Seeing An Old Friend at the Nassau Inn

He was sitting comfortably in the lobby of the colonial era Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey when the statuesque blonde passed in front of him. His eyes scanned her like a barcode reader as she walked away. He collected and stored all of the data – real, imagined and suspected – that male DNA had programmed him to collect for purposes of survival of the species. Hotel lobbies, he thought, are great.

Ten minutes later his friend arrived, striding briskly past the wood-paneled front desk area into the brightly lit lobby with its warm yellow walls. They greeted each other briefly and, with the familiarity of old pals, his friend gave him some clothing on hangars to hold onto while he checked with the front desk clerk. There are some relationships where you can assume assistance without asking and this was their relationship. And yet, they had seen each other only a few times in the nearly 30 years since high school graduation. The last time had been at least ten years ago. Yet, the years had been bridged in that short moment of comfortable recognition and it was as if they had never been apart.

While his friend went to his room to freshen up and hang up the change of clothing, he reminisced about their boyhood and teen years.

He had first met Bill when they were both in seventh grade, except that at the time Bill was using his first name, Irving. They had lived four small one-story brick houses away from each other in a typical 1950s subdivision teeming with kids, dogs, and bicycles – and without fences. Their parents were the young men and women who, after World War Two, had turned their attentions to starting families and turning farmland into vast tracks of virgin suburbia.

He and Irv, who was quickly labeled “Oyving” as a term of dubious affection by his new pals, almost always walked to the schoolbus stop together. Irv would patiently wait on the couch by the door and talk with his parents until he was ready. After school they played outside, no matter how hot or how cold. Once, while wrestling in Irv’s back yard, Irv’s kneecap had popped out and he had called Irv’s parents for instructions on how to pop it back in place. Irv remained cool, as he always did, except for an expression on his face that betrayed his pain.

When they became teenagers, they both took up smoking. (They also both quit later in life.) Exhibiting the style that was completely natural for him, one night Irv leaned nonchalantly against the fireplace mantle in his parents finished basement and proceeded to stoke up a pipe. Pipes were for cool people back then. Irv’s father was hidden behind the newspaper he was reading and his mother was sewing when she noticed the downy-faced pipesmoker in their midst. Very calmly, his mother said, “Harvey… Look. Irving is smoking.” His father, peering slowly over his newspaper, drawled, “Yes. He is.” Then he went back to reading. There was no doubt after that where Irv, his dog and his sister got their laid-back qualities of innate unflappable coolness.

Irv grew into a tall lanky young man, always soft-spoken, with blonde hair and that plague of teenagers, an imperfect complexion. He was a good student, always did his homework and managed to excel at all of his courses. He tried out for and made the varsity football team through sheer determination. As a forerunner of today’s geeks, he was not a born athlete. And because of his geek qualities, his friends often played jokes on him. But he had been the best of good sports and never, ever responded in an unfriendly way.

Sitting in the comfortable red leather chair at the Nassau Inn decades later, our time traveler laughed out loud. He and Irv had once gone on a winter camping trip in the mountains. Irv drove his parents car. They had taken only the essentials for teenaged boys: hotdogs, beans, marshmallows – and cans of beer. Some beer was left over so they had stowed it under the front passenger seat of the car on the way home. Unfortunately, the beer had frozen overnight and when it began to unfreeze in the heat of the car it was forced through the seams of the cans. After they noticed, they decided to drive the rest of the way home in freezing temperatures with the windows rolled down to get rid of the smell. Irv’s parents, they hoped, would never know they had been drinking alcohol.

On the night of their high school graduation they had gone to a German restaurant and, being 18 now, legally drank beer. That night Irv wrote a touching coming-of-age poem on a beer-drenched napkin. His friend reminiscing in the lobby had kept it, but eventually it was lost. For years he tried unsuccessfully to remember its words.

Irv went on to a top-ranked university and got an engineering degree. Afterwards, he got a job with a company that was on the leading edge with computers. As always, he was rock solid, the salt of the earth. He was smart and reliable. He dressed and behaved conservatively. He bought sensible cars. He saved and invested his money. He succeeded.

After high school, they had seen each other a few times, then there were many years when they had no contact at all. On one occasion during these years when they did see each other, he was amazed at what Irv had become. His complexion had cleared up, he had grown a mustache and he looked like the actor Robert Redford. And he was no longer Irv. He was Bill now. The “Oyving” business was left behind as a not too pleasant boyhood memory.

He had married, become a father, continued to succeed at his career and then divorced. And now, Bill had remarried and the reception was being held at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reminiscing ended when the elevator doors opened and Bill stepped out into the lobby once again. They walked a short distance to the wedding reception, where family and friends awaited Bill’s arrival.

They drank and talked and there were speeches in honor of Bill and his new bride. Our time traveler finally came clean, confessing that which, previously, he had steadfastly denied. He had, indeed, goosed Bill’s younger sister as they were going up the stairs in his house when they were teenagers. They all laughed, except for Bill’s brother-in-law, who remained politely neutral.

Bill and his bride danced the traditional first dance. Then something happened. A tall statuesque blonde, whose data Bill’s old friend had stored permanently in his male mind for survival of the species purposes, walked onto the dance floor and began dancing with Bill.

And then he knew. She was Bill’s daughter from his first marriage, now a young woman. He had met her once as a child. OMG!

Every Gun Is Always Loaded All the Time

He stopped shooting, but the adrenalin in his body didn’t. Feet solidly planted, knees slightly bent and eyes narrowed, he drew the pistol in close to his right shoulder at the high ready position and swiveled his head to the left and then to the right, searching for more threats. Finding none, he relaxed, but kept the weapon pointed to his front.

An arm’s length behind him, the Safety Officer barked, “Is shooter finished?”

With a nod, he said, “Yes.”

The Safety Officer then continued with the expected series of commands, to which he complied with the correct actions:

“Unload and show clear!” Holding the Springfield XD45 semi-automatic in his right hand, still pointed downrange, he pressed the slide release button with his right thumb and caught the magazine as it ejected into his left hand. He placed the partially loaded mag in his left pocket. That was step one. Then he pulled the slide back, causing the live round in the chamber to eject out onto the ground. He held the slide back until the S.O. leaned over and peered intensely into the chamber to verify that the gun was empty. That was step two.

“Slide Down!” He allowed the slide to return to the closed position, not letting it fly forward, but restraining its travel for a gentle closing. The gun was now in firing configuration, but it was unloaded.

“Hammer down!” He pointed the gun safely downrange at the earth wall called a berm and pulled the trigger. Now the gun was absolutely safe, it having been fully demonstrated that it was completely unloaded. That was step three.

“Holster!” He reholstered the XD, making sure that the web between his thumb and forefinger put no pressure on its grip safety, even though the gun was definitely now safe. This was a habit he had consciously developed. His gun could not be fired unless the grip safety on the back of the gun handle was fully depressed, as it would be during firing. He followed the main rule of gun safety, drilled into all properly trained shooters: EVERY GUN IS ALWAYS LOADED ALL THE TIME. The last thing he did was stoop over and retrieve the single live .45 caliber round that he had just ejected onto the ground.

All of this took but a few seconds, then the S.O. yelled, “The range is safe!” and held the electronic shot timer so that a second S.O. behind him could see the time it had recorded.

“Eleven twenty three!” This came from the Safety Officer who had been behind him with the timer and was intended for a second S.O. who made notes on a clipboard. Also, “Good shooting, young man!” The shooter smiled. Only if you were very young or very old did anybody call you a “young man.” He himself was two months short of being 63.

He walked downrange, accompanied by the two safety officers and several other shooters who would place pieces of tape over the holes he had made in the cardboard targets, making them ready for the next shooter.

“Down zero!” called out the S.O. with the timer as he moved from the first target to the second. The second S.O. wrote this on a form attached to his clipboard.”Down two!” The second S.O. noted this for target two. “Down one!” This was for the third target.

So he was down a total of three points. Half of this, or one point five seconds, would be added to his raw time score, which was from the moment the timer’s start buzzer had gone off until he fired his last shot. Points down reflected accuracy or, better stated, some degree of lack of accuracy. On the first target, he had placed all his rounds in the perforated circle representing the center of mass. That was zero points down. On his second target he had placed two of his shots just outside the circle. That was one point down each. On his third target he had placed one of his shots just outside of the circle for another point down. This accounted for the three points down.

“Here you go, Curt.” said another shooter, handing him the empty magazine his XD had ejected onto the ground as he had executed the realistic encounter with imaginary bad guys.

As Curt walked with his range bag to the next stage of the match, he did the math in his head. Raw score of eleven point two three added to half of three points. His score was 12.73 seconds. Not bad. Not bad at all, he thought! Not good enough to put him in the running with the really good shooters, the guys with scores around seven seconds for this stage of the match, but not bad at all. At least he could say that he was “the worst of the best.” He was making progress in his sport – and it was about time.

Note: Watch champion shooter Dan Burwell shoot the 2009 International Defensive Pistol Association Maryland State Championship Match! http://bit.ly/8kGxkJ

In Line for the H1N1 Flu Shot

My son is home from college, so my wife sends me with him to get the H1N1 shot. She says I need the shot, too, because I have a chronic health condition. She drives us to the designated location for this Saturday, our local community college.

Traffic slows before we get onto the campus. Cars by the dozens share our destination. We want to arrive 30 minutes early so we’ll be among the first to get our shots when they open the doors.

Now we’re on campus, still in the car. A large white van with antennas sits in the parking lot. I count about a dozen police officers and one sheriff’s deputy – and this is just what I can see from where we are at the moment. The sheriff and fire department EMS are also present.

My son and I get out of the car and start walking to the back of the line. On the way I hear someone say that when we get to the back someone from the Health Department will give us tickets. People who come after the tickets run out will not be able to get the shot. It’s a neat system and is needed because before the ticket system a lot of people were breaking into line and there was a lot of tension and worse.

People have brought lawn chairs and blankets. We pass moms and dads with kids, moms alone with kids, dads alone with kids, grandparents with kids and aunts and uncles with kids. Kids in this case includes teenagers. We pass others in the “initial target groups,” which also includes people aged 25 to 64 who have a chronic health condition. We pass people who are way over 64 and are not accompanied by kids. This scene is playing out all across America and the rest of the world. We’ve all seen the photos.

There are thousands of illegal immigrants in our county, but we see very few who might be in that category standing in line. Where are all the others? Are they coming on a different day? Are they coming at all? Did they have a meeting and decide not to all show up at once because they would draw too much attention to themselves? The people in line who look like they might be illegal immigrants are all parents with small children, just doing what any parent would do. I wonder, as we walk by, if anybody in line actually resents these parents and their kids.

Everybody understands the situation. There’s a shortage of a potentially life saving drug. Only certain categories of people are eligible to get the shot. The County website says “once vaccine supply is sufficient and demand in the initial target groups is met, we will be able to expand our vaccination efforts to those beyond the initial target groups.” Wash hands. Wash hands. Wash hands. Purell. Purell. Purell. Bow, don’t shake? Preposterous.

We walk and continue walking. Finally we are at the back of the line, which is the back of the line only for an instant because hundreds more are still coming. From the sky the long line of people must look like a skinny upside-down letter “U,” with the side where people are facing towards the front being much shorter than the side containing people still walking to the rear.

We enter the line and face forward. A Health Department staffer gives us our tickets. Fifteen minutes later the line begins to advance. We feel good now because the still arriving masses have changed our relative status to “front of the line.” Eventually we are within sight of the entrance doors, maybe 150 feet back. Health Department staff are working the lines, keeping them moving and orderly, answering questions, telling people to have their coats off and be ready for the shot because “it will go fast” once inside the building. Now, every 25 feet or so, there are signs specifying who is eligible to receive the vaccination.

I have a few minutes of mental consternation as we get closer and closer to the door. I’m pretty sure I could just keep going and get the shot. Finally, I take a deep breath and decide. I hail down the next Health Department staffer to come by. I give him my ticket so that somebody else can have it. I secretly wish that I could see the person he will give it to.

I am over the age limit for people with chronic conditions. I am 66. My son continues moving forward and I go to wait outside the door from which he will exit after getting the shot.

This is rationing. It is necessary, assuming that the vaccine shortage can’t be helped. We may have more rationing in the future. I’m not saying it’s bad and I’m not saying it’s good. At least the shot is free.

My wife is going to be very angry with me.

Wash. Wash. Wash. Purell. Purell. Purell. Bow? Still preposterous!

Epilogue: On December 15, 2009, after the county lifted restrictions on who could get the shot, the author got his H1N1 flu shot. It took only one hour and was completely uneventful.

Spirits in the Mist at Sailor’s Creek Civil War Battlefield

Last night, just before dark, I took a detour down a narrow back road to visit Sailor’s Creek Battlefield Historical State Park, not too far from Appomattox, Virginia. A misty rain, suspended in the air, dampened my uncovered hands and face as I walked my dog and thought about where I was and the ground I was standing on. We were the only ones there, Dusa and I, although you might imagine we were surrounded by the spirits of the past.

Thousands died on this ground at the very end of the Civil War on April 6, 1865. The battle was basically a bloody and futile holding action. The war would end not too much farther down the road when General Lee surrendered all the troops then under his command and caught inside General Grant’s trap. More about the italicized part later.

Sailor’s Creek was fairly unique in that many who fought on the Confederate side were Richmond desk jockeys and others who had found ways to avoid military service, even though the South, like the North, was drafting men as fast as they could track them down. For the most part, these men might have continued avoiding, but they didn’t – and that’s the interesting part.

Everybody knew the war was lost for the South. My speculation is that these men knew this was the last chance they’d have to win self-respect for the image they would see in the mirror for the rest of their lives – if they survived. They didn’t suddenly decide to fight for a cause which was already lost and which they might not have agreed with anyway, but they did feel they owed something to those they viewed as their fellow countrymen and to their homes and families. (Note: I did a video shoot of a reenactment here several years ago and the reenactors did a great job of portraying the former deskjockeys.)

Now about the italicized text. Some Southern cavalry broke through the Northern encirclement just before Lee surrendered. These men figured , therefore, that they weren’t surrendered and they rode on to Lynchburg, Virginia. There they were told by a high-ranking officer to go to their homes, that the war was over. It appears that my great-great-grandfather was among them, in the 3^rd Virginia Cavalry.  If only he wasn’t just a spirit in the mist, I would truly love to talk with him…

- As written quickly at the Muse Coffee Company in Lynchburg, Virginia on the morning of November 20, 2009.

Soldier by the Playground Poem

Note: After reading, check out my film at http://bit.ly/3H9GIv 

The early autumn evening sun defended against the chill,

When I left the struggle on the soccer field and climbed the amber hill.

I made my way past the parking lot, the picnic table and then,

The white picket gate swung open and reverently I stepped in.

Gray tombstones at crazy angles stabbed at retreating light,

The earth was soft and spongy, the weeds had conquered height.

I scarce could know that evening, to another century I was bound,

When at first I did encounter, the Soldier by the Playground.

“Samuel C., son of Daniel and Isabella …, who fell at …Gettysburg … July 2, 1863,

In the twenty-second year of his age, striking for home and liberty.”

Gettysburg! Long ago, far off, brought home for me to find!

Now sounds of the soccer field, trailing off, merged with battle sounds in my mind.

And then I wondered, pondered, questioned which flag he would prefer,

If he could return to join us and with history confer.

Did he fight to save the Union or for the South his life forego?

Here, in the border state of Maryland, I’d possibly never know.

 

Twenty Previously Untold Particulars About Berlin During The Cold War

On November 9, 2009 there will be a giant street party at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin attended by hundreds of thousands of revellers. This will be the culmination of a year of speeches, special events, exhibits and celebrations in Germany to mark the fall of the Wall in 1989. For those too young to have experienced the real Wall, there will be a fake one constructed on the site of the original. It will be toppled just before the party.

Some say the Berlin Wall fell because the East German and Russian governments lost their will to crack down on growing numbers of protesters. Some say it was because President John F. Kennedy went to DEFCON 2 (Defense Readiness Condition Two, on the brink of nuclear war) over the Cuban Missile Crisis, thereby convincing the Russians that the U.S. would stand up to them if they made a military move against West Berlin. Others say it was because President Ronald Reagan proceeded with the inter-ballistic missile shield project, nicknamed Star Wars, and the Russians couldn’t keep up with it financially. For an encore, President Reagan famously commanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!” And, of course, there is Mikhail Gorbachev himself, with his notion of perestroika, or restructuring of society in the former USSR and its relations with the West.

Actually, at the very end, the Berlin Wall fell because an East German bureaucrat made some fateful misstatements at a press conference that gave the Western media the impression people would be able to pass freely through the Wall. When East Berliners saw this on West Berlin television, thousands went to the Wall and the situation got so out of control that the confused East German border guards let them through. Humpty Dumpty could not be put back together again. (Here is a link to the actual, incredible event http://bit.ly/2o569X .)

Of course, the British, American and French forces who served in Berlin deserve some credit, too. They held the ground in West Berlin from 1945 to 1989, knowing they wouldn’t have a chance if a shooting war started because they were 110 miles inside enemy lines and the other side had them surrounded in vastly overwhelming numbers. At the time, no one could have guessed that it would all end peacefully.

So, with this broad canvas as background, here are 20 untold particulars of Berlin during the Cold War that you won’t find anywhere else:

• Respectable Germans crossed the street to avoid walking by GI bars. The Germans would have preferred that we didn’t have to be there, but they didn’t want us to leave, either.
• It was well known that GI bars were patronized by East German female spies.
• The Russians occasionally dropped metal chaff to create radar blind spots and disrupt air traffic into West Berlin.
• Russian jet fighters buzzed West Berlin and the US helplessly protested.
• Powerful spotlights were used by the East to harass aircraft landing at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport.
• The Tempelhof Air Traffic Control Tower, equipped with powerful binoculars to search for arriving aircraft, had an unobstructed view of apartments across the street from the airport.
• For security reasons, an electronic counter-counter measures simulator in Berlin Air Route Traffic Control Center, manned by the United States Air Force, was referred to only as “the Coke machine.”
• On completion of routine radio checks, made during shift changes, air traffic controllers could hear “ghost” microphone clicks, possibly coming from all the spooks on all sides who would be listening in and could not do their own verbal radio checks.
• British soldiers regularly and ceremoniously relieved themselves in a public fountain in their sector of Berlin. It was a tradition.
• US Army helicopters flying along the border between West Berlin and East Germany, referred to as the sector-zonal border, enjoyed a view of a nudist colony on the western side.
• A U.S. airman at Tempelhof Airbase was killed in a freak accident when a plywood board he was carrying caught under his chin in a paternoster. A paternoster is an elevator the size of a closet that is open at the front and doesn’t stop, so you have to get off while it is moving.
• A Polish Air Force major flew under the radar and landed at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Central Airport in 1963 with his wife and two children.
• Mysterious guys who looked like German civilians with long hair picked up mail in the Tempelhof Airbase mail room. When a USAF T-39 aircraft “strayed” into East German territory and was shot down by a Russian MiG-21 in January 1964, these same men showed up in uniform with fresh GI haircuts and became part of the team that went into East Germany to retrieve the bodies of three crewmen.
• There were numerous alerts in the middle of the night, but the average GI could not be sure they were only alerts until they were over. The most disturbing item of required equipment was a gas mask.
• Many GIs visited German orphanages during Christmas. Many of the orphans were fathered by Allied military personnel who had rotated out.
• A dispute between a taxi driver and a GI became a near riot when the taxi driver radioed for taxi driver reinforcements and GIs poured out of nearby bars to help his passenger.
• A five hundred pound unexploded World War II British incendiary bomb was found buried near the Ground Controlled Approach radar unit located alongside the Tempelhof runway where the author worked.
• French military personnel were the best behaved, but U.S. and British soldiers said the French soldiers were not the best soldiers on joint maneuvers.
• Teenagers who were probably just angry with their parents and managed to escape from the East became celebrated freedom fighters in the Western press.
• U.S. Army Special Services took uniformed military personnel visiting from bases in West Germany on tours through the Wall into East Berlin in an Army-green Mercedes Benz bus. If there were no actual military tourists, troops stationed in West Berlin were put on the bus because the real purpose of the tours was to exercise U.S. rights to enter East Berlin under post World War Two agreements with the Russians.

On the day of the actual reunification of Germany into a single nation, October 3, 1990, in a telephone call between German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President George H. W. Bush, Chancellor Kohl said:

“Things are going very, very well. I am in Berlin. There were one million people here last night at the very spot where the Wall used to stand–and where President [Ronald] Reagan called on Mr. [Mikhail] Gorbachev to open this gate. Words can’t describe the feeling. The weather is very nice and warm, fortunately. There were large crowds of young people. Eighty percent were under thirty. It was fantastic. A short time ago there was enormous applause when our President said that our gratitude was owed especially to our Allied friends and above all our American friends.”

Amid the din and roar of events at that time, the words of the President of a reunified Germany mentioned by Chancellor Kohl were little noted by the public at large – except for those who had actual experience of the thousands of untold particulars about Berlin during the Wall.

Note to Readers: The author served as a United States Air Force air traffic controller in a unit that was in support of Strategic Air Command during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and was stationed at Tempelhof Air Base in West Berlin from March 1963 to June 1965.

Old Letter to My Nephew in the Service

October 28, 2009 - I got an email yesterday from a nephew who is in the Air National Guard. He was, he said, sitting in a terminal and in two hours he would be leaving for an airbase in Iraq.

 His Facebook page still says “Delaware ‘10” and lists his interests as “…guitar, da beach, eating, sleeping, talking, piano, drums, skydiving, doing backflips, wallflips, frontflips, and any other type of flips.” (Note: Google “wallflips” and be amazed…) Favorite music includes, to name just a few, “Making April, Amber Pacific, Something Corporate, Starting Line.” Under “Political Views” he says “Obama is my boss.” Boss, as in Commander in Chief.

This is his second deployment to the Middle East, his first to Iraq. He loads and unloads airplanes that transport troops and heavy military cargo and equipment. On his last deployment he worked as many as 14 hours a day in heat that often reached 115 degrees or higher. As part of US Air Forces Central Command his unit helped break records for moving troops and cargo during the Surge.

Now, Iraq. Now moving troops out. Now more heat and more sandstorms and more danger. As I write this I am listening to news on the radio about Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not good.

Five years ago, not long after he decided to enlist, I wrote him a letter. Here it is, with just a little edited out:

 August 25, 2004

 Dear Danny:

Last week Cory, your sister Maggie and I were walking on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland. The temperature was in the high 80s and the sun was shining brightly. A teenage boy walked by us wearing a Darth Vader style ground length black coat. I asked Cory and Maggie what message they thought this guy was trying to send to the world and expressed my opinion that everything we choose to wear is intended as a message to others. At this point, Cory looked at me and asked, “What message are you sending, Daddy?” And I said, with no hesitation whatsoever, “I was in the Air Force once.”

The words came out of my mouth so quickly that I was startled. I am in my sixties. I went in the Air Force when I was 18. I wondered if it is possible that something that happened so long ago could have become such a dominant part of my self-identity, so much so that it influences how I wear my hat, what I wear, how I stand and walk, who I think I am, and how I think.

Here are my considered views on all this. Military service, in war or peace, changes your core. Permanently.

 It starts when you raise your right hand to be sworn in, promising to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the orders of the President of the United States and those who are appointed over you. Taking this oath, if you do so seriously, puts you far ahead of the responsibilities shouldered by the average 18 year old civilian. You will always have a sense of pride in having taken this oath. You will always have a sense of pride in knowing that you are permanently part of the long historical procession of those who have served in this country’s armed forces.

But it is an oath with such potentially serious consequences that it would be just plain foolish and naive to enlist just for the educational or other benefits. There has to be a sincere sense of duty to your country or it makes no sense at all. You are agreeing, for the period of your enlistment, to be placed in harm’s way if your country needs you. You are saying that, if in harm’s way, you will not surrender as long as you have the means to continue the fight. You are saying that you will give up your right to do whatever you please and will obey all lawful orders in order to serve your country. Danny, some people go their whole lives without developing the maturity and discipline to handle the “have-tos” which enter into every life. You will learn the needed maturity and discipline at a very early age in the service.

In basic training you are pushed to new levels of physical achievement that you could hardly have imagined possible. You learn to keep going in the face of calculated harassment that aims to find out if you’re made of the right stuff.

After basic training you will go on to training for your specialty. When you finish this training it is very likely that you will be given job responsibilities and experiences that are far greater than those held by people your age in the civilian world. You will not get the higher civilian pay, but you will get up every day and know that what you are doing really matters to your country, especially now. You will be guided by a sense of duty, even if you can’t wait to get out. It’s possible you will see the friends you left back home as immature and self-indulgent, but you will envy their less regimented lifestyles. When you do get out, your service to your country behind you, you will find that you are a member of the largest informal fellowship in the world – that of men and women who have served their country in the military.

There will be occasions in your life, probably on a Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, when you will be at church or in a restaurant or at a sports stadium and someone with a microphone will ask all who have served in our armed forces to stand to be recognized. You will be glad that you are among those standing.

For the rest of your life, you will look at things from the perspective of a young serviceman, because you will always be able to put yourself in their place. You will say to yourself, “I was one of them,” and your opinions will be influenced accordingly.

Danny, someday when I die, I will be put in a veterans cemetery where I will be with others who served in war and in peace. My stone or plaque will be the standard, showing my rank when I was a young enlisted man in the service, as though I never accomplished more in life. In my mind, thinking specifically of my own experience, I never did accomplish more or for a greater purpose.

God bless you and protect you. We are all proud of you.

Love,

Uncle Gordon

Senior Airman Daniel Kotler, to you and all of the young men and women who serve in this nation’s armed forces – come home to us safely.

 What not to miss: Here is a link to a 9 minute and 45 second long YouTube video I shot of a planeload of our armed forces personnel returning to the USA through BWI Airport outside Baltimore, Maryland on June 6, 2008. Senior Airman Daniel Kotler is tagged and appears for nine seconds.

http://bit.ly/14pL87

The Invisible, Definable, Horizontal Tunnel of Space

Amtrak doesn’t specifically state that lacrosse sticks must be checked as baggage. Ski equipment, snowboards, golf clubs and bicycles are specifically excluded from being carried on, but 72 inch long lacrosse sticks, helmets and large gloves that look like they’re made for a robot are not. I was comforted by this thought as I took my younger son, carrying his lacrosse stick in a bag that could have held skis, to the Amtrak station for his return to Lynchburg College, in Lynchburg, Virginia.

 

Riding the rails on Amtrak, my son would make a stop in Washington, DC, then cross the Potomac River into Virginia, stopping at Alexandria, Manassas, Culpeper, Charlottesville and, finally, Lynchburg.

 

It occurred to me that I had once traveled on the same tracks, but had gone all the way to Biloxi, Mississippi. I was about my son’s age, in the Air Force, and returning from my first leave over the Thanksgiving holidays. Headed for Keesler Air Force Base, I traveled in uniform because in those days servicemen traveling in uniform got a pretty good discount. Plus, as long as you had enough money for one drink in the club car, the World War II vets, now businessmen and traveling salesmen, would offer to buy you a drink, or several if it was a long ride. Most of them were still in their thirties at the time and they knew how to ride trains. (For historical references about this period and consumption of adult beverages, consult AMC’s cable series Mad Men.) Also, there were, even then, plenty of college kids riding on that route, and I found myself sitting in a coach car full of coeds. Unfortunately, they all got off in Virginia.

 

Something I didn’t know then is that ninety-nine years earlier some other young guys who lived in our general neighborhood rode in an old steam locomotive train over some of the same route that I had traveled – and that my son would travel. They were Daniel, Samuel and Joseph Duvall, three brothers from a farm in Crownsville, Maryland who had joined the Confederate Army and were being transported from Richmond to Staunton, Virginia, from whence they would ultimately march to Winchester, Virginia and on to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Of the three, only Daniel would survive the war. It is lamentable that in September of 1862 they couldn’t meet the coeds of 1961, now the grandmothers of 2009, as I did. (Note: The exact part of the route the Duvall brothers and I traveled on, and that my son would travel on, is the stretch in Virginia from Gordonsville to Charlottesville.)

 

Here’s what I think about. The steel rails, spikes and ties have probably been replaced, but the railbed is pretty much in exactly the same place. We, the subjects of this piece, are separated in time, but with a certainty we all traveled over the same narrow passage - that invisible, definable, horizontal tunnel of space linking past and present. Somehow, we are connected, if only in a state of mind, and I wonder if we left a trace of ourselves there that’s untouchable and unseeable.

 

At the moment, however, I am no longer thinking of history. I am thinking, “Did the lacrosse stick get there?” Oh, yeah and my son?

Healthcare Insurance: Thanks for the Memories

A funny thing happened on the way to healthcare reform.

 

• My father went to the dentist, possibly for the first time in his life, in his early forties. Daddy couldn’t afford to have the badly needed work done, so he opted to have all his teeth pulled and got a set of false ones. Problem solved. For us kids, there was a university’s school of dentistry where the students practiced by filling our cavities. Other than that, the remedy for pain from a cavity was a cotton ball soaked in oil of cloves.

 

• The only time I ever went to a doctor’s office as a kid, was when my parents took me to one of my father’s uncles for shots required to attend elementary school. He provided his services for free as a family member. Other than that, never. We couldn’t afford to go to doctors. We just got sick and, luckily, we got better.

 

• As a young military air traffic controller I was officially given annual physical examinations by the base flight surgeon. Top notch. Unofficially, if you had a hangover, you could go to one of the friendly medics, usually another late teen or early 20s airman like you, and breathe pure oxygen from a tank. If you were really screwed up, you could get a vitamin B shot. Very, very unofficial.

 

• The young military dentists (the young and very young run the military) found and filled several cavities. One told me that I would probably lose a lot of my teeth by the time I was thirty, because the gaps left where a couple had been pulled would cause the surrounding teeth to lean over. I believed him, but wasn’t worried. When you’re eighteen years old, being thirty seems very far away and when you’re in the service, you think maybe never.

 

• I went to college and on to graduate school after getting out of the service. During this period I had a serious illness and resisted going to the hospital until my fever was well over one hundred degrees. I nearly died, but recovered. The health insurance provided to my wife, who worked at a bank, covered the expenses. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise.

 

• After graduating I worked for a company with great health benefits, but of course, I stayed well for this period in my life. Then I moved to another state and was without healthcare insurance for a while. When you’re still young you do crazy things like that. I had a friend who had coverage but opted for the low cost plan and I remember him saying, “I’m young. I don’t need much.” Then he got a bad disease, which he survived, but he had to pay huge sums out of his own pocket and probably the pockets of his parents. After that his premiums were really high because of his pre-existing condition.

 

• I founded a small business and decided to provide healthcare insurance to my employees. When you’re a small business you pay more for healthcare insurance for your employees than large corporations do. It was a really big deal for most of my employees, but one of them who received some sort of government assistance declined because she qualified for free healthcare for herself and her family, along with subsidized housing, etc.

 

• After I sold the business and retired at a relatively young age, and my wife did the same, we had to get an individual policy for ourselves and two kids. It was very expensive. Worst of all, we could have been kicked off of it because when you’re on an individual policy you don’t have the protection of being on a group policy. My wife decided to return to work, in large part to get us on a group policy. Our monthly healthcare insurance costs, meaning the part we pay, actually dropped by 95%.

 

Okay, here’s the funny thing. After going down memory lane and seeing how healthcare has affected my life and decisions, you would think that I would have some ideas about what sort of healthcare reform would be best. The truth is, I’m still not sure – I’m torn. I don’t trust the government having too much power, but still… Is anybody else confused?

 

From Caterpillar to Butterfly: A True Tale of Twitter

Okay, I admit it. I got suckered into writing a blog post about the basics of Twitter. Clearly, my humility knows no bounds, considering that I must have thought I could do this better than a kazillion other bloggers who have already done it.

 

Here’s how it happened and then unhappened. One day, about a month ago when I was a Twitter ingenue, I found that I had a new follower – and this one had all her clothes on! Wow! A follower out of the blue! How great is that? Her profile photo conveyed the image of a simple village girl, wearing simple village clothes, in India. In fact, her one-line bio said “I am a smart and simple girl, wanting to make some new friends.” Her fourth tweet, after “Hi All,” “Good Afternoon….” and “Hi people…..” was “can anybody tell me what twitter is and all that? bcos im new to this thing……” Pity this poor child! I needed to go into the rescuer mode I have always been tagged with and help this simple villager with her Twitter dilemma.

 

Her use of an elongated ellipsis should have been my first tip-off.

 

About a week went by, during which time I slaved over my keyboard trying to explain Twitter and learning that once you get beyond the basics there is no end in sight for enlightening your grateful readers, which, of course, would include simple village girls in India.

 

The next time I see our simple village girl she is sleek, drop-dead gorgeous, tastefully buxom and wearing a strapless, sleeveless, aqua-colored, luminescent sheath dress. Her eyebrows are arched and her long sleek black hair with brown highlights cascades over one shoulder. She is poised and confidently smiling into the camera. She has followers in the hundreds and she is following over a thousand, but she still uses broken English. Her one-line bio continues to proclaim, “I am a smart and simple girl, wanting to make some new friends.”

 

For the first time, I take a hard look at her Twitter personna. To make sure I have not been in a coma, I check the photo in my email from Twitter which first announced that she was following me. Yes, it is a simple village girl. (This photo is now gone entirely, even from my saved email. How do they do that?) Her URL says “Don’t pay for white teeth.” I look again at one of her early tweets: “one of my friend has some nice information……check it out at (url).” This was followed by “so many people liked this site, did u see it? if no then heres the last chance (url).” The site promotes “Work from Home,” where we learn that, among many other things, it is actually possible to earn money from home just by clicking on links and there is a variation on this theme involving text messages.

 

And me, a little further down the road? I have decided not to post my well-intended, ever-so-generous and never-to-be finished piece on how to use Twitter. Places like India can teach us folks here in the U.S. a thing or two. Instead, I will eventually send my Twitter lesson via email to a few friends who think they’re “up with it” when it’s plain that they think Twitter is the new form of email. Wow! You gotta worry about friends like this because you never know what they might say that should be private.

 

Epilogue: Two days before I posted this, our simple village girl tweeted, “Why do every twit has only 140 characters in it?” Boy, I’ll tell ya, there’s a sucker born every minute!