(OK, this is almost a perfect circle in technology. The photo that went along with the original “Letter from Kiev” was clipped out of something, we think, and Xeroxed with a paperclip still imaged at the top of the hand-written block printing used to create the original Letter. The place has changed names, from “Kiev” to “Kyiv.” We are not sure what year it was written and sent from what was part of the Soviet Union. We think it is 1988 or ’89, certainly before the Saltwater Summit in which the Cold War ended. We found this version of the black-and-white picture, in color, and only a few frames away from the film version of Dorothy and the Mayor that appears on the old Xerox letter).

So, part of the weekend was proofing the manuscript to “Last Cruise.” It was an interesting journey into the past, the key point being that within the manuscript someone was termed an “as***le” (in one iteration) and a “little s**t” on page 411. This will be a second edition- I found a version my now-deceased sister made at the Kinko’s she ran in Alaska long ago in the stack of books in the white cabinet in the bunkhouse. Plus the actual manuscript to “The Snake Ranch Papers” which needs some work, since it is actually a compilation of the carbon copies of letters typed during 1980-81 from USFK at the headquarters in Seoul, Republic of Korea. That will be the next project, once “Last Cruise” is done with a nice cover and the interior done up neatly for print-on-demand.

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(Other stuff showed up as well. This is an image from another early work created in 1979 of noir Detective Nick Danger and Girl Friday Matilda, the first of two aircraft carrier sagas created underway in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Seas. Artist was shipmate M.E. Bastin, who we have never met in person though we served on the same ship.)

One of the things we found while dumping out the contents of the bedroom yesterday was a sheaf of papers, Xeroxed ones, which we thought was ours from long ago. You know the neat block letters we used then when we communicated with words hand-written on real paper. Sometimes with the sheet on which we were writing placed over a lined template sheet to keep things neat. So, we assumed it was something we had written. But incredulity grew as we realized it wasn’t one of us at all- it was Donna and Bonds, college pals, who had cooked up a scheme to keep us all current on their whereabouts and activities. It was a sort of competition. We were writing from Korea about the coup in progress in 1980 when some of us were assigned there. They had both secured jobs at something called “Tambrands,” which was the international company that produced women’s sanitary products. It was a new thing in the USSR. Tambrands was establishing a manufacturing and distribution network to serve the feminine needs of the Soviet Union. They were accordingly living in Kiev, when all the Ukrainian names still made sense.

You can imagine it made us sit up straight, since “Last Cruise” covers 1989 and 1990, a coincidental time in which things had been placed in a stack on my desk, then dumped into a box with other pieces of paper used around the same time. The description, matter of fact, about the perils of cotton production with inferior quality control while the Soviet Union collapsed was interesting. The communist system could not meet the practical needs of half their population. The letter was a mixture of events observed by an early married couple living in a Ukraine that was Russia. At our last meeting we had agreed to make multiple copies of “letters,” in this case, Donna’s block letters hand-written and Xeroxed and sent to three or four correspondents. We would write back the same way, with a couple ‘editions’ across the changing seasons in different continents.

Technology intrudes on the narrative, like the crucial technique on how to properly ‘bleach’ a bale of cotton to make the product suitable for feminine use- and just returning to the Soviet Union (which is what it was then) as in this paragraph:

“Our return to Planet Kiev was so typical. We knew the vacation was over. A guy from the plant picked us up at the airport in the company van, only it didn’t want to start, wouldn’t even turn over. So he removed the windshield wipers and it started right up. He knew what was wrong. Figure that out. And then no hot water for two weeks in the hotel & half the city. This was their annual cleaning time for the city’s hot water system! Cold showers for two weeks. Welcome to Kiev! The progress at the plant is running on schedule.”

So, that was a hand-written approach to a Spring long ago, year uncertain, but seemingly 1988 or ’89. Their hopes were to return to the USA in 1990, the very same period I was attempting to scribble about as the USSR fell apart. We all succeeded in that limited goal. But it was interesting seeing the product from then. Hand written, Xeroxed and mailed. Saved for 34 years and unseen since being dumped in that box.

The manuscript on of us was working on then- more than three decades ago- was typed on an original backed by carbon paper before being signed, folded, stamped and mailed. Later it was scanned on a big printer in the carrier’s Intelligence Center into whatever version of Microsoft Word was in use on the ship where we were assigned at that moment. That went through a couple versions, including what the system produced: an irritating automatic and sometimes random replacement of some of the characters with other ones used in newer versions. The major irritant was the replacement of the dash “-” symbol with “@” which made much of the Navy lingo jarring, since the “@” character was inserted into other things- S@3 in the digital version, for example, is what we knew as an S-3 Viking Aircraft. And everything else, like the descriptive phrase ’12-15FT seas’ being rendered as 12715FT, which meant the character “7” sometimes meant something else. Over 435 pages of deletions, replacements and modifications.

So, with age creeping up on the Writer’s Section, it was an interesting trip back in technical time. A perfect circle, almost, looking at old Xerox copies and typing the contents. Again. To get it into digital!

– Vic

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com