Staff Work

(Mac in 1945. Photo courtesy the Admiral)

Sorry. No time to follow up on the story this morning. I am pinned to the computer waiting on an input from my able Subcontracting officer, based on some work that went on past midnight last night. My input was going to be about young Major Sweeney, the Air Corps pilot who dropped the second of the Gadgets, the products of the most expensive project ever conducted by the human race, an enterprise that exceeded that those of the Pharaohs and their pyramids in terms of public treasure.

It actually was sort of casual, the mission to Nagasaki. Col. Tibbitt, the squadron commander, had electrified the world with the mission of the Enola Gay. By contrast, the follow-on mission flown by Chuck Sweeney’s crew has been described as “technically botched,” since it missed the primary target of Kokura due to smoke cover (ever heard of it?). Instead, the city of Nagasaki died.

Sweeney was low on fuel by the time he eventually got the B-29 Bockscar back to Okinawa, but it did not matter. The war was effectively over. Still, it is interesting that half of all of the Manhattan Project’s considerable labor was rendered an afterthought, suitable for delivery by a Major.

Anyway, I was thinking about that yesterday, and this morning, hunched over the computer waiting to do something else. I remembered talking to Mac Showers about this a couple years ago, those moments when one world ended and another began.

I had a hard time keeping up with the Admiral. He was 90 then, and I was just a bit more than thirty years younger. He had the life force: I don’t know what it is, but you could see it in his merry eyes.

I look in the mirror most mornings and see only blear in mine.

It was past all our bedtimes, but he had escorted all of us at the dinner table of the bustling Willow restaurant back to 1945, and being there with him it was hard to let it go. It can be a little disconcerting.

If you have read the Time Traveler’s Wife you will understand the ability Mac has to transport you across space and time. I have to keep the notes on my cocktail napkin numbered, since earlier in the dinner we had visited 1955, jumping easily between the decades, and the creation of target folders for the SPAD drivers to study before launching against the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.

It sounds preposterous now, but that was the case when the Admiral arrived at the FIRST Fleet and began to survey how training was being done to support the training mission for units going forward to the Western Pacific.

The Navy had fought hard to be included in the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the master scheme for the attack on the Evil Empire, should it have come to that. The SIOP (pronounced “sy-op”) was an esoteric and highly political document that purported to de-conflict Air Force and Navy strike operations in the event that the balloon went up. It required a lot of staff work.

The Admiral was disconcerted to find that there were no materials to assist the dauntless men in their flying machines on their way to Armageddon. He fixed the problem in his tour by establishing a new staff to prepare highly sensitive target folders. There were no satellite pictures to help, as there were in my day, but at least the pilots had some some way-points on the route to hell.

It is a magical thing, talking to someone else who was in the same very sensitive line of business a long, long time ago.

With Mac, it is as fresh as if it happened yesterday. The years fall away, and you can feel the presence of others, dead now, crowd around holding glasses of whiskey and nodding. The Admiral is their emissary, their guide between the worlds.

I could tell you where we were in the course of drinks and dinner, but mostly it was in 1945, since so much of our present rests on the foundation of what happened that year.

The Admiral recalls that the SPAD, the vaunted AD-1 Skyraider that the Douglas Company built for the Navy that my Dad flew, was designed so that it’s internal bomb-bay could accommodate the dimensions of the atomic bomb.

I scratched my head at that. The Bomb was one of the biggest secrets in the world at the time, and certainly it would not have been disclosed to the designers at their drawing tables at the Douglas Corporation. Or perhaps it was just a grim-faced staff officer in dress khakis who showed up one day after lunch, and spread his arms “just so,” and told them it had to be that way, “just shut up and do it, you have no need to know why.”

The Admiral was just a pup then, twenty-six and a Lieutenant on the staff, but filled with vinegar then as he is now. The war had moved mo west. Guam fell in early August, 1944. Nimitz arrived on the doomed USS Indianapolis, and directed his staff relocate from Pearl to commence work there on the 15th of January.

Mac mentioned that the Marines were still catching eighty or more of the former enemy a day. They were hungry out there in the jungle, and sometimes the Marines killed them in the night, as the hungry soldiers scavenged for American food. The staff officers would walk by the bodies on the way to work in the morning on CINCPAC Hill.

They were planning the end game of the war, as best they could conceive it. The over-arching plan was called DOWNFALL, and included two major landings in the Home Islands. One would be led by General MacArthur in Kyshu to the south, code-named OYLMPIC, and a second one under the command of Fleet Admiral Nimitz on the Kanto Plain near Tokyo called CORONET.

“Why two invasions,” you ask?

One for the Army, and one for the Navy, silly. They don’t call it inter-service rivalry for nothing.

The Admiral was briefing events cribbed out of the Foreign Broadcast Intercept Service, which is called something a lot less ominous these days. That was really a cover, though, since his unclassified briefings were informed by highly secret decrypted intercepts of military and diplomatic communications.

If you are like me, history forms a jumble in the mental attic. For a lot of folks, amiable chowder-heads, it isn’t even a jumble. It just doesn’t exist. Here is what was happening that chaotic year of 1945, as the Admiral was briefing and planning:

Soldiers and Marines landed on Okinawa in March. President Roosevelt died on April 12th. The Nazis quit in May, and the troops were told to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The new fellow, Harry Truman, was informed that there was something being worked on, something big. Major combat operations were concluded on Okinawa in June, though scattered resistance continued.

The Scientists of the Manhattan District Project did not know if their bomb would really work, or if it would consume the atmosphere if it did. It was not tested until July 16th of 1945, as the Gadget was assembled at the hijacked McDonald Ranch and then trucked to the tower where the Los Alamos scientists predicted it would probably detonate with great force.

The CINCPAC Fleet Gunnery Officer, CAPT Tom Hill, was sent to observe the event, and he brought a highly-classified film clip back to Guam to show Fleet Admiral Nimitz, for his eyes only.

Nimitz pursed his lips, and kept his own council at the news as his staff planned the end.

Truman sent a question through his Joint Chiefs, once he knew what they had. How many Americans were likely to die in the invasions?

It was a logical question, for a man who had options that others (except Uncle Joe Stalin) did not know about. In the Philippines and on Guam the planners paused in their deliberations and made calculations.

MacArthur’s people in Manila low-balled the estimate. Maybe a quarter million, they said, ignoring the evidence of the communications intercepts that stated plainly that the Japanese knew where the landings would be, and that everyone, man, woman and child, would die to stop them.

The Admiral’s team, headed by Ground Analyst Hal Leathers looked at the evidence from the defense of Okinawa, and calculated that it might take more than a couple million casualties to secure the capital.

MacArthur desperately wanted to command the invasion, and damn the cost, in treasure and lives. That was his way. It was like his insistence on receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor for good staff work so that he could join his Dad as the only Father-son combination ever to win the highest military honor in the land.

There was discussion at the time back in Washington of considering Dugout Doug for promotion to a special “super rank” of General of the Armies, so as to be granted operational authority over other five star officers like Admiral Nimitz. Thank God the plans went forward as they did.

MacArthur would have been a Caesar in reality then.

The story has been told of the days the world turned more acutely on its axis than normal. A-bombs fell on the 6th and 9th of August. I commend to you the account of the second strike on Nagasaki, and the comedy of errors recounted by Major Sweeny in the Super Fort Bockscar, which resulted in an emergency landing on Iwo Jima to refuel and make it back to Tinian from the second most important mission the Air Force ever flew.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Both of the weapons had worked as advertised, hundreds of thousands died, but not tens of millions which might have occurred if that astonishingly brutal path had not been chosen.

General MacArthur arrived at Atusgi Air Base on the 30th of August, the strangest month in the strangest year in human affairs to that date. I used to stay at Atsugi periodically and marveled at the revetments of old gray concrete that protected Saburo Sakai’s Zero fighters still ring the ends of the field.

They say there is much more still below in twelve great caverns carved out by the industrious Japanese, but it is too dangerous to go down there even after all these years, since traps were set with deadly efficiency, and now all those who set them are gone.

By the 2nd of September, the Allied Fleet was in Tokyo Bay to take the surrender.

(Surrender and fly-over. Photo montage courtesy University of Nebraska based on official USN Navy Photos)

Being so junior at the time, Mac stayed behind on Guam when Nimitz and four of his officers went to attend. He was there two days later, on a courier run, dispatched by his boss Captain Eddie Layton on an improvised and probably bogus mission to have an see what they had accomplished.

He landed in a seaplane next to a tender moored in the Sagami-wan in the late afternoon, and a jeep took him to Yokohama where MacArthur’s staff was preparing the Occupation. For perhaps the only time in history, there was no traffic on Route 16 north from Yokosuka to Yokohama. There were crowds of Japanese on both sides of the road, looking at the jeep impassively as it passed.

He arrived in the dark, and handed over his briefcase. By the time he got back to Yoko, there was only time to trade a bottle of Three Feathers Whiskey from the wine-mess on Guam to a young Marine for one of three remaining battle flags liberated by the Marines from the only Japanese ship that was still in the harbor, the heavy cruiser IJN Nagato.

Then it was on a motor-whaleboat to the seaplane tender for the flight in the morning.

(Tokyo at Peace. US Air Force photo)

“After we lifted out of the gray waters of the bay, the pilot did two long circles around the blasted capital before heading southeast for Guam. All the wooden buildings were ash, and only a few buildings stood in lonely isolation near the Imperial Palace. You could smell it.”

“So, you got back to Guam and what was it like, Sir? Having it over and done with such abruptness? It must have been surreal. When did you go home?”

“We were told we were to clean out our desks. We were flying on the Staff C-54 back to Pearl, direct, with a brief stop for fuel at Kwajalein Atoll.”

“You must have accumulated enough points to be among the first to go home, back to CONUS, the Land of the Big PX,” I said.

Mac dabbed his lips with one of the snowy white Willow napkins. “Well, I did have a lot of points. More than most. But that is another story,” he said. I waved to the waitress, suddenly realizing I needed another napkin and either a brandy or a cup of coffee.

Or more likely, all three.

Copyright 2010/2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Gadgets

When I think about it, I freak a bit. Better not to think. I have gotten pretty good at that over the years, a product of a compartmentalized career dealing with…well, stuff.

Unfortunately, this morning I woke to the clock radio gently playing a Rimsky-Korsakov symphony and got about the business of confronting Monday. I made the coffee and set up camp by the laptop and was most of the way through the first cup of coffee before I noticed that it was 0130, not 0530. It was too late to stop it. I was thinking again. Crap.

The five hour Red Team drill had obviously taken more out of me than I had thought. I tossed the dregs of the Dazbog Russian-roast coffee in the sink which was crowded with clutter to be disposed of, and then I thought about that rather than nuclear weapons, but wound up wide awake back in bed, where I opened the iPad and resumed reading a marvelous new book to see if the details about converting raw Tubealloy ore into highly processed weapons grade uranium to build the first two modern weapons of no-shit mass destruction.

You don’t have to use them, but the cover terms of the Project are useful. “Tubealloy” was the name for the uranium ore that was enriched to bomb grade at Oak Ridge and Hanford. The product of those two pafacilites- later joined by others- were to be integrated into a weapon called “the Gadget.” Sort of cute, from this vantage, but the sprawl of what it took to find, process, integrate and delivery the Gadgets to the Empire of Japan might just be the most expensive thing that any government in the world has done.

If you happen to be awake at some improbable hour, I highly recommend “The Girls of Atomic City” by Denise Kiernan. The subtitle places it in the latest tier of oral history, harvested before all the participants have left us, and while those women who retained their memories of that astonishing time were free to speak. The book is indeed “The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped World War II,” but it is much more than that. It is the sociology of the civilization created by mass warfare on an unimaginable scale, a classic American story, and an eerie Orwellian vision of a democratic society that suspended democracy for “the Duration,” and set security “creeps” against its own workforce to protect a secret that would change the world.

All of it in temporary housing in the mud. Most of it performed by men and women in their twenties- the time when people in those days normally paired up- but against a landscape of barbed wire and guards and a secret that could not be named.

What with the North Koreans and the Iranians and their centrifuges, we have all had to consider the world in new ways- atomic weapons in the hands of people who seem at least a little unhinged, and saber-rattling that is going to go along with those two nations- in addition to established nuclear wild cards in Pakistan and India- is going to make this old former bi-polar world a very interesting place for future generations of policymakers.

When I think about it, I freak a little. Better not to think. Or think about getting out of Washington, anyway.

Some of what is coming could result in military action- self-defense by other, publicly unacknowledged nuclear states that you can probably imagine are the number one prospective target for an Iranian bomb.

It makes you a little sentimental for the despised White Separatist regime in Pretoria, which actually decommissioned its atomic program.

We might be doing the same thing. There was an initiative in the Bush Administration that I brushed up against, a program to update our nuclear arsenal, but it didn’t go anywhere then, and obviously is not going anywhere now.

Ever seen a nuke? The ones I knew were intended for use by aerial delivery by Navy tactical jets. They were guarded by Marines who were really excited about having the use of authorized deadly force to protect them. The proficiency drills for loading them were always conducted with dummies that looked just like the real thing, though of a brilliantly different hue to ensure that no-one made any mistakes.

I saw the Real Deal only once, when a transfer was in progress from one secure place to another- I am still not comfortable talking about what and where- and they were things of ethereal and evil beauty. Slim. Luminous. Elegant. Monstrous. Necessary.

I am not going to get into atomic politics at this point, or why the US Navy had tactical weapons, or how this all played in the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP) run by the Strategic Air Wienies in the old Unified-and-Specified Command system for mass retaliation against the Main Adversary, if required.

I was lucky enough to not get tagged with the intelligence support to the loading drills, though we were all expected to participate in the planning evolutions, and were definitely tagged with the command and control aspect of the nasty things- two man rigid control, the famous “cookies” that in my mind resembled the packaging of a Trojan condom, rather than the authentication system for the End of the World as we knew it.

When I transferred out of the deployed unit, it was frankly a relief. Inspections were hair-raising, and there was no provision for errors or do-overs. Open the wrong “cookie” and the next communication was going to be a world-wide secure blast than announced to every nuclear participant in the U.S. Government was going to know you were an idiot, and not to be trusted with the gadgets or serve much longer on active duty.

Anyway, it was better not to think about it.

All of us have heard about the Manhattan District Engineering Project, or at least it used to be taught in schools. I have no idea what they are teaching now- I know the revisionist version of history deeply angered our pal Mac, and provoked a firestorm when the Smithsonian got political about the display of a completely refurbished Enola Gaye, the B-29 that took the first Gadget to Hiroshima.

“There are too many of us alive,” he declared at Willow one afternoon, not long after America’s Attic had to crawl back from a display that conveyed the topsy-turvey view that the Americans were somehow the aggressors and the Japanese the hapless victims of imperialism. “They tried it too soon. Wait until we are all gone,” and he sipped his virgin Bloody Mary pensively.

Kiernan’s book brings the whole thing past the first rough draft of history- the saga of troubled genius Robert Oppenheimer, obsessive General Leslie Groves, the vast swaths of America’s hills and forests and deserts that were confiscated by FDR’s people and devoted to spawning the Atomic Age.
After thinking about other things- and quite happy to have had the chance- the Manhattan Project intersected my life again, and I was amazed to discover that it was not a historical footnote- it was all still there, but had changed mission sets. Now it was about “remediation” of the toxic nuclear waste created in fifty years of weapons production. The mission, the Department of Energy helpfully pointed out, “was possibly 10,000 years long.”

That is Washington for you, personified. Like the interesting fun fact that copper for magnets was hard to get in a mobilized wartime economy. Lacking that critical element, the Project decided on a substitute: it went to the Department of the Treasury and “borrowed” almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion. Treasury officials blinked. They were accustomed to thinking of silver in terms of ounces, not tons. The promise was that the Mint would be paid back, but you know how these things work.

Anyway, years later, and when I hoped my involvement with the Gadgets was done, I was a useful idiot on the Hill. I had access to Navy assets to support travel by Congressional Members and staff. I had a cross-over customer in Armed Services and Energy who supported the Energy account, and she was tired of the heavy-handed minders the Department always attached to her travels through the astonishing and robust remnants of the Manhattan District Engineering Project. We cooked up a trip that managed- barely- to visit some purely Navy activities to justify the travel, and in the interests of efficiency, we also visited Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, the Nevada Test Site, and Yucca Mountain and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, all 586 square miles of it.

It is all still there, at least most of the original parts. It is too dangerous to do anything else with it now. You have to walk up the tunnel cut in hard rock to detonate a nuclear device to really get the creeps. I try not to think about it and mostly succeed. But how it all came to pass is worth a read, and it is about much more than that. On one level, it is about something that is completely inexplicable, which is to say the relations between men and women, and between the races in this country only a little while ago, in Atomic Time.

I may come around to that tomorrow. I vividly recall talking to Mac about how necessary it was to turn the product of the most expensive and secretive project in the history of the world over to a 20-something Air Corps Major named Chuck Sweeny and send him off to incinerate Nagasaki.

I have been there, too, just as Chuck was right after the war. His reaction was interesting, having been the proximate instigator of the horror, and still completely justified in his mind about what he did.

As am I. I think.

As other states are engaged in their own Manhattan Projects, it seems appropriate to think a little about the unthinkable these days, though I will concede that it is much more pleasant not to think of it at all.

(The entrance to the K12 Processing Plant at Oak Ridge, TN. Photo Wikipedia).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Clutter

(I miss George. His stuff seems a little dated these days, but some of it is intensely relevant. See an important correction to an earlier rant below, following this contemplate of clutter.)

George Carlin, or at least his shade, is with me as the gray light comes up at Refuge Farm. His ghost is a good fit for my mood as I do a load of laundry and contemplate a truncated day of rest.

Carlin’s intelligence and skill have not aged particularly well, since the great battles about freedom of speech and wars in Asia have been concluded, and his foes have fled the field. We are a cruder and less informed society now, despite the explosion of communications.

But Carlin’s classic rant about “stuff,” still resonates with an almost Shakespearean blank-verse rhythm in its wordplay.

In fact, some of the “Stuff” that is piled around me includes the complete works of the Bard, on the off-chance that I will need a great quote in a post-attack, no-Internet world. Which would you rather have? A great quote or plenty of ammunition?

Ideally both. But that just feeds the need for Stuff.

“That’s all your house is,” Carlin reflected about the consumer society, “a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

“Stuff” is synonymous with one of his Seven Words you can’t say on the radio, and I will use another euphemism this morning as the light is coming up at Refuge Farm. “Clutter.”

By that I mean crap that is potentially more valuable than the momentary feeling of liberation that comes from pitching it. I have not factored in the gas and personal energy to actually move the stuff. I don’t know. More analysis is needed, or maybe I should just acknowledge that Carlin was right and have a bonfire.

The solar-powered lights are winking out around the white pea-gravel of the Garden of Whatever, and the mercury vapor security light is making up its mind about whether night has really gone.

The coffee is good, but I am looking at clutter and the glowing digits on the microwave’s clock. Red Team at noon, and I am going to have to be prepared with the computer linked to a SharePoint site before that, so departure not later than 1000. Crap.

If I did not love it down on the farm as much as I do, I would have just surrendered and stayed in Arlington to catch up on sleep.

But there was something else. The young and aggressively cheery Realtor was as tactful as possible. He assured me that the wreckage and debris of a career and an obsessive compulsion for eclectic collecting was quite fascinating, but possibly…maybe…would not appeal to all those seeking a two-bedroom two-bath condo in Arlington for under…well, some improbable number of bucks.

I perked up immediately as he bounded the market potential. I had assumed the only way I was leaving the crushing losses at Big Pink from the puncture of the housing bubble was feet first. So, it was sort of bizarre that I should applaud the inflation of yet another bubble by the fools downtown. But, where you stand is where you sit, and after the first conference call of a Saturday I started throwing clutter into my cart to roll down to the Panzer and transfer the mess from one place to another.

(People tell me these are good books. I intend to find out sometime.)

I won’t enumerate the nature of the crap. Books, mostly, good ones acquired through recommendations from alert readers. The ones on top are pristine, for the most part, unopened and the ideas still fresh and contained within the covers. The old friends of literature are still behind pictures- those have to go, for sure- but they too are just clutter.

As I was stacking books on every available surface I realized that I had a whole new library on my iPad, and the only hard copy thing I really have any use for is the Culpeper Clarion-Bugle.

I had both on the deck when the stuff was out of the Panzer and the sun was lowering and it was time to just chill, and watch to see what critters would come out to feed on the pastures.

I missed a brew-fest downtown, the thing ending just as I came across the article. Rosmarie’s barn just up the road is starting the Spring-Summer cycle of equestrian events Sunday morning, and continuing the last Sunday of the summer months. That critical knowledge will permit me to get a cheap horse fix, and be ready for those intense people in giant trucks towing horse trailers down the country road and across the end of my gravel road.

County taxes are going up. The Teachers say it is “for the kids.” The volunteer firemen say it is “for the fire engine.”

Really, the information in the Clarion-Bugle is the only crap I need. Everything else is just… well, you know.

(Beats me. The bronze gecko came from somewhere, and the two gaping toads with the red-glass eyes must be important, like the gold damask doily on which they now sit ominously. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Errata:

In a piece riddled with distraction earlier this week, The Daily implied that the Islamic Republic of Iran was supporting the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Alert Reader Sid (not Sid Vicious, this Sid is quite nice) pointed out that the hard line opposition to the Assad regime has been led since its inception by “Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas of a diverse and ancient land.” The descent into brutal civil war has hardened sectarian differences, and the failure of more mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters.

Thus, the paramilitary Iranian al Quds force and the resources of Shi’a power are flowing to the government, rather than the rebels, who are a proxy for the Sunni fundamentalists supported by our good friends from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

To clarify, the Daily staff holds the Wahabbis, Salifists and Deboandis in particular contempt, along with the Twelfth Imam faction of the Iranian flagship brand of extremist Shi’a Islam. This is by no means a comprehensive list of vicious extremists we don’t like, since there are also radicalized young men who consider detonating bombs in American cities a vital part of their spiritual journey, but also like hip-hop, American community colleges and beating up their wives.

There are no apparent good options for American policymakers, and if The Daily implied otherwise, we deeply regret it. Our thanks to Sid for pointing out the inconsistency and keeping us honest.

– The Daily Staff

Proposal Heck

Proposals can get you in big trouble. I have made a few personal ones- none of them worked out. Better said, they all worked out to one degree or another, but the outcomes had nothing to do with the initial going-in expectations. The business ones are different- I know how that process works, and while painful, they have results I can understand.

Win-lose. Binary. It is good to be busy- there was a long dry spell as the customer tried to deal with conflicting guidance on how it could spend money, or not spend it, as the case may be. It is a strange landscape: the money had flowed in the usual streams (write me if you want to talk about Major Force Program 2, 3 and the Overseas Contingency Operations accounts, hahaha) up until Sequestration loomed, and then we were all paralyzed like Air Traffic Control officers on furlough.

Now things have lurched into more artificially-inspired but quite real activity.

Oh, insert disclaimer here: “I am not a Republican…” Wait, wrong one! “I am not complaining, I am happy to have a job, and find a great deal of satisfaction in supporting our forces in the field even if I am not one of them at the moment. I recognize that this has been a good second career and an honorable one, and we here in Washington have avoided nearly all the travail the rest of the nation has experienced since 2008.”

That said, “Proposal Heck” is not where I want to be this morning- while it is still morning, anyway.

I managed to get through the entire Friday (Friday! The New Saturday!) without falling asleep at the desk due to exhaustion while ticking off conference calls, one by one, dealing with the big and unexpected solicitations that issued through the week from our Government customer. I had a couple writing projects that go along with Proposal Heck, and Saturday (Saturday! The New Monday!) and Sunday would feature more meetings and a Red Team review of our proposal, which is not quite as much fun as a trip to the dentist for a root canal.

I blinked as five came and went and finally the last call had beaten the last issue of the day to death and I could get out. Home or Willow?

God, I was tired. But the hell with it. It is going to be a working weekend and I thought it might be pleasant to go see the people who live in a realer world that were going to have some time off.

I wandered over to Willow to see the usual suspects. I found a hook under the bar for my backpack and sat down next to Jon-without, whose placid demeanor and rakish bow tie- personally knotted- always helps to put the day in perspective.

Then the Other Russian showed up, and I frowned.

I feel like I am being stalked. I get it. With business as tight as it has been, any approach to advantage is fair game, even if I am the target. That does not mean I have to like it. Willow has served as a sort of living room for me over the last five years, and I felt my personal space being violated. I blinked hard and tried to consider a post-Willow world. I could not quite wrap my brain around the concept. Maybe it is time.

Stalkers aside, it was good to see the Usual Suspects. Jamie was back from Boston and planted with a certain luminescent aspect that could have been a reflection of the lowering light of the Spring sun that really, really was trying to beat back the last claws of the Winter that won’t quit. She is commuting to Boston these days for her consulting job, and apparently it had not been a good week.

“Maybe metropolitan-size post traumatic shock?” I asked.

She said she didn’t know about that, except that everyone seemed cranky in Beantown. The Lovely Bea provided a gracious presence on the other side of Jon-without, Old Jim held court at the apex of the Amen Corner, while Chanteuse Mary his attractive other half worked some sort of deal with her pal Judith at one of the cocktail tables across the aisle from the bar.

It actually turned into a sort of old home week, with Ann-Marie and Brian from Pentagon days appearing at the mid-section of the bar. If it had not been for the Other Russian hanging over my shoulder I think I might have relaxed and got with the general sense of merriment.

Instead, I got tense. That is not what I was looking for. I finished my second glass of Happy Hour White and decided to trudge back to the garage at the office and go home. I needed some sleep, and there was a writing project looming for Saturday- that and de-cluttering the unit.

Proposal heck. Hell, it is a paycheck.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Red Lines

Two-thirty, I thought. That is too damn early for anything interesting.

I could not get back down. My brain started churning through what the eager-beaver Realtor was talking about, and getting the unit spruced up for sale. “Thin things out,” he said. “Replace the vanities in the bathrooms. Otherwise, you are pretty much good to go.”

In the back bedroom he looked at the contents of the bookcases. “You have interesting stuff,” he said, a bit quizzically. “But you might want to get some of it out of here before showing it.”

I took his point. I live in a quirky personal universe that is part Steam Punk and strange art out-of-time, dragons and fish and surreal scenes and the décor might not appeal to everyone. So the notion of going through everything in preparation for down-sizing.

But that is too daunting to contemplate for long, except with the Moon peaks out from the corner of the West Tower of Big Pink and the bedroom is lit in brilliant silver.

Getting rid of stuff will be liberating, right?

I shrugged in bed and surrendered to the inevitable. I made the coffee before 0400, and logged onto the company system to see if the input to the proposal had arrived while I tossing. It had, and I began to revise it on-screen.

The most powerful human urge is not procreation, by the way. It is the compulsion to change other people’s copy. I spent an hour or so adding drama and urgency, or at least the words that signify that sort of thing, and moved on to crafting a Small Business participation plan for something else that will happen after a review of several dozen resumes later in the morning, assuming I am not face down at the keyboard at the office.

Somewhere along the way the BBC informed me that Syria had probably used chemical weapons against their own people, even after the President was very stern with them and drew what he called a Red Line in the sand, or the dirt, or whatever about the matter.

I am not quite sure what he can do, without committing us to support the insurgents, who appear to be backed by the Iranians and led by Islamists who will impose Sharia Law if they eventually succeed. Nice. This is even better than running around suburban Iraq looking for evidence to justify the invasion, with the benefit that we are supporting people who would just as soon blow us up.

I was getting a little disoriented. I had been figuring on a variety of contingencies over the last few weeks. I think it was North Korea last, right? Weren’t they going to nuke us or something? And Iran before that, with another set of Red Lines.
After the adventure in Iraq, it is of more than passing interest on how they get- or manage to avoid getting- the truth.

I looked at the clock. Crap. Only two working days until Monday.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Lessons-Learned

(Willow’s secret experiment- don’t tell anyone how much it costs! Photo Socotra).

Old Jim called me up to ask if I was going to stop by Willow on the way home. It was a tipping point- left to my own devices I would have just gone home to Big Pink and enjoyed the mellow afternoon sun that threatened to be overwhelmed by a rear-guard action of the winter that won’t quit.

But I enjoy the human company, and the workplace has been quite dynamic as the Government Customer rouses from its long torpor. I told him I would be by, and got back to work.

Work is good, considering the alternative, and I had the radio going in between conference calls to stay abreast of the investigation into what happened in Boston, and the why of it. I wondered if there would be a Blue Ribbon Panel established, as they did in the aftermath of the attacks on the Marine Barracks in Beirut, or Khobar Towers or the USS Cole Attack.

Nothing as big as the 9/11 Commission, certainly, but something to collect what went wrong. I did not hear anything like that, but who knows. Maybe we will try to learn something about how and why this happened. I have my doubts.

Anyway, when it finally got to the time when I could sling my back-back on the hook under the bar at Willow, I was done with that for the day. I looked over at Jim where he was sucking on a long-neck Bud and told him I could not bear to delve much further into the sordid and pathetic lives of those two welfare losers in Boston.

“I can understand the process of radicalization. To a degree I have felt the process myself, as society appears to be continuing a trajectory toward disaster. The trend is that more of these events are happening. What is a citizen to do, when everything is going in the wrong direction?”

“Have a drink,” growled Jim.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I responded, and yawned. I am not getting enough beauty sleep these days. Brett appeared, Genie-like, and poured a crisp and impertinent glass of white into a tulip glass. I raised it to my lips and let some pour over my soft palate, down the throat and into a warm spot in my mid-section. “Not bad.”

Chris the Sommelier and Barkeep Extraordinaire wandered down to talk to the regulars. I asked him if he was having a burger-of-the-week special, and he shook his head. “We are taking a break on that this week. We have an experiment going on.”

Jim and I exchanged glances. We have both been the subject of other people’s experiments before, usually to no constructive outcome. “What sort of experiment?” I asked suspiciously.

Chris leaned forward, his Devil Dog tattoo on his right forearm right with color. “We are having a Facebook burger.”

Last week it was an egg-topped apple-bacon cheeseburger with barbeque sauce, a sort of bar counterpoint to Tracy O’Grady’s finer cuisine in the main dining room. “What on earth is a Facebook burger?” asked John-with-an-H.

“Ah,” said Chris with a mysterious smile. “It is our usual Willow burger, two patties of organic-raised beef with a nice slice of Bermuda onion, cheddar cheese melt and a big pickle on the side.”

I am off beef at the moment, but I am an enthusiastic follower of scientific experiments, like Congress. “So what is the secret about your usual burger?”

Chris looked up and down the bar and leaned in, conspiratorial. “We posted it on our Facebook page, and priced it at $5 bucks.”

“Five bucks? That is a fabulous price! You couldn’t buy the ingredients at for that, even if you cooked it yourself!”

“Right- it would be a loss-leader if we featured it. What we are doing is trying to see who is visiting the page, and hopefully mold behavior.”

“I don’t use Facebook,” growled Jim.

“Then you will pay the usual price,” responded Chris. “We are in new territory here. Cutting edge.”

“They say the Jihadis were twittering and Facebooking all their lame stuff,” I said.

Jim looked over at me with a wry smile. “I thought you weren’t going to talk about them.”

“I’m not. I am talking about social media and hamburgers.” I looked up at Chris. “How many special priced sandwiches have you sold?”

He pursed his lips. “About five, so far.”

“Make it six,” said John-with. “Special price, please. I saw it on Facebook.”

Chanteuse Mary and The Lovely Bea arrived and watched as Jon-without made it seven, saying he had seen it on social media. I had another glass of wine, and felt it impact my system. I ate John-with’s pickle, which was as far down that road as I felt I could go.

I gathered my crap together as Jon-without’s burger arrived. “I am going to take off,” I said. “Catch me up on the lesson’s-learned for this on Friday, would you?”

Jim nodded solemnly. “Hopefully we will know more by then,” he said, and ordered another Bud.

“I sure hope so,” I said. “It would be nice if somebody did.”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Common Sense

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
– – Eric Arthur Blair, better remembered as George Orwell

Looking back from this small summit on the road to ruin, I recall a time in middle school when “1984” was so distant in the future that it was unreal.

Impossible, in fact. Sitting at the desk in English class at Barnum Junior High School, I looked at the trade paperback volume and alternately watched the dust motes dance in the still air that smelled of old wax and disinfectant.

I calculated what it meant in dog years.

By the time the world of Winston Smith- he even had a screen name like the one AOL assigned me years ago: 6079 Smith W- arrived full blown, I would be a grown man in my early thirties. Not dissimilar to Winston himself, I thought, as I plowed through a thoroughly discouraging look at the future.

It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, and what happened to poor 6079 Smith W was really troubling. I don’t like rats, and I am naturally inclined to be suspicious of bossy people who tell me what to do. Thank God we were not subject to learning history from that revisionist jerk Howard Zinn.

I imagine his trash is going to be part of the “Common Core,” the new syllabus the Department of Education is going to jam down the throats of local school boards. Orwell knew that was coming, too:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

There were other Orwell books I liked. “Burmese Days” gave me an appreciation for what it was like to be an Imperial apparatchik in south Asia. But “Animal Farm” was much better, and was blown away by the assignment that first revealed to me the subtlety of the writer’s craft. It was something simple- symbolism, I think, or the power of metaphor, but the assignment rolled into my 7th Grade consciousness like a grenade.

Orwell changed not only what I thought, but how I thought about it.

I was listening to the radio in the Panzer yesterday when a Wall Street Journal columnist came on to talk about the deliberate furlough of Air Traffic Controllers at major hub airports that would result in inevitable and irritating travel delays.

Finger pointing for blame was going on, naturally, since everything is about that these days, and the 2014 election cycle, but the guy had a point. The Department of Transportation also is going to go ahead and spend a half billion bucks on something called “sustainable cities,” a really important initiative that could probably wait six months, wouldn’t you think?

But they need to make the taxpayers….pay. So, off we go.

I am opposed to government that does not function, since that is a complete waste of time and money, as opposed to the half measures we are used to. But on the other hand, I do not like to fly any more. I hate the airports and the TSA and the small-minded oppression we are expected to accept without protest.

I can feel our world getting smaller by the day. This morning I was juggling Orwell quotes to try to match the government Doublespeak. One really need go further than the titles- all of them- attached to the omnibus legislative vehicles that no one reads before voting on them. I think probably the most spectacular example is “The Affordable Care Act.”

It is Orwell personified. Black is white and white is black, after all.

But it brought back some syntax analysis I remember from that same 7th Grade year with Mrs. Bigelow. My favorite hard-boiled writer, Raymond Chandler did the analysis this way. His gumshoe Philip Marlowe walks into a pub and sits down at a stool. “The sign behind the bar red: “Only genuine Pre-war Whiskey Served here.” I started to count the lies. I stopped at five.”

Orwell wasn’t that whimsical about what he predicted was coming. When he is busted by the state, the Inner Party interrogator gets 6079 Smith W to accept the principles of doublethink. (“2 + 2 = 5. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once”).

The latest perversion of the language is the phrase “Common Sense,” which famously called for the independence of the North American Colonies of Britain. They must be calling Thomas Paine Whirling Tom now.

When I hear those words issue from the lips of a politician, I know there is a whopper coming, like when the President stops speaking university English and lapses into the folk-dialect he doesn’t do very well.

The only time you can tell the Inner Party guys are not lying is when their lips are not moving. And then I panic and realize they are fumbling around in my back pocket looking for my wallet.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Year Zero

(The new calendar promulgated by the Revolutionaries of France.)

John-with and Jon-without bookended the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. I had wrestled with the notion of going to the bar, and the inclination to just go home and cocoon was in ascendance as I walked slowly back from the Mediterranean food cart to eat a salad at the desk while linking up to another conference call.

It was cold, unseasonably so, and waiting in the line made me shiver against the chill.

It is good that business is flowing again, but the system is rusty and there are some kinks that needed to be worked out. I thought a tall drink and some time with the latest addition to the Kindle app on the iPad sounded appealing. Mark Mazetti’s “The Way of the Knife” covered the last years of my professional career with eerie fidelity: the rise of the robot drone and the Special Operations community and all the euphemisms for terminating our opposition with extreme prejudice.

It has become easier to kill by remote control than arrest people, and that is what the game is about these days.

I had to chuckle over some of what was in the book, since it was a classic Washington read with people I knew on every page. Other parts of it, the inevitable parts, made me cringe to have been part of it. But all that went onto the back burner when Old Jim called on the cell. “You going to Willow tonight? There are some things I want to talk about.”

Jim has not been a reliable fixture at his seat at the apex of the bar lately, and if he wanted to talk I was eager to listen. So, I said “yes,” and gathered up my crap at the desk and walked over to take my chances crossing the rush hour traffic buzzing down Fairfax Drive on foot, drivers with their cell phones screwed into their ears.

The bookends of Johns in the bar made Jim a little cranky. He gestured to the space next to him and I moved a stool over to sit next to him.

Jim glared at me as the conversation rolled through the music that was playing in the background- I think we got stuck on The Small Faces and the progression of young Ronnie Wood from boy-toy teen throb to Rolling Stone, and the migration of The Turtles into Florescent Flo and Eddie. Jim was clearly was intent on something he considered important, and between the hard right political view of John-with and Jon-without’s Sedoku puzzle, we clearly were not getting to where he wanted to be.

It was a bit of a pensive afternoon, what with the chill of the weather and events. We all decided to call it quits early, though that provided the opportunity to get at what was bothering Jim when Jon-without and John-with eventually rose and went about their business. There are no coincidences in this world, and though Jim is an Old Democrat, our topic was essentially in agreement.

“It’s the end of history,” he growled at me, ordering a last Bud. I put my hand over my glass- three was enough for me, and hearth and home called out.

“You mean like Fukuyama contended after the Wall came down and the Commies were routed?”

“No, the millennium is not at hand. I am not an idiot. It is the end of our world and it was slipping away and now it is gone.”

I looked at him quizzically. “No, it is all there,” I said. “Mac was right here just a couple months ago.”

Jim nodded. “Exactly my point. The War? The touchstone of all our common experience? Gone. Gone with the fucking wind. The 60s? No news, no relevance. Vietnam? No one remembers, not the President, not any of the kids who may or may not remember to vote. Desert Storm? C’mon.”

“So you are saying that history is over.”

“If no one learns it and no one remembers, we are cut loose. We are in new territory now. No past. The future is not connected to anything.”

“I heard that asshole Tamerlan caused a stink at his mosque when the Imam held up a picture of Doctor King. He was offended that a non-Muslim could be held up as an example of anything. Then he went off on a rant that the bible was nothing but a cheap rip-off of the Koran.”

“Wait, you got to be shitting me. The Old Testament was around- at least in part- a couple thousand years ago. The New Testament is from Christ’s time. The Koran wasn’t written down until around 600 AD, right?”

“It doesn’t matter. People can think up anything they want and start killing because of it.”

“You mean like Year Zero in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea?”

“Or the French Revolution’s new calendar, with all the monarchy stuff scrubbed away. New beginnings, detached from all that came before.”

“That is ridiculous,” I said, finishing the dregs of Happy Hour White. Then it occurred to me that Jim was completely correct. “Wait, maybe it is not crazy. Everyone who lived it is dead. Mac’s war is as far away as Appomattox was to us.”

Jim nodded. “Gone with the wind and even less relevant. I am just describing what is. There is no history. There is only now, and what comes next. It is not going to be based on anything you or me understand.”

“Crap,” I said. “You could be right.”

“Forget about it. It doesn’t matter whether I am right or wrong. I am describing fact. No one knows, no one cares. Not in the slightest. So don’t be surprised at what comes next.”

“What the hell is that?” I asked. Jim took his bull-dog cane off the hook under the bar and leaned on it to stand. He just shook his head.

I pondered the end of history on the way home to Big Pink. And ponder it this morning, with everything new and everything unknown. The news says that there is no connection between the Boston assholes from Dagestan and any other enemy, foreign or domestic. The BBC reported that three other assholes- from someplace in the Middle East- were plotting to de-rail a freight train in downtown Toronto.

No connections. It just is what it is. Like Old Jim says, it isn’t about anything as quaint as “good” or “bad.” It just is what is.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Something Wicked

This is getting tiresome. I wanted to do something about deer repellent and tips from my garden experts, the Russians next door at Refuge Farm, and the Naked Gardener, and specific recommendations from my Coon Ass Cajun buddy about deer and the solid advice about marigolds and best garden practice from a committed herbalist in Utah.

The ground was too cold to get with the program this weekend, though, and we seem to be holding Spring at bay with a half-back’s stiff arm. The harbinger of Spring was limited to the Heckle-the-barn-cat’s imperious stroll past the front door to the garden plot and then a brisk leap up the rail fence with the metal screen around the inner compound.

It was chill in the morning- rising up only from near freezing in the thin chill air. I wanted to stay. I did not want to come back to the City, where I find mysel applying common-sense precautions to the near-term security situation, go-back packed and dealing with the potential for something wicked:

Avoid crowds.
Do not take the train.
Stay alert.

Why do all the kids have their ear-buds screwed in so tight so they could not hear a threat-or a warning- if their lives depended on it?

This is ridiculous in what was a free society, but looking through the reporting this morning on the stuff I do not want to talk about, I see that we are both ignoring the clear and present danger and assuming the invisible shackles attached to the chains that one clearly identifiable group seeks to apply to us.

Ah, well, thus was it ever so, I imagine. But there seems to be more to all this wicked business. I mean, the Russians talked to the FBI not once but twice about that young man with the dazzling smile and the newly found enthusiasm for his faith. Did you see the video of the attack and strategic withdrawal?

Chilling, man. Absolutely chilling.

Anyway, life has to go on. I am not going to beat it to death. I mean, the news we don’t talk about is as awful as anything else: the little city of West, Texas, vaporized. The five Colorado snow-boarders whose loss of life in the worst avalanche in a half-century exceeds the total of Boston Strong?

As I said the other day, sometimes stuff just happens, and sometimes you go asking for trouble and get it.

It is only news when you turn it the paradigm on its head and something wicked comes looking for you. How can you place a bomb on a sidewalk next to an eight-year-old boy?

But as a pal opined this morning, there is likely to be more to all this in the middle distance, and I will hold my peace for now. But Shakespeare always had human nature pretty well, and despite the archaic words and cadence, that serves him and his legacy well even today.:

Horatio:
He waxes desperate with imagination.
Marcellus:
Let’s follow. ‘Tis not fit thus to obey him.
Horatio:
Have after. To what issue will this come?
Marcellus:
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Horatio:
Heaven will direct it.
Marcellus:
Nay, let’s follow him. [Exeunt.]
-Hamlet Act 1, scene 4, 87–91

Somebody ought to follow something, you know? Before it follows us?

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Underground

 

I honestly have no idea how I can have been at the computer since five-thirty and watched the night be overwhelmed by the assault of dawn, and still have not done a damned thing.

I will not include the several streams of invective on everything that is going on, since none of us can do much about Chechen sleeper cells, North Korean missiles on the march, nor the vulnerable critical national infrastructure.

Maybe it is the existence of sleeper cells on my own property that had my attention. Heckle the Miracle Cat is back after a full winter underground. She is a bit skittish now, but I am sure with the resumption of a reliable food stream, she will be caterwauling around the residence again in no time.

In my feeble defense, The Russians bushwhacked me last night- not their fault, as we have not completely worked out the bell signals.

When I dragged my go-bag in from the car, and the 42 Airline mini-bottles of liquor a Hindu flight attendant of my acquaintance stashed with me- I signaled my presence at Refuge Farm with a brisk professional grasp on the bell-pull: “ding ding, ding ding” Arriving signal.

He gave back one-and-a-half bells, a signal with which I was unfamiliar, though it might have meant something on the Protected Cruiser Aurora in St. Petersburg, back in the day.

I shrugged and went into town on a gardening errand in course of which I was earnestly counseled by an avowed naked gardener at the Big Box Lowe’s not to worry about the tomatoes for a week or more- the soil is still too cold, regardless of what my neighbors are doing, and that is a lot.

The rule of thumb, as I understand it now, is that the time is right when you can work the soil naked. That was somehow simultaneously comforting and disturbing, and I put off the issue of the tomatoes to the next visit.

I drove the Bluesmobile slowly back the scenic way to take in a sample of Culpeper Remembers, the eighth iteration of a look back at the Revolution and the Civil War right here in our Fair City. I cruised slowly past the Civil War Re-enactors campsite in back of the Museum, and saw that the Confederates had abandoned the campfire and joined a wedding party on the lawn at one of the old mansions up the street.

Gray uniforms and hoop-skirts. For an instant it was 1863, the last year the Army of Northern Virginia controlled the town. I contemplated trying to get a picture without wrecking the car and could not.

I returned to the farmhouse with the clock approaching the cocktail hour, and succumbed to the desire to sit out back, look at the pastures and review the week’s Clarion-Bugle. It is unseasonably cold this weekend.

I had switched the furnace over to “chill” last week and back to “heat” it came. But in the lengthening shadows, I felt a peace, of sorts, and read the paper for the minutia of life that is not played out with the national news as an intrinsic part of personal life.

Whereupon the Russians swooped into the gravel driveway with Croftburn Farms organic free-range chicken slow-cooked with sweet and savory spices from the Caucuses. Natasha, after all, is from the Crimea, and much of this external news is personal for her. She is a proud Russian and has no truck with either Communists or extremist Muslims.

Mattski is of the view that this is all a trial run for other things, and while there is room for disagreement, the consensus was that it was better to be in the country than the city as this plays out.

It was a hit-and-run dinner, since they had been working hard in the expanded garden all day, and I at least had thought about working. Around the big table on the deck we worked on bell signals, among other things, and then the underground cell here in Culpeper that is going to erupt soon.

It has been seventeen long years since the red-eyed evil looking bastards went to ground. They are expected back soon, and we have to be ready.

They are anarchists, the little bastards, and crawl out of the ground once every 17 years to sing, mate and get eaten like crunchy, winged Milk Bones by canines like Biscuit, the Wonder Spaniel. The cicadas have no discernable political agenda, though I am alert for evidence of one, but let’s face it: they are implacable and they will be back.

They will join stink-bugs and Asian lady bugs, along with the usual gnats and mosquitoes and hornets in making life interesting here at Refuge Farm. Unlike cicadas, stink bugs can damage crops, feeding off fruits and vegetables, and may be targeting my so-far virtual tomatoes. “They won’t kill the plant,” the naked gardener informed me, “but they will damage mature fruit.”

We have got some damn bugs here. Oh, that is was the previous natural order. The Russians are adding 6,000 honey bees today. The bees arrived by UPS, not quite hive-ready in bags, getting to know their queens and each other in preparation for transferal to the white boxes Mattski has prepared.

None of these guys are dangerous, and they do little damage that I can remember from their last emergence from deep cover in 1996. The Clarion-Bugle article helped me out: the seventeen-year variant is a direct relative of the common annual cicada, but smaller and much more colorful. They are shorter, black-bodied, red-eyed and have orange legs, not unlike some of the political operatives back up North.

The key is the noise, which can rise like the crashing of surf on rocks. The males vibrate and make the noise to call the females, there is a thrumming response like at some of the younger-themed clubs on Wilson Boulevard, they mate and the females will lay eggs in small twigs in trees, and then they all die. The eggs hatch and the nymphs crawl into the ground to nap for nigh onto two decades.

To me, it seems a little anticlimactic, but I am a mammal and funny that way, I guess. I am glad Heckle survived the winter. I am hoping she will have all the red-eyed snacks she can handle soon.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com