Catching Up with a World Traveling Friend: Ivan Porccino

Ivan Porccino at a visit to Georgia Military Institute

Twenty years ago I worked for a big American company that bought a big Brazilian company. As a result of this deal Millennium Inorganic Chemicals acquired a manufacturing plant, a sales office and a mine in Brazil; I got a friend I have kept in touch with ever since. I recently met Ivan for dinner in New York. 

When we met in Sao Paulo in 2000 Ivan Porccino was a 27-year-old junior sales guy who knew lots of people in Sao Paulo and could help his American colleagues like me navigate the biggest city in South America.  We worked together in arranging a big event for our CEO to talk to all of our new customers through the acquisition. 

Ivan seemed to know everyone and languages of Brazil’s biggest communities.  So whomever we needed to talk to, Ivan could talk to them in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and Italian, then talk to me in English.  Although Ivan saw his future in international business, he was also interested in philosophy, history and read great books in all the languages he could speak. 

When we were stuck in Sao Paulo cabs going slower than Amish buggies we could talk about whether Hume was right about free will, whether Adam Smith, John Locke and the philosophical Scots were the true beginning of the modern world, and if Dostoevsky saw the world most clearly of all the Russians. 

Ivan was back in New York to take over a major commodity chemical shipping operation. He sees it as the next stepping-stone toward a top job in international commerce in South America. In his eyes, America creating tariff barriers is bad for the world, but it creates opportunities for other countries that live in the shadow of the world dominance of the U.S.  For Ivan, America is the greatest and most brilliant sociological experiment in the history of the world, and it is currently being squandered.

But the long game for 47-year-old Ivan is to get his teenage kids through University then have more time to spend with philosophy and literature. He may retire before he’s 60. After we talked about business, we were back to talking about Dostoevsky and Machiavelli, because they are the authors that see the evil as well as the good inside all of us. 

By the way, dinner was Japanese because what else would a North and a South American eat in New York City?

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Unforgettable Moment, B-52s Scramble, Hill Air Force Base, 1974

B-52 Bombers taking off on full throttle on Strategic Air Command alert

I was stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from 1972-74. Early in 1974, Strategic Air Command stationed a wing of B-52s on Hill.  

My duty station was four miles from the airfield on the north end of the base.  Sometimes I went to the hangar for electronic parts.  On a warm spring day, I happened to be in the hangar when I heard an enormous roar, then another, then another, and another.  

Six B-52s filled the air with black smoke and the howl of 48 jet engines on throttle. The planes took off one after the other less than a minute apart. When all six formed up in the sky above the base, the giant airplanes flew east toward the Rocky Mountains and disappeared.

It was magnificent.

I was 21 years old when those planes took off.  Those airplanes were about my age, first entering service in 1952, a year before I was born. Like me they have had a lot of maintenance, but still have an active life today. Some of them, like me, are in their 60s.  

Fishing My Phone from a Storm Drain

This grabber saved me lots of money 

Yesterday I rode south from Lancaster for about fifteen miles. On the way back I was coasting down a hill on Route 272. I pulled my iPhone from my jersey pocket--and dropped it.

I briefly heard the sound of the phone skidding on the road, then nothing. I looked back and saw the steel grille of a storm drain. I turned around. At the drain, I looked down and there was my phone. It was not submerged, but sitting on a small pile of gravel out of the water.

I rode five miles home, got in my car and drove to a local shopping center with both a Verizon Store and a Home Depot.  The phone was insured, but it would cost almost $100 for a replacement and it would be sent to me. Getting a phone in the store meant buying a new one for $300.  Since it was Saturday on a holiday weekend, it would be 2 or 3 days to get the phone.  And there was a chance I could fish it out. So I left Verizon and went to Home Depot. There I bought a three-foot grabber, the longest they had, and drove back to the storm drain.

The grabber would not reach the bottom of the drain, but there was a gap between the steel drain and the curbstone. I could reach just barely around through that gap. After a few tries, I was able to clamp and lift the phone. It still works.

A few weeks ago I bought a phone holder for my handlebars.  I meant to use, but I am so used to having the phone in my pocket, I did not.  But now I do. Today I rode about 35 miles with the phone clamped on the handlebars.

 Phone clamp on the handlebars of my bike

The phone holder mounts differently on each of my two road bikes, so I will get another phone holder for other bike with carbon handlebars.

And I will use the phone holder instead of my pocket.  By the way, I lost another phone last year exactly the same way--pocket to storm drain. So use of the phone holder is overdue.

Loving the Book is not the Same as Liking the Author

Mark Helprin, I love his books, hate his politics

 My two favorite living authors are very different men. I have read all of the novels of each man and re-read my favorite novel by each. I plan to re-read more and, of course, read anything else they write. C.S. Lewis said “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.” He also cautioned that a reader who loves an author’s work should not believe he would like the company of the author.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Noble Prize in Literature, 2017

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro in 2014 on the recommendation of a good friend. The first novel I read by him was “Remains of the Day.” In January of this year I finished “The Unconsoled,” making my reading of Ishiguro complete. Two years ago I re-read Remains of the Day, still my favorite, although “TheBuried Giant” is a close second. The Buried Giant was published in March 2015. Two months later Ishiguro spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia.  After hearing Ishiguro speak, I was quite convinced I would love to have a drink with him. His Nobel Prize address last year made me even more sure I would love to hang out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself. That address is moving, brilliant and sad, the common threads in everything Ishiguro writes.

In February 1983, when I was still in graduate school, I first read Mark Helprin in the New Yorker magazine.  I read the story “Jesse Honey Mountain Guide” in the last issue of the month.  The story was a chapter in his second novel “A Winter’s Tale” published the following September. I was hooked.  I read his first novel and two short story collections published to that point. In the years since I read every other novel as each published. I have re-read Winters Tale and plan to re-read Helprin’s most recent novel “Paris in the Present Tense” this year or next year. “Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite.

I was so taken with Jesse Honey, I wrote paper in grad school about Helprin’s precise use of exaggeration in the story, comparing to the Walter Mitty stories by James Thurber.  

Over the years I read Helprin’s editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other essays. He is a conservative, so I never imagined we could have a totally friendly conversation, but in 2015 and 2016 Helprin spoke out against Trump and seemed to be a Never-Trump conservative.  Maybe we could have a drink?

Alas, that was in 2016. After Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, Helprin wrote in Trump’s defense in The Claremont Review of Books. Next month Helprin is speaking in New York. I have never heard Helprin speak, and I would like to, but I won’t be attending the event.  He is the featured guest at “Socrates in the City” an occasional gathering organized by author and total Trumpian Eric Metaxas. In 2011, Metaxas wrote a biography of a martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Despite writing about a victim of the Nazis, Metaxas is a full-throated supporter of a man whose campaign was built on the Birther form of racism and spread to every other non-white group as soon as the campaign began.

So I won’t be paying Metaxas to hear Helprin speak. In addition to Helprin, the event is a launch party for a new Children’s book by Metaxas “Donald Drains the Swamp.” Metaxas is a very funny guy. He is one of the creators of the “Veggie Tales” series. But, sadly, in his new book he is not ironical. Metaxas really sees Trump as the savior of the western world. The irony runs the other way though: no one in Washington has ever been more corrupt than the Swamp-Creature-in-Chief. 

When I think of Veggie Tales now, I imagine Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber being thrown into a Black Car driven by the Veggie Gestapo. Bob and Larry plead that wanted to salute The Orange Fuhrer, weakly protesting, “But we don’t have arms!”

Larry and Bob

I will keep reading Helprin, because the things he writes, like all creations, are from, not of, the person who created them.  And 70-year-old conservatives can become cranky—at least that’s what I’ve heard. 

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Military Movies and "The Rule"

Dick Winters, inspiration for the book and video series Band of Brothers

The world is full of good, great and terrible things to watch: movies, TV, and videos. To figure out what to watch, I have The Rules.

The Rule is, I won't watch anything about which I know technical details. Of course, I have exceptions, but in general, if I want to be entertained, I stay away from subjects that are part of my actual experience. I watch car racing; I don't watch car racing movies.

Next on my suspect list are war/military movies.  Even when I like part of a war movie, I know I am going to hate part of it too.  For instance, the first half of "Full Metal Jacket" is amazing. The second half is so predictable it could be a John Wayne movie.

I loved the movie "Fury" which was so right about procedures inside the turret of the tank. But, as with Full Metal Jacket, the final 30 minutes would make John Wayne blush.

And speaking of John Wayne movies, is there a veteran anywhere who does not think "The Green Berets" is the worst war movie ever made? In 1977 in the dayroom of Bravo Company, 1-70th Armor in Wiesbaden, West Germany, that movie came on the one TV channel we had--Armed Forces Network. Half the company crowded into the dayroom throwing rolled up socks and popcorn at the TV and howling about how bad that movie is.

Using The Rule, I will happily watch shows and movies about Secret Agents, Drug Dealers, Mobsters, Undercover Police, Surgeons, and Pirates.  I have no experience in any of those jobs, so when the they get the technical details wrong, I don't know it.  I have watched medical shows with real medics.  That's a hoot, listening to them flare up and yell, "No way! No one does a tracheotomy that way!" I have not had the chance to watch "The Sopranos"with a mobster or "Rome" with a Centurion, but that would be fun!

Just as an aside, I enjoyed all five seasons of "Breaking Bad" until the final episode. I know nothing about teaching high school or cooking meth and the series was brilliant. But when the star of the show welded a remote controlled M-60 machine gun into the trunk of a Cadillac and fired it with a key fob, killing a half-dozen Neo-Nazi drug dealers: "That's Bullshit!" was my reaction.

That's how I acted at the end of "Saving Private Ryan" when the German tanks went into a built up area, just so they could get blown up. "No armor commander would be that stupid" I spluttered in the theater eliciting glares from those around me.  I calmed down, but when I left the theater I called an old friend from 70th Armor and said, "The end of that movie is bullshit....." and we laughed about all the movies we dissed over the past two decades.

The glaring exception to my criticism of military video is "Band of Brothers." I found nothing to criticize in that amazing tribute to Major Dick Winters and the paratroopers he led from D-Day to VE Day.  When I re-enlisted and went to Iraq in 2009, I found many fellow critics of military-themed movies, but I never heard anyone criticize "Band of Brothers."

Next on my "To Watch" list is a video series: To Watch is a real list I keep in the Task List of Google Calendar. When I hear about something good to watch, I add it to the list.  Anyway, next is the final season of "The Americans" on FX. What a great show. I know nothing about being a Russian sleeper cell secret agent.

Soldiers Hate the Media—They Always Have

Ron Chernow’s thousand-page biography Grant explains the life and legacy of the General who won the Civil War, and the President who held the Union together after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disastrous Presidency of Andrew Johnson.  The book is also fascinating on tension between the military and the free press.

Like the vast majority of Presidents and soldiers before and after him, President Ulysses S. Grant hated the press.  He hated the press as a general and he hated the press as President.  That part of the book was no surprise. 

The interesting thing in Chernow’s book is his comparisons of the newspapers in the South and in the North. 

The Press in the Confederate states spawned across the South as soon as the war of rebellion began and became direct ancestor of Fox News.  The South was not a Democratic country. Like Fox News, the media in the South saw themselves as part of the war effort and wrote accordingly.  They were Совиет Правда (Soviet Pravda) , not the Washington Post.

Grant, like every other general in the North, got pummeled in the press, criticized, second-guessed and sometimes vilified.  In the Southern press, Generals were heroes. Battles were all massive victories, until they weren’t.

But also like Fox News, the press in the South wrote about real events and real people. Grant was an avid reader of Southern newspapers. At one point near the end of the war, Grant was out of direct contact with General William Sherman in his March across Georgia and turn north. Grant followed Sherman’s progress in Southern newspapers that were telling citizens where to defend against the Yankees.

When I first enlisted, I heard from older soldiers that hatred of the press really began during the Vietnam War.  Certainly, the Vietnam War turned up heat on an already simmering conflict, but the conflict itself is part of every army in every country with a free press.

The alternative to a free press is the propaganda machines in Russia and every other current and former tyrannical government.  The depth of the hatred of the press by the military was most clear to me when I was a public relations sergeant for my last unit.  I wrote what my commander wanted me to write, but because I had a camera and a notebook, I was “the press” to the majority of the soldiers in my unit.  In the school for military journalists at Fort Meade, there is no doubt we are public relations, not the press.

Among the many reasons to read Grant, is to see how deep the animosity is between the military and the free press. And to see that state-controlled media did exist in America in eleven states for four years.  

 

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The Painting in My Living Room by a Prisoner of War

 A Picture of Bavaria on My Living Room Wall

Painted by an Afrika Korps Prisoner of War

When I look up from reading on the couch at night when the house is quiet, I see this painting. It was painted by an enlisted man serving in the Afrika Korps who was a Prisoner of War of the American Army.

The POW camp he was a prisoner in for more than two years was in Reading, Pennsylvania. The site is now the Reading Airport.

The painting was a gift from the prisoner to the camp commandant, my father, Capt. George Gussman. When my father took command of the camp in 1944, most of the prisoners had been there for more than a year.

On the day he took command, my father lined up the officers to introduce himself and let them know what he expected from the prisoners. One of the officers whispered that my father was a Jew. Which is true. He was also a ranked middleweight boxer before he enlisted. He called the man out of formation and hit him hard enough to lay him out cold in front of the other officers.

Dad then sent his guards into the barracks for and inspection that led to confiscating hundreds of Hershey bars the prisoners had bought with the money they earned in work on local farms.  These candy bars became my mother's engagement present from Dad.  That story is here.

My Dad never went overseas in World War II. He enlisted before the war started at 34 years old. As a rule, the Army did not send soldiers that old into combat during World War II.

After the initial drama, Dad had no more trouble and got along well with the prisoners.  The prisoners were repatriated several months after the war ended, and few applied to stay in America and pursue citizenship.

The painting reminds of the ironies of war--that soldiers from the country that killed millions of Jews would be prisoners in a POW camp run by the son of Jewish immigrants.  I keep that token of respect and affection on my wall. It hung on the wall of the home I grew up in. I will pass it to the next generation.

The prisoners my father was in charge of were captured far from home in a war that was already going against Germany. Prisoners of War in any Army are brave men who faced the enemy and death and survived.