Author: frankisemptiness

October 7th, 2021

Lightning and thunder. It’s a rainy, windy night. Maybe I should say that it’s a rainy, windy “morning”, since it is after 2:00 AM already.

Asher is asleep. He struggled to stay awake when it got dark in the evening, but finally he crashed. At ten months of age, Asher is a willful boy, determined to do things his way. When I put him in bed several hours ago, he rolled around and kicked. He tore at my beard and grabbed at my nose. He pulled on my ears with his sharp fingernails. Slowly, very slowly, he wore himself out. The little guy finally bowed to the inevitable. His body relaxed, his face became calm, and he gave himself to that state of total rest that adults can never have. I envy him.

It is just me and Asher tonight. Karin, my wife, is in Texas with our other grandchildren, the grandchildren that she has not seen for well over a year. She flew down there visit with them yesterday. I remain here to care for Asher. I don’t mind. It just is.

The situation feels different now because of Karin’s absence. Since Karin and I became fulltime caregivers for Asher back in February of this year, we have worked as a team. It is difficult for any one person, especially an elderly person, to care for an infant. Karin and I have always given each other space. We have been very aware of the other person’s need for rest. Asher is a wonderful little boy, but he is always a very active little boy. I am writing now because I can, because my grandson is sleeping. In a couple hours things will be very different. All hell might break loose.

I am happy to be here with Asher. He’s amazing, at least he is to me. He is fascinated by his world, and I am fascinated with him. He loves our dogs, and they tolerate him. He wants to stand and walk. He wants to explore everything. All things that are old to me are new to him. He is easily impressed.

I introduced him the wonders of a phonograph yesterday afternoon. I played for the first time in a long time my copy of “Sgt. Pepper”. Asher was interested in how the record spun on the turntable. He didn’t particularly care for the music. Asher is more of a hard rock/heavy metal kind of guy. Karin puts him to sleep with Mozart. I put him to sleep with Foo Fighters.

Our youngest son, Stefan, came over to visit yesterday at noon. He brought me some Italian food, and he helped me to put up the new futon. I fed Asher blended carrots, and Stefan talked to the boy. We checked out what kind of music Asher likes. Stefan is very fond of Asher. That’s good. Asher is going to need a strong and loving uncle. Asher will not have a dad in his life. Stefan will need to be a role model for Asher.

Asher’s mom also came to visit yesterday. She put Asher down for his nap in the afternoon. She is good at doing that. She loves Asher intensely. She is a good mother.

In a few hours I plan on meeting a Greg, the deacon from our church, for coffee. Obviously, I will take Asher with me. It is always good for Asher to meet new people. Maybe it is of greater value for the others to meet Asher than it is for him to meet them. I don’t know. Somehow it seems to make things better.

God willing, I will take Asher to meet my rabbi on Monday. Asher, despite his name, will probably never become Jewish. That’s okay. He will grow up knowing good people who are Jewish. His world will be larger.

It’s late (or early). I need to rest for a while.

Asher won’t be patient with me when he wakes up wet and hungry.

September 29th, 2021

The UH-60 Black Hawk has a hook on the underside of it. That is the helicopter’s primary means for carrying cargo. When I flew Black Hawks, way back when, we could haul some stuff inside the aircraft, but most of the time we had to hang the freight on the hook. The hook was good up to 9000 lbs. I think the most we ever carried was about 7000. That was plenty.

When I was stationed in West Germany, my unit was part of the 3rd Armored Division. We seldom carried troops. That’s what the tanks and APC’s were for. Our job was to transport fuel and ammunition. We seldom actually transported ammo (security issues), but we carried lots of jet fuel. Aircraft with turbine engines, such as helicopters, burn through enormous amounts of JP-4. We had to make sure that there was enough during each exercise.

We used the hook on the Black Hawk to transport the equipment that the III/V (Fuel and Ammo) Platoon needed to set up a FAARP (Forward Area Arming and Refueling Point). The pumps and hoses were crated up and placed in a net. The net had a ring on the top that could be placed on to the hook on the helicopter.

We also transported the fuel on the hook. The JP-4 was pumped in fuel blivets, each of which carried 500 gallons. Two blivets were attached together to a sling and the sling was hooked on the bottom of the helicopter. The blivets plus the sling weighed approximately 7000 lbs.

It was sometimes tricky getting the blivets off the ground. 7000 lbs put a heavy strain on the turbine engines. We would face the helicopter into the wind to get extra lift. As far as the Black Hawk was concerned, facing into a headwind was the same as the aircraft moving forward. Forward motion and/or a headwind reduced turbulence under the rotor blades, thus increasing lift.

Even with a headwind, we sucked the guts out of the engines when we first picked up the blivets. The engine strip lights would go from green to yellow, and really close to red. Once the fuel bladders were even a few feet off the ground, we would start moving forward. Any extra lift was welcome.

Full blivets hung under the helicopter like a set of black balls. They were usually steady as stones. Empty fuel blivets, on the other hand, would catch in the wind, and swing and twist. That was disconcerting. It was a pendulum effect. We didn’t want the crew chief to tell us that he could see the blivets from his side window.

There were flight procedures to follow if the blivets were swinging to the point that control of the aircraft was in question. A gradual climb or descent could smooth things out. Or the pilots could go into a gradual turn to stabilize the blivets. In a real crisis the pilot could hit the emergency release button to open the hook and dump the blivets. It was impossible to hit that release button accidentally. It had to be done on purpose. If a pilot hit the emergency release and dropped blivets with residual JP-4 from an altitude of a couple thousand feet into the potato field of some German farmer, he better have a good reason for doing so. It was likely that the flight crew would have a meeting with unhappy people of high rank immediately upon landing.

When I went to the 7th Infantry Division , we did a lot more troop movements. The 7th ID was made up of “light fighters”, grunts with little or no ground transportation. We still used the hook on occasion. We lifted 105 Howitzers for the Artillery guys. That was pretty easy. We only had a problem with that once.

A helicopter tends to build up a static electric charge while in flight. The charge is typically released when the aircraft touches the ground. Sometimes the charge is released when the aircraft touches something or somebody on the ground. That can be problematic. The way to avoid grounding the helicopter inadvertently is to key the mike on the radio just prior to landing. That is another way to dissipate the electrical charge.

When an artillery man tries to hook up his Howitzer to the bottom of the Black Hawk, He straddles the chassis of the gun and holds a ring up to place on the hook. This ring, or donut, is attached to a sling on the Howitzer. The soldier usually wears a gasmask or at least goggles when doing the hook up. The rotor wash from the blades is intense.

We flew in to grab the Howitzer. We saw the gun bunny standing precariously on top of the weapon. He was holding the donut as high up as his arms could reach. We got right over him. Then we heard…

“Man down!”

“What do you mean?!”

“The troop with the donut is on the ground.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s moving a little bit. Yeah, he’s getting back up.”

“Roger. Let’s try it again.”

Got to remember to key that mike.

September 28th, 2021

The Fort Irwin National Training Center is deep in the Mojave Desert. It is about 37 miles from Barstow. California, which means it’s 37 miles from nowhere. To get to the nearest real city, you have to drive two hours to San Bernadino. To get to the Pacific Ocean, you need four hours of windshield time. I was at Fort Irwin in February of 1986 for training. I don’t remember much from that time period, probably because I don’t want to remember it. However, I might as well write about the highlights of those weeks in the desert.

I have to back up a bit. To properly tell this story I need to begin at West Point in the spring of 1980. I was getting ready to graduate and become a second lieutenant. At that time all the members of my class had to choose their branch. Branch selection was based on class rank. People at the top of the class could pick whatever branch they liked. The folks on the bottom got to go Infantry.

1980 was the first year that a graduate could go to Flight School immediately after completely the officer basic course for whatever branch they had chosen. At that time, there was no such thing as an Aviation branch in the Army. The graduate who wanted to go directly to Flight School needed to pick an unrelated branch in the Army, usually one of the combat arms. The idea was to sleepwalk through the basic course, and then become a pilot.

Also in 1980, there was a total of four slots available in Military Intelligence for prospective pilots. Those went fast. I got the last slot, and I went into MI prior to going to Fort Rucker to learn how to fly. I spent several months at Fort Huachuca, AZ, studying PHOTINT (photo intelligence) before I was sent to Fort Rucker. If for some reason, Flight School did not work out for me, I would have gone back to the MI branch fulltime.

I had a classmate who was (and is) a good friend. He also planned on becoming a helicopter pilot. He was higher in class rank than I was, so he could have snagged that coveted Military Intelligence slot. But he didn’t do that. Instead, for reasons that were never made clear to me, he chose to go Infantry.

Before any of us could be accepted into Flight School, we had to have a flight physical. I think we had an initial physical while still at West Point, but then we had to undergo another physical prior to beginning classes at Fort Rucker. My physical was a nerve wracking experience. The doctor needed me to “valsalva”, that is, clear my ears. Pilots had to be able to equalize the air pressure between the outside environment and inner ear canal. Well, I couldn’t do it. I had scarring from childhood ear infections, and I couldn’t get my ears to pop. After multiple attempts, I finally got an ear to make a pitiful pop, and the physician reluctantly signed off on my medical exam. I came very close to not ever becoming a pilot.

My friend failed his exam. They determined that his vision was not good enough. It was good enough to pass the first exam, but not the second go around. The Army didn’t know what to do with him at first. He got a position working at the Fort Ricker golf course. He went to work every day in his Izod shirt and chinos. His life as a golf pro went on like that for months.

Then the letter came. My friend and I shared an apartment off post. He came back one day pissed off. He went directly to the refrigerator and made himself a rather strong Black Russian. I asked him what was wrong. He tossed me an envelope. Inside was a copy of his PCS orders. I looked at it.

He was going to Fort Irwin, as an Infantry officer.

I asked him where Fort Irwin was, and he exploded.

Eventually, after we had numerous Black Russians, he explained where Fort Irwin was, and what they did there. He would be part of the OPFOR (Opposing Forces) for training troops that were rotated in from posts all over the U.S. In practical terms, he was becoming a faux Soviet officer for three years at one of the most isolated duty stations on earth.

Over the following years, we would write to each other. My friend’s letters were often bitter and sarcastic. My impression from reading the letters was that there wasn’t a fucking thing to do at Fort Irwin except work. So, everybody stationed there got really good at being the OPFOR. They knew all the terrain. They knew all the ways to win. When other units came to Fort Irwin to join the wargames in the big sandbox, the locals were ready for them, and they were playing for keeps.

Fast forward to late 1985. The 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord was chosen to train at Fort Irwin. That meant that I finally got to go there.

We spent months preparing for the move to the National Train Center (NTC). The Infantry was getting all pumped up for the trip. They were absolutely convinced that they were going to kick some ass. I was not so sure about that. It didn’t matter, we were all going there anyway.

We flew the fifteen Black Hawks in our company from Fort Ord to the NTC. We planned to make a grand entrance. We were going to go in as a flight of fifteen, Apocalypse Now-style. It went well at first. We looked good. I was in Chalk 5 behind four other aircraft. I watched the first helicopter slowly approach the ground.

Then it disappeared into a cloud of brown dust.

Oh fuck.

Chalk 2 did the same thing, as did Chalk 3. Now the rest of us had no idea where any of these three Black Hawks had landed. We could see nothing, and it is considered bad form to land on top of another aircraft’s rotor system. So, it was every man and woman for themselves. We each peeled off and found a piece of level ground. We planted our helicopters and turned off the engines. Like fools, we had flown with doors open. Everything, I mean everything, was covered with dust and sand.

We set up our operations tent next to the only Joshua tree available. We got ready to do our thing: transporting troops and equipment. Everybody was preparing to show the folks at Fort Irwin what the 7th ID could do.

The first day of the war came. Once again, our operation was carefully planned. We were ready. The show started promptly at 6:00 AM. We cranked the engines. The rotors started to turn.

We all got a radio call:

“It’s done. Shut them all down.”

“WHAT?!”

“It’s done. We lost. Shut the aircraft down.”

My watch said, “6:06.”

Fuck.

September 25, 2021

We tend to forget history, especially the parts of history that were relatively calm. I served as an Army helicopter pilot in West Germany during the latter years of the Cold War. It was during the time of Reagan and Andropov. Nothing happened while I was there, but fear was omnipresent. The threat of a nuclear war with the Soviets was always hovering in the background. People went on with their daily activities with a certain edginess. It was best not to think too much about the unthinkable. Just do your job, and drink plenty of beer when you weren’t doing your job.

I visited Berlin with a friend in May of 1983. It’s hard to remember much about that trip after 38 years. All I have are faded photographs and equally faded memories. The details may be fuzzy, but feelings are still intense.

My friend, Mike, had a buddy who was assigned to the Berlin Brigade. I forget the name of Mike’s comrade, but he had a small apartment in West Berlin, and we were welcome to stay in it, if we didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. The Berlin Brigade was a tiny American military force surrounded by the communist troops in East Germany. It was mostly for show. It also acted as a tripwire. If the hated Reds ever decided to move on West Berlin, they would have to fight the American soldiers of that brigade. That would start World War III. The Soviets never tried it.

Mike and I decided to go to Berlin. I had just purchased a new BMW 320i, and was ready for a road trip. The first thing Mike and I did was go to our battalion S-2 ( intelligence officer) to get a form authorizing each us to travel across East Germany to West Berlin. It was a cool document, written in English, French, and Russian. I wish I still had it. That piece of paper, along with our military ID’s were all we needed to make the journey. We did not require passports.

Keep in mind that at this time Berlin was still an occupied city. World War II was not quite over. As military personnel of one of the four occupying powers, Mike and I could legally go to and from West Berlin. We could also enter East Berlin. We just needed to wear our dress green uniforms while we wandered through the socialist paradise. We planned on doing that.

We drove the BMW to Checkpoint Alpha in Helmstedt on the Inner German Border. Before we could make the trip to Berlin, we had attend a briefing. The sergeant who talked to us kept it simple:

“Stay on the fucking autobahn!…Sirs.”

That advice would seem obvious, but apparently there had been American GIs who failed to follow that guidance. Over the years, soldiers had gone into East German villages to get lunch, or buy gas, or do any number of stupid things. As long as we remained on the autobahn all the way to Checkpoint Bravo, we were good. Side trips meant time in a socialist slammer.

We received a card from the sergeant that was written in German. It said,

“I want to speak with a Soviet officer.”

If we got pulled over on the autobahn by the East German cops, say for speeding (the Reds had a speed limit), we were not to talk with them. We were to show them our little card. The U.S. did not recognize the German Democratic Republic. If we got in trouble, we were only supposed to talk with a Russian. That would be unpleasant.

The sergeant made it abundantly clear that it was in our best interests not to get into trouble. Eventually, the U.S. government would bring us back home, but there be people waiting in the West to ask us questions that we would not want to answer. Bottom line: DO NOT SCREW UP.

We crossed the border into East German, and immediately had to present our paperwork to the Soviets. We walked up to a kiosk with a frosted window with a narrow slit open on the bottom. We slid our ID’s and transit forms under the glass. Nobody talked to us. We just heard the sounds of somebody stamping, folding, and mutilating our papers. In the meantime, some skinny Russian soldier who looked all of fifteen inspected out vehicle. Eventually, our paperwork reappeared and we could drive to Berlin.

The ride to Berlin was uneventful. We didn’t speed on the autobahn, mostly because we would get busted for it at Checkpoint Bravo in Berlin. They (the Army personnel) noted our departure time at Checkpoint Alpha, and they checked our arrival time at the other end of the trip. If we got to Checkpoint Bravo too soon, well, then we were speeding. There was nothing to see on the way. The East Germans kept the locals away from the freeway.

The arrival at Checkpoint Bravo was exactly like the departure at Helmstedt, except that the process was done in reverse. What immediately struck me when we got to West Berlin was The Wall. It was impressive: massive and imposing. Trump bragged about his wall on the southern border of the U.S. That ain’t shit. The East Germans knew how to build a wall. With socialist zeal and Teutonic thoroughness, they erected a barrier to last the ages. The irony is that none of it exists now. I have a small piece of it at home. It’s just a lump of concrete that somehow still feels like tyranny.

Mike and I wanted to see and do as much as we could in as short a period of time as possible. Mike’s Kamerad was willing to help us with that. We did the whirlwind tour. We saw all the touristy stuff: Charlottenburg Palace, the Siegessäule (Victory Column), the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag. Mike’s friend took us into the Kreuzberg district, where the action was supposed to be.

The three of us went to a cabaret. We paid a cover charge, and found a table. It was still early, so the place was nearly empty. A waiter cam to our table and asked us to order drinks. We demurred. He explained that we had to buy drinks to stay at the table. Fine. We ordered three overpriced beers, and grumbled about it.

In the center of the cabaret was a small stage. On the stage were maybe a dozen people, men and women, who were just standing there wrapped in white sheets. The sound system started to play the Moody Blues song, Nights in White Satin. This was decidedly strange. We were about to leave when everybody on stage dropped their sheets, and nobody was wearing anything.

We ordered another round.

West Berlin was like a city on meth. The town was wide open for business 24/7/365. A guy tried to sell us coke on the U-Bahn (subway). West Berlin was the most glorious and grotesque example of capitalism on earth. You could buy anything there.

East Berlin was the opposite. It was supposed to be the shining example of socialist supremacy. Not so much.

Mike and I spent a Sunday afternoon in East Berlin. We put on our greens and drove to Checkpoint Charlie. The spy movies like to portray Checkpoint Charlie as this dark and dangerous border crossing. It was really like that, or at least it felt that way. The place reeked of espionage. It kind of made us wonder if crossing the East side was such a good idea.

My main memory of East Berlin is boredom. There were rows of drab and monotonous apartment blocks, built in that soulless Soviet style. There were huge empty plazas that only contained heroic statues of Marx and Engels. The most interesting sight was the Monument Against Militarism and Fascism. It had an eternal flame and a squad of East German soldiers goose stepping in front of it. I had thought that the goose step had gone out of style in 1945. I was wrong.

Looking back on my visit to Berlin, I can only describe it as “bizarre”. Even then, it was bizarre. It was just nuts. In one of his books Carl Jung uses postwar Berlin as a prime example of political and psychological dissociation.

Spot on.

September 23rd, 2021

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. “

Book of Ecclesiastes 3:1

Over the years I have met many new people, and they have often asked me what sort things I have done. The conversation has usually gone like this:

New Guy: “So, tell me about yourself.”

Me: “I used to be in the Army.”

New guy: “What did you do there?”

Me: “I flew helicopters.”

New Guy: “Really?”

Me: “Yeah, really.”

New Guy: “How long did you fly in the Army?”

Me: “Five years.”

New Guy: “Did you like it?”

Me: “Yeah. It was 90% fun, and 10% sheer terror.”

New Guy: “Wow. Do you still fly?”

Me: “No.”

New Guy: “Why not?”

I never have a good answer for that. After I got out of the Army in August of 1986, I never flew again. I had a commercial pilot’s license from the FAA, but I didn’t have enough flight hours to be marketable as a civilian aviator. I had to go into another line of work, and quickly. My wife and I had a baby boy within a year of me resigning my commission. As time went on, we gained two more children, a mortgage, tuition payments, and the rest of the American dream. Flying as a hobby was out of the question. That requires time and money, and for three decades I had neither.

I retired six years ago. When I left my job, I finally did have time and money. However, my eyes were not as sharp, and my reactions were much slower. I also had other interests. I was busy teaching a citizenship class. I was visiting patients in the VA psych ward every week. I was going on adventures that I would have never dreamed of doing earlier in my life. Flying was no longer attractive to me. It was a huge part of my youth, but it’s over.

I loved flying in the Army. It was exciting, and occasionally dangerous. I learned to fly with night vision goggles at the Netheravon Airfield in England. Flying with goggles was often challenging. It was like watching a green TV screen through toilet paper tubes. The NVG’s allowed for no depth perception, which made things in the air more interesting. I flew over the Salisbury Plain training area near Stonehenge. It was an endless sea of grass bathed in moonlight. The landscape was beautiful, but treacherous. Flying over fields of grass is like flying over the ocean. There were no landmarks, nothing I could use to judge my airspeed or my altitude. Eventually I got used to the goggles. It took a while.

When I was stationed at Fort Ord, CA, I needed to go on instrument flights. As a pilot, I was required to get a certain number of flight hours in actual IMC conditions, which meant flying in the clouds. I didn’t need to much “weather time”, but I had to get a certain minimal amount. Racking up those flight hours on the sunny California coast wasn’t easy. The best time to do it was during the summer, when the fog rolled in from the ocean every evening and didn’t clear away until late in the morning of the next day. The fog was thick, hundreds of feet thick.

I remember walking with the other pilot to the Black Hawk that was sitting on the pad. It was early in the morning when the fog was dense, and a cold wind was blowing in from the west. The air smelt of sea water and fish. Everything was damp and dark. The top of the aircraft was slippery, making the pre-flight checks of the rotor system a little nerve wracking. I could only see a few feet in any direction. It felt like being inside a golf ball.

After we had started the helicopter, we taxied to the runway. ATC gave us our flight instructions. Basically, we were to keep on a certain heading and steadily climb a couple thousand feet. We were on the instruments as soon as we took off. There was nothing to see outside. The windshield just showed us a blank sheet of grey mist. We climbed and climbed and climbed.

Suddenly, everything was blindingly bright. We had broken through the cloud cover. Above us was the bluest sky I had ever seen, and below us was endless sheet of dazzlingly white clouds. Seeing that was a transcendent moment for me. It was absolutely glorious. I don’t think I have seen anything that breathtaking since then.

I have other memories from my time as an Army aviator. Some of them are pleasant. Some are terrifying. But they’re only memories. I can’t relive those experiences, and I don’t want to. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to fly. I have no regrets about it at all, but it’s done.

It’s time to do new things.

09/17/2021

I have no idea what I will be doing tomorrow. In very general terms, I know that I will caring for our nine month old grandson, Asher, for most of the day. My wife and I watch over Asher 24/7. However, there is nothing specific set up on tomorrow’s schedule. Actually, there isn’t anything on the schedule at all, other than whatever Asher decides to put on it.

There are things that I would like to do, but they all take a back seat to the needs of our grandson. My wife and I give him what he needs when he needs it. If he’s hungry, we feed him, If he’s tired, we take him to bed for a nap. If he’s bored, we play with him. If he’s dirty, we wash him. Asher does not follow any kind of plan. Neither do we.

I have been trying to write on my blog for almost two weeks now, and this has been the first opportunity to get at it. Asher is asleep at the moment, and perhaps for only this moment. I may complete this essay, or I may have to stop and check on the boy before I finish typing this sentence. There is no way to predict what will happen next.

Karin and I try to meet up with friends when we can. That does not happen often. It’s not that people don’t want to hang out with us. It’s more the fact that Karin and I cannot know in advance what our situation will be the next week, or the next day, or the next hour. Our friends, understandably, want to set up a time and place for any kind of meeting. Karin and I can agree to join them at the specified time and location, but we always have to add the disclaimer: “If Asher is okay.” It has happened several times in the past that we have set up something with a friend, and then we needed to back out at the last minute. This has been frustrating for everybody involved, except maybe for Asher.

It has worked out best when our friends have come to our house to visit. Some people we know don’t like that idea, due to COVID and whatnot. We understand how they feel, and we respect their desires. On the other hand, if they can’t or won’t come here, then we are not going to see each other. That’s the bottom line.

I know I’m bitching, but I really don’t want to do that. A lot of people have situations similar to us. Some have it far worse. There are whole nations that can’t plan ahead. Look at Afghanistan. The forty million citizens of that country have no idea what tomorrow will bring. They all suffer from a sort of communal PTSD. They haven’t had any kind of steady lifestyle since the Soviets invaded their land in 1979. They have had generations of unrelieved chaos, and that condition is unlikely to change. Our lives are pretty stable in comparison to theirs.

I think about what Zen has to say about all this. Zen does not tell people not to plan. Zen tells them not to attach to the outcomes of those plans. Suffering comes with attachment to the results. Not having a plan can sometimes be liberating. If I have no schedule, then I am not constantly looking at the clock or the calendar. I can be in the present moment, which is where I should be anyway. I don’t have to worry about what I will be doing. I just give my full attention to whatever I am already doing.

Years ago, when I was in the Army, I was assigned as the operations officer for a helicopter company at Fort Ord, CA. All I did all day, every day, was plan and organize. I was good at it. Eventually, I learned the limitations of my skills.

There was a joke in the Army about making plans. We used to spend endless hours writing detailed operation orders (OPORDs) for military exercises. The joke was that once the exercise actually started, you just threw away the entire plan. Often we did.

One time we had to organize a very complicated joint operation with the Navy. The Navy was supposed take Army infantrymen on to their ships, and land these soldiers on the beach at Big Sur. Then my unit was supposed to fly them in our helicopters from the beach and then over the coastal mountains to Fort Hunter Liggett in the Salinas Valley. It required us to make three round trip flights to transport all the troops. Everything had to synchronized. We planned and practiced these maneuvers for months.

The big day came. We made the first flight with no problems. The execution was flawless. Then we got an emergency call over the radio saying that the fuel was contaminated. They had found water in the jet fuel that was in all the helicopters.

Game over.

We all landed immediately. Each pilot found a horizontal surface and planted his or her aircraft there. As it turned out later, the fuel test was inaccurate. There was no contamination. We could have done the entire mission with no problem. All the planning was for naught.

Asher is up. He’s smiling at me.

I’m done here.

September 6th, 2021

“Once Khidr went to the king’s palace and made his way right up to the throne. Such was the strangeness of his appearance that none dared to stop him.

The king, who was Ibrahim ben Adam, asked him what he was looking for.

The visitor said, ‘I am looking for a sleeping place in caravanserai.’

Ibrahim answered, ‘This is no caravanserai, this is my palace.’

The stranger said, ‘Whose was it before you?’

‘My father’s,’ said Ibrahim.

‘And before that?’

‘My grandfather’s.’

‘And this place, where people come and go, staying and moving on, you call other than a caravanserai?’ “

from The Way of the Sufi

Father Michael gave the homily at Mass on Sunday. The topic of his sermon was how we often taking others for granted. We assume (I know I do) that a person we love and need will be always be there for us, even when experience proves that assumption to be false at times. Our relationships with other people are fragile and transient, and therefore precious. Individuals enter our lives unexpectedly, and then leave in the same way.

Our grandson, Asher, came into our lives quite suddenly nine months ago. He was born two months premature, and his arrival took us a bit by surprise. After four weeks in the NICU, the little boy came into our home, and he has been part of our family ever since. We love this baby, and we are amazed at how quickly he is growing and developing. The fact is that every morning we meet a new child when we first see Asher. He is not the person he was last month, or last week, or even yesterday. He is constantly with us, but he is already in the process of leaving us.

Over the years, many people have entered my life, stayed a while, and then left again. Some of them I failed to appreciate until they were gone. I have tried to maintain contact with a number of them, with middling success. Sometimes our relationship can continue in a different fashion than before. Sometimes that is not possible, and with great reluctance I have had to let them go.

People leave our lives for various reasons. Sometimes they move far away. Geographical distance does not always doom a friendship, but it can make it difficult to keep alive. Often people change. Their attitudes and values shift, and the things that we held in common no longer exist. Without continuous interaction, a friend can quickly become a stranger. Life events split friends apart. The arrival of Asher into our family has forced me to curtail many outside activities. This in turn has weakened or ended the connections I had with those who shared my interests.

People die. Two of my friends have died during the last year. They are irretrievably gone. There is no chance of us reuniting in this world. As I grow older, this very permanent separation happens more often.

I thought about my wife and myself, as I listened to the priest’s sermon on Sunday.

My wife and I take pains to appreciate each other. Since we have to care for Asher full time, we need to do that as a team. It is impossible for one of us to raise Asher alone. Karin and I are very aware of our mortality. We are both in our 60’s, and neither of us knows how much more time we have on earth.

We do not take each other for granted.

August 30th, 2021

I got an email from a religious sister I know. A guy had contacted her to ask for help with a course he was taking at a local retreat center. The class was called the “Spiritual Guide Training Program”. He told Sister that he needed two “seekers”, people whom he could guide at no cost themselves, in order to complete this one-year program. Sister told me to contact him if I was interested .

I did.

I emailed the man, and we set up an appointment for a Zoom meeting to talk about the process. He needs a person (actually two people) to meet with him in person or virtually once a month for several months. That is a requirement he needs to meet in order to get certified by the retreat center as a spiritual guide.

The Zoom meeting lasted a bit less than an hour, and I found it extremely frustrating. I suspect he did too.

I have previous experience with “spiritual guides”. Some of it was wonderful. Some of it not so much. I have had the most trouble with persons who advertise themselves as “spiritual guides or spiritual directors”. I have no issue with people who have extensive training in the field. I regularly consult with two rabbis I know, and a with couple Catholic deacons. I know several Buddhist dharma teachers who are willing to give me guidance. Being trained in spiritual matters is often helpful, but it is not always a guarantee of competence. I have known priests and other religious professionals who were incapable of providing useful advice. A title or a diploma may or may not mean anything.

My wife, Karin, spoke to me about my meeting with this new spiritual guide. She said,

“With this sort of thing, the two people have to ‘click’. You are hard to ‘click’ with.”

Oh, so true. I am a difficult person to read, especially at the beginning. I seldom make good first impressions. I tend to alienate people rather quickly. It takes a while for somebody to get past my gruff exterior and find out that there is a gruff interior too. Sometimes, they find something worthwhile once they get to know me, but few people last that long.

This guy didn’t.

I asked the man straight out, “What makes you competent to be a spiritual guide?”

He was a bit taken aback. He replied,

“I’m not an expert, but I’ve been doing this as both a seeker and a guide for fourteen years.”

“Doing what?”

The prospective spiritual guide told me about the process we would use, and it made little sense to me. I told him,

“That’s rather vague and amorphous.”

He attempted to explain, “Well, there is no curriculum to this. It’s not like there are books to read, and homework. A person comes to me, and tells me what is bothering him or her, and I respond to what they say. Most of my job is to listen.”

“Are you a good listener?”

He nodded.

“And people actually tell you this?”

He nodded again.

I thought for a while and I asked him, “What do plan on getting out of all this? Are you expecting to help me somehow? Are you going to learn something?”

He replied, “My main goal is to complete this course I am taking. I need to work with seekers for some months in order to finish the class and get ‘official’ approval from the retreat center.”

“So, you’re telling me that you are using me to get this official oky-doky from the retreat center to be a spiritual guide?”

He shrugged, “Well, that’s true to a certain extent, but there is more to it than that. You see…”

I stopped listening for a while. He finally finished talking. I admired his candor, but I was angry at the notion of being a means to an end.

I asked him, “Why should I trust you?”

That stopped him dead. “Well, at this point, you shouldn’t trust me.”

“Yesterday, I talked and drank beer with my friend from the synagogue. We had a heart to heart, and solved no problems. I have other people I can talk to. Why should I talk to you?”

That bothered him. “Well, this process isn’t for everyone. If a person thinks that their lives are good already, and they don’t want to do any personal reflection, then this won’t work.”

All during this conversation, the man had asked almost nothing about me. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seemed like he didn’t give a damn about my life.

He went on, “What a seeker gets out of this is what they bring to the table. Have I answered your questions about the process?”

“Yeah, I know now that when we meet, I will do all the work, and you’ll sit there.”

“That’s not completely true.”

I had had enough.

“Okay, let’s do this. Right now you know nearly nothing about me. I’m a writer. I will send you some links to what I have written. That is how you can know me. Read some of it, and decide if you want to deal with me.”

He responded quickly, “I can see you got it all handled already. This won’t work.”

“Agreed.”

I left the meeting.

I’ve been thinking about who have been my best spiritual guides. They have been the veterans who were patients in the VA psych ward. They have been homeless people I have met on the street. They have Native American elders who walked with me for miles and miles. They have Buddhist monks who gave me food, shelter, and love. One has been an old Jew who fed me beers while telling stories about the Baal Shem Tov. One was an elderly Black man who gave me moonshine and told me about growing up on Chicago’s Southside. None of them ever called themselves spiritual guides.

My very best guide has been my nine month old grandson, Asher. He has taught more about myself than any other person on earth.

The man taking the spiritual guide class may in fact do excellent work. I don’t know. I won’t know.

Maybe he would be better off going to bartending school.

August 24th, 2021

“The white noise of an industrial and commercial society drowns out our ability to think.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“War is peace.” – George Orwell, 1984

How many people gave any thought to Afghanistan before August 15th, the day that Kabul fell to the the Taliban? Let’s see a show of hands.

Hmmm…I thought so. Damn near nobody.

The truth is that I wasn’t thinking about that place much either.

The almost universal lack of interest in Afghanistan prior to the complete collapse of the nation’s government is no surprise. After the initial invasion of that country twenty years ago, we slowly forgot that there was a war being fought there. If we didn’t forget about the war, we simply ignored it.

We were encouraged by our government to ignore the war. George W. told us to go shopping after 9/11, apparently because it was our patriotic duty to keep the consumer economy humming. The Bush administration wanted to avoid at all costs the domestic nastiness of the Vietnam War. Afghanistan was going to be fought by a volunteer army half way around the world. Somebody else’s kid would fight and die in that place. There would be no pictures of coffins or body bags coming home to be buried. Nobody would bother to report on the Afghani civilians being killed by drones or bombs. The billions upon billions of dollars spent to fight the Taliban would all go on the national credit card to be paid by future generations. The following administrations in Washington went along with that program. Spend the blood and the money, and keep it all quiet.

For twenty years that plan worked. We fought a war that almost felt like peace. There were no Victory gardens, no instances of gasoline rationing, no sacrifices of any kind for the vast majority of people. A few malcontents, like me, would occasionally bitch about this endless war, but very few Americans cared. We all slapped “Support the Troops!” stickers on our car bumpers, and we were more than willing to shake the hand of any person in uniform, telling them earnestly,

“Thank you for your service!”

Occasionally, the truth slipped in through the cracks. I remember meeting a few Afghanistan vets in the psych ward of the local VA hospital. They were hurting, and they are just the beginning of a flood of patients that will eventually overwhelm the mental health services of the VA. I remember my son, Hans, talking about his old Army buddies who were in Afghanistan, either as soldiers or as contractors. I used to get emails from Voices for Creative Non-violence about the suffering of the Afghan civilian population. For all those years, the only people who cared about Afghanistan were the folks who personally knew somebody who was there

Now, somehow, everybody seems to care.

Why?

Americans care now because we can all see the the emperor has no clothes. The ugly truth about the war is all out in the open, and we are embarrassed. We still don’t care about the Afghani people. Most of us never did. We really don’t care about the troops, unless we have a son or daughter who fought in the war (my kid fought in Iraq). We care about Afghanistan now because we look bad. We look weak.

In a few days the evacuation will be complete.

In a few months, maybe weeks, we won’t care any more.

August 20th, 2021

Hans called me yesterday. He’s called me a few times recently, especially since Kabul fell to the Taliban. Hans was never deployed to Afghanistan. He went to Iraq instead. He was in Iraq in the latter part of 2011, when U.S. forces were supposed to leave that country permanently. Of course, when ISIS started rampaging through Iraq, American troops returned. Now I guess we’re leaving Iraq again. It seems like we don’t know if we’re coming or going, literally.

Hans told me on the phone,

“I haven’t heard anything yet from my buddy in Afghanistan.”

I asked him, “He’s the contractor?”

“Yeah. I’m going with idea that he made it to some other country, and then he turned off his phone and got drunk.”

I said, “You could be right.”

Hans replied, “Well, there’s nothing else I can do.”

That’s true. A lot of people, Americans and allies of Americans, are stuck in Afghanistan, and it is iffy that they will all make it out of the country. I knew a guy, Scott, who quit his job as a truck driver here to go to Iraq to transport fuel. I think he was working for Halliburton in Iraq. They paid him a ridiculous amount of money to drive a tanker truck over there, but then they never guaranteed that he would live long enough to spend it. Scott made back to the U.S. He was lucky. Hans’ old Army buddy might not make it back home. The guy took a calculated risk, and maybe he bet wrong.

I know a woman who is a long time peace activist. She has been working for years with young people, especially young women, in Kabul. Her friends in Afghanistan are now in limbo. This woman and other people, like me, would like to help get these folks to safety. But how? We don’t know yet.

While we still on the phone, Hans told me,

“I saw this picture, or cartoon, or whatever, about Afghanistan. It shows an Afghanistan vet sitting with his head in his hands, and this old Vietnam vet puts his hand on the young guy’s shoulder and tells him, ‘Just tell yourself it don’t mean nothin’…that worked for us’. I mean there’s two negatives in the sentence, but I get what the Vietnam vet is trying to say. We felt that way in Iraq too.”

All this suffering, and “it don’t mean nothin'”?