Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, we will soon see the real. Not later. Marlow’s thoughts on that matter have a dramatic echo from other times. It is a reverberation of words and events that we may see again soon. Not later.

– Vic

####

We start life alone as wee, wet, wrinkly strangers and end as stooped, wrinkled friends on pilgrimage together, arm in arm.

I am firmly at the stooped and wrinkled end of the spectrum. So is my friend Fred, who along with his wife Z relocated here from Pittsburgh three years ago.

W and I spent a Labor Day weekend afternoon enjoying these friends’ backyard pool while shooting the breeze about our past lives’ adventures and screw ups, our kids and families, friends and enemies, and most decidedly not about politics.

When we four retired to their screened-in backyard porch for some food bites and another beverage after two plus hours of warm saltwater pool time, Fred’s decidedly a-political wife faced me and asked me a direct question.

Z, like W, is younger than her spouse by about the same number of years. She on other hand had visceral firsthand experiences of civil war that none of the rest of us has had.

She’s a native Croat who lived through the truly bad years of the terror violence by the Serbs back in the 90s and knows what a US successful intervention there meant. It led to her eventual immigration to America, her naturalization, and her parents resulting peaceful long lives in Croatia to this day.

Thus, her question about America’s treacherous (my word) abandonment of its Afghani allies shocked me, since she’s the most nonpartisan person I know here in the Empire. There was fear and confusion in her voice as these past three weeks made her question WTFO was going on with her adopted nation.

I was at a loss how to speak to her growing sense of America’s betrayal. I found myself just calmly talking about our self-inflicted deep reputational wounds here and in the past. I softly exited by offering a reed of hope for the future softly saying we did rally after America’s 1975 Vietnam skedaddle to rise up and act in the American 1990s responses to Saddam and the Serbs.


Clockwise from top left: the central street of Dubrovnik, the Stradun, in ruins during the Siege of Dubrovnik; the damaged Vukovar water tower, a symbol of the early conflict, flying the Flag of Croatia; soldiers of the Croatian Army preparing to destroy a Serbian tank; the Vukovar Memorial Cemetery; a Serbian T-55 tank destroyed on the road to Drniš (source Wiki Commons by User:DIREKTOR)

Yeah, I know the country is different now than what it was way back then with the WW II generation still largely alive, kicking, and leading the charge.

Malheureusement on verra bientôt du vrai pas plus tard.

Copyright © 2021 From My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com