Thanksgiving--168 Hours Later

Last week we ate Thanksgiving dinner which was opulent by any buffet standards and was free--except to tax payers. But even with shrimp cocktail, ham, turkey and every kind of fruit and vegetable you could want, it really wasn't much better than every day fare here. Last night there was a huge line at all four main serving lines when I walked in the chow hall. Wednesday night is surf and turf night. Last night was king crab legs, fried shrimp and prime rib. I was meeting some friends who were already at the chow hall, so I went to the wings line, got lemon pepper wings--my favorite here--fresh cut watermelon, celery sticks, and fruit salad--apples, kiwi, pineapple, melon in yogurt. 20 minutes later the line went down so I got fried shrimp and a chocolate milkshake. I also had orange juice.

Tonight, I had shrimp scampi and everything else I had last night. The food here is the best I EVER ate in the Army and for sheer ridiculous opulence, the only time I eat better is at expense account dinners.

Who Fights This War? -- All Female MEDEVAC Crew

“Charlie’s Angels” Fly First Mission as All-Female Crew
For the three days before Thanksgiving, one of the on-alert crews for Charlie Company, 3-238th MEDEVAC, is the first all-female MEDEVAC crew to fly in this company’s history. “This is the first time an all-female crew has come up in the rotation for us,” said Maj. David Mattimore, 38, of Hampton, N. H., the Charlie Company Commander. “And it would not have been possible until one of our avionics sergeants became a crew chief.”
The four women that comprise this crew have a total of nine deployments and each has between eight and twelve years of service. “This is the first all-female crew any of us have flown with,” said Capt. Trish “Cocaine” Barker, operations officer. According to the other members of the crew, Barker got her nickname because she is high energy and addictive. She has ten years service enlisting in 1999 as an aircraft fueler. Barker, 30, went to Officer’s Candidate School in 2003 and Flight School in 2004. A native of Menominee, Michigan, she was deployed to Bosnia in 2005 as a MEDEVAC section leader.
When she returns from this deployment she will return to her job as the State Occupational Health Specialist for the Michigan Army National Guard.
“Same for me. Never flew with an all-girl crew,” said Staff Sgt. Misty “Monkey” Seward, 30, of Owosso, Michigan. Seward enlisted in 1998 and has severed as a medic for a total of eleven years. She has four years as a flight medic and seven years on the ground. She deployed to Kuwait in 2001-2 and to Baghdad in 2006-7, both tours as a ground medic. When she returns from serving as a flight medic in a war zone, she will resume her job as a security officer at a Level One Trauma Clinic in Lansing, part of Sparrow Health Systems.
The Pilot in Command for the crew is Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrea “Anddie” Galatian, 31, of Lansing, Michigan. “There must have been another all-female MEDEVAC crew somewhere, but I haven’t seen one,” she said. Galatian enlisted in 1997 and served five years as an administrative clerk before going to flight school in 2002. She has served seven years as a pilot including a deployment to Bosnia in 2005. As a civilian, Galatian is the business analyst for the Real Eastate Division of the Michigan Department of Transportation.
The newest name on the flight roster is Sgt. Debra “Guns and Knives” Lukan, 43, of Keene, New Hampshire. She enlisted just after 9/11. “I just barely made the age cutoff,” said Lukan. She trained as an avionics mechanic and just recently switched from the shop to flight crewmember. Lukan deployed to Camp Spyker and Tikrit in 2005-6 in avionics and is happy to be on the flight rotation this time. “My family doesn’t know I’m flying,” said Lukan. “They worry a lot, but I suppose I’ll have to tell them eventually.” Lukan is a federal technician working in avionics in the New Hampshire National Guard.
“It may be months before this crew comes up in the rotation again,” said Mattimore. “We only have nine female flight crew members and everyone rotates to our remote bases, so the odds of them being back together again are low.”
“I’m glad we got a chance to be first even if it is just first for us,” said Barker.

What Does Socialism Look Like? It Looks Like Us.

When I listen to the TV or radio news commentary from back home I
hear political commentators accusing each other of Socialism. Many of
those commentators have no idea what Socialism really looks like.

But we do over here. It looks like us.

In a Socialist system, all the money is collective--there is one budget.
Just like us. There is an Army budget. If pay goes up, procurement
goes down. The opposite is also true. Reduction in Force (the Army's
version of layoffs) means more money for equipment.

Medical care is free, or the same price for all, but no one gets to
choose their doctor. Just like the Army.

In a Socialist system everyone gets the same pay if they have the same
rank, regardless of their productivity. Unions work this way. In the
Army an E4 with four years service who is a first-rate Blackhawk crew
chief, fit, and fully qualified makes exactly the same pay as an E4 with
four years service who is truck driver flunked the PT Test and still
can't fill out a maintenance inspection form.

In a really ideal Socialist society, no one owns private property. Your
housing depends on your rank. If you lose your rank you lose your
house. Since there are no privately owned vehicles, the only vehicles
are state-supplied and go with a position. So a unit commander gets an
SUV, a platoon sergeant takes the bus.

In a really radical Socialist system, everyone would dress alike and eat
together. If they had to carry weapons, they would only carry the
weapon designated for their job.

So here we are with assigned housing, assigned vehicles (or not), and
assigned weapons. We eat in the same three DFACs. We all dress alike,
both men and women. The commercials on our radio and TV do not sell
products, they attempt to modify our behavior for the betterment of the
state. We get the same pay for very unequal work. We all have the same
doctor.

In a radical socialist system we would not have freedom of worship as we
have here. In an interesting socialist aspect of life here, all
Churches use the same building. So the Catholics, Lutherans,
traditional and contemporary Protestant services, Gospel service, and
any other group that wants a worship service holds it in the same room.
This aspect of our socialist world emphasizes that all Christians really
worship the same Lord. I like that.

In America, in the active Army, even though we still dress alike at
work, we can wear our own choice of clothes after work. A Colonel can
choose to drive an 8-year-old Chevy and a Specialist with a
re-enlistment bonus can drive a new BMW M3 or a Suzuki GSXR. But not
here in Iraq.

We are defending freedom but for now, we are what Socialism looks like.

Bike Update

By the time I go to bed, I will have close to 850 miles this month. So I should get to 5000 miles in Iraq and 7000 miles for the year by mid December. If I time it right, I should be able to hit on of the milestones on December 19--the 40th Anniversary of my drivers license!!!

I celebrate that day every year. Usually I can mention at a holiday party and say I am pretending this particular celebration is in honor of my driver's license anniversary. It's usually good for a laugh. It turns not so many people celebrate their driver's license anniversary.

In sad bike news I think I am losing a bearing on the road bike. It makes and awful sound when I pedal and the freewheel is not very free. If it is a bad bearing, I don't have to sit up nights trying to decide which bike to ship and which to keep. The road bike goes in the Conex, the Mtn. bike stays.



On a completely different topic, I got my 7th Army Coin today. It's an unofficial award that recognizes a good job, sometimes on the spot and has no paperwork. I'll take a picture of mine, but the ones on the photo above are typical. Today's coin was for being the emcee on Veteran's Day from the Garrison. I got another one from my brigade commander for the same event.

Evangelical Icon Fading

At Chapel today the Chaplain asked the audience "how many people know the name Joni Eareckson?" Three of us raised our hands. I suppose there were 80 or 90 soldiers and only three raised their hands. If you don't know the name here are the first two lines of her Wikipedia entry:

A diving accident in 1967 left Tada hospitalized and paralyzed (as a quadriplegic; unable to use her hands or legs.)[1] After two years of rehabilitation and in a wheelchair, Tada began working to help others in similar situations.
Tada wrote of her experiences in her international best-selling autobiography, Joni, which has been distributed in many languages, and which was made into a feature film of the same name.

when I became a believer in 1973, it seemed Joni was everywhere in Christian media and even secular media.

Two years ago, Joni returned to my life in a way. She and I had very similar injuries. She smashed the fifth vertebra in her neck, I smashed the seventh. In 1967 MEDEVAC was rare. More importantly, medical science was only beginning to bring the discovery of DNA into practical treatments. In 1967 Joni's first responders may not have put her on a backboard. She was not MEDEVACed from the scene. And her hospital did not have a neurosurgeon who just returned from Baghdad and was very skilled in replacing smashed vertebra with bones from cadavers. All of which I had.

Joni has touched millions of lives with her ministry as a paraplegic. I may have had a ministry as a paraplegic, but I consider it a very awesome blessing that I do not have her ministry.

The advances in medical science since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA (They knew from Mendel and Darwin what they were looking for) are something I am VERY thankful for on this Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. Younger Christians here often talk excitedly about how Christian rock stars cross over and get played on secular stations. The new icons of Evangelical Culture play metal and alternative and get picked up on secular stations. They make movies, or at least animated vegetables. More sadly, they put saddles on dinosaurs in an indoor theme park labeled a science museum.

It's strange to think of Joni as passing to the margins of Christian culture.

Life Here Seems to be on Hold, but Life Goes on Back Home

Last month the last of the six Gussman brothers died. My father, George, was the fourth of six sons born to two Jewish emigres from Odessa, Russia. My grandfather died in 1932 just over 20 years before I was born. I have very few memories of seeing my father's three older brothers: Abraham, Emmanuel and Ralph, but I occasionally saw the youngest of the six, my uncle Harold, and most often saw the fifth brother, Lewis. In our family, everyone referred to him as Uncle Louie. He was the most successful of the five brothers, following Grandpa into the produce business and building a highly regarded business of his own.
Louie always drove Cadillacs and often drove too fast. My father liked to tell the story of Louie being one of the first to get a new Cadillac after the auto plants started making cars again after World War 2. Louie wrecked the car not too long after. He wasn't badly injured, but no one seemed to car about him anyway. People at the scene and after said what a shame it was to wreck a new Cadillac.
Uncle Louie had one son, Bob, who I always thought of as an uncle rather than a cousin because he is about 15 years older than I am. I saw Bob more than any of my cousins. He had a very dry sense of humor, in contrast to the loud exclamations that characterized most of the people at Gussman gatherings. Bob, like his Dad, is still working long past the age others retire, and if he lives to 100 like his Dad, he will also probably work till he is 98.

The obituary below is from Produce News--a trade paper. It says a lot about Uncle Louie as a businessman and as a person that they would run his obituary.

Mutual Produce founder dies at 100
by Brian Gaylord

10/21/2009
BOSTON -- Lewis Gussman, founder of Mutual Produce Corp., here, died Sept. 30 at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, MA, following a brief illness. He was 100.

Mr. Gussman launched the wholesale company, formerly named Mutual Produce Inc., at the New England Produce Center in 1955. He sold the company in 2000 and continued to work for Mutual Produce Corp. until he was 98.

"He paid his bills on time, he ran a good business," Richard Travers Jr., co- owner of Mutual Produce Corp., said of Mr. Gussman. He added that some shippers have been doing business with Mutual Produce for 30 years.

Mr. Travers said that Mr. Gussman loved the produce business because "no two days are the same." He said that Mr. Gussman would "jump on the phone" to tell callers that he'd rubbed elbows with their grandparents.

Sadly for Mr. Gussman, he outlived his contemporaries in the produce industry. "He was the oldest guy around here for 15 years," Mr. Travers said. "He was an icon of the produce industry."

Mr. Travers recalled that Mr. Gussman "loved playing with fruit, creating displays that were outstanding."

Paul DiMare, president of Boston-based DiMare Inc., said that Mr. Gussman was a mentor of sorts to him. He described Mr. Gussman as "honorable" and "one of the best produce people."

"He was a double A house in [the] Blue Book," which meant that he paid his bills every week, Mr. DiMare said. "There aren't a whole lot of companies that do that."

Mr. DiMare said that "everybody respected [Mr. Gussman] in Boston" and that he had a "great list of top-notch shippers."

Mr. Gussman's five siblings -- all brothers -- also worked in fresh produce, though not at Mutual Produce. Mr. Gussman's father also worked in fresh produce.

Mr. Gussman is survived by a son, Bob Gussman, and his wife, Trudi, of Winchester, NH, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Lewis Gussman was preceded in death by his wife, Ethel Rosenberg, in 2004.

Bob Gussman said that the family is considering holding a memorial gathering in the spring.

Ups and Downs

Last week I mentioned that I have been sending friend messages to my high school classmates on Facebook. After 38 years away from Stoneham, I am missing my childhood home in a way I never thought I would. I suppose getting homesick in Iraq is about as surprising as getting thirsty in a desert.
Today I got a brief message from one of my high school classmates thanking me for getting in touch and asking me to Google his son. His son was killed in action in Baghdad in 2006. I read the many messages from his friends and family on the memorial web site. Seems clear from the messages he was a good soldier and a good man also. He was 22.
Before I went through the pre-deployment processing and training for this trip, I made three visits to Brooke Army Medical Center, which everyone refers to as BAMC--pronounced BAM-See. BAMC is the treatment and rehabilitation center for those who lose limbs. I was in San Antonio for four days, had some free time and thought I ought to go and see what this war really costs.
I talked to parents at BAMC. But they are different than the parents of the dead. Even when their child is maimed, he or she is alive. The parents of the dead have only memories. I have other friends who have lost children. Two men in our unit lost children during this deployment. I went to one of the funerals when I was home on leave.
Part of what we are here for is to comfort each other when we face grief. On this day after Thanksgiving, I am very thankful for four healthy children. And I will put the grieving parents I know at the top of my prayer list.