Story of My Life - part 3

It was shortly before my 30th birthday when I got fired from the plastic bag factory that it was time to pursue my dream of becoming a military linguist. I had spent the last year watching the rise of ISIS and all their atrocities. My goal was to join the Army, learn Arabic, and do what I could to defeat them. But first I had to lose 50 pounds. I moved back in with my parents and spent the next six months walking on a treadmill for four or five hours every day. Most days, I’d drink three or four beers to cope with the boredom and misery. Not smart, but I did achieve my goal. The Army recruiters I met with once a week said they had never seen anyone so determined.

I enlisted in August 2015 after getting a perfect score on the ASVAB, the military mental aptitude test. And I know I got a perfect score because the proctor told me moments after I submitted it. I didn’t get to pick my language, but I got the job I wanted and a $40,000 bonus when I completed training. I’ll always love the Army, I just got to the point when I didn’t want to be in it anymore. To paraphrase the great philosopher Homer Simpson, the Army looked deep inside my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined. After three employers in a row threw me in the trash, the Army gave me another chance. Same goes for the NSA, which I worked for under the Army’s auspices. It’s pretty hard to get a top-secret clearance and I’m grateful they took a chance on me.

The last thing my mom told me before I left for the Army:

Her: I’d tell you to give ’em hell, but I know you. Don’t give ’em anything! Just do what they tell you.

Basic training was easier and more fun than I expected. You know you’ve broken a drill sergeant’s spirit when they stop yelling at you and start saying ‘please’.

Once I had to wake up the guy on the next fire guard shift and despite increasing amounts of jostling, he stayed asleep. As I was desperate to return to my bunk, I pinched his nostrils shut for a few seconds until he woke with a start. We spent a lot of time standing next to each other because our last names are almost the same and were friends despite the incident.

As I was the shortest male, I often ended up at the front of the formation and so became the designated mailman. Once while waiting in line to throw practice grenades, I had the following conversation:

Him: Did you get the mail?

Me: Yes.

Him: Did you put it in the mailbox?

Me: Yes. That’s why when you asked me ‘did you get the mail?’, I said yes!

Well, that got the attention of the drill sergeant and my last line in the discussion I had with was: I haven’t called you anything except ‘drill sergeant’, drill sergeant.

My crowning achievement were the lines that got me banned from calling cadence. I began with the familiar formula: they say that in the Army, the training’s mighty fine. And I finished it with: SHARP and EO classes are not a waste of time!

I believe I got just about the whole battalion laughing at that moment.

SHARP and EO are the Army’s don’t be a rapist and don’t be a racist programs respectively. Soldiers must spend hours every year in refresher training despite the near total absence of rapists and racists in the Army. If I were a less scrupulously man, I would sell tiger-repelling rocks to the Army, as the logic is the same.

I was in a SHARP class once and the presenter said that victims of rape rarely lie about it. I was tempted to quote the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate to her. He said that if an accusation is all you need to condemn someone, who could be called innocent? Logic does not seem to be the main subject of gender studies majors.

Nonetheless, one drill sergeant said at graduation that I was very funny. She had previously treated me when the thumb clip of a practice grenade went through my thumb like a fishhook when I pushed on it with my thumb as I had been instructed. Murphy’s Law is never far off.

So off to the Defense Language Institute in scenic Monterey, California. I had a wonderful time there and was thankful for my luck in being assigned Levantine Arabic. I was a few steps closer to fighting ISIS. It was a bit disappointing that I was not picked for an overseas immersion despite my high grades, though the fact that I was able to learn Arabic in my 30s still gives me pride. My prior knowledge of Swahili made it easier as about 20% of Swahili words are from Arabic. The word Swahili itself is from the Arabic word for coast. Arabs and Africans met on the coast to trade and invented Swahili as a common language.

I lived in the barracks and had the room to myself for a time. Later, I got a roommate who barely spoke to me for the first month. I found out later that someone told him I had been a mercenary in Africa, hence my age and knowledge of Swahili. I never thought I’d need to tell someone that I was not a mercenary, alas such are the burdens of living an exotic life. It turns out he was assigned to my room because he was in danger of failing the course and it was thought that I could save him. I did my best to tutor him, and he made it to the end of the course. He needed two tries to pass the final exam, but he did and when I checked with him later, he was doing well on mission. DLI flunks out more people than any school on the planet and my hat is off to anyone who even attempts it.

I, Soldier - part 3

I volunteered for a deployment to Vietnam and arrived just in time for the Tet Offensive. Don’t get too excited. I got hit by shrapnel my third day in country and was sent back to the US without having led any troops or even firing my own weapon. I did stay long enough to help heave some bodies into a mass grave. That was my introduction to the reality of war. There was one VC pinned to a tree by flechette rounds. I helped rip him off but had pry out the some of the flechettes first. Flechettes are like big nails fired out of a cannon all at once. Some went by my head once. It sounded like a swarm of bees. If it was not possible to bury bodies, they were simply burned in massive funeral pyres. Bodies were stacked with alternating layers of dry bamboo and doused with gasoline or aviation fuel. The smell was like a combo of bacon and burnt hair. I had read once that in parts of Polynesia where cannibalism is practiced, human flesh is called long pig.

I decided I should study Vietnamese as there were very few Army officers who knew more than a few words of it. I spent the next year at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) learning as much Vietnamese as I could. My interest in foreign languages began when I was young and obsessed with dinosaurs. I wanted to know what the names meant and ended up learning a fair amount of Latin and Greek. Dinosaurs are such a great way to get children interested in reading and learning.

DLI is in Monterey, California. It’s a beautiful with wonderful weather, beaches, and night life. It was very difficult to enjoy any of those things while I was studying Vietnamese for 50 hours per week, plus doing physical training and keeping up with all the other demands of the Army. The bright side was as an officer, I had fewer obligations and more freedom than most of the students there. Because of my good grades and the recommendations of my teachers, I was volun-told to join Army Special Forces, AKA the famous Green Berets.

Before I could deploy, I had to complete the Q course. It seemed mostly silly to me, but by this point I had learned the Army was full of overgrown juvenile delinquents and other mediocrities. I heard a lot of bragging about run times, pull-ups, and push-ups, but very few about education or language knowledge. I saw that as a troubling omen. I passed the course, got my Girl Scout hat, which I never wore after graduation and got on a plane bound for Vietnam. On a side note, the beret is meant as an homage to the French Resistance who wore such headgear. The Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA, worked closely with the French Resistance in the build-up and aftermath of D-Day. The French word for woods or brush is maquis, and a person who lives in it is called a maquisard, or woodsman. Later, the word came to mean a French resistance fighter. In a similar way, the French called the people who lived in the highlands of Vietnam “Montagnards”, which means “moutaineers”. The motto of my home state is Montani Semper Liberi, which means “mountaineers are always free”.

I was sent to an outpost in the Central Highlands where the Montagnard people live. Most spoke Vietnamese as a second language which made it easier for me to communicate with them. I worked closely with a volunteer fighter named Binh Nghia which means “Just Cause” in Vietnamese. His parents gave him a Vietnamese name instead of Montagnard name in the hope it would make his life easier. He had a tattoo on his arm that said SAT CONG, which means “kill reds” (communists) in Vietnamese. There’s a myth that American soldiers spent a lot of time teaching the friendly locals about things like weapons and tactics. That’s bull because by the time I got there, Vietnam had already been wracked by 27 years of war. The Japanese fought there from 1941 to 1945, then the French came back and fought until 1954, and then the Vietnamese turned on each other.

Partly for my own safety and partly for style, I did not wear a name tag on my uniform. If I got killed, they could always check my dog tags for my name anyway. I remember once watching a western movie where the main character was never called by his name. I think even in the credits the character was listed as “the man with no name”. Being anonymous adds an aura of mystery which can be useful.

Unfortunately, most of the Americans sent to fight in Vietnam knew nothing of this or would have cared if they were told. For them, they were all just gooks, and they were either scared of them or thought they were worthless. I knew from my time at DLI that just wasn’t true. On a side note, I will add that the term gook entered GI slang during the Korean War. Miguk means American in Korean and whenever Koreans saw American troops, they said “miguk” a lot. The GIs though they were say “me gook”, as in “I am a gook”, and so gook became Army slang for an Asian person. Vietnam is a much older country than the US and has had to fight off invaders many times. They even fought off Genghis Khan, one of the few countries that was able to do so. While I was learning Vietnamese, I also studied the writings of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the communist Vietnamese. He spent a lot of time overseas, taught himself French and English, and studied the works of the French and American Revolutions. He did that because understanding your enemy is the first and most important step towards defeating them. By the way, Ho Chi Minh was not his real name, it means “bringer of light” in Vietnamese. Very few Americans knew this or bothered to learn it.

Story of My Life - part 2

Once I woke up in my own vomit after a night of heavy drinking. I’m lucky I didn’t choke in my sleep. I remember carefully washing my bedding and mosquito net the next day. It should have turned me off to drinking but didn’t.

Alas, all good things come to an end and so I returned to the US in December 2009. It was the bottom of the great recession, and the job market was tough. While I waited for a job offer, I took up stand-up comedy as a hobby. I was so good at it that 5 years later, I ended up joining the Army. Anyway, in October 2010, I got my first engineering job at specialty glass manufacturer in Chicago. It did not go so well. I got fired a year and half later and the experience was so disappointing that I decided to start my own tutoring business. I never quite broke even, so I took another engineering job about 9 months later. Even so, it was fun to be my own boss for a while.

About this time, I went to an Army recruiter to see what my options were. He tried to rope me into Officer Candidate School, but when I saw that the application required a photo, I gave up. Not sure why becoming an Army would require a photo, like an audition for a movie. When I asked about being a linguist, he told me there’s a five-year cool-off period between being in the Peace Corps and any military intelligence job.

From time to time, when I told people I was unemployed, they’d say: oh, you lost your job? And to that I would say: no, I still know where it is; they told me not to come back. My first engineering job was dull, and I spent many hours discreetly reading Wikipedia to pass the time. My second engineering job was in a bubble wrap factory, which was about as exciting as it sounds. And yes, one of the quality tests involves make sure the bubbles pop properly, though it is done with a special machine rather than by hand.

It was at this job that I had one of my famous run-ins with a tall but clueless boss. See, Illinois gets very humid in the spring and there was a frequent problem of water condensing in the silos that stored the plastic pellets. The tall, clueless boss suggested a blower to dry out the silo. I tried in vain to explain the concept of dew points and that a heater would work better. I could tell he did not like it when I asked him if he could keep a cup of coffee from freezing by blowing on it (hint for the physics-challenged: you can’t).

I only lasted 3 months at that job and my first day there was April Fools’ Day. I can’t prove the universe has a sense of humor; however, the circumstantial evidence is plentiful.

My nemesis in Chicago was a guy I met doing comedy. He ran one of the better open mics and I thought well of him at first. That changed when I made the mistake of debating politics with him on Facebook, and he resorted to various insults when he had no counterargument. So using his Facebook profile, I was able to track down his address and I knocked on his door unannounced. He wasn’t home, but he freaked out and never insulted me again. It was amusing to see the sudden flip from tough guy to coward so quickly. I should add that I later found out he was registered sex offender in Illinois because he went on a 3-year groping spree in his 20s. People who live glass houses should not throw stones.

Although I applied to the Chicago police and was invited to sit for the exam, I decided to take an engineering job at a plastic bag factory in Texas. It turned out about the same as my first engineering job, though it was great that I could walk to work. It was so boring that I drank a six-pack most days after work. My weight went up to 207 pounds vs the 150 I weighed in college and the 130 I weighed when I got back from Tanzania.

The biggest problem though, was my boss- my tall, clueless boss. Once, I ordered a part which was delayed by my company’s refusal to follow the supplier’s rules. I went to my boss for help. He then spent an hour giving me a lecture that began with him bragging about his high IQ and ended with him threatening that the world would chew me up and spit me out. I have no patience for people who demean me, so I responded by refusing to sit with him at the conference table at meetings. He didn’t like that and complained, which I found pathetic and amusing. When he gave me a sample of his own writing as being an example of good business writing, I replied with a list of the dumbest things he had written.

I didn’t think it was possible for a college-educated native speaker of English to write so poorly until I met that man. The phrase of his I remember best is ‘human-operated manual process’. I replied that all the manual processes in the factory are human-operated, unless we have trained monkeys. The last straw came when he asked me to write an essay about what I thought he wanted. I am neither a mind reader nor in elementary school, so I refused. When I was fired, I was given a nastygram which he clearly wrote but was too cowardly to put his name on. I was proud of the reply I wrote which was covertly delivered by a work buddy. It read:

***

Dear Fred,

I missed you in HR today. I figured you would want to savor the moment when the ax fell. You coward. I see also you couldn’t resist the urge to cram in a few more lies into my “get lost” letter. I’m sure you rubbed your oily hands together and cackled with glee. Since you were too chicken to face me, here are some parting words:

Remember that long chat last year? It was the one that began with you bragging about your high IQ and ended with you threatening that the world would chew me up and spit me out. I thought about walking off the job then, but I thought I could impress you with results. So much for that. I guess I just don’t have the Right Stuff for the heart-pounding, high-stakes world of plastic bags. People like you are the reason Dilbert cartoons exist. You’re a buzzword-spouting stuffed shirt with as much depth as a sheet of paper. There are engineers there with patents and PhDs. You really think you’re more impressive than them?

If you’re lucky, you have another 50 years left. I suggest using that time to learn how not to be a royal prick.

Peace & Love

***

I, Soldier - part 2

My mom died when I was young, and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. So that also made me kind of a loner and self-contained. My hard work at school paid off, and I went to study at West Virginia University when I was 18. I decided I should study Russian as that seemed to be the most important foreign language at the time. I vividly remember hearing JFK’s speech on the radio where he said: ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. The first time in my life I can remember crying was the day he got shot. I was never very sensitive emotionally, but there were always a few things that would play a chord on my heart strings. I learned about Stoic philosophy early and life and found it useful. I particularly enjoyed Epictetus. I forget who said it, but the two quotes that always came to my mind in troubling times were: everything weak feels itself attacked if touched and don’t argue about what a good man is, just be one.

With my Russian degree complete, I applied to the Foreign Service through the State Department. As I had no overseas experience, I was rejected. My dad suggested joining the Army as an officer. He said the pay is good and you can write your own ticket. What sealed the deal was when mentioned that with my Russian knowledge, it would be easy to get a military intelligence job and likely a cushy billet in a place like Germany. My dad mentioned volunteering for occupation duty after WW2 just to enjoy the sights of Europe. I wish I had spoken to him sooner about it, so I could have done ROTC in college. I had read about West Point and the requirements seemed onerous. Fortunately, there was an alternative: Officer Candidate School or OCS.

In 1967, I was accepted into OCS and from there did basic, infantry, airborne, and officer training. I remember the first time a drill sergeant yelled at me. It was like someone threw a handful of nails at my face. Even for a 22-year-old college grad like me, Fort Benning was a hard job. Eventually, like the rest of the training platoon, I learned how to march, shoot, and salute. The obstacle courses were fun, but what I really liked was learning how to throw grenades and shoot machine guns. Earlier on, the long hair and beard I had grown in college got shaved off. It was sort of fun to watch it all hit the floor at the same time, like a sheep getting sheared. Infantry training was only a few weeks longer. It was mostly running around in the woods while practicing small unit tactics. The woods around Fort Benning weren’t too different from the kind I spent by boyhood romping around in, so I felt at home.

Airborne school was more interesting, though I questioned the need for all the running. Running can cause stress fractures, which make injury much more likely when landing during a parachute jump. The force of landing from a paratrooper jump is about the same as jumping down from a height of eight feet, which is very likely cause injury without careful technique or if there is a pre-existing stress fracture. Several trainees ended up getting medical discharges for exactly that reason, and it happens every training cycle. Oh well, such things were above my grade. I had no power to change them. This was about the time in my Army career where I decided the only person I could rely on for my safety was me. The first jump, sometimes called the Hollywood jump, is done without a combat load in the daytime, which makes it easier. To pass the course, I had to do four more jumps, including one at night and out of four different kinds of aircraft. All those jumps were with a full combat load, which means you must pull a strap on your leg to release your gear right before landing. Landing with 40 pounds of stuff strapped to your leg often causes permanent injuries. As was to happen many times in my Army career, through a combination of prudence and luck, I avoided injury.

Officer Candidate School was much easier. It was like being in elementary school again, at least from my perspective. That’s where I met Barry Delmar. He was the only black candidate in the class. As we were both soft-spoken bookworms, we became friends. Officers who came from this course were derisively called 90-day Wonders during WW2. Equivalent German officers got far more training before they were allowed to lead men into battle. Given the Army’s need for officers at the time, it was a sensible decision. I read somewhere there is not much of a difference in officer performance on basis of training, be it from West Point, OCS, or ROTC. All Army officers have a bachelor’s degree, aside from the occasional battlefield commission.

There was a time when Barry seemed a bit more down than usual, so I tried to cheer him up by telling him the story of Benjamin Davis. He was the first black cadet at West Point in about 70 years following the handful who came through right after the end of The Civil War. He was shunned by all the cadets; he ate and roomed alone for those four long years. Later, he became a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen and commanded the famous Redtail Squadron, which had a perfect combat record. Not a single one of the bombers they escorted got shot down. Davis later became a Lieutenant General in the Air Force. Delmar seemed to appreciate my encouragement. I got the feeling that he didn’t get a lot of that in his life.

The military had only been de-segregated 20 years prior, and it had been only three years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I could see a kind of sadness in his face, but also a fiery determination. We didn’t get much free time at OCS, but Barry and I made the most of it. We had both been lucky enough to grow up in places with good libraries and had spent a lot of time reading the classics and the encyclopedia. He didn’t talk much, except with me and I once asked how he had such a large vocabulary. He answered that he once decided to read the dictionary. It was clever because a dictionary is much shorter than an encyclopedia but contains the same information in condensed form. Later, I learned that Malcolm X read the dictionary in prison to become a better public speaker.

Barry told me he grew up in a town called Amity in Washington State. We exchanged addresses and promised to visit each other when we were out of the Army. It gave us both something to look forward to. After OCS graduation, we wished each other luck and went our separate ways. We both had a copy of a picture we took of ourselves and a few other classmates we were friends with.

Story of My Life - part 1

My life has been a long, strange journey and I have struggled to find my place in the world. I can say with confidence I’m the only man in history who’s been in the Peace Corps, the Army, the NSA, and an insane asylum. And if there is another man who can say that, if he isn’t an Eagle Scout, I am. My favorite book is the autobiography of a game warden in Africa in the 1930s called Hunter. Ever since I read it, I wanted to have a similar life of adventure.

In the spring of 2007, I graduated college as a squeaky-clean ex-Mormon. I like to say I went from a Latter-day Saint to a Latter-day Ain’t. I had wanted to join the military in 2003, but a full college scholarship to study chemical engineering and the Iraq War convinced me otherwise. My brother joined the Army in 2006, so the military was off the table after that, as I did not want to stress out my parents more.

Since I’ve always been interested in travel and foreign languages, I decided a stint in the Peace Corps was the best option. Yes, the Peace Corps: Fighting Fire with Marshmallows since 1961. It was a great experience. Among other things, I learned Swahili, survived malaria, and climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. My main role was to teach math at an all-boys high school in a little village called Kibosho. The name in the local Chagga language means ‘Kibo view’. Kibo is local name for the main peak of Kilimanjaro. A famous Swahili proverb is milimia haikutani, lakini binadamu, hukutana (mountains don’t meet but people do).

What I was particularly proud of was the fact that after a year of teaching, the pass rate for my students on the national math exam hit the highest level in 12 years. After seeing the relative lack of science books in Swahili, I wrote my own and published it locally. I also distributed an electronic version for free.

The wildest experience I had there was the time I learned the meaning of the word msukule. An msukule is a person who is put under a spell by an mchawi (witchdoctor). The spell forces the victims to wake up at night and work in the mchawi’s field for a few hours before returning home with no memory of the event. When someone seems tired for no reason, local lore says the person might be an msukule.

As for the wildlife there, I had some interesting encounters. There’s a kind of flying termite the locals call kumbikumbi. They gather in great swarms, and you scoop them up, fry, and eat them. There’s also a creature called a kicheche, which is like a weasel. It often breaks into chicken coops to steal eggs. My neighbor had a persistent problem with one until he used a syringe to inject poison into some eggs and left the coop open. The creature took one egg and never returned. And of course, there was the time I stepped on a nest of siafu, a kind of aggressive ant that tends to eat everything in their path when on the march, though they are not particularly dangerous to people.

When I was living with a host family during the initial training phase and they found out I had never slaughtered a chicken, they told me to buy one at the market. Upon my return, they handed me a knife and told me to make dinner, so I did. My host brother helped me pluck it, but I did bloodiest part.

Tanzania is generally a safe country, but like all places, it has crime. The difference is that over there, mob justice is common. Tanzanians get very angry about crime, especially theft. Thieves who are caught red-handed in public are often beaten or stoned to death on the spot. This means that it is one of the few places in the world where criminals run *toward* the police to save themselves. Once, a Norwegian visitor to the orphanage in my village was beaten and robbed in broad daylight. The villagers captured the bandit and beat him til he laid on the ground, apparently unconscious. I did my best to calm the mob while the orphanage director called the police. When they came, the bandit immediately got up and into the police car.

From time to time, all the Peace Corps volunteers in my area gathered for a holiday. One Thanksgiving featured a special guest, a turkey named Mr. Delicious by his keeper. That guy spent a month feeding the turkey garlic in the hope some of the flavor linger in the meat. It was a touching moment when we all said goodbye to Mr. Delicious and thanked him for his sacrifice as he went on to his glorious destiny.

Malaria was awful and I couldn’t get to a hospital because it was the monsoon season, and the roads were impassable. When word of my illness spread, many people came to visit, bring food, and wish me well. It made up for all the times when I did not feel quite so welcome there. Another heart-warming moment was when the kids at the local orphanage would run out to hug me. That always made me feel like I was not a waste of flesh. I taught English to the orphans and made a website for the place to help with fundraising.

Never drank a drop of alcohol til I was 21, and I only started because my favorite restaurant (Long John Silver’s) burned down on my 21st birthday. When I saw the charred ruins, I figured I might as well try it and see what the big deal is. As luck would have it, that night a very drunk and lost college student banged on my door that night. I gave him shelter figuring he’d freeze if I turned him away. He pissed himself and had to leave in the morning with his pissed soaked clothes. You’d think that would have turned me off from drinking entirely and you’d be wrong.

The standard Peace Corps joke is that everyone who goes to Asia comes back a philosopher, everyone who goes to South America comes back a revolutionary, and everyone who goes to Africa comes back a drunk. It’s funny because it’s true, at least for me. Most tribes in Tanzania have their own brew, which is called pombe in Swahili. In my area, it was called mbege in the local language and it was made from millet and/or bananas. I tried it and it was OK. Methanol poisoning is a risk with any homemade brew, so I can’t say I recommend it.

I, Soldier - part 1

The original title to this novella was I, Rambo. I wrote to David Morrell, creator of Rambo for permission to use his character and he was kind enough to respond. He said fanfiction is OK, but because Rambo is copyrighted, I can’t publish a story for profit with that name. No problem, I re-wrote the story. Enjoy.

Foreword

While I was in the Army, I did not experience any combat, though I have been in a number of dangerous situations in the US and overseas. I drew on those experiences in part to write this book.

All the violent and criminal acts described herein are 100% fictitious and strictly for entertainment purposes only. Don’t try this stuff at home.

Coming in hot; locked, cocked, and ready to rock!

***

I was born in 1945 and grew up in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Fun fact: it’s the only county in that state which doesn’t have any coal. But I digress. Often. The most famous town there is called Harpers Ferry. John Brown’s failed abolitionist raid took place there. He was hanged a few months later in Charles Town, about five miles away from the house I grew up in. The history of The Civil War and war in general saturated my childhood. I remember once climbing up Maryland Heights, where you can get a great view of Harpers Ferry. Confederate artillery was once positioned there during a battle and it’s easy to see why. From there, you can see a Catholic church that was used as a hospital for the wounded of both sides. To avoid being attacked, the priest flew the British flag as a sign of neutrality. The ruse worked. That flag is still displayed in the church. It was in September of 1862 when that happened. 26,000 Confederates surrounded 14,000 Union troops defending Harpers Ferry. In the end, The Confederates won, and 12,000 Union soldiers surrendered. It was the largest surrender of the US Army until the fall of Bataan in 1942.

My dad was a tail gunner on a B-17 during WW2. Of course, I was amazed when I found out and all the more so since he was so humble about it. I asked the question everybody who’s never been to war asks: did you kill anybody? His answer was: “I kind of hope not, but it was my job. They were shooting at me, so I shot back. I was lucky to make it home in one piece.” The stories he told me got me interested in WW2 and all things military. I read Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back, when I was 12. It’s the amazing true story of a boy who grew up poor and had to hunt rabbits to keep his siblings fed. Later, he lied about his age to join the Army when he was 16 after being rejected by the Marines and paratroopers. He won every medal for bravery the Army gives. His greatest feat was fighting off a charge of six German tanks reinforced with 150 infantry. He called in artillery after ordering his own men to fall back, and then he jumped on a burning tank and used its machine gun to repulse the surviving enemy. Stories like these were my inspiration for joining the Army.

Another important part of my education was reading the Bible. You’d be surprised how much there is in there about strategy and unconventional warfare. My favorite story in that regard concerns the origin of the term shibboleth, which today is a synonym for password. There was a battle between the Israelites and another tribe, and in the aftermath, a soldier came up out of a river and begged for help. The Israelite guard asked him to say “shibboleth” and when the soldier said “sibboleth”, the guard killed him because he knew from his pronunciation he was not an Israelite. In the story of Jericho, Joshua sends two scouts into the city to recon the defenses. They are pulled up into a window by a woman named Rahab who asks that they spare her and her family in exchange for helping the Israelites. And lastly, there is the story of Gideon, who despite a cowardly reputation led an army of 350 against 100,000 Assyrians and won. His secret was having his troops light the enemy tents on fire while smashing clay jars and blowing trumpets. I knew there was an element of truth to this story because later I read about how the great commander Hannibal won a naval battle by using catapults to launch clay jars full of snakes onto enemy ships. When the jars hit the decks, they broke open, released the snakes, and panicked the crews, thus disabling the ships.

As a kid and teen, I spent a lot of time alone in the woods. I wanted to toughen myself so I could be a great soldier and figured that was the best way to do it. When I wasn’t outside, I was reading. Most people can read about 250 words per minute, which is the same as 15,000 words per hour. If you read an hour per day every day for 10 years, that’s almost 55 million words. For comparison, the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is 44 million words in all. In fact, reading just an hour per day every day for ten years gives you enough time to read the Bible, War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare with another 52 million words to spare.

I mostly studied military history, but I read just about everything I could get my hands on. West Virginia is a good place to learn how to shoot so I did a lot of that too. It took a lot of practice to get good at it. The mistake most beginners make is anticipating the recoil which makes them flinch. Until you can suppress that reflex, it doesn’t matter how much you practice aiming. I was never a great marksman much in the way that the Red Baron by his own admission wasn’t much of a pilot. His strategy was to fly out of the sun or a cloud and attack at close range. He was sort of the human form of an ambush predator, like a trapdoor spider or a crocodile. Every living thing has tactics and a strategy for survival and reproduction.

Nature is itself a kind of intense, never-ending war. The subtitle for The Origin of Species is “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. At the end of the book, Darwin writes that from the war of nature, famine, and death, higher and more complex animals are evolved. In my opinion, anyone who neglects the study of natural history is not truly educated. My love and study of nature would have many practical applications later when I was trying to stay alive in the jungles of Vietnam.

Astronaut Walk, part 5

 

In order to decipher an unknown language, a total at least 130,000 words of it must be recovered. This is the reason there are so many undeciphered scripts even today such as the Harrapan script. The only way around that is if the text appears next to a translation of it into a known language. This is how hieroglyphics were deciphered. An artifact called the Rosetta Stone contained the same message in hieroglyphics, Greek, and a phonetic form of ancient Egyptian. Often, the key is determining whether a script is based on letters, syllables as in Sanskrit, or ideograms as in Chinese. I remember reading a sci-fi story where the key to decoding an alien language was discovering their version of the Periodic Table in the ruins of one of their cities. An intriguing idea, yet as far as I could tell, the last person who did chemistry on Mars died eons ago. In any case, I had no doubt that my photographs of the Martian written language would keep linguists busy for many years to come. Yuri Knozorov, the linguist who decoded the Mayan script famously said that any possible system made by man can be cracked by man. It would remain to be seen whether humans could decipher an alien language.

By this time, the alien and I had become accustomed to each other, so I decided it was time to ask a favor. With signs and visual aids from the tablet, I explained how the bent landing gear on my ship prevented me from leaving, and I only had a limited time left to find a solution if I wanted to return to my home planet. The creature understood immediately and motioned me over to observe him work. I could tell it was being very gentle as he did not want to cause worse damage with its brute strength. It was delicately work, but in the end, my spacecraft was more or less pointed straight up. NASA confirmed this when I sent some positional data. The maneuvering thrusters would need to work a bit more than had been planned, but they had been engineered with enough redundant propellant in case of an emergency. I did my best to express my gratitude to the Martian beast and hoped it would understand that I was ready to do a favor for it. After pausing for a few moments, as if lost in thought, it lumbered off and return an hour later with a large ball of dried mud about five feet across. It motioned to the spacecraft as if to tell me it wanted me to take the mud ball back to earth with me.

It saw the look of confusion on my face, so in the sand, it drew a cartoon of what could only be an egg hatching, and miniature version of itself crawling out. Ah, so the mud ball contained many such eggs of its kind. I drew my own cartoon to explain that, and the creature signaled that we were on the same page, so to say. In another drawing, the creature explained that the young of its kind could not survive in the current Martian environment, though they could remain dormant for a long time when covered in dried mud. The creature concluded that perhaps young Martians could survive on earth. It was worth a shot, and as the creature had no one else to help its species survive, I was its only hope. Unfortunately, the mud ball was too big to fit in the airlock. We ended up having to very carefully cut it in half. Through tapping with its antennae, the creature was able to sense exactly where to cut and did the delicate work with a rock hammer. The bottom halves of the two resulting hemispheres needed to be resealed with mud, and so I used some of my precious water to accomplish that task. 

Before I resealed the mud hemispheres, I took some pictures of the eggs jutting out and sent them to mission control. They were, of course, thrilled and fascinated, though with the launch window fast approaching, it was time to make my departure preparations. The added weight of the hemispheres was a few hundred pounds, and so I would need to ditch a fair amount of gear in order to launch. With help from NASA technicians, I was able to cobble together a basic communication station that would charge with a solar panel. I explained to the creature that hopefully it would be able to communicate with me both on my way home and with scientists on earth in the future. To protect it from dust storms, it was small and light enough such that the alien could stash it in the nearby cave for safekeeping. I could tell that even though the creature was nearing the last few years of its life, it was buoyed by the hope that it might live long enough to see its species hatch, grow, and have a future elsewhere.  

It was a bittersweet moment as I climbed up the ladder for the last time on launch day. In what I presume was a farewell gesture, the creature raised its claws and snapped its pincers loudly several times. I returned his gesture with a salute, a wave, and a bow before closing the airlock door behind me. The spacecraft rumbled and shook as blasted off to begin the long journey home. It passed pleasantly as I was able to converse with the creature through the improvised communication device. Almost a year later, I splashed down near the Bahamas and was taken to Cape Canaveral to recuperate. Based on what was known of Martian biology, scientists created a habitat for the eggs, which hatched successfully a few months later. It was another scientific first, though my Martian friend stopped broadcasting shortly after being sent a video of the hatching. I like to think it died peacefully knowing its most important work was complete. As for myself, after a few months of tours and lectures I decided a long vacation was in order. I chose a spot near Tybee Island where the sea turtles come ashore to nest. Watching their eggs hatch was a soothing reminder that life goes on, no matter where you are in the universe.