Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch

Corona Film Festival Movie Four: The Wild Bunch

My son Nigel and I are having a Corona Film Festival. The most recent and fourth film on our list was "The Wild Bunch."  The movie just before this was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." 

Both movies were made in 1969--the year I got my drivers license.  Both are set at the end of the 19th Century and represent the end of the frontier and "The Old West." They are the farthest extremes of the cowboy movie genre and represent the end of cowboy movies.  Traditional Good Guys and Bad Guys were out of fashion.

In The Wild bunch, three groups are set against each other in this movie.  All of them are bad. All of them end up slaughtered in the final Sam Peckinpah gun fight or shortly after.  There are no good guys.  The group we follow through the movie are bank/train robbers.  They are pursued by a vile, incompetent set of vigilantes led by a former member of the gang, and in Mexico they fight against and ally with a Mexican rebel army led by a bandit general. 

By contrast, in "Butch Cassidy" nobody is bad.  Butch and the kid are robbers, but they are amiable, honorable and kill only when threatened.  The posse that pursues them is relentless, again honorable men upholding the law.  The rest of the Hole in the Wall Gang are decent men. When Butch and Sundance escape to Bolivia, they rob banks and are pursued by Bolivian police and soldiers who are also decent men. No bad guys. 

The final scenes are a stark contrast.  In both the robbers at the center of the drama are killed in a hail of bullets. But Butch and Sundance die off camera.  The gang in the Wild Bunch die on camera surrounded by the bodies of their enemies. At the nearly everyone is dead, except the Mexican villagers oppressed by the rebel general. They come to the scene of the carnage and collect the guns to protect themselves from other bandits.

Neither movie is anywhere close to the white hat hero versus the black hat outlaw of the traditional cowboy genre.  At the end of the 1960s, America was protesting war. There was violence in the streets. The top movies of the following year, 1970, were anti-war war movies.  Nigel and I will be watching these also:  "M*A*S*H,"  "Kelly's Heroes," "Catch-22," "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Patton" debuted during the first year of the 1970s.

"Patton" may not seem like an anti-war movie, but the character of General Bradley is a foil to Patton--the General who cares vs. the General who dares--at the expense of his men.

The return of Good Guys and Bad Guys would be the 1977 movie Star Wars--which used every trope of the traditional cowboy movie right down to the bar scene to bring back the Good Guy/Bad Guy Hero/Villain theme to the movies.  The full title of that 1977 movie is "Star Wars--A New Hope" a title more appropriate than ever looking back over almost five decades. 

Movie one of Corona Festival was Midway which I wrote about here. Nigel and I will watch the 1976 version starring Charlton Heston. 

Movie two was Ford vs. Ferrari, which I first saw in Paris in November with the title "LeMans 66." I was so taken with the movie I visited LeMans, France, a few days later and the museum at Circuit de Sarthe where the race is held. 

All My Passport Stamps--Memories Rebuilt

After I returned from my most recent trip to Europe and Israel, I decided put together a spreadsheet of the stamps in my passports.  Like so much of my life, I start late and then become obsessed.  I got my first passport just after my 44th birthday in 1997.  I had been overseas before that. I was stationed in Germany for three years with the U.S. Army and had seen a lot of Germany and some of France and Portugal with no passport. American soldiers could travel Western Europe without a passport during the Cold War. 

The second reason I persisted in putting together the 170-line document is that I have a five-year gap in my bicycling records, in fact in all of my records.  I started riding a bicycle seriously in 1988 two years after I quit smoking. In 1989, I started keeping track of miles and races and big ride. From 1989 to 1996 I have paper logs I got from Runners World magazine every year. 

Then in 1997 I started using Microsoft Excel to keep track of mileage.  In 2002 I switched from a PC to a Mac and somewhere in my digital history I managed to lose all records and files from 1997 to 2001.  I have a lovely spreadsheet of all my miles from 2002 to 2017.

In that five-year period from 1997 to 2001 were some of the best rides I ever had. Although passport stamps have their own problems as records, the stamps from trips gave me a pretty good record of where I was which has helped me to reconstruct some of the memories of that time.

Between April 1998 and November 2000, I worked for a multinational company whose main product was white pigment. During those 2-1/2 years I traveled to seventeen countries on five continents--I was supposed to go to Africa on one trip, but the trip got cancelled--traveling nearly every month for a total of 28 trips I could piece together from the stamps.  On all but two of the trips, I took a road bike with me.  Before September 2001, taking a bike was free on an overseas trip and only $50 per flight in America.  There was still the hassle of oversized baggage, but no charge back then.

Five of the trips were Round the World trips, usually somewhere in Europe first, then Singapore, Australia and/or Hong Kong, then back to America.  Two of the trips were more than half-way round the world going from the US to Europe to South America then back to America.  I also made trips directly to Asia and back: to Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore. 

According to the passport stamps, the top countries I have visited are France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, China, Singapore and Hong Kong.  For each of these countries I have more than ten stamps.  But I have made more trips to Italy than all but the top three countries and I only have two stamps.  I have, for instance, been to Turin, Italy five times since 1999, but I have traveled there from France twice in a train through the Alps (an amazing trip), twice in a car and once in a regional jet.  I went to Florence and Padua by driving from Switzerland--no passport stamps. 

I have been to eighteen countries for which I have no passport stamp. Many of the 53 countries I have visited are in the European Union. Some I passed through in a car or on a bicycle or a train and never passed through customs. I have no stamp for Portugal, Ireland, Andorra, Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Kosovo, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Lithuania or Estonia. 

During my first long overseas ride in 2017, somewhere between Serbia and Ukraine, I quit keeping tracking of mileage. I became a regular user of Strava. I got so much data out of Strava that keeping spreadsheet seemed redundant. 

I'll write about rides I can fill in using passport and other travel information I have.  With coronoa virus, it could be a while before I add more stamps to my current passport. 

Trump and the Death of Honor

I loved being a soldier and hate what is happening to the American military

In the 44 years I was in the military between 1972 and 2016, I saw racial equality become reality just eight years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not perfect, but way better than the civilian world. I grew up hearing my Dad talk about being the Jewish commander of a Black Company during World War II, and then he became commandant of an Afrika Korps Prisoner of War Camp.

When I re-enlisted in 2007 women were part of the force, not marginal. By the time I left women were being accepted in combat leadership and gay soldiers served openly.

And then Trump was elected.

Since 2017 Trump has insulted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, dismissed the intelligence chiefs in public in Helsinki just to kiss Putin's ass, insulted every NATO ally, betrayed the Kurds to suck up to the dictator in Turkey, pardoned a war criminal causing the Secretary of the Navy to resign and now he fires the Captain of an ship who tried to protect his sailors, then sends the new sycophant Secretary of the Navy to insult the Captain on his ship.

During those 44 years, the country went from hating the military to loving the military. Now Trump is bringing the military down to his own dishonorable level.

"Midway" Movie Shows How Great American Leadership Can Be

My son Nigel and I just finished watching the movie "Midway." I first saw it in a theater in Paris in November. I cried three times during the movie at the beginning listening to the voice of President Roosevelt, at end watching the dive bomber pilot Dick Best leave his ship in a wheelchair and in the middle watching the defiant death of gunner Bruno Gaudi.

This time I just teared up at the end.

My initial response to the movie, which begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor, was deep sadness listening to the President we had versus who runs the country now.

Today was the first time I saw the movie since the beginning of the pandemic. From Pearl Harbor to victory, America led the fight against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Now we can't even nationalize the response to the virus, nor the distribution of medical supplies.

It was also more stark this time that the key to victory was the way Admiral Nimitz believed his intelligence officers and listened to evidence--not on idiotic gut feelings and wishes.

The movie has been criticized for using too many speeches both by the Japanese and American leaders. It is the starkest contrast with the movie "Dunkirk" which explains almost nothing and presumes great tactical and strategic knowledge on the part of the viewer.

If you watch the movie at home and don't like spectacular war scenes, fast forward through the fighting and listen to the conversations. It's a brilliant example of leadership at many levels on both sides of the battle.

The distance between President Roosevelt and the current President could be measured in light years.

"He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels"--Riding a bike made of ash wood up a 1000-meter climb

This bike is entirely made from ash wood including the seat and handlebars

It's not great for a 1000-meter climb on a switchback road.

Several times during my recent trip in Europe and Asia I switched my plans to avoid the places where the pandemic was currently worst.  I was in Athens when I was supposed to be in Rome.  It was a Sunday. The bike rental shops were closed. The only place I could rent a bike was at an upscale hotel that was connected to a local company that makes bikes from ash trees--fifty bikes per tree and then they plant fifty seedling trees for each tree they use. Here is their website.

The bikes are seven-speed, planetary hub city bikes.  Three miles away from my hotel was a 1000-meter high mountain in the middle of the city with several cell towers at the top. It was 60 degrees, sunny and I wanted to ride!  So I rented the wooden bike, raised the seat as high as I could and rode up the mountain.

At three miles up, the road got really steep and I had to walk a hundred meters, but then it leveled a little and I kept going.  The view was beautiful. Halfway up I looked back at the city and was looking down on the Acropolis.  Further up the road turned south and I was looking at the harbor and the Aegean Sea.  Near the top the switchback interval got shorter and the grade went above ten percent.  I gave up when I was looking at the base of the cell towers knowing I could get a steel bike with a triple crank the next day and ride to the top.

Along with its planetary gearset, the bike had a caliper brake on the front wheel, but a coaster brake in the rear. On the way down the mountain, riding into a couple of switchbacks I slid the rear wheel when I went to backpedal and braked instead. By the bottom I was used to it, but it made me realize that I backpedal on the way into sharp turns--some of the switchbacks were 180 degrees.

The road had few guardrails and many long, sheer drops. I thought if I had really screwed up with the coaster brake my epitaph could be:  "He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels."

Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.

Alligator or Crocodile: Google maps wanted me to find out in person!

Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.  I rented a car at the Athens airport and drove back to a hotel where I was staying. The hotel was six miles away in a little village.  For some reason, Google maps told me to leave the highway and take a dirt road to the hotel.  For almost a mile, I followed the road with an increasing sense of foreboding.  At first it was two very small cars wide, then narrower. 

Then it went from straight to winding. There were stray dogs on and near the road. Then the road turned slightly downhill.  Although Athens is mostly very hilly, the area near the airport is flat and occasionally marshy. Slightly downhill can be significant.

It was.  I rounded a corner and there was a puddle. A big puddle. A width of the road puddle. I stopped. I stared. In the light of a waxing moon, the puddle was black but illuminated by the lunar light.  I looked beside the puddle and saw no clear path. The puddle itself was smooth—not rocks or branches sticking up through the surface, so it was deep.  The Renault Clio I was driving had about three inches of ground clearance, I had one bar of cell service, so I turned around and went back to the highway. 

Google tried to get me to turn around and go back to the impromptu alligator habitat, but I kept driving on the highway until it recalculated me a route on pavement.  Or was it crocodiles?

Persistent Pitch Men and Women in front of Athens Restaurants

Restaurant row in Athens.  Each restaurant has a 
pitch man or woman saying some version of "Eat here!"

Between my hotel and Athens and the place I rented bikes was a block of restaurants. They were side by side competing for tourists who could only eat so many meals.  My favorite coffee place was also at the far end of the line, so I passed restaurant row several times a day for three days.

Outside each of the restaurants was a hawker.  A man or woman who would say, “Eat here. Authentic Greek food. Or pizza if you want.” I passed by. Crossing the narrow street to the opposite sidewalk was no help.  Some of the times I was walking by I was wearing spandex—not a fashion choice of anyone else that I could see. 

Finally, the last night I wanted to eat a pizza, so I went in the restaurant with a tall, bearded guy doing the pitches and ordered pizza and water. 

When I left, I had to pass by a half-dozen other hawkers. One of them, a short, intense woman in her forties said, “Why did you go to his place? What did they offer you? Was it free beer? They give free beer.”

I was going to keeping walking, then I stopped and said, “They gave me a brand-new car. They gave me a 2020 Renault Clio.” 

She looked stunned for a minute then recovered and said, “What else?” Then the woman hawking for the restaurant beside hers, a taller woman in her late 20s, smiled and said, “Yes, what else did they give you?” 

I said, “Two motorcycles. A Ducati Monster and Honda CBR1000.”

She said, “You better be careful and not drink too much if you are riding those bikes.” 

I said I drank a whole bottle of sparkling water and would not touch the bikes till morning.  She smiled. The first woman forced a smile. Clearly, she had a side bet going about whether the old guy in spandex would ever eat in one of their restaurants.

A Woman Who Took Charge Like a Drill Sergeant Meeting a Recruit Bus

On the 15th of February at the beginning of a five-week trip across Europe and Israel, my friend Cliff and I took an Al Italia flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, changing planes in Rome. Because the first flight was between two European Union countries, there was no customs check. We had a two-hour layover and knew there would be a customs check before flying to Israel.

We landed about a half-hour late; the next flight was in another terminal. As we left the plane, Cliff and I wondered if we would be spending the night in Rome. As we cleared the Jetway, we saw a tall, blond woman wearing an Al Italia flight attendant uniform holding a sign that said: Tel Aviv.

When we joined the group, she made a quick count, then an about face and marched away holding up the sign and saying, "Follow please."  We followed, about 20 of us. Fast. Cliff and I made jokes about whether we could keep up. We also said if she were not ex-military, she had us fooled.

After a long march she swept up to the customs area and pointed at two lines we were to join.  We obeyed.  All 20 of us. Customs proceeded quickly under the eye of our leader.  When we were all through customs, she counted, turned and marched us to the gate. We made the flight in plenty of time.  Once we were in line, she turned and marched back to her other duties.

It is a small joy for an old sergeant to follow someone confident who knows exactly what she is doing.

Shades of Yellow--in Taxis

This lovely, pale shade of yellow is the color of taxis in Greece

This German-standard color of taxis has also been declared yellow by the government in Greece. 

This is the cab of Niko, the taxi driver who took me to my hotel. It is only yellow in Greece.

When I first arrived in Greece, the hotel where I was staying sent a taxi for me.  The taxi ride was free, along with a very low nightly rate at the hotel.  The driver, Niko, met me at international arrivals. We walked to his cab. I noticed that many of the cabs were Mercedes and that they were a pale yellow—very different from the harsh yellow of NYC taxicabs.  When we got to his cab, it was cream color.  I said, “This is the color of a German cab.”

Niko spoke English well and told me about flying to Europe to buy the cab.  He was part of a group of Greek cab drivers who got permission to use cabs in German cream color rather than yellow.  He said the government decided to call cream color a shade of yellow, allowing any cabbie who wanted a cab that color to do so without special permission. 

Like German cabs, there are no ads, phone numbers or writing of any kind on cabs.  Not all are Mercedes, but all the cabs I saw were a paler yellow than is true in America. 

As in Tbilisi and Jerusalem, I saw a lot of Priuses as cabs.  Hybrids really are at their best in the intermittent, fast/slow/stop driving of city cabs. Niko wanted to keep driving Mercedes sedans as long as he could.  We talked like two old motorheads (which we are) about the joys of driving the A5 Autobahn in Germany in the middle of the night and going 150mph. 

Niko wants to travel to America someday, to New York and to California.  He loves Greece and is very proud of the projected number of tourists for the coming year. He said 36 million was the projected number.  The coronavirus will certainly put a damper on that, and on Niko’s travel plans.  

Nostalgia for Tito in North Macedonia--former Yugoslavia

Dozens of statues in every direction in the center of Skopje

In Skopje I met a very funny guy named Ferdinand. "Call me Ferdi," he said when I asked his name.

He asked me how I liked the statues in the center of Skopje. When I hesitated he said,  "I hate them. It's ridiculous." He began winding up toward a speech.  "We have no trains, the buses are old. The bridges are crumbling. But we have statues everywhere. Who needs them? I don't!"

He went on about the corruption and stupidity that has dogged his country since the fall of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. "Under Tito we had the best two decades in that past century. Maybe ever.  Tito falls. Capitalism is not so good for us.  Under Tito, the government worked. Now....." he shrugged.

Then he straightened up, his blue eyes flashed, he smiled and said, "But you guys elected Trump. At least we did not vote for someone who bragged about being corrupt. He showed you who he is, and you elected him."

I could only agree.  In "On Tyranny" Timothy Snyder recommends making friends in countries that have suffered under authoritarian rule.  They know what's coming. Ferdi's words echoed the Russian emigre writer Masha Gessen who said we should believe the tyrant when he says what he will do.

We talked about Bernie Sanders. As with other people I have spoken to in Europe, they all think Sanders is Trump's ticket to life rule. "If Trump runs against Sanders, democracy ends. Maybe it already has."

As I left I passed a lot of statues and some very old buses.

"If You Share A Room with A Monk in Jerusalem, You Have to Expect An Early Wake Up"

My recent ten-nation trip began with a week in Jerusalem. I met my old friend and roommate from our Cold War military service, Cliff Almes, in Darmstadt, Germany.  He has lived there since we both left the military in 1979, becoming a brother in a monastery there. He is Bruder Timotheus. 

We stayed in a German Guest House in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem just 100 meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. For a monk of 40 years, being that close to the most holy site in Christendom was a blessing of the first order.  The Church is open between 4am and 6pm each day and mobbed with tourists and pilgrims every hour except 4-5am. 

So, Cliff awoke every morning at 3:30am, dressed and spent an hour at the Church.  Then came back. I was glad we could stay at a place that delighted Cliff so much.  I seldom go to sleep before midnight. Even if I weren’t an iconoclast, there is nothing that interests me enough to get up at 3:30am. 

Mostly I got back to sleep and stayed asleep through Cliff’s return, waking for the communal breakfast at 8:30am. 

Cliff stayed in Jerusalem a few more days as I went off to the Republic of Georgia. Two weeks later we went to Dachau and Nuremberg together.  We met in Darmstadt in the evening and drove to Dachau. At one point I asked if he had any reason to set his alarm before 7. He smiled and said, “No, but if you share a room with a monk in Jerusalem, you have to expect an early wake up.”