03 September 2021

Out With the Old

I am working on a project that surfaced with the move out of Big Pink, and selling the last of the units I lived in or owned in that stately old place in Arlington. I lived there as long as we at war in Afghanistan, and for just as long.

A bunch of stuff surfaced in cleaning out the closets, one of which was a project from the last finale of generational change. It was a rare treat to have Mac Showers in our little group, since he lived across the street from The Willow and it was convenient. His friendship led to association with Rex Rectanus, an interesting man who shared some of the times and events of Naval Intelligence dating back to the start of the Cold War. And his companion Jinny Martin, of course, and her life and times with the community through her married life with Barnie, who left before I knew him as anything but the NIS Commander.

The immediacy of their vitality was in contrast to the departure of my folks. Dad was sinking by the time this came around, and Mom was starting her drift toward the exit in her gentle and still erudite way. Anyway, the below was part of that story. Rex passed in 2009. My folks and Mac left in a cluster in 2012. Jinny had a hard time of things alone, and she also departed. Her vibrancy was real, and the loss of all five of them was poignant in a way that affected me deeply.

But this episode brought back the memories of something that looks like it is happening now, almost like it was a trial run for life under emergency rule.

– Vic

01 January 2010

Out With the Old

The last full moon of the old decade still hangs in the Virginia sky as the world below is sleeping off the follies of the first morning. I have nothing social to blame on which to blame the way I feel. The sickness had come on suddenly, and the memory of the last three dozen hours are composed mostly of gray cotton wool and the tactile feel of one pillow or another.

I fell ill almost immediately on the return from wintry Michigan, and New Year’s Eve is at best a fevered blur. I am surprised to be awake this morning and gratified to be almost fully respiratory.

I have a theory. That won’t surprise, you much, I imagine. This one is not about whether Lyndon and his crooked Texas pals were responsible for the decade of the 1960s being so completely crazy. This particular theory is about the H1N1 flu variant.

They say that people of a certain age- oh hell, call us the Old Farts- have lived long enough to have been exposed to this particular nasty bug the last time it was abroad in the land. That was so long ago that we were not concerned about offending anyone with the name of the bug, nor the prospect of irritating the members of one of the Great Faiths which has had some anger management issues in this past decade.

It was 1976, the year after they took down the city signs in Sai Gon and began calling it Ho Chi Minh City. It was irritating then, and has not got better with time for some, but I suppose that was the point.

Much later, I was snookered into giving a speech of congratulations to the Mayor of Ho Chi Minh City on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the city. It was a bizarre address for which I had no notes, given in the formal reception room of the stately Hôtel de Ville. I was unprepared for that, just as the delegation was unready to respond meaningfully to the hurried request for asylum from the SRV-provided translator at its conclusion.

In 1976, the wounds were still raw, though the process of anesthetizing them was well begun. There were other things to worry about. In February, an Army recruit at Fort Dix, NJ, complained of feeling tired and weak. He died within 24 hours, and soon four other soldiers were hospitalized. Health officials at the time attributed the death to something they ominously termed the “swine flu.”

You can’t blame people for freaking out. The strain of influenza was said to be closely related to that of the Great Pandemic of 1918 that killed millions worldwide and more than 600,000 people in the U.S. alone.

More unsettling, the outbreak had first been noticed in at a military installation, just like the Swine Flu. Fort Riley, KS, was ground zero for the epidemic. The implications were dire.

In 1976, Public health officials connected the dots and took the predictable step and panicked. They urged kindly healer-in-chief President Gerald Ford to act decisively, just as he had been urged the year before to intervene to stop the last North Vietnamese armor offensive that broke the Paris treaty and ended the American chapter in the war for Indochina.

The Congress had no stomach to re-enter that conflict, despite all the blood and treasure spent. As a nation we had turned contemplative and inward. Empowered with resources, the Department of Health and Human Services ensured about a quarter of the American population was vaccinated against the threat.

At this distance, I cannot tell you whether I got the flu or the vaccination. There were consequences to the hasty introduction of the vaccine. More people died from it than from the flu.

Nearly five hundred cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were linked directly to an immunopathological reaction to the vaccine, and there were a few dozen additional deaths from severe pulmonary complications. The cure had proven worse than the disease.

In the end, that is what ended the life of Admiral Rex, the pulmonary part, not the flu, due to years of smoking while he was in the service and cigarettes were both cheap and a way to pass the time between professional panic attacks. His companion Jinny reminds me of that frequently, and it is clear that she is right.

So, here is my theory: whatever it was that laid me low the last few days may have been H1N1. I believe that it was not as bad as it could have been due to some residual antibodies that lingered from long ago. I suppose you could make that argument about life in general, at least until it takes you away altogether.

Of course, it may not have been President Johnson who was responsible for everything, and maybe Oswald acted alone. I don’t know how to connect the dots on that to the rest of it. I don’t know how he could have also got the President of the Republic of Vietnam, the Attorney General and Dr. King.

I will have to work on my theory about that.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com