02 February 2010
 
Operation Homecoming

(Operation Homecoming Flight Arrives at Clark AB, RP, 1973)
 
I looked morbidly at the on-line edition of the Times this morning. It is just turning gray. There is stuff to do this morning at the office, and I have guests coming from a long way off. I need to do something about that, but it can wait until later.
 
The budget thing is troubling. I know that we drove off a cliff a long time ago, but the realization is now hitting hard, and even the politicians are going to have to come to grips with it.
 
In the short run, some relatively minor domestic programs are going to get decapitated. DoD is going to get reined in, and some big-ticket military acquisition programs are going to get whacked. Secretary Gates fired a two-star yesterday who was running the Joint Strike Fighter program and appointed a three-star to replace him.
 
It was something about whether there should be two suppliers of engines for the aircraft, or just one. There is more to it, of course, and the JSF program has been slurping at the public trough since it gobbled up several independent programs in the 1980s to provide a bold one-size-fits-all answer for military strike aviation.
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This has been tried before, as I recall, the previous iteration being the misbegotten FB-111 program crafted by Robert McNamara. It didn’t work then, but who knows. Yesterday’s firing of General Dave Heinz shows emphasis on accountability on one program, but the trend lines over the next decade for everything else- and I mean everything- are not good.
 
There is a pittance in the budget for education and civilian research, and there is the real prospect that if I keep working I am going to be paying more in taxes. Looking at it objectively, that means last year is the best year I am going to get, and all things considered, it was not one of those banner years. It appears it is time to pay the Piper, though we are going to take one more turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl before the music starts to play in earnest.
 
I put that aside. There is absolutely nothing I can do about it except have the best time possible in the time remaining. I will need to think through how to go about that, but it is going to be a busy week with the Homecoming to deal with.
 
The term is being recycled to describe a support process for the kids coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a good thing, this re-integration, and not at all what the kids coming back from SE Asia had to confront.
 
The opponents of the war- the ones who captured the popular landscape that made the victory of the North inevitable- managed to demonize the troops who served there. There were no parades. There often was much worse. Even I got called a “baby killer” one time, years later, when I appeared in uniform at my sister’s wedding. I laughed, but for the people who had just got done with their war the wounds of that were deep and painful and are not healed yet. The anger was manifest in the rapid response to John Kerry when he wrapped himself in the flag.
 
After DESERT STORM we had a parade. This time around, the opposition has been careful to differentiate the war from the warrior, and it is a welcome break of civility.
 
There was some cheering from the other war long ago, but it was for the Prisoners.
 
Operation Homecoming commenced in January 1973, and under the terms of the Paris Accords, returned 591 American prisoners of war held by the VC and the DRV. The first flight of 40 U.S. prisoners of war left Hanoi in a C-141A, later known as the "Hanoi Taxi,” which is now in the Air Force museum in Dayton. There were dozens of missions flown in February and March, bringing the boys home.
 
The last one was Major White, Jack Graf’s pilot. Our pal Dick mentioned the other day that a couple years ago he had a strange encounter in Denver. He was waiting for his pop-up camper to be repaired in an RV dealership in Arvada, and he noticed a fellow customer wearing a t-shirt that suggested that he had been associated with Army aviation in Vietnam.
 
Some discussion transpired, you know, vet chit-chat, and it turned out the man in the t-shirt was MAJ Robert White, who had retired in the Denver area.  He was very reluctant to discuss painful memories but briefly described their shoot down, captivity, Jack's escape and the fact that he was the last US POW repatriated from VN.
 
Dick asked him if he had written anything about those experiences, to which he said no, saying that he still has nightmares and it simply is too difficult to discuss.
 
After Operation Homecoming, the U.S. still listed about 1,350 Americans as POW/MIA of whom most- but by no means all- were reported KIA but whose bodies were not recovered. The matter of uncertainty surrounding the other few hundred would continue to simmer for years.
 
That is why Rex called me in 2005, and how we plunged into the great quest to have Jack Graf recognized as a symbol for the Navy lost.
 
I will have to tell you more about that tomorrow, though.
 
There are bags being packed in California and Florida this morning. Jinny will travel from her stately home on the hill near Rancho Santa Fe in the glorious north country of San Diego County. She is not packing light.
 
Larry is reviewing his reservations on-line at his legal office, and probably thinking about several months spent in the humid Vietnamese border town of Ha Tien.
 
Rex’s son and his family are getting organized in Florida. This is going to be a tough week for them, taking his Dad home to a place he remembers only from long ago.
 
The Artful Logger is checking the weather from Tennessee to see how thick the coats should be to give some warmth against the chill at Rex’s grave.
 
At the barns of the Old Guard over at Fort Myer, the last working horses in the Army are being groomed, and the troopers are checking the winter weather advisories for the week.
 
Bless them, they are out there in the gardens of stone in all sorts of weather, and this is just about the bottom of the season for outdoor misery here.
 
The Old Ones knew. In a simpler and less insulated time, they called this day Imbolc, and marked it as the turning point in the Celtic winter to Spring. I can sense it in the slight lengthening of the day, the dying rays of sunset now after five PM.
 
The Sailors who will don their white puttees for Rex’s guard of honor might know this as Groundhog Day, and the Chief will probably mention it at Quarters this morning, since a week in the ceremonial unit probably seems to be the same ritual, over and over.
 
I doubt that he will since that is the pagan festival channeled through the Medieval Church as Candlemass and brought to the new world by the hardy Germans of central Pennsylvania. In that guise, the day got its own movie, and a festival in Punxsutawney, PA, a village with big dreams and great PR sixty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where Rex grew up.
 
Thousands of people are up there now, trooping to Gobbler’s Knob to see the burghers of the Inner Circle pull Phil the Groundhog from his stump to see if he will view his shadow.
 
The tradition goes that if Phil sees his shadow this morning, winter will last another six weeks. If it is cloudy, spring will come early.
 
The National Weather Service has forecast 15 degree (Fahrenheit) and overcast skies for the ceremony, so I would think there is good news coming from Pennsylvania, but since it is complete nonsense I will take it with a grain of salt. Or two.
 
The sky-gazers are also predicting snow showers later, and some mixed weather through the week. Friday morning is the only prediction that matters, in terms of all this activity, since that is when the hearse and the limo and guests and the horses will come together.
 
If the elements cooperate, things will go smoothly. But one way or another, it will go.
 
Rex has to go home, and it is time.
 
I was just about to shut this all down when there was a bulletin from Pennsylvania. The Groundhog saw his shadow. Six weeks to go.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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