Vic Socotra

04 August 2009

Post 2584

(Master Chief Bobbie K. Hubbard, USN-Ret)

Former President Clinton is in Pyongyang, trying to extricate two journalists who were kidnapped by the North Koreans. That is the usual way one winds up in North Korea, either by force or on a mission to get someone sprung.

The only time I made it to the Hermit Kingdom was ostensibly about the thousands of silent hostages the North still holds, who are the bodies of the dead Gi’s who were buried where they were killed on the wrong side of the ceasefire line.

I wish the President a lot of luck, and I feel for the two journalists. Being a hostage in Pyongyang is no place you want to be, and the North Koreans are hard negotiators with steep prices for what they want. Plus, the liberty sucks.

They wanted something like a million dollars per each set of remains, as I recall, and since we had laid out the cemeteries to begin with, the search would not have been that hard.

Oh well. The Veterans of that war are fading away today, just a few years younger than their comrades of the great war against Fascism. Some of them were two-time losers, recalled to service in 1950 just as they were getting their lives back together.

Just a few years ago I would have agreed with you that the Veterans of Foreign Wars would go the way of the buffalo. There had only been the one foreign war since Vietnam, after all. With the downsizing of the force after the Cold War sputtered out, my money would have been on the slow but inevitable extinction of the organization.

The VFW apparently agreed with my assessment. They looked around for other categories of vets who had served overseas for likely candidates to bolster the ranks. That is the problem with exclusivity.

The Civil War generation closed the door on their veteran’s organizations with those who actually served, and just like clockwork, went from the most influential private organization in America to a handful of stooped old men.

Just because we have been fighting the most savage of conflicts for the last eight years doesn’t necessarily mean that the ranks of the VFW will necessarily swell. The organization will have to adapt to the younger generation and their particular needs and interests.

There are already competing groups oriented to the new veteran class, like IAVA (Iraq-Afghanistan Veterans of America) and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. There is a problem with exclusivity, like I said. In the end, gravity and entropy win.

That is why I was surprised to hear that Hubs had been buried at the cemetery at the former Clark Air Base. I mean, Hubs was the consumate Old Navy Master Chief, salty as the sea and crusty as wash khakis after a night of liberty that ended up in the Barrio Baretta.

The old saying was that a Navy Chief who retired in the Philippines had a life expectancy of one year. The expectation was that no man, regardless of his relative youth, could handle the temptation of limitless cold San Miguel beer and the thousands of beautiful young money who would vie for what was left of their attention.

Hubs wildly exceeded the one year mark, but he was smart and he was tough. He had to be, to have had three Filipina wives. I wish I had more factual information on what he was up to in later years in what is now becoming the world’s least specific and most circular obituary.

But I am going to have to get to that tomorrow, and tell you how the Grave Diggers of VFW Post 2854, a very exclusive organization, tended to the last affairs of Master Chief Bobbie K. Hubbard.

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