WOUNDED KNEE

December 29 is an important date for me, in my history as a writer. It appeared earlier today on a friend’s page, and I included some of the following information in my comments. But I don’t see it any more; maybe just another Facebook mystery.

         On December 28, 1890, troops under the command of Colonel James Forsyth, US Army, moved about 350 Lakota Sioux into an encampment near Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

         The following morning, the encampment was surrounded by a superior number of soldiers (Wikipedia’s report says 500) who had four Hotchkiss guns among them, strategically placed on high points overlooking the Lakota camp. A Hotchkiss gun was a light, mule-portable mountain artillery piece (1.65”, or 42mm); or, depending on the model, a rapid-firing 37mm early machine gun.

         At daybreak, Forsyth ordered the Indians to surrender all weapons. As the story goes, one old man, who was either deaf or did not understand English, or both, was struggling to keep his rifle, which went off in the struggle and killed a soldier.

         Little more than an hour later, 150 Lakota men, women and children (mostly women and children) lay dead on the snowy prairie (it was December in South Dakota), along with about 25 white soldiers. (Some of whom may have been killed by friendly fire; it was by all accounts a chaotic day.)

         Sometime late in 1990, I asked my editor at a small weekly in Santa Cruz, California, if I could write a review of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” which was coming to town. He said “Write it, and let me see it.”

         I went downtown to a store that rented VCRs and video tapes, and asked the proprietor if he’d let me sit in the store and watch “The Wizard…” as it was coming to town and I wanted to write a review.

         Hm… no-brainer: more business. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.”

         I sat through the movie, took lots of notes, and went home and wrote a piece that said Dorothy’s neighbor had every right to call the Sheriff because her dog Toto had been tearing up the neighbor’s garden, and anyway the Sheriff didn’t shoot the dog, just scolded Dorothy. So then, in the movie, the neighbor lady, who was only trying to protect her garden, metamorphoses into the Wicked Witch of the West.

         Later, the Wizard turns out to be a bullshit artist, the Cowardly Lion has his affliction cured by pinning a medal on his chest, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man receive equally phoney solutions to their problems. When Dorothy wants to go home, all she has to do is click her red shoes together.

         I called bullshit on much of that: is this the stuff we want to raise our kids on? Tread on our neighbors’ rights, then send in troops when they get uppity about it?

         That editor usually accepted what I wrote -  typically an article about Reagan’s interventionist policies in Central America, mainly Nicaragua and El Salvador – without objection. But as I waited for a reaction to the review of Oz, none came. Finally I went in to see the editor: “Did you see my review?”

         He reached into a drawer, took out a manila envelope containing my manuscript, and tossed it rudely across the desk toward me. He didn’t say anything, but when I picked up the envelope, I saw he had scrawled across the front “Wizard of Odd.” I turned and left the room, to the accompaniment of snickers of my fellow staffers, the same people who were usually very supportive of my antiwar writings, and which were generally well received in that town which would later elect at least one Socialist mayor, and which was often lumped together with Berkeley as havens for leftists.

         Some weeks later, in late December, I was driving in four lanes of heavy traffic on Soquel Drive, at the end of the work day. Traffic was so heavy it just inched along, but I was content to listen to “All Things Considered” on NPR.

         A report came on which noted the 100^th Anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29^th, 1890. A woman historian was being interviewed. I didn’t catch her name, but she said that a few days after the massacre, a South Dakota newspaper editor wrote in his editorial advocating the extermination of the Sioux.

         That editor, she said, was L. Frank Baum, who was later to write and publish “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

         My shout was so loud it drew surprised and frightened looks from drivers and passengers across the four lanes of stalled traffic: I knew it! I FUCKING KNEW IT!!

         My shout, not understood by the alarmed motorists nearby, was an expression of self-righteous delight at my take weeks earlier on the story content of the “Wizard of Oz,” before I knew anything about L. Frank Baum, or very much about the massacre at Wounded Knee. It was all right there, in a story which millions of American families read to their children.

         I had seen it, looking at the story with the eyes I’d had in my head since I left the burning village of Tho An, over twenty years earlier.

ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE 40 YEARS AFTER EXPOSURE TO AGENT ORANGE

December 8, 2011

         On November 15, 2011, my wife and I were seated aboard a Continental Airlines flight at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, waiting to take off for Houston, Seattle, and Walla Walla. It was to be a short trip to Northeast Oregon for the first public reading of my just-published memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story.

         Our trip was suddenly shortened. I lost consciousness, just sitting there. When I came to, flight attendants and my wife, Patricia, were huddled around me. The flight attendants were urgently questioning Patricia and me: what was my name? what had happened to me? had I been sick recently? How did I feel right now?

         Patricia explained to them, and to me, that she had been asleep in her seat, waiting for takeoff, when she was wakened by me, noisily gasping for breath in the seat beside her.

         Paramedics came aboard, took my blood pressure, found it elevated, gave me a medication or two, then brought a wheelchair, helped Patricia collect our personal belongings, asked her for our personal data so they could retrieve our luggage from the belly of the aircraft, and wheeled me off the plane, Patricia walking behind.

         They took me to a clinic at the airport, then by ambulance to a hospital. A lot of questions, blood tests, electrocardiograms, more questions.

         We were there 2 days: more tests – especially more electrocardiograms – more questions. One young doctor there was especially notable for her throroughness, her knowledge, her obvious caring, and her efficiency without seeming impatient with my slow answers in Spanish. This doctor mentioned the possibility of my condition being “isquemia (Spanish), a word which I didn’t know in either Spanish or English.

         Nov. 19, a couple of days after we arrived in Oregon, my friend Walter Smith forwarded to me an email of an artile titled “How Agent Orange Led to Ischemic Heart Disease in Veterans.” “Ischemic” would be the the English pronunciation of the adjective for “isquemia.”

         BINGO.

The article Walter had sent me was a wake-up call, but was very brief, and sent from a website I didn’t recognize. After we got home and I had two more attacks and more treatments, my wife got on the internet and found an informative article on “isquemia” in Spanish, which she urged me to read immediately. When I got to the end, it turned out to be a pretty informative piece from the New York Times, translated into Spanish. The original English is here:

file:///Users/deanmetcalf/Desktop/Desktop/Agent%20Orange%20-%20NYTimes.com.webarchive

         Some more treatments, some more medications, an appointment scheduled with a cardiologist in Bogotá, and now I’m home, working some but mostly resting. First priority is to finish this note and send it to friends – especially veterans – so you’ll know why I’ve been so absent these past few days, and especially so that vets will know about ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE CAUSED BY (APPARENTLY) TRACE AMOUNTS OF AGENT ORANGE INGESTED 40 YEARS AGO.

          In my case, this explains a few things previously unexplained.

         But for now, this is long enough to be AN ALERT TO VETERANS: WATCH YOUR BODY. IT MAY CONTAIN INFORMATION YOU DON’T YET KNOW ABOUT, REGARDING THINGS WHICH MAY VISIT YOU LATER, AS YOU GET OLDER.

For decades, I was a serious athlete (ultramarathons, martial arts) and continuously active construction worker. But there were strange, infrequent episodes of unexplained weakness, to the point of not being able to walk. I once had to turn myself into an emergency room in Santa Cruz, California. I had to walk there, and though it wasn’t very far, I had to sit down several times on the sidewalk in order to regain enough strength to continue.

         There were others, isolated, unexplained by doctors.

        

         “The most common of the three illnesses, ischemic heart disease, restricts blood flow to the heart, causing irregular heartbeats and deterioration of the heart muscle–from the New York Times article noted above, which was published Oct. 12, 2009, and reported by James Dao.

The Veterans’ Administration recognized ischemic heart disease in October 2011 as being caused by toxins in Agent Orange, which was sprayed widely over Vietnam to kill foliage and deny the enemy cover; also to kill their rice crops. Vietnamese people are experiencing 4^th generation birth defects from Agent Orange.

         You don’t want to see the pictures of these children.

VETERANS' DAY POST: POEM BY WILFRED OWEN

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.--

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Owen was a WWI Conscientious Objector. At the same time, he was a Lieutenant in the British Army. Lines in this poem about dreams remind me of some of my own – which is not to put myself in the same league with him as poet or writer. He was killed in combat a few days before the Armistice on 11/11/1918, which we now celebrate as Veterans’ Day. He was about 24 years old. The last two lines, with Latin translated, would be:

The old lie: sweet and proper it is/ to die for one’s country.

ALMOST A COWBOY/ CANAL

Almost a Cowboy

     Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all-around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy. 

     Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horsedrawn sickleblade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around - I remember a Massey Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes, partly just to show off, Stan said’ Les would hitch a single horse to an old steelwheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horsedrawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good. 

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again. 

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done. 

     Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap  the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig  so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.

     But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields. 

     Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dumprake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.

     The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbedwire fence when a horsefly - an attack bomber of an insect - spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine. 

     I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again. Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbedwire fence in front of my nose. 

     Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”

     One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans. 

     Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.

     I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt. 

     I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose  "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella"  and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. 

        All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.    

     I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner. 

     He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage -  and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something! 

     Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.

     Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.

     It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

          Last time I seen 'er,

          ain't seen 'er since,

          she was jackin' off a nigger

          through a bobwire fence,

          gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

          gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

     We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.

     "Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way. 

     We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little spending money out of it.    

Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town. 

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, brokendown pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the fourletter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad. 

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!" 

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold. 

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenalinejerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An. 

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two armlengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people. 

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy. 

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 

     

Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.           

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well-directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.

SUNSET OVER KLAMATH LAKE

Sunset Over Klamath Lake

     Coli Avenue was a dirt street two blocks long. (Thirty years later, it still was.) Our house sat on a knoll between the highway's north entrance to Klamath Falls and the southern end of Klamath Lake. The Cascade Range rose against the sky beyond the lake to the west.     

     One day in 1960 I walked to the mailbox and took out a form letter addressed to me from the Veterans' Administration saying my father was dead. I read it standing by the mailbox. It didn't seem to affect me much at the time. I was seventeen; I'd last seen him when I was eight. 

     One evening after the VA letter came I went behind the house and stood on the knoll and looked out over the lake. It was sunset. The Cascades were an uneven indigo line against the western sky; Mt. McLaughlin still had snow draped around its shoulders. Wind moved clouds around the sky above the mountains; the sun's afterglow played with shades of red, palest pink to crimson of arterial blood, even on to purple. There was enough rain about to punctuate the burning clouds with strokes of grey. 

     The pulsating sky sent tremors through me. An electric arc seemed to jump between my past and future, not distant in time but perhaps in place. The sky seemed to be a signal from that future, a call to go places and do things. It thrilled and frightened me. I couldn't wait to get there. 

     Years later, studying Russian, I would learn the word toská which means, primarily, longing. It combines longing for something one is separated from with sadness at the separation. It can be a longing for something which once was but can never be again, or something desired for the future but which one knows can never be. 

     Now, on the rare occasion when I encounter the word toská, I remember the evening I stood looking across Klamath Lake at the sunset over the Cascades. I also remember how short was the time between that evening of longing and my arrival on the far side of the world in situations far less beautiful, far less calm, far more violent.

ADESTE FIDELIS, SEMPER FIDELIS

               Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis

One of my strongest memories of the Marine Corps has my bayonet scabbarded, rather than parting the air in front of my rifle's muzzle as I and others walk through waisthigh grass in search of someone to kill. This memory has my rifle unloaded and slung underarm, muzzle down against the entry of December's Camp Pendleton mist into the barrel. Our enemies were the wet cold, sore feet, tired legs, not being able to sleep, not being HOME. 

     Grey gunmetal of ancient M1s, showing through worn blueing, was cousin to the fog. Steel rifle butt plates clanked black plastic canteen caps; the canteen caps' flat aluminum chains clinked. Soggy canvas packs disbalanced; straps chafed. Steel helmets weighed on stiff necks and caught our bodies' steamy heat and fogged the glasses of those of us stuck by tradition with the "foureyes" monicker. The column caterpillared to gravity's commands: men descending into a ravine slid and hurried and opened the distance between them only to bump against the bunched up men grunting up the other side. 

     It was some indeterminate part of the night, closer to dawn than to last evening's muddy dusk. We were a company of novitiates, already considering ourselves legendary because we'd finished Marine boot camp. But we were unblooded privates, marching in tired column toward the quonset-hut, fuel-oil-stove end of one of the last exercises of the three-weeklong Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), where we learned to fire, and to maneuver with, all the machine guns, mortars, grenades, automatic rifles, and rocket launchers in our nation's arsenal. 

     Every boyman of us was tired. We all wanted to lie down - the mud would have been fine - and sleep.      

     Some one along the accordioning column of homesick nascent heroes began to sing. At first the singer mumbled; the song stumbled. Then what always happens, in life and  at death’s door, happened: another Marine helped. The song spread along the column: "O come all ye faithful..." 

     Chins came off chests. Each of us began to judge footing by the bobbing of the faint silhouette of the helmet in front of him rather than by the dark-shrouded ground underfoot. "...joyful and tri-um-phant..." 

     The pace quickened. The column, which before the song had been an aggregation of tired blue adolescents, became a unit. Spacings evened; we got in step to the rhythm of the song. 

     We ran out of words we knew, but marched in a still attentive silence, keeping in step by the sound of our footfalls, reluctant to reenter the previous loneliness. A new wave rippled along the column: "Adeste fidelis..." Sure. Same song, words remembered now by youngsters brought up Catholic.

     My teenager's bones felt ancient. I felt myself to be one of a column of soldiers that was all soldiers, from all times, marching in mud, marching in snow, marching in hot sand, marching in jungles, marching on narrow trails clinging to mountains' shoulders, carrying weapons and packs, sweating and cursing, marching to a rhythm older than all of us, a cadence set by those before us, stepped off and chanted by us in our turn, to be followed after us by boys now still crawling, too young to walk, but who would be marching not many years after they learned to walk, to be followed after them by boys born of women not yet born themselves, all as we marched now. 

     I did not particularly like what I was doing, this marching in history's infinite column of young men. But I felt a stirring in me, as I imagine a Canada goose feels when autumn triggers something in its body saying it's time to fly south. So we rolled, swimming in our song, swapping languages as we ran out of what we knew, and learning more each time as, with the strength a group can give to one of its own, some isolated voice would bellow a remembered phrase into the now expectant fog ....

     "...come ye, O co-ome ye..." "I'm comin', honey, I'm comin'!" Laughter yelped along the column and flattened "...to Be-e-th-lehem." Those of us who'd never yet come inside a woman laughed loudest. 

     Sergeants, grinning into chinstraps, did not bark. They knew what we all knew, even if we didn't have words for it, even though we'd have mocked the words then had we heard them: that the United States Marine Corps is one of the core repositories of American patriotism and maleness; that it is, like the values it represents, an emotional rather than a thoughtful entity; that its primary attribute is faithfulness in the face - not just of death, but of plentiful, bodyripping, terrorborne, messy Death -and that the lineage of that faithfulness has much less to do with country and flag than with each man's loyalty to the man on either side of him when the combat would become so fierce and otherworldly that none but they could have the slightest notion of what it was about. 

     In my memory, it was that night that I entered the brotherhood of warriors.

HAULING ANCHOR IN SHELTER COVE

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir, so is more than war stories. In 1971 one of my nightmares booted me out of grad school, and out of my academic career. I was on the road for a while, drifting, then ended up as a deck hand
on a commercial albacore boat...




Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove

     The albacore, and a small fleet of jig boats following them, were off the California coast outside San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst had his castle built. It had begun to blow, with gusts in the range of thirty to forty knots. That made the seas too nasty for fishing from these boats. The wind itself made the trolling lines pretty useless anyway; they flailed about and jerked the lures out of the water too much of the time.

     A dozen or so boats made for the anchorage at San Simeon. Dick Mathews pointed the bow of the Anna Marie a little north of east, and we pulled in among the other boats already at anchor about midafternoon. He found a space open enough for the boat to swing on its anchor cable with a change in tidal current, and we dropped the hook. I stayed on deck to keep watch, lest we or a nearby boat should drag anchor and head toward its neighbor. Dick and his wife Ella went into the wheelhouse and relaxed with the two kids, taking their time and making an evening meal for all of us on the galley's diesel cook stove.       

     Shelter Cove was a good enough anchorage, but it wasn't perfect. It offered only partial protection from northwest winds, which was what we were trying to escape. And as darkness came, more and more boats slipped into the cove from outside, so that it would have been considered pretty crowded even in calm weather. 

     The weather wasn't calm. Though we'd escaped the brunt of the blow that was still howling offshore, the wind in the cove itself was maybe twenty knots, which is a little gnarly for being at anchor anyway. And the swells from outside continued to roll in under us, slide up the beach, and turn into a surf that pounded the rocks well within sight and hearing. No one, on any boat in the cove that day, could have been without some fear of dragging anchor and being swept onto the rocky beach. Dick got on the “Mickey Mouse” - the short range CB radio - and talked with skippers of a couple of boats near us. They all agreed to keep a continuous watch. 

     We ate our dinner as it got dark, and took our time cleaning the dishes and galley. Dick and Ella put the kids to bed in the forecastle, and we sat and talked awhile. Our conversation ranged here and there, to people we knew, places we'd been, schools we'd studied at -  Dick had graduated Summa Cum Laude after three years at Harvard - but the talk kept circling back to where we were, and to the wind. We kept hoping the wind and seas would die down, but they didn't. 

     Our anchor was holding in the sandy bottom. So, apparently, were those of the boats near us. Things looked not great, but not terrible either. We all agreed that we could sleep, which we needed badly after bucking several days of heavy weather outside, but that I should bring my sleeping bag up and roll it out on the hatch cover, to keep a closer eye and ear on the boat, the weather, and the sea.

     Sometime during the night, I started awake, feeling something wrong but not knowing what. Dick burst from the wheelhouse door, half dressed. 

     The anchorage was a snarl of frenetic activity. The wind had suddenly picked up, and just as suddenly changed direction 180 degrees. Boats pivoted too fast and too far on their anchor cables. Diesel engines roared into the wind as skippers maneuvered their boats up to now-dragging anchors and raised them, while trying to avoid collisions with other boats attempting the same maneuver. Radio channels crowded with urgent voices as men shuffled who should move through which opening first, in the scramble to get under power and out of the cove. Too preoccupied to go into detail, Dick said something about having heard about occasional contrary winds that would swoop down one of the canyons that footed on the cove, then quickly die out and give way to another such wind howling down a different canyon from a different direction.

     Dick started the main engine. Ella and I went forward to the bow to watch for other boats and make sure the anchor cable coiled properly onto its drum. Dick engaged the anchor winch. Nothing happened. The winch whirred, but the cable didn't move, didn't pull the Anna Marie toward her anchor, not a foot.

     Just when we needed it - desperately - the anchor winch had failed. There had been no warning. 

     The kids woke up. An emergency at sea sends shock waves through a small vessel; something beyond unwonted noises or motions of the boat will snap sleeping humans back from any momentary forgetfulness that they are, after all, at sea, and that the combined power of wind and water can take you down quickly, without warning. 

     Dick and Ella at first thought to put the kids back in their bunks below decks, so we'd be free to work. But they looked at each other and I could see agreement pass between them. Hunh-uh. Not below decks, not now. Ella got them into their life jackets and told them to wait in the wheelhouse, where they could see us through its forward windows, and we could see them. 

     While she did that, Dick had been looking over the winch, trying to find the problem. He turned to us with apology, and the beginnings of panic, on his face. He directed a questioning look at me. "I'm not much of a mechanic," I said. I'd spent time at sea in the service, but as a Marine aboard ships of the "gator navy," not as a seaman. The Anna Marie was my first experience as a deckhand, and I'd only been aboard a couple of weeks since Dick and I had met at the Mermaid Tavern.

     We knelt at the winch, while Ella made nervous trips from rail to rail, watching for other boats, pausing to reassure Christina and Alec at the wheelhouse window, tow heads sprouted from orange life jackets. I felt her conflict: one instinct told her to stay with the children, to hold them, to shut out the world for them. Her knowledge of that world told her in equally strong terms that the survival of her children depended more on avoiding a collision with another boat than on comforting them. So she had to endure the yawning distance of several feet from them, had to bear their pleas like a cross. 

     "What's wrong with it?" I asked Dick as we knelt by the winch housing, the size of a kneeling man, bolted to the foredeck immediately in front of the wheelhouse. "What's supposed to happen isn't happening," he said. I didn't know if I could help with the mechanical situation, but it was becoming apparent that Dick was beginning to be afraid that his spirit of adventure had gotten him in over his head, and that his life and that of his wife and their two very young children might be in the balance. But he was still the skipper, the only one who could really handle the boat. Somehow, I would have to help him, to inject some calmness into his bloodstream so that we didn't lose what was still our most valuable resource: our captain. As we knelt by the anchor winch, neither of us could avoid hearing the surf crashing on the rocks not far astern; nor could we shut out the knowledge that the wind was dragging us toward them. 

     "These two are supposed to engage," Dick was saying, putting his hand on the side of the winch where a heavy cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter rotated freely in the housing. The rotating part was connected to the winch's motor, and was turning fine. But the larger ring that was concentric with it, with a separation of an eighth of an inch, wasn't moving. That ring was the drum that, when the lever was thrown to engage the winch, was supposed to rotate along with the cylinder at its core, and reel in the anchor cable with enough power to haul the Anna Marie up to her anchor.

     The winch housing was a smooth casting, with no way to even see inside it short of unbolting the whole thing from the deck and lifting it off, a job that would require a crane, and much more time than we had. That was drydock work.

     "So, if this..." I pointed to the spinning cylinder – engages this..." – I put my hand on the larger stationary ring – "...and turns it, then the winch will work?" I asked.      "Should," Dick said. 

     "Do you have any of those little steel wedges we use to drive into the end of a hammer or axe handle, to tighten a loose head?" I asked. 

     "No." 

     "Got any spikes, or big nails, or any other soft steel?"

     He brightened a little. "Nails, I've got nails."

     "Got a cold chisel?"

     "Yes." 

     "Get me nails, cold chisel, hammer, hack saw if you got it, a pair of channellocks or visegrips to hold the nails."

     He disappeared below, obviously grateful to be doing something, and for the appearance of another shoulder under his load.

     I knelt on the deck by the large steel cleat between the anchor winch and the bow. Dick came back with the nails - 16 penny bright commons - and the tools. 

     "These your biggest nails?"

     "Yes."

     "They'll have to do."

     Ella continued her patrol, slipping past us as she moved from one rail to the opposite one, stopping where the kids still had their heads and arms stuffed through open windows of the wheelhouse. She made an occasional quick detour aft to check for danger there. 

     I shut out the world of wind and seas and other boats. They were Ella's responsibility now; she would handle it. The world narrowed, slowed. Long instants, like fat ripe fruits of time, floated before me to be picked. The universe was a small ellipsoid with two focal points: the cleat and the winch. I used the cleat for an anvil. 

     "Dick. Hold this nail with the pliers, here." I hammer end of nail into wedge, cut it off with cold chisel. One blow, one cut. Quick, deliberate. Each piece a wedge. Blacksmith rhythm now, WHAMPta, WHAMPta, WHAMPta.... A small pile of steel wedges. "Dick, disengage the winch. Drive these wedges into the crack, the ring between the cylinder and the cable drum. Ella. Need another hammer. Dick. Place each wedge across the circle from the last one; always opposite pairs, points of a compass. Try it now, engage the winch. "It turns! ah, slips again. Okay. Disengage. More wedges. Try it again. It turns, it turns!" 

     But it turned with only enough power to pull in slack cable. When the slack was taken up, and the boat's tonnage straightened the cable, it slipped again.

     Ella, Dick, and I talk about options: we can hacksaw the cable, kiss off thirty or forty fathoms of cable, the anchor chain, the anchor, get the fuck out of this maelstrom. But then we'd be back out in the weather, with no anchor to get us behind shelter somewhere else, in case the wind out there gets even worse than it is now.

     Can we pull it in by hand? Can we get a few feet at a time, use the winch to take up the slack cable, pull again? The cable has to go on the winch. If we just take it up and drop it on deck, it will turn into an unmanageable snarl. A coil or two falls overboard, slides aft, gets caught in the propeller, rips the drive shaft out through the hull, down we go, glub glub.       

     In a safe harbor, in quiet water, one strong person can get a line on a piling and brace against a boat's rib or a deck cleat and lean into it and move – very slowly - a boat the size of the Anna Marie. With no opposing force but the friction of the water, and no hurry, it can be done, a foot at a time.

     In Shelter Cove, we were in a frenzy of forces so much bigger than our physical selves that we were toys, rag dolls tossed by a nasty sea.

    What source of power do we have? We have the engine. "Ella. We're stronger. Take the wheel." (This is Dick talking now, he is the captain again). "Pull us forward, slowly, a little bit, until I say stop. We'll pull a few yards of cable onto the forecastle by hand, then you hold that position while we coil the slack cable with the winch. Then we do it again."

     Ella tried mightily, concentrating, forcing herself to ignore her children in order to save them, trying to feel the wheel and the throttle and to translate our shouts into the right movements of her own hands. But Dick had always handled the boat in harbors and anchorages, in any touchy situation, the captain's job.

     She couldn't do it, she hadn't been trained. She missed the timing, the Anna Marie lurched against its cable and made our wedges slip; or she went too far forward and the cable looped down in the water, slid aft along the gunwale, too close to the propeller. Dick would have to take the wheel. Ella and I would have to pull the cable. There was no other way. They traded places, remorse smudging both faces as they passed. 

     Dick got on the horn, tersely told nearby skippers our situation. They took responsibility for staying clear of us. They all hauled their anchors and turned out to sea. They kept in touch with us. One or two pulled away but stayed within sight, using their engines and rudders to buck this way and that into winds that would change direction ninety degrees or more in a minute. 

     O what a nice touch Dick had. He became inspired, a poet of throttle and kingpin. He relaxed, he rode the seas, he read the seas, he felt the tension on the cable, he watched the meager coils of cable we'd dump to the deck, he took my shouts and headwags as if made by parts of his own body, turning them into just the right easing forward, just the right holding of a position relative to the anchor. He timed the rhythm of his throttling with the rise and fall of the seas, so that when the bow dropped into a trough, Ella and I would have several feet of slack that we didn't have to fight for, and when the bow started to rise on the next sea, he'd ease off so we wouldn't get yanked overboard, or have our hands slammed into the bowstem, or lose all the cable we'd just earned.   

     Ella pulled cable like John Henry's wife drove steel. We bent beside each other, on either side of the cable, each bracing both feet against the point where the two sides met at the bowstem, and we pulled, four gloved hands on the cable. She didn't care about the leather of the gloves tearing, she didn't care about her hands tearing on the broken steel strands, she just pulled, she didn't care about the slamming of her kneecaps against the bow, she didn't care about the ominous compaction of her vertebrae when her refusal to slide her grip, to give up cable earned, suddenly transferred the pull of a tricky wave along the cable to our coiled backs. She wanted every inch of that cable, she would by God have it, she didn't care about the hair in her eyes, she didn't care how she looked, she didn't seem to care about the fact that we were both pulling on the same cable, and that the bulkheads we were braced against formed a sharp corner at the bow which made a tight pile of our four rubber-booted feet and jammed her body against the body of a man she hardly knew, she didn't care that she mingled straining arms with me, she didn't care that she butted heads with me. 

     That, she laughed at. She laughed and pulled.

    We would get some coils on deck; Ella would jump over and engage the winch. Dick would keep us steady. I’d hold the cable to keep it from sliding back overboard. We'd reel the slack cable onto the drum. Then we'd pull in more cable, and dump it in slack coils on the fo’c’sle deck. 

     Slowly, over the minutes or centuries or whatever game Time was playing then, the angle of the cable, where it snaked down into the water from the bow, changed. It steepened. 

     Finally, the cable pointed straight down. We were directly over the anchor. Shit. We hadn't thought this far. It was one thing - one groaning, tearing, tissue-sacrificing thing - to haul fathoms of cable aboard the Anna Marie till she was above the anchor. But could we lift the anchor? "What does it weigh?" "175 pounds." "What does the chain weigh, the fathoms of heavy links between the cable and the anchor?" "I donno. Probably more than the anchor." 

     But now we have to raise it. We're no longer anchored- the pick is bobbing up and down in the blackness above the ocean floor - and we can't get under way either, because our forward motion would sweep the anchor aft, now hanging free on fifteen fathoms of cable and chain, and draw the cable into the prop. We can't stay in one place; the seas will put us on the rocks.

     We must haul it. Ella and I look at Dick, at each other. We all know. I move my hand up and down, in the same rhythm as the seas. Dick nods. He comes out of the wheelhouse. The engine is at idle, which means we are drifting toward shore. The three of us lean over the cable, wait for the bow to drop into a trough, then scramble to beat gravity, to take advantage of the momentarily lesser weight of the anchor and chain and cable to take in a few feet more, then brace for the moment when the bow starts up the sea on the far side of the trough, making the weight we're holding multiply itself. The plummeting weight crunches us against the bulkheads, against each other, slams us to our knees on the plank deck, steals some of the cable we've just earned. 

     The Anna Marie, no longer under power, turns slowly sideways, lying in the trough, her bow shaking side to side like a terrier killing a rat. We can't handle the combined violence of up and down and side to side. Dick has to go back to the controls, has to wrestle the throttle and the  rudder and the wind and the seas and the position of the cable and himself until we are again facing into the seas, with the anchor dangling directly below the bowstem. He must stay there. Ella and I must haul the anchor and chain. We are drifting closer to where the surf is crashing on the rocks.        

     Ella and I work with the rhythm again, stealing precious feet of cable from the ocean as the bow drops. One of us has an idea. Just before the boat starts to climb the side of a new sea, multiplying gravity's effect and tearing the cable through our hands, we push down hard on the cable just inside of where it crosses the bowsprit, so that it crimps just enough to give us a mechanical advantage. We become a two-human ratchet, able to hold against the extra weight. 

     We are pulling the cable and it stops dead, before we hit the bottom of the trough. Something's wrong, something mechanical. We crimp it and wait for the next trough, poke our heads over the bow, look down. The first fat link of the anchor chain is lodged against the steel plate at the point of the bow. "Dick, the chain! the chain!" We're only a few fathoms from the anchor now. There is plenty of space between the protective plate and the ring that arches over it like a ferrule on a fishing rod to keep the cable or chain in place. But the increased diameter of the chain means that we'll have to get the first link of the chain several inches higher, and without tension, to pass it through the ring. 

     For that we need slack. 

     "Ella. Next trough, I'll reach over, lift chain and anchor from outside, give you slack. Get the first couple of links through the ring, then crimp it down and hold for your life, that's all we need the first time is two links inside and hold."

     We do it, I heave one lunge, she drops the links inside the bowstem and holds them, risking her hands. I swing one hand inside to hold with her, the weight tears the chain out of my other hand as the Anna Marie hits the far side of the trough and lunges skyward.

     But we have captured the beginning of the chain. We keep working that way, pulling in the chain. It is very different from the cable. It gives us a better grip, and holds more surely when crimped. But slippage of a chain that size, pulling a committed grip across a steel plate, does not mean torn tissue. It means mangled hands, missing fingers.

     More of the weight is coming aboard now. Our load is lightening. The coils of cable on the anchor winch are covered by coils of chain. Now comes the anchor, rusted flukes dipping in and out of the water. Ella and I lean over and just haul, straight up, knowing this is it, knowing that the few feet of chain still out aren't enough to reach the propeller and foul it, that our remaining danger is to leave the anchor dangling from the bow where it could knock a hole in the planking, but ho, there is no fucking way that fucking pick is not coming afuckingboard now, we reach down and grab the anchor together and heave it like Judo wrestlers up and over the bowstem, we fall in a wet clanking heap with it to the fo'c'sle deck. Dick guns the engine, the Anna Marie shakes her fanny at the rocky beach, we head for open sea, one woman, two men, a little girl named Christina, a little boy named Alec, and one GMC 671 diesel engine all screaming into the wind.

     Weeks later, after I had hired on another boat, Dick and I ran into each other in the Caravan Bar in Monterey. We got to swapping stories. After he'd told me about putting Ella and the kids ashore in Bolinas and fishing alone for a few days, I told him about my new skipper and boat, Doyl Myers and the Dora B. We paused. Dick wanted to talk about the night in Shelter Cove.

     He said he'd been scared, that he hadn't had a clue as to what to do about the anchor winch, that mostly he'd just had this dreadful feeling that things were falling apart, and that nothing he could do as skipper or husband or father would be able to hold his world together. But I had found a way, he said. 

     "How did you do that?" he asked.

     I thought for a long moment. My answer surprised both of us. "Vietnam," I said. What did I mean, he asked. I said it had been like combat. I told him about things moving in slow motion, about there being enough time to move, about getting inside the fear and snuggling it and about making the situation into a technical problem rather than an emotional one. I told him about the time after Tho An when Captain Love had told us to be ready to assault with fixed bayonets into a village which sounded like it had two or three .50 caliber machine guns on the enemy side, and I'd slept soundly for eight hours so I'd be ready.

     The other thing I learned about war that night in Shelter Cove I don't think I told Dick during our talk in the bar. It came to me gradually over the years. It was that working as we had on the boats, especially as Ella and Dick and I had done hauling the anchor, had satisfied some of the deepest hungers in me, needs that I've come to know had sent me to war more surely than the reasons I'd been given, and which I had given to myself at the time: the need to be in danger and to perform my way out of it, to save something or someone precious, and to be recognized for having done it. 

WHAT IS GOOD

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us. 

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.     

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest  beliefs. 

     These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle. 

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END