Point Loma: Circumnavigations
Marvin Creamer, a Mariner Who Sailed Like the Ancients, Dies at 104
“No GPS for him, not even a sextant; the sun and the stars did nicely. He was the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments.”[1]
Long before I went down to the sea to take my chances on ships, I had memorized this verse written long ago by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:[2]
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.
I don’t know why I have remembered it all of these years, but it wound up meaning something once I first beheld the vast, watery desert of the ocean blue. First, you don’t go to sea, especially on a small boat lightly – it is a deadly place for the unwary and unprepared – just watch any episode of Gilligan’s Island. Odds are not in your favor even if you survive a shipwreck, and you probably aren’t going to be shipwrecked with Ginger or MaryAnne. And oh by the way, shooting an albatross is extreme bad luck. Liking pissing to windward, don’t do that shit, either. And make sure you keep a weather eye out for sea bats – even more deadly than the COVID-19 carrying variety to the unwary…
Okay, I digress. I also have a circumnavigation under my belt, performed aboard the USS CARL VINSON during most of 1983, and it was great. But not in the same league of a feat as that performed by Marvin Creamer on a small boat in 1982-1984, without instruments. Hell, I’ve been offshore several times on long-distance sailboat races over the past 20 years and I would never, ever dream of going out there now without my trusty GPS, an HF radio, SATCOMM, and EPIRB. The last race I was on we even had the internet via satellite as well as AIS. Nothing as ballsy as what Marvin and his crew did – I was on a 100,000T nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, after all, but it was still a challenge back then. We had no GPS, just LORAN and Transit SATNAV; we did sun shots at noon every day, and star sights at night during bridge watches. We were underway for nine months, to include two 70+ day stints on Gonzo Station and made a dozen port calls on five continents. I was single, a LTJG and in my early 20s. it was a heady, almost hypnotic adventure back in that golden haze of time but sadly, it is not like that today.
Interestingly enough, we were pretty close to Marvin and his crew during their transit from Cape St. May to Cape Town, South Africa. I remember reading the night orders and NOTAMs that we had to review and initial before every watch. For a period of time after clearing Ascension Island and before we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, we were instructed to be on the lookout for a small sailboat that might or might not be in our area; to determine and report his location if sighted or contacted, and render assistance if needed. It seemed a little weird to me, since I was more concerned about dodging fast merchant ships in the shipping lanes off Africa with sometimes 60kts of relative motion closure in the pitch dark off the Skeleton Coast – so fuck a small sailboat. But now, looking back, it was Marvin we had been alerted to look out for, so he had the US Navy in the South Atlantic as sort of lifeguards while we were in the area. But I was not the first in my family to make a circumnavigation, just the latest.
USS SHANGRI-LA (CVA/S-38) – Still One of the Best Carrier Names, ever
My uncle Guy was a WWII Pacific Combat Vet, flying SBDs, and later a Sky Raider pilot in the 1950s, flying out of NAS Quonset Point along with my bud B’wana Jim’s and Vic’s fathers. His squadron was assigned to the air group on the USS SHANGRI-LA. Over the course of a two-year tour, the Tokyo Express (as she was known) completed a circumnavigation of the planet during various deployments to Westpac, the South Pacific, and the South Atlantic while transferring from San Diego to Mayport. He told me they made about 15 port calls all told, to include several exotic places in South America that Navy ships never went to before, and probably won’t ever again. This conversation occurred before I had graduated high school, and I was already hooked but didn’t really know it at the time. It only took me five years of college to figure it out. Join the Navy and see the world (which is mostly covered by water, by the way). Given the choice, I was glad to do it on a carrier, not a small sailboat as did Marvin Creamer. What he did was true guts ball stuff, and likely a feat that will never be replicated except maybe by some weirdo Euro-weenie guy like Dieter from the SNL sketch “Sprockets” wearing skin-tight black pajamas lying semi-prone on an interviewer’s couch while trying to prove some obscure point or position on the green ecology, global warming, and the threat that human existence poses to the planet – whatever that might be.
Dieter and the Gang – And now we dance…
So, like many things these days it won’t be the same as what I and my uncle experienced, now going on what way too many years ago, but the chance for a circumnavigation is still a brass ring worth grabbing. If you get the opportunity, go! and take that ride; life is short, your career is even shorter, and no one will ever pay you to do it again. Marvin Creamer took that risk, albeit under more extreme circumstances, and now has bragging rights for the ages.
I remain your faithful servant.
Copyright 2020 Pont Loma
www.vicsocotra.com
[1] Source NYT, online edition 17 August 2020.
[2] From the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Point Loma: Star Wars
Editor’s Note: It is a rare and welcome thing to have contributions from the Socotra Writer’s Panel. I have a marvelous rumination from he redoubtable Marlow which is waiting for a September release. Today we have Point Loma’s take on SPACECOM and the future- one that appears to be marching ahead of us at every turn. There is plenty to talk about in terms of the social impact of the COVID virus, or what people think is reasonable adaptation to the virus. I am trying to keep track of it all, but Point Loma touches on things that are not changing, but have already changed. We are going to be different, but we don’t understand what is rushing toward us. Oh well, that has not stopped our follies before, and as we have often said, what could go wrong?
-Vic
Star Wars
Rep Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas – First President of the United Federation of Planets?
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of all of the COVID-19 doom and gloom, and the vapid dogmatic posturing of the Marxist-Leninist-Socialist (oops, I meant Democratic) and Republican conventions – neither of which I watched. I’d rather keep my mind in the stars, since it is a lot safer up there although I long for real phasors that work on Planet Earth just in case the libertarian hate-and abolish/defund-the-cops movement comes to my neighborhood to make their point to us quivering balls of white privilege and micro-aggressions.
Just to keep things lively, Rep Dan Crenshaw managed to get included into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) a proviso that requires the Space Force to adopt Navy ranks vs. what is currently in the Air Force. As you well know, the Air Force adopted Army ranks (and signature bus driver blue-dyed uniforms) drawing from its legacy of being the air arm of the ground forces primarily before and during WWII, of which my father was a part, and then there was the big separation in 1947, and the Key West agreement in 1948 which still checkers today’s inter-service politics to a certain degree. I mean, we Navy guys tried to ditch those pesky Marines at Guadalcanal in 1942, and yet, here they are…
Besides, I like a guy with an eye patch. There’s a great story about a guy wearing one who lured this hot woman into bed and after consummation of the act of coitus, curiosity got the better of her. Thinking that her partner was asleep, she inched up on him and lifted the eye patch to see what was underneath and was rewarded with a wink. I’d like to think that Dan is that kind of guy – he’s winking at us in his own style.
Anyone with half a brain could spot the fun that was going to come from all of this asinine sandbox politics – grown men and women in uniform holding senior ranks acting like the spoiled brats that we have raised, playing their stress and time out cards. Spacemen and women, cadets, it’s all going to become true. Right now, if the Senate agrees with the House version of the NDAA, Navy ranks within the Space Force is going to become law – and Starfleet will become real.
And of course, there is nothing like the original Starfleet Captain to come out of the woodwork to foot stomp it – it may be fun for him and great entertainment for the rest of us wags on the sidelines, but people in the know realize that he carries a lot of weight in this debate.
We may not have starships yet, but we also didn’t have instantaneous Dick Tracy global communications 20 years ago, either. Going to space may prove to be too hard on the normal human body, but maybe not on robots and future cyborg derivatives thereof (see the movie Blade Runner and its sequel for details). And if you are really curious, you should be reading about Elon Musk’s brain chip and Computer-Brain Interface (CBI), as well as what is going on at DARPA with Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which is today $88.5M of your tax dollars invested in developing human-computer neural interfaces. I’ll bet you didn’t realize that you voted to fund that research – I didn’t until I started to read about it…
In the meantime, we do have our current planetary solar environs in which to experiment; and people are learning to spell cis-lunar space in a hurry to stake out that non treaty- confined high ground for all sorts of the normal nefarious purposes that snoopy, power hungry governments can conjure up as justification for large expenditures of national treasuries. Yep, we are going to have space fighters flying Moon and Planetary CAP and overwatch missions – mark my words. And the performance requirements will tax both Newton’s and Einstein’s physics. I still love one of my favorite naval War Colllege dead guy quotes about Newton and complexity since it will apply to the fight for dominance in space:
“We must evaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect war may have on them. To assess these things in all their ramifications and diversity is plainly a colossal task. Rapid and correct appraisal of them clearly calls for the intuition of a genius; to master all this complex mass by sheer methodical examination is obviously impossible. Bonaparte was quite right when he said that Newton himself would quail before the algebraic problems it could pose.”[1]
At any rate, it is coming as fast as the next election which Vic has done such a great job of covering and his painting of the real political picture and all of the delicious deviations and succulent variants from believed ground truth from his hideaway at Refuge Farm. I just thought I would throw this into the fray as it will be interesting to see how the future imposes itself upon us. I hope it gets better than it is right now.
I remain your faithful servant.
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, who else?
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com
Point Loma: Death of the Ready Room
Editor’s Note: Point Loma has some thoughts on identity in the institution we served. There is nothing more personal than your name, right? One of the most important characteristics in the culture of Naval Aviation was the re-naming that new arrivals in operational squadrons received. In no small part it was the establishment of an identity associated with the people you flew with, your character in situations of stress, the aircraft, the ship and the maintainers who kept you flying. The name was earned, not invented. “Point” and “Vic” are part of a tradition that is ending, and it is a significant one that may affect the way we fight. More on the political circus tomorrow.
– Vic
The Death of the Ready Room
Bombing Six on Enterprise – Waiting for the Call to Launch at Midway, June 1942
Author’s Note – I don’t condone call signs that are outwardly sexist, racist, or otherwise personally demeaning. We never tolerated that – but pushing the buttons of prudes and pressing the edges of prudence were always acceptable back in the day. It was part and parcel of the Ready Room – the great equalizer and destroyer of overblown egos – if you couldn’t make it there, survive and thrive, then you were soon to be just another statistic in the great weeding out of those found wanting.
Well, here we are in the COVID-19 La La Land, where every day is like Ground Hog Day. Those of us high-risk individuals take our temperatures every day and pray that the passing cough or runny nose is not the precursor to a one-way ticket to the ICU. Meanwhile, the twinkies and snowflakes that we used to abhor and knew would rue the day that they would be in charge, running our Navy and Naval Aviation, are now pretty much there, at least in the PC Navy run amok.
I was a huge advocate and proponent for the genius of the Ready Room and its peculiar ways, to include how one earned or was assigned callsigns. You could literally make your reputation in 15 seconds, and it would follow and/or dog you the rest of your life. Now, I’m not so sure.
We could see the end coming, starting with Tailhook ‘91, which served to undo everything of operational excellence that we had achieved in the first good Gulf War. I was an attendee at Tailhook ‘81. Those of you who know me well know that when I think there is something wrong with something that involves liberty, alcohol and our female party guests, then it’s really fucked up.
I knew that we had a problem then, and it was only a matter of time before it bit us in the ass. Top Gun actually put some distance between reality and hype, but our greater demons did rise out of the earth to ultimately devour us Naval Aviators in the midst of our hubris.
Callsigns were assigned or earned by reputation or individual acts of bravery or outrageous reckless stupidity – that was sort of the law, and you could pull all of those at the same time. The Ready Room gave you your callsign, and that was that – you wore it either as a red badge of courage, honor or shame. You couldn’t change it (unless you changed coasts) or order up your own – not allowed. Since I was a Westpac sailor but operating in the eastern US, I caught a few guys trying to pass themselves off as someone else by assigning themselves a new callsign. My favorite example was “Flounder,” who as an XO and A-6 war hero from USS Midway (CV-41) told all of his now Hornet JOs that his real East Coast callsign was “Duke” – it was fun to pierce that balloon. But that was then, and this is now.
I got my callsign 40 years ago, the day my orders hit the squadron’s read board. The aviators had a hard time trying to figure out my last name so they went to “Point Loma,” since it was easy and the Ready Room does move on to other business. “Point” I was and remain to this day. As I said, you can’t fight it or change it, just accept it. You may not like it, but the Ready Room of that day
could give two shits for what you like or don’t like – but if you didn’t like it and were stupid enough to complain, then you became a “special case” which is where no one ever, ever wants to be (see my earlier piece on Wog Day for more about that). You might as well have clicked a stopwatch on your career because you weren’t going to last long in that environment – one that suffered no
fools.
However, you can get your callsign changed – by doing something even more stupid that surpasses what, when, how or where you were when you originally were awarded with it. My favorite story involves a young stupid-ass Hornet pilot who got the callsign “SIR,” which was an acronym that translated from “Stuck In Room.” It seems he had managed to lock himself into his bunkroom- the “BK”- and wound up missing a hop, which was a cardinal sin. He was an amiable little moron, smart enough to know how to fly a Hornet but not the sharpest – which I guess was one of the reasons that he was awarded a new Ready Room moniker.
During battle group work-ups, there is a never-ending series of drills, or what we call the SOE – Schedule of Events. Over two-week period or so, the SOE gets more complicated to the point where you start to simulate combat, battle damage drills, and rescue operations for downed aircraft/aviators. Here is where SIR made his true mark. We were operating off SOCAL, and air wing operations were centered on our training areas and ranges on San Clemente Island.
San Clemente is a paradox – it is both a bombing range and also a nature preserve. At some point, we had to simulate a downed-aviator rescue – which meant that we had to helo in a volunteer survivor, who then had to enact all of the rescue protocols – radio authentication, visual signals, helo extraction, etc. Most aviators forced to do it hated that shit, since it meant a day when they couldn’t fly. I actually volunteered to be the designated survivor one slow day during work-ups, since I was on flight status and used it as a means to get off the ship and get some fresh, non-jet fuel-laced air. This day, however, belonged to SIR, who was volunteered by his squadron mates to demonstrate a degree of stupidity that still defies description.
Helo Rescue – Thunderball
So, SIR gets helo-lifted on to San Clemente Island, where he is set down on a promontory on the south end of the island. The Mediterranean climate of SOCAL is actually arid, semi-desert, so it was dry, and ripe for fire. The normal rescue evolution can take several hours, so down time is sort of expected – but leave it to you dumber-than-average Naval Aviator to find a way to liven up
his existence. When flying, we are afforded a whole lot of survival gear, to include those little screw-in red pencil flares like the one James Bond used to mark his location in the coral reef outcropping in the movie Thunderball.
So, here is SIR, on a semi-arid desert island, with too much time on his hands – three hours to wait for his “rescue” and lots of cool James-Bond kind of shit in his survival vest. So, our hero decides to do an inventory, and finds his screw-in pencil flare kit, and screws one in. With a 10-15kt cool breeze blowing from the north, and a six-hundred foot sheer cliff behind him a couple of hundred yards to the south from his designated pick-up point, he aims said screwed-in flare horizontally into the wind, and depresses the firing button. Said flare does its thing – working to perfection. It flies a hundred yards or so, and then torches off a brush fire in the dry conditions, which is now advancing on SIR with flames growing across his dim-witted but now alerted horizon. Not looking good for our hero.
SIR, now horrified at what he has accomplished, takes off running to the south where-there-is-the-sheer-cliff. He manages to get his PRC-112 rescue radio out of his survival vest, and fortunately the battery is fully charged – what happens next is classic. He manages to select the “Guard” frequency (243 mHz for military international rescue) and effects the following radio transmission:
“MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY. Santa Catalina is burning!”
So, what is wrong with this? First, he issues hisemergency call on a broadcast frequency normally used by ships in danger at sea, not some dumb-ass Navy Lieutenant on the cusp of being roasted like so much roadkill by a fire he set himself – Darwin Award stuff here. And oh by the way, he doesn’t even know what the fuck island he is on – so the Coast Guard LA/Long Beach Sector and Navy rescue folks out of Pt. Mugu are now going to go looking for something like a burning ship sinking 60 miles away from where the real on-scene action was – the very real prospect that SIR was going to soon to become a crispy critter, but thereby enhancing the human gene pool.
Fortunately, our E-2 bubbas who were going to be part of the now very real rescue scenario were already airborne on a triple cycle, and were able to cut through the bullshit and figured out how to retrieve SIR off San Clemente before he was toast, calm down the Coast Guard, and get everyone’s shit in one sock. However, as my colleague L.T. is/was want to say, “…we had some ‘splaining’ to do.”
SIR had the ignominious distinction of earning a new call sign – “Pyro.” His career was short, but pretty colorful, even fiery while it lasted.
I guess callsigns are now going the way of the dodo – a symptom of a toxic culture. My advice to people who don’t care for their callsigns is to get over it and get to the business of naval aviating – that’s your job – to be the best. If you are all worried about what people call you then you don’t have your mind right.
Naval Aviation is unforgiving – there is no mercy for the clumsy. No one will care what your callsign is or was when you are dead and maybe killed a few more trusting innocents by making a fatal mistake, and no one will want to fly with you if they think that you are incompetent. Hiding behind not liking your callsign should be a warning to everyone around you– steer clear.
I’m worried that the current PC climate is more inclined to try to make everyone happy, which means we carry and advance some people through the training process who should have been sent home to do something else a long time before they have the chance to kill innocent people mis-flying real expensive airplanes because they can’t cut it, just because they got their feelings hurt.
Well, it’s hard and meant to be so and not everyone can do it but somehow now those found wanting are somehow entitled for the kid gloves treatment – the kind of shit the Ready Room would have rooted out immediately 40 years ago. Well, guess what? I don’t care; I don’t have to fly with you, and the bad guys don’t care, either; they will cheerfully flame your ass given half a chance.
Anyway, the fearless heroes of Big Navy dodged the bullet and made Chief of Naval Training (CNATRA) the fall guys for taking flak from the troops, good and bad. Here’s the latest PC policy:
https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/policies/call-signs.pdf
People used to be afraid of us. Now, I’m scared of us since aviating excellence and strength of character now seem to have been relegated to a backseat behind hurt feelings. And of course, the next thing that is coming is that you will soon be able to choose your own callsign, no more Ready Room culture – it is or soon will be dead.
I guess now is high time for the robots to take over, since the leadership wants all of us humans to be colorless, asexual drones. I’ll bet you can have a better Ready Room conversation with a robotic pilot in the future; they will have more personality and you can’t hurt their feelings, or so we can hope.
I remain your faithful servant.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com
Point Loma: Hot ‘Lanta
Rep John Lewis (D)
I was somewhat bemused but not unsurprised to see that Vic chose to write about the passing of John Lewis in “Information Operations” which is a great piece. I was thinking about doing the same, but for different, more personal reasons. It all sort of centers on Atlanta, doesn’t it, and in particular the airport. We used to have a saying that when you died in the South and were on your way to Heaven, you had to change planes in Atlanta.
My stepfather Henry was a great man in his time – lawyer, Mississippi Circuit Court Judge, Campaign Manager and later Chief of Staff for Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman (D), and then President of what would become the largest title insurance company in the US. He was the son of a Baptist Minister and Sunday School teacher from Shebudah, Mississippi, and attended the Cumberland School of Law in Tennessee right after graduation from high school. It is sort of weird that my wife and kids never knew him as he passed so many years ago – it’s like we are talking about a ghost. In his time, he was personal friends with every politician in Mississippi and Alabama, and even introduced us to George Wallace one day at the capitol in Montgomery – I worshipped the ground he walked and the water that he navigated upon. But as a child of the old South he grew up as a racist and white supremacist, until one Friday afternoon in the Atlanta Airport, he changed. It took one special man to do that, and it is very much the story of a road not taken. You might even say that it was an experience for him that was unforgettable.
Nat “King” Cole
One sultry and rainy Friday afternoon in the old Fulton County Atlanta Airport in the summer of 1960, he was experiencing the pleasure of a Southern Airlines flight delay for thunderstorms, waiting for his connecting flight to Jackson. The airport was crowded as it always has and ever been, and hot – but there was an open seat next to him. An older, courtly black man approached him:
“Is that seat taken?”
By racist reflex, my stepfather, not wishing to sit next to a black man, lied:
“Yes. It is.”
The black man nodded courteously, and then went elsewhere seeking a place to sit and rest from the oppressive heat. It was then that my stepfather emerged from his lifetime of racist-induced stupor, realizing that it was Nat King Cole and that he had stupidly passed up his chance to sit next to and converse with a living legend. He said that it was a moment and missed opportunity that he would never get over and regretted for the rest of his life.
After that, there was nothing that he could not do to help out poor black people and families. He adopted several and they were like family in a way – the dads worked for us around the house and moms sewed our clothes and kept house, they got all of our hand-me-downs, and were invited to all of the fish fries out on the pier on Mobile Bay, treated as equals as part of the family along with the other “rich” white people. He and my mother bought all their kid’s Christmas presents every year up until he died in 1984. You’ve got to remember that this was the late-60s and 70s when I was growing up, and that was the way things were back then. One of my earliest memories of 1960 after watching the Nixon-Kennedy debates on B&W TV was seeing the segregated restrooms at the local Sinclair Dino gas station in Madison, MS. If you ever saw the movie “The Help” then you will understand where I come from – I was raised back in the Mississippi of the 1960s by black nannies, some who lived with us, and who were as strict about teaching us our manners as Catholic nuns. Punishment for transgression was ruthless and quickly administered, and I’m the better for it. And I can tell the difference as I’ve been trying to teach my kids courtesy and good manners but not doing so well now that corporeal punishment is a criminal offense, even with your own children.
Vintage Restroom Sign from the days of Segregation
Fast forward to 2006, and I’m sitting at my departure gate at Reagan National on an MD-80, enduring a thunderstorm-delayed Delta flight to Atlanta to change planes for Key West and home. I had had time to change into island chic – shorts, flip flops, ball cap and Sloppy Joe’s T-shirt, so I was sort of incognito except for the military haircut. I had a choice aisle seat, no one in the middle, an interesting book to read, cocktails to look forward to, and the best thing was I was getting the fuck out of DC and heading back to the Keys, so life was good. Then, they let more people on the plane, to include a bunch of House reps from the South, who were going home for the weekend. A somewhat portly black man asked if he could sit next to me – I spotted the US Flag badge of a Congressman on his left suit lapel and said:
“Absolutely sir, please take the seat.”
I was sort of startled and annoyed about sharing the cramped space, so I didn’t really realize who it was at first – John Lewis. I flicked through my memory banks and realized that I had the chance to not make the same mistake that my stepfather had made so many years before., and I had about two hours to talk with a living legend.
“So, Congressman, what was Martin Luther King really like?”
I remain your faithful servant.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com
Point Loma: Nuke the Wogs
Don’t Piss this Guy Off – Just Do It
Vic’s recent soliloquy on the crossing the line ritual we used to “enjoy” that was once a staple of being a Westpac sailor brought back what are now, in retrospect of nearly 40 years, some great memories. Goddamn it was good to be a JO in Ronald Reagan’s and John Lehman’s 600-ship Navy. However, I fear now that it – the experience – has been watered down into something less gross, painful, and cathartic. It was once a rite of passage and transformation from being a scurvy-riddled slimy Pollywog to a Trusty Shellback – now I’m afraid that it is just another participation award given to everybody regardless of whether they show up or not.
Over a 27+ year career and four extended cruises, I crossed that imaginary magic line in the water ten times – but the first one is seared in memory. We were aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, transiting north back up to Gonzo Station from a port call in Perth, Australia, where I had joined my VA-52 Knightrider squadron mates, most of whom were subjected to “Wog Day” on the way down. I among others was the subject of Wog’s revenge – what we called being a “special case.” Trust me; you never want to be known as a “special case.”
The fun started the night before with the arrival of King Neptune and the Royal Court for hangar bay skits and other shenanigans, like the Wog Beauty Queen pageant, which was basically when all of the drag queens came out of the woodwork, so to speak, to strut their stuff. It was ribald and unruly every time I witnessed it, so I can’t believe that it is a tradition that has survived – but on second thought, it might make sense given today’s swerve towards LGBTQ empowerment. I remember my last crossing watching the spectacle unfold while standing next to the 2-star battle Group Commander, RADM B. He was shaking his head in amazement at some of the more flamboyant performers. I told him:
“Can you believe that we are getting away with this shit after Tailhook?”
And this was in 1993…
On the appointed day, we were told to wear khaki pants turned inside out and backwards, a white T-shirt with the number of years and months you had been in the Navy written in black laundry marker on the back, some type of heavy duty shoes or boots – gloves and knee pads were optional. We lucky few were roused out of the rack before reveille by our squadron mates, paraded down to Ready Six, and then after much verbal abuse led on all fours out to the mess decks for “wog breakfast,” which consisted of raw eggs cracked on your head, and soured milk and orange juice poured on you, along with whatever other treats the shellbacks wanted you to enjoy, like oatmeal, Cheerios, oranges, rotten tomatoes, etc., pelted on your helpless carcass, and then getting your ass whipped by the ever present shillelaghs – three foot sections of used fire hose wielded with great zeal and vigor.
Then we had to crawl up the stairs to the hangar bay and make the long trek down to EL 4 for the ride up to the flight deck. It was a raucous welcome – we were greeted with fire hoses and a mob of butt-thirsty shellbacks rhythmically slapping their shillelaghs in unison on the flight deck and chanting “Wogs! Wogs! Wogs! Wogs!”
Wogs Rising
There, we were subjected to the whims of your average American enlisted sailor, who took great pleasure in slapping an officer’s ass. While I was an Ensign, another miserably abused creature next to me was then-RADM Huntington “Hunt” Hardisty, the Battle Group commander who had somehow escaped Wog Day by virtue of being an East Coast sailor for more than 27 years and some change, or so said his T-Shirt (mine said 13 months)
Once we got up to the flight deck, the Kitty Hawk skipper, CAPT Foster S. “Tooter” Teague came over to greet us and put a rope leash around the admiral’s neck, and then paraded him around on all fours on the flight deck like he was a pet poodle at an AKC Dog Show – he was a real “special case.”[1]
There was no mercy or timeouts for stress in the old Navy – my Navy.
The flight deck was actually not that bad since there was a breeze to waft the stink away and you weren’t subjected to all that much concentrated abuse except for the occasional enlisted-guy (most of them were from our squadron) ass-whipping you and yielding to their constant demands to blow water out of the pad eyes, waiting your turn for the judgement of the royal court. Trying not to vomit on King Neptune, you were sentenced to the next carnival ride, which invariably consisted of confinement in some rotten food fermented for a week on the mess decks and in the sun that morning. The worst part was the wear and tear on your hands and knees from the abrasive non-skid – I picked pieces of it out of myself for six months afterwards.
There were several stations that your Wog handlers had to choose from but you had to have your shellback certificate chit in your mouth when you went up for judgement by the Royal Court, and to kiss the royal baby (aka the fattest CPO on the ship whose navel was greased with the nasty lube they used on the arresting gear wire batteries), and then swim through the garbage chute to “cleanse” yourself before joining Neptune’s Legions. After that, I swore that I would never eat tuna or green peas again, it was that foul, and the ship stunk to high heavens for weeks afterwards.[2] Then, you took a dunk in some sort of green dumpster vat filled with industrial-strength Lysol-like stuff to cleanse off the bacteria, and once you popped up, the flight docs were there to swab out your ears with disinfectant and greeted by a welcoming committee of your now salty peers asking “What are you?”
“A trusty Shellback!”
Since we all still had crud in our hair and on bodies, there were showers set up at the end of the flight deck before the round down. I was not the only one who stripped naked, tossed my clothes overboard, and walked back to my bunkroom in just my boots for a real hot shower and uniform change. Imagine in today’s Navy a thousand naked guys walking around on the carrier flight deck… and the other ships in our battle group were doing the same thing and we were all sailing in close formation so there were a lot of naked guys on the equator, hooting and hollering friendly insults at each other across the water, mostly commenting on the size of our aviation vs. black shoe peckers as only groups of naked grown men can do. There’s a lot to be said for the experience – it was what transformed a battle group of disparate ships and individuals into a true battle group of warriors forged through shared common hardship.
Was it what is now considered by the liberal PC-types as hazing and sexist? Yeah, probably, but I would not have missed it for the world. I also wouldn’t do it again, either. SERE School was the same – go there and get that T-Shirt, but you don’t want to do it twice. People may disagree with this notion but it is/was character building – both were; and when it came time to go to war and swill the adrenaline of combat ten years later, I wasn’t awed by the prospect since I had already endured a little bit of hell, survived those ordeals, and came out on the other end mentally stronger and more confident in my own abilities than before.
My next cruise the tables were turned and I extracted my own sadistic version of Wog’s Revenge. I had my talented IS, who had studied graphic arts, design for me a special T-Shirt which featured a mushroom cloud emanating from an underwater nuclear explosion, including dead whales (with crosses in their eyes) being blast-heaved out of the water, with the underneath caption “Nuke the Wogs.” For good measure, I also had fashioned a special fire hose shillelagh into which I had the para riggers sew in a rope handle with my own personal Shellback motto emblazoned upon it in big black letters “I Love Sweet Wog Ass.” The T-shirt is gone, just like those great Navy traditions now and forever frowned upon. However, I still have the shillelagh in my old patch-covered and faded parachute bag, somewhere.
I remain your faithful servant.
[1] Both of those great naval aviators have long since passed, but if you get the chance, you should look them up as they were pretty amazing men and leaders in their time. I had the pleasure of being at a meeting when I was a LCDR with then retired 4-Star ADM Hardisty at the Naval War College and got to remind him that we had shared the Wog Day experience on the Hawk together – the look on his face was priceless.
[2] I was on the Hawk 17 years later when I was the CCG-1 staff N-2 as a CDR, and I swear the ship still smelled like rotten food and vomit from that Wog Day in 1981.
Point Loma: The Birth and Death of the Modern
Falling Water
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little weary of the second wave COVID-19 doomsday predictions, the George Floyd canonization, and the overall Trump Derangement Syndrome and unhinging of our collective sanity by the ravening mob of media fools. I thought this weekend I’d rather write about beauty, of things past, and hope – the latter not looking all that clear. So sometimes, it’s good to wallow in nostalgia – when things were cast in the black & white and sepia tones of now longed-for videos of yesterday. It all changed with WWI – what a fucking disaster for the modern that was, both during the war and the interregnum until WWII. Yet, the human spirit endures, and will survive until we collide next year with Mars. In a sense, COVID-19 has been like an alien invasion – we haven’t done a real great job of handling that but the next UFO motherfuckers had better watch out – we do get smarter over time, no matter how much it costs or how hard it winds up being.
So, there was a lot going on around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. I will try to limit my focus to the arts, and maybe a little allegory. The earliest progenitor of the modern was probably Frank Lloyd Wright, and all of the melodrama of his life and art. I’m reading a new biography about him now and learning that he was even a more complex and fucked up human being than I ever thought, yet, he gave us some of the most moving structures ever conceived by one man – Falling Water being a prime example. The house was originally commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, a department store owner in Pittsburgh, but now is a shrine to architectural greatness and overseen by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Be warned – there is nothing that can prepare you for the sight when you walk out from the visitor’s center, emerge from the tree cover, and really see it in real life – it nearly brought me to my knees.
Sergei Diaghilev – Master of les ballets russes
Diaghilev is an extremely interesting character and an huckster and impresario to rival P.T. Barnum from art and entertainment history. He left Russia early before the Bolshies, and set up shop in Paris. He collected a wide range of artists and performers into his mad vision of an intersection between art, dance, music, design, and politics. LesBallets Russes was widely regarded as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century. The list of artists, composers, and performers is pretty incredible when viewed in the rear-view mirror. He preceded Hemingway’s tenure in Paris, so Ernie never really wrote about him – lest he degrade his own legacy. Yet, there was the birth of the modern wrought by a Russian émigré who flashed briefly and started a fire that is still burning in many respects to this day. Besides, my wife is a ballerina and loves this stuff, so I have to pay homage. The richness of his art and artifice is now covered in a thin veneer of my making in the interests of brevity, so now let’s take a look at science.
Albert Einstein at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in 1921
It’s sort of a shame that we have turned Einstein into some sort of cartoon character. This man had the most fantastic brain that ever came to find the light of day, and then defined for us exactly what that was all about. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read some S&T article somewhere that states that his theories were once again proven in some star eclipse that occurred 30,000 light years ago in a galaxy far, far away. In the age of COVID-19, the next time you walk up to a door and it opens automatically, it is because he figured out how that worked more than 100 years before. Yeah, we should all take a knee to this guy. But now, how do we really see the world that Einstein defined for us?
Picasso drawing a Bull with light…you should really watch the video
Picasso was one of the artists commissioned by Diaghilev for designing sets and backdrops for Les Ballets Russes. But he was already a character in his own right before then, and the immensity of his talent stands him apart from all others. Since I used to live in Spain, and Andalucia, and also a frequenter of Paris, I am a fellow traveler. I loved the story of how he used to carry around a pistol loaded with blanks, and would shoot any motherfucker who pissed him off – imagine doing that today…as if?
At any rate, his evolving artistic vision has ultimately led us towards the digital world, even before the IBM guys and RADM Grace Hopper got involved. He painted what technology would wrought, aided and abetted by Alexander Graham Bell and Gulglielmo Marconi, who gifted us with what is now modern telecommunications. But Picasso truly altered the way that we see things. And then there are the guys who changed how we experience nature – and since I am a sailor and once-upon-a-couple-of times a Rhode Islander, my final focus of this piece is on the yachting world.
Ticonderoga on Narragansett Bay – with a Bone in her Teeth
Unlike most Air Intelligence guys- AIs as we called ourselves- I didn’t go to AOCS in Pensacola, and instead opted for OCS Newport for the America’s Cup Summer of 1980. It was a heady time, and I got to learn about the vagaries of navigating Newport harbor, the bay itself, and Rhode Island Sound, as well as the bars down off of Thames Street. Up in Bristol, there was the L. Francis Herreshoff Museum, and we wandered up there one liberty weekend, and it was eye-opening. Tico still is one of the most amazing sailboats ever imagined. I’ve been alongside her underway a couple of times up in Newport before being left behind in a blizzard of spray and wind exhaust – she was and still is that fast and powerful. Herreshoff was a contemporary of Wright, Diaghilev, Einstein, and Picasso among others who thrived during the turn of the 20th century. He was a naval architect and engineer who invented many modern things about boats today, like underwater appendages and catamaran designs which are now the rage more than 100 years later. Who knew? And what does this mean?
George Orwell – Everyone likes to invoke his name, but no one ever really knew what he looked like, did we?
We who have completed a career in the military are the product of all of our collective life experiences. I still get asked by people who want to know where I am from – not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but probably more curiosity on their part. I’m still not sure how to answer that question. In a similar vein, I’m beginning to wonder about where we as a nation are from – everything is being challenged by the current PC mob mentality that seems to be hell-bent on eradicating the forms and structures of the past. I can’t remember where I saw this Orwellian saying but it was something like “We are going to control the future by destroying the past.” Well, I for one take that as a personal threat – they have started with statues and other symbols and when that supply is exhausted, a movement gathering momentum will need new targets to destroy, so the color of your skin might be a problem in some areas. There has been talk about taking their fight to the suburbs – I’m not waiting around to see what that means, just taking some precautions – like buying more ammo.
The birth of the modern times was a wondrous juxtaposition of many things and gifted, visionary people. The death of it may be just as cataclysmic but in a really bad way, like something out of the Road Warrior. The future is full of bad portent so I’m building up my stock of toilet paper, just in case.
I remain your faithful servant.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com.
Point Loma: Telework
Kryptos – Just something else for pigeons to shit on in Langley, or is it?
In our current age of COVID-19, telework is all the rage. I myself love it, since otherwise I would be driving a minimum of 100 miles round-trip every fucking day to work and back, scare shitless most of the time, especially on the beltway at oh-dark-thirty; hangovers never help there, either. It sucks when all of your life decisions are driven by the magnitude and timing of your commute. So, in a sense this curre nt situation has been great in confirming what I already knew was true, and I am never going back to doing that shit on a full-time basis. Now, I can get a good night’s sleep, awake at a decent hour, feed my cats, sit down at the computer with a clear head in a T-Shirt and my Tommy John’s, and am immediately effective.
The problem is that us so-called IC professionals have to ply our trade in SCIFS on TS systems, hermetically sealed. Today it reeks of being a stupid way to make a living. After 40 years in the business, I know that there are some things that have to be protected, to the point of using deadly force to defend them, but a lot of other security rituals we undergo are either habit, or driven upon us by nameless and faceless individuals who make it their job to ensure that their life-style is maintained to the inconvenience of the rest of us other-wise responsible adults who know how to use and protect said secrets worth defending.
When I started my puny SDVOSB back in 2010, I applied for a DD-254 and got certified for TS storage at home, as long as I had a GSA-certified container. The inspector who came to review my paperwork and do the home inspection told me that he had seen several instances where senior government and other spooky folks had installed the then DIS-approved private SCIFs in their houses. Most of those were closet-sized since you still had to comply with SCIF construction standards, double locks, outside motion detectors, and some modicum of Tempest or white-noise shielding for electronics that were not in a basement. People who had TS circuits in their houses used dial-up modems with crypto keys. I can’t remember who it was now but someone I knew had bought a house over on Capitol Hill from the widow of a former NSC staff guy, and discovered that he had
a SCIF in his basement.
RAF Rheindahlen – Because I know You are tired of pictures of Key West
When I was in Key West and later on at JIEDDO, I was working with a commercial company who had developed ICW JHU/APL a bit-level encryption program that protected both data at rest and in motion – theoretically unbreakable until the projected end of the universe – and it was not quantum encryption. Its secret sauce ran on normal PC and laptop technology at room temperature – like PGP but on steroids and a whole lot easier to use; allowing you to send/receive, work on, keep and store TS info on your home laptop. This was not a bulk-level encryption algorithm like AES-256, Triple DES, Rheindahlen (nefarious namesake pictured above), and/or Diffie Hellman, but one that used network theory and an M-n sequence to disassemble the data into 8-bits, and then send them along with the accompanying disassembled key bits on different pathways to be re-assembled at the other end. You could recover all of the data with even some missing bits – and it all happened automatically. A man-in-the-middle attack might get one or two bits, but not enough to be able to recover the entire algorithm. Data stored was similarly impregnable. The company was paired up with another large commercial service provider trying to bring their technology to market in the financial industry – they’ve had mixed results, mostly because the telecoms are still fighting their loss of control of the metering and taxing of volumes of data traffic, imposed by current crypto algorithm standards – just try to encipher the byzantine “Net-Neutrality” arguments. I had learned a little bit about that at a place that Dick Nixon once called “The Kremlin on the Charles.” Both Vic and I share those stigmata.
Not Exactly a Liberal Disquisition, but Pretty Damn Close
Lawrence Lessig was part of the adjunct faculty at Harvard Law, along with an iconoclastic and utterly entertaining PhD genius named Jonathan Zittrain, who when I was there in 1999-2000 was offering a ground-breaking 2-L and 3-L elective course called “Internet & Society: The Politics of Control.” Jonathan had gotten himself a generous grant and established the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, of which his chief henchman at the time was Lawrence, and also amongst various co-conspirators included John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and also a lyricist for Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead).[1] It was Barlow who more than two decades ago publically iterated the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace (and by abstraction the Internet) to wit:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
There’s more to it, and it’s worth reading about. Lawrence had just published his book, and I went to the party and got a signed copy. Harvard then was a pretty innervating place to be, and I did remember some of the things I learned there – I just had to wait for the right time to apply them.
The day I retired from the Navy, it was a monsoon. I later got a call from my contractor CEO friend that we had gotten a $2M grant from the HASC via an earmark courtesy of Duncan Hunter (the company was in his district in CA) to run a pilot program at JIATF-South using DEA LES and FOUO data as proof of concept. I had former employees who had had to move out of Key West lined up in places like Tennessee and Oklahoma to come back to work for us as contractors using the technology. However, it had taken too long to run through the permissions gamut and the whole concept died the day I walked out the door – SOUTHCOM objected to us getting extra money and conspired with DASD (CN) to steal it to use for some other stupid-shit ideas that they had – and we couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
About six months later, we were in high gear at JIEDDO building out our counter-IED network and deploying our own version of in-house developed analytical tools to sites around the planet. In addition to installing a rack of specialized gear and large data storage, we also bought with us high-speed network connectivity. The problem of course, was physics, and the limitations of bulk encryption standards and optical switching at the time meant that we were spending a lot of money transmitting fluff, and doing it on stacks of encryption devices – at great cost. So there I was looking at paying a hideous nine-figure telecommunications bill, and then the light came on – how about we use a national emergency as an excuse to see if we can get that cool-shit in-stream encryption program on our network so we don’t have to pay out of the tax-payer’s asses to switch tons of extraneous padded data, eliminating some very costly and unwieldy crypto devices, and get on with the future?
I talked with my then boss M4 and the other technology experts we had, and they were interested, so we had a meeting with the contractors and got their technology demo, and then M4 called A4, and told him that he needed to see this now. He sent one of his crypto gurus for a meeting, and agreed that they would run some independent V&V on it, which three months later came back aces and confirmed all of the claims of the technology – it worked as advertised. But, the inertia of the security system meant that not much else happened on the government side, and the bulk encryption crypto Nazis and national security hero ISPs were able to maintain their evil empire by strangling that pretty baby in the womb.
So it can be done, but maybe even less onerously these days given the spread of VMWare – printers and other peripheral devices will still be a problem. I’ve got me some guns to solve the physical security issues. So, the tech exists and nowadays probably is even better than ever – it is the culture that resists change, and as I learned at Harvard more than 20 years ago, it is all about control. Sound familiar these days in the new age of telework?
I remain your humble servant.
[1]Jonathan is still there at HLS doing the voodoo that he do, after having spent several years over at Oxford padding his resumé.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com
PointLoma: Déjà vu All Over Again
Editor’s Note: Point Loma chimes in with an appreciation of the weekend madness. I have lived 1968 once already. It is a pity we seem to be doing it again. As I recall, it wasn’t that good the first time.
– Vic
Washington DC, Burning
I don’t know about you, but this feels so…1968.
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain supposedly said “…history never repeats itself but it often rhymes.” While attribution to Twain has never been verified since his death in 1910, other people attribute it’s popularization in today’s culture to Canadian Artist John Robert Colombo who used it in the first four lines of an innovative poem written in 1970 with a format based on quotations to wit:
A SAID POEM [1]
(for Ronald and Beatrice Gross)
“I have seen the future and it doesn’t work,” said Robert Fulford.
“If there weren’t any Poland, there wouldn’t be any Poles,” said Alfred Jarry.
“We aren’t making the film they contracted for,” said Robert Flaherty.
“History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” said Mark Twain.
Think about it – we just watched a historic space launch yesterday, rioting in cities across the country, all while are still embroiled in what seems to be never-ending war against shiftily relentless enemies in lands far, far away. The Russians and Chinese are our enemies, and the economy has gone into the shitter. The National Guard and most likely the Army has been called out to enforce order in major cities around the country, and after watching all of this bullshit on cable last night I turned off the trigger lock on my S&W. A sitting President is besieged on all fronts, even the White House is being assailed and most likely contemplating his re-election prospects. Could a Kent State incident be next, when the good guys trying to protect us against the rioters and looters, say “enough!” and open fire. That pretty much stopped the campus riots. Maybe we are actually going to find out why DHS stocked up on all those armored vehicles and millions of rounds of ammunition a few years ago.
Where is Dick Nixon when we need him, much less Ronald Reagan?
Spacex-NASA Crew Dragon Flying Wing on the ISS, 31 May 2020
Against this searing backdrop was the successful launch of the Spacex Crew Dragon yesterday on the Demo-2 Mission. It should have been a feel-good moment in an era that doesn’t even bring into account the quarantine and human carnage being wrought by COVID-19. That is new, or at least something that hasn’t been seen in over a century since the Spanish Flu.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of living in interesting times, and re-living some of the worst of them, all at once. If you go to the web site I footnoted above, there are a lot of more interesting propositions for the origin of the Mark Twain quote. I found another spookier one that is worthy of Marlow – this from the October 1845 publication of Volume 10 of “The Christian Remembrancer” as what they called a thematic precursor:[2]
“The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.”
Crew Dragon just docked at the ISS, time to get on with building a brighter, more lucrative, and disease-free future…
I remain your faithful servant.
[1]Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
[2]Ibid.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com
Point Loma: Pet Sounds
Editor’s Note: Point Loma looks back on a parade of non-human close friends that enrich our lives. I was thinking of my first puppy the other day, and our next twelve was together. Having more time to think while under our Governor’s House is a marvelous mystery. I wonder how this clash of past and future will resolve itself. I will be interested to see how society adapts.
Meanwhile, I swear I hear some Beach Boys in the background when I hang out on the back deck above the pastures. And remember.
– Vic
Pet Sounds
Nibbles – Master and Ruler of the Universe
Unless you are a lizard, this one should jerk out your living guts. Strap in, and arm your ejection seats.
When’s the last time you got a cat to do anything that you wanted?
Why do we humans live with, and form bonds with “dumb” animals, like cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, tarantulas, iguanas, and boa constrictors? I know that there are all sorts of stupid asses who take their “comfort animals” on flights. Cats and small dogs are okay as well as service dogs, but I for one don’t want to see or smell a comfort pony or pet alligator taking a nasty shit in the middle of the aisle of a 737 Max on a long-distance cross-country flight; so why do airlines permit that singular form of absurd idiocy?
Pets do serve us with an essential comforting function – but doing it at home is better than inflicting your self-absorbed obsessions on the rest of humanity. Those of us who have chosen to lug our pets along with us during our military careers know what really caring about them means – they are special and not excuses for acting stupid. Once you adopt a pet or pets into your family, it is a sacred choice.
If you are young and single and like your freedom, then having a pet is not a real good idea – you own them and vice versa, and you probably will spend more time worrying about their well-being when you are gone and/or out and about. There are always kennels, but those are a cold choice. It’s better when you are married, and can rely on someone else to perform pet care at home since they all need it in one way, shape, form, or another. It’s like getting married – which is a good thing when you are ready for it, then pets are an option, but having kids is terminal as far as the rest of your life is concerned. I’ve done all three as many of us have – marrying the right life partner is important, your kids are eternal responsibilities – and your pets are the wild cards of life that will jack you up unless you are ready for their antics, and the rare theater that they can create.
There are all sorts of us pet owners – I’ll keep it simple and just talk about dogs and cats – I’ve lived with both, and prefer the latter. Dogs are needy and high-maintenance. Don’t get me wrong – I have friends who have dogs and love them and do what it takes. I remember when our elderly neighbors came back from an extended RV trip down South with a rescue dog named Amber. She’s a good dog, but now they have to take her out walking three times a day – okay if you’re retired, but a daughter-of-a-bitch chore when it’s 5 degrees outside and the streets are covered with snow and ice – love conquers all I guess, but I don’t think that was what they were intending when they adopted the dog as a humanitarian gesture down in warm and sunny south Florida. Still, they do it every day.
My wife and I are affirmed cat people, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love good dogs. If I am going to be a country music songwriter, that goes with the territory. I’ve got some personal favorites, like my college friend’s White Samoyed Mr. Ming – the most obnoxious dog I’ve ever met (more on him later); there was Smokey owned by a fellow lifeguard Danbo, who I rescued from drowning after some asshole guest kid I wanted to kick the living shit out of who purposely shoved him off the fishing pier into Mobile Bay; and a couple of B.E.’s good dogs – Boris and Bear.
Bouvier des Flandres
Boris was a huge hyperactive English sheepdog who would bite your head off – I remember the day that he guarded our drinks 40 years ago when B.E. got pulled over by the Nohope Police for some questionable driving antics, and was forced to blow the breathalyzer. We were out sporting in his dad’s yellow Caddy convertible on an early Spring Chamber of Commerce day downtown, and had to wedge our drinks between the front seats and doors. Boris was in the backseat and would not let the cops get anywhere near the car – they should have known something was up when we climbed out of over the doors. It was still early and B.E. passed the test, but we decided not to push our luck and headed elsewhere – being famous has its limitations. Bear as depicted above is still with us – a big sweet-hearted Bouvier des Flandres (Belgian sheepdog), whom I used to fooled some unwary female tourists in St. Pete one night a couple of years ago into believing that he was some kind of hybrid bear-dog tame monster from Canada. You can’t pull those kinds of pranks with a cat.
The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds Cover
Sonically, this may be the best Beach Boys album ever. They were competing for #1 with the Beatles, who had just done Rubber Soul, which Brian Wilson considered a challenge. I saw a special on the making of this album, and John Lennon’s commentary on how blown away he was with what they had achieved. Brian was and still is an incredible lyricist who invokes wonder in his vocal orchestrations and harmonies. He worked exclusively with a collection of LA session musicians back in the 60s and 70s who were loosely called “The Wrecking Crew.” His goal was to make the best ever rock album, and Pet Sounds was his vehicle to immortality. Amongst the list of unsung musicians who were the backbone of contemporary pop in the Wrecking Crew at the time were the drummer and documentarian Hal Blaine, trumpeter Herb Alpert who is still conducting the Tijuana Brass, matchless bassist Carol Kaye, and consummate guitar player, composer, and singer Glenn Campbell. There’s a great documentary out there on YouTube – do yourself a favor, and take a couple of hours to watch artistry in motion. Brian was asked why he called it Pet Sounds – he never had a real good answer to that; but it is a great, even historic work of art.
While the titles of albums and the lyrics of songs are always the draw, it is the bridge that makes all of the difference, and sometimes hides or reveals the real meaning of the composition. For example, listen to the Stars and Stripes forever – the brass interlude bridge is so masterful that even I don’t have words to describe how good it is, and what a powerful message John Philip Souza still sends to us and the rest of the world after more than 120 years – don’t fuck with the United States of America.
There are a lot of bad guys in the world out there who think we are weak, ineffectual. My message to them is the same as Souza’s – the Pet Sounds I want them to hear and experience is the roar of our avenging Eagles and Hornets delivering death from our Air Forces and Navy from on high, the burn of Hellfires from Reaper drones (take that Soleimani you dead yogurt-swilling sheep fucker), feel the hissing Cobra strikes of our air and ground artillery, the heart-rendering lacerations from the Lions and Tigers of our Special Forces and Marines, and the earth-shaking Good Vibration son your soon-to-be dead asses from the foot-stomping Elephants of our tanks and firepower delivered by our gallant infantrymen, who will grease the treads of our tanks with your living chickenshit guts. Of course we will afford you a decent burial, if there are any pieces big enough to find left on the battlefields of your bad choice – but I digress.
How’s that for a bridge?
The real bridge of Good Vibrations has been described by some music critics as “the best ever” which demands that you give it another listen. BLUFs are what bureaucratic fools focus on and while they may be important components to writing Intel analysis, it is in the funky breaks where intuition strikes that you make your money or reputation. That’s where Brian Wilson really made his magic by creating lyrics that purred truth in your ears – just like a cat. Some dogs may have pizazz, but cats have jazz. It’s pretty clear that dogs love you – its cats who are the eternal mystery.
I’m not trying to insult my dog-loving friends out there, but I would much prefer a 12-pound cat jumping up on the bed and curling up next to me, kneading me with his soft-paws, than a 72-pound dog panting and drooling all over me with dog-slobber, just to say they love you before collapsing in a hairy heap on your chest – just saying. Cats, on the other hand, make you feel like they are doing you a great honor by allowing you the privilege of spoiling them and know when and where to take a shit – no wonder they have been cast as evil creatures in countless novels and movies down the years.
Duhé– Dutch for “Hello”
We’ve had a lot of great, but also terrible cat experiences. After my wife and I moved in together in Puerto de Santa Maria, she had brought a kitten down with her from Portugal named Duhé, who was tragically killed on the road behind our house by some shithead punk on a motorbike. We later did a stint as surrogate parents for a program of pet adoption for five flea-infested kittens from the local animal shelter before they could find homes – we gave them our own nicknames; my favorite was Pinch, who was white with two grey spots on either side of his back that I used to remove him from some feline fracas during the six weeks that they were our charges. Since we were leaving for Japan soon, we couldn’t realistically keep any of them so they were all eventually adopted. Before they left us, they did get to witness a robbery when our house was broken into by local Spanish drug addicts. Then, there was Paint.
Paint was a coal-black stray kitten with a white chest forelock that somehow had gotten himself entangled with a can of white paint in the carport at a neighbor’s house across the street. The neighbor ran him off, and then he wandered over to our house. I was sleeping off a mid at the time, and my wife cleaned him up with some turpentine and had placed him between my legs so I woke up with a pleasant, albeit smelly surprise. He was a funny cat but we couldn’t take him to Japan with us either, so I foisted him off on a close friend, who owned him for something like 15 years afterwards – thanks Dale. Unfortunately I can’t find a picture of him.
When we got to Japan, I was going off to war in Desert Storm on Midway, and had to leave my wife there in Atsugi. I gave her my checkbook and three admonitions – get a car, a place to live, and have something left in the bank when I got back. She got a 2-cylinder 35hp Daihatsu mini-car and found a great two-story house right outside of the Sagamihara Army housing complex, where there were a bunch of alley cats scavenging the streets. Some of them were dumped cats, and one in particular was looking for a new home – he was an orange and white blotchy ring-tailed cat with a bold personality. She started out feeding him scraps of meat outside and he hung around, looking for shelter. I was getting intermittent letters from her during cruise and she asked about taking him in – I wrote back to tell her if she did and got him fixed so to speak, then we owned him. She took him to the vets at Camp Zama, had him tested for feline leukemia and when he passed muster, had his little kitty balls chopped off so own him, we did. He cleaned his dirty-self up and I took to him after I finally got home from the Gulf.
We called him Wang Dang Doodle, after a rock-n-roll song out there that my ex-squadron and former roommate the famous Harry O turned me onto – Wang for short. Hell, we were in Japan so why not give him an Asian name? He was a funny boy and had a bold rocker personality to match – during the cold winters on the Kanto Plain in a house with no central heating, he would crawl in on my side of the bed, wriggle his way down to my feet to warm himself, and then worm his way over to my wife’s side of the bed where he would stick his head out on the pillow but still under the covers and sleep like a human being, purring all the while – we only thought that we owned him.
Wang Dang Doodle
Unfortunately, he had developed an addiction to being an alley cat and would wake up around 0400 and verbally berate us until we had to let him go out and do his catting about thing – which ultimately led to his demise. Warning to you current and would-be cat lovers out there – don’t let them out of the house once they are domesticated – there are only bad things to come from that and we suffered greatly for it later.
We took Wang back with us to the States after I wangled orders to the Naval War College, but he did eventually succumb to a late-diagnosed case of feline leukemia and we had to put him away – it was a very sad thing considering the history. I was stationed in Japan for three years but was underway for two of those, so he had become my wife’s loving companion for the two years I was gone and for that I will be forever grateful and indebted. We were both shattered at losing him after all of that drama. That cat had a personality that never quit, and a way of sharing love that would crush your soul when he was gone. But, there is always the hope of a new day-a-dawning.
Kyle & Stephen – and some asshole on the right
We later adopted a couple of brother kittens whose mother had been killed out of the Newport Potter League ASPCA animal shelter where my wife worked as a volunteer. They only knew humans as care-givers, since they had to be bottle-fed at first. In a marketing move to promote their adoption, the Potter League advertised then as “The Tabby Crew.” Hell, I wanted all of them, as I do all kittens even to this day. Hemingway was like that – he surrounded himself with cats both in Key West and later at his Finca in Cuba. But we could only take two, so we chose the most interesting of the five. They were with us for a long time and endured moves from Newport to San Diego to Boston, DC, Key West, and then Annapolis, but both are now sadly long gone. We named them Kyle and Stephen after my close CAG-5 friend Dave’s sons. Stephen was mommy’s boy, but Kyle was my kitty, and slept cradled between my left arm and shoulder every night for his entire life which was almost 15 years. Kyle was the mischievous one, sort of like my college pal and fellow lifeguard Michael’s dog Mr. Ming.
Mr. Ming
Ming was a White Samoyed Husky, and particularly obnoxious just like his owner. He was a chick magnet, and had charisma – when they would come over to us at college parties and other outings to ooh and aah at his magnetic doggie-ness, he would lie down and roll over to display to them his family jewels without fail – he was like a hairy little frat brother, and I thought that there was something human in him given his sense of timing in his own version of committing social doggy mayhem. I remember well his prank one morning in New Orleans when I was trying to sleep off a bad Bourbon Street hangover at Michael’s parents’ house in the Garden District; Ming stuck his cold wet nose into the small of my back and jolted me almost out of the bed, and then backed off to regard me with head half-cocked and signature blue-eyed smirk. He knew what he was doing – asshole.
Ming sadly was killed while he and Michael were out jogging one afternoon a few years later – some asshole kid ran a red light and ran over him while Michael was watching it happen like some kind of super-bad awful no-fucking good day horror movie sequence. I was in Germany at the time and when I got the news, I wept. He was one special dog.
Stephen the cat was more solid and stolid; he had great powers of concentration in any task he took upon himself – like looking to catch the mice that, during a rare two-week summer drought in New England, infiltrated themselves into our condo in Newport, looking for water. Stephen would spend hours at his self-appointed guardian’s watch – hunkered down in front of a small crack in the wall and floor by their food and water bowls, waiting for a rodent to arrive. He would snatch the mouse but Kyle, sleeping in our bed, was instantly aroused and would jump out of the rack and take it away from him. Hearing the commotion, I would have to get up, put on a kimono, and retrieve the still wriggling creature from Kyle’s mouth, and then go outside to take it across the street and toss it into a patch of holly vines. One morning after performing this rodent rescue chore around 0400, I was walking back to our place and there was a skunk sitting smack-diddle in the middle of the driveway – oh shit oh dear!
Pets are family, and losing even one of them, much less both is, like Stalin said, a tragedy. Kyle contracted kitty cancer and died suddenly not that long after we moved back up to Annapolis from Key West. Stephen lived on to be almost 19 years old – an eternity for cats and it was sad to see his health deteriorate at the end game – they say you will know when it’s time. They both lived good pampered lives, and it was a wonderful thing to see the both of them sleeping together like they were still entwined in the womb – we called them the “sweet brothers.” They tussled as kitties do but never fought; just loved one another.
God knows that I have been directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of deaths – it goes with our professional territory and I have never felt any compunction about doing that – it was my job and a lot of those motherfuckers, like Soleimani, desperately deserved it. While euthanasia is considered a humane act for animals, it’s like killing a child when it’s your own personal cat or dog. Watching them die, at your bidding, just plain fucking sucks, even under the direst of circumstances. That long, lonely , last drive to the vet for the final denouement of your relationship is a killer to your soul – those of us who have been forced to make that sad journey know that there is nothing remotely good about it. It is emotionally devastating and a bad guilt trip that brings strong men and women to their knees. We always made sure that when the vet was administering that act of extreme unction to one of our beloved kitty boys, that the last sight he saw before he went to meet the Creator was our teary-eyed faces.
Fuck, it hurts to write this.
But like Gandalf said in the Lord of the Rings, “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”[1]And there can be silver-linings to those gathered clouds of imminent psychic doom that unfurl to reveal the sun of a new day. There are always plenty of pets out there who need, and deserve our love. Here’s ones who captured my heart:
Lucky Doodle – The former Ditch King of Dayton
We have adopted two more stray cats – the cat on the frontispiece was the runt-of-the litter whose mother cat left him to die in a fellow church-member’s backyard shortly after we had to have Kyle put down; Nibbles we call him since he likes to gently bite you. He was a feisty little chap back then, and I still remember the day when Stephen, who had grown into a 16-pound bad-ass by then had had enough of his BS, and put him in his place – just by a glowering look and menacing stance delivering a withering message from the Alpha Male to a young whipper-snapper – “enough goddamnit.” When Stephen succumbed to his fate, we went for a while being a single cat family, but always looking for the one who would come next; not trying to push it. Then along came Lucky the love pirate, for whom I moved my little pieces of Heaven and Earth to rescue out of a ditch behind a cheap hotel during a TDY trip to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio a couple of years ago – you maybe have read about him and that pretty cool story of how I saved his furry little ass from the alley cats, raccoons, and foxes that were after him with bad intent.
For those who missed that piece, I was standing outside at a picnic table one night in back of a cheap hotel in Dayton, across the street from the Air Force Museum (you should go there – it puts the National Air & Space Museum to shame), when out of the dark emerged this cartoonish white and black-spotted tiny character with his feather-duster tail twirling in his wake like a mini-tornado. He was emoting soft meows that echoed off the walls of the building akin to a feline sonar searching for a datum – well, he found one. I was enjoying a fine American tobacco product at the time, and sipping from a cup of cheap bootleg wine I had smuggled out of the fridge in my room upstairs, not wanting to pay the hotel bar prices. That little living thing, all of three pounds of him marched right up – rolled on to his side onto the top of my shoes, sank his tiny claws into my pants legs and then looked up to me with his warm plaintive amber eyes; he favored me with his now signature “meow” as if to say “You are mine, and I am never letting you go. Do we have a deal?” He was dirty, battered from fights he never wanted or deserved, covered with fleas and ticks and I was all in – it was smashing.
He is now sitting next to me on the couch of my living room on this late cold Spring night in front of the gas log fireplace soaking up its warmth while I write this. I know he will be my snuggle-puss later on tonight – yeah, he had me at “meow.” I am his chosen person – and he sleeps closely next to me every night tucked under my left arm, when I thought that I would never find another Kyle. Lucky purrs pure kitty jazz in my ear – Good Vibrations indeed.
God does work in mysterious ways.
I have to face the fact time is closing in and that these two little pieces of cat work may out-live me, so the tables may be turned in time – we’ll see. Now with COVID-1, all bets are off. Love your pets – they love you, and they are far from being just dumb animals. They have perfected the art of stealing your heart so give in and shamelessly spoil them in return. Pay attention to what they have to say – be it via barks, growls, purrs or meows. That’s how they communicate and tell us how much they love us – Pet Sounds.
I remain your faithful servant.
[1]
J.R.R Tolkien, The Return of the King.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com
Pont Loma: Tone Deaf
Editor’s Note: In following the traffic from several old pals and shipmates, I have an increasing certainty that the civil war some people mutter about has already occurred. We just missed it, because we were intimately familiar with how all this stuff works. The cognitive process doesn’t recognize that it doesn’t work that way any more. It is funny, this temporal dislocation, and it pops out in different places. Point Loma shares his observations about an old friend apparently on the rocks. I suppose every generation must feel this way as their world recedes and another replaces it. But if asked how this circus is going to work out, I would have to respond that this is all sort of nuts.
– Vic
Tone Deaf
SECDEF Esper – Defender of Free Speech?
After Jimmy Carter was elected, my stepfather said that he could now die happy knowing that he would have been as good a President as just anybody off the peanut farm. Well, here is the latest casualty of mediocre social instincts, and he is running the department. Of course, I mean his decision to shut down the Stars & Stripes (S&S) and then in the face of criticism from members of both sides of Congress, he has the wrong-headed gumption to double down on that decision. I mean, where do we find such men?
You never give your foes a weapon with which to beat you – because they will.
This is disturbing on many levels – when you can’t take criticism from the ranks, as the S&S is perceived, then you have no business running things in Washington or anywhere for that matter. He looks like a tough enough guy, and I appreciate the fact that the man has a lot on his plate; but squashing what is rightly perceived as the 1st Amendment rights of his own constituency – the US military and defense establishment, is way beneath his office.
Well, it has turned personal, so if he wants to act like a stupid ass, then who am I not to flame him? If he means to squash dissent, then he is picking the wrong fight with the wrong people – his own troops. What did Sun Tzu say – “don’t go to bed at night with more enemies than you started the day with?”
His obtuseness has made him about 200 million new enemies – good move, comrade Esper. Hope you like who you see in the mirror tomorrow morning, as you scrape the stubble off that manly jaw. I predict that you will cave – and you could have spared yourself the humiliation by tossing the assclowns who suggested this out of your office. Your job is to figure out how the execute the National Defense Strategy and beat the Chinese and Russians, not act like the $15M or so that it costs the Department to subsidize the publication of S&S each year will even approach the cost of one F-35 engine, which when you do this math is therefore more critical to national defense than troop morale?
This must be what it felt like living in the old Soviet Union, where there was no truth in Pravda, or news in Izvestia. I know that when I was in Europe in the 1980s and Japan in the 1990s, it was our go-to news. The S&S has a somewhat checkered past, but who among us doesn’t? They picked on everybody, as any good journalistic endeavor worth a shit could, and should do.
S&S – A Typical Headline from more Heady Days
Historically, the S&S was briefly produced in 1861 during the Civil War, and began consistent publication during World War I. When the war was over, publication ended, only to restart in 1942 during World War II, providing wartime news written by troops specifically for troops in battle. It has been in publication ever since.
A lot of great military writers, photographers, and cartoonists (e.g., Bill Mauldin) got their start, or in some cases met their end while chronicling the front-line experiences of US troops in combat. When I was in Germany back during the Cold War’s heyday, we eagerly read the S&S to see how the latest insult or scandal involving general and flag officers was proceeding – yeah, there was a bit of National Enquirer going on with the editorial staff; but, that was to be expected. At that time, there was another publication produced by ex-GIs that was even more reviled by the brass – Off Duty.
Off Duty in the 1980s was like an American version of Charlie Hebdo, replete with its own classic cartoon pairing of Fred & Frank, an unapologetic rip-off of Mauldin’s Willie & Joe. Off Duty was run by a bunch of ex-pat retired or former US troops, and relations with the Army leadership, in particular, were bad. Since we at HQ EUCOM were ostensibly Army claimants for our support, it was entertaining to see the lengths the leadership in Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Stuttgart would go to quash Off Duty – which only made them re-double their biting efforts.
The favorite targets of official ire were Fred & Frank, published for 20 years by active duty and then retired Air Force Captain Charles Kaufmann, who were famous for their bad attitudes about being GIs in Germany, and the 100-day “short-timer’s calendar” which was the countdown to one’s rotation date back to the States. The kicker was when those were banned in all work and living spaces, as they were deemed to be “detrimental to morale, good order and discipline.” Really, whose morale were they talking about? Of course, you know the result – the number of Fred & Frank calendars multiplied faster than the COVID-19 virus.
Well, they fucked it up by doing that. One of the first things you should learn about leadership as an officer in the military is to never issue an order that you know won’t be obeyed, or even makes sense to the rank and file soldier. That is just as true today, as it was in yesteryears. Esper was an Army guy growing up and had a good career going before he turned into a designer soldier, and now uses it as a resume bullet along with being a lobbyist, but obviously that experience didn’t really register, did it?
Fred & Frank
Okay, so it was a lot more poignant 35 years ago or so and Kaufmann has wisely put the collection in a book for sale so this was the best I could steal off the Internet that isn’t copyrighted. Back then, there were still relics of WWII and the occupation around, like ration cards for smokes, booze, and coffee, and then there were the gas coupons to offset the cost of German gasoline, which was roughly something like $4/gallon.
There were no real speed limits on the autobahn back then, but there are now, and photo and radar enforced. On my last trip to Germany in 2012, my friend and the CEO of the company I worked for as a consultant took my dare and rented us a Porsche Panamera, which is a beautiful beast of a car. Since I had “autobahn cred” I claimed the keys, even though I was not on the approved driver’s list since he had rented the car at the Frankfurt Airport before my flight landed.
We flew low level down to Stuttgart and then back up to Ramstein a couple of days later, averaging over 100 mph and higher. About three months afterwards, the speeding tickets started to arrive at my friend’s company out in San Diego – something over $2000 worth – ouch.
Yeah, that Germany is gone forever, and soon they will move EUCOM to Belgium, where it probably should have been all along, not in Rommel’s old wartime Kaserne. But it was fun while it lasted, and there we lived and sometimes wasted our lives, worked hard, drove too fast, drank lots of beer, swapped girl and boy friends, and skied our asses off without fear of censure, or censorship. Our favorite movie was The Big Chill, and for a couple of three years, we had that vibe going on amongst us 20-somethings. We were tuned in, and S&S was part and parcel of the experience.
The President has now intervened in the S&S episode for a variety of reasons but one is apparent – the US military civilian leadership in the persona of the SECDEF has grown tone deaf and has presidential egg on his face, even though he is a smart guy who should have known better. Now he has a choice – suck it up, or quit. Can you hear us now?
I remain your faithful servant.
Copyright 2020 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com