Talk Radio Defenders are Polite

Today the "In My Opinion" editorial in the Lancaster Sunday News was a response to my editorial of May 30.
http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/257742
And the first four letters to the editor were also responses to my editorial.  Only the last and shortest letter was positive.  But everyone was polite.
http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/257737

Strawberry Fields Forever

On Saturday I went strawberry picking north of Lancaster at Shenk's Berry Farm.  For Nigel and Jacari this meant both the accomplishment of picking a few pounds of strawberries and the added bonus of eating all you want as you go along the rows.  The boys went first up parallel rows.  My wife and I followed behind the boys to pick the hundreds of strawberries they miss.

In the rows next to us were two young women.  My wife talked to them for a while about canning, then they returned to their main topic of discussion.  They were talking about the upcoming marriage of one of them.  The soon-to-be bride was telling her friend how much her fiance would have to change when they were married.  He spends too much time with his friends, etc.

One of the things I did as a father of three girls was to convince them that the silliest fantasy American girls have is that they can change a boy or a man.  My daughters seem convinced that they have to find a guy they like as is, and enjoy the relationship, or move on.  One of the more painful passages to read in CS Lewis's The Four Loves concerns a wife whose life program is to change her husband to suit her, and what sort of man he becomes.

Of course, many woman also end up in bad relationships because they use their maternal instinct to pick a guy.  Relationships in which a smart, competent woman has a grown, male dependent begin with a woman who says "No one understands him but me."  The truth is, everyone understands the creep except her.

When I was in Iraq, there were guys who were happy to be baking in the desert sun rather than listen to their wives "bitch about everything."  I know very well that I am not perfect and I do not know any perfect men. But a wife who's complaints can make Iraq look good has her reward.

Riding with Mike Zban & Cat Hollenbach

Today I had an off-site meeting and got to ride the with the Thursday Daily ride.  Three of the five of us were former employees of Godfrey Advertising. I worked there from 1985 to 1998.  Mike Zban and Cat Hollenbach both worked at Godfrey from the early 90s until a few years after I left.  Both run advertising agencies of their own in Lancaster now.

When Cat and her husband Matt came to Lancaster they were accomplished mountain bike racers.  They had been thinking about riding on the road.  Both of them got road bikes.  We started riding together at lunch and on Saturdays.  The office was in Centerville in the early 90s.  We had a route back and forth across the ridge between Centerville and Columbia we called the "Thousand-Foot Lunch Ride."  It was about 1000 feet of climbing for an 18-mile ride.

Matt and Cat both became great road racers.  In 1997, Cat was on the winning women's amateur team at the 24 hours of Canaan, West Virginia.  That was Team Alloy Nipples.  Later in the year, Cat was the winner in the Altoona Stage Race, the biggest amateur road event of the year in the 90s.  Matt was on the top amateur team at Canaan in 1997 and on one of the top teams in the men's Cat 3 Road Race.  My family went to the Altoona race and handed water bottles to Matt's team and Cat's team.  Today Matt is still racing, Cat is still a strong rider, but is not racing.

During today's ride, Mike Zban reminded me of a ride when, in his words, "You dragged me and one of my friends all over the hills of southern Lancaster County."  I rode with Mike when he started riding.  He got strong fast and is now a top Cat 3 racer on one of the best teams in central PA.  Mike was kind enough to ride in front of the pace line during most of the ride from Turkey Hill to Columbia and to hold the speed of the ride down when we climbed up to Highville.

It was a lot of fun to get back to riding with more friends.

Military Future

It's June and the Army Old Age clock is ticking faster for me.  Without a waiver from the commanding general of the PA NAtional Guard, I will be a civilian exactly three years from yesterday.  My discharge date is May 31, 2013.  I will not be retired on that day.  I am reliving my father's Army Career in many ways.  He lost his pension when the age-in-grade law caused him to be mustered out with 19 years service.  The Army retirement requires 20 years to get any benefits.

I will have 17 years in 2013.  I would have to stay until I was 63 to get a retirement, at least as far as I understand the rules, and that would require three consecutive waivers.

Not likely.

But I knew that when I needed a waiver from a general officer to get in three years ago.

In the short term, I also have to decide what to do for the remaining three years.  A public affairs officer in the Stryker brigade would like me to work in his office--he does not have a staff writer--but does not have an E5 slot.  I am not at all interested in an E4 slot.  The vast majority of people I deal with on a regular basis know there is some difference between a sergeant and a general, but both are in charge of soldiers, so it's not all that different.

For older people, Beetle Bailey cartoons may be part of their picture of Army ranks.  The general and the sergeant both order Beetle around.  How much different could they be?

So I want to stay a sergeant.

I have thought about trying to join an armor unit.  It would be kind of cool to begin and end my odd Army career in a tank.

Getting Back Some Speed on the Bike

A year in Iraq left me in generally better shape than when I left, but I am way behind on bike training.  This long weekend I started to train to actually get back some fitness.  On Saturday, I got up early and rode to Philadelphia.  I covered the 72-mile distance in 3 hours and 48 minutes.  That's 24 minutes slower than my best time a few years ago, but better than I thought.  It is also the first time I rode more than 40 miles in one ride in more than a year.  In Iraq I usually rode just 10 or 20 miles at a time because of the dust.  I took the train back to Lancaster.

I had the departure time for the train wrong and rode harder than I needed to.  I wouldn't have pushed myself that hard if I knew the right time for the train.

On Sunday I rode the daily ride with Jon Rutter, the reporter who has been writing about my return to the Army for the Lancaster Sunday News.  He had never done Scott Haverstick's daily ride and wanted to see the course.  So I got 30 more miles in Sunday.

On Monday I did one of the traditional Lancaster Bike Club rides climbing steep hills in Ephrata.  Except, I only did two of the four big climbs, then rode back on state highways.  I was wiped out.  But when I got home, my I rode six miles with my son Nigel on the tandem and Lisa on her bike.  Then Nigel had enough so Lisa and I did nine more miles.  Then Lisa ran five miles while my wife and I planted trees in the yard.  Lisa finished her run about the same time we got the last tree in the ground.  So we ran three miles with Lisa.  After that Nigel and Lisa and I did a few pushups and situps.

My last activity was reading a book.  I did not actually opened the book.  Two hours later when a big thunderclap woke me up, the book and my glasses were on the bed beside me.  

Editorial in Today's Sunday News

I wrote an editorial in today's Lancaster Sunday News about Conservative Talk Show hosts who never served in the military.  I like the headline they wrote.



Radio/TV patriots snipe from safety of homefront

I was surrounded.

I was taking fire on all sides.

No, not from Iraqi insurgents, but from the conservatives I was eating lunch with in a dining facility or DFAC on Tallil Ali Air Base in Iraq.

Last year I was deployed to Iraq with the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard. I knew I would be in the minority when I voted for Barack Obama for president, but sometimes I really felt like an Army of one — the one white, male Obama voter among the thousands of soldiers and airmen on base.

We were real curiosities for each other, the conservatives and I. The most ardent among them listen to Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and others tell them that liberals are cowards and trying to destroy the nation and who knows what else. But there I was sitting in the DFAC, my rifle under my chair, serving in the Army. The radio/TV patriots were home in America where they had always been and always will be.

I was arguing with some of the best men and women I ever met. While we disagreed on politics, they were the kind of men and women who left home to support their families and maybe make their lives better. When we were done hassling each other about politics, we could go back to complaining about the heat, or the garrison, or talking about what we were going to do when we got home.

It did seem strange to me that these soldiers and airmen, many on their second and third tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, would give such respect to men who never served. Often someone would say that the president should be a veteran. If, as usual, Fox News was playing on the DFAC TVs, I could point to O'Reilly or Beck and say, "They never served. Why should they be the ones to say who is and isn't a patriot?"

Foreign visitors often see the strangest things about America more clearly than we do. Recently I was talking with an Israeli writer working in America. He thinks America is a great country, but he does think it very odd that all of the leading radio/TV patriots in America have not served in the military. Odder still that in America you can be a draft-dodger and be calling someone else a coward on your daily show.

Israel has compulsory military service, so the situation is different, but no one in Israel who avoided military service could pretend to be a paragon of patriotism.

In 1972 when I first enlisted, my enlistment meant a poor kid would not have to be recruited or drafted to take that place. Military service is a zero-sum game. If enough people walked in off the street to fill the ranks, the thousands of sergeants on recruiting duty could go back to leading squads and platoons.

When Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh avoided the draft, a poor kid who could not afford to duck the draft took their place. When a draft-dodger said the Vietnam War was the "wrong war," that implied they would serve in a "right war." But if other Americans are fighting and dying, how can that be a wrong war for a patriot?

I can understand avoiding the draft if you are anti-war. I can't understand it for someone who is yelling about patriotism on the radio, or accusing others of cowardice on TV.

I don't think the war in Iraq was the "right war." Reasonable people still disagree about whether we ever should have invaded. I did not volunteer and serve because Iraq was the "right war." I went because, just as in 1972, if I went, one less person had to be recruited.

Although they are too young to be draft-dodgers, I also wonder why Beck, Hannity, and for that matter Ann Coulter, did not at some point take a temporary pay cut and show us liberals how brave conservative media mavens really are. Coulter and Hannity were born in 1961. They could have enlisted any time between 1979 and 1996. Coulter is an attorney and may still be able to get a waiver before her 50th birthday next year.

Born in 1964, Beck had from 1982 to 1999 before he became too old for an initial enlistment. Technically, Beck could have enlisted during 2006, when the Army raised the enlistment age to 42. That way he could have been in "the surge" instead of just talking about it.

I would not want to return to a draft. That we can fight two wars and patrol the world with an all-volunteer force that is less than 1 percent of our population says volumes about how good our military is. But I do think that those who accuse others of cowardice should have served themselves, especially Savage, Limbaugh and O'Reilly who avoided the draft and let someone else fight and maybe die in their place.

Read more: http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/256882#ixzz0pPvijEuJ

70th Armor Reunion

Tonight I spoke with Sam Rushing who is organizing a reunion of the 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, Wiesbaden, Germany.  I served with Bravo Company of the 1-70th from 1975 at Fort Carson, Colorado, to 1979 in Germany.  the reunion is for anyone who served with the battalion from 1976 when we arrived in Germany through 1984.

The reunion will be held from July 23 - 26 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  It's the same weekend as the Pennsylvania Senior Games, so I may have to fly in for just a day or two.

It will be great to see people I served with during the 70s!!!