24 January 2010
Normalization of Relations
I was out doing gentleman farmer things early against the coming rain today. It was just coming light when I got the hose out, the long extension cord and the power drill to make an attack on the barn gutter that was knocked down by the weight of the compacted snow of the great 2009 blizzard of December.
There is still a bit of a bow in the middle, but it is safely tacked back against the wood and under the eves where it belongs. That is a good thing, considering that the chill rains will increase to sleet later today.
I only had a chance to glance at the Times on the way out to the barn. Apparently in the wake of the Brown election to the Senate from Massachusetts, the Administration is going to double-down on the current agenda going toward the November mid-terms.
It will be interesting to see how that works out for all of us.
Rex thought the Democrats were deeply wrong, and he included me in later years on his e-mail list of the outrage de jour. There we found a few differences.
I was assiduous on fact checking some of the wilder stories, particularly after being burned by things that seemed to make perfect sense when I read them in a hurry.
My favorite of those was not political. It was a completely concocted story about the rum-soaked cruise of Old Ironsides in her early days. It was an uplifting story of alcohol abuse in the days of Wooden Ships and Iron Men.
Perhaps you have seen it. The story has the gallant ship returning from an imaginary world cruise with The USS Constitution arrived in Boston on 20 February 1799, seven [7] months after her departure, with “NO cannon shot, NO food, NO powder, NO rum, NO wine, NO whiskey, and 38,600 gallons of stagnant water.”
According to calculations contained in the imaginary ship’s log, the crew consumed two-and-a-half gallons of alcohol per man per day.
It was nonsense, of course, and when I saw items in the stream from Rex that indicated the IRS was going to start collecting gun information, or the President had a Kenyan birth certificate, I would research it and get back to him privately.
He was always gracious about that, and would correct the record to his distribution. He was always a gentleman and gracious to a fault.
If I agreed with him that the Democrats were sometimes wrong, that did not mean that I thought the Republicans were always- or even close to being right.
Professionally, I had to be a servant of the Cintonistas in the decade that followed the fall of the wall, and salute those who were elected to lead us. They were not always wrong in policy, and the mess we find ourselves in seems to me to be a product of bipartisan institutional corruption as much as anything.
In 1995 I had a chance to organize a few Congressional delegations from the Intel Oversight committees to world hot-spots like Haiti and North Korea and former hot-spots like Vietnam.
In the course of one trip to the SRV, I told you that I was snookered into giving a short speech of congratulation on the fall of Saigon to the leaders of Ho Chi Minh City, as I think I mentioned. The point of that trip though was about MIA’s from the war, thought the sub-text was more about normalizing relations than finding the lost.
Not that the military was not trying their best, mind you. There was just more going on than that.
President Clinton had lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam the year before, and a detachment of the Joint Task Force Full Accounting had been established in Hanoi in January of 1995. We were there in May, at the start of a flurry of high-level delegations visiting the former enemy.
Our group had an audience with President Le Duc Anh at the palace in Hanoi. The Congressman asked him what we could do to make things a little better, and I was surprised to hear that if the Defense Mapping Agency stopped publishing aeronautical charts advising that a state of hostilities existed in the region, there would be huge savings in insurance costs for air carriers doing business in his country.
That was a no-brainer, and President Clinton was able to respond days after we got back to Washington. About eight weeks later, on July 11, President Clinton and Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet announce of establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam.
So, twenty years after the fall of Saigon, the war was really and truly over.
Well, the one over there, anyway. The one here in America still had some legs.
At the annual dinings-in, we continued to toast Our Missing Comrades, though there was only one from our little tribe, and after the trip, I began to get more interested in who he was, and how he came to be lost.
For his part, retirement afforded Rex the opportunity to lend his services and participation to organizations like the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation, Patrol Craft Sailors Association, PBR Forces Veterans Association (Life), and the associations of his former ships, USS Noa and Macon.
There were a dozen more groups. The most important one, and the place where our interests came together, was the Naval Intelligence Professionals. That organization began to loom larger in Rex’s growing campaign to fix some old wrongs.
Elsewhere, the veteran community was increasingly vocal about the fact that the US military, writ large, and the Brown Water Navy in particular, had served in their war with skill and courage, and they left the rivers of the Mekong Delta with honor.
This was after the last WW II Vet left national offie and before the term “Swift Boat” became a verb. It was a time when the Vietnam service records of candidates were a major factor in four Presidential elections. The tipping point was the campaign of celebrated anti-war Senator and alleged Navy hero, John Kerry of Massachusetts.
A lot of people, Rex included, thought the whole thing was preposterous.
But that was part of a new phase of all our lives. I sailed into the new Millennium still on active duty, though nervous about things stranger and more ominous than Y2K.
Rex’s wife Derlie passed away in 1998, ending a 49-year marriage. In addition to Rex, mourners included his son Earl, daughter-in-law Colleen, and two grandchildren. Some men might have been content to settle into the role of the doting grandfather, but not Rex. As he told me, he could not live without the company of a woman. He was that kind of man. As it turned out, Rex and Derlie had been close friends with the Sourbeers and the Martins, long-time naval intelligence families. Jinny Martin’s husband Barnie had recently passed away, and a late romance bloomed.
Subsequently enjoyed a rich and abiding affection with Jinny, who has a life narrative as extraordinary as any active duty Spook. I am proud that she is a pal, too, and maybe we can get to that story one of these mornings.
I am running behind, and need to get on with things this chill rainy Sunday. I’m glad I got the repairs done this morning. AccuWeather expects another Arctic push in February like that in December. They predict the cold air mass will center on Tennessee.
Perhaps above the Gore mansion in Nashville. I will have to check the location to ensure that it is factually accurate.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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