OK- you are just going to have to bear with me on this one. It requires a bit of a deft touch, since there are two clear paths by which I might spin this memory. I could be my usual snarky self and play it for laughs, mocking a profession of seers and mystics that is as old as the race itself.
Given the increasingly coarse nature of public discourse, that would naturally fit better, but this is an experience that I went through two weeks ago, and doubt if I ever will. Let me give you some background.
A mutual friend of Mac Showers is working on a book about what really happened at Pearl Harbor immediately before and continuing long after the morning of the attack. She takes it all personally- she had family who were key actors in the events surrounding one of America’s biggest military disasters. In the course of her research, she came upon Mac, and as part of an effort to contact as many Pearl Harbor survivors as she could before they departed, called Mac at his apartment at The Madison and would talk for hours about the people with whom he served.
That is how I met The Macaroon Lady, a title she earned through her love for the Willow’s delightful airy dessert. Mac would mail her a dozen periodically when they showed up from Kate Jansen’s pastry kitchen. I have talked to TML frequently since Mac crossed the Styx, with me serving as a knock-off version of him for matters concerning naval intelligence jargon and procedures.
As you are by now painfully aware, I am working on Mac’s long biography, and frequently I find myself kicking the lower drawer on the desk about some simple yet important bit of information that I should have asked him about when I could. During a call shortly after New Years, I think I said so. “Dammit, I wish I could just ask him. He made himself available fifty or sixty times, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
“What if I could find a way to let you ask those questions?” she said. And that is where this story really begins, and where I ask you to suspend disbelief. In this age of politics, that should not be a leap of faith.
Lest you think I am just another devotee of the Ouija Board, I will put this out there for consideration, and why I do not dismiss notions about paranormal stuff out of hand. In addition to dozens of sort of strange things I have run across, there are three vivid instances containing facts that do not fit my normal world view, the one I normally attempt to subjugate at Happy Hour.
The first of those, of course, is the near simultaneous passing of Raven and Big Mama, my wonderful parents. Dad died in the nursing home around lunchtime. Mom was seen active and alert when she was down in the lunchroom at Potemkin Village. She returned to her room and was seen by staff watching the Turner Classic Movie Channel. At the next visit around three that afternoon, she was found collapsed on the floor of her closet. The folks at the Village said it looked liked she was changing clothes to go out.
Two points about that. She was not told that Dad had died. She did not go out on her own since we took the car keys. Simple, really. I am left with the conclusion that 63 years of marriage had built a communications path so strong that only the end of life could terminate it. Obviously it took Dad a little while to shake off the fog of dementia that took him and go get His Sweetie.
The second personal event is not circumstantial, if a bit stranger.
When I was assigned to the THIRD Fleet Staff in the mid-1980s, the command was located on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor. As the Pacific Anti-Submarine Warfare commander, it was deemed necessary to have an officer on the island on call, 24×7, and accordingly we established one of the Navy’s traditional all-purpose remedies: a watch bill. We would have a periodic requirement to stay on the island overnight, since it was (in those days) served only by the redoubtable Ford Island Ferry, and it did not run after taps.
To accommodate our requirement, a bunkroom on the second deck of the island Dispensary was assigned for our use. It was historic for several reasons. The courtyard of the building had been struck by a Japanese aerial bomb in the attack, and afterward, the building was used for triage of the wounded and as a morgue for the dead.
In the film “In Harm’s Way,” our bunkroom was the place they filmed young Patricia Neal sitting behind a desk as The Duke boldly strode into room, her silhouette profiled against our now-shabby room. Painting for the movie was the last maintenance the place had seen in years.
Anyway, with nothing else to do, I read messages at the HQ until nine one night, got my book and walked down the darkened street to the Dispensary, climbed the ladder to the second deck, slid the key into the solid old wooden door and enter my sanctuary. To say that the place was eerie would be an understatement, and I took off my uniform to sleep in the single bed in my skivvies.
Sometime in the deepest part of the night I was dreaming. It wasn’t one of the usual nightmares- the running dream or the falling dream- this one was just images, none of which made any particular sense until I realized I was looking down at a figure under thin Navy sheets on a single bed in a darkened room, moonlight flooding in Patricia Neal’s office window.
I watched myself stir, and then sit up, looking directly at me in the upper corner of the room by the door.
And then I was integrated in my body again, on a lumpy mattress in an old dark room that smelled vaguely of disinfectant and mold.
So, take that as a contribution to my personal ambiguity about the spirit world. There are components of it, and of the human brain, that I do not understand. If there is anyone out there that does, please do not hesitate to drop me a line.
Of course I recognize that these are suggestive rather than conclusive events. But there was a later time in my military career where I discovered to my considerable bemusement, that our program had been funding a paranormal unit for several years.
I will tell you this: if you can get the most hidebound organization in the US Government to fund telepaths for nearly ten years, there is something there. The unit was only called on for missions for which all other conventional approaches had been exhausted.
The demonstration that convinced me was the after-action report regarding the kidnap of a one-star American general in Germany by the Red Brigades. After all other leads had gone cold, the Unit was tasked to do their best to find him. The reports the Talent produced were ambiguous in nature. Some of them were like: “subject is cold and it is dark where he is.”
Not much in the way of actionable intelligence, and of course the hope had been that ‘remote viewers’ could glance up at street signs on demand and perform real-time targeting. Apparently that is not how it works. But against all hope, the General was released and extensively debriefed. When they laid down the time line against some of the Unit reports, they matched up nicely. Of course it had been cold and dark. It was the German winter. The general had been locked in the trunk of a car.
I understand you cannot see much from there.
This was not the unalloyed success that supporters wanted, and in the nature of Washington projects with a significant giggle factor, it was transferred out of DoD and to the CIA for management. The folks at Langley did a blue ribbon review and announced that they could find no application of remote viewing to produce “actionable intelligence,” and they killed it.
Of course, they didn’t say there was nothing there. The report just concluded that it could not be relied on for military or covert action purposes. End of story.
Which it is for the Unit, but the story goes on. The Macaroon Lady had gained her trust and confidence after years of experience with mountebanks and frauds in one of the oldest cons in the book. She told me she had gifted me a reading with a medium who she could trust. I was informed that I would be speaking to Karen Anderson, Medium, at her office in Seattle in a couple weeks.
Naturally, I did my homework. Here is what I know about all this. The paranormal has been exploited by charlatans for thousands of years. If there is something there, it is not an on-demand capability. It can not be weaponized, per se, nor can it provide information that is not inherently ambiguous. The capability flits and it wanders, if real, like a ghost through the human mind itself.
But those are the conclusions of the Central Intelligence Agency. I know that Mom and Dad could communicate outside the normal means, and I know that I have seen my own sleeping body. But I will have to get to that tomorrow, when you will meet my medium, Karen Anderson. She is a remarkable lady. But like I said, more on that mañana. I had no idea we were going to get to the very heart of one of the things I had been meaning to ask Mac about.
Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com