The Wisdom of Calvin

 

Preparing

We've  decided to add an adjacent ranch to our holdings, some 10,000 acres.  The owners wanted $1,000 an acre for it but there have been no takers for years because there's not a lot that can be done with it -- limited livestock grazing potential is about it, plus, with care, one annual crop of alfalfa hay, probably mostly Grade 2, some Grade 1 -- so they were happy to have us take it off their hands for a comparatively modest sum.  But it does have water, and water in the west is more valuable than gold and silver.  But we'll put this acreage in a conservation reserve program (lower taxes!) and leave the water where nature wants it.  We'll also do a lot of restoration work planting native vegetation to help re-establish a flourishing ecosystem.
As we completed the sale, the owners of a 6,000-acre ranch adjacent to our new holdings came to us offering a very reasonable price for their ranch. It was inherited land they did not know what do do with and wanted to be rid of.  We were happy to acquire it and for now, at least, also put it in a conservation reserve program.  
So in total we've added some 25 square miles to our fiefdom.  There's lots of game on the new land.  Aside from some roads and a few other improvements, most of it looks just as it did before the white man came.  That is, unless you are a botanist and can recognize all the invasive species.  And spot the changes caused by a lowered water table and hard-panning in a few places.  

One reason for the eagerness to sell ranch land is the collapse in beef prices during the Covid restaurant restrictions.  Prices have come back somewhat, but now there's a war on cattle and other livestock production because it's supposedly bad for the planet.  So people are nervous about having so much marginally productive lands on their hands, lands that are still taxed and involve potential legal liabilities for all sorts of things and require insurance to help protect against those.  But for us the additional land has real benefits.  One of these is security.  It's not a problem yet and our neighbors are good people, but since the governments, federal, state and local, no longer feel it necessary to enforce civil peace or prosecute criminals, we have to be practical and prepare for what may come.  The more we can isolate ourselves and our assets from the wider world the better off we should be.  So, at no little cost, obvious access roads are being obliterated and surveillance and monitoring equipment is being installed. And soon there will be only one way to easily enter our land and it will be double-gated and guarded.   Once you pass through that second gate you are safe in your person and property.  Isn't that worth a lot?

The world today

 

Baby Blue

 Art Laboe, the legendary DJ who passed away recently, broadcast a dedication to me on my birthday when I was in an overseas DoDEA high school. It played over Armed Forces Radio Pacific, as it was then called. The request wasn’t called in but mailed in some time in advance, but Laboe made it happen on the right date.
The song was “Baby Blue” by the Echoes, popular decades before I was born, but it seemed fresh and new to me. I still remember hearing that dedication over the radio and being amazed and thrilled. And I still love that song. 
The boy who dedicated it to me, a service brat as was I, I had known since we were seven years old.  Parental transfers meant we often didn't see each other for years, but we always kept in touch, and it was always assumed by both of us that we would marry.  We were meant for each other.  There could be no doubt. 
Then 9/11 happened and as soon as he was old enough, even though he had been accepted at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, he postponed his education to join the Marine Corps.  He was wounded in the fighting at Najaf and after a series of infections and amputations lasting more than a year, died of septic shock.

 

No more than a memory

Everyone needs a ghost.  No matter how busy our lives, how interesting our pleasures, there are depths of loneliness  that neither work nor pleasure can plumb, a little core of ourselves that needs someone to talk to or simply be with. Who can fill this need better than an understanding ghost?
Each of us not only needs a ghost but has a ghost.  We cannot see it or touch it or hear it, but it is there and keeps us company when there is no one else. A ghost, perhaps, is no more than a memory of someone once well loved. 

The Intruders, first broadcast by CBS Radio Mystery Theater, March 30, 1976:

Old War

As I've written before, one of my grandfathers was a naval aviator and his wife, my grandmother, was a navy nurse.  They got married before Pearl Harbor and both served throughout the war and stayed in the service afterwards.  During the war, my grandfather was shot down at sea and listed as MIA and probably dead, but was rescued weeks later.  Two other times he made it back to his carrier but his plane was so badly shot up that it was unrepairable and pushed over the side.  In all, he was wounded three times.  My grandmother served aboard a hospital ship during several island invasions.  The most harrowing was Iwo Jima, where casualties overwhelmed the ship, lining the passageways and filling the deck spaces.  She was sent ashore during the fighting to carry out triage on the beach. She went among the wounded like the angel of death, deciding who would live and who would be left to die.  Those who were not evacuated knew they were going to die as soon as she looked at their wounds and then moved on without calling up stretcher bearers to take them to the evacuation point.  After the war, my grandfather flew one of the first Navy jets, the F2H-2 Banshee and then the F9F-2, in which he flew flak suppression missions over North Korea.  My grandmother again served on a hospital ship during the war, and treated casualties from the Inchon landings.

My other grandfather I haven't written much because I didn't often see him, although I liked him a lot, because he retired to New England, which was not convenient to visit.  He joined the Army Air Force in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor and flew P-40s in New Guinea and then P-51s in England.  After the war, he left the service, and from what I understand, thought to get a job as an airline pilot, but single-engine fighter pilots held no attraction for the airlines.  They preferred transport pilots -- those who had flown military versions of the DC-3, DC-4 and Constellation.  Even multi-engine bomber pilots held little interest for the airlines because there were so many transport pilots to choose from.  In my grandfather's case, he eventually found a job with a Central American airline, TACA Guatemala, flying war surplus C-47s.   He was called back into the service for the Berlin Airlift, flying coal into the beleaguered city in the same type of plane.  After the Airlift, he decided to remain in the Air Force, it being a better life for him and his wife and  babies than going back to his old job.  He was assigned to a Douglas B-26 (nee A-26) unit stationed in Japan.  When the North Koreans invaded the South, he flew some of the first combat missions against them.  Due to a number of difficulties locating and identifying enemy targets in the fast-moving and confused early days of the fighting, he served stints as a ground-based Forward Air Controller, where he saw combat from the foot soldier's point of view.  After serving in Korea, he was recruited to join the Strategic Air Command, where he flew B-47s and later B-52s out of bases in New England. 

Dead Chinese soldiers killed in hand-to-hand fighting in front of US foxholes.

During the Viet Nam war, he flew bombing missions out of Guam, including during the Christmas bombing, after which he retired to a quiet life in Maine. 

Retreating US soldiers pass by dead Americans killed in a Chinese ambush

From what I have learned, his experiences in the Korean War affected him more than those of the other wars he was in, perhaps because he was involved in a massive military defeat and retreat by American forces and the largest seaborne evacuation in history, dwarfing the Dunkirk operation, the rescue of the United Nations armed forces trapped at Hungnam by the Chinese as well as many thousands of Korean refugees in what was called the Christmas Miracle. He saw it all first hand on the ground, not merely from the air, although he saw it that way, too.  Maybe it was a combination of seeing the bird's eye, or god-like, view of the fighting and then being right there on the ground in the middle of it, that affected him so profoundly.  The Chinese invasion of Korea was massive (250,000 troops), extremely brutal, and overwhelmingly violent.  Korean civilians fled the Chinese onslaught as the Americans fought desperately to at least slow down the invaders.  Once the troops reached the harbor at Hungnam, they formed a perimeter and held off the attacks of Chinese while almost 100,000 civilian Koreans were evacuated on US Navy ships, then all supplies and equipment were loaded onto LSTs. Nothing was left behind.  Finally, the American troops were evacuated under the protection of naval gunfire, including the massive cannon of the battleship Missouri.  When all were embarked, Navy demolition teams blew up all the harbor facilities in a series of massive explosions that rocked the ships still in the harbor.

Jeep blown up by Chinese artillery.  One killed, three wounded.

Bombed train burning in Pyongyang.

The living walk, the dead ride.  US troops retreating.

Dead mortar platoon sergeant killed by Chinese arty.

Dead American GI's pet dog refuses to leave him.

US "Long Tom" artillery fires on approaching Chinese.

US Army howitzers ring Hungnam perimeter continuously firing on Chinese

Captured US soldiers, hands tied behind their backs, executed by the Chinese.

American GI captured by the Chinese, hands tied behind his back, executed and left along the road,.

October!