Blessed

As I was fixing brunch this morning I heard the Elton John song 'Blessed' playing on the iPod and I remembered back before 'The Little Girls' came home from Korea. My memory is that at the time we knew 'someone' was coming, but we had no specific information, and inevitably we began to fill in the blanks with artful imaginings. Jennifer had heard a song on the radio by Elton John...something about a child that had yet to be seen, '...you're a child in my head...', she mentioned to me that she'd heard it and was touched by it, and thought the name of the song was 'Blessed.' Sure enough we were able to find the song on CD. We played it many times in the weeks before we learned of the girls and before they 'came home' in September 1996.

At the time I think Jennifer and I were entirely focused on how WE parents and grandparents would all make sure that the girls lived a 'blessed' life...and we have all kept that commitment...Kim, Shawn, Jennifer and me...the girls have been blessed with love, stability, safety, continuous adult presence, and perhaps too much 'stuff.'

What I didn't predict and couldn't have known was how blessed I would be...we would be...by their presence. While we thought they were being 'saved' from an undesireable life in a ‘2nd world country’ it was precisely the time that we needed focus outside of ourselves and our own wants, needs, history and real or imagined hurts...the girls came into our lives and became that bridge to the future...and it gets better! When I heard that Justin and Heather were going to have a baby my initial reaction was almost that another grandchild would be superfluous...I'm not proud of that initial response, and it turned out to be REALLY untrue. Even though Hayden didn't need to be saved from poverty, ignorance and superstitious biases that the baby twin girls in Korea would have experienced, he has again attracted us to the future, at the same time he reveals himself, our parents, and ourselves as he develops...we are blessed by his presence and need him in our lives, and our intent is that he will be blessed as well.

So even though I joke (sort of) that '...insanity is inherited, you get it from your children...' it is through our children, their choices of mates, and their children -- adopted and biological -- that we continue to be blessed.

- - -

Back to Beginnings

I was bent on writing about Southeast Asia when my daughter commented in reference to the initial blog, "This is great dad, I look forward to reading more, especially more detailed descriptions of what Nana and Papa were like..." So, I'm putting Southeast Asia on hold for awhile, in favor of some observations about my predecessors. I think relatives are best explained through the telling of events...that way the readers can make up their own mind about how crazy the ancestors truly were.

Not that he was crazy, but by way of introduction, my father was born in Eldorado, Illinois in 1909. He was the fifth in birth order of seven children, including: Voltaire, Romaine, Lucille, John, (William), Maxine, and Charles.  I believe there was another infant who died or was still-born between Maxine and Charles (who was the surviving baby of the family) but he did not survive young-adulthood.  He died at 28 from complications of Type I diabetes.  During my childhood we would on occasion end up back in St. Louis to visit William's (as his siblings and mother called him) family as well as my mother's remaining family, including her closest sister Hazel.  The reason for being there was always an impending death, or a funeral.

The last time I actually lived there, we had initially moved into a third-floor apartment across from the street-car turnaround at the water-tower on East Grand Avenue. The water-tower was a large painted-white-brick monolith in a round-about just West of the point where Grand Avenue headed downhill toward the Mississippi River; at the time, the area was burgeoning with small street-level businesses, the second and third floor apartments occupied by the merchants or transients like we were. This was a predominately Jewish neighborhood at the time.  During part of our stay, my mother Goldie worked as an aide at the nearby Jewish nursing home.  We had a dog, a black cocker spaniel named Mike, who played on the roof of the second-floor; we lifted him onto the roof through our kitchen window. As I remember our bathroom was a community facility one floor down on the second-floor.

Thankfully, before school started we moved to a ground-level duplex on Blair Avenue where there was something like a yard, our own bathroom, with some separation from family for each of us.  In the summer there were nightly visits from street vendors selling hot tamales, or ice-cream, from their respective push-carts. "The tamale man" was frugal with his audible advertising, wasting no words as he promoted his product; perhaps a half-block down the street his voice would cut the evening air and drift in through the open windows -- "HOT!" and then perhaps directly in front of the house, "TAMALES!" I don't remember ever eating one of these delicacies, but during the good times, when my Dad was employed at Small Arms sprayin shellac on ammunition casings, we did regularly (perhaps weekly) get a Fudgesicle from the ice cream vendor, who, as I remember had a bell that was rung by the spokes of his cart.

My memory is that we stayed there long enough for me to start school -- 3rd grade I think -- and have my tonsils removed, and long enough to bury Charles, my Dad's brother. This was my first brush with orderly death from disease as staged by hospitals and doctors...I had seen a child drown when I was 5 or 6 years old in a flooded gravel quarry in St. Anthony, Idaho. But, somehow this staged death was “creepier” - more frightening and unnatural, taking place for mysterious reasons and occurring out of plain sight in a hospital.

My grandmother lived in the brick neighborhood of "Old North" St. Louis not too far from East Grand Avenue, near Florissant Boulevard. By 'brick neighborhood' I mean the streets, side-walks, buildings, backyards, and alleys were brick; this total brick world made sure that the heat of a summer day lasted until well after midnight in the uncooled tenements. There were walkways or as I thought of them 'tunnels' between the buildings running from the street to the back-yards, and no space between buildings except those covered passages.

In my earliest memories, probably 1947 the year my Grandpa died, the vendors -- milkman, iceman, rag-man, glass-man, tin-man, and the like serviced this old neighborhood with horse-drawn wagons, and push-carts. The horses knew the routes and would walk ahead, then pause, to allow the milk-man or ice-man to perform deliveries. Even though Pevely Dairy had motorized delivery elsewhere, Old North continued to employ horse drawn, ice-cooled, wagons in 1947.  I think all the horse carts had gone by the way by the time we returned in 1953.

Down the street there was a corner tavern, literally having its front door in the apex of the front corner, and beyond that a major residential thoroughfare. There was a ballpark not too far away where the St. Louis Browns played. On Sundays, I could hear the fans expressing their pleasure or frustration, but I never attended a game. It was either beyond us financially, or possibly it would have exposed us to some sort of real or imagined evil, such as loud, obscene men smoking cigars and drinking beer...men whose taxi cabs I often saw wheeling through our neighborhood on game day.  They were citizens of another world, another America, where people had excess wealth for ballgames, cabs, cigars, and beer.  But, we had Holiness, which they clearly lacked.

My dad's sister Maxine lived with my grandmother her entire life. She never married; she had polio as a child.  She was somewhat gnome-like having been stunted in growth by her disease, and as an adult became progressively more immobile though she got around independently on her aluminum forearm braces for as long as I knew her, well into the 1970's. I don't remember ever seeing my paternal grandfather when he wasn't, as they used to say, 'bed ridden.' My only visual memory of him is that of a frail, cadaverous, gray head on a pillow. His bed was in the living room of the brick tenement house where he and my grandmother lived, so he really couldn't be avoided; when I went into the living room I would say, "Hi grandpa!" and he would respond, "Hi grandpa!"  At the time, his response seemed truly weird to me. Thinking about it now, his response makes perfect sense; it was likely his 'dry' way of messing with me, though at the time I thought he was a loon. Grandpa was said to have pernicious anemia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pernicious_anemia I don't know if that was true or not. Even today, for many well-known diseases, diagnoses are a matter of exclusion and doctors only know what it isn’t, but can't say with any certainty what is wrong with their patient unless there's a big smoking hole where a pancreas should be...my grandfather's diagnosis was made in the mid-40's...so who knows what he actually was suffering from?  He died in 1947 and after he was in the ground, we hauled ourselves back West ever seeking the center of God’s will…trying to find that homing-beam where everything fell into place, and the world made sense…God’s Will…we don’t know the mind of God, but we’ll know His will when we find it.

My paternal grandmother, Lizzie, was not dying of anything.  She would live one month short of her hundredth birthday, and even then it seems her brain and heart simply forgot to speak to each other one night as she slept in her nursing home. She had no illnesses. Her daughters had put her there nearby where they lived before she was 90, according to my dad, because the daughters got too old to get into town to visit her, and they were worried about her living alone. Jennifer, Kim and I infrequently drove down to St. Louis in the early ‘70’s from our apartment in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn to visit her and other relatives; at that time she lived on The Hill...Dago Hill as the Italian community was called back in the days before humorous prejudice about ethnicity required stern offense.  Back then, it seems we were all "something" from "somewhere else" and cruel humor was mostly equally delivered to Heb's Micks, Dagos, and Pollocks alike, though I will say that "Negroes" got the worst of the "malicious humor" in the St. Louis of the time, and well into the ‘90’s when I was last there.

I don't remember how my grandmother came to be in that neighborhood, The Hill, since she wasn't Italian.  But, The Hill was safe, orderly and clean, and her neighbor's son checked in on his own Italian mother daily, and my grandma who lived next door, to assure they were safe and supplied. If any of the problems inherent to St. Louis then and probably now came into The Hill, bringing trouble, fear, or even merely inconvenience in the pristine Italian neighborhoods, the plainclothed, informally elected, armed, Italian 'constables' would resolve the issues quickly, then take what remained of the unpleasantry back out into St. Louis proper and call the city police to '...come pick up their trash.' Strangely enough, on The Hill there were never any witnesses to any of the defensive crimes, and the external criminals came to know that it was a place to be avoided unless of course one had a death wish.  I’m not espousing this kind of social control, however, I recall that my grandma and her friends sat with impunity on their open porches on Summer evenings.  They lived on a peaceful island in a sea of chaos otherwise known as St. Louis in the ‘70’s.

Eating dinner at my grandmother's table was always a treat and an adventure, particularly when I was a small boy. Not only was the food wonderful, but when we gave thanks she might have a very sudden and loud 'Holy Ghost breakdown' (not a description wisely used around my parents) which was so loud and unexpected that I more than once wet myself as a young child...the surprise was made worse because she didn't always do it. So many times I sat rigidly, holding my breath, waiting for the squeal, vowing silently to not be taken by surprise when the "Ooooooo! THANK YOU SWEET JESUS!" came out of this small women, accompanied by the rhythmic, rapid pounding of her feet on the floor under the table. The food was amazing...country cooking, fresh food, gravy with everything, and too much, but the meals were nerve-wracking until the prayer of thanks was well behind us because Gra'ma usually didn't interrupt a good meal with her Holy Ghost breakdowns.

My father had left his family suddenly when he was a young man of perhaps 17. He confided in me on an occasion when I was old enough to add my own lusty imagination to his sparse facts, that he had to "...leave town in a hurry..." because he got on the wrong side of a young woman's father. I suspected he had got on the girl's 'right side' and the father might not have been fond of the 'class difference' between his deflowered princess and the young Bill Karns, son of a tenant farm family. So my father-to-be fled the town where he lived and went on the road. I've always felt that this may have set into play his life-long pattern of avoidance and flight...perhaps also encouraged by the societal and cultural chaos that was soon to follow, for it couldn't have been too long after that until the banks and markets crashed and the Great Depression came and stayed until the economy was resurrected by FDR and a world war on both sides of the globe. In any case, my father used to speak of 'riding the rails', in other words, using freight-trains to get around the the West and Midwest, from town to town, odd-job to odd-job, until he (and his brother) met my mom (and her sister) and became an extended family.

We sometimes drove through these rail-road towns from his past as we moved from place to place when I was a child, though we never actually lived in any of them. We traveled by car, sometimes dragging a utility trailer full of household goods, other times only the back seat contained my sister and me, and our pared down belongings. Many times when we were traveling we'd come to a town and he'd remember coming there on a train, and might say, "Spent a night in jail in this town for vagrancy...food was pretty good as I remember!" Or, "Got kicked off the train outside this town here. They made us walk around and stay outside the city limits." My mother was not entirely appreciative of his past, nor his tales. Goldie was not a prude, but I guess she just felt it wasn't necessary to celebrate your crude beginnings.  I remember her being a “class act” though not at all snobbish, judgmental, or uppity. I will say she had a way of transmitting disappointment without seeming to blame the offender.

Goldie Lucille McKinnon was born in 1915 in West Imminence, Missouri. Why there would be a West Imminence as well as an Imminence, I can't fathom. Neither place merited a visit much less separate names and city governments. My mother never talked much to me about her early life before she met my father. Her own father Ike McKinnon and at least one of my mother's sisters still lived there in West Imminence when we visited the final time.  I was 15 that year, and Ike was already terminally ill. As near as I could tell Ike was just a mean drunk, and something of a bully. He may be the reason my mother left home at 15 to go to the city to live with another older sister Hazel. In 1959 my mother's oldest sister, Faye Culpepper, lived with her husband Olin and any number of children, grandchildren, chickens, dogs and other critters in an unpainted wood-frame house, with perpetually askew screen-doors letting in flies and various animalss. If memory serves, she and some of her family worked the town's telephone switchboard back when calls were placed and connected manually by a central operator. The town's operator was a very powerful and knowledgeable person because she connected all the calls, and most of her customers were on "party lines" with 2 or 3 other households.  The town operator didn't necessarily disconnect herself expeditiously after the call was connected with her customers. Even if a town was too small to have a newspaper, it usually had an operator who readily distributed the "news."

I have two distinct memories of Ike...both from my 8 or 9th year well before he got sick and died from stomach cancer, which according to the story, was caused by drinking his own home-made whiskey. In one instance, we had gone '...down to the country...' as the saying went, from St. Louis.  We went there to visit family, and all the McKinnon "girls" were gathered with their husbands, if any, and kids in Ike's slab-cabin. 

Ike got tired of hearing all the chatter and didn't like the meal that the women were planning, so he got his rifle and announced, "Billy I'm going to go get a squirrel for dinner...come along with me!" (Ike was not big on asking children if they wanted to do something). So I went along with him. Once out in the fields and the oak trees, we encountered a fat squirrel probably 20 or so feet up on a substantial limb. Ike promptly shot the squirrel in the head. However, it clung to the limb of the tree in a death-grip and would not fall. Ike waited a while to see if gravity would join death in providing a solution to his dilemma. When death and gravity failed to resolve the situation, he tried carefully head-shooting the squirrel off the limb. That squirrel was glued to that limb! Now a lessor man would have turned to the kid and said, "Billy, there's other squirrels out here...let's go find one!" Instead, Ike turned to me and said, "Billy! Run back to the cabin near the wood-pile (he heated and cooked both food and sour mash with wood) and get my axe!" which I did, knowing Ike expected immediate satisfaction. Ike cut down that oak tree, perhaps 6-8 inches through at the ground, rather than let that squirrel "win." I mention this to say that perhaps I come by my stubborness somewhat naturally, though I've not read that the stubborn-gene has yet been isolated in the human-genome.

The other instance that characterizes Ike in my memory was on perhaps the same visit down to the country, when he stomped angily away from the dinner table and out the door, because his daughters had used his whiskey-makin's (corn) for a dinner entrée (corn on the cob). Ike couldn't tolerate using good whiskey-making corn to feed humans or animals, yelling as he walked off in his tantrum, 'It's a pure waste of good corn!' at least that's how I remember it.  My Dad often spoke about Ike, but not in admiration.  Ike was feared, but not respected, even by his own daughters.  Ike was the town 'bully' who prospered and persisted because law enforcement people were also his ‘shine’ customers, and afraid of him. 

My mother and her sister Hazel, had married brothers -- my dad and his brother John -- making my sister and I 'double cousins' to Hazel and John's son Wayne Karns. The relationship with Wayne did seem to me more often like a brother. Hazel and John's marriage hadn't lasted too long. I think Wayne was hurt deeply by the divorce of his parents, and the apparent rejection of his father John during his early years.  Maybe they reconciled a bit later on. My guess is -- after listening to 'discussions' between my dad and mom -- that John felt Hazel was using little Wayne as a means to manipulate him, and he declined to be manipulated by anyone, in particular a woman. In any case, Wayne seemed to me at the time quite tough and cavalier...stoic and impervious to pain...showing total disdain for the adult world and any punishment "they" might deliver.  He was my hero at 8 and 9 years old. I saw him cry only once...that was the morning he heard on the radio that Hank Williams had died...and given the seriousness of that somber event, his open tears did not reduce his stature in my young eyes at all.

I looked up to Wayne. He had carefully oiled and combed hair, in that 1950's 'rebel without a clue' style. Adult authority rolled off him without sticking! He drove his mother's car without permission or a driver's license; he rolled up his pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes in the sleeve of his white T-shirt for all the world to see, and smoked openly and anywhere except inside Gra'ma's house and church, to the despair of his holy grandmother and concerned mother. He smoked for more than 50 years I guess. When I last saw him in July 1991 he was suffering from end-stage emphysema, and was concerned about becoming disabled and losing his job at the May Company distribution center. He died of a heart attack some years later in the parking lot of a Shonie's restaurant after eating breakfast. That seemed somehow fitting and almost a tribute to the way he lived his life. I like to think of him emerging from the Shonie's, stepping into the fresh air, and lighting up one last unfiltered Lucky Strike before collapsing and dying in the handicapped parking spot by the door. I would have hated to know he died in a nursing facility or hospital sharing tubes with sucking machines, while bored strangers pretended to care, for an hourly wage.

I never knew my maternal grandmother. I think my mom was 15-years old when her mother died. The story I remember is that she died of leukemia...again likely a questionable diagnosis, perhaps made by a country doctor who also looked after the health of livestock in Southern Missouri. I know she came from a respected family in a nearby town, with a Matriarch named Sarah Davis who was a community pillar.  How Josie Davis ever got seduced by Ike McKinnon is probably a tragic love story which someone would pay to read, but I never heard the story.  In any case, shortly after Josie's death, the perpetually drunk Ike, now unsupervised, began showing "unnatural" interest in his two remaining daughters, my mother and her next older sister, Hazel.  They ran away from Ike, and moved in with the oldest sister Faye and her husband in St. Louis.  The were soon employed as cigarette packers at the Leggett-Myer Tobacco Company.

I want to say to any reader who happened to get trapped in this article: I have no lack of respect for any of these people or roots they came from, though I may find pity and entertainment in their traits and events. These were tough, resilient, uncomplaining folks from Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri. This generation never asked for anything from anyone, especially the government. They took care of each other, and their neighbors, and for the most part their children carried on with that same pride in independence and frugality...with the possible exception of Ike. As for Ike, I don't think he would have wasted a drop of urine on another human if they burst into flames in front of him, and my guess is he'd would have stolen anything that was not nailed down or under lock and key.  Near as I can remember, he was a pure waste of protoplasm, and yet one of the most graceful and kind people I've ever met, my mother Goldie, came from his union with Josie. 

Somehow, through culture and biology these people continue living through me...like it or not, I see them often in the mirror.  I recognize them in my reactions, my behavior, even my purposeful thought. And, even though I'm not comfortable with seeing "them" it seems we're stuck with each other.  

Knowing that Ike is in my background, upstream in my DNA and cultural history, reminds me to not be too proud because the squirrel doesn't fall far from the Oak tree.

- - -

Southeast Asia, and other trivial matters.

Viet Nam February 1963 - July 1966

After completing Basic Training more or less successfully, I attended and graduated 3rd in my class at the Navy’s Radio "A" school in San Diego. This minor feat entitled me to some choices of duty after graduation. I chose to be in the Pacific Fleet, preferably in SE Asia.  I would subsequently volunteer for Swift Boat duty, Nuclear Sub Duty, and an Antarctic Expedition, and would be turned down on all attempts because of particular personality traits, including oppositional habits, risk taking, and a lack of impulse control.  I disagreed that those traits were a liability, particularly on the Swift Boats, but wiser minds would prevail.  I should point out that my sole reason for wanting submarine duty was the extra pay, which I ended up getting anyway when in Vietnam's coastal waterways. My reason for wanting SWIFT Boat duty was the pay, the speed, and the informality of the organization and its leadership. The units were disciplined, but discipline wasn’t wasted on matters which in fact didn’t matter. I can’t remember why I volunteered for Antarctica. Possibly a long punitive year in and around Pearl Harbor was the motive for volunteering for even worse duty.

I boarded the USS Ashtabula (AO51) in Yokosuka Japan U.S. Naval Shipyard in June 1963, after spending more than a month enroute from California, waiting  in transient housing in Subic Bay, Philippines where the ship was scheduled to port at “any time.”  She never appeared, so eventually I was flown to meet her.  The Ashtabula was an oiler, whose sole purpose was to refuel other vessels at sea, during an underway replenishment (UnRep).  After expending our supply of JP5 and Avgas, we would run for the nearest fuel depot, top off, and run back to refuel more ships.  During my time on the "Nasty Ashty" as she was affectionately known, we operated almost entirely off the coast of Viet Nam, within the imaginary combat lines, and so we earned combat pay ($65/month) and were awarded an Expeditionary Medal for our service, because the Viet Nam Service Medal was not yet conceived...no one figured we'd be "there" that long, so an expeditionary medal probably seemed most appropriate.  I remained aboard until being transferred in November 1963, a week before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

I don't remember much about the day I boarded except that I was 19-years old and scared. My lack of knowledge about shipboard life, or about much of anything useful for that matter, was glaringly apparent; the ship was big and strange; the people trying to help me spoke an unfamiliar sea-speak, which wasn’t taught in basic training or A-school. Also, I was concerned that I might have forgotten how to do "code" (International Morse Code), because more than two months had passed since I had my hand on a key or heard code through ear-phones, and transcribed that code to English typewritten words for others to rely on.  

As it turned out, almost all of my entire duty hours on my new ship were spent with key in hand, wearing headphones, trying to pick the sounds out of the solid wall of static and phantom signals, and put the results in 5-character, typed clusters so that someone else with a higher pay-grade could run the code through a decryption device and produce intelligible information.  That information might tell us where to go, and what to do when we got there.  If reception of the thread of 5-letter segments had been broken by static, a typing error, or loss of the radio-synch, then that part of the encrypted message had to be requested for a repeat, finally resulting in a message which was seamless, otherwise, when decrypted every sequence following the error would just be random nonsensical letters and numbers.  It was boring, laborious work.  No wonder it fell to the least senior radio operators.  Once in awhile I was picked to take messages to the Captain of our vessel, or to one of the Division officers, but more often than not my watches were spent sitting at a typewriter, wearing earphones, my right hand at the ready above the telegraph “key.”.

The next 9-months was a blur...most days under-way spent performing replenishment of carrier battle groups in the Tonkin Gulf, followed by "hauling ass for port" to top off, usually in Subic Bay, P.I., then turning around as soon as possible and hauling back to replenish more ships. There was a brief rest and relaxation stay in Hong Kong and another in Kaohsiung, Taiwan...both cities were remarkable in their own way, but the (then) Royal Colony of Hong Kong, its neighborhoods clinging to the rocky island and mainland was mesmerizing for me.  The city was non-stop, and offered up every legal, carnal, and illegal activity you could think of, including some which I had never considered, or didn't know existed.  Proudly, I can announce here that I never did go to see "the Donkey and the girl have sex" as hawked by the street pimps.

Though the majority of Ashtabula’s cargo was thick bunker-oil, we also carried unstable and explosive aviation-gasoline (Av-Gas).  Our unstable cargo required that we 'anchor out' in the hazardous anchorage zone near Stone Cutter Island in the outer-harbor of Hong Kong, and similar locations at other ports, far from the busy water-front and the criss-cross of the ferries. Consequently, the motorized whale-boat ride into port from the ship allowed the city to be revealed in ever finer detail...the boat seeming to become smaller as the city loomed larger. When the breeze was right, the smell of several million 'lives' washed over the salt water long before a single human figure came into sight. Cooking smells, open sewers, unwashed bodies, incense, cottage industry, and the cities many lush parks conspired to produce a perfume that maybe only young men who’ve been breathing sea-air can smell.  This monster-city was alive and writhing with energy, commerce, met and unmet human needs, and dreams of immigrating to a better life in some other Crown Colony.

I never quite mastered the lay-out and details of the city; looking from the bay it seemed it should be easy to navigate, but once away from the waterfront, on foot in the maze of streets, I lost all sense of direction, and was guided here or there more by curiosity and various appetites, most often having to do with drink or food. Though I could find my way to where I wanted to go, my route was never traversed in a precise fashion. Because of this navigational weakness on my part, sometimes augmented by beer, Jack Daniels, or Absinthe, I accidentally saw parts of the city which I would have missed had I been a more skilled navigator, and seldom developed a routine to or from course to anywhere. At the time there were parts of the colony which were deemed 'off limits' to U.S. service-men. Though the Navy hardly ever explained the why of any 'off-limits' it mostly had to do with physical dangers of robbery, or illegal activities in the area; illegal activities more often than not consisted of gambling, prostitution, availability of drugs, and on rare occasion something having to do with mainland  China and ‘demonstrations’ by various political factions.  Placing an area 'off limits' was akin to advertising it's virtues to most of us enlisted sailors. Clearly if the Officers didn't want us to go there, it was necessary to get there as soon and as often as possible...hence my habit of roaming the Wanchai District of Hong Kong...entirely off limits during all 3 of my visits to the colony.

How can I describe Hong Kong in the 60's?  The 'war' in South East Asia had boosted the port from being simply one of the world's busiest material and financial trading centers, to being overrun by the combined hungry, thirsty, horny Allied military (U.S., Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, Australia and the rest of the U.K.) looking to quench a large collective thirst and more than a few carnal appetites. Tons and tons of 'black market' goods were finding their way out of South Viet Nam, if they ever actually arrived there before being diverted to non-military customers; thanks to the impeccable, creative accounting and asset management of those same combined military services, buyers could purchase almost anything which had ever been shipped to Viet Nam, and sometimes could receive it before it even would have reached it's intended destination farther South.

Hong Kong was also a supplier for the illicit needs of the constrained citizens of the People's Republic of China...all of the largess of the decadent West flowed from Hong Kong into main-land China, smuggled, while sympathetic and reputedly well-bribed border guards turned a blind eye to the 'trade' flowing through their gates in both directions. Indeed just up the way from Hong Kong in the Portuguese Colony of Macao there were no trade barriers whatsoever for any product or service, including human trafficking.  Reputedly, in 1965 one could take still take written legal deed to another human in Macao, if you had the assets and the connections; of course, justifying owning another human got a bit tenuous after leaving Macao, unless your purchase was going to the Middle East.

As I remember, large purchases in Hong Kong were 'duty free.' We marveled at the relative cost differences of some of the big-ticket necessities, such as, Mercedes Benz and Rolls Royce vehicles, compared to their U.S. price. However, my trading level was somewhat constrained by my meager earnings at the time. Thankfully, I left Hong Kong with nothing but the receipt for a pair of dress trousers and a couple dress shirts, custom-tailored by a local craftsman, which would be shipped to me in Hawaii sometime later; and, to this day I wear a 'cat's-eye' opal ring that I bought at the Royal Navy's South China Fleet Club. Some of my unfortunate, less discriminating friends left Hong Kong bearing the burning sensations and additional scars of their 'purchases' which required multiple weeks of antibiotics as a form of 'payment over time' for their moral lapses.

After nine months of refueling aircraft carriers and their defensive vessels in SE Asia, the Ashtabula went 'home' to San Pedro, California near Long Beach. I expected to be in home-port for 3 or 4 months, including the Operational Readiness Inspections, and then turn around and come back to SE Asia. What I didn't know was the Ashtabula had been invited to take part in the annual Battle of the Coral Sea Celebration, which included visits to multiple ports in Thailand, Singapore and Australia. When I found this out I was excited beyond belief! Going to the Coral Sea celebration and those ports was almost too good to be true...and, as it occurred, it was actually too good to be true, because within two weeks I, and other first enlistment personnel, started receiving orders transferring us to other bases and ships which were not going to the Coral Sea event; in my case, the new duty was to be a Pacific Fleet ship (USS Abnaki) which was destined for SE Asia from Pearl Harbor in 1965. The Coral Sea Celebration was too precious to waste on us first-time enlistees.  Where possible we newbies were replaced in every department of the ship by the loyal 'lifers' or perhaps those who were having to decide whether to reenlist.  The Navy takes care of its own!  Incidentally, this "slight" was among the reasons I didn't reenlist and stay in the Navy...not one of the main reasons, but it remained a lingering resentment, and a slight which I would remember when it came time to reenlist in the service.

So I had orders transferring me from the Ashtabula to the Abnaki, starting with a month of shore-leave to visit home and friends. However, due to being arrested by Long Beach City Police the night before I was due to transfer, I left the Ashtabula in the afternoon of my 20th birthday, Saturday November 16, 1963; most of that morning it appeared that I was going to be delayed, perhaps in the brig, so that I could endure 'nonjudicial punishment' for the crime of embarrassing the U.S. Navy with my misbehavior in the City of Long Beach, California, although as embarrassments go, my transgressions were fairly puny; preceding 'the great embarrassment' I had been awake for 3-straight days of on-board duty, and an equal number of nights of revelry with some of my friends, who were sending me off with no small amount of jeering for missing the Coral Sea Celebration, and late on the 3rd night, having had almost no alcohol that day, I sat down on the fender of a vacant police car awaiting my friend Willie who was attempting to talk a waitress into allowing us to crash at her nearby apartment. My next conscious sensation was of being poked in the ribs by one of Long Beach's finest, prodding me awake with his night-stick or flash-light, arresting me for 'public drunkenness' and transporting me to the city's fine lock-up facility...so ended my 'crime spree' in Long Beach.

Next morning at the godawful hour of 7 a.m., an armed Bos'un's Mate from the ship arrived in his dress-blues, complete with "SP" arm-band and Colt .45 standard issue to transport me back to the ship, in hand-cuffs of course, because it was entertaining for him and others to be able to transport someone from "Operations" -  those who handle communications, radar, sonar, navigation and the like...in other words, we were the guys with high school diplomas and no criminal background...and as such were rarely brought back aboard under arrest.  I was not happy to provide this entertainment for my ship-mates which made up the deck-force and engineering crew.  Plus, it was beginning to seep into my consciousness that I might end up in a Marine brig, awaiting punishment, since I had already been ordered off the Ashtabula.

Once aboard, I drew the "luck card" because the Officer in Charge was Mr. Hampton, a Lt. Commander and the head of Operations...in other words, my enlisted boss's, officer-boss...with whom I had an amiable relationship, and a fair amount of contact as a courier with a high security clearance. I was able to lobby the Officer in Charge that it would be a waste of time to keep me aboard for a Captain's Mast when by just giving me my all-ready printed and signed orders I could go down the gang-way and be out of his life forever...but, if I stayed, who knew what might happen? It might drag on and they could end up taking me to the Coral Sea Celebration at the expense of one of their precious 'lifers.' He saw the logic, sent me off the ship with my orders, and a warning to not make him sorry.  I started my shore-leave by hitch-hiking from Long Beach to Tucson, Arizona to visit my church and high school friends, including Jim Brogdon and Cherry Beck, but the trip to Tucson bears recounting.

This hitch-hiking trip was the seeming endless trip from Hell! Let's take pre-trip inventory here: I had been up the better part of 4-days now, with a scant 5-hours of sleep in the Long Beach drunk-tank, followed by being let go from the ship sometime around four in the afternoon, at which time I rode a cab to the freeway entrance where I started hitchhiking. On my first ride I got picked up by a sexual predator who wanted to touch me in places my bathing suit covered, though I was wearing dress-blues, and worse yet, he wouldn't stop the car and let me out till I threatened to beat him senseless though we were going 70 mph; he dropped me off, left in a huff, and, I got immediately ticketed  by a CHP Officer in Colton, CA for hitch-hiking on a controlled access highway (a ticket which, unpaid for 2 years, later resulted in a bench-warrant for my arrest should I ever enter the great state of California).  My mother ultimately convinced the Court to let her pay the original $45 fine.

I was next picked up by a drunk couple on their way to a weekend tryst at the Salton Sea...a happening place for the trailer-trash seeking to get away from their city double-wides, and legal mates in the 60's.  This modern love-story was playing out in the front-seat, with heated bouts of clutch and tickle between the driver and his ‘squeeze’ while navigating the now dark highway with one hand and one-eye, while both sucked down vodka screw-drivers from a large thermos.  Purely out of self-defense and a wise fear of meeting my Maker, I suggested to the horny driver that possibly I could drive so they could be properly attentive to each other in the back seat. They agreed, and though I lived long enough to tell this story, likely because I took the wheel that night, I was summarily evicted from their car when I took the highway on the South side of the Saltine Sea, while they had wanted the North side of that stinking piece of waterfront.  My wrong turn went unnoticed because they were occupied with each other to the point of oblivion, which was punctuated by (perhaps) several ‘happy ending’s on her part...I was surprised they weren't more grateful for the time alone which I had provided, but, the night was young, and I was learning that no good deed would go unpunished.

Never the less, I was again picked up after a few minutes, this time by a pleasant however badly intoxicated young Hispanic fellow, one of many agricultural workers near Indio, California who at the time were referred to as 'Mes'cans'. Soon after picking me up, he had discarded his lit cigarette out the driver's window, only to have it blow back through the back window, unbeknownst, onto the back seat, resulting eventually in a very noticeable orange, quickly spreading flame in the back-seat, fanned by the hot, desert wind coming through the wide opened back windows.  We stopped on the shoulder, and first tried simultaneously urinating on the back-seat to douse the spreading fire, but, in desperation, ended up pouring the better part of a half-case of beer and a half-gallon of red-wine on it before it stopped blazing.

We got going again, somewhat sobered by the near catastrophe, now nearing El Centro, CA.  When he had to turn and head North, I thanked him for the ride and entertainment, got out, and was standing along side a lightly traveled rode, on a warm night, in solid darkness except for the stars above.  Almost immediately I was picked up by four farm workers (3 Black and 1 White) also drunk who ultimately used me as a counter decoy while they pilfered liquor at an all night liquor store in El Centro, CA; one of the Black gentlemen, named "Red" apparently had been treated badly by White people and seemed intent on making even the score at my expense, though he and the others acknowledged that I had done them and Red no personal harm.  I explained to Red and others in the car that to my knowledge my family had owned no slaves, and I had never directly harmed a Black person. (It should be noted that this statement was a minor falsehood because I had in fact beat up a little Black kid, in order to please a much admired, older Cousin in St. Louis when I was 8 years old.)  Red again muttered his intent to harm me in some fashion before we permanently parted ways. Thankfully, one of the others was able to reason with him along the lines that killing a serviceman in uniform was not patriotic. They dumped me out in Yuma, Arizona when they turned off the main highway, which would later become Interstate-8, to proceed to their next farm job  Then as now, the valley North of Yuma was a large source of employment for itinerant farm hands of all races, creeds, colors, and in Red's case, temperaments.

After hiking a ways East of Yuma, complete with my full sea-bag, about 40-lbs of stuff, I encountered some crazy local guy whose introduction out the window of his custom-muscle car was, "You know we kill sailors around here!"  I learned later that indeed, in the not too distant past, a hitchhiking sailor had in fact been killed and discarded by some unknown assailant.  I don't remember my response but in my defense, I was beginning to feel a bit fatalistic about my trip, and replied something to the effect that “At this point I’m not sure I care if I die!”  I was resigned, as it were, to the possibility that virtually everything was going to go wrong, including my own early demise.  Apparently he felt my comment deserved transport on over to Gila Bend, after a short-stop at his girl friend's to explain why he would be late.  The trip went quickly because "Gomer's" muscle car speed never dropped below 100 miles per hour the entire 60-some miles.  I was very happy to disembark in Gila Bend, and catch my next ride, which must have been safe, because I fell asleep and have absolutely no memory of the individual, or the rest of the ride.  The trip from Gila Bend to Tucson has been entirely lost from my mind, the result no doubt of sleep deprivation, a modest hangover, fear, and of course, the passage of years of time.

In any case, I blacked-out until the driver woke me up in North Tucson, at the exit for Miracle Mile.  Because of all the craziness and misroutes, the delays put me late into Tucson on Sunday afternoon, a full 24-plus hours after leaving Long Beach. However, I also learned during that 24 hour period that alcohol, when applied with courtesy, humility, and understanding is not only a social equalizer, it has the potential to be a life-saver, and a fire-suppressant for a minor car-fire, provided the alcohol content of the liquid is not too high. It was now Sunday November 17, 1963.

I must have called the church or Jim's house, I don't remember which now, and left a message about where I was...on Oracle Road near "The Miracle Mile" intersection, so Jim and Cheri (pronounced ‘Cherry’) Beck could retrieve me from the restaurant I was camped out in. When Jim and Cheri showed up they were welcome sights...sober, clean, dressed for church, friendly faces from the near-past, glad to see me, providing me a chance to eat and a place to sleep...on the couch at Jim's house as I remember. I spent the next four days just reconnecting with people I'd gone to school with, including my Literature teacher Harriet Martin and my Guidance Counselor Frances Smith at Tucson High School. Miss Martin and Miss Smith had played a huge part in some of my early decision making, and provided more resources to me than my poor academic efforts deserved.  I wanted to demonstrate to them that while not National Honor Society material just yet, I was at least not a total detriment to society as some of my class-mates had predicted I would be, unless you count that whole Long Beach thing.  Of course, there would be several future offenses against humanity, though they would pale if compared to Lt. Calley at My Lai, for instance.

The following Friday I was to meet Jim Brogdon after his last class at the University of Arizona, and as I remember we were going to shoot some pool at Louie's Lower Level in the student union building, then drag Speedway including Johnnie's Drive-In and other custom-car hangouts during the night. I don’t recall how I was transporting myself; perhaps Jim was letting me use his car.  Our pool game was not to be...this was November 22, 1963, and as I entered the student union building the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas was just playing out on the black and white TV in the student union common-area. Students and faculty were standing around the television watching those unique, awe-filled moments, many crying, some ashen-faced and in shock...while I was a fairly calloused and street-wise kid, I must admit that the possibility that a President of the United States could be assassinated was surreal to me at the time; my unpracticed mind equated power with being untouchable. Later the radio in Jim's car reported that all military on leave were ordered to complete their ordered leave and report to their next ordered assignments. The time between the day after Kennedy’s assassination and my December 24th arrival at my next ship have been lost to time. I can only assume I hitched from Tucson to the Northwest to visit friends and family, then found an air-hop to Hawaii.  

I had initially remembered arriving at the salvage docks, at the entrance to Pearl Harbor on a sunny afternoon, made warmer by the fact that I was wearing the mandatory travel uniform of the U.S. Navy, dress-blues. But, in fact the ship’s logs indicate that I came aboard between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. on December 24th, where the ship was moored at the Sierra docks at the entrance from the sea to Pearl Harbor.  As I went aboard, I was immediately struck by the difference in size and environment of this ship, compared to the Ashtabula;  it was not even a third the length of the Ashtabula, and there was no pomp and circumstance whatsoever at the Quarter Deck. When boarding the Ashtabula one would encounter an Officer, a Petty Officer, and a messenger, all in crisp "whites' or dress-blues depending on the climate. The Abnaki's Quarter Deck was manned by a single 3rd Class Bosun's Mate, dressed in denim "dungarees" which were the manual labor clothing of the Navy. The Abnaki was a 'fleet seagoing tug' - as opposed to a harbor tug. Fleet-tugs were used to do all manner of duties, including: salvage towing, relocating vessels, such as dredges, dragging gunnery targets, dragging sounding devices (when we assisted sonic mapping the beach for the Marine landing at Da Nang), and performing interdiction, search and seizure of small vessels running contraband from international waters in the South China Sea into the Mekong Delta area. We would also search for downed fliers off North Viet Nam, as well as, members of a Swift Boat which mysteriously detonated near Yankee station one night.  And for months at a time in the Springs of 1965 and ‘66, we ran interference with Skunk Delta, a Russian "harassment" trawler, to keep her from running afoul of the carrier based air-operations going on South East of Haiphong. In short, "fleet tugs" as they were called were work-horses, without the usual puffery that would be present on even an Oiler like the Ashtabula, and certainly on a destroyer or guided missile frigate, or other specific purpose vessel.

The Abnaki could navigate in relatively shallow water, at up to 12 knots, and had enough fuel and dry supplies to stay at sea indefinitely; fresh-food, however, was depleted within 12 or 14-days unless an underway replenishment could be arranged. Long before the Swift Boats were organized up the coast Viet Nam, and before John Kerry bumped his head, got his Purple Heart and became an anti-war hero, we were patrolling the coastal waters from just South of China to the South Tonkin Gulf 500 or so miles North of the Equator. I went to the Abnaki December 24, 1963 and left her in July of 1966 while we at Subic Bay, PI.

I wanted to be in SE Asia but not necessarily on a vessel as pedestrian as a 'tug.' So when the opportunity came to volunteer for the recently organized Swift Boats I did so. To make a long story short I was rejected on the basis of my paper application without so much as an interview. The early recruiting for the Swift Boats was very idealistic.  They were looking for "John Kerry's" because there were lots of photo ops and lots of scrutiny, including "congressional interest" in how all that money for SWIFT Boats was being spent.  My service 'record' had by then become unacceptable. I had accumulated a substantial history of undisciplined behavior, including a 'Captain's Mast' (the Navy version of non-judicial punishment)...in short I was the 'loose cannon' which was not destined to be a SWIFT Boat crewman...looking back from here I have to admit that it was a wise decision on some one's part though I complained mightily about it at the time; I later challenged the decision in person during a stay in Subic Bay, saying to the Administrative Officer, among other things, "So you'd rather send some 'brown-bagger' (married guy) with a family than a single guy...how does that make sense? The young Officer looked at me and said simply, "The married guys bring our boats back!" Later on, the Swifts and "Brown Water Navy" Riverine boats became a bit more realistic in their recruiting but once rejected, the decision was not to be revisited by me or the Navy.

In all -- during my four-plus active service years in the Navy -- I was denied Nuclear Sub service (applied for while in Radio "A" School), Swift Boats, and an Antarctic Expeditionary Forces attempt after being denied Swift Boats. If I had to guess about my motives for volunteering for Antarctica, I think I just wanted to do something 'special' or 'stand-out' in in some fashion; spending 24 hours at a time locked in a radio-shack and crypto vault was not terribly heroic...incidentally, this same need nearly got me involved with (I think) Che Guevara's outfit in South America by way of a mercenary recruiter after I left the service. Because I had tactical radio operation and radio repair skills, as well as some light weapons training I was potentially attractive as a mercenary field-radio operator recruit...it also helped that the recruiter did not have access to my official U.S. Navy service record, otherwise I'm sure that Che Guevara, or some other Latino guerrela, would have found me 'unacceptable for duty' as well! The story of how I didn't go to Colombia as a mercenary is yet another story for another time.

As it occurred, while on the Abnaki, I saw more interesting duty than I had on the Ashtabula; the Ashtabula was essentially a big fuel delivery vehicle which ran a route back-and-forth to it's customers on or near Yankee Station, while the Abnaki did 'projects' over the entire length of the Tonkin Gulf, and even further South, including:
1.) Assigned to a Mine Flotilla to drag a sonic transponder in order to do a 'map' of the 'beach' at Da Nang...a beach that would later, March 8, 1965,  become the only amphibious Marine landing of the war
2.) Assigned to pick-up a 'target raft' at Johnston Atoll and perform a deep water anchor of that raft so the U.S. Airforce could test a new, top-secret, B-52 bomb-sight. The raft emitted a variety of electro-magnetic signals (visible light, running gasoline motor and generator, infra-red, radio-frequency, and more) all of which the bomb-sight could use to hone in from above 52K feet...it was said that the planes bombardier built in a 3 degree error so as not to destroy the raft.
3.) On Dixie Station we performed interdictions, stopping sampans trying to come back into the Mekong Delta from Chinese, Polish, and Russian freighters in international waters, presumably carrying weapons, ammo, and medical supplies for the VC.  Our interdiction actions were deemed "legal" because we carried a Vietnamese Naval Officer aboard who gave us case by case authority to intercept, and board.
4.) For months at a time, we dogged 'Skunk Delta' on Yankee Station.  Skunk Delta was the radar blip name for the Russian "fishing" trawlers, which interfered with carrier flight operations and communications; once airborne, the sorties were mere-minutes from Haiphong and Hanoi.
5.) We towed a large harbor dredge from Johnston Atoll, with a destination of Yokosuka, Japan; the dredge flooded and capsized during a massive tropical typhoon, endangering our vessel in the process.
6.) We towed gunnery and missile targets for other ships and “Fire Fly” targets for planes to fire on.
7.) We carried 4 tons of C-3 explosives in diving 44-lb canvas back-packs, and the SEAL team members who would place the explosives to widen the shipping channel at Johnston Atoll.
...and there were more day to day incidents which have become fuzzy over time, including "one off" towing missions for sundry vessels.

I left the Abnaki from Subic Bay in July 1966, with my friend 'Robert-not-Bob' Knapp, an Electronics Technician from Pennsylvania. (Robert-not-Bob had a ‘thing’ about being called Bob). We hired a car and driver to take us to Clark AFB; we took our time, stopping at roadside cantinas to sample the local and national beers, all having the same name, San Miguel; the driver too, drank his share of the "free" beer. I had orders to report to the Treasure Island, California processing station to be mustered out to Inactive Reserve duty. As coincidence would have it, this was precisely the week that the Boy Scout Jamboree was being held on the mainland and magically, we returning Vietnam veterans were bumped from flight after flight over a 4 day period by military brats, their Air Force troop leaders and parents streaming back to the U.S. at the tax-payers expense for the Scout Jamboree in Indiana or some other white-society outpost.  Meanwhile, we languished without proper quarters or food authorizations; even the officers who could have granted temporary housing and food were off to the Jamboree.  Yippee!

We lived in the base theater, enlisted men's club, and the airport waiting room for the better part of four days, and finally were flown out on separate aircraft. I never saw Knapp again, even at Treasure Island. It may be that he was processed out at Great Lakes. In any case, the event at Clark AFB gives you an idea how little our society valued returning Viet Nam vets; this was in the mid-60's, and it was destined to get worse for the returning "baby killers."   The civilian population, fully informed of our atrocities by the evening national news, was even less benevolent, unless of course, the returning vet was one of their own.  Clark Air Force Base is no longer there, having been wiped out by anti-American sentiment, and the volcano of Mount Pinatubo.  On Google Earth, the reclaimed area now appears to be some sort of industrial park and possibly houses a small airport.

Upon arriving at Travis Air Force Base in the Bay Area, the returning Navy personnel were gathered and bused to Treasure Island, a rock just off the west side of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland. I spent almost a week there being weighed, probed in all orifices, observed for tropical diseases, checked for VD, threatened regarding the secrecy and top-secrecy of what I had seen and handled in my work, reminded of my security clearance, as well as, the penalty for breaking the trust of SEATO and NATO, and several other equally mundane activities, such as the bomb-sight testing in the South Pacific in violation with at least the spirit of some treaty with Russia. In fact the administrative activities necessary to actually produce my DD-214, and complete my separation from active service should have taken no more than 3-hours of effort, but the Navy managed to stretch the tasks into almost a week.

Still this brief stay let me become acquainted with some newly developed "pop" culture, that being, young underclad women in white boots, dancing in elevated cages in "Go-Go Bars."  (Equal at last, equal at last, thank God Almighty equal at last!)  Thinking back on those scenes from this vantage point in the 21st Century, those '60's events seem relatively "prudish" when compared to the carnal treats available to most everyone today. And to my surprise, on my last day on 'TI' as Treasure Island was called, in this atmosphere of high-value for me as a serviceman, my being bumped from the Coral Sea celebration, my various volunteerism rejections, and several non-judicial punishments, and of course, the most recent demonstration of my value by being bumped from return flights at Clark AFB, the Navy made one, last, long effort to convince me to 're-up' for another enlistment...dangling all manner of goodies in front of me to entice me to sign up for another 6-years.  That six, and my already four years, would likely seal the deal for life.  Almost no one retired voluntarily out of the Navy after10-years, because they have no retirement benefits whatsoever, including medical, and had by then likely become fully institutionalized.

The irony was, I had joined the Navy with full intention of making it my life and career. I wanted a life at sea, travel to foreign, particularly Asian, ports of call. What drove me out was the gut-rending ignorance, ineptitude, lack of decency, and absence of fraternity, demonstrated by most of the non-commissioned officers -- the Petty Officers (aptly named). And, I had recently learned that one could not voluntarily remain at sea for their career. Shore duty was inevitable. I could spend 3 - 5 years at a Navy Communications Station, for instance, Keflavik, Iceland or Rota, Spain at the whim of some anonymous Navy analyst and his computer.  That roll of the dice was just an unacceptable risk, so I discharged into the inactive reserves.  

Some of my old shipmates on the Abnaki are still friends today...Gary "The Burner" Born and Cranny-Rat (Mel Lantham) are email and Face Book friends. Ken Wetzler, perhaps my most enduring shipboard friendship, died in January 2006. 'Pop' Kelly, Gunners Mate First-Class, was one of the most decent humans I've ever met.  He was simple and uncomplicated.  He had been a young gunner on some vessel which was destroyed in a battle at Buckner Bay. He claimed he had been a Warrant Officer for awhile after that because most of their officers were killed in one attack on the bridge, and several men received promotion to warrant officer.  He was not given to enlarging anything, so I tended to believe him. And, in addition to my few enlisted buddies, I have very fond memories of a few officers who went the distance for us, and more, some on my personal behalf when I didn't deserve it...Captain Williams, Ltjg. Robert Turner from Oklahoma, Chief Warrant Officer James Hollis of San Diego., deceased in 2021.  And of course I remained friends with Jim Brogdon, now deceased, who didn't serve on the Abnaki, but was at Cubi Naval Air Station, in the Phillipines performing maintenance on jet engines.  Jim died convinced that his Muscular Dystrophy was a direct result of exposure to Agent Orange which had been sucked into the jet engines while doing low level bombing and strafing runs.  The VA remains unconvinced that Muscular Dystrophy of any variety is a presumptive disease of AO exposure.

“Vietnam” as a personal experience is a chapter in my history which will never be finished as long as I’m alive and my memory is working.  What occupies my “wonderment” is less my own personal actions and involvement, but more incredulous curiosity about WHY we could have gotten so involved at all.   I know now that the chapter called Vietnam will forever exist in draft-form, constantly edited, never quite complete until I am interred at the VA Memorial in Marana, Arizona.  

I’d like to think that our society and its government learned the lessons offered by our collective Vietnam experience, but it appears we have committed most of the same errors again and again in the four decades since Vietnam ended, and we even found some new fallacies to justify involvement in the lost causes of Iraq and Afghanistan, then slipping out the “back door” and abandoning our local allies to the violent whims of our common enemy when the bored onlookers at home become “fatigued” with the conflict.

Where did it all begin?

I was born November 16, 1943 in Dillon, Montana (I've been back once as a child of 5 or 6). We were there at my birth because my father ("Bill") was the pastor of a 'pioneer' Assembly of God church in that town. The word 'pioneer' suggests that he was the founding pastor, or at least an early pastor, and that the survival of the church was an open question. The Assembly of God parishioners in the West, at that time and well into the '60's were society's undereducated, generally poor, agricultural, loggers and mill-workers, craft and non-craft blue-collar workers whose families had fled the impact of the Depression and the Dust-Bowl on the Midwest and Mid south of the U.S. for the promised land of the West.

Their heritage filled the the churches I attended with the soulful almost 'blue grass' music of guitars, banjo's and fiddles singing of a better day in the '...sweet by and by...' and triumphantly caroling the certain knowledge that 'I'll Fly Away!' There were potluck dinners 'on the ground' at least once a month during the Summers, and the pervasive myth of being God's latter-day saints, simple honest working people from rural roots living in a world of sin and oppression by the wealthy, whose only hope was to be rescued in the very near future by 'The Rapture' at which time all would be put right and the rich oppressors would get their comeuppance because 'wealthiness' was the opposite of Godliness. It was a simple black and white world, of evil and good, them and us...I often envy the clarity of those times, but only the clarity...the rest I can well do without, in particular the blind ignorance, and the pride that went with the identity..

My mother ('Goldie') became my mainstay and compass during the chaotic first 18 years of my life. 'Goldie', as I called her from about my 13th year on, was the most influential human in my early life, though I doubt she would have willingly claimed some of the lessons I learned from watching her; for example, I learned by watching her patient and longsuffering approach to life that there was no near term payoff for possession of virtues.  So if you doubt the existence of a future life after death, there is little virtue in these practices...they benefit only your tormenters here and now, and there will be no there and then in the sweet by and by.  She was intelligent and seemed somewhat guileless and naive about other people and their motives. Over time I came to understand that she was not ignorant of others' motives...it was mostly that she felt responsible only to live her own life in the Light, which included responding with grace to the guile around her. Like every little boy I have idealized my mother in my memory, still there are much worse flaws that men can have.

My sister ('Lois') was one month shy of 8 years old when I was born. There had been a prior conception, another child between Lois and me. 'It' came into the world as an unidentifiable mass of protoplasm, aborted at home by the Universe...perhaps on that small death hangs the chance for my own conception and birth.  Thank you "It" -- because of you I got the chance to "...contribute a verse..."

Lois and I agree that we were both 'only' children, that is, she was almost 8 years old when I was born, and I was 10 years old when she married and left home...leaving each of us with 8 years of sibling-free parental attention. Still I was 'the baby' so I know -- and remember -- that the parenting and discipline was not equitably applied during the years that Lois and I overlapped in the home.  More was expected of her simply because she was a female...I didn't mind that inequity then, and I'm still quite OK with it at the sibling level.  However at the societal level I've come to think of the gender inequities as "criminal” though I could argue that our biases run so deep as to be difficult to isolate.

I don't remember leaving Dillon...I was an infant, but the leaving foretold many more departures, from many more towns and cities in the future. I now know that these departures...at the time purported to be 'God's call' on my father to some place he was needed in the unknown Scheme of things...were in fact the continuation of my father's already lengthy history of avoiding adversity by fleeing the scene. Bill was a 'flight risk' all of his adult life -- starting as a 17 year old in trouble with the law in his hometown, continuing until age and immobility forced him to live in a fixed-community for the last decade plus of his 88 years of life.  We moved towns, states, and schools often.  Either God moved us, or the weather (in search of house-painting weather), or my Dad's allergies, or the illness or death of a relative in the Midwest but move we did...regularly, though not with any predictable pattern or duration, but with 100 percent certainty...at some point I began simultaneously arriving in new towns or schools while planning my defensive departure...preparing for inevitable loss of friends, roots, and context.  Still, there was no suffering in this...it was quite simply just the way it was.  The morning after I graduated from high school in Tucson, we locked our rented duplex, left the key under the mat, and departed Tucson.  This was June 3, 1962.  I would, coincidentally, return for a visit the week Kennedy was killed, in November 1963.

I joined the Navy in July 1962. While living with Lois and her family the summer after high school.  I tried to go to sea as a merchant sailor. I was then and still am taken with Joseph Conrad's stories of young men going to sea, and discovering themselves -- strengths and flaws alike -- during their adventures. Lord Jim is perhaps my favorite book, and amazingly a damned good movie. My merchant seaman effort was brief, less than a month, after which I settled for the Navy when my money ran out.  I was assigned to Radio 'A' School following boot-camp. During leave between boot-camp and radio school, Goldie and I documented every town we had lived in since my birth, in order to complete the application for a security clearance and the FBI background check which preceded any clearance.

In my family 'towns lived in' was a vague concept, punctuated by good intentions for staying, interrupted by some real or imagined inconvenience.  ‘Lived in’ could mean a week in an itinerant cabin-court; it could mean a month in a rental; it could mean two-plus years in a parsonage.  So the FBI background investigator ultimately settled for only the residences at which we received mail or had a monthly expense receipt, such as rent, lights or garbage collection...this parsed the list to just less than 40 towns and cities between November 1943 and June 1962. We decided to not confuse the investigators by trying to explain the several 3 and 4 month sojourns to Southern Mexico to '...save the Indians...' Saving the Indians was a persistent theme in my father's Cosmos, so I'll revisit that concept frequently over the coming months. At this point just let me say about travels, causes and adventures: To some degree 'Where you've been is who you are' though I wouldn't argue it in those simple terms, because 'When' you were Where may have equal importance, as well as 'Who you met When and Where.'  Turns out identity is complicated, particularly the environmental part, while DNA is pretty much set in stone, but with known and  unknown implications from environment.

I graduated 3rd in standing in my Radio 'A' class at San Diego Naval Training Center, and for that result was given the privilege -- within boundaries and limitations -- of choosing my future duty. I wanted to be at sea in the Pacific Fleet and I wanted that ship to be in Southeast Asia, preferably in and around Viet Nam. I got my wish and within a month of leaving Radio “A” school in San Diego was en route to Subic Bay in the Philippines where I was to rendezvous with the USS Ashtabula (AO51) which in less technical terms was an 'oiler.'  Oilers, are no longer built having been replaced by ships that do other things besides carrying JP5 and Av-Gas.  But, oilers carried fuel and supplies to other ships in and around SE Asia. My stay at Subic Bay extended to more than a full month in the transient barracks, as the Ashtabula's orders and arrivals were changed several times, diverting her to other ports. Ultimately, I caught up with her in June of 1963 in Yokasuka Japan.

I had three (3) simultaneous and diverse experiences in SE Asia: One experience was the news, as reported by our ever objective media; another was the Secret and Top Secret information available to me on a daily basis as a Radioman and Crypto Specialist, and Courier to the Captain of the vessels; the last my own personal firsthand experiences and those of my ship-mates. While Viet Nam may exist as nothing for modern America except a cautionary tale, there remain several hundred thousand of 'us' Americans, Canadians, Aussie's, New Zealanders, Koreans, and other SEATO nations who have been unable to comfortably put it to rest. I still keep the news texts and pictures of 'Hanoi Jane' (aka Lady Jayne Fonda) chronicling her visit to North Viet Nam on my computer.  I still carry the symptoms of exposure to Agent Orange. My guess is I'm unlikely to resolve the ambiguities of Viet Nam before I depart for good. Still some readers may find it interesting. One of the great things about written material is that you can sign out, or skip ahead.

Next: More about SE Asia