(I heard the holiday greeting issued from someplace near the White House yesterday. It was about having a good “long weekend.” We have those periodically through the year, but this one is not “long.” For some it is forever. The vistas of Washington used to captivate me. An accidental project seemed to draw me in- a tour of the Boundary Stones of the District of Columbia, placed precisely one mile apart around the land ceded by Maryland and Virginia to establish the Nation’s capital. The Stones are arguably America’s first national monuments. Visiting them was a helpful counterpoint to the traditional stones that decorate the Federal district. The image above is one I took on a visit to the Vietnam War Memorial, the somber carving of 52,000 names in black granite that line the last path of so many to the proud spire of the monument to General Washington. It is all in controversy today, but for those who remember the owners of those names, it is quite moving).
Editor’s Note: These are some accounts of episodes in life that includes alternatives. It has been lurking in the digital corners of the box, waiting for a propitious time to share them. I read the strings this morning and got the feeling I used to feel when I talked to our storied pal Admiral Mac Showers. He participated, and sometimes helped direct the winds of change. What intrigued him was that I was interested in the things of his real life. Like people and families and commutes- life patterns beyond the great event drama we celebrate together as Memorial Day. It seems we are headed into one of those periodic generational changes with a ton of conflicts, augmented by new technology. I saw a snippet on the news about a person-on-the-street interview with a college kid from the renowned Georgetown University. He was asked about Memorial Day and what it meant. He proudly declared that Georgetown taught him it was about Imperialism. Times do change, don’t they? Today, Marlow shares memories from two people remembering the great forces in our collective past. Tomorrow, Arrias will visit Socotra House to talk about sacrifice.
– Vic
Author’s Note: Methinks the time may be nigh to pull the curtain back a tad on the horrors our parents endured as part of their battles versus the ultimate evils of WW II.
Today’s snowflakes deserve a chance to learn from “history at close quarters.” Their viewing of the world, while ignoring the rich context of history, through social media’s toilet paper roll apertures has only resulted in their missing much if not most of what is happening and its meaning.
Maybe if they do learn, they’ll come to grips with actual processes that were so very different from those presented in schoolbooks, Hollywood movies or video games. Perhaps giving them a chance to appreciate these time capsules that have been buried in our personal backyards will allow them to play their part in preserving the real “truths” for posterity.
– Marlow
Modern Conflict
Modern conflicts do not operate like the ones our parents knew. The sole purpose of those foot soldiers back then was to strike an entire objective and pulverize it so that, in their wake, nothing of the enemy was left. The job was to finish whatever target they struck — utter annihilation of all that did not surrender. No pirate sword thrusts or ninja shit, just episodes of meat-grindings and flame-throwerings liberally applied. Mopping up meant something much grislier than cleaning up the neighborhood grocery store floors back home after closing time.
An almost exultant joy was sometimes heard that is jarring and foreign to civilians who know not “das war alles” warfare. Here is one fragment I wrote hurriedly down of Sheldon’s memories of the grim-as-hell crossing of the Saar River and the piercing of the Siegfried Line:
“Never in my life have I seen anything as exciting or as pretty. Imagine the first rounds of eight artillery battalions exploding at exactly the same instant on an objective the size of a small town. It looked like the town just blew up. It was wonderful the way the barrage lifted the first houses when it arrived. We stormed into town, running, shouting and shooting, taking one house after another . . . as if we had rehearsed it.”
In a way, of course, they had. Shel’s 94th was nicknamed “Roosevelt’s Butchers” by German propaganda broadcaster Axis Sally. The moniker she used came from the 94th’s fighting in and around the town of Nennig in 1945. One after another German counterattack was repulsed with vigor. The bodies of the German dead became a problem. The winter cold kept them refrigerated but there was no way to evacuate them. Finally, the dogfaces piled them up neatly in rows and in abandoned houses.
All I can say these many years later is “F**king A!”
– Marlow
Editor’s Note: I am a little slow on the uptake, but what Marlow described in his conversation with Shel is something that shrouded parts of the Boomer experience in growing up. Many- if not most- had part of the Shel experience at the dinner table. Uncle Dick was one of the Mighty Eighth pilots who lead a thousand bombers from England to Germany to wreak destruction on those below his B-24. Uncle Harold was a Marine who carried a flame thrower from bunker to bunker in the Pacific. Dad was a Navy pilot. They then adapted to the new world they made possible, and in large part left their experiences in silence.
The women in their lives were as tough as they were, perhaps tougher They likewise mostly silent about what it was like to see the boys get called up and leave, and then have to carry the whole enterprise of life on their own shoulders. The colossal suspension of life in wartime naturally produced unusual things. Our generation- the now passe Boomers- were one of those products.
The generational change in progress at this moment is harping on old topics that it does not fully understand. One of the controversial issues today is about race and injustice. It is a little disconcerting for geezers, who supported the destruction of the Jim Crow South almost sixty years ago. But there is a new angle to the new version of old (if curiously inverted) rhetoric. For those who traveled, worked and lived in Asia it is strange, but of course that is the essence of the world today. Here is Marlow’s take on an incidental meeting that casts an illuminating light on it all. It makes this edition a little more expansive, but as someone said, “It’s a long weekend.”
– Vic
The Shogun’s Translator
This story is rooted in a time period when a fellow Spook and I would meet regularly for multi-hour long sushi lunches at Tachibana in northern Virginia .
When we first started dining at Tachibana in the mid 1980s, the restaurant was located in Arlington, hard by I-66, just north of Spout Run Drive on Glebe Road. We were drawn to it by word of mouth reviews proclaiming it the best sushi bar in the metro-DC area and featured the finest toro (bluefin tuna) on this side of the Pacific. After its owner Eiji relocated the business to the more fashionable environs of McLean in the 90s, Tachibana became widely renowned for its unparalleled sushi selection and freshness. One time we ate sea scallop sushi which were de-shelled live in front of us, but I digress.
My friend and I preferred to eat at the McLean back bar. It was a secluded, Japanese style bar that seated six. The back bar was sublimely personal, and its chef, normally Eiji, was attentive and observant. The sushi bar server, Armando-san, has been with the restaurant for many years and treated us like long lost uncles. Japanese tourists hardly ever found their way to the back bar. It thus housed a self-selected, motley assortment of locals, CIA weenies and nigiri sushi devotees like us.
On the day in question, we had arrived later than our standing high noon reservations, so we hurriedly took our seats. Eiji was absent due to some personal matter. The substitute chef was well known to us. He knew our preferences and meal rituals. Ordering our Kirins and inquiring as to what delicacies had been delivered fresh that morning, we quickly set about savoring our first course – two pieces each of hand formed, fatty tuna sushi. As we warmed to our task, we became aware of a new face sitting at the end of the small bar.
As our meal continued, this gentle wizened soul slowly became fascinated with our strict adherence to a rote order for fish entrees and beer pouring for each other. Surprised to see two gaijin dining a la japonaise, he decided to breach the sushi bar privet hedge of dining privacy. He paid us the high compliment regarding our eating rituals when with diffidence he inquired where we had learned our dining habits.
We quickly explained and introduced ourselves: former Naval Intelligence officers, WESTPAC sailors and frequent visitors to his parent’s former island home since the 1970s. He reciprocated in kind — Frisco-born Nisei, WWII internee and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur’s number one translator during The General of the Army’s first 5 years of his Japanese post-war shogunate.
Both of us had hoped to hear tales from the times of West Coast Jap hunts, internment camps and his recruitment into the Military Intelligence Service as a Nisei translator. He was intent on sharing other more personal memories. For more than two hours and well past the restaurant’s midafternoon closing time, we were glued to our stools, while he spun his short and poignant narratives. He refused multiple offers of sushi, Kirin and sake but did take up our offer to join us to facilitate our conversation. We finally prevailed upon him to share a cup of Tachibana’s home-made green tea with us. He generously shared snippets about:
· The early days of post war Japan;
· The power that his words had over Japan ’s occupiers and natives alike;
· How different his children had become — even preferring to own “Jap cars like Toyotas and Nissans” over American made cars and trucks. He softly stumbled on this point before choking back down his throat what I thought would be the word “unpatriotic;” and
· How he occupied his days since his wife’s death.
We were unable to dine with him again since we could not penetrate the sphere of silence that surrounded his habits and dining schedules. We did divine that he and Eiji had a long-standing feud which dated back decades. This had led the translator to eating at the restaurant only on days when Eiji was absent. There were very few dots to connect in the aftermath of that afternoon’s long conversation. Given the shogun mouthpiece’s use and inflection of the word Jap, we settled on that as the reason for the feud.
30 May 2021
To Better Days
Coastal Empire
August 1945, 76 years ago — no, I wasn’t there. I arrived a bit later that decade to participate in a phenomenon called the Baby Boom. I’ve been thinking about what those times must have been like.
My father was home on Long Island during that month, at least for a while. He had spent the last 2-1/2 years, in training, then as a crash boat skipper in Florida, rescuing downed flyers or gathering their remains to send to their families back home. That last part hadn’t been easy. He never much talked about those grisly moments.
Saving lives at sea was more than a job or mission. It was like the best drug in the world. Yet these crews denied themselves those moments’ floaty lightness since they would head out the next day only to see mangled gore or sea monsters doing what sea monsters have done to sailors for millennia.
All these years later I think it was a horror show for him and his crew. I saw it in his reaction to the film Jaws. While we watched it together, he physically tightened and blanched during each Great White Shark scene. I strongly feel he was re-visiting those horror shows when he was trying to rescue injured aviators as the Gulf Stream’s apex predators reached the airmen first. None of us have the right to judge them for what they may have done in response.
They saw things people wouldn’t believe. Shark attacks just off Homestead and the lower Everglades. They watched the ocean suddenly glimmer dark red as airmen disappeared below the waves. All those moments were lost in time, like tears in rain as they bore witness to others’ time to die.
He and his crew at sea were separate, had their own code, something that kept the horror at bay. Despite its mercy, it stayed a silent part of them, and it never went away.
I’m not sure when he arrived back home but his mustering out papers to the inactive reserve say to me it couldn’t have been much before June 30th.
His papers pointedly reminded him that he was still in the Navy at that time, but it seemed that he was not going to do any further fighting, even if the dreaded invasion of Japan became necessary.
He, like the rest of the nation, didn’t know that better days were ahead. But they were.
He later enrolled that summer to get his MS in metallurgy in what now is part of Columbia University. With that degree in 1948 he moved his new wife to the Midwest and embarked on series of classified R&D projects that led to things like the nuke reactor for the USS Nautilus.
Which brings me to my point:
What the hell happened to us in the intervening 76 years?
We’re currently worried about an economic rough patch and global disease upheaval (and we should be) but so were they. They were worried that the Depression would return and that the US would suffer a million casualties invading Japan.
Permit me this trivial side note: 1945 and 2020 were the only two years since its 1933 inaugural when no July Major League Baseball All Star game was played.
The difference is not in the problems we face. The difference is in our attitudes. They were united then in a way that we can only imagine, and they were determined to face their problems. They endured the casualties of the war as well as severe rationing and other economic privations. Much of our country today seems embroiled over masks/no-masks, statue/no-statue, and assorted other micro assaults in words, history, or guilt.
Folks in 1945 didn’t piss and moan about gas, meat, and food rationing. I’m sure a few did but in the end, they knew that this was for the common good. I think that’s what we’ve lost, at least in part: the notion that we have a common purpose and a responsibility to put that ahead of our personal needs at least some of the time.
The 1945 version of the United States wasn’t perfect. For instance, July 1945 saw the first time in nearly a century when Independence Day was celebrated in Vicksburg Mississippi. The military was still segregated, and Jim Crow reigned supreme across the land.
But most of that generation tended to regard problems as obstacles to be overcome, not some manifestation of the malevolence of the other political party or a hoax perpetrated by bad guys.
Maybe our growing wealth and standing as a nation over these intervening years have led us to take too many things for granted. I know my parents many times told their older kids early on we were a bit soft. Compared to the youth of today, we were paupers, but we knew we were loved and blessed. I am not sure if that’s still the case.
I feel like they handed us Boomers the torch and we dropped it. Can we pick it up somehow? Will we? I’d like to think so but I’m not at all sure.
I hope I live to see what happens.
To better days!
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