The old guys down at physical therapy are pissed. Evidently five of the Arab freedom fighters the US has been holding captive somewhere are going to be released so’s to get back one GI Arabs captured. Hell of a deal, seems to me, though some might argue a GI is worth ten of anyone else anywhere.
But there are a lot of different ways of looking at the matter. Elected officials are afraid we didn’t get our moneys worth on the deal. I’d have to suspect they think after five years captivity that GI isn’t going to be much use to anyone, which might be their rationale.
On the other hand, people get out of prisons all the time after being gang-raped repeatedly the way that GI almost certainly has been in captivity. And it doesn’t hold them back. Ex convicts are almost all able to stick up convenience stores, steal cars, sell drugs, do a little rape and mayhem. Being gang raped in prison hardly slows them down at all.
So my gut feel is this guy’s probably going to be okay and if he plays his cards right maybe he can sit on top of a building with a rifle somewhere and plink off a dozen-or-so anonymous people of one sort or another. Plenty of ex-GIs are doing that nowadays anyway who haven’t even been gang-raped that we know of.
Anyway, people who are against the trade still ought to feel good knowing an American is worth five Arabs. I can’t help wishing it was ten, though. Would have been ten back during WWII when it was Japanese, I’m guessing.
If you’re harboring any sweetness and light illusions that the Chinese have forgotten the Rape of Nanking et al, and that they’ve bought into the US post WWII dedication to venerating the Japanese, forget it. Just go over to Netflix and have a look at what comes out of the Chinese movie industry these days.
Naturally they find a lot of opportunities to make films about Nanking days and the countless dramas played out at the end of Japanese bayonets, downrange from Japanese artillery, rifles and pistols, and underneath Japanese bombers. That’s to be expected. Murdering, raping and generally having an orgy of plundering a few hundred thousand people lingers on the minds of their progeny. Native Americans do the same thing.
But the Chinese make a lot of films about all manner of subjects and genres. It’s inevitable there’ll be Japanese in some. Military men, of course. Business men, martial arts masters, you name it.
But what’s fun about Chinese depiction of Japanese is the consistent, mean, evil, ugly, portrayals whenever a Japanese person rears his ugly head in a Chinese movie. And incidentally, how much better Chinese-martial artists fare against Japanese martial artists, you name the weapon or method.
I’d almost bet there hasn’t been a Japanese person depicted in a Chinese film since WWII that was anyone you’d wish to meet in a dark alley, or want to marry your daughter.
We in the US accepted the US government approach at the end of WWII, that the Japanese were the best people in Asia whom we loved the most of all of them. Went about making them richer than they were back when they were killing Chinese with abandon, enslaving the Koreans, and charging US Marine machine gun positions with bayonets.
We rebuilt Japan backward forward and sideways while we helped the Chinese further destroy Korea better than the Japanese ever got around to, then moved down and tried to flatten Vietnam because the Japanese hadn’t really focused on them.
But the Chinese didn’t buy that. Maybe they have WE WILL NEVER FORGET banners out in the rural towns the way the US used to say about Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, and Little Bighorn. And the sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania.
Wonder if there are any countries remember us that way. Besides the Indians, I mean.
The KS Star gave Boy Scout merit badge hunters a gold star on Sunday. Jeanne and I figured to visit the Union Cemetery, oldest one in KC, on Memorial Day just for the hell of it. Then I saw the KC Star front page had Boy Scouts out decorating graves of veterans there. And everyone using the words ‘Veteran’ and ‘Warrior’ interchangeably.
This isn’t Union Cemetery, but you get the idea anyway.
As it happens a lot of one-time Confederates are buried at the Union Cemetery. Once a person gets into the spirit of putting flags on graves, might as well send the troop out with Confederate battle flags, too. Most were one-time Confederates who died decades after the Great War of Secession, but there’s a monument over the mass grave of Confederate POWs who died in a prison camp near here. That one got a forest of Confederate battle flags.
I say this with some authority, though we took a pass on the Memorial Day visit. Went out there Sunday, Memorial Day Eve, instead. Though most of the burying that’s ever going to be done there has already happened, 55,000 funerals seems plenty for most normal purposes. And a surprising lot had flags sticking up from them courtesy of Boy Scouts. Back in the heyday of Union Cemetery veterans had a lot bigger wars to get drafted into.
Likely as not somewhere out there the Boy Scouts put German flags on WWI Germans who fought in the Big one on the wrong side before migrating to the US. Maybe even a few from WWII.
Because the only way past the post-WWII series of incomprehensible US military adventures in foreign lands with any hope of inspiring those Boy Scouts to enlist to buy a piece of one is to ignore the Wars and glorify the warriors. Dead or alive. Company clerks, regimental band trumpet players, helicopter mechanics. All heroes, all warriors, all guilty of conspicuous courage without having to do a damned thing to demonstrate it to anyone.
If you’ve never done anything worth mentioning in your entire life and never will, visit your Army recruiter. Gets you a flag on your grave after everyone’s forgotten everything else about you.
A lot of old US Veterans have to be getting a lot of secret laughs about this in the privacy of their home bathrooms before they hoist their trousers, pluck their galluses over their shoulders, and carefully place their cammy ball caps with VETERAN over the visor onto their gray pompadours.
All over the US VA Hospitals/Medical Centers are under investigation for incompetence, waste, negligence, malfeasance and misfeasance, brutality and being a cruel farce. Turns out the San Antonio VA Medical Center is under investigation for precisely the same [failure to treat patients in a timely manner] reasons I entered a private hospital in Kerrville, Texas in January after several weeks of non-treatment and non-diagnosis at the VA Odessa and Big Spring VA Medical facilities during November and December, 2013
I’ve said before I don’t believe the US government owes veterans good health care for the remainder of our lives as an ethical matter. Merely a legal one.
We don’t particularly deserve it any more than Native Americans deserve cradle to grave health, dental and eye care because they happen to be descendants of aboriginals. Merely something required by law. Same as the VA. They’re no more deserving than veterans, Wall Street bankers, CEOs of Multi-National Corporations, Congressmen and US Senators, or people living down in the war zones of slums getting their asses shot off in driveby shootings and their kids getting HIV from dirty needles.
Fact is, the US used to have wars people could understand and they needed to be able to draft young men to fight in them. Forcing the Confederate States to come back into the Union and offer up their sons to fight in Cuba and Puerto Rico [Spanish American War], the various Indian Wars acquiring Arizona, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Washington and Oregon, and WWI [the BIG Mystery], along with WWII and various Asian Police Action debacles required incentives and salesmanship.
Out of the need for incentives for young guys to be discommoded in foreign lands for the benefit of big business and old men who liked parades grew the VA hospitals. And when military conscription went away at the end of the Vietnam War and the US began using a force volunteers, the need for the huge infrastructure gradually aged along with draft era vets.
Today we’d probably be better off moving the entire Indian Health Care System [run by the US Public Health Service] into those VA facilities so they wouldn’t be getting any better care than Veterans. That would take up the slack for a while, until this whole health care issue in the US gets sorted out.
It ain’t that anyone deserves any better health care than anyone else, no matter how much money they make, don’t make, or what they’ve done with their lives. It’s whether whatever health care anyone gets is what it claimed to be out where these claims are made when people are deciding what they want to do about their health issues.
Today the VA appears to be a cruel farce. I’m glad I’m eligible to make use of it, but a nice disclaimer on the front above the door might be appropriate:
All but two of these guys were 2 year draftees or single enlistment 3 year recruits. Those would have all come home before the end of 1964, ETS [expiration term of service]. Just in time to miss the Vietnam debacle. Those returning to the US for reassignment went to 11th Air Assault Group, Fort Gordon, GA, training to jump out of helicopters. Then the Army moved the 1st Cavalry Division to Vietnam, dissolved the 11th Air Assault Group, and sent everyone in it to Vietnam. I’m betting these guys had better sense than to reenlist.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Camp Howze, Korea, 1963, 1964. I was standing in a chow line almost certainly with one of the guys in this picture waiting for breakfast. A twelve-year-old Korean lad came down the line selling Stars and Stripesnewspapers, yelling, “Lots of Japs killed! Hurrah! Lots of Japs killed!”
Koreans still savored a deep hatred for Japanese in those days. Having your mamas and grandmamas raped more-or-less whenever the mood hit for a few decades probably does that. At least when the rapers are of a particular nationality. [I’ve wondered whether East Germans don’t feel some of that toward the Rooskies because of their grannies during the retreat from the Eastern Front].
Anyway, it was a ferry disaster of some sort carrying Japanese passengers. The first time I recall ever paying any mind to ferries and the associated dangers.
But over the decades I’ve certainly heard about a lot of them. I suspect a risk assessment involving frequent use of ferries would reveal it to be more dangerous than airliners, trains or busses. Not to say I haven’t ridden on a lot of them.
But on a ferry going between [I think] Newport News, RI, and Long Island, a nuclear attack submarine surfaced next to our ferry almost close enough to touch. We assumed at the time the submarine commander was perfectly aware of the ferry. By hindsight, though, I’m brought to wonder whether he had to go change his shorts when our presence and proximity came to his attention.
A person used to be able to pay once to get on the Statin Island Ferry and ride it back and forth all night, which I did a good many times. Near misses with smaller craft were relatively common and a source of amusement for the ferry passengers.
I was on a ferry to one of the outer banks islands of Georgia, or North Carolina once when it hit something hard enough to jangle the eye-teeth of everyone aboard. Never heard what it was, but none of the passengers were laughing.
Which is to say, life’s full of surprises and ferries have the potential for providing new ones.
I don’t recall when I began carrying a couple of hundred feet of small diameter 200 pound test rope with me in my luggage when I travelled. But I do recall it was a decision I made watching people diving out of the windows of burning multi-story buildings on the news. A bit of rope, I observed, would have saved a lot of them by allowing them to get off the upper floors and beneath the fires.
If I had to ride a ferry every day I’d probably decide an inflatable camp pillow would provide a nice place to sit on those hard ferry benches. One person aboard protected by one inflatable pillow would remove the temptation those vessels wave around in front of the Coincidence Coordinators inviting disaster.
Jeanne’s uncle Dr. Philip Carlson patented this thing back in the 1960s. Got himself and it all written up in Popular Mechanics. So you’d figure when they put it together to serve a need of civilization, quid pro quo, wouldn’t you?
Well, there ain’t. They’re building it though, and someone’s going to get rich off it in a timely manner.
Brings to mind the story of my ex-wife, Carolyn’s uncle Arthur, who invented the forklift while serving in the Army during WWII. General Eisenhower visited his mom and dad in Comfort, Texas when he died, but they never saw a penny for the forklift.
This week, a small town near the U.S.-Mexico border gave an unusual company the right to build a 2,250-foot-tower, destined to become the tallest structure in the U.S. The company, Solar Wind Energy Tower Inc, is only three years old. But the idea it’s hocking dates all the way back to the 1960s.
It’s called an “energy tower,” or in the words of Forbes, an “energy skyscraper:” A massively tall hollow concrete structure situated in a warm, arid climate. The sun’s rays super-heat the top of the tower, and a cool mist gets sprayed across. The water evaporates and the cool, heavy air is then sucked down into the base at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. At the bottom, the whooshing gusts of air push through a circle of wind turbines—producing energy.
Solar Wind, which is based in Maryland, wants to start construction on the first major energy tower in the country, in San Luis, Arizona, by 2018. The town of 26,000 has also agreed to sell the company the water it needs to continually spray a fine mist over the 1,200-foot wide top of the tower. This mega-structure will sit on a 600-acre piece of desert near the Mexican border where the temperatures regularly reach 106 degrees—perfect for the technology, which relies on hot, dry climates.
So, where does this fairly incredible-sounding idea come from? It turns out that the energy tower dates back to the 1960s, when an engineer names Dr. Philip Carlson floated the idea. In a December 1981 issue of Popular Mechanics, Carlson, then an engineer at Lockheed, describes how the idea came to him while working on a desalinization plant in the 1960s:
We ran some calculations and found that, theoretically, we’d get out eight times the energy we put in to pump the water to the top of the chimney. But, in 1965, there didn’t seem to be any need for new energy sources.
Carlson did patent the concept in 1975, but it seems the idea was tabled. Since then, two engineers named Professor Dan Zaslavsky and Dr. Rami Guetta from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have resurrected the idea, studying it extensively and publishing a number of papers on the topic.
So, why isn’t the American Southwest dotted with 2,000-foot-high energy towers? First of all, there are considerable challenges involved in actually building them—including not only funding the construction of such a huge tower, but also the cost of pumping water up to the top at a constant rate. Building Solar Wind’s tower, in Arizona, will require $1.5 billion in capital, according to Businessweek.
It’s also easy to imagine that communities aren’t excited to welcome huge, industrial-looking towers that would loom over their homes. But as a San Luis city official told Forbes, it’s also an economic driver and an opportunity for smaller, struggling cities:
In Arizona you do get a lot of dreamers who say, ‘You could really do something with this.’ With (Solar Wind Energy), they have already gotten permission and concurrence from federal agencies in Washington. They weren’t starting with the Air Force, they weren’t starting with BLM. They were starting at the top. It isn’t a guarantee of success, but it is a lot more feasible than a lot of the other things I’ve seen.
The deal with San Luis no doubt hinges on the fact that the construction and upkeep of the tower would bring thousands of jobs to the area—not to mention producing 1,200 megawatt-hours of power in the hotted, driest months.
Still, there are plenty of questions about how their plan would work—starting with who’s going to put up the $1.5 billion to build it. But Solar Wind doesn’t seem to be letting that slow it down: Beyond putting up a tower in San Luis, the company reportedly wants to license its technology to developers all over the world. For now, winning approval from the small town is a huge step forward. [SMH; Businessweek; Forbes; Solar Wind Energy Tower]
This advertisement in the Kansas City Star isn’t sufficiently well explained to allow me to ease your thoughts by elucidating the reasons it’s included in the Johnson County Museum.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
The Kansas City area has as much history as any area of its size in the United States. Every few hundred yards there’s a sign, “California Trail crossed here“, “Santa Fe Trail crossed here“, “Oregon Trail crossed here“, and “Overland Trail crossed here“.
The Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant near De Soto was a huge operation during WWII, the Korean War and somewhat so during Vietnam. Today it’s mostly in ruins, a superfund cleanup site with no funding remaining. This sign was evidently from one of the times when they had plenty of money to throw away feeding workers.
Yet over and over again as you puruse the exhibits in the Johnson County Historical Museum you’ll find yourself muttering, “Why is this place so Goddamned lame?”
Thanks to Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant employees sweating like good Americans the Korean War didn’t last as long as it did and not as many people were killed and injured as actually were. All our boys have come home from Korea now thanks to these Americans.
Some historians possessing PHDs have believed almost all babies born to pioneers nine months after resting overnight within this geographical area were conceived here.
When you have a labor shortage you have to appeal to the baser instincts of every potential labor pool. Gypsies, tramps and thieves. Safecrackers. Negroes. Patriots. Whatever works.
There used to be cowboys and Indians, stagecoaches, battles between the north and south, raids, rapes, plunderings, blunderings, Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Jessse and Frank James, the Daltons, the Youngers.
Probably similar things are being spoken in Chinese today somewhere in Asia.
But Kansans know everyone was pretty much passing through, either time-wise, or on their way somewhere else geographically.
Harry Truman and Joe Stalin fought on the same side in WWII. But both had to readjust their thinking rapidly, think on their feet as shown here, because five years later they were on opposite sides.
Part of the problem is that even though human beings live fairly long lives, human memories are short and budgets are ‘budget-years‘. Budget decades might allow for long-term alliances and loyalty between friends measured in years or longer. But budget-years demand constant realignment to keep the funding rolling in.
To help everyone remember when there’s a war going on a lot of strategies have been tried. War Dad caps were only partially successful because older guys frequently became confused about who’s the enemy this week. Especially if they were shooting at the friends and dodging bullets they fired a short while back.
Weaponry ideology has been attempted on numerous occasions.
This was intended as a morale builder. Unfortunately it allowed friendly fire to be identified with too much certainty by those on the receiving end to become a trend.
But attempting to get Kansans out of the yellow brick road mindsets and into the Jesse James and John Dillinger approaches to history doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
If one of those guys had long hair I’d lean to believing it was Bonnie and Clyde.
Maybe there’s still something from the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant days still to be learned and useful.
The US might yet make use of an explosion proof clock. I sort of wish i had me one if I leaned to having wall clocks.
The ‘Us’ government’s searching frantically for a new threat, trying to create a believable illusion of a new cold war with Russia, then talking increased military tensions with China. But it ain’t easy.
Sure, Russia still exists. On paper, anyway, run by a bunch of Mafia-types who know they can’t make any money if they’re all shot to pieces by anyone, including the Us.
And China? Well, even though Washingtonians are prone to stupidity and self-blindsidedness, most recall the Us hasn’t won a war since 1945. And the ones it didn’t win most spectacularly were coincidentally in Asia.
Fact is we couldn’t even defeat little bitty pissant North Korea in a shooting war back when our soldiers were still real he-men. We couldn’t even whip North Vietnam, or fight them down so’s they’d let us leave in a relaxed, organized way. The Us left Vietnam in an every-man-for-himself devil-take-the-hindmost scramble. Running and looking over their shoulders the whole time. Peace with honor, Nixon called it.
So who is going to be scared Washington will be stupid enough to get into a war with China? Nobody. Who’s going to believe anyone in Washington is going to get us into a shooting war with the Rooskies? Nobody. And they’re scared of everyone in Asia, including North Korea. Nobody wants to see North Korea kick our asses in another shooting war.
Trouble is, nobody’s scared of the Muslims anymore. Every time we send the military somewhere new over there they roll over and play dead without racking up a decent death-toll of Us troops. Sure, they kill a few, and a lot more Us troops raise the ante by killing themselves, but even with that it’s just not enough to get the juices of patriotism flowing anymore.
One thing they mightn’t have considered, though: Asians can win wars against Asians. Fighting a good proxy war with China using Japanese troops might work and since no Us troops need be getting shot up, the Us citizenry could probably get behind it.
Even better, getting the South Koreans and Japanese fighting on the same team, invading Manchuria, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanking and so-on might work.
I can see how the Us citizenry might get behind that if only for the relief from the ennui of yawning Muslim terror snores it would provide. And we could sell the weaponry to both sides.
The only way we’re likely to ever win a war in Asia now that Japan has its guard up.
King James 1 died of sarcophageal cancer in 1625 ce. I don’t understand this gravestone item except the foot in the lower right corner. I understand the foot, mostly.
Hi Readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
I have some loose ends here in need of exploitation, same as everything else we humans touch need exploiting. These are photos not quite lousy enough in concept to justify tossing them, but not juicy enough to justify a blog entry built around them.
Sarcophagus of a church: Olathe Community Theater Association – one block east, currently the eastern extremity of my attempts to walk somewhere. Easternmost bastion of artsy fartsyism from where I live and breathe.
For instance [above], Olathe, KS is full of neighborhood churches gone to meet Jesus leaving behind useful buildings to be converted by sinners into nothing particularly holy.
Back when everyone thought radioactivity was harmful to human beings a person would see a lot of these. Today you have to visit a ghost-town to find them. Anachronistic tomfoolery. How dare they deny science by being scared of a little radioactivity?
Sarcophagus of Sunflower US Army Ammunition Plant contains lots of smaller sarcophagi above and below:
Sunflower Ammo shot its wad but that’s no reason to get careless. Hope you folks found other jobs.
West Side Story said it best: Nobody wants a fella with a social disease.
There’s a small problem on the cleanup thing. They runned spang out of money. The sarcophagus of a once-useful piece of real estate after all the profiteers ran and hid, disclaimed kinship.
Possibly too much honesty displayed here.
Some things probably shouldn’t be put on a sign.
Don’t be drinking cereal malt beverages around here. Whatever the hell those might be.
This is the nature park outside Sunflower Ammo Plant.
Kansas Museum for the Deaf – one block north, the extremity of my walking distance northward. Northernmost bastion of artsyfartsyism from where I live and continue to breathe.
Back in Olathe, one block north.
I’m feeling much better now. Glad we had this little talk.
Predominantly draft era veterans end up at VA hospitals I’ve observed. And we’ve got all the warts and scars to suggest we were a flawed segment of humanity. Truth is, watching the mannerisms and behaviors we still are. Flawed, certainly, many also pathetic as individual personalities. Needy. Obnoxious.
But strangely enough, there’s a constant undercurrent of moments cutting through the lies on top of lies and BS revealing something I’m ashamed to admit I suspect is a sort of brotherhood. A smile and wink in an elevator from a guy in a wheelchair with more problems than me. Thumbs up signs when someone gets called to see one of the sawbones or other ‘team’ members.
Granted, most of the conversations going on are lies about things that happened when in the military. But when I brought up the subject of the Afghan/Iraq vets suicides the lies stopped and were replaced by frowning thought. A momentary pause to try to understand.
It’s there to be recognized. And it can also be found in the mention of the guys on ‘the 10th floor’. The guys who are ‘still in Vietnam’. Everyone knows about those guys and they only get mentioned in muted tones, phrases expressing horror and awe.
We few. We happy few. We band of brothers who aren’t on the 10th floor.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
![All over the US VA Hospitals/Medical Centers are under investigation for incompetence, waste, negligence, malfeasance and misfeasance, brutality and being a cruel farce. Turns out the San Antonio VA Medical Center is under investigation for precisely the same [failure to treat patients in a timely manner] reasons I entered a private hospital in Kerrville, Texas in January after several weeks of non-treatment and non-diagnosis at the VA Odessa and Big Spring VA Medical facilities during November and December, 2013](https://sofarfromheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/kc-va-med-ctr.jpg)
![All but two of these guys were 2 year draftees or single enlistment 3 year recruits. Those would have all come home before the end of 1964, ETS [expiration term of service]. Just in time to miss the Vietnam debacle. Those returning to the US for reassignment went to 11th Air Assault Group, Fort Gordon, GA, training to jump out of helicopters. Then the Army moved the 1st Cavalry Division to Vietnam, dissolved the 11th Air Assault Group, and sent everyone in it to Vietnam. I'm betting these guys had better sense than to reinlist.](https://sofarfromheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1stcav2.jpg)
So Far From Heaven 