Me too

 I try to avoid thinking about politics and what's going on, but the witch hunts are becoming serious and ... .

Oh, well.

Better to just focus on the frivolous and foolish.

Here's a joke from a 75-year-old Fibber McGee and Molly radio show:

Wallace Wimple, "Wimp," as Fibber calls him, often provokes Sweetie Face, his domineering wife, who teaches judo classes in the Marine Corps. One day, he told Fibber that when he asked Sweetie Face what she was doing she said she was practicing her weight-lifting and he said back to her, "'My goodness, you do that every time you get up out of a chair.'  And then when I regained consciousness, she'd left the room." 

AHAHAhahaha...ha...ha....  Well, I guess you have to hear Wimp tell it.  Or, as Molly would say, "'Tain't funny, McGee!"

Aw shucks.

Here's an episode of the show from November 24, 1942, that I enjoyed.  It's about women taking over men's jobs.  Eight decades ago.  Nothing new, is there?

Fibber McGee & Molly Show

 

When the present is too much to face, why not retreat into the past?  Things were better then. Or so I choose to believe.

PS:  This old cartoon gave me a chuckle.  Dream on, boys!

A day in the life

 Windy, wet and cold.  And noisy.  Yes,  noisy.  But being topside is better than being below,  so stick it out as long as you can.  Lucky guys whose ratings require them to work on the flight deck.  They probably don't realize it, but these days are the best days of their lives.  

Just for the heck of it:

Not only do I saunter, I amble and mosey

 

“People ought to saunter in the mountains -- not hike. Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them." 

~ John Muir

What's going on?

 

Each day seems to bring some new lurch toward totalitarianism.  I don't understand what's going on at all, or why.  I keep hoping we've reached the worst of it and from now on it will get better.  But it doesn't.  It just keeps getting worse.

I started re-reading Nora Waln's memoir of her stay in Germany from 1934 to 1938, The Approaching Storm.  Things were fine, even optimistic, in the country in the early days of the National Socialist regime, but day by day, little by little, things got worse, terribly worse, until she and her husband had to flee for their lives.  And she wasn't even Jewish, nor was her husband.  He was an English classical musician, studying the great German composers, and she was an American Quaker of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction.  Didn't matter.  They had to get out or end up in a concentration camp.

How soon will that be true of us normies in these times?  Will it really become true? 

Klagen und Klatschen verboten!

Afghanistan -- Notes from a deployment

Random notes from deployment:

"I love working for Uncle Sam. Lets me know just who I am! If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home!"
"I’ll tie back my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on, I’ll pass as your comrade as we march along."
I have my blood type written on both my boots, as well as written in indelible ink on my body.
"It's okay to be scared; you just don't want to show it."  Sorry....
Sometimes nothing can be done, even though we try so hard.
I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I have added a new phrase to my vocabulary: "Drive on." Short for "Suck it up, shut up and drive on."
The 11th was a very bad day in Black Rock.
I am so tired.
“I am ready. I have repented my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like a man.”
I am in a place where to show your fear is worse than cowardice. It's a sin.
"The individual must have rendered satisfactory performance under enemy fire while actively participating in a ground engagement."

I have officially seen the elephant and I am on the other side of the line now.
“Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.”
I go to sleep with my cheek resting on the cool barrel of my M9. Wake me gently....
I am so tired. I am so very tired.

I may be killed doing this job. I've thought about it. I'm okay with it.
"And I heard as it were the noise of thunder, One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' And I saw."
"And I looked and behold, a pale horse. And his name that sat on it was Death. And Hell followed with him."
"Though I ask naught else of God, I pray to Him: 'But these were boys, and died. Be gentle, God, to soldiers.'"
It doesn't hurt me. You want  to feel how it feels? You want to know that it doesn't hurt me?

Sgt V was killed in combat on the 23d but they didn't release his name until today, meaning his wife was notified of his death on Christmas eve.
I should be moving on in less than three months and, God willing, will never come back. But I will never leave this place.

I am exhausted, I am exhausted. I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
I will take a lot of things with me from this Afghanistan experience. The most important ones are inside me that no one will ever know about.

But I also have a spent and deformed bullet from an SVD, and shrapnel from an 82mm mortar shell that have special meaning for me.
Can't sleep.

I no longer have anything in common with my old friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Their lives and interests seem trivial and pointless.

"There’s this huge sense of urgency any time the helicopter flies. It’s such a violent machine.  It shakes and it screams and it’s going some place and you see these guns hanging off the side and all these men with weapons." --Sgt T
Well, never again for me. My last helo ride is ridden.
No matter how much I sleep I am always tired. Everything appears as if it were under water. When people speak to me I don't respond. Not immediately. I have to force my brain to engage, grasp that some action is required of me, determine what it is, compel my body to act.

So ... I have hearing loss as a result of exposure to an "intense impulse sound" -- that is, an  explosion. I also have an exaggerated startle response and generalized anxiety. Oh, and trouble sleeping. And I will be having PCS and probably PPCS.

But it's all good, I still possess all my appendages, am not blind or..., and my brain still functions manageably. I have a face.  I am not... well, there are so many ways to still be alive yet.... I can't even write them down. They are too horrible.

Sometimes I think I am all cried out. But there are always more tears. And not one of them can you let out. I have to be the strong one.  But inside I am shaking...with anguish, despair and pain such as can never be described. What do I say inside my head so often? "I'm sorry!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" I'm sorry I couldn't stop this. I'm sorry I couldn't help. I'm sorry you are in such pain. I'm sorry.  I'm sorry you are going to die. I'm sorry I couldn't stop you from dying. I'm sorry I didn't know what to do to fix it.  I'm sorry God did not answer our prayers.  I'm sorry the universe is silent in the face of our cries for help, our cries to be saved, our cries to be rescued. Our cries not to die.  I'm sorry I am so helpless in your need.  I'm sorry you are dead.
But I will be along soon enough myself. The pain and the fear and the unheeded pleading for help will engulf me soon enough too. Soon enough.

These are my boys. How can I abandon them? I've tried every thing I can to get my second tour extended. But no go.  What will my days be like without carbine and pistol, PBA and Kevlar, MREs and A-rations, without guys who clutch my hand so hard it hurts?
A week...a week...and then it's all over. On my exit flight I will brush Sebastapol with my right sleeve, as von Schlieffen might have said.  The thing is -- I don't want to go. I don't. I can't imagine not being here. I want to be the last one out. Every day hurts so much.
Oh, who can understand?
"Nothing but hurt left here. Nothing but bullets and pain and the bled-out slumping and all the fucks and goddamns and Jesus Christs of the wounded. Nothing left here but the hurt." --BT
I should be thinking: "I made it through!" Through so much. So very much. But I'm not.
See you when I see you!

“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”
― Sebastian Junger

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline
 

The more training we receive, the more real it becomes. Watching clips of IEDs exploding and what they can do to a soldier, marine, sailor, or airmen intensified these feelings. Working with wounded and many times amputated individuals after they left the field at my command could not prepare me enough for having the trauma happen right in front of me. Visions of gunshots, amputations, and blasts fill my dreams at night and often wake me up as I wonder what in the world was I thinking by volunteering and asking for this deployment.

 

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”
― Bram Stoker

What truth soldiers would speak 

None would hear, and none repeat.

Double Standards

 I was reading an essay by Theodore Dalrymple,  a thoughtful writer of conservative persuasion, who casually remarked in an aside that once you've participated in one orgy you've participated in them all.  That implied that Mr. Moral Rectitude had not only attended one orgy, but several.  That brought me up short and started me reconsidering my attitude to Teddy boy.  But then, I reflected, he's just a guy after all, so what do you expect?  *Shrug*

Then I thought what if Heather Mac Donald, also a thoughtful writer of conservative persuasion, had casually remarked  in one of her essays that she had participated in orgies and was rather jaded about group sex.  I expect that would be the last time she would ever write for any conservative publication.

Shooing my mind away from imagining Theodore and Heather in sexual congress amidst a pile of writhing bodies, I reflected on the way men always boast about how many sexual partners they've had and what sexual adventures they've experienced, yet condemn any woman they suspect of having had more than one sexual partner as a slut.

That frosts my cookies, as grandma used to say, because where do they think they get all those girls they proudly claim they've totally wrecked? 

But then, thinking further, I realized that the most harsh criticism of me personally for things I have done -- or they thought I had done -- has come from women, and that criticism has been viciously personal and intended to do me emotional harm.  I even once casually mentioned that in a brief stint as a waitress when I was in college that I enjoyed flirting with male customers and that doing so earned me nice tips.  A woman who heard me said that she, too, had once been a waitress but she didn't have to demean herself to get good tips.  See, I was demeaning myself by having fun with some guys on their lunch break.  Thus, she established her moral superiority to me, little hussy that I was.

She couldn't grasp -- didn't want to grasp -- that I just liked my customers and enjoyed bantering with them.  The good tips were merely lagniappe, not the reason I flirted.  I like making people feel good and enjoy themselves.  Much of daily life is a boring grind, sometimes stressful and often disappointing.  So why not spend a few minutes putting a bit of fun into someone's life?

Phooey.

Anyway, I do suspect that, aside from patrons of professionals, the average male actually has fewer sexual partners than a reasonably attractive female.  I have gotten hit on more times than I can count over the years, but never once have I hit on a man.  It wouldn't even occur to me to do so.  I've flirted, even teased, sure, but the interaction was always initiated in some way by the man, not by me.  It's fun, but it's not serious; at least not in my case and I think the guys have understood it's just banter.  

But had I been so inclined, I could have had sex with every man who ever hit on me.  Could a man say the same thing about every woman he's hit on?  I don't think so.

 

P.S.

Boulogne, 1973

 I was talking with my mother regarding the post I made the other day about her trip where she met my father.  In it I mentioned that she had visited Egypt.  She recalled that she left shortly after she arrived and abandoned her plans to visit other countries in the area because there was an uneasy sense that something was about to happen.  Thinking back, she couldn't put her finger on it, but she just wanted to get back to Europe and then go on home.

She went to France briefly and then decided England would be safer if something happened and she couldn't get back to the States.  Not long after she arrived, the Yom Kippur war broke out and things got grim, even in London town.  She stayed through December before returning to the States, only to encounter the OPEC oil embargo and the first so-called oil crisis.  Grim times.  

London, 1973

My father was assigned to one of the carriers of the Sixth Fleet flying an F-4B when his leave was over so he was right in the thick of things. I looked up what the Navy was doing during that war and was surprised to discover just how close we came to war with the Soviet Union.  I found this passage in one article (link below):

Soviet destroyer so close during Yom Kippur war.

The Soviets rode herd on the American vessels so aggressively that Adm. Daniel Murphy, the Sixth Fleet commander, sent a semaphore message to his Soviet counterpart asking him to adhere to an accord obliging their vessels not to point guns or missiles at the other.

As tensions mounted, Adm. Murphy reckoned the chances of the Soviet squadron attempting a first strike against his fleet at 40 percent. (In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy put the chances of war at between one in three and even.) Adm. Murphy, in an interview with this writer a decade after the event, said that if he had detected Soviet preparations for a strike there would have been no time to consult Washington before taking action. If his fleet survived the opening exchange, he said, he planned to hunt down and sink every Soviet naval vessel remaining in the Mediterranean.

The Soviet commander, Admiral Yevgeni Volubuyev, was meanwhile preparing scenarios of his own. Lacking air cover, he planned, if the crunch came, to strike first at the American aircraft carriers, disabling them before they could launch their planes.

In the US Naval War College Review in 2004, Lyle J. Goldstein and Yuri M. Zhukov quote from a personal diary kept by the former chief of staff of the Soviet squadron, Capt. Yevgeni Semenov. Dubious about the chances of winning “the battle of the first salvo,” as he called it, Semenov mused that “(The squadron’s) attack groups need to use all weaponry –missiles, artillery, torpedoes, rockets – the whole lot, since it is unlikely that anything will remain afloat after an air strike. We are kamikazes.”
Unlike the Cuban missile crisis, the world at large, focused on the land battles, remained ignorant of the superpower confrontation at sea.

F4 shadowing Soviet Tu-95 bomber, Med., Oct., 1973.

The Soviet squadron had 52 ships when the land war began on October 5. The Sixth Fleet initially had 48 vessels, including two carriers -- the Independence, then in port in Greece, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt in Spain. The Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Murphy to avoid any move that could be construed by the Russians or the Arabs as direct involvement in the conflict. The US Navy made a point of announcing it had no ships in the war zone.

As the land war continued unabated, nerves in both fleets frayed. The solitary Soviet destroyers that normally shadowed the carriers – “tattle tales” the Americans called them -- were reinforced by heavier warships armed with missiles. Although ranking officers had never before been noted on the tattle tales, the Americans now became aware of two admirals on the ships following them. The Americans, in turn, kept planes over the Soviet fleet prepared to attack missile launchers being readied for firing. Both sides were aware that their major vessels were being tracked by submarines.

The little-known US-Soviet confrontation during Yom Kippur War

An in-depth analysis of these events I found in a Naval War College Review issue:  

 A Tale of Two Fleets—A Russian Perspective on the 1973 Naval Standoff in the Mediterranean

It's hard to believe that only weeks before the US and the Soviet Union were on good enough terms that American tourists could travel across the whole country virtually unhindered.  Things may be bad now, but they were truly terrible during the  Cold War.  It's amazing there was no World War III.  If that was avoided, maybe we can avoid war with China and solve our own problems and move on to better times.

Fingers crossed.

Inevitable

I am afraid there will be a moment when you fail me, friend. You will turn slightly away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field there will be no one.

 

 

 

 

At least once a week...

 

Cute Meet

My mom met my dad on a ship sailing from Yokohama,  Japan, to Khabarovsk, USSR, in the late summer of 1973.  She had just finished working at the Barsky Unit in Saigon.  This specialized in burn victims. It was part of the Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery funded by Children's Medical Relief International, name after Dr. Arthur Barsky.

Surgery on a child suffering from napalm  burns.

Prior to that she had been a nursing student and then when her brother, who had been drafted, was killed in Viet Nam, she joined the Army and served as a nurse at Cu Chi.  The only thing she has ever said about that episode in her life is that she thought she would never be able to get the blood out from under her fingernails.  She's never said anything at all about her time with CMRI.

Army nurses in Viet Nam. A tough bunch.

So anyway, she decided to return home by way of Japan and the Soviet Union.  It was the era of detente and American tourists were being allowed to visit the USSR I think for the first time since the start of the Cold War.
Her travel plan was, after visiting friends in Japan,  to sail to the Soviet Maritimes and and travel by the Trans-Siberian Express train to Moscow, thence to Europe where she would travel by Eurail pass and other public transportation to as many countries as she could before her money ran out.  She had no job and no schedule, but she didn't have a lot of money.  In fact, the route she chose to get to Europe, her main destination, was the cheapest one she could find.

A Navy F4J over North Viet Nam during Linebacker II.

My dad was on leave from the Navy and had 30 days.  He had been serving with a carrier battle group off North Viet Nam, and had participated in Linebacker II, before being sent to Japan.  He wanted to visit the Soviet Union and took the same itinerary as my mother except, as he had little time, he would fly from Khabarovsk  to Moscow and

Aboard ship from Yokohama to Vladivostok.

On the Trans-Siberian Express.

only from there take the train to Western Europe.  While her initial destination was Frankfurt, Germany, his was Ostend, Belgium.  He would take the ferry to  Dover, and on to London to visit a British friend, then fly to Munich to visit another friend, a German immigrant to the States who had joined the US Navy and become an aviator like my father, but as a civilian

BSA posed next to a Spitfire at RAF Biggin Hill.

worked for BMW's motorcycle division.  Together they would spend a week or so riding around the Alps on R90S sport bikes borrowed from the BMW factory.  Then he would fly back to London where he would buy a BSA Thunderbolt and ride around the British Isles, mostly visiting old World War II-era airfields and the like before flying back to the States and his next duty station.
As I've heard the story, my future mother and father got to chatting as they wandered about the ship, at meals and whatnot, and found, having both served in Viet Nam (though my father never set foot there -- if he had he would have been having, as he said, a very bad day at the office).  They spent time together walking around

Park in Khabarovsk.

Khabarovsk and otherwise spending time together before dad took an Aeroflot Il-62 to Moscow, where he stayed at the Hotel Metropol and spent a few days sightseeing before taking a train for Belgium.

He recalls a few things from Moscow.  One was that there were kiosks selling some clear liquid from a dispenser, but instead of having disposable paper cups, there was only one drinking glass, attached to the kiosk by a chain that everyone drank from.  The other was that there were a lot of pedestrians but few stores and no advertising.  The city was very dark at night with

GUM department store, Moscow.

no neon signs and not much traffic.  At the hotel restaurant, which was quite grand, the menu extensive, but everything he asked for was not available, so he finally asked what they had.  That was chicken and rice, and that's all he ate his whole time there.

 The train trip west was memorable for his noting the fact that whenever the dual-track rail line approached a river crossing the two lines separated widely and there were two bridges far apart.  Having just finished flying combat missions over North Viet Nam, it was obvious to my father  that the crossings had been built with air attack in mind and any raiders would have to deal with destroying not just one, but two bridges.  

Sight seen from the trans-Siberian Express.

My mother recalls the train trip across Siberia as incredibly tedious and seemingly never-ending, without much to see but trees and the occasional rail yard in a small town, and some farms or road crossings that swiftly passed by her compartment window.  Whenever she tried to take a photo, the old lady concierge at the end of her car told her in English "No pictures!"  But she managed to take a few anyway. 

Most of her fellow passengers were Japanese students traveling to Moscow to

View from train compartment window.

study at the university there.  They largely kept to themselves and seemed not to be interested in the other passengers on the train, including her.  She did make friends with a Russian traveler who said he was a musician.  This was not too long after Salvador Allende had been overthrown in Chile and she brought this up as a conversation starter but all he would say is, "I'm a musician.  I don't know about politics."  And that was that.  

She did manage to make friends with one Japanese student, a girl who seemed quite nervous and ill at ease.  Mostly she wanted to know what my mother thought about Japan.  She promised to meet her at her hotel when they arrived in Moscow so they could sight-see together, but she never showed.

Both my mother and father remarked that there was an amazing transformation passing from East Germany into West Germany:  Lights at night!  Lots and lots of them.  It was like transitioning to another planet.  Both also remarked that the doors of their train compartments were locked without notice and they had no food until they arrived at their destinations.  Both were relieved to have passed through the Communist Bloc countries safely, feeling that, arriving in Western Europe, they had reached paradise.

By chance, they ran into each other again when they lodged at the same zimmer near Salzburg, Austria.  She rode pillion on his motorcycle to Munich for Oktoberfest, after which he turned in his BMW and flew to England and she continued on to Italy, the Balkins, Greece and Egypt.

They didn't meet again until 1975, when they ran into each other quite by chance in San Francisco.  Both were walkers and San Fran in those days was still a safe and pleasant city to walk around in, the cable cars not yet mere tourist attractions and no hoards of aggressive homeless, junkies and panhandlers.  So they walked and talked for hours.  They kept in touch over the next couple of years, and spent as much time together as they could, finally marrying in 1977.