Reunion at a Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale Shade and I at the Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale and I in 2009 with Matt (next to me) and Andy

Today I began what will be a very Army weekend by going to a Welcome Home Party for Task Force Anvil.  The unit I went to Iraq with in 2009-10 went back to the Middle East last year, returning a few weeks ago. 

Shortly after I arrived, Dale Shade said hello and asked me to have a seat with him at the bar.  He was the sergeant in charge of public affairs on the last deployment. For the last four months of the deployment, I worked in the same office as Dale and Matt.  The deployment was not going well, the staff officers in brigade headquarters were at each other's throats. Dale had to listen to complaints from frustrated officers who needed someone to blame or just to bitch at. He was the lightning rod that kept the rest of us from getting hit with the thunderbolts from the hastily built headquarters we called the plywood palace.   

I had not seen Dale since I left the Army five years ago. It was fun to catch up.  And strange to see a former sergeant with shoulder-length hair.  

The original post about the public affairs detachment in Iraq is here.

Are Your Kids Religious?

 

A friend who is amused by my own wandering spiritual path in the last half decade asked about the faith/religion/spirituality of my six kids.  

My response was a smirk that turned into a laugh.  

"Six kids, six spiritual paths.  That's for sure."

Right now (things could change as I am writing this) five of my kids are some flavor of Christianity and one is an agnostic, possibly agnostic about being an agnostic. In age order here is what I know as of now.

My oldest daughter is a fairly conservative Presbyterian who attends a Church near her home where the pastor is her Godfather.  My friend Stanley Morton and I both were Evangelicals in the 80s and became Presbyterians in the early 2000s. Stanley went on to become a Presbyterian pastor. Stanley is the Godfather of both of my birth daughters and my youngest son.

(Both of birth daughters attended various churches with me as kids and very occasionally went to the Unitarian Universalist Church. Their mom described herself as a lapsed Unitarian and did not often exercise her right in the divorce decree to take the girls to her church.)

My stepdaughter is tolerant and accepting of people of religious faith, but does not believe in God herself and is also the calmest of my six kids. I don't know if there is correlation or causation. When the girls were all in high school, my daughters were insanely competitive.  My stepdaughter was between them in age and sometimes between them in fact, the calming influence that kept them from killing each other.

My younger daughter was baptized into the Catholic Church last weekend.  My youngest son and I flew out to see the ceremony.  The Church in which the ceremony took place is theologically conservative. She is the only one of my six kids to go on a Birthright trip or do anything Jewish.  She also was deeper into Eastern mysticism than the other kids and at one point seemed convinced of biological determinism--we have no free will, our genes determine our actions. She now attends mass three times per week.

My adopted daughter grew up Catholic, attending a Catholic school and Church.  She is currently a conservative Evangelical as is her husband.  

My older adopted son could be described as the most religious of the kids in the sense that he has been baptized and converted three times.  He has religious moments and hours, but then returns to living the "chill" life he prefers.  

My youngest son attends Church when he is with any of his siblings who attend Church but does not when he is on his own.  He likes his Godfather Stanley's Church the best and attends there when he is in Richmond. 

But wait! There's more!

Having said six kids, I realized even the number is not definite.  In addition to the three birth kids and three adopted kids, we had a host daughter who lived with us for almost two years on a break between college and medical school. She had arrived at Franklin and Marshall College as a freshman not a believer. By graduation, she was the head of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the college. Her family was not pleased.  But they were reconciled and she went to medical school. This week she begins a three-year residency in Georgia and considers medicine her ministry.

Voting While I Still Can

 

I voted yesterday. I dropped off my mail-in ballot at the Lancaster City offices. Two police officers on duty at the entrance watched me drop my ballot in the box.

Since 2016 I have wondered if the next election I vote in will be the last free and fair election.  

Russians did not know in 1991 that the presidential election would be the first, last and only free election they would ever have.  

Germans voted in 1932 and did not vote again until after their country was in ruins and under the control of the countries that defeated Naziism. For East Germany, they would wait until after the collapse of the Soviet Union to vote again.

I believe the 2022 elections will be as corrupt as the Republicans can get away with, but they will do their authoritarian worst in 2024.  

Last week I was talking to a group of friends who are mostly independents. I was defending my loyalty to the Democratic Party. I tried to stay numerical. The most recent numbers say 40% of Americans identify as independent vs. 26% R and 31% D. And yet those 40% of people vote almost entirely with one party or another and have no political power as a bloc. 

Being an independent means having no power. Being a party member evokes that memorable line from "The Wire" when the retired mayor explains to the hopeful candidate what the mayor's job is like: 

"Every morning I sit at my desk. They bring in a big, steaming bowl of shit and I have to eat every bite." 

For a former military, fiscally conservative, pro-Israel voter like me, I find something to disagree with every day in being a Democrat. But the alternative is the orange-god-king worshipping racists who want to burn democracy and rule from the Redneck Versailles in Florida. 

So I will be happily loyal to the Democratic Party and support everything I can and hope national debt does not become a multiple of the our GDP.

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Review

Spoiler Alert!! 

I am going to talk about the end of the novel. If you haven’t read it, I don’t want to ruin the read for you. 

Klara and the Sun, the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is sad, beautiful and haunting, as are all of his eight novels. Each of the eight novels are different in setting and characters and time period. His main character can be an English butler, a single mom in post-war Nagasaki, a teenager raised to be an organ donor, an old couple in medieval England losing their memories as they wander in search of their son, or an aging Japanese painter remembering his life after World War II. 

In Klara and the Sun, the protagonist is an “Artificial Friend” always referred to as an AF*. She is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) robot companion for a teenage girl named Josie. At the beginning of the novel, we see Klara in the store that sells AFs and other household items. She is very curious about her world, more curious than other AFs, even the new B3 AFs that have recently been added to the store’s inventory. 

We see the world through Klara’s eyes from within the store until she is purchased by Josie’s mom. Through most of the novel Josie’s health is in decline and only Klara maintains hope that Josie will get better. Klara’s hope is based on her deep and serious, almost primal, worship of the Sun. AFs were designed in a way that required solar power. Klara observed this and spoke often of “the sun’s nourishment.” Not just for herself, but for humans and animals. 

Klara believes the sun goes into the ground at night. She twice goes to a barn to address the sun on Klara’s behalf and finally make a deal with the sun to heal Josie. Then, at the worst of Josie’s decline, her bedroom is suddenly flooded with sunlight and her rapid recovery begins. But this story is Ishiguro, not Disney. 

As Josie recovers, both Klara and Josie's neighbor/boyfriend Rick become less and less important. At the end of the novel, Klara is confined in some kind of junkyard, still conscious, but no longer humanoid. Like someone who loses the use of their body, but keeps her memories, Klara can review the events of her life while she waits for the slow decline to nothing that seems to be the lifecycle of AFs. 

The story is not as wrenching as Never Let Me Go—the story of young people bred and raised to be organ donors. It is not quite as ironic as The Remains of the Day and the mountain of regrets that haunt the late life of an English butler. Nor is it quite as odd as The Buried Giant and its quest through medieval England to find a son who may or may not exist. But Klara and the Sun is thoroughly sad, especially if Klara, the AF with the truly sunny disposition, is telling her story from a junkyard. 

We get hints of rebellion against AFs and AI from the people in the city so we don’t know why Klara is in the scrapyard. As with the end of other Ishiguro novels, the protagonist is in a terrible place with little hope, but there is still life: whether it is the aging butler who knows that his world has passed away and love has passed him by, or the organ donor barely alive and one operation of from certain death, or the old couple lost in the mists of memory loss, or Klara still exploring her world with the senses she has left. 

I have read all of Ishiguro’s novels and re-read Remains of the Day. I may re-read that again. I might also re-read Klara and the Sun to look more closely at how Ishiguro portrays misplaced faith and deep misunderstandings. The future of AI looks hopeful for the rich and privileged and bleak for everyone else. Klara and the Sun captures that perfectly. 

Here is a review of three of Ishiguro’s novels related to war and its aftermath.

Here is a contrast of Ishiguro and Mark Helprin, my favorite living authors.

Here is a look at the similarities between and army Sergeant’s Major and an English butler.

*It took me about 50 pages to get used to the AF acronym. I am an Air Force veteran so AF wants to be Air Force in my head. Also, some of my friends, including younger Army friends, use AF as an emphatic suffix: Shamrocks are lucky AF (for As Fuck). Einstein is smart AF. An Artificial friend in the Air Force would be AF AF AF!

May 9: Victory Day for Russia, Crash Day for Me

 

In Russia, May 9 is Victory Day, the annual celebration of defeating the Nazis in World  War II.  I am happy to celebrate dead and defeated Nazis any time.  But May 9 has a new significance for me.

Sunday, May 9, will be the 1-year anniversary of my 40th broken bone. I smashed my left (dominant arm) elbow in a low-speed (10mph) crash.

On May 9, 2007, I broken ten bones including C7 in a high-speed (50mph).

I realized this morning that all of the bones I have broken this century were on May 9--about 1/3rd of all the bones I broke in my life.

Also, in this century, the only bones I have broken have been from bicycle accidents. In the rest of my life, motorcycles, missile explosions, football, car accidents, along with bicycle accidents were the causes of broken bones.

I was thinking of wearing bubble wrap on Sunday. Especially if I ride.

Talking About Veterans with Paws for Purple Hearts

 

This evening I had the chance to speak with several staff members of Paws for Purple Hearts: an organization that provides and trains service dogs for recovering veterans. 

The people I spoke with train dogs to be companions to veterans and provide training for veterans who bring the dogs into their lives.  

My daughter is a clinical consultant for Paws for Purple Hearts. She asked me to speak to the group about my experience serving in the military during and after the draft and the Vietnam War, and then returning in 2007 and deploying to Iraq.  

I spoke about soldiers I served with in both time periods: how they were the same and how they were different in the 1970s and 2010s.  Paws for Purple Hearts works with veterans from our recent wars and from the wars of the last century.  Soldiers, like all of us, are shaped by the society we live in.  The difference in the experience of draft-era veterans and current veterans is most evident to me in the subject of suicide. 

I told the group about how suicide was treated in the 70s and in the 2010s after I returned from deployment.  It was so different. I wrote about it here. Suicide was condemned by everyone in the 70s. The soldiers I knew who took their own lives after Iraq were treated the same as combat deaths.  

In both the 70s and the 2010s, I knew soldiers who could not stop their hands from shaking and were kept on limited duty so they could retire.  They were combat veterans suffering with PTSD but wanted to finish their careers.  The military is certainly better about dealing with PTSD now than during the Vietnam War, but the kind of person who becomes a soldier has trouble dealing with personal weakness.  So it is important to deal with soldiers as individuals who need help but do not want to feel weak. 

I got a lot of good questions in the Q&A.  One was about how counselors could best work with older veterans.  The soldiers who served during the draft era in general and the Vietnam War in particular often deeply mistrust the government and authority.  I knew and know many veterans of that era who felt betrayed and abandoned by the government that sent them to a hopeless war.  I said it was important to acknowledge the importance of their service and the sacrifice they and their friends made.  Being part of the welcome home they did not get 50 years ago could help establish trust.

Next time I go to Richmond, I hope to visit Paws for Purple Hearts in Ruther Glen, Virginia, near my daughter's home.  

The Mission of Paws for Purple Hearts: 

Paws for Purple Hearts improves the lives of America’s Warriors facing mobility challenges and trauma-related conditions such as PTSD and TBI by providing the highest quality assistance dogs and canine-assisted therapeutic programs; and by building public awareness about the important role dogs play in helping Warriors along the road to recovery.