Like Watching a Dinosaur Sit in a High Chair

The Refueling Crew at Camp Garry Owen in Iraq in 2009.

Soldiers from Echo Company, 2-104th General Support Aviation Battalion

I have had several moments of awe in my life when the thing I saw in front of me seemed too amazing to be real.  In October of 2009, I watched a Chinook helicopter land in the tiny space between the blast walls of a base about a mile from the Iran-Iraq border.  When I saw a query on twitter from Maiken Scott of WHYY's The Pulse about moments of Awe, I called right away.

The lead pilot on that Chinook was Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jeffrey Hatt.  At minute 14 on the link below, I describe as best as I can remember the watching Hatt land that big helicopter in that small space by turning 90 degrees at the last moment.

He made the same maneuver on take-off.  It was just as impressive to watch in either direction: like watching a dinosaur sit in a high chair, was the first metaphor that popped into my mind.

Seeing any expert do their best work is something I love.  Whether it is sports or flying or racing or dance or writing, seeing the best at work is wonderful.

I made two trips to Camp Garry Owen during my deployment to Iraq in 2009-10. This small base close to the Iran-Iraq border and was hit by rockets regularly.  When I flew up it was on a Blackhawk helicopter taking carrying a team that was looking for smugglers along the border. 

When I got to the base, I took a tour of the tiny facility and wrote about it here. Matt Kauffman (3rd from left, 2nd row) took me on a tour. 

Chief Hatt is still flying. Right now he is deployed again, flying a Chinook in combat operations.

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/thepulse/item/96024-awestruck

Going to the Top of the Chain of Command

Today I talked with one of the soldiers I served with during for the last several years.  I told her about asking Congressman Joe Pitts to help me get the 11 months and 9 days of service I need to complete 20 years.  He couldn't help.  So she suggested I write to the President.

So I did, on www.whitehouse.gov

Here's what I wrote.  I will let you know what happens:

On May 3 of this year, I left the Army at age 63.  I first enlisted in 1972, served for 11 years on active duty and in the reserves then left the military to pursue a civilian career in 1984. In August of 2007 I re-enlisted at 54 years old, made possible by a temporary increase in the enlistment age.  I knew the mandatory age for ending my enlistment was 60.  I deployed to Iraq for a year in 2009-10.  I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2012 with the 55th Brigade of the PA Army National Guard, but the deployment was cancelled.  I got two extensions past age 60, in part because I scored maximum on the fitness test and was in a shortage job skill.  Earlier this year, I asked for, but did not get an extension to serve another year.  As a result, I left the Army with 19 years and 21 days of service.  As you are aware, military retirement requires 20 years.  I am a bicycle racer and finished an Ironman Triathlon at 61 years old.  I am physically able to serve and good at my military job. I live in the Congressional district of Joe Pitts and asked for his assistance.  He was unable to help.  At this point, I believe only President Obama could help me.  I would be happy to serve and know that medical personnel get waivers up to their late 70s.  Since I have six kids, three adopted and three the old fashioned way, the retirement income would be put to good use.  But I also would like to maintain my connection with the soldiers I served with in Pennsylvania and in Iraq.  Without an official connection to the military, I cannot go on military bases.  My service and all of my discharges were honorable throughout my career.  I have many awards and decorations.  My tour in Iraq was with the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard.  While I did not serve in the Vietnam War, I served during that war and was temporarily blinded in a missile explosion in Utah.  Thank you in advance for anything you could do to let me complete my long career.

BFFs Army Style: My Platoon Sergeant 32 Years Later

Army version of BFF: Best F#ckin' Friends

Ron Lamm, Command Sgt. Maj. Retired

In his book "The Four Loves," C.S. Lewis said one mark of friendship is that after any passage of time, the conversation between friends picks up right where it left off.  I have not seen Ron Lamm since I left Alpha Company, 6th Bn., 68th Armor in May of 1984.

Last weekend, in one of those coincidences turbocharged by Google, I met Ron at the reunion of Charlie Company, 6-68th Armor.  On Friday of last week, I was looking up when 68th Armor was deactivated and found a Facebook link to the reunion.  The reunion was the following day.  I showed up at the Charlie Company reunion and found a few people from Alpha, including my former platooon sergeant, Ron Lamm.

My son Nigel and I were in Pottsville that morning at the city's annual bicycle race.  After the race we drove to Fort Indiantown Gap and went to the reunion. I met several people I remembered then found Ron.  We sat at one of the picnic tables for a half hour and talking about our mutual interest in World War II.  We talked about our fathers' service during the war and then talked about Ron's recent ride in a restored B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.  Ron told me about a project to restore the original "Memphis Belle" one of the most famous B-17s.  Ron was talking about how they used staggered waist guns in the 1990 movie, but the actual Memphis Belle was a B-17F waist guns opposite each other, not staggered as in the later G model.  We are both the kind of guys who know that staggered waist guns and chin turrets are modifications made in the G model of the B-17.

Ron told me about the rest of his career after I left Alpha Company.  He made Command Sgt. Major in 1990 and stayed with 68th Armor until the unit was disbanded in 1995.  He also volunteered for the Gulf War, but would have had to take a reduction to E5 to go, so he turned it down.  Ron has been retired 21 years.  In a few years he will be retired longer than he served.

Talking with Ron reminded me how very sure I was that I should leave the Army in 1984.  I really liked Ron, I liked the unit, I had the papers for OCS filled out, but was sure I needed to move on.  I have Ron's email now and we have tentative plans to go to an airshow.

Worst Retirement Plan Possible

In May of 1984, I had a total of eleven years and two months of active and reserve service.  At the time I was a staff sergeant, a tank section leader and had just filled out the application for Officer Candidate School (OCS).  

At that critical point, I had to decide whether to stay and finish 20 years or more of service, or get out, grow a beard and be a real civilian.

SPOILER ALERT!  I grew the beard.  

How did I make this momentous decision to leave the military with nine years till retirement? 

Because of advice from my uncle Jack, the only other recent veteran in my family.  Jack retired in 1978 from the Air Force after 20 years of service.  He had three full tours in the Vietnam War and three temporary duty (TDY) assignments to that war that stopped short of the 180-day line of counting as a full tour.  He flew back seat in an F4 Phantom fighter and was also a navigator in a refueling plane.  When he was not in Southeast Asia, he was often assigned to Thule, Greenland.

Jack said that if I stayed in I should go to OCS.  But if I stayed in I would be in a desert war before I got out.  More importantly, he reminded me that with a reserve retirement I get no money till age 60 and I would be subject to recall to duty any time until age 60 if I was enlisted, age 63 if I was an officer.

He went on to describe the most unhappy people in the Vietnam War as retired aircraft mechanics reactivated in their 50s and taking incoming mortar fire while trying to fix aircraft.

Jack said, "If you take the retirement, here's the choice.  You either go to war or forfeit all pay and benefits for life."  

Wow!!

With all that clarified, I left the military, grew a beard and got a job with an ad agency.  You may think I could have gotten the job anyway, but not really.  During the three years I was in the 6th Battalion, 68th Armor in Reading, Pa., I worked on the loading dock at Yellow Freight near Lancaster, Pa.  I was a Teamster.  With a union job, I could simply sign out for reserve duty any time I needed to.  As a section leader, I had monthly meetings on Wednesday nights, drill set up on Friday, and other additional duties beyond reserve weekends.  In a union job, the extra Army time was no problem.  In a white-collar job, that meant choosing between work and Army.

Most reserve and National Guard leaders are government or union workers.  

My decision was rational, but the irony is sadly funny.  At 54 I re-enlisted.  At 56 I go to the desert war Jack predicted and at 63 I get out one year short of a retirement and three years past the date I would have started receiving my Army reserve retirement pay.  

The 68th Armor did not mobilize for the Gulf War, and not many tankers were activated for Iraq and Afghanistan.  As a reserve tank officer, I would almost certainly have missed the Gulf War, and most likely would not have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan since I would have had almost 30 years service by then.  

As a military career move, I should have stayed in my reserve unit.  But if I did stay in the reserves, I would have had a lot of reasons to either stay in the Teamsters union or try to get a government job. I could not have had the world-traveling civilian career I had during the 90s and first decade of the 2000s.  

Jack and I talked in 2005 about all the places I had been in the world, versus all the places he had been with the military. My job took me to the capitals of every thriving economy in the world.  The places I went most were Paris, London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sao Paulo.  Jack's big destinations were war-torn Asian airfields with winters in Thule, Greenland.  

I would have liked a military retirement, but the travel with my civilian job really was amazing--and incompatible with reserve service.

Soviet Armor vs. American Armor, Israel 1973

In July and August 1975, I went to the U.S. Army Armor School in Fort Knox, Kentucky, after three years in missile weapons testing.

We learned the basics of armor and about our tank, the M60A1.  We also learned about a serious flaw in our tanks that was fixed at great cost by the Israeli Army.  The Israelis fought and defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan using the M60A1 among other tanks.  It turns out the hydraulic fluid in our tanks was prone to catch fire.  After the Israelis lost crewmen to these fires, the hydraulic fluid was changed.

We also learned how important mechanical reliability is to combat tank crews.  The Arab countries used Soviet tanks, primarily the T-55 and T-62 main battle tanks.  We learned the difference between "live" and "dead" track.  Soviet tanks used dead track, like bulldozers that does not use rubber bushings.  In hard use, especially at high speeds, dead track is more prone to break.  According to one report, the Syrian Army lost one-fourth of its tanks before they reached the battle in the Golan Heights due to automotive failure.

After the 1973 War, the Israelis installed American-made drive lines in captured Soviet tanks to make the Soviet armor more reliable.

To people who have never trained and lived in a tank, they can seem like the indestructible behemoths of movies.  But real life in a tank is a life of wrenches and rags.  As a tank commander of one of the most reliable tanks of its time, my crew and I spent five hours or more maintaining our 54-ton tank for every hour of operation.  Each of the 80 track blocks on each track were held together with a center guide and two end connectors.  Each of the 160 center guides and 320 end connectors could work loose and had to be checked, often.  The center guides ran between six pairs of road wheels, three pairs of return rollers, the drive sprocket and front idler wheel for adjusting track tension.  Each of the wheels had inner steel plates bolted to the aluminum wheels.  The road wheels were attached to torsion bars.

We tightened bolts all the time.  Our tanks would received major service at 6,000 miles of operation, usually including a refurbished V12 diesel power plant and transmission.

And our tanks were so much more reliable than the Soviet counterparts that the Israelis ditched their drivelines and installed American-made drivelines to make the Soviet tanks more reliable.

War shows strengths and weaknesses.  Reliable, effective armor is definitely an American strength.

Laurus, Book 19 of 2016: A Tale of Old Russia that Stretches to Florence and Jerusalem

Eleven of the books I have read so far this year are by Russian authors writing about life in Russia from the present back through the last two centuries.  This book goes several centuries further back into Russian history.

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin showed me a Russia that I have seen only in fleeting glimpses. We follow the title character, Laurus, from when he loses his parents as a child until the end of his long life as a healer and a holy man between the mid 1400s to the 1520s. 

This is a medieval book by setting and by the parade of wretched, reverent, hopeful, fearful and foul characters that people the pages of this wonderful book.  After Laurus (Arseny in his early life) loses his parents he moves in with his grandfather, a healer named Christopher.  Arseny follows his grandfather and becomes a healer, but as his life progresses, Arseny relies less on the herbs and lore of Christopher and more on the healing gift he has from God.

Arseny becomes adept at healing plague victims.  He heals a young woman from far away named Ustina.  They fall in love and live together.  Ustina gets pregnant then she and their son die in childbirth. 

At that point, Arseny becomes an itinerant “Holy Fool” in the city of Pskov. (Pskov is the northwest corner of modern Russia.)  He shares Pskov with two other Holy Fools.  One is Holy Fool Foma, who is very territorial.  Foma is one of the many brilliant bits of comic relief we get on the long life of suffering of our very Russian hero Arseny/Laurus (also at various times Ustin and Ambrosius). 

In the middle of the book, we meet Ambrogio, an Italian from Florence with a gift of Prophecy as strong as Arseny’s gift of healing.  Ambrogio is convinced the world is ending soon and the only place he can get exact knowledge of the coming Apocalypse is in Pskov.  In 15^th Century Florence, Ambrogio finds a trader willing to teach him Russian.  Ambrogio learns Russian with an accent perfect for Pskov in short order and sets out for Pskov.

In Pskov, Ambrogio meets the mayor.  The mayor introduces the Italian to Arseny and bankrolls their trip to Jerusalem.  All the horrors of the road befall them.  Ambrogio is killed near Jerusalem; a sword but lives and return to Pskov slash Arseny. 

Late in life Arseny goes to a monastery and finally lives in a cave.  He takes the blame for a sin he did not commit and dies rejected by thousands who he healed.  But when he finally dies, more than 100,000 people mourn his passing. 

Laurus shows from beginning to end that the life of true faith, the life truly given to others, means poverty, rejection and suffering.  Arseny, like the Bishop in Les Miserable rejects this world out of habit and choice.  Arseny, like the Bishop, illustrates the passage called the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew.  I am adding that passage at the end of this review. 

Laurus is the Book of Acts set in Russia with the unrelenting suffering of the Apostle Paul set in a colder climate.  Any televangelist who read and understood Laurus would burn his mansion, his private jet and his TV studio to the ground. 

This book shows what the Christian life looks like and it is a good story well told.

Matthew Chapter 5

Seeing the crowds, ohe went up on the mountain, and when he psat down, his disciples came to him.

The Beatitudes

2 And qhe opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

3 r“Blessed are sthe poor in spirit, for utheirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are vthose who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the wmeek, for they wshall inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and xthirst yfor righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

7 “Blessed are zthe merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are athe pure in heart, for bthey shall see God.

9 “Blessed are cthe peacemakers, for dthey shall be called esons1 of God.

10 f“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, forutheirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 g“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely hon my account. 12 iRejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for jso they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

"Wrong War" Conservatives: “Patriots” Who Dodged the Draft

Just 99 years ago, this was America's view of draft dodgers. 

Many strange things make America unique in the history of the world.  One of the strangest to me is that Draft Dodgers can let another man serve and maybe die in his place, and yet they can be “Patriots” later in life.  And more ironic than that, they can be patriots in the conservative party.

I know a guy who is a life-long conservative, is three years older than I am, and never served in the military.  He said the Vietnam War was the “Wrong War.”  (Really?  Who decides what is the "Right War?" You?) In his mind, those who have the means to avoid the war are free to do that.  So he went to college and got four deferments that got him through the effective end of the draft in 1973.  He considers himself a true conservative and a patriot and has no lingering guilt about avoiding the Vietnam War.

More importantly, he believes if it was the "Right War" he would have served.  Usually with this kind of assertion, there is no way to test if it is true.  But in America, we have so many wars we can  validate the experiment. America was attacked on September 11, 2001.  America invaded Afghanistan within a month and was making plans to invade Iraq within a year.  In the USA where  upwards of 100 million people claim to be conservative, the government had trouble maintaining a force of just two million.  By 2007, the Army National Guard let me re-enlist at 54 years old.  The Army, in a failed three-year experiment, raised the enlistment age to 42.  I got in with 11 years of prior service and a waiver. Where were all those conservatives?  Was Iraq another "Wrong War?"

In most any country in the world through most of history, dodging the draft was treated as treason. The draft dodger went through life known as a coward. 

Yet in modern America, the party that wants to “Make America Great Again” does not want any part of the real path to greatness, which involves suffering and sacrifice. 

With the glaring exception of John McCain, every nominee of the Republican Party in this century has avoided combat service while blaming the Democrats for the ills of the nation.  A nation that is looking back to the what they consider the best days of America, would not nominate, let alone elect, a draft dodger to be commander in chief.  There is a moral dimension to greatness.  The sort of man who will let another serve in his place as a young man will not suddenly become a brave leader as an old man. 

When Donald Trump addresses the Republic Convention tonight he will stand in front of the largest gathering of rich draft dodgers in America: the coward in chief telling thousands of other cowards how he is going to “Make America Great Again.” 

I wish I was making this up.