm at anyone who walks by on the sidewalk out front, or comes either of our two houses. My driveway, and front walk are clearly part of “her” territory, and noisy attention must be paid to any trespasser. This is a good thing; it is one of the traditional uses of a dog— to alert us of company and passing strangers. As a puppy, I may have cuddled her just enough to form a bond, and now she demands affection as her right. She recognizes the sound of the VEV, and her owner insists that Polly is watching for me at 6 PM daily, bouncing up to the gate so I can lean down and rub that chestnut-brown little head, while her tail whips back and forth so energetically it shakes her whole hinder end. So I have the use of a dog, without any of the responsibility for maintenance, and all it costs me is a few minutes of time. When we lived in Spain we also had the use of a dog, a dog that spent more of the first few years of her life with Blondie, and more time in our yard than her own.

A young Spanish couple, engaged to be married, had bought the duplex unit opposite ours to be their permanent home. Their yard was separated from ours by only a thin and raggedy hedge, although there was a tall chain link fence at the back, and an ornate brick and metal fence at the front of the units. During their engagement, and then while their duplex was being renovated, they used it as a weekend or summer cabin, and one of the first things Antonio and Susannah did was to get a dog to guard the yard and the usually empty duplex. Drufy was a purebred German shepherd, of the Prussian persuasion of German shepherd— that is, lean, intense and very driven. (As opposed to the Bavarian persuasion, who tend to be fat, happy canine slobs). She had a little doghouse under the stairs, and the portero, or maybe one of the urbanizations’ watchmen came around every day with food and water. Of course, my daughter discovered the presence of a dog in the adjoining yard very early on, and since the hedge was permeable, and we were actually there, much more frequently than Antonio and Susannah were… well, it was only logical outcome. Drufy bonded to us; my daughter and I were Her People, and our yard was Her Yard. She was our fiercely dedicated guardian, and everyone considered that a good thing, certainly Juan Vigilante, the retired Guadia Civil who was the senior watchman in San Lamberto— keeping a strict and observant eye upon all the comings and goings— thought it an excellent idea that a single woman with a small daughter should have the use of a such a tireless guardian.

My daughter took it into her head, at the age of 10, that she wanted to be a latch-key child, and the presence of Drufy, Juan Vigilante, a telephone in our duplex unit, and the near-by residences of several friends were the things that tilted my decision to allow it. My daughter took the school bus home every schoolday, with strict orders to call me as soon as she got in the door: I was on air at EBS-Zaragoza, in the radio studio doing the drive-time afternoon show then— I took her call in the studio, every afternoon between 3:30 and 3:35, otherwise I would have been calling out everyone short of the American Counsel. It was reassuring to know, that Drufy-dog was there, alert and vigilant. Indeed, my daughter described with relish, how the propane-gas-bottle deliveryman had barely beat Drufy to our gate, with the empty bottle and the payment for the new one, and Drufy’s teeth bare inches from his ass.

When Antonio and Susannah married, and the renovations were complete, they moved into the apartment opposite, but Drufy’s situation did not improve materially; she was still the outdoor guardian dog. Susannah had a vile-tempered Jack Russell terrier, which had indoor privileges and all the shelter and affection that that implied. Drufy remained in her doghouse outside. My daughter thought this was cruelly unfair; Drufy was loving and affectionate, a better and more satisfactory dog all around than that nasty little terrier. Even when the terrier was bred, and had a litter of puppies— Drufy baby-sat the puppies, and continued to guard our house, and was unmercifully bullied by the terrier. At least, she was, until the summer that we returned from one of our long road trips to notice that the terrier had a long bandage around her middle, and was behaving more respectfully to Drufy and everyone else. It seemed that she had snapped once too often, and Drufy had about bitten her in half. My daughter and I were totally partisan; we felt Drufy’s response was completely justified and long overdue.

But as always with a military tour— and I had done a double tour at Zaragoza, six years, long enough to see my daughter all the way through elementary school— the orders and pack-out date loomed. I made arrangements for the VEV, for the cats, for the hold baggage… and my daughter asked if we could take Drufy, too.
“She thinks she is ours, much more than Antonio and Susannahs’,” she insisted, quite correctly, and even took it up with Antonio, who pointed out that she was a pedigreed dog, and very valuable. He did offer to send her one of her puppies, when he had her bred, which was quite fair, but where would we be, when that came around, and how much would it cost to send a puppy halfway around the world? It would be hard enough to rent a place that permitted the eminently portable and well-behaved cats. We bid Drufy an affectionate farewell— I took a picture of her with my daughter, and gave Antonio and Susannah a couple of bottles of good California wine. We should have given Drufy some nice treats, but how could that have ever made up for half of her People suddenly, and inexplicably vanishing from her limited world?

I just hope she did not grieve for us too much… and that she did not have a nervous breakdown entirely when our duplex was rented to someone else.

Memo: Anyone Feeling a Draft in Here?

19. October 2004 · Comments Off on Memo: Anyone Feeling a Draft in Here? · Categories: General, Military

From: Sgt Mom
To: Joe/Josephine College
Re: A Slight Draft

1. I take up my club yet once again to play whack-a-mole with the issue of (cue scary, menacing music!) a military draft. Every time it is whacked to the ground, this little urban legend pops up again vigorously and undented, so please pardon the somewhat uncharacteristic testiness in my voice. I do not enjoy repeating myself, and the suspicion in some circles is that the rumors of a proposed draft are being carefully and artificially fanned by the winds of election-year politics.

2. So, pay attention, class; take careful notes for there may very well be a pop quiz shortly. Write them in reverse writing in indelible ink on your forehead or any other body part which you are accustomed to looking at in the mirror. Whatever it will take to etch the following indelibly upon your awareness:

The American military establishment does not want a draft! A draft would be like kryptonite to Superman, garlic to a vampire, like Woody Allen signed to play for the San Antonio Spurs! That is, an element not only toxic but #%*#ing useless!

3. Clear on that concept yet, Joe/Josephine? We— that is the professional, all- volunteer, extremely specialist military— have no use for minimally trained personnel of the sort which used to be called “cannon fodder”; that is, enormous numbers of men, hastily trained to march and shoot, and directed straight into the trenches or the front, or wherever. We’ll leave that sort of malpractice to the Russians, okay? It’s not quantity that rules on the battlefield today, its quality; quality that takes time to build, to standards that are demanding, selective, rigorous. The standards are such that only people who really, really want to be there have any hope of meeting them. This is not your dad’s military, Joe/Josephine, and it is definitely not your grandfathers’.

4. As a career NCO in the volunteer military, what makes you think I (or any other NCO) are in any way keen to try and accomplish our mission with a bunch of slackers who don’t want to be there? WE DO NOT WANT YOUR USELESS, UNFIT, WHINY, NASTY ASSES! NOT NOW! NOT AFTER THE ELECTION! NOT EVER! CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT, ARE WE? ANSWER UP, JOE/JOSEPHINE– I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

5. Finally, as someone near and dear to you thinks you are smart enough to be worth the tuition, you should be asking yourself: “Self, who is telling me that the draft is coming back and why are they telling me now?” You’re bright kids, Joe/Josephine. Do a bit of thinking. And when you come up with an answer, do let me know. We’d like to have a serious, life-changing talk with whoever is keeping this draft thing going. Blankets and bars of soap in GI socks may be involved in the discussion.

Sincerely, Sgt Mom

Rites, Legends and Lore #10: Supply and Demand

18. October 2004 · Comments Off on Rites, Legends and Lore #10: Supply and Demand · Categories: General, Military

I had forgotten, until I read Timmer’s essay on the fiscal year-end rush to spend windfall funds, when there is leftover money in the unit budget, and everyone must have a list of nice-to-haves, all neatly costed out and prioritized, for that money MUST be spent. The rationale is that if you have surplus money left over at the end of the year, then your unit has obviously been given more than you need, and in the next years’ budget the Powers That Be will adjust your budget to cover those needs with not a penny left over. So firm in the belief that what they can to do you, they invariably would, great care is taken to spend exactly what you have been budgeted for the year, and funds that have been set aside and held against a rainy-day emergency are up for grabs once it is clear that the year is nearly over without that emergency occurring. So doubly blessed units like Timmers’ can revel in ordering lavishly, filling their supply room with extra stock, which may later serve as the raw materiel in the machinations of the scrounge, swapping for favors from units less blessed.

Alas, for my time in AFRTS field units, we were the less blessed; budget wise, we were the illegitimate red-haired step child, and so far from having any sort of year end-surplus (and joyously spending same) during the last month of the old fiscal year, we would be looking at an empty cupboard, and shifting our last typewriter correction tape from typewriter to typewriter depending on who needed to correct something, and bringing light-bulbs from home. I also clearly remember carefully re-winding that last correction tape to the beginning again, so dire was our predicament: three weeks to go, and $%**#-all in our supply account.

At other times, the supplies just weren’t there at all, especially when waaaaaay out at the end of the supply chain. For some reason, AFRTS-Sondrestom Greenland was perennially out of splicing tape, used during those pre-electronic editing days when you marked the edit points with a tick from a black grease pencil, sliced on the tick mark with a single-edged razor blade, butted the two segments together and applied a length of white audio editing tape to hold it together. (We were strictly enjoined from using scotch tape for this purpose because the sticky element would run, and damage the audio tape, as well as collecting all sorts of crud at the edit point, resulting in a noisy and very audible sound as it went over the playback head… although— true story— I once did see a piece of 16mm film with an edit held together by a couple of metal staples. As in Stanley Bostitch office supply staples. ) As production chief, I had a packet of pre-cut tape splices in my desk, and dealt them out one at a time, upon presentation of a really good justification as to why this audio edit was really, really necessary. “We need splicing tape!” I would plead with the station manager, who would shrug and say, “It’s been on order, since last month/last quarter/time and memory began.” We got by with begging for packets of splicing tape from our sister-station at Thule, and when our order finally did arrive (by rowboat, around the Horn and across the western Atlantic, apparently) we had to send half of it to Thule in repayment for tiding us over.

Even having money in the account and supplies in the supply room/cupboard did not mean that supply would meet demand; the supply NCO at AFKN/Yongsan was not disposed to helpful on the day when I decided to train some of the other broadcasters in good newsroom habits, and provide them with an invaluable tool of the trade; to whit, a spiral bound steno notebook.
“Sorry, no can do today. I’ll get you four of ‘em when I go to central supply tomorrow.” I looked over his Army buzz-cut head to the shelf immediately behind him. There was a stack of spiral steno notebooks.
“You have ten of them right there, “I pointed out, doing my best to remain civil and non-judgmental. “And I need them right now. Why can’t you just give me four notebooks now.”?
”No can do, Sarge. I might get inspected, I gotta have ‘em on the shelf.”
“So…” I looked at him, “I am understanding this correctly— the purpose of your supply room stock is not to actually provide supplies as they are needed, but to make the supply room look good for a theoretical inspection?”
“Well… yeah. You gotta come back for those notebooks tomorrow, Sarge. You want how many? Four?”
“Never mind, I would hate to disturb your levels of stock for your inspection,” I said grandly, and turned on my heel.

I went straight down the little winding path that came out in the BX parking lot at the foot of the hill, went in and bought four steno notebooks out of my own pocket for the news trainees— a whole two bucks, but at least ten dollars worth of no hassle with an Army unit stockroom, and not the first time I ever subsidized the military industrial complex out of my own pocket.

Other heartrending tales of deprivation, supply skullduggery and budget excess are warmly invited in comments.

Also, I still have a qualitity of copies of the book, if you want to get an autographed copy directly from me: Paypal or check, just e-mail and let me know

Sgt. Moms’ Virtual Book Tour: Stop #1

15. October 2004 · Comments Off on Sgt. Moms’ Virtual Book Tour: Stop #1 · Categories: General, Site News

Book Interview is
here, at “Technicalities”! The Book is available here, and through Amazon, and I have a few signed copies available, for anyone who wants to order a copy directly from me. (Check or Paypal for $13.95 + $3.00 for postage)
And if you have a weblog, and want to send me some interview questions, I will do my best to provide sparkling content, honest answers and a link to it from The Daily Brief. Just click on my name or make a comment, and I’ll get back to you.

Memo: Up With This, I Will Not Put

14. October 2004 · Comments Off on Memo: Up With This, I Will Not Put · Categories: General, Iraq, Media Matters Not

To: AIG
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Allegations of Iraq Atrocity

1. The journalist Seymour Hersh, who has a long established reputation— although what sort of reputation is a matter of hot debate amongst the cognoscenti—was interviewed himself recently (link here), and among a number of other interesting allegations, made this one:

In the evening’s most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be “cleared.” Another platoon from the soldier’s company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them. “He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts,” Hersh said quietly. “He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, ‘No, you don’t understand, that’s a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don’t you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?’

2. Since reputable journalists are generally supposed to loiter meaningfully in the vicinity of independently verifiable facts, I will briefly entertain the supposition that Mr. Hersh is in possession of reliable information, and urge him to inform the responsible military law and judicial authorities immediately. He has been informed of the commission of a crime of particularly heinous nature. His duty is clear as a law-abiding citizen, especially given an alleged crime of this particular gravity, a duty from which status as a journalist should not excuse him. Investigation, courts-martial, conviction; it worked for My Lai, and Abu Graib, with which cases Mr. Hersh should be most familiar.

3. A fair number of people with whom I have shared this story, and discussed via e-mail and weblog comments agree with me that it reeks, with the reek of week-old mackerel steaming in a boxcar parked in on a siding in West Texas on a sultry summer day. (critique here, from commenter #28, “Jarhead”). The points have been made that something like this would be impossible to keep secret for long, given the number of American soldiers or Marines present, all of them presumably cognizant of their responsibilities vis-à-vis war crimes and illegal orders. One must also note the propensity for parties like Al-Jazeera and Human Rights Watch to squeal (at length and in Technicolor) about a supposed incident as this one as if their private parts were in a bench vise. In this age of interconnectedness, of the internet, weblogs and e-mail, this sort of story would have wings. Atrocities do not happen in a vacuum these days.

4. If this is a fabrication, then Mr. Hersh is calumniating our professionalism, our honor and our competence. In going before a credulous audience and representing the American military in Iraq to have committed such a brutally stupid and counter-productive act, he is bearing false witness. He has standing as a journalist, a degree of credibility amongst the great and the good, authoritative contacts in the political and intelligence establishment; what he says may stick, and stick for a long time.

5. This may seem a trivial thing, these days; an aging anti-establishment figure telling an audience at Berkeley what they yearn to hear, but it angers me to know that someone is making a career out of sliming the military. I don’t want to repeat the decade where we had to take care about wearing uniforms in public, of leaving military experience off resumes, of being harassed in airports. These new accusations must be countered, debunked, shown up. This is not 1968, despite so many wishes that it were. We can go toe to toe with those who defame us for their own purposes, or at least urge that justice be done on those whose actions defame us.

I sincerely hope that this story may be comprehensively debunked and Mr. Hersh join Mr. Rather in the corner of irrelevance.

Sgt Mom.

Andalusian Dreams

13. October 2004 · Comments Off on Andalusian Dreams · Categories: General, History

It is a country of dreams, fragile pavilions, airy courtyards, and meticulously planted gardens, cool trickling fountains and pools, refuges from the harsh summer heat of Southern Spain, that the Moors called Al-Andalus. In this country the bougainvillea vines make a splash of dark red or electrical magenta against whitewashed plaster walls, and curved roof tiles of a peculiar faded hue, somewhere between rose pink and honey. In the afternoon, the cicadas make a churring sound in the oleanders in the great enclosed garden of the citadel of the Alhambra high on the Albaicin hill, in the city of Granada.

The place seems deserted of people, only my daughter and I exploring the paths where the white dust settles softly in our footprints as we pass. Behind us is the ruined citadel of the Alcazaba, the fortress looking out over the city below, and the sprawling palace complex of towers and courts, whispering with myrtle leaves and the trickle of water. The Patio of Myrtles – the Comares Tower, the Hall of the Ambassadors, its interior walls covered with a fine tracery of intricate plaster lace. Our footsteps fall with a faint scuffing sound on the stone floors. The Lions’ Court, water bubbling from a great stone basin, born up on the backs of oddly stylized, almost Chinese-looking stone lions, at the center of a forest of slender pillars, branching into more elaborate arching trees of plaster filigree. To me it is a wonderland, a place of enchantment, but something about the rooms opening into the Lion’s Court creeps out my daughter. She feels a sense of oppression, the whisper of something bad having happened there, and runs ahead. I follow, doing my best to drink it all in, the fabled rooms and gardens, loggia and court. There was the Queen’s mirador, a tower with an airy latticed window, once with a view into the town below- all ornamented with plasterwork, with tile and magnificent woodwork, the last grand flowering of the Moorish kings in Spain, their paradise on earth, planted with flowers and shrubs to make a living carpet, ornamental trees swaying gracefully in the cool breeze. Boabdil, the last king of Granada, departed in 1491, asking of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs that the gate out of which he left be stopped up and never used again. At the head of the pass leading down towards the sea, he looked back at his glorious citadel and wept.

Granada, the last remnant of Moorish control on the Iberian Peninsula. Once, at the peak of power and glory, the great dynasties—the Umayyad, and after them the Almoravids and the Almohads held all but Asturias in the far north-west, and went over the Pyrenees as far as Tours before being pushed back by Charles Martel. Moorish rulers held the great cities of Toledo, Cordoba, Seville; shining beacons of learning and culture in the darkness of the European Middle ages. Gloriously adorned with gardens, running water, street-lighting, Cordoba boasted subtle philosophers, learned doctors of medicine, poets and mathematicians, and an atmosphere of toleration that drew on the finest scholars from all three religious traditions. Abd-al-Rahman III, who held supremacy as the Caliph of Cordoba built himself a great palace outside the city, called the Medinat-al-Zahra – palace, garrison and city all at once, splendid and sprawling – as glittering and ultimately as fragile as a blown glass sculpture. It existed only a bare half-century as the Versailles of Iberia, before it was razed nearly to the ground, and the Caliphate collapsed into a muddle of warring city states. The Christian Reconquest slowly gathered, retaking Toledo by the 11th century, brought to a glorious conclusion by Ferdinand and Isabella in this very city, in the shimmering fairy-tale palace that my daughter and I now explored. Within a few years and decades many others followed King Boabdil into exile, probably many of them looking one last time over their shoulders and weeping for that lost paradise, that splendid dream that was no longer theirs. The exiles took skills, intellect and trade contacts with them, and Spain glittered for a while, and then grew moribund, rigid, overtaken in intellectual, industrial and mercantile energy by other countries.

But some still dream, of colonnaded gardens, and fountains of clear water from the snow-melt of the Sierra Nevada, and of taking back the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, caring little that what made it so, was liberty from religious orthodoxy, and the free exchange of ideas, in the courtyards of Cordoba and Toledo, with the blossoms of orange trees perfuming the twilight air.

Update: Mom and Dad’s New House

11. October 2004 · Comments Off on Update: Mom and Dad’s New House · Categories: Domestic, General

It will have been a year this month since their house burned in last Octobers’ devastating fires around San Diego; the new house is coming along, rather more slowly than we had estimated, but faster than the original did. They had estimated three years to build it themselves, but it took five, mostly because they insisted on doing even the boring stuff like shingling the roof, the interior drywall, and tiling the floors themselves. This time, they are farming out the boring, and labor-intensive stuff to professionals, and since a lot of other houses are being replaced, the construction crews are very, very busy.

The work goes quite rapidly, once it is started, but there are long waits between various jobs being accomplished To date, the exterior walls are complete, and the verandah is nearly so, with the posts, rafters and plywood ceiling in place. The joists are being delivered this week, and Dad is collecting a crew and a forklift to get them all set into place. Once that is done, then the roof over the house itself can be completed and tiled, and the interior space divided up into rooms, and dry walled…

I had hoped to see the whole thing completed in time for Christmas, but Dad advises me not to hold my breath on this. I think they are actually rather having fun improving the house. They were insured to the exact level needed to rebuild and replace, so they are not having the worries with the insurance company that some of the other affected families are reported to have.

Oh, and they have acquired another cat, in place of the Siamese, and the two kittens who went to stay with my sister after the fire, and adjusted so well they were given to Pippy’s family permanently. The new cat seems to have been a pet, dumped out in the country, which had the good sense to hang around near Mom and Dad’s closest neighbors. He is sort of long-haired and colored Grey, so he is named Davie, after the former governor.

Marbella Cat

09. October 2004 · Comments Off on Marbella Cat · Categories: Domestic, General

The affinity of cats for bloggers, and bloggers for cats is axiomatic; I am myself– in the opinion of William and my daughter– only one more cat away from verging on “crazy neighborhood cat ladyM status, with the current herd of four, all of them Cats of the 1st Order, those which are kept indoors, spoilt and adored, allowed to sleep wherever they like, and fed by hand on chicken and salmon – well, maybe not that last. But Cats of the 1st Order are those which accompany you when you move halfway around the world, whose lives are extended with extensive veterinary courses of care, and whose inevitable death is deeply mourned. Cats of the 2nd Order are those who rate a degree of care, and affection, and for whom you feel a certain amount of responsibility; these cats do not share your life, and are usually just there temporarily, until you pass them on to someone suitable. (Or they may be someone elses’ cat, who just prefers your yard, and to freeload at your back door, like Bubba From Down the Road). Cats of the 3rd Order are all others; strays and ferals, other people’s cats; who ask for nothing from you and usually prefer it that way. Except sometimes, when the planets and stars align, and the mysterious cat god decrees that one of them shall suddenly walk up to you and declare him/herself to be yours.

We do not pick them, you see; they pick us, and it is unwise to go against this great power of the universe. I did, once. We walked away from a charming small cat who had very clearly selected us as his own Very Special Humans, in the clearest imaginable terms. I have felt guilty about it ever since: the place and the circumstances were all wrong, and we had a houseful of cats anyway, and all the excuses in the world. But none of them are any good. I should have packed up the small cat, and taken him away with us. By way of expiating my guilt, I have taken in Henry VIII and his sister Morgie, and Little Arthur and Percival have been gracious enough to select me as their Chosen Human, so perhaps the great and mysterious God of the Cats has forgiven me for spurning the affections of the least of his little ones, late in the summer of the last year we lived in Spain.

It happened during the last week of our summer camping trip, a long loop through Southern Spain; Cordova, Seville and Granada, concluding with a drive along the coastal road between Gibraltar and Malaga. This was the Costa del Sol, the fabled south coast, sometimes built over with expensive new urbanizations, gorgeous modern condos, filling up the spaces between the ancient towns, which were guarded by medieval watchtowers against the threat of corsairs, raiders and pillagers from the African coast, just a short sail over the horizon of the blue Mediterranean.

We had set up our tent on the beach itself, at Marbella. A steep driveway zigzagged down the face of a steep hillside, fallen away to make a cliff in places. The buildings of the campground nestled in a cove at the bottom amongst palm and olive trees; the managers’ quarters, and the bar, the lavatories and shower house, half empty at the end of the season. My daughter and I took a place right along the driveway at the edge of the beach, where we could look back at the lights of the city I had driven through, and fell asleep that night to the soft shurr and wash of the surf, just thirty feet away.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by something, a small weight on my chest, something nudging my face, something that meowed interrogatively. One-quarter awake, I caught the cat by the scruff of the neck, and dumped it on Blondie’s sleeping bag.
“Here – take Patchie!” I mumbled, and my daughter said sleepily.
“That’s not Patchie, she’s at home.”
In the dark tent, the cat mewed again. Half-awake, I rolled over and found the flashlight. It wasn’t Patchie; it was a little half-grown cat, white with irregular splotches of caramel and brown, which had slipped under the outside screened part of the tent, and wriggled through the little space where the three zippers met to close the inner part. It mewed, looking expectantly at me. Obviously, if I wanted to get any more sleep, I would have to do something about this. I rummaged in the plastic tub of supplies for the emergency pop-top can of tuna, pulled off the top and put it down. Small sounds, rapturous tiny meows mixed with the urgent slurping of tuna overlaid the constant music of the surf as I went back to sleep. During the rest of the night, I floated occasionally up to the surface of wakefulness, aware of a tiny weight curled up next to me, contentedly purring tuna-scented breath into my face.

“We’ll call it Marbella,” announced my daughter the next morning over our breakfast of hot tea and croissants from the campground store, “Because that’s where we found her.”
“Him. It’s a him, sweetie, and we can’t take him with us. We’re on our way to Granada, and 600 miles from home, at least. And you know how Patchie is. She hates other cats, if they aren’t her kittens.”
Every reason, every rationale— the kitten might belong to someone else, we had four cats already, the vet bill for this one, where would we keep it while we went sight-seeing, there was no place in the VEV for a litter box— I deployed them all.
“But he wants to stay with us,” my daughter insisted. “He picked out our tent in the middle of the night. We have to take him home.”
And the little cat had curled up on my sleeping bag, perfectly at home, radiating assurance that this was where he belonged, that the crowning achievement— status as a Cat of the 1st Order was in his grasp, and glory and everlasting tuna was his, now and ever after.
“We can’t,” I said, finally “We just can’t.”

And we emptied out the tent and packed the car, to the little cat’s evident distress, and finally struck the tent, with him still in it. We emptied him out of it, and rolled it all up, and he tried to get into the car. I put him out, and we drove away, leaving him sitting disconsolately where the tent had been, no doubt wondering what had happened— he had done all those cute kitten things, selected us out to be his Chosen Humans— and here we were heartlessly abandoning him.

“It’s a campground,” I said, “There are lots of people there. Someone will feed him.” But in my heart, I knew that we should have taken him with us. I could have worked out a way. I could have back-tracked into the town, found a grocery store. But I already was challenged almost to the max, just with driving the VEV across strange roads, setting up camp, the strain of coping with the demands of travel in a foreign country, distanced from every support system, and the constant drain of existing responsibilities. The VEV had twice needed repairs on this trip already; they were small and inexpensive repairs, but nerve-wracking.

But we should have brought him with us. He was meant to be ours, and we drove away and left him, and I have felt guilty about it ever since. And that is why I have four cats, all of who did the honor of picking me, and this time I could open the door and say
“Come in. Stay. Let me open a can of tuna for you.”

In Touch With My Inner Martha: Everything and the Kitchen Sink #2

07. October 2004 · Comments Off on In Touch With My Inner Martha: Everything and the Kitchen Sink #2 · Categories: Domestic, General

Being compulsively organized, I carry around a set of paint chips and fabric samples, usually buried in the side pocket of my Korean-bought Coach knock-off shoulder-bag— the one with a side pocket large enough to accommodate a couple of magazines, I know it’s a standard comedy riff, the huge handbag with everything in it…. But how else should I carry around all the necessaries? Not just the keys, checkbook and pen… but the clasp-knife, the powder compact, extra lipstick, address book, second bank account checkbook, backup set of keys, the floppy-disks with whatever I are working on when peripatetically between computers, card case with three sets of cards—personal, business and artistic—the postal forms for registered and return receipt mail, the letters I simply have to answer, a book of stamps, a pad of lined stationary, the steno notebook with notes on everything, a clutch of envelopes, a book of stamps, shot record and passport, a mini-flashlight, two extra pens and a pencil (one of the pens entirely dried up) and a miscellaneous rabble of paper clips, bulldog clips, odd change, wadded-up receipts and a little tin crucifix that is supposed to remind you that Jesus is always with us, knocking around in the bottom depths. Really. I have all this in my purse— I just did an inventory. (When I travel, there are my tickets and passes, a water bottle and a paperback book. When I traveled as a teenager, my bag had all this, my lunch and dirty laundry, in the event we encountered an errant Laundromat, or a picnic area, and the bag weighted twenty pounds.)

I have been prepared for most interesting eventualities over the past thirty-four years, so don’t laugh. I am even prepared for painting over the ghastly wood-grained Formica countertops with heavy, cream-colored paint, especially formulated for garage floors. It seems the trick is to clean them of every speck of dirt and grease, and lightly sand. I have the palm sander, I have the caulk, the masking tape and the paint pan from my last project. Everything, the toaster and blender, the microwave, and the ranks of glass jars with herbs and dry staples are cleared away and stacked on the wood-topped cart that serves as an island in my kitchen, while I scour and clean and sand. The cats watch, curiously from the back of the sofa as I roll out the first coat over the Formica….The paint is thick, and creamy, but it looks like heck. The first thin coat barely covers the Formica pattern, and in other places it looks rather pebbled, as if I had not cleaned off all the grease. The cats stay out of the kitchen area, I don’t think they like the smell of the paint. The second coat goes on when the first is dry; and marvelously, covers the pebbled areas, and the thin places where the wood pattern showed through. I strip away the masking tape, around the edges, and lean against the back of the sofa, enjoying the view. Much better; a vision of cream and blue, against the pale apricot walls. Only the sink itself remains as a patch of blight, but it is now four PM on a Sunday afternoon. I will purchase the new sink after work the next Friday afternoon, and install it before I have to be at work in the vineyards of public radio— I have, after all, been bashing around under the sink before, and vividly recall what must be disconnected.

My plan is derailed, when the Home Depot closest to my workplace is not only out of the specific model I had planned to buy, but takes half an hour to work this out. The nearest outlet with one in stock is a little off my drive to the radio station, so purchase is deferred to Saturday morning, and venturing under the sink to disconnect the disposal, the outfall, the faucets to Sunday. This does not bode well— my last two adventures in plumbing were epics, but at least they developed when I got home, not when I set foot in the store.

The fall-back Home Depot has it in stock, and the box with it, and a small box with the drain kit fits easily into the cavernous trunk of the VEV. At home that evening, I take out the instructions and warranty: it all looks pretty straightforward on paper; an attractive double-sink unit, the same top dimensions and configuration as the crappy metal one. I have the required tools and supplies— a short length of plastic pipe for the drain outfall (left over from installing the new disposal last year), two tubes of calk, a container of plumbers’ putty and the trusty crescent wrench. Sunday morning, I take it in hand, along with a stout screwdriver and dive fearlessly under the sink. It is familiar territory, having ventured into it last year in the cause of installing a new sink faucet. Off comes the garbage disposal, giving me room to reach the underside of the faucet. I notice a small patch of rust already on the disposal unit. Damn. Detaching the faucet from the water supply also goes fairly easily. The newer plastic rings securing the faucet to the underside of the old metal sink are not corroded into place as the originals were, but the metal clips holding the sink in place in the space cut out for it in the Formica countertop are. The cats learn some interesting new words, as the eight clips are loosened and pried free, and the drainpipe from the other sink detached from the “S” bend.

I can indeed lift the sink with two fingers, and yes, it is a piece of cheap crap. I put it down in the living room, and clean the rim of the opening where it was. The new sink should fit exactly into the hole— it is, after all, a standard size, resting on a thick bead of caulk run all the way around. The sink fits neatly; with a little bit of shifting the high-curving rim exactly covered the place taken by the old one. The weight of it and attachment to the drains and faucet is supposed to be sufficient to anchor it in place, but I need to let the caulk solidify first.

Oh, take a break, and go out for a walk, the walk I do every day, and which on Saturdays and Sundays takes ever so longer because of all the neighbors pottering around their yards and garages. Rachel, two streets up and a half-block over, is working on her garden, attended by her nervous Schipperke dog and the three-legged cat. She has a stained-glass fan-light over the main front window, which she did herself, and an amiable boyfriend who does construction and is tinkering with his motorcycle. They are about my age, and are facing the expense and hassle of replacing the wall to wall carpeting… but with what?
“I painted and stenciled the concrete underneath, “ I say, “You want to have a look?” Intrigued, they follow me back to my house, where Rachel takes one look and says
“Oh…it’s like a doll-house, tiny and perfect,” while the boyfriend zeroes in on the bookshelf and quotes the opening lines of “Out of Africa” from memory. They both admire the effect of several layers of paint and sealer over concrete and keep interrupting with their own ideas as I try to explain exactly how I did it.
“I’d show you my house, but it’s a mess,” Rachel says, “I’d hate to have you see it the way it is.” I wonder how much worse than mine it can be, with the living room area rug felted with a fine layer of cat fur, and the old kitchen sink laying in the middle of it.

After they have gone, agreeing excitedly that painting the concrete will be just the thing, I go back to the job at hand, connecting the taps and the drains.
And that is when I realize that the new sink is deeper than the old. The drain running from the disposal sits nearly two inches lower… and the length of pipe from the other sink does not fit…. And I will have to take out the “T”shaped connection that empties both sinks into the u-bend and shorten part of it, but I can’t budge the connector. I need a pipe wrench and a short length of new pipe.
“Only one trip, for a project?” says the cashier at the hardware store consolingly, as she rings them up for me. “That’s pretty good, actually. “
“I have everything from the last couple of projects,” I tell her. “Even a saw to trim the pipe. Everything and the kitchen sink.”

I put the old sink and the connectors in the box the new one came in, and put it all out by the trash. It is gone before the trash collectors come around the next morning. Someone else wants to upgrade their sink, I guess.

Autographed Copies of “The Book”!!!

04. October 2004 · Comments Off on Autographed Copies of “The Book”!!! · Categories: General

I have a number of copies of my book “Our Grandpa Was an Alien”, and if anyone would like to purchase an autographed copy, with personal inscription directly from me ($13.95 + $3.00 p & p), just let me know. I have not yet been given a warning letter from Paypal for naughty things on this blog, so I still have an account there. (Checks and money orders are fine, too.)
Comment, or e-mail me, if you would like one.
And the virtual book tour is still in the planning stage…

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