Who Got Drafted for the Iraq War?

Several of the soldiers I served with could be considered draftees. At least, they were serving very much against their will and were surprised to receive a FEDEX package telling them to report for pre-deployment training within two weeks.  Most of the soldiers I knew who got called back adapted well after the initial shock.  One did not.

One of the Battle Captains in our aviation unit was Jay Hoffman.  He received a FEDEX telling him to report for duty in two weeks for deployment in Iraq.  His home is in London where he works for an oil exploration firm.  Jay was a Black Hawk pilot and had left the service several years ago, but did not resign his commission, so he got the FEDEX and went to Iraq with us.  A couple of days ago,
he wrote me from the Congo to ask me how things were going.  Jay applied for the MBA program at the London School of Economics while we were in Iraq and was accepted for the fall 2010 class so he will be changing his career again.  He also is completing all the courses he needs to be a reserve major so he can be in a reserve unit instead of getting a FEDEX with no warning next time.

Chief Warrant Officer Suzy Danielson left the military in 1994 after serving as a Black Hawk pilot during the Gulf War and in Somalia.  She did not resign her warrant commission, and did not really give the Army a second thought from 1994 until 2008 when she got a FEDEX package telling her to report for duty.  She had not flown a Black Hawk since 1994, but worked as a flight instructor for fixed wing aircraft since she left the Army.  She had to brush up on the Black Hawk, but flight was very much second nature.  When I met her she was flying the chase bird on MEDEVAC mission--the Black Hawk with door guns that follows the MEDEVAC bird.

One of the stranger recalled soldiers was an extremely unhappy female sergeant major who was activated out of retirement to go to Iraq.  She had retired several years before and never expected to be at Tallil Ali Air Base, but the condition on the military retirement is "return to duty" when requested or forfeit all pay and benefits for the rest of your life.  The sergeant major did not want to lose her retirement so there she was running the chapel coffee shop called "God's Grounds."  She was assigned to a support battalion, but was unhappy enough that they sent her to the chapel.  I heard her explain her circumstances several times--losing no vehemence no matter how many times she repeated her story.

Riding in San Antonio

While temperatures dropped to near freezing in the northeastern US, I rode 65 miles in San Antonio today at a high temperature of 82 degrees.  My official work began late in the day with a dinner and ceremony lasting till late evening.  The dinner was a meeting of a group of petrochemical executives who have worked in the industry for 25 years or more.

I have ridden in San Antonio before, but did not realize that all of the several major highways that go through and around San Antonio have frontage roads.  Some pasts of these roads are as crowded as the frontage road on Route 30 in Lancaster, but others are empty, one-way, two-lane strips of asphalt or concrete that are excellent places to ride.

My route was due north out of the city to the outer ring route North Loop 1604.  I rode west then followed I-10 east back into the city.  I ate lunch at a local coffee shop on the ring route about 35 miles into the ride.  It seemed like the kind of place that would serve sandwiches with sprouts and have about 10 veggie sandwiches.  I ordered chicken salad and expected light fare.  I got about a half pound of chicken salad in a sandwich that could have been sold in a New York deli.  Instead of sprouts and leaf lettuce, I got iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and bacon.  I also ordered a side of cole slaw.  It also had bacon in it.  I knew I was in Texas.

A couple of miles before I stopped, I rode by a large very rectangular Church.  It actually looked more like a security firm, almost no windows, set back more than a 1/4 mile from the road.  Then I saw it was the church of Pastor John Hagee, the pastor John McCain had to disown during the 2008 Presidential campaign.  

At the end of the ride I went to the gym at Fort Sam Houston.  Military bases have much better gyms than hotels--at least better than Holiday Inns.

Saved a Little Too Much Money

There are several Holiday Inns within the downtown area of San Antonio.  I usually stay at Holiday Inns which are cheaper than the conference hotels at the meetings I go to.  On this trip the conference hotel is the new Grand Hyatt right next to the San Antonio River Walk.  I stayed just a half mile away for less than half the price.  But sometimes a short distance can make a huge difference.  From the Grand Hyatt to the Holiday Inn Express, you walk under a highway, past a few bars and a Ruth's Chris Steak House, then across the railroad tracks and into a warehouse area.  The hotel is just three blocks away.  But across the street from the very sad looking Magott's Grocery Store.

 

Actually, Magott's Grocery, was established by Theodore Maggot in 1881.

And the whole area around Magott's including my hotel, definitely looked like industrial decay.  Very different from the River Walk and the surrounding restaurants.

I walked over and bought a Vitamin Water.  The guys who work there were very friendly but that is one difficult name to put on top of a score advertising Fresh Meat.

Last Day in San Francisco

Today I flew out of San Francisco in the late afternoon.  I had an 4pm flight to LAX followed by a 715pm flight to San Antonio, arriving at 1159pm--actually 1205am, but very close.

In the morning I rode up to the top of the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  This picture is the view from the top looking back at the city.  Although the climb is less than two miles from the north side of the bridge to the top, it was enough for me.  Three climbs up Mt. Tamalpais in the four previous days left my legs like rubber.

Yesterday I rode through one of the temperature shifts that happen between San Francisco and the top of Mt. Tam in Marin.  three years ago I left a fog-shrouded city of San Francisco on a morning ride.  The Golden Gate was also fog covered.  And the for persisted all the way to the 2000-foot line on Mt. Tam, then it was brilliant sun all the way to the top of East Peak.  I could see back to SF, but the only thing I could see was the cloud of fog that blanketed the entire city except for the peaks of the Golden Gate tower support piers and the antennas on top of Mt. Bruno inside the city. 

Yesterday it was clear and cool all the way from the city through Marin up almost 2300 feet then a cloud covered the very top of the mountain.  I rode the last half mile to the crest in increasingly thick fog.  At the top I could not see a thing.  the wisps of fog were so thick they seemed like they would hurt if they hit me.  I went back down into the cloud, but a half-mile later , below and away from the cloud, the sun was shining again. 

The Elitists in My Life: My Wife

I am going to start this series at home with my wife. Annalisa Crannell is the oldest daughter of two physicists. Her mother, who passed away last year while I was in Iraq, was a solar physicist as NASA Goddard Space Center. Her father is a recently retired particle physicist from Catholic University. Her parents studied the same subject at vastly different scales.

Annalisa went to Bryn Mawr College to major in Spanish and English, but graduated in three years in math with good enough grades to be accepted as a graduate student at Harvard. She left Harvard after the first year and got a PhD in math from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation she was hired by Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster where she is now a full professor and Don of a Bonchek House. F&M has a system that puts a professor’s office in each dorm to bring academic life into the residence halls.

She is liberal in her politics and, though we both attend a theologically conservative Presbyterian Church, her beliefs are best reflected in the Quaker Church. In 1997 when we married Annalisa was a single mom of one daughter. She became the step-mother of my two daughters. In 2000 we adopted Nigel. Now we are in the process of adopting Jacari, who is in the same grade as Nigel.

A leader in her field in math, dynamical systems, she spends many hours on campus beyond the class day with student events and meetings. In her spare time Annalisa served for several years as a hospice volunteer and in 2002 was a live kidney donor, undergoing major surgery to help a woman she did not know.

She makes all this look easy. I just hope some of it rubs off on me.

Who We Fight For--Everybody

Everyone who deploys to Iraq and Afghanistan, or fights pirates off the coast of Somalia, or goes to any of the outposts of the War on Terror fights for all Americans. Even though I am a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, I am a soldier in the Army of all America.

Sometimes, I admit, I wish it were otherwise. When I travel I pay more attention to the news than when I am home and the news during the last week has been sad for me. White people yelling the N-word at a congressman who fought for civil rights in the 60s, bricks thrown through windows of Democratic Party offices, a gas line cut at what was believed (mistakenly) to be a US Congressman’s home that could have killed kids, and on April 19 there will be a gun rights march on the anniversary of Timothy McVeigh killing kids in a Day Care Center and more than 150 other innocent victims. I don't want to defend those people.

But "those people" are Americans, so the American military stands for all of us whatever we believe. And I really do believe that America is all of us, not us and them. In many previous posts I wrote about soldiers I served with in Iraq under the collective title "Who Fights This War?" I will continue those stories when I go back to drilling and catch up with what my fellow soldiers are doing now.

In future posts I decided to also write about some of the people in my life that TEA Party activists, militia members, and right-wing talk show hosts call the enemy. They are people like me. People with graduate degrees who live and work in major cities, who read dead poets, who do all of the research that preserves our past and defines our future, and are dismissed by Conservative leaders as elitists as if six to twelve years of education after high school was a curse. Many of their listeners don’t know anyone with a PhD.

It is clear from email and comments I received in the last year, that some of the people who read my blog don’t know many soldiers. Since I have one foot in each world—the Army and the Academy—I will occasionally write about people in my everyday civilian life.

Just as with the soldiers I wrote about, the profiles are simply my view of people who have chosen to live the life of the mind whether in research or teaching or preserving history in the form of books, documents, art, and artifacts. I like to talk with people who excel. To me, an excellent marksmen, pilot, racer, point guard, goalkeeper, or runner has a kinship with the most inspiring teachers, brilliant writers, innovators and researchers.

I’ve mentioned before that all US military personnel taken together, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Active, Reserve, and National Guard add up to about two million men and women or about 2/3 of one percent of the population of America. Two million is also the number of people in America who have PhD degrees. Two of the most influential groups in America have very separate worlds. But in my experience, the best soldiers and the best researchers share a devotion and passion that people who just bitch and whine will never know. I admire people in both groups. I hope you will too.

Meeting One of My Favorite Authors

In the exhibit area of the the conference I am attending, many publishers have booths set up to sell their books. Their top goal is to sell textbooks to the many chemistry professors that attend the national meetings of the American Chemical Society.

As I was walking past the WH Freeman booth I noticed one of my favorite authors standing in the booth. Peter Atkins, a professor at Oxford, is the author of five textbooks and seven popular science books. He had four revised editions of his textbooks published in the past year and one of his popular books published in 2007 Four Laws That Drive the Universe will be published in a new edition as part of the Oxford series "A Very Short Introduction" series of small books about a single topic. So far more than a hundred books on everything from Aristotle to Quakers to Quantum Mechanics to Vikings are part of the series. Atkins will be 70 this year and said he is retired now, which gives him more time to write.

One of the articles I am currently working on is a column about Peter Atkins popular science books. So it was a very pleasant surprise to meet him. I bought the latest edition of his textbook Physical Chemistry and now own an autographed copy.

                                                      Dr. Peter Atkins

It was not entirely Geek day. In the afternoon I rode up Mt. Tam to the first crest where you can turn left for the West Peak and right for the East Peak. On the way down I passed a pair of Toyota Tundras between turns. That was fun. On the way to the mountain I just crested the hill between Golden Gate Park and Marin. A powder blue scooter went past me as we started down the other side. I drafted and passed him before we got into the town below. It's great to be back on big hills.