I’ve been thinking a lot about us veterans lately, possibly because of the recent VA fiasco including my own healthy part of it. Which put me into close proximity with a lot of other old model vets.
I’m going to start this off with what General Smedley Butler had to say to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in possibly the most honest address in history by a general-grade officer:
Old Confederates trying to recall the rebel yell:
Spanish American and Civil War veterans trying to remember how much fun it was.
Then there’s WWI:
I couldn’t find any veterans of the American Indian Wars being interviewed, though there were plenty of them still alive long after the movie camera and recording was invented. I suppose John Wayne will have to do. We veterans all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude anyway.
There’s something new on the Universal Love front to begin pondering: Hydrox and Shiva-the-cow-cat appear to be slouching into some sort of hanky panky. They’ve been observed lying side-by-side on Jeanne’s bed.
These cats have known one another for more than a decade and never a kind word has passed between them. Hydrox surprised me last year when he began licking the face and inside the ears of Tabby whenever she got aggressive, but Tabby was an entirely different matter. What Shiva’s always wanted was to be left strictly alone by other cats.
Until now. She’s the one jumping on the bed as the party of the second part, not the first.
Also, sometime around 2 am Christmas Eve I heard cat racing noises, sat up in bed and saw Hydrox run from Jeanne’s bedroom into the kitchen. With Shiva in hot pursuit. I shook my head and wiped my eyes in time to see Shiva race out of the kitchen closely pursued by Hydrox, back past Jeanne’s Christmas tree into her bedroom.
I’m convinced they’re teetering on the brink of a Christian Era.
And meanwhile Wavy Gravy Duff, managing editor over at Veterans Today did a wordy Christmas post bragging of his past life without being too obviously obnoxious nor untruthful. For that matter, aside from Jonas Alexis there were no Jew baiting/hating articles during the Christmas truce.
Soooooooo if we’re not teetering on the brink of a Christian era I think we’d better all start digging bomb shelters.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Bob Hope used to do those USO shows every year. In fact Al Jolson died in the aftermath of returning from a USO show in Korea. Fact is, any Christmas entertainment that includes John Wayne jokes and nasty jibes at draft dodgers burning their draft cards is probably worth a rerun anytime anyone is singing songs about Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.
Ms. Welch, at least, is about reality, which every USO show should include a taste of.
As an aside, a lot of you probably didn’t know Clint Eastwood’s real identity was Andy Williams. Here he is singing something I thought of as a favorite in 1963.
No Christmas is complete without Clint Eastwood singing Old Bilbao Moon.
Some few, some happy few, some band of brothers of you mightn’t have thought about this song in a while. Which seems a shame.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about this morning. I actually wanted to tell you about the time I spent half a day poking around the town lots along the highway in Canyon City, Colorado looking for evidence of a long-burned out diner. Ian Tyson recorded the song in the 1960s and when I found myself in southwestern Colorado I couldn’t resist.
But I didn’t find the ruins of that diner and Jeanne, midway through writing this, advised me I wrote about searching for those ruins on here sometime before.
So there I was, riding a plastic saddle of a blog entry as a consequence of having a mind that functions too much it its own image when it comes to thinking up anecdotes to reflect on.
Hells bells. I could tell you about the young man who lives next door to Jeanne and his difficulties finding a job, but nevermind that. He’s a fine young man with a lot of experience as an automotive mechanic, but he has some brain disorder causing him to need an extremely expensive medication so he can think in straight lines. When he doesn’t get it his thoughts go everywhere.
$300-$400 per month the damned stuff costs and he doesn’t have medical insurance. So he quit taking it January and by March Mazda was deciding they didn’t need him anymore going to get the same wrench fifteen times and forgetting what he was after.
So from then until now he’s been looking for another job without measurable success, though he does a little security work filling in, and the night it snowed he drove a bobcat around clearing a parking lot.
But for any job of a regular nature nobody’s calling him back. Even though he worked eleven years for Mazda never a hitch.
So, when he’s not filling in applications for jobs he turns on this giant TV screen and loads up a game the likes of which I’ve never seen nor imagined. I is an authentic appearing urban environment with a lot of authentic appearing men in combat gear stalking one another around shooting one another and otherwise dealing misery. I’m guessing it’s a lot more seductive than working down at AutoZone selling auto parts.
Brent’s the man’s name and he’s taken to visiting me some, killing time. He told me about two documentary movies about Afghanistan he’s seen recently:
Restrepo 2010 R 93 minutes. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington embed themselves with the Second Platoon in Afghanistan, chronicling the men’s work, fear and brotherhood
Korengal 2014 R 84 minutes. This follow-up to the Oscar-nominated documentary “Restrepo” delves into the experience of war and how it impacts those on the front lines.
I don’t have much interest in the US military adventures anywhere but he sparked my interest and I watched them. Glad I did because it revealed something I hadn’t thought seriously about.
Those honest-to-goodness US soldiers stationed in the hottest combat zone in Afghanistan being followed constantly with cameras and recorders throughout their tour loved war! During firefights they whooped and cheered when they thought they killed someone. And between firefights they pined for someone to shoot at.
When they’d almost served out their tour the cameraman asked them, “What are you going to miss most about Afghanistan?”
A surprising number answered, “Shooting people.”
Under questioning it was clear none of those troops thought they were doing anything patriotic. They’d been filtered from the US population to find people who’d hooha their way out into the killing fields and love every minute of it.
So when the young guy neighbor said he regretted he couldn’t join because of his daughters and his medical condition it went a long way to explain that game he loves playing on his television. A plastic saddle.
One of the GIs gave an interesting reply though, on one of those documentaries.
“I’m going to have to go home and live with what I’ve done. I think God hates me. God didn’t intend people to do what we do here.
“I hate it when people say ‘you did what you had to do. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to kill anyone. I didn’t have to join the Army. I chose all that and now I have to live with it.”
With vets offing themselves at a rate of one per hour the guy might be a worthy object for study by the people who worry about such matters. It ain’t a plastic saddle he’s riding back to the Home of the Brave.
I swan, every time I get feeling low and remorseful, which I mostly don’t, I just can’t hold onto it. Slips right between my fingers the way a broken egg gets away from a person. Doesn’t even leave any particles of eggshell hanging around to try to pick away so’s to save the goo.
What I’m saying is I could get used to this. Something awful. Here I am, snow outside, me inside. Jeanne never lets it get below 63 degrees F here in the house, which isn’t something I’ve experienced since sometime before Y2K. And I’m having to count calories instead of just counting miniscule particles of sodium.
Heck, when I checked into the hospital here almost a year ago I weighed in at 145 lbs, and didn’t have an ounce of body fat. Fasting before medical tests was agony. And here I am at 190 pounds, being careful not to gain any more. I figure I’m around 10 pounds heavier than is ideal for me. But I’ll take it off gradually, or it will rot off if I croak.
I’m cooking a lot of salt-free stovetop bread, both for bun-type [hamburger-like] or somewhat cake-like. Or pizza-like. And no sodium or low sodium isn’t cramping my style one bit. I can whip out curry fish, curry chicken, ginger beef, sauteed mushrooms, and more kinds of siamin than anyone ever heard of using mung-bean vermicelli and no sodium chicken or beef broth.
Jeanne found some extremely low-sodium Swiss cheese and I’ll confess I almost found myself wallowing in ecstacy with the first, pizza, then omelet that resulted soon thereafter.
Whip over to the double-sink with hot and cold running water, spang wash all the dirties quicker than I can tell about it. Sheeze.
Here I am gazing out the window, Otis Redding playing on the gramaphone, Hydrox snoring on his wool old-man army blanket. Shiva the cow cat nosing around finding things of interest under Jeanne’s Christmas tree, curling up on the ‘tree skirt’ [an item I never knew existed].
So here I am trying to work up a good pessimism but it escapes me. Got an old Frederick Pohl novel [Far Shore of Time] about a third read. Finished a pretty good biography of Captain Woodes Rogers, a surprisingly scholarly piece of work by David Cordingly. Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean. Thinking of passing it on to one of Jeanne’s sons, it’s so fun reading.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not falling into any pit of joy, getting snagged up by the trap of hope. I’m just muddling along grateful as hell it’s so warm in here, watching it snow.
Hi readers. I’ve mentioned in the past that Air Force enlisted men don’t get to be as John Wayne and James Bond when they’re dreaming up lies about their youths. The Air Force mostly just didn’t offer up too many simple opportunities for lying about combat experience for non-pilots. But there’s an exception to every rule. A guy named ‘Chip’ Tatum is out there proving me a liar.
Tatum claims he’s a murderer, that he was a part of death squads for the military and CIA! He claims he helped Oliver North smuggle in tons of cocaine a bit later. ‘Chip’ Tatum is a jewel of a human being, even though most of what he claims he’s done is probably a pack of bald face lies:
Gene “Chip” Tatum was a Vietnam Special Forces Air Combat Controller Defense Intelligence Asset, and US Army special operations pilot flying classified missions during the US invasion of Grenada, Tatum was also involved in the Nixon Administrations relations with China, NASA’s Apollo Program, the Iran Contra Affair, and several other classified intelligence operations dating through through 1992.A 25-year CIA deep-cover agent and a member of the ultra-secret Pegasus “hit” team” working directly for the sitting President.
Prior to the public release of the existence of the Presidential “Kill List”, Secret units comprised of Military, Ex-Military, Intelligence and Ex-Intelligence officers operated under the control of a secret organization within the Federal Government. These units are referred to in the media as “Death Squads”
by Dick M Prior to the public release of the existence of the Presidential “Kill List”, Secret units comprised of Military, Ex-Military, Intelligence and Ex-Intelligence officers operated under the control of a secret organization within the Federal Government. These units are referred to in the media as “Death Squads”A death squad is an armed group that conducts extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances of persons for the purposes of political repression, genocide, or revolutionary terror. These killings are often conducted in ways meant to ensure the secrecy of the killers’ identities.
Death squads are often, but not exclusively, associated with police states, one party states, or military dictatorships. It is not unheard of, however, for democratic governments to form death squads.
Death squads may have the support of domestic or foreign governments (see state terrorism). They may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary groups, or government soldiers and policemen.
When death squads are not controlled by the state, they may consist of insurgent forces of Privatized Security companies or organized crime.
The following is the story of one such Death Squad Leader subsequently finding himself in prison on the charge of Treason.
Gene “Chip” Tatum joined the Air Force Special Force as a forward air controller in the early 70’s, at age 19. He went to US Army Special Forces school and was assigned to South-East Asia as Airman First Class (A1C) in December 1970, he was assigned as a radio operator on a Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft attached to Task Force Alpha (secretly under operational control of the CIA, but on paper it looked like it was under the 56th Special Operations Wing, and under the major command, US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), under the Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense.
56th Special Operations Wing and Task Force Alpha were operating out of Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base Phnom Penh, Thailand. As to how much of a secret this was I don’t know, but it appears the US did whatever we could to keep our operations there secret. I have noted more about 56th Special Operations Wing at the end of this article.
Shortly after being assigned to Thailand, Airman Chip Tatum, assigned to a task force code-named, Team Red Rock. The team was composed of Airman Tatum, eight US Army Green Berets, three US Navy SEALs and two CIA paramilitary officer or (aka direct action) or contract agents/soldiers (a total of 14 US men) that was under operational control directly from the White House.
A plan had been drawn up by Siagon (Theodore “Ted” Shackley) and ordered by President Nixon, Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig, operational direction by Ted Shackley and Bill Colby, Team Red Rock was to enter Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and secretly attack the Pochentong airport, military and civil installations, and destroy all of the Cambodian air force parked there, or as many as possible. The plan called for the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh. They were tasked to take with them formerly captured, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) POWs wearing their NVA uniforms, but were unarmed and alive. The plan was to murder the POWs and leave their bodies to be discovered by Cambodian forces. The purpose of this was to makes the Cambodian leaders come to the false conclusion that the North Vietnamese were responsible for the attack. This kind of operation is called a “False Flag” operation. This whole plan including the murders was approved and ordered by President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, General Alexander Haig.
According to Tatum, he and the rest of his team were dressed in North Vietnamese uniforms as were the NVA POWs, This is a violation of the Geneva and Hague convention (a war crime) and the team could be shot as spies if were captured.
It was also part of the secret mission, and ordered by Pres. Nixon, Kissinger, and/or Haig, that Team Red Rock was not to come back from this mission alive in Cambodia alive. A detachment of Montagnard tribesmen working for the CIA, was assigned to kill everyone of the team and dispose of the bodies to make sure no word about this mission ever leaked out.
Chip Tatum is not very forth coming in his video interview with Ted Gunderson, a former FBI Chief of Station, for Los Angeles. It will help you in understanding what I am telling you here, if you watch the following video tape after reading this.
So, they guy’s in prison on charges of treason and by all accounts he’s getting off light. Other people get caught smuggling even a microscopic piece of cocaine end up coming out of a lifetime in jail with an anus capable of having a Volkswagen parked inside it. But, if convicted, Tatum isn’t even likely to suffer what people not even charged with crimes have gone through at Guantanamo.
Naturally this particular veteran’s asking for help with his legal defense. Figure that one out.
If Chip Tatum isn’t guilty of anything else he ought to be congratulated for finding a package of lies allowing enlisted Air Force vets to be as damned John Wayne and James Bond as the other branches of the service.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Those of you who’ve been reading here a while might recall the soul-searching I had to do when my Timex Expedition wouldn’t belly up to the bar after the batteries went dead and I tried replacing them. That poor old watch breathed its last. I figured I’d be replacing it, but what with heart attacks and one thing and another, I didn’t.
Instead I picked up a digital watch at Dollar Tree for a buck to hold me over until I could decide whether I was going to live long enough to be needing a $25-$30 watch until the batteries died. No point putting out all that money for extra watch a man wasn’t going to live long enough to look at the full $25 worth. Or more. Hell you can’t take it with you. It’s like buying new underwear, if you’re me. When your life is on a short leash you debate hard with yourself whether these jockey’s can’t be stretched long enough to hold out until I croak.
Aesthetics gradually rolled over me with that dollar watch. Damned thing had a stiff plastic band that raised welts on my wrist and I’ve really never been able to make my mind absorb the numbers on a watch without any damned hands at a quick glance. I have to squint and study on it to figure out where the hands would be if it were a real watch.
So last year at Andrews, Texas, while my bud Eddie Brewer was being host for the RV, the cats and me while I awaited the pleasure of the VA medical folks, I spang went to a discount-type store in Andrews and found myself a $6.00 [American] real watch with hands. Figured I couldn’t die until the VA got around to telling me why I was going to, and it might take a few more bucks of watch to outlast them.
That was about this time last year, got myself a nice $6.00 watch with a leather-looking band and a quartz movement. That watch saw me through some damned difficult times I can tell you. I spent last Christmas in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in Big Spring, Texas, digging through the dumpster and admiring the life left in that new watch.
When the store re-opened after Christmas my brake master cylinder arrived, I installed it using tools I got out of their dumpster, and trucked to San Angelo. Where I suspect I had another heart attack in the WalMart parking lot, but nevertheless trucked back to Gale’s. All this is probably written up here in the archives.
Then the Kerrville, Texas hospital.
More damned needles, tests, hospital beds than a person has to put up with if he’s only relying on the VA for his health care. Those damned private medical facilities get downright enthusiastic when it comes to poking and prodding.
Anyway, after the hospital in Kerrville the watch was still working, so naturally I had to try to stay alive, which didn’t seem all that likely if I didn’t take some sort of decisive steps to outlast the damned watch. I could barely stagger up the steps into the RV and out again to pee. And I was worried about the cats being stuck inside if I croaked and nobody found me for a few days.
So I headed for Kansas during the coldest weather in living memory in Texas and it was no slouch in Kansas, either. Made it north of Dallas, checked into a motel to croak or whatever. But the damned watch was still running and Jeanne’s sons came down, drove me up here. Coldest damned road trip I recall in my life except one in Korea. But that’s another story.
So, you know the rest, mostly. Hospitals, more VA, all the usual suspects, and that $6 Andrews, Texas watch kept on ticking.
It was the band that killed it off. Watch is fine but the band broke up next to the watch. I was afraid that was going to happen, saw it coming. I even went so far as to shop around for another watch band, which would have cost double what the watch set me back. Then I sneaked around and looked at the cost of Timex Expeditions. And I knew in my defibrillatored heart I couldn’t outlive a damned Timex. I had to draw my line in the sand.
Jeanne took me over to a Big Lot store, me thinking they might have something I could live as long as, and spang! There it was. A six-dollar [American] watch, that had the look of something that probably wouldn’t outlast me.
The lady at the register helped me unfasten all the security belts and extra packaging a person hates to throw away, but hell, damned stuff is shaped to be worthless. I strapped that mama on, set it to the time on the clock above the register, and I was ready to rock and roll again.
Brief panic when I checked the time against my computer an hour later and it seemed to have lost 10 minutes, but it was just they had their clock set fast at Big Lot. Those folks are young enough they don’t have any appreciation for throwing their time away fooling around with clocks.
So I’m back in the saddle. Got me a watch I can feel confident will last me the remainder of my life if need be, without wasting a damned cent. And not likely to put a lot of pressure on me to live past my time.
1951 I fell madly in love with a song on the radio: Trumepeter’s Lullaby. So naturally around 1955 when Central Grade School began scouting around for kids who wanted to play instruments in the band I announced, “I shore do!”
But half the boys lining up to sign wanted to play the trumpet. Probably the glamor of it looking so similar to a bugle, which we’d all seen in John Wayne movies, along with various war movies. And Frank Sinatra’d been a trumpet player in something to draw our attention.
Okay. My parents assured me I could learn to play Trumpeter’s Lullaby on a trombone as well as Anderson played it on a trumpet if I worked hard. Besides, someone they knew had a trombone the kid outgrew and I could have it for the price of a little oil and Brasso.
So I worked myself something awful on that trombone for the rest of grammar school, right on up into Junior High Band. Learned to read music as long as it was following a bass clef lead. And damn me, never could play anything as well as I could play taps or reveille. Sounded really good on a trombone.
I did learn to play Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread.
And I did a fair job on Under the Double Eagle.
But taps, reveille, Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread, and Under the Double Eagle does not a band member make. Never could bring myself to learn anything else and finally Mr. Jackson, the band director suggested I try choir. Move on to greater horizons, sort of thing.
So hell, I did. Never joined the choir, but I spent a good many years singing Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread until it became rude to do it for other reasons than my voice.
Likely as not if I live long enough I’ll take up the trumpet, though. I never cared for that damned trombone.
Probably most of you have noticed the US has become an asylum. What the hell. I suppose it’s to be expected. This morning I perused Yahoo News long enough to discover Israeli soldiers beat a Palestinian Minister to death because he was protesting the latest US sponsored land grab Israel’s been doing since the summer slaughter at Gaza. They’ve gobbled up a lot more territory on the West Bank, as well as in the half of Jerusalem they don’t own.
Nothing new there except me pointing out it’s the US sponsoring it all by sending them all those billions of dollars and megatons of weaponry. So you and I are complicit in the slaughter, robbing and rape of Palestine by Israel.
However, what really surprised me is the uproar defending torture of prisoners and holding them without due process of any kind for years, decades. It’s taken as an opportunity for self-celebration by news announcers. “America is awesome!” trumps “Jesus H. Christ! We need to quit torturing people and provide them with due process or we’re leaving ourselves open for a royal screwing!”
Yep, welcome to the asylum.
Jeanne told me about a news item – they’ve found ruins and written documents in Massachusetts, she says, authenticating a Muslim settlement 500 years before Columbus. I’ll be interested in chasing that down, but the strong man for Turkey made a news release sometime in the 1990s making a similar claim. Evidently Columbus made an observation somewhere in his writings that they’d found a Mosque in Cuba.
Heck, probably they were the shock troops over here looking for something to blow up but got here ahead of schedule. Makes sense to me.
I hope that last bit doesn’t give Israel any ideas based on the Hebrew writings on Hidden Mesa dating back so far it took modern scholars to identify precisely what they were and said. Next thing you know the Israeli army will be bombing schools and hospitals in Albuquerque preparatory to sending settlers to New Mexico because ‘they owned it once’.
Might as well. Hell with Congress and so much of the government already being dual-citizenship Israeli they’d probably end up owning it again.
Gangs, whether it’s Hell’s Angels, Banditos, cops or [now] Army Navy Marine and Airforce volunteerees, tend to be jealous whenever some non-member sports their colors. A tattoo artist acquaintance in Austin, Texas, started keeping a Thompson submachine gun under his mattress when he learned he’d tattooed a non-Bambino with a Bandito badge of honor, for instance.
But now what with the Valor-this and Valor-that being bandied about by the ‘thankyouforyourservice’ clubs, the big issue of the day is what you can see down at the VA hospital any working day. People sitting around lying to one another about what John Waynes they used to be.
However, this is mostly a different breed. Guys claiming to have been Navy Seals or Army Snipers getting all riled up because some dumbass down at the mall is pretending to be a soldier. Sick enough the dumbass wants to do it, but how needy are those Seals and Snipers who haven’t suicided yet over the serious bullshit going on inside their heads? They’ve got to go around looking for dumbasses to out to jack themselves up into something with a life worth living?
Probably there needs to be a little Ferguson platoon burning down the local recruiting offices. This stuff is getting all out of hand. Those guys are beginning to believe their own bullshit.
Now back in the day when I was John Wayne I wouldn’t have put up with all that crap by either side.
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.
So Far From Heaven 