It feels out of control this morning. Not that it ever was in control, mind you.

I thought maybe I would be feeling a certain buoyancy with the funerals and the estate crap in the rear view, but instead, I have a curious sense of emptiness and dead air.

I would not have expected it. Monday had dawned with an early notation on the calendar. I had an appointment at Walter Reed, a sort of 1/3 progress assessment- and a deal with Baby Doc that if I arrived early for the appointment, she would get me seen expeditiously. My Guardian Ensign was otherwise occupied, and I have imposed enough on my friends and acquaintances for assistance, and looked out at the water pooled on the fresh black-top on the west side of Big Pink’s parking lot.

It was raining, of course, and while I had intended to drink a pot of Dazbog full-bodied Russian coffee before inserting the Bluesmobile into the morning rush, I thought the prospects of some bone-head pranging their auto was high. One act of motorized lunacy out there can act like the proverbial butterfly, and bring the commuting of the entire Metro Region to its knees. I wanted to get in and get out of the clinic. So I got on with it.

I poured a travel mug of the rich coffee, slipped a couple phones and the iPad into my green ammo-carrier and slung it St. Bernard-like around my neck. I picked up the crutches, and went out to the hall to meet my fate.

When I managed to wedge myself behind the wheel, I head the radio reports of sporadic lunacy on the I-66 corridor, and overturned trucks on I-95 coming north to the sprawl of the National Capital Region near the Occoquan River. The GW Parkway was placid enough going north, and the American Legion Bridge not as bad as it could be. But Wisconsin Avenue was a mess, and traffic crawled on board the Walter Reed complex.

Health Professionals and patients were strolling or rolling toward the medical complex from outlying billets and parking lots, and those of us on four wheels joined in yielding to foot-or wheelchair traffic. You have to be alert. The terrain of the National Military Medical Center is hilly, and for those in chairs, a good downhill toward the crosswalk is an opportunity not to be missed.

These are mostly young people in the chairs, so the demographic is not that of pensioners, but of high-testosterone young men in the prime of life. Those are the warriors who fight our wars, and some of the chairs were full-out competition models, and the young men in them, minus limbs, were as competitive as you might expect: wild eyed, bearing down on the rims of their wheeled chariots with fierce commitment.

The chair I have been living in is a utilitarian thing, not fast and very heavy. I eschewed the use of it yesterday since it is just too hard to horse around with the crutches, much less having to carry the sticks balanced on my shoulder. The double and sometimes triple amputees did not have a choice. Some of the latter had powered carts that could really fly, so caution and courtesy around the America Building where the Orthopedic Ward is located is the order of the day.

I was able to secure a handicapped parking spot in the garage, thanks to Raven’s blue placard. I looked at the permanent marker scrawl on the face, under the wheelchair logo. It expires in 2014. I made a resolution to be healthy by then.

I did the trip from the parking garage to the Cast Clinic spotting each tentative forward step on the sticks. A nice lady held the elevator for me, and I appeared in the Cast Clinic with only another Vet is a gray t-shirt, attended by his family. Identical government-issue crutches were at his side. Waiting time was minimal, and I was Baby Doc’s first patient of the day.

In preparation for my minutes with a physician, the duty Corpsman popped open the speed clips on the brace and the leg was exposed in the black clam-shell of the device. He cut off the bandage- apparently we are done with that now- and the long zipper scar is healing apace, though I will spare you a look at how the body does that, exactly.

First, the bad news. Baby Doc is moving on, and completes her rotation at the Clinic on the 30th of June. I am not scheduled to return until July, and thus this will be the last time I see her. “Hey,” I said, responding with a frown. “Continuity of care is the key to cure.”

“This sucks,” she said. “I get to go back to medicine. I will see if I can snag Dr. Anderson.”

Papa Doc, when he arrived, was briefly solicitous and gave me some cautious good news that made me optimistic that I will be swimming again by August. Then he asked Baby Doc what room he was going to be in next, and the complicating factor that the theater was being occupied by an open heart procedure, and I thanked my lucky stars that I was dealing only with the minor inconvenience of the leg.

According to Papa Doc’s instructions, transcribed by Baby Doc, I am authorized to go back to showering (thank Goddess!) and up to 40-degrees of motion on the limb. And stomp around on the crutches to my heart’s content and start rehabilitation exercises 2-3 times a week and not to come back for a month. She flew away someplace and left me to hook up the brace, reapply my shoe, and hobble out to make my return appointment.

The hobble back to the parking garage seemed to go better than the one on the way in. The rain had stopped. The traffic had died down, and only the whizzing wheelchairs populated by the intense young men without limbs provided brief barriers to vehicular traffic.

When I got back to Big Pink, I arranged with Rhonda-the-Concierge to have Leo and the Little Men come up and install the hand-held shower-head in the back bathroom, and the geezer shower-seat. I am looking forward to a nice soak today, as I am sure everyone who comes in contact with me will as well.

And now comes the scary part- exercising and putting weight on the leg again.

I am going to have my buoyancy back. I am going to be able to travel in August, you know? I only need to figure out where.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 (Eby Granite Works did us proud. The new stone is done by computer etching. To match the other stones would have taken a stone carver four days work. The footing is nice and will last as long as the little town of Shippensburg does. Photo Socotra.)

It beyond weird here this morning. It is the first day of the rest of my life, and I am not quite sure what to do with it.

I swear I will get back to caring about the Greek Debt Crisis, and the leaking of classified information and the financial abyss that is confronting a do-nothing Congress and an apparently can’t-do Administration. That is really important stuff, or so I am told, though I must confess to a certain distraction due to Epiphany (DDTE).

That, of course, is the product of the long voyage with Raven and Big Mama.

Annook and her daughter wore little raven broaches at the Spring Hill Cemetery yesterday in tribute to his memory. I included a pair of his Navy wings in the urn, along with a pair of Big Mama’s earrings. And their Social Security Cards, just in case St. Peter wants to check their eligibility at the resurrection of the flesh.

I was awake around 0300 yesterday. Dim gray pre-dawn arrived presently, and I could not drift back off. There was too much to do. ENS Socotra was coming to pick me up at 0730, and my older son and his lovely fiancé were going to pile in as well.

The remains were in the trunk of the Bluesmobile and needed to be transferred. No remains would mean no burial. Impossible to forget, right? There was more not to space out. The contents of the safe deposit box had been labeled and apportioned according to negotiations. In the background, the affairs of the estate were wrapping themselves up, with some nudging from me in the wheelchair. The probate process had been initiated, and basically closed out. Bequests were paid to the grandchildren. The Broker and his implacable investment company appeared, finally, to be satisfied that Raven and Big Mama were actually dead, and the last recalcitrant insurance company appears to be on the verge of acknowledging the reality of eternity.

So, with that, I wondered whether the last details were going to work. The logistics of the ceremony in Shippensburg suddenly swam into focus in the pre-dawn. Was the headstone really in place? Were there errors in the inscription? Had the gravedigger done his work? Was the hotel acceptable to the family, which was flying in from all points of the compass: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New York, North Carolina, Texas and northern and southern Virginia?

Should I have arranged for a tent, and chairs for the bereaved? Crap. I checked the weather on the iPad in my bed. Brilliant sunshine was the forecast, according to the information on the screen that lit the darkness. We had dodged a bullet there, and I sighed in relief. I should have contacted a local funeral home that does these things, I know, but I took my chances and dealt only with the gravedigger and his father who run Spring Fill. Whew.

Would the reception details be in place? I have rarely felt this helpless to influence events. Cousin Jo Anne sent a fuzzy camera-phone picture of the gathering of the family on the patio of the Shippen Place Hotel the night I was supposed to be there- the Raven and Big Mama sides of the family looking at one another, with one connection between to translate between them.

I felt bad, not being there the evening before, but sometimes things don’t work, and arriving with my sons and the newest prospective member of the Socotra Clan seemed so natural. If the arrangements had worked out, that is, and my stomach knotted at the number of things that could go wrong with the plan, and reflect poorly on the memory of a wonderful couple, the last of their generation, and more particularly, me.

I have talked to the folks, periodically, in the days since the white rectangular boxes arrived in the mail. The mingled remains were then in the urn that rested near the foot of my bed, where I have spent way too much time since returning from the surgeon’s knife 24 days ago.

ENS Socotra showed up right on time, in his Service Dress Blues. I had not asked him to do that, though I recalled vaguely that I had worn the same thing the last visit to the family plot. That occasion was to lay away my Uncle, the patriarch of the family, and the lack of a formal church event was traditional.

The Socotras had been big in the Lutheran Church in the little town since before the Confederates raided the place on their way to Gettysburg. There are still stained glass panels in the church that filter the rich light of the farm country. But Raven never picked up that particular passion, and Big Mama, juggling the Presbyterian-Catholic tumult of her family had no strong preferences in any direction.

We stopped at the hotel and saw the throng of family. That much had worked. I wondered about the rest, and after some general discussion, the plan emerged that most of the family would walk the few blocks to the Spring Hill Cemetery.

There, the plan was to gather under the plinth that carries the granite Muse and her anchor, say a few words, and consign the earthly remains to the ground where all those other Socotras lie. I noticed one had the notation of service in the 55th Pioneer Infantry in the AEF of World War One, and decided to look into it, now that there will be some time.

The family straggled up the hill in a ragged line. The weather was beautiful. The hole was dig. There were no discernable typos on the Pennsylvania granite that will mark their place so long as the adamant gray stone stays intact.

(Family from all the points of the compass. Photo Socotra.)

At precisely 1100, I opened the formal aspect of the ceremony, leani

ng on my crutches. There were remarks by the kids, Then remarks by anyone who cared to, and memories at the foot of the stones that mark the rest of the elder clan.

“Lunch will be served back at the Hotel,” I said in conclusion. “I am proud and humbled at the distance you have all come to be here, and that you have joined to celebrate the lives of our parents.”

Since I can’t walk, my Guardian Ensign drove us back to the hotel with my cousin, who shares Raven’s given name, an honor bestowed by my uncle, even as I was named in return for him. My cousin is a survivor of a horrific cancer that took his larynx and nearly his life, but with an electronic voice box, he announced that he was the only one in the family who traveled with his own public address system.

He has not lost his sense of humor, either.

The reception itself was fine. A little impromptu, but considering it had been done on the phone, I was satisfied. Everyone seemed to get enough to eat, and the conversation, prompted by Annook’s Memory Book of photos and recollection, was lively.

A couple hours into it, people who were driving on to Ohio for the second inurnment at the Catholic side of the bluff-top burying ground began to edge to the door.

I settled up the tab with a large tip, and paid respect to those family headed north and east before the ENS wheeled me to the SUV.

He and his brother loaded the wheelchair and crutches as I leveraged the rigid leg into the car.

He fired up the engine and we wheeled slowly out of the parking log behind the hotel. The family was scattering back to the winds of this century. I am sure I will be back, I thought, and when I can walk I will check the old family store that still stands on Earl Street, and the solid brick exterior of the one-time family seat just up the block.

I waved to my brother, and to his family gathered at their rental car. They would soon  head West, toward the big river.

The ENS turned left on the main drag and we started down the road to the Interstate.

“Well,” I said. “That seemed to go pretty well.”

There was no disagreement as the car hit the entrance ramp and we accelerated back to our lives.

I had a couple stiff ones back on the balcony of the unit, when eventually we arrived and the ENS wheeled me upstairs. He took off to get out of his Blues and re-enter his life. I sipped my drink with my shirt off under the last warm rays of the June sun. I listened to the raw joy of the kids splashing in the pool down below.

“Done,” I murmured to no one. “Done.”

(View from the balcony, afternoon of the first day of the rest of everything. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

(Oliver Hazard Perry shifts his colors from USS Lawrence to Niagra, War of 1812. Photo Naval Academy.)

Well, you could go watch Greece melt down this weekend, or ignore the lies, half-truths and general crap spewing from the Continent and the Campaign and do something fun.

My Guardian Ensign has agreed to drive to the funeral tomorrow in Pennsylvania. It is Mom’s birthday today and Father’s Day on Sunday, which marks the ceremony in Ohio.

Then, I think things will be done, and I can pay more attention to the reading list- I bought the “Game of Thrones” four-novel pack for Kindle, and Craig Johnson’s “Hell is Empty,” and with the grim fascination of a mouse confronting a mongoose, bought that “Confront and Conceal” thing by David Sanger.

That should cover the next week or two. Then I got a shock and realized I am going to miss The Blues appearance in Baltimore this weekend.

I was alerted that there is some crazy stuff going on in the Charm City to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, a cautionary conflict that doesn’t resonate much unless you are Canadian and get to say “Kicked your ass, Yank, and we are still here!”

For Americans, we got The Anthem, and with Fort McHenry front-and-center in our bellicose national song, you can imagine the pride that Baltimore has with the commemoration of the Dawn’s Early Light. In addition to the Blues, there will be tall ships in the inner harbor and parades and Chesapeake Bay street food under the roar of the noisy F/A-18 jets of the Flight Demonstration Team.

We are not much interested in the hoopla here in Washington, possibly because our local recollection is of a more successful British incursion. The Red Coats skirmished against an improvised force of Marines on the Bladensburg Pike and brushed them aside. They came to the new capital of the young Republic and burned the White House to the ground. Dolly Madison, the Congress and the Executive Branch took to their heels ahead of the Royal Army.

It was a defining moment in the war, a demonstration of impotence that everyone in DC would just as soon forget.

We got some other cool stuff out of the little war, though. I have always thought it bizarre that our Fighting Blue Water Navy’s most famous epigram  spoken by gallant Lawrence …”Don’t Give Up the Ship!” was made most famous by his classmate Oliver Hazard Perry….on Lake Erie!

Young Captain Lawrence took command of the USS Chesapeake at Boston and sailed out to engage HMS Shannon on the blockade line. He got his ass kicked. Chesapeake was captured and Lawrence was killed- his actual quote was something like “Fire Faster- don’t give up the ship!” which was inspirational but didn’t work.

In tribute, Lawrence’s pal Oliver Hazard Perry had part of the epigram sewn onto a battle flag, which in fact was the motto of victory off Presque Isle, on Lake Erie. Perry was in command of USS Lawrence and got shot to pieces before giving up the ship and transferring his flag to USS Niagra, which he then sailed decisively into harms way.

Perry’s brief report of the action to General (and later President) William Henry Harrison was memorable in its succinct brevity: “We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.”

This, of course, is also the model for the modern phrase: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Thank-you, Pogo, and Great American Walt Kelly for that.

(The Blues. Long may they wave. USN Photo.)

It would be fun to be there to see the Blues, bit alas, duty calls and I will be in the southern midsection of Pennsylvania (“Two great cities surrounded by Alabama!”) doing what needs to be done.

The berating of several honored friends finally penetrated yesterday. Kindly, they said: “You fucking idiot, have your son drive you if you insist on going and DO NOT go to Ohio.” I mulled that over, and thought about the consequences of being by myself in the Bluesmobile, several hundred miles from Bethesda if I fell navigating the hilly ground of the cemetery at Bellaire. Or the consequences of a fender bender with my leg rigid in the brace. Crap. New plan required.

So, my Guardian Ensign will pick me up in the morning, and we will do what needs to be done.

Pity. I love the Blues. They are the class act of the flight demonstration world. The best show I ever saw was at Fleet Week ’98 in San Francisco Bay, from the fantail of the Flagship docked at Fisherman’s Warf. Mayor Willie Brown (former Speaker of the CA Assembly and all powerful) was in attendance wearing our ship’s ball-cap.

What a guy- no kidding. With his solid public sector union backing and whacko environmental coalition in the state assembly, Willie is probably personally responsible for the fiscal catastrophe that the Golden State is in now (with the no-tax initiatives) but what an effective (if deranged) legislator. Cautionary tale in there someplace, but I have to get on and do other things.

Oh, say can you see?

(Mayor Brown and some guy at Fleet Week San Francisco in 1998. Photo Socotra).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

I had two martinis at around what used to be the cocktail hour and drifted off to sleep for an hour or two on top of the covers after the big trial run to Move the Bluesmobile and navigate on the crutches around Big Pink. This convalescence is screwing up my drinking. It is too hard to visit the Loo, so I am practicing a certain liquid intake management, and that has lead to an alarming sobriety at all sorts of unusual hours of the day.

The wheelchair is swell, and I spend most of the waking day in it. But it is too hard to horse around and in and out of the car when my guardian Ensign isn’t around. This was a big deal on the road to recovery.

Woke about eight pm, worried about another endless night stretching out before me. Thought briefly about going out to the living room and turning on the television, but I have recently demonstrated that is stupid. I picked up the iPad and flipped it open, entered my access code and finished the latest of a series of twisted thrillers.

Getting back in the habit of reading is pretty cool, I thought, and when I had finished that blood-soaked epic impulsively started another.

I gave up a little past midnight, folded the snuggly cover over the brace and then tossed but did not turn the rest of the night.

As the darkness flooded in around me, I took stock. The trial run demonstrated that I could navigate the police cruiser. That meant I could make the funeral- at least the one for which the portion of Raven and Big Mama’s ashes in the urn in the trunk were intended.

If I can get this behind me, then life will be pretty good. Lying there, looking up in the darkness, I took stock of things. I can work the crutches. Don’t seem to need the chair, which was a significant barrier to getting out of the building on my own.

So, job one, healing, seems to be going all right. Job two was to make this enforced inactivity somehow productive. I used to be a voracious reader, before I got the electronic device Attention Deficit Disorder that afflicts all of us these days.

I set a goal of reading a book a day- that guilty luxurious feeling of falling into a book, feeling the world around me drift away and live in the theater of the mind.

Rolling through the titles, I had to turn on the bedside lamp, fish around for my glasses, light up a Lucky with the ashtray perched uneasily on my chest, and clicked on the iPad to see what I had accomplished.

I will grant you, this is not optimal pool-side reading. I will try that next week, ins’hallah, if the crutches mobility permits. I know, I know, no swimming for another eight weeks. But it will signify something. Glancing at the titles on the Kindle App on the second flick-screen of the iPad-2, I was surprised to see what has tumbled off the list so far in the first three post-op weeks:

The one I just started. Lee Child: “The Affair.” A prequel in the Jack Reacher stories. Apparently Tom Cruise is going to take on the role on the big screen, which seems unlikely for a short shit like him. Jack Reacher is about six-five and two-twenty and kicks the crap out of all sorts of people even though he carries no luggage except a toothbrush and replaces his clothes when they get soiled. I am not so sure about that, or how his active romantic life is independent from having one pair of skivvies, but like I say, we can suspend disbelief curled up on the Big Bed. In this outing, Child reveals how Military Police Major Reacher leaves the Army in 1997 after uncovering sordid political involvement between Army Legislative Affairs and a brutal local crime committed near a base in Mississippi. Opening scenes in the pre-9/11 Pentagon brought back memories strongly.

The one before that was Jo Nesbo’s “The Leopard.” How the hell these ascetic Scandinavians have so thoroughly appropriated the Noir genre is a little bewildering. The book doesn’t make complete sense, but neither did the original LA sleuths of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose dark words invested the sun-drenched streets of LA with a wild and romantic presence. Norway just has dark, and a lot of caffeine. In this wild serial killer adventure, we get some walk-on characters from The Snowman and some other sadists. For a break from the darkness of the Olso winter, there are chapters set in Hong Kong and Goma, Congo. It is creepie beyond belief. Don’t ask what a “Leopold’s Apple” is. Trust me, you do not want to know. If you read it, well, you will be as freaked out as me and existential protagonist Harry Hole of the Oslo Crime Squad.

I dipped back into the historical murder mystery thing with Philip Kerr’s “Prague Fatale.” Kerr started with a trilogy of novels about Germany in flames. First was “March Violets” (Hitler takes over); then, “The Pale Criminal” (life in hell, 1943) and “A German Requiem” (note to self: do not lose major wars with the Red Army). Since then there have been several more, ranging through the life of hard-boiled public-and-private dick Bernie Gunther. This one is about the run up to the assassination of Reichsprotector SD General Reinhard Heydrich in Bohemia and Moravia. Bernie is a tormented reluctant SD officer in this edition, and he has seen (first hand) what the Special Action teams are doing in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. It is another horrifying episode in the disintegration of Western Civilization in the Nazi expansion towards Gotterdammerung.

Craig Johnson. Two police procedurals set on the Rez in Montana and Philadelphia. New author I had not heard of with a Wyoming connection like C.J. Boxx, whose stuff this echoes. It is a lot of fun, with reverse riffs on Tonto and the Lone Ranger, with Johnson’s Tonto being the smarter, more spiritual and tougher of the two. Modern adventures in the Wild West:  “Kindness Goes Unpunished” and “As the Crow Flies.” Great fun- I will read more of him.

Ann Coulter, the irredentist. In “Treason” she attempts to dynamite the conventional wisdom on Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, she asks, “Was Tail-gunner Joe wrong about Soviet penetration of the US Government at the highest levels?” No, he wasn’t. Proved by Soviet archives opened (briefly) after the Cold War and US the US Government decryption of Soviet diplomatic cables from WWII. Her point made, I put the book aside as the vitriol may be justified but is hard to take.

Edward Klein: “The Amateur.” A slightly superficial account of a more than slightly superficial Administration.  With more leaks this morning (“Secret American Airfields set up all over Africa!”) you have to wonder if this is just incompetence or pure mendacity. How could you play with the lives of American kids in harm’s way overseas? Being with Harry Hole in Goma, Congo, last night convinces me I am not going back to Africa personally any time soon.

Andre Norton: “Distant Shores.” She was a great science fiction writer of the post-Golden Age, and one of the first I read when I discovered I could buy adventures at the RexAll for a quarter (or .35 cents) when I was a kid. Fun nostalgia. This collection is a triple novel, one third better than the old Ace Double Novels that they sold, two books printed head-to-foot or the novelty. Maybe it read better when I was still taking Percocet.

John Irving: “In One Place.” John mines a lot of ore we have seen before. This is one kid’s clearly autobiographical adventure through the entire astonishing spectrum of weird human social and sexual interaction. Fun but made me a little queasy. Like everything else these days, you wonder, at its conclusion, if John is a genius or just working out some junk we didn’t need to know about.

That is nine in 21 days, or a little off the pace I had hoped to maintain, but it is going to be a long summer and one has to do what one can to stay amused. It is interesting to be reading again. It is a going to be a pity if that is one of the arts that we leave behind with eight-track tapes and the Betamax.

All those other books are lurking on the shelves, too, from months (and years) gone past.

Visit from the Goon Squad. The Room. The English translations of whoever that last Nobel Laureate from Latin America was. All those Alan Fuerst ‘30s spy novels on the shelf. Mom’s last two book-club editions in real hardback covers. The 20 volumes I own (one more is incomplete) of Patrick O’Brien’s definitive sea-going sail-operas with Jack Aubrey and that strange Maturin fellow in the Age of Napoleon.

If there was world enough, and time. Man, I haven’t even begun to deal with the magazines yet. I may not have time before the leg is healed and I have to go back to digital ADD.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

(George Stephanopoulos on set. Photo ABC News. I think that used to be a network.)

I have to move the car today. The leaflet from the box told me in no uncertain terms that the re-paving people are coming to do half the parking lot, and if the Bluesmobile is still parked proudly near the front entrance to Big Pink it will be towed at my expense.

Normally not a big deal, just walk down to the elevator, flirt with Rhonda at the front desk and bonce out the glass doors, fire up the big V8 and move it to curb parking- or the Eglizia lot across the street.

But wait, you say. “You gonna do that in the wheelchair or try it on the crutches?”

It is Day 20. I am going stir-crazy. I have to be careful, and I also have my parent’s urn in the trunk, and the urn has to go in the ground in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

If I can get to the car today, and successfully move it, then I should be able to get to Pennsylvania this weekend.

That is the theory, anyway. We will see how it works out in practice.

I was going to try to explain how freaked out I was by the evening news, and the nature of television itself. It was sort of a test drive of the new big screen television I bought- you know, three-D capable, hi-def, wifi enabled, all that crap.

I have not watched it. Got out of the habit, I guess, preferring real people at the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. But I am a shut-in, and thought I might try to recreate a world that used to exist- the one where I got home from the office, poured a drink, listened to the Ex describe the tumultuous events of the day in Fairfax County, and see what the rest of the world had been up to while I drove.

Then I would turn on the local news, transitioned into the National News for one or two iterations, and then weaned myself off real news into Access Hollywood or something as that first and second martini eased the day into night.

Last night, I turned on the gigantic box to take it for a test drive. Put the bad leg up, and propped pillows around the brace. It was sort of wild, an entry into a far country. I heard my first political ad of the season. It sucked. Then, one of the proud old legacy networks told me a story about a man treed by a bear in Alaska. it wasn’t news- even anything that looked like news.

It was entertainment- of a sort. Computer graphics of a guy attacked by a bear on a trail near Anchorage.

In my time up there in the 49th state, I always understood it was only prudent to be packing some heat on the trail in self defense, not that you could actually bring down an angry bear in time, but maybe this was too close to the artificial civility of the city or the guy believed in virtue an coexistence.

His call, I thought. Three or four minutes were spent on the bear attack, with lavish production values. I did not blame the Mama Bear. The guy up the tree seemed like a weenie. George Stephanopoulos seemed interested.

In the Clinton Administration, George used to have a heavy five-o’clock shadow. I wondered briefly if he had laser work done, and if political operatives were the new logical pick for anchoring the evening news.

It was pretty amazing to see how far down the mighty networks have come. I think I switched from the Mainstream Media News to watching Simpsons re-runs in 2002 or so. It has been a full decade away from the networks, and gave up on television altogether a year or so ago. The Netflix discs would sit for months accusing me next to the DVD player.

I checked my queue the other day. I am at least three years behind on movie releases.

Amazing that television was one of those things- like hard copy newspapers- that was so integral a part of my life and then- poof!- gone.

Looking at the man up the tree with the angry bear in stunning computer graphics was a trip. This is news? I thought. No wonder we are in deep kimchi.

Or up a tree, as the case may be.

Want to read something provocative? Try this one out.

I am taking no position on it, though it is a way to try to interpret what is happening all around us.

Take it for a test drive to see whether you think we are on the brink of one of those major tectonic shifts in how power is allocated from the people to the idiots in Washington.

Let me know what you think. I will be back in a few hours, ins’hallah, to sit and look blankly again at the computer screen. There is nothing to watch on television, that is for sure.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

(70th Anniversary of the Battle of Midway coins from USPACOM and COMFACFLT, with macadamia nuts and dried peaches. Photo Socotra.)

Kimo was in town on other business- important stuff, dealing with aging family and surgery and you can imagine how well attuned to his circumstances I was.

Except that I was on the other side of it, and not completely comfortable with the vantage. I mean, they say that when you are over the hill you pick up speed, but being confined to a rolling chair most of the day, it is uncomfortably apparent where you are going. And look out for the crest of the hill. It is all downward velocity from there.

Kimo came by for dinner. I offered- a little half-heartedly- to cook, since if I am braced between the counters of the little kitchen I have a reasonable confidence I can stay upright. He took pity on me, though, and graciously brought a feast from Vapiano, the restaurant on the ground floor of his hotel.

“Hope you like it,” he said, producing plastic containers from white upscale paper bags with little rope handles.

He gave me the blow-by-blow on events in Hawaii last weekend over a fine smoky bottle of ’09 Centine Toscana with a bottle of Pellagrino mineral water, con gas.

It was a little surreal, being so continental: strawberry spinach insalada, tabouleh with just the right touch of basil and yoghurt, tiramisu ai mille limoni with delicate little clams. Of course, the irony of the Eastern Med cuisine coupled with the subject matter only heightened the conversation.

Sometimes people ask me where I am from, and Michigan was so long ago now that I just say: “From the Navy.”

Kimo is one of my favorites of the new generations. He has had a singular focus on Asia since his earliest days, and now he sits as the Assistant Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Just between us, we agreed to just call the place “CINCPACFLT,” the traditional name for the command before Uncle Don Rumsfeld got the vapors and decreed that only his boss was the “Commander in Chief,” and prohibited the use of the title by those of us little people who thought the command had actually won a war. Go figure.

Anyway, I was so dim as a junior officer that I thought being forward and operational was what counted. That gave me a 7th Fleet tour on Ma Midway, and then a follow-on in the wilds of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, with a bonus five years on O’ahu at PACFLT and then at THIRD Fleet.

What a parade of characters from that time! There were irate Iranians, bellicose Koreans, militarist juntas and a resurgent Soviet Pacific Fleet presence that bristled with nuclear arms.

Around that time I wised up to the game and decided to be a careerist weeine. I was tired of the East Coast looking down on us Far East vagabonds. The further from Norfolk you were, I discovered, the more translucent your career became.

I got back to the East Coast, and ensured that I got a Med deployment under my belt so I could more effectively deal with the Norfolk Mafia who shuttled between the World’s Largest Naval Operating Base (NOB) and the hothouse of Naval District Washington.

Kimo did not do that. He has his standards, and they are high one. He had a single-minded fascination with the Far East, and he has had the coolest operational and staff tours to prove it. He is the current occupant of the chair in which our pal Mac sat years ago, and Jake later on, and of course where legendary Eddie Layton advised CINC Chester Nimitz on how to dismember the Empire of Japan.

Over the slowly diminishing level of wine, we were two old Asia hands again, talking about , talking about our favorite topic: the rise of the Dragon of the Middle Kingdom, and where America’s Navy was going to play in the strategic pivot back home to Asia.

It is heady stuff, considering how limited my horizon has been of late, and once dinner was shoveled aside, he showed me the pictures and video from the commemoration of the battle.

In the pictures, Mac looked indomitable. He of course is the only survivor of the CINCPACFLT staff that pierced the JN-25 Naval Code and enabled the courageous kids to smack the Japanese where they least expected it. Mac was not up to the ceremony, or better, he could have done the ceremony, but the air flight looked to be too much for him in the wheelchair.

I am with him. This was a real event, though, since it may be the last one to be held with vets on the island itself 800 miles northwest of Honolulu.

Kimo went. There were two other 90-somethings who were along for the ceremonies, one of them a still-ramrod straight Marine who had been on Midway Island when the battle occurred.

(Two hung-ho Goonies at Midway Island.)

There was a ceremony there, too, three hours by airplane to the place where the Fish and Wildlife Services now manages the United States strategic inventory of Gooney Birds. The pictures were fabulous, and the video Kimo captured of the memorial wreath laying in the lagoon’s tranquil waters off the pale white sand beaches made me a little misty.

Not as funny as the Gooney Bird who tracked him down with an implacable gaze, but that is another story.

Kimo is off for Seoul or Beijing, or Singapore or someplace. He is part of this strategic pivot to the East, and I am here to tell you, that Greatest Generation crap didn’t end with Mac.

They are still here. And we are damned lucky they are.

(Reverse of the commemorative coins. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

(Etneded forecast of central Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Image courtesy of The Weather Channel.)

I got stabbed in the heart while seated in my wheelchair at the dining table. It was a reminder from the flower shop in the Little Village By the Bay about Mom’s birthday. I always sent flowers for that event, and for Raven’s later in the summer, and the anniversary in September.

No requirement for that now, unless it is to send a floral bouquet to myself in remembrance, or to the cemetery in Pennsylvania. I don’t like it when sentiment sneaks up on me like that, and I clicked through the menu to delete the account.  Then I remembered that this is the coming weekend for the funerals- and there is no getting around it- I am going to be traveling again.

Damn- it will be 22 days since the surgery by the time we get to next weekend, and the ceremonies and burial of the ashes of the folks. I hope I can pull off my little portion of the event with a little class. Then, suddenly, I realized I needed to publish something about the ceremony for any of the distant relatives who never left the hamlet there in south-central Pennsylvania.

And I realized I ought to think about flowers for the gravesite, and maybe glance at the extended regional weather and see if we are going to need a tent. Ten percent chance of showers, they say. I guess we will take our chances.

Thinking about Mom’s birthday drew my attention to my own. I normally try to ignore it. Last year was one of the round even numbers and it freaked me out a little bit. This one is not so bad- it is a low number, albeit in a decade I did not ever really anticipate actually happening, and there are many more of them before I have to confront something with a “7” at the beginning.

That I would be spending the birthday in a wheelchair is something that would not have occurred to me this time last year. What an amazing journey it has been.

Everything I knew was wrong, and you can start the list anywhere you would care to and it winds up the same way. I get the sense that the world was shouting to get my attention and not succeeding.

It finally did, big time, and now I am healing, and remembering, and thinking. The sense of loss has diminished, except for those occasional stabs of sudden immediacy.

It is a lovely day. I can make it out to the balcony and catch the late afternoon sun. The pallor is leaving my skin. Looking at the extended forecast, I think that life is good, with a ten-percent chance of showers.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

(Former stainless staples now in gull-wing configuration and removed from my flesh. Photo Socotra.)

I saw the face of medical care coming at us. It wasn’t a Death Panel, per se, but I was pretty interested in what I heard. It is not so much about health as it is about resources. If you want to call it something fancier than what people are calling the mechanism to protect medicine from patients, you could call it what the professionals do: ‘triage,” or you could just call it what it is.

Resource decisions.

Anyway, the insight popped up as Papa Doc was working the four beds in the Cast Clinic on the second floor of the new America Building at Walter Reed. Baby Doc was at his side, along with Judy, the volunteer assistant. I was present with ENS Socotra for a little weight loss program yesterday morning. It was all steel: here are the 23 staples that were removed by the second class Corpsman with whom we were goofing around.

I was in the second bay in the Cast Clinic. We got in early that morning, and hoped to escape the same way. I was upbeat, since in a pinch (and it is a pinch) I could escape the clutches of military medicine as soon as the first of July, when the new Company Medical benefits are expected to kick in.

But I like the team at Walter Reed, and the frequency of the visits should diminish over the course of the next nine weeks of enforced convalescence. Baby Doc was proud of the line of gleaming stainless steel that marched from below the kneecap to well up the thigh. I asked how she did it, and she said she had a cool staple gun.

“Whack, whack whack!” she said with a smile, blowing past the end of the bed. I noticed she wore earth shoes, which is apparently an optional uniform item. Baby Doc is an Annapolis grad, and later of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), the only federally-funded medical college in the country.

“Doc, what is the obligated service requirement for all that education?” I remembered the pay-back requirement for getting a masters degree through the Navy, and the OBLIGSERVE incurred was two years commitment to active duty for each year of education. Baby Doc smiled.

“I specialized in orthopedic surgery,” she said briskly. “That gives me an obligated service requirement of 18 years.”

I gave a low whistle. “That is some commitment. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank God. It would be a looong time otherwise.”

She went off to do something else, and HM2 began to take his little surgical pliers and break each of the 23 staples on their backs, first working his way up, and then working his way down. It tickled, but not in a way that made me want to burst out laughing.

I don’t want to violate patient confidentiality, so just imagine that there is a consult happening in the bay next to the one where ENS Socotra and I sat drinking coffee he had procured on the concourse one deck down from the Cast Clinic. Note to readers: it helps to have a commissioned officer with you as an informal adjutant in these military settings. Most of the care at Walter Reed is provided by enlisted personnel, protecting the Medical Corps officers, and it seems to add some juice. Or maybe it is just my imagination.

Anyway, just for argument’s sake, imagine a discussion between a physician- one of the few and much in demand- and a young ROTC student with a sports injury. There was some discussion about next steps. MRI was inclusive, apparently, and the medical consensus appeared to that a scope with camera was going to be necessary to determine exactly what was wrong.

Imagine you heard something like this: “We would like to get to that, but probably not until August or September. We have nine cases of combat injuries coming in today alone, and we have to concentrate on stabilizing them.”

Imagine, further, you heard a concerned father, and a very concerned young person trying to broker a deal. Imagine that the Physician was concerned, and regretful, but unable to put the kid ahead of a solider who had just stopped the angry shredding blast of an IED with his-or-her lower body.

Speaking hypothetically, I might have looked over at ENS Socotra and mouthed the words: “Was I lucky, or what?”

Imagine that a deal was brokered, only the services necessary would be provided by a Doctor who had not yet reported at a facility located thirty-five miles up the road at Fort Meade, where many activities have been concentrated by the forces of the Base Re-Allocation and Closure. Not optimal, of course, and commitments made in this ward were not binding on a physician in another, but that was the best they could work out- hypothetically speaking, of course.

It is just a question of resources. There are not enough to go around at the time that you might want them. In the case of my imaginary ward-mate, he was a kid who wasn’t actually even on active duty. But it is his future- college starts in August, and if he misses it, he may miss a career and fundamentally change his life.

I finished my coffee as HM2 plinked the last of the stainless piercings out of my skin. I thanked him for his professionalism.

“Nah, ain’t nothin,” he said. “We have to put the things in our own legs to practice taking them out with the least amount of discomfort.”

“You are very good, HM2,” I said. “And thanks.”

Baby Doc was very stern with me, as she outlined the recuperative goals for the next two weeks. Flex to 30-degrees, no more, and while prone only. Rigid vertical lock must be engaged when ambulatory on the crutches. No getting the brace wet. Invest in a shower seat and keep the leg dry. NO swimming until further notice- probably 68 days away, depending.

I dutifully repeated the instructions back to her, not certain that if I fell again before things healed sufficiently I would not be on my way to Fort Meade or somewhere really inconvenient to talk to a Doctor who had not yet been assigned.

ENS Socotra wheeled me out of the ward when he had bandaged the angry-looking incision and re-strapped the Bledsoe G3 Post Op Brace on my pathetic excuse for a left leg. We stopped to get the follow-on appointment that Baby Doc had directed, and then managed to get the chair into the elevator and head for an escape.

“Man,” I said. “Was I lucky.”

“Luckier than the guys coming back from Afghanistan today,” said the Ensign. “They are going to be mighty busy here for a while.”

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

(David Sanger and his new book. Photo New York Times.)

David Sanger has a new book out. He is a thirty-year veteran reporter with the sadly diminished New York Times, and his street creds are impressive on the Washington beat. He has seven years as the Gray Lady’s White House correspondent, during which of course he covered two wars, Iran, North Korea and other rogue state issues, and America’s efforts to deal with the rise of China.

He did Bush and Obama. His new book is called “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power:”

You can imagine it got me going pretty well, since in my professional life I have never seen such sustained cavalier disregard for the preservation of the nuts and bolts of our business: Sources and Methods.

I have been troubled by the rush of the media to disclose intelligence and operational details of operations that cost blood and treasure to create, and secrets being as ephemeral as they are, with disclosure they pop like soap-bubbles.

There is a lot of discussion about the aftermath of the bin-Laden raid, which was a real eyebrow lifter. Think for a moment about what it is we get when an operation scoops up dozens of computer hard drives, pocket trash, and all sorts of leads and contact information.

Even better is the exploitation of human intelligence through interrogation, though the opportunity to do so in the case of scum-bag Osama was lost. I will go ahead and buy Sanger’s book, though of course someone has already run their mouths about some really amazing stuff.

I would include in that the discussion of the killing of  al-Qaeda’s second-in-command this week, noted operational mastermind and scumbag Abu Yahya al-Libi , who was killed in a US drone strike.

(National Security Affairs Advisor and former Fannie Mae lobbyist Thomas Donilon. White House Photo.)

A “top aide of US President Barack Obama” termed al-Libi’s death a major blow to the terrorist outfit. I assume that is Tom Donilon, the National Security Advisor, but Jay Carney the Press Secretary piled on with details from the podium as well.

In the cyber regime, that includes the STUXNet virus- really a cool netbomb that harnessed human engineering techniques to leap hard firewalls around the stand-alone Siemens software that drove the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran’s not-so-covert atom program.

Or the recent disclosures about the FLAME virus, apparently also targeted at our buddies in Iran. I am not sure exactly what this one is intended to do- it is unclear if this variant of malware is a tool of collection or destruction. Or both.

And this is about basic SCADA systems, too, the dumber older brother of the usual suspects in disc operating systems- DoS, Windows, Mac OS, et. al. SCADA is the stuff that turns on lawn sprinklers, manages pipelines, and maybe turns off the power grid. All this stuff used to be stand-alone and hard to tamper with.

Not so much, any more.

There is a lot of dual-use bad stuff out there, and for all I know it is lurking on both of our hard-drives, too. I don’t have a good feeling for what could be happening. If you do, I suspect what you have been reading does not fully appreciate what is being released into the wild of the World Wide Web.

You can go chapter and verse on disclosures about every military or covert action conducted lately. Beyond the bin-Laden raid, the details of the drone strikes conducted in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and in the depths of the Yemeni Empty Quarter are announced from the podium in the Press Room of the White House, right over the remains of FDR’s swimming pool.

It is pretty close to having Mr. Roosevelt come out and talk about exactly what he was going to do once Ike and the boys broke out of the hedgerows and headed for the Rhine.

The bin-Laden thing was spectacular, you have to admit, and maybe it is because neither the media nor the Administration have any particular experience in what happens when things don’t work out quite the way you want. In the excitement about the Abbottadbad raid, the rush to disclose everything about it was breathtaking.

Could we do something like that again, if the chance popped up to get the current undisputed al-Qaeda #1, the whacky former Egyptian physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri? Just askin’.

Life must be stimulating for the good Doctor these days, since between Bush and Obama, they have killed more than thirty top al-Qaeda commanders. Good on ‘em, I say, but I have my doubts that success against one is success against all, particularly when we are so excited about trumpeting the details of our successes.

Al-Qaeda may be on the ropes, but their franchise operations are still chugging along. I would like to see them dead, too, and keeping a modicum of operational security about how we are going to do it seems only prudent.

I mean, Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) continues to roll out innovative ways to slaughter us. They were responsible for the attack on Northwest 253 over Detroit, after all, and the even newer and recent disclosure of a new generation of allegedly undetectable underwear bombs.

Oh, wait, I only know about that because we found out all about the CIA operation immediately. Which disclosed that it was NOT CIA, but rather a British MI-6 partnership with Saudi Intelligence that actually did it, and the disclosures happened so fast that the dedicated (and heroic) agent who penetrated AQAP had to run screaming ahead of the people he had pissed off.

I mean, really. Only people with no clue about what happens when you go one time too many to the well and someone gets their face blown off. Who would treat this stuff as fodder for the 24-hour news cycle? If you think I am talking about National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, you would be warm. He is the guy who took retired Marine General James Jone’s place after he succeeded in undermining him.

Donilon, BTW, is a lawyer and Fannie Mae lobbyist by experience, and has no known expertise in military or intelligence affairs. Maybe it is one of those OJT things- his previous government time was as a Public Affairs Spokesman at State, which is to say, his background is talking about things.

I think it is long past time to try not to do that. I mean, of course there is an election on, but jeeze Louise.

So long as AQAP is still out there trying to ruin our vacations, maybe the silent treatment might be right for covert operations? I am thinking the time might come when we head to the magic tricks locker to save our bacon and discover that the cupboard is bare.

Bob Gates is one of my personal favs as Secretary of Defense. David Sanger’s book describes a cool meeting between SECDEF and the blabby National Security Advisor. In the week that followed the killing of scumbag Obama, I was bewildered by the profusion of technical details that were in the press; everything from the composition of the team, the canine members, the stealth characteristics of the SPECOPS helos, details on Team SIX and tactics.

The latter might- I can’t say conclusively- have played into the devastating attack that killed dozens of SEALS and allied special operators in Afghanistan a couple weeks later. Anyway, in the flurry of once-classified information, Sanger says the Mr. Gates went over to the White house the week after the bin-Laden raid. He told Mr. Donilon that he had “a new strategic messaging theme.”

“What is that?” asked Donilon.

“Shut the f@*k up,” said Mr. Gates.

I really miss Bob, you know?

(Robert Gates as SECDEF. Photo DoD.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com