Riding in 2017--A Story

“Shane, Shane is right as rain,” Shane sang to himself as he drove north on Pennsylvania Route 74 from York.  He saw dark clouds to the north. He was driving Grandpap’s ’74 Chevy C10 Stepside pickup truck listening to President Trump talk about how he was going to get all the Mexicans out of the country.  The old truck only had an AM radio. That was fine with Shane.  Trump was on WHP-AM.  Really, he was on every station now.

“Shane is right as rain,” he sang to the open windows on this April afternoon.  All those Lib’ral bitches that made fun of him weren’t laughing now.  Trump was Making America Great Again and Shane was part of it.  He was on his way to a Klan rally in Grantham.  Christians can’t be Lib’rals and they were going to march across the Messiah College campus and let them know what’s what. Shane dropped out of York Area High School.  Shane knew Trump would put all those college bitches in their place.

“Here’s a Trigger Warning bitches!” he said as he patted the AR15 in the rack behind his head.  He kept on singing. Shane called his AR15 an M4 because Shane should have been a soldier.  He tried to enlist but they turned him down.  The Jews made up the intelligence test he flunked and the bitches at the recruiting station said he needed to lose about 100 pounds.  What did they know?  He could shoot.  He could fight. 

The old six-cylinder engine clattered with knock from cheap gas and old age as Shane started up the first hill north of York.  Ahead riding on the shoulder was a guy on a bicycle.  “Faggots wear bike shorts,” Shane said to himself.  As he got near the bicyclist he moved gently right hitting the rider on the shoulder with his mirror.  Shane then laid on the air horn he installed himself and yelled “Faggot!” laughing as he drove away.

The bicyclist stayed upright and kept pedaling. 

Just past the crest of the next long hill, Shane pulled off the road and parked well off the shoulder.  He grabbed his rifle, slid his overall-clad form from the driver’s seat and walked to a pine tree just past the crest of a hill.  He dropped to the ground and wiggled his plus-size body under the tree.  He settled down in the pine needles, his massive midsection puddling out on either side of his body.  He could see well down the hill to the south.  Shane turned the switch on the battlesight.  The red dot inside the sight glowed faintly.  He watched as the lone bicyclist pedaled smoothly up the long hill.  When the bike was 200 meters away Shane listened for traffic.  Hearing none, he set the magazine on the patch of dirt he cleared in the pine-needle covered ground.  Shane put his right cheek on the collapsible stock, put the red dot in the middle of rider’s chest, flipped the safety to Fire and squeezed the trigger. 

The rider collapsed on the handlebars.  His legs wobbled.  His right foot twisted out of the cleated pedal, but the left foot stayed locked in.  The bike swerved left and fell.  He was dead before he hit the ground.  Shane rolled out from under the pine tree flipped the lever on his weapon to Safe and walked as quickly as he could back to Grandpap’s C10. 

“Shane is right as rain,” the unemployed Trump supporter said softly and smiled as he returned the rifle to the rack in the rear window.  “One round, one dead faggot,” he said louder as he started the old truck.  Shane looked left, signaled and rolled down the hill toward the Klan rally. 

Five minutes later an ambulance sped past to the south.  “Don’t need no ambulance,” said Shane as he watched the red lights blaze.  “Bicycles don’t belong on the damn road in Trump America,” he said to his open window. 

As he pulled off the road near the Messiah College campus, Shane saw dozens of Klansmen with their hoods off looking at their phones.  Shane grabbed his sheet and locked the door to the truck.  He walked over to a group of men and heard one of them say, “Shot dead.  A fucking General in the Army National Guard.  The real fucking deal.”  Shane started to ask, then decided to just listen.  Shane had no money for smartphone so he had no idea what they were talking about.  After a few minutes it became clear that the “faggot” he shot was General Pete Stevens, one of the most Conservative Congressmen in America.  Trump loved the guy.  Pete was an Apache pilot. He fought in Iraq. 

“Shit,” Shane said to himself as he slipped away from the group and walked back toward his truck.  “Ain’t right a General should ride a bike. Ain’t my fault.” He climbed in his truck and stared at sheet-clad men staring at their phones on the field in front of him.  He put the key in the ignition, then took it out again.  ‘Cops won’t come here,’ he thought to himself.  ‘Best I just do what I came to do.’

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Shane swung his legs left and slid from the seat.  He pulled his sheet on and the hood and walked back to the group. “Shane is right as rain,” he said to himself as he joined the hooded horde.

Feeling More Jewish as the World Moves to the Right

  

In mid-August, while I was returning from a family vacation in Santa Fe and enjoying life, the world got darker.  A candidate for President of the United States appointed the leading promoter of White Supremacists to head his campaign.  Donald Trump appointed Steve Bannon, head of Breitbart News, as CEO of his campaign.  If Trump wins, the Ku Klux Klan will have an office in the White House. 

When conservatives get power, they try to limit gay rights, minority voting rights, and abortion rights.  But Bannon in the West Wing will mean women’s rights and even civil rights are in peril.  Every genocide begins with the group in power taking human rights away from minorities.  Next the party in power takes away minority citizenship, next those in the minority become refugees or die. It is a large and terrible sign that Trump began his campaign by saying illegal immigrants are not people like us.  Trump’s use of “They” and “Them” is straight out of every dictator’s playbook. And Trump loves Vladimir Putin. 

Speaking of Russian dictators, my paternal grandparents escaped the Holocaust by escaping from what is now Odessa, Ukraine, (They called it Russia.) when killing tens of thousands of Jews was Russian government policy.  Millions of Jews who escaped death in Ukraine and went to America survived.  Those who stayed in Ukraine were very likely to have died in the Holocaust.  My family never talked about the Holocaust and it was not much discussed in my school that I can remember. Since only my father was Jewish, I am not actually a Jew, even though I had a Bar Mitzvah. But I am culturally Jewish, and to a Nazi, I have more than enough Jewish blood to be condemned.

Five years after my Bar Mitzvah, I was in the Air Force.  I had “Jewish” on my dogtags. If I was part of a small minority in Stoneham, Jews were simply non-existent in the military.  I was the first Jew my basic training bunkmate had ever seen “up close.” Leonard “’Bama” Norwood was fond of saying he was “from Sawyerville, Alabama, population 53.”  Not a lot of Jews in Alabama.

 

Recovering from a missile explosion the following year, I began to believe in God, then become a Christian.  So when I re-enlisted in the Army in 1975, I had “Christian”on my dogtags.  Because I was an American soldier, I was free to identify myself by my religious preference.  There was no genetic test, no blood test, no religious requirement to my military service.  So I could identify as a Jewish missile technician in the Air Force, then as a Christian tank commander in the Army.  A decade later I was out of the Army and in college full time. In my classes I first read the poetry of Dante Aligheri and Chretien de Troyes and fell in love with the Medieval World in Western Europe.  

I did not think much about being Jewish until 1994.  That was the year of the genocide in Rwanda.  Kids hacked to death in Churches or left mutilated in agony by their former neighbors was so wrenching I could not look away.

At the same time as the Rwandan Genocide, I helped a family of survivors of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to settle in America.  Vladislav and his daughter Branka escaped first, then Branka's mother Borka followed them two years later. The story is here.

At this time my view of mass murder started to shift from millions of people murdered to millions of murders.  Vladislav, Branka and Borka Semeunovic were refugees.  They escaped slaughter because America took them in, just as America had taken in my grandparents 94 years earlier. The Holocaust had seemed remote before, but now refugees and mass murder victims had faces and families.

Every Jew killed by the Nazis had a life and a family. Every Rwandan hacked to death by a neighbor had a life before that neighbor took a machete and cut her to pieces.  Every Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim in the former Yugoslavia could have been killed in the chaos of the 1990s.  More than 200,000 were killed.  

Then in 2001 nearly 3,000 Americans were the victims of murder.  It was a mass murder but each individual died in their own agony within just a couple of hours.

And now a candidate for President of the United States has named a Neo-Nazi as head of his campaign.  I have Jewish daughters and African-American sons.  Before Bannon, I thought random gun violence was the greatest danger they faced.  With Bannon in the West Wing, the U.S. Government itself could become a threat. 

Most of my life has been devoted overcoming obstacles and full of very American optimism that I could do anything I worked hard at. I am not a fatalist by belief or temperament.  But a Trump victory will reduce everyone to their tribes.  Jews have long been victims of the whims of dominant cultures, as have all people of color.  German Jews who were combat veterans of World War One became victims of Holocaust.

We Jews, by the many ways Jewishness can be defined, and all people of color will find America a very different place if Trump wins. And even if Trump loses, his campaign has made real evil mainstream. Refugees look like danger and evil to Trump.  To me refugees look like my grandparents, like the Semeunovic family, like people who need help.  America is already great.

Injections in Both Arms--So Army!

This week I went to my family doctor to get two injections.  One was a tetanus booster so the woman giving me the shot asked me to stand up and let my arm hang loose.  Usually at civilian doctors, I get shots or blood drawn sitting down.  Standing with my arm loose is just what they told me to do in basic training in 1972 when they used the air injectors like the one in the picture above.

As the line moved slowly between the medics with the injector guns, the drill sergeant told us to be sure and stand still because if we flinched the air gun would rip our arm open.  I never saw that happen, but we all believed it.  The real story of terror was the Square Needle in The Left Nut on the 10th Training Day.  That was scary.  I wrote about that shortly after re-enlisting.

Forty-four years later, the needles are thinner, the technicians are older and I had no ill effects in either arm, just the memory of waiting for the air gun.

Surprising Follow Up with a MEDEVAC Pilot

I do not have a photo of MEDEVAC Pilot Suzy Danielson

But this poster covers her attitude towards life

Yesterday I posted a story on the DUSTOFF Facebook page I wrote about a MEDEVAC pilot I served with in Iraq.  The story is here.  She was a pilot in the Gulf War in 1991, left the Army in 1993 and forgot she was still a reserve officer.  In 2009, the Army reminded her with a FEDEX package telling her to report for duty.  She was 44 when she returned to active service and deployed to Iraq.  

After I posted the story, I sent Suzy an email, not knowing if she was still using that address.  At midnight, I got an email back from Suzy.  She is in Afghanistan!  Apparently she liked returning to the Blackhawk helicopter cockpit.  I asked her to follow up with me when she returns.

Cold War Draft Army: Best Army I Served In

Cold War Training Exercise

Since my first enlistment in 1972, I served in three different armies.  I first enlisted during the draft near the end of the Vietnam War and the height of the Cold War. When I re-enlisted in 1975, I was in the new Volunteer Army, VOLAR was the acronym at the time.  After eleven years of active duty and reserve service ending in 1984, I re-enlisted in 2007 in the Post 9-11 Army National Guard.

When I climbed into my bunk in basic training in 1972, the other 39 soldiers sharing my room were men between 18 and 20 years old.  None of us were married.  We were from nearly 30 states, from both coasts, mostly from the American South and West, but "Jersey"and I were actually from the Northeast--very rare in the active military. 

No one planned to make a career of the military.  We were all going to "do our time" and get out.  Half of us were planning to use the Vietnam War GI Bill to pay for college, although the reality then and now is fewer than one in ten actually would use their education benefits.  At our active duty stations, we all referred to anyone who re-enlisted as a LIFER: Lazy Inefficient Fuckup Expecting Retirement.  More than 80% of draft-era soldiers served one enlistment and left the military.  We shined our shoes, ironed our starched uniforms, told extravagant lies, and had a common enemy in the sergeants in charge of us.

Five years later in 1977, I was a tank commander in Germany.  The draft effectively ended in 1973, and formally ended in 1975, ushering in the era of the Volunteer Army.  In 1973, new soldiers joining a unit were 19-year-old single males on short enlistments, usually 2 or 3 years.

From 1975 on, when a new soldier joined our tank unit, that soldier was between 19 and 21 years old.  He was married, had one child and his wife was pregnant again.  That was the reason many of these guys had enlisted.  Most had enlisted for four years because the longer enlistment in Combat Arms had a $2,500 bonus.  So my new crewman was married, poor and a father.

The great increase in the number of married soldiers between the early and late 70s meant a lot of soldiers were living off base in poverty in Germany because Base Housing went by rank.  And if their young wives were not in country for their two-year tour, there would eventually be a night when the soldier received a Dear John letter.  Later he would be blind drunk on 80-cent per bottle Mad Dog, MD 20-20.  (Actually the MD stood for Mogen David.  MD 20-20 was the cheapest drunk possible and it always made me smile that the mostly southern boys swilling the stuff were getting drunk on Jewish wine.)

By this time I was a sergeant, I had re-enlisted so I was a LIFER.  They still called us LIFERS, but with more married soldiers, more of them were re-enlisting.  By the late 70s, LIFER had little of the sting it had during the Vietnam War.  The Army was a job.  The Vietnam War was over and until the Gulf War, the military was a pretty safe job.

Then I re-enlisted into yet another Army in 2007.  No one made fun of LIFERs.  I could not find anyone under 40 who had ever heard the acronym.  In 2007 I enlisted in the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard.  The unit had more than 100 pilots and several hundred mechanics and flight crew.  More than half of the 2,000 soldiers in the brigade were at least considering a career in the Army, if they were not already committed to Army life.

The current Army, including active, reserve and National Guard, is a professional army.  The Army of World War II really represented a huge cross-section of America. Every family either had a soldier in their family or a soldier next door.  After World War II, for the first time in U.S. history, the wartime Army was not demobilized.  Most of the soldiers went home, but the draft continued and a sizable force remained ready for war as well as occupying the countries of former enemies.

By the time the draft ended almost 30 years later, the Army represented the south and west much more than the northeast.  But it was still not a professional Army. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I was the only soldier that many of my co-workers actually knew.  The museum where I worked had a staff of 55 and had been in business for more than a quarter century.  I was the third veteran who had ever worked there.  When I deployed they had to write a policy for National Guard service.  They never had a serving guardsman before.  My co-workers, to use the southern expression, had more degrees than a thermometer: more than two degrees per person on average including the maintenance staff.  People from cities in the northeast mostly don't even think about military service.

The result is an Army that does not represent America.  It is an Army that is easier to send to war because the people who make the decisions never served and the soldiers who go to war will not come from every city, town, village and neighborhood.

A draft Army is much tougher for politicians to send to war, and the soldiers want to go home when the war is over.  That, to me, is a better Army for the soldiers and for the nation.

MEDEVAC Story from Iraq I Never Posted: Brett Feddersen, Pilot

My supervisor at Camp Adder, Iraq, in 2009 was Medevac pilot, Brett Feddersen. 

            Major Brett Feddersen sits alone in the ready room next to the Medevac hangar at 11pm hunched over his personal computer editing a document for a meeting the next day.  “I’ve got to get some sleep in case we get a 2am call,” he says mostly to the air.  The rest of his crew is asleep or resting, waiting for the call.

            Feddersen is a senior staff officer with 2-104^th General Services Aviation Battalion, but two to four days every week he is a Medevac pilot on a 48-hour rotation with Alaska-based Charlie Company, 1^st Battalion 52^nd Aviation, an active Army unit attached to 2-104^th for the current deployment.  His shift will be over at 9am the following morning, but he had a long flight in the afternoon and a long day of meetings either side of the flight.  “I have to stay balanced, I have to stay rested, I have to complete the mission,” he said. 

            It’s a challenge he faces both in civilian life and on deployment.  Senior Trooper Feddersen has served with the Pennsylvania State Police since 1995, most recently flying Aviation Patrol Unit One in the southeastern area of the Commonwealth.  Adding Medevac pilot to his staff duties makes life hectic, but Feddersen lives to fly.  He arranges his life to complete the staff tasks to the best of his ability, making the time necessary to fly Medevac Blackhawks every week.  He is serious and professional when discussing staff duties, but is all smiles and broad hand and arm gestures describing a favorite Medevac mission.  Even crawling on top of the Blackhawk underneath the rotors for pre-flight checks before starting the engines, he is clearly enjoying himself whether under, at the controls, or on top of a Blackhawk helicopter.

            Feddersen said flying Medevac in Iraq has many similarities with flying for his civilian job.  “Flying for the state police is always on an emergency basis,” he said.  “The mission can be a lost child, lost hikers or hunters, or a bad guy pursuit.  We get the call.  We go.” 

            Medevac is the same.  On the first 24 hours of his 48 hours shift, Feddersen and his crew are “second up,” the backup team that goes if a call comes in and “first up” is already on a mission.  During the first day, the crew must be ready to take off within a half hour and can travel a short distance from the ready hangar.  On the second day the crew moves to “first up.”  The Army standard said they must to fly within fifteen minutes of receipt of the Medevac call.  In Charlie Company, the standard is eight minutes. 

            Whether at Ali Air Base or in Pennsylvania’s Twin Valley the emergency response mission gives Feddersen a real sense of accomplishment, “We make a difference here.  When a soldier is down we do everything we can to get them care and get them home.  At home we find the lost child, get the bad guy, it’s a great feeling.” 

            “One big difference here is we have to be more vigilant when landing at a point of injury,” Feddersen said.  Scanning for mines, IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), and the enemy who just came in contact with an injured soldier are part of every mission in Iraq. 

            Feddersen will turn 37 on this deployment.  He served as an enlisted military policeman for the first 5 of his 17 years of service and also attended college.  He went to Officer Candidate School in 1997 followed by Army Aviation School.  Feddersen is married and the father of two boys.  His current deployment is his second.  He was deployed to the Balkans with the Pennsylvania National Guard in 2005.

MEDEVAC Training at Fort AP Hill

These photos are from MEDEVAC Training at Fort AP Hill at Annual Training in 2013 for 28th Combat Aviation Brigade. SFC Jeff Kwiecien is supervising the training.

Flight Medic Training Soldiers in Combat Medicine

These photos are from Annual Training 2014 for the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.  Flight Medic Staff Sergeant Pamela Leggore is training medics to work under combat conditions.

One More Medal Reminds Me of Stuff That Doesn't Get Awards

On Sunday, September 11th, I received what is very likely the last medal I will get from the military. My unit gave me the Pennsylvania Meritorious Service Medal.  The citation talks about all the things I did for the unit.  It was about writing stories, taking pictures and re-enlisting after a quarter century as a civilian.

In other words, it talks about the kinds of things I did which got praise at the time I did them.  So the 200 words of praise in Army prose was about the stuff I did right and made someone higher in the chain of command happy.

The things I did in the military that were the most difficult and that I was most proud of were not the kind of things that people get medals for.

In 1973 when I got blinded in a missile explosion, I got no award.  Since the explosion happened on a test range in Utah, it was not a combat injury.  I recovered my sight and the use of two fingers that were bent and broken in the blast.  I will always be thankful for the surgeons who got the wire and other bits of shrapnel out of my eyes, but they had to operate six times to get all the metal out.  Facing he next surgery and that feeling of a wire being pulled from my eye was one of the more difficult moments of my life.  As was the night after the blast when I overheard a nurse say I would be permanently blind.

There was a moment in Iraq when I got aboard a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq in a brownout sandstorm so bad we could only occasionally see the other Blackhawk we were flying with.  At that moment, I thought about the big turbine engines on the roof of the Blackhawk just above the passenger area and about the big gear box between the engines that drive the big rotor blades.  In the crash I imagined, my guts were squeezed like toothpaste out of my Kevlar vest when all that machinery on top of the helicopter crushed everyone inside.  The flight was fine.  The weather cleared on the way back, and I got the pictures the commander wanted.

I am grateful for the award, but every award reminds of the actual best and worst moments I had in the military, not the ones for which I got the medal.

15th Anniversary of September 11, 2001

Fifteen years ago, I saw this image on the computers of the dot-com where I was working at the time.  I knew a dozen people who worked within blocks of the World Trade Center.  I called them.  I know that when you are inside a disaster, you can lose the larger perspective. I wanted to be just a bit of  perspective from outside New York City for Joe Chang, Helga Tilton, Esther D'Amico, Rob Westervelt, Rick Mullin and Andrew Wood among many others.  Those I was able to reach reacted like the New York journalists they are, calm and ridiculously confident that all would be well.

In 2009, in Iraq, I spoke about September 11, 2001, and my long road to Iraq from the day Islamic Terrorists attacked America.  In Iraq, I spoke about Helga Tilton.  She walked home from south of Ground Zero to the northern end of Manhattan in heels.  She was born in Germany in 1943 in Frankfurt, one of the most heavily bombed of the Germany cities.  Helga grew up in rubble, and now in 2001, at nearly 60 years old in her adopted country of America, she walked through that rubble to go home.  Helga died in November of 2007, not long after I re-enlisted. I still wonder if the dust of her birthplace and the dust of Ground Zero contributed to her death.

Combat Medics and MEDEVAC: Soldiers who save other soldier's lives

MEDEVAC Blackhawk helicopter landing at Al Kut, Iraq.

From the time I deployed to Iraq until now, I have written many posts about MEDEVAC and the medics, pilots and doctors who deliver Army medicine in the field.

Here are some of them:

Pamela Leggore, flight medic.

Sara Christensen, pilot.

David Doud, flight surgeon.

Kevin Scott, flight surgeon.

Jeff Kwiecien, flight medic.

All-Female MEDEVAC Crew in Iraq.

Cynthia Dalton, flight medic.

Quincy Northern, flight medic.

Dunker Training for MEDEVAC flight crews.

MEDEVAC Response time almost cut in half, Peter Huggins, pilot.

Anthony Meador, pilot.

Matt Stevenson, pilot.

Suzy Danielson, pilot.

MEDEVAC Chase Bird Crew.

MEDEVAC Pictures from Iraq.

Quincy Northern, flight medic.

All-Female MEDEVAC Crew

Retirement, or Not, Update

Senator Pat Toomey, Pa.

Earlier this week I spoke to two staffers in the offices of Senator Pat Toomey in Allentown and Philadelphia. Both of the men I spoke to were enthusiastic and helpful. They asked questions about my status and said they hoped they could help.  

If enthusiasm can get me back in the Army to serve my last year and retire, the guys I spoke to in Toomey's office will make it happen.

Today I got a letter from a staffer of President Barack Obama.  She said the White House referred my case to National Guard Bureau in Washington, which referred the matter to the Pennsylvania National Guard in Harrisburg.  They already said No, so I am not looking good there.

Rep. Joe Pitts, Pa. 4

My first appeal letter was to my Congressman, Joe Pitts.  His staff sent my case to National Guard Bureau in Washington, which referred the matter to the Pennsylvania National Guard in Harrisburg.  They said No. Case closed with the Congressman.

Of the three, I have no hope with Pitts, little hope with Obama and some hope with Toomey.

That's my Labor Day Weekend Update.

After 1,500 Posts the Top Ten Topics? Not Helicopters!

Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard Christopher Kepner

Today marks 1,500 posts on this blog since August of 2007 when I re-enlisted after 23 years as a civilian.  Last night I wrote to the soldiers who are the subjects of the most popular and the 11th most popular posts on my blog: Christopher Kepner and Pamela Leggore.  In between my stories about the current Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard and a flight medic who just returned from her second tour in Iraq, are stories Army life, but not about helicopters.

Pamela Leggore, Flight Medic

After Kepner, the most popular story I wrote was about CHUs, our homes on base in Iraq.  These sun-baked metal boxes were Home Sweet Trailer Home for most deployed soldiers and a lot of people wanted to know how we lived. 

                                            A Containerized Housing Unit in Iraq

After the CHU comes a post comparing Soviet and American Armor in the 1973 Arab-Israel War.  The tenth most popular post is also about tanks--a drunk German driver crashing into one of the tanks in my unit near the East-West German border:  Spoiler alert, the tank was undamaged.

Also popular was about about firing machine guns, about barracks liars in the Facebook Army, about "Military Privilege," a Tough Mudder competition, and one about the use of war language outside of war called War Metaphor.  

I posted a lot of helicopter pictures, but those posts were never as popular as the posts about soldiers' life and about soldiers, which makes perfect sense.  

My favorite post to write was "Shit as a Pronoun."  

Thanks for reading.  And thanks for sharing my 1,500th anniversary!!