Category: USA

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Traditions, Quantico and NGOs on the Battlefield

Military bases and battlefields are often located on beautiful natural locations.  It makes sense when you think about it.  They were looking for high ground that commanded some natural features.   Such places have nice views.   Below is the view of the Potomac from the Marine base at Quantico where I went to participate on a panel on civil military affairs at the Expeditionary Warfare School. 

We had an interesting discussion about NGOs in battle spaces.   The students were generally unsympathetic to the neutrality of NGOs and their arguments were cogent.   What happens when an NGO learns about an imminent attack?  On the other hand, it is important that we have NGOs maintain the ability to work with both sides, at least nominally.   This is especially important for an organization like the Red Cross, which has real responsibility to minister to the victims of armed conflict on all sides.   There will always be a dynamic tension.    It takes physical courage to be on a battlefield and it takes moral courage to maintain neutrality in these tough conditions.   The expedient thing to do in the short run is often not the right thing for the long run.  I defended the NGOs, although I admitted that the actions of many also annoy me much of the time.   We cannot always defend only those things we like.  

Beyond that, NGOs are a key part of civil society.   They usually help us with stability operations, whether or not they want to work toward “our” goals.  They provide services that make life better for the local people.   The bad guys tend to hate them for that.   Their goal is to make life horrible for the average person in order to break down support for legitimate authority, create chaos and drum up recruits for their nefarious purposes.   Of course, that does not include the politically motivated NGOs, and there are a few of them.

The military does tradition well.  The building where we met was called Geiger Hall.  Many buildings are named after famous people, or people who gave piles of money to whatever institution is naming the place.  This is different.  General Geiger earned the honor AND the building owners explained why.   The constant exposure to the reminders of his successful and heroic life gives instruction and inspiration.  These are things we need more in our lives.  Below is the story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a truly remarkable man.  If you don’t know the story, I suggest you google him.

I had to rush back from Quantico to do a presentation on strategic communications for the JSAT at NDU.   Our part of the task force is studying that and I will write more insights re public diplomacy when I have more of them.   I will have to go to Doha to work on this in early December.   Back to the Middle Eastern desert.   Actually that area is pleasant in the winter, it is only for a couple weeks and I won’t be in the war zone, so I don’t mind.  

I walked along the Potomac on the way from the Metro to NDU, where I met this guy.   He told me that he was fishing for catfish and rockfish and catching some catfish.   As a senior citizen, he says he doesn’t need a license to fish in the Potomac.   He has been fishing there for more than a half century, back when this part of Washington was a poor semi-rural town.

Above – with all the oak trees, we have alot of squirrels, agile and graceful creatures. Three of them were burying acorns, but by the time I got my camera out, only one remained. This one reared up.

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Becoming American: Then & Now

Above is Howell Ave looking north as St Augustine Catholic chuch, where I occassionally went. 

Milwaukee’s old ethnic communities are gone, replaced by new ethnic communities.  I clearly saw that the Polish immigrant community around 6 and Lincoln is now a Hispanic immigrant community.  All over the city it is the same. The workingmen with the big forearms speaking with accents that sang Eastern European rhythms (where the streetcar bends the corner around) even into the second generation are gone.  We shall not soon see their like again.

Below – Public schools Americanized generations of immigrants, my ancestors included and I suppose me too  This is Dover St school, founded 1889 and still in the same place.  When I went there, it was still black from the coal smoke.  I thought all brick building were black, but I found that most were a nice light brown (cream city) color when they were cleaned up.  I don’t like the paint job.  Dover is made of nice Cream City brick.  They should just clean it up and let it be natural.

I miss them.  These were the hard working, blunt and practical guys who went to war to save America from fascism & communism.  They literally built & protected my world.  Their patriotism and loyalty to the country of their or their parents’ choice was enshrined at the VFW posts, their hard work evident in the busy factories and their troubles washed away at the many taverns.  A new generation of immigrants and their children is at work in the old neighborhood.  They come from places like Mexico or Honduras.  I have confidence that they too will build America and in process become Americans, just as the Poles, Italians, Serbs and Germans did before them.

After a couple generations all that really is left of the immigrant are T-shirts saying “proud to be Italian” or “kiss me; I’m Polish,” along with some food preferences and two or three phrases in the old language that make genuine natives of the old country smile.  Imagine someone whose language was learned and frozen in the slang of the 1940s or even the 1960s or 70s.   Language changes; immigrants keep and propagate the old stuff in groovy and copasetic ways.   They just don’t know it. I know it from personal experience, when teachers at the Foreign Service Institute who left their native lands long ago taught me phrases equivalent to “23 skidoo” or “now you’re cooking with gas.”  

Below – These steps lead from Chase Ave to … nowhere.  I suppose they used to connect neighborhoods before the freeway went in. 

I do have some concern about too many immigrants coming from the same place and concentrating among each other.   When you get immigrants from many sources, they have no choice but to learn English and become Americans very quickly.   This is what happened circa 1910, when immigrants made up a greater % of the American population than they do today.  If immigrants from Poland, Russia, Germany, Italy and Greece were all together, none could dominate.  The only language they could use was English, even though it was nobody’s first language.  I saw it happening with my kids friends in Fairfax County.  Arab kids, Chinese kids, Korean kids and other from countries you cannot even find on a map get to be friends and speak to each other in English.  Diversity is really strength.  Immigrants from one place can maintain their separateness.  Separateness is a bad idea.  I value true diversity, with lots of different groups all contributing to an American identity.

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Beer and Sauerkraut

I went with my sister to the Miller brewery and then around the old neighborhood.  Below are the boiler vats.   They are eighteen feet deep.

Miller Genuine Draft is good beer.  Miller Highlife & Miller Lite are not.  Miller also has a partnership with Leinenkugel, which is very good and it distributes Pilsner Urquell and Fosters, both of which are among my favorite beers.    It was fun to see where they were made. 

This is King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer.  This statue is in the “cave”, caverns dug into the hill where they used to keep beer cold before refrigeration.  They used to gather ice from the local lakes during the winter and pack it around in the caverns.  This cooled the temperature during the summers.  Evidently the ice would last until the next winter.  People lived closer to their environment in those days.   You have to be more innovative if you have to do more than flick a switch to get air conditioning.

The plant in Milwaukee makes a half million cases of beer a day and all this beer moves out EACH day.  This plant serves the upper Midwest and around 40% of the beer goes to Chicago.  Five other plants around the country serve other regions.  

BTW – According to the Bier Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) issued by Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516 all beer sold can be made of only malted barley, hops, water, and yeast.   This rule still applies on Germany.   Beer can be made from any grain.  Miller mixes in some corn with the other ingredients and Budweiser uses rice.  That means by German rules these are not really beers.

Only 1600 people work at the plant and half of them are corporate staff.  That means that around 800 workers make all that beer.  The plant is mostly automated.  I was thinking again re the loss of jobs.  Those jobs have not gone to China; they have just gone away.  below is the Miller warehouse, clean, tidy and almost w/o workers.  A half million cases will move through it today.  You can easily see the jobs that automation takes.

On the other hand, other jobs are created but hard to see.   My cousin Tony works for a company that runs webpages called www.officefurniture2go.com and www.homefurniture2go.com.   The firm was founded in 2006, has about a dozen employees and distributes furniture around the country – w/o a significant bricks and mortar operation.  We still think in the old industrial model where lots of people come together in one place.  The new model has people distributed thinly and in small groups.   It is hard to get used to it.

Anyway, we had another beautiful fall day.  Milwaukee has nice parks as you can see from the pictures. Above and below is Humboldt Park.  Pictures cannot capture such a glorious day.  Even if the visuals could be perfect, you would not have the smell, sound and feel of the day.

I also drove down to Franksville.  It is not a major tourist spot.  It used to be where they made Franks Kraut.  I don’t know if they still do, but I did see lots of cabbage fields.  The brand is actually owned by the Ohio based Fremont Company, makers of all sorts of Kraut and catsup.  Franksville is interesting for me because it was for a long time the edge of my biking world, as far south as I could reasonably ride and return in one day.   It is still familiar.  below is a cabbage patch.

Below a pumpkin patch near Franksville in Racine County.

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Indian Summer in Milwaukee

Below is Lake Michigan looking south from Warnimont Park.

Indian summer is always a bittersweet time.  The warm sun shining through colorful leaves is delightful, especially mixed with the smell of the new fallen leaves and the sound of their rustling underfoot.  But this is also an ending.  The last flowers of summer are on hanging lonely on their stalks.   The falling leaves will soon leave branches bare.  Pleasant October will yield to rainy and bleak November and we will have to wait several months for exuberant life to return to the forests and field.

Below is Boerner Botanical Gardens in Whitnal Park

Indian Summer is often a metaphor for life with its last vigorous but perhaps futile & melancholy gesture.   It essentially one of the characters in John Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist”.   The poem “the Last Rose of Summer” sums it up.   (I put the full text at the bottom of this post.)

Below is Austin Street where I grew up looking north.  Those beautiful yellow trees are ash trees planted after the death of our elms.  They were planted in the middle of the 1970s.  The one on the right I repaired after a wind storm broke its branches.  It was smaller then.

Metaphor aside, October is my favorite month and Milwaukee’s October did not disappoint.  I visited some of my old haunts.  Many things have changed; most things have remained the same or similar.  

Below is a statue of Patrick Cudahy in Sheraton Park.  Cudahy founded the city that bears his name when the opened a meat packing operation south of Milwaukee.  

Below is Tadesuz Kosciuszko the Polish American hero in the park that bears his name.   The Polish epic Pan Tadeusz is based on him.  Interestingly, it starts “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie.”  Lithuania my country, you are like good health.  Of course nationality is always complicated.  The most famous Polish epic, written in Polish about a Pole can talk about Lithuania because they were part of the same commonwealth, which was lost, swallowed by its more agressive neighbors in 1795.  It was gone for 123 years.  That means that most Poles who came to the U.S. were not technically coming from Poland; they came from Russia, Austria or Germany, the countries that had annexed Poland and controlled its parts.  Pan Tadeusz goes on with some poingancy, ” I never knew till now how precious, till I lost thee. Now I see thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.”  Poles didn’t get their country back until 1918.  The Lithuanians lost theirs again in 1940 and didn’t get it back until the fall of the Soviet Union.  When I see the statue, I am reminded of the struggle.  This was a Polish neighborhood and people knew the story back then.   Today most people probably just see a man on a horse and think it is George Washington.

Speaking of a Polish neighborhood, this is Saint Josaphat’s Basilica, built by Polish immigrants.  Milwaukee has lots of churches near each other.  Each immigrant group built its own. We used to see it in the distance from our house.  It was lit up at nights and my sister and I thought it looked kind of like some kind of giant monster. It was scary.  You can see how this might be the case. Look at the “eyes”.

Below are geese flying into the pond in Kosciuszko Park.   The geese chase away the ducks. In this goose-duck war, the ducks are completely outclassed.  Geese used to be rare, but now they are all over the place.   They are bigger and more aggressive than the ducks and they crap all over the place.  Eventually, I suppose they will come to replace the ducks in the local ecology.  They also used to migrate, but now many stick around all year living off the fat of the land (and the local gardens)

Don’t forget the poem

Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go, sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter,
Thy leaves o’er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
From Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away.

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Bubblers & Civic Virtue

I went down to Washington to meet Chrissy for lunch and took advantage of being there to see some of the memorials.   

Washington is a truly beautiful city.  There is a lot to see and it is all free. I corrected a German tourist who I overheard saying to a fellow European, “Americans have so little history that they have to make a bigger thing of so short a time.”  I pointed out the truth that we Americans enjoy the OLDEST continuous government in the world after only the UK.   We have not had a radical or violent overthrow of our government since 1776 and we have lived under the same Constitution – never suspended – since 1788.   I asked him just to think about it.  I didn’t point out that Germany was not a country until 1871 and that it went through some interesting changes after that.

Below is the new office building where I will work in 2009, although I bet I won’t get a good view of the Potomac.

Below is the same building in April.  They are making good progress.

Many Europeans have a different and, IMO, mistaken view of history.  They fix on places and traditions instead of people.   Some people live close to old things but no “people” or culture is older than any other.   My mother’s family left the new Germany soon after Otto Von Bismarck’s unification thing in 1871.  My father’s family left Poland (then subject to the Russian Empire) soon after.  I am glad they did.  When they came to America, they didn’t just set back the human clock to zero and start over.  They added to America’s in a shared heritage.  I have been to Germany.  We make better sausages in Milwaukee, but they still make better beer. 

BTW – I hear my great-grandfather used to imply that things were better in Germany.  This made him unpopular during World War I.  Of course he was not telling the truth.  ALL immigrants think that America is better than the places they left, otherwise they would be there and not here.  It is true even if they don’t want to admit it.

Below – Washington still has many big and beautiful American elms.

There is no such thing as a culture outside its human carriers.   It is not resident in old buildings, the land or anything else non-human.  Parents pass their culture on to their children and some cultural traits can be astonishingly long-lived, but each transition produces an imperfect copy.  This is great.  Otherwise the culture would be as dead as a rock.  No two individuals have the same understanding of their culture.   We talk about culture as thought it was something palpable, but it really is just a chimera and a very ephemeral one at that.  Better to adapt the best things you can find rather than stick only with the adaptations that worked for your grandparents.  Even the best things must be adapted.  Living people adapt and so do living cultures.  I think America does this well.  I love our traditions and still feel a kind of excitement when I walk around the Capitol Mall, even though I done it literally hundreds of times.  On the other hand, I would not want to be limited to the skills of Washington’s dentist.

Above is WWII memorial from behind.

Of course, I didn’t bore the European tourists with all that either.  Germans usually have good teeth. 

I thought of change and persistence as I walked past the World War II memorial.  It is a new memorial, but it is so very well done and fits perfectly into the Mall that you would think it had been there forever.   It commemorates the courage of my father’s generation.   Each year there are fewer and fewer of them.  Their courage is something worth passing along.

There is one simple tradition that seems to be disappearing – bubblers.*   There are still bubblers on the Mall.  There used to be lots of bubblers around generally, now not so much.   I suppose they are trouble to maintain.  Vandals break them or put gum in the spigots.  But I think the culture has taken a small wrong turn in not keeping those things around.   A bubbler is an obvious symbol of civic virtue.  Everybody gets to have something everybody needs and it is available to all.  The symbolism is one of the reason that separate bubblers were so offensive during the time of Jim Crow.   Now people sell bottles of water.   Everybody carries a bottle of water around to “hydrate”.   I would rather have the bubblers.

*Drinking fountains to people not from Milwaukee

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Life is Good

Below – back again in the USA for a couple weeks.  This is the airport bus.

I am back in the U.S. on my last R&R.   I can easily see that my country that is prosperous, peaceful, clean and full of opportunity – and very green in Virginia.   Yet all I hear on the news is how tough everything is.   Maybe all those whiners should check out some other places. You really have to wonder about the points of reference.

My point of reference is the 1970s, when I started to pay attention to things like jobs, the economy and the environment.   Then like now, I was very concerned about the environment; it was a lot worse back then.  Lest we forget, Lake Eire was declared dead and you couldn’t safely breathe the air in major cities.   Many people seem unaware of the improvements and perhaps most think the opposite, but the environment is indeed better.  So is the economy.  In my economic courses back in college, I learned that unemployment of around 5% was “full employment” and almost impossible to sustain.   I remember the stagflations and unemployment rates of 10%+.  Of course, when I was apt to whine, my father would point to his youth during the 1930s.  Now I hear that unemployment of around 5% compared to the Great Depression and economic growth of only 1% is called a recession.  What great times we live in when such trouble we have is cause for gnashing of teeth.  

It doesn’t get very much better than this in terms of opportunity, despite what politicians are promising.   Maybe that is precisely the problem – it doesn’t get much better.  Let me give a individual analogy. Alex has been working out for a year so that he can now toss around hundreds of pounds w/o much effort.  He is worried re “plateauing”.   It is a little sad to reach a goal, but at some point you are about as good as you can get.  Society is not the same as an individual person.  Experienced people understand that general conditions do improve – over time – and it is indeed possible for them to improve their own circumstances with hard work, patience and a little luck.  But some aggregate measures will never get much better.  It is not possible for unemployment to drop much below 5%.  Some “problems” are merely tautologies.  Half of all Americans will always earn less than the median wage, for example.  And the weather is always bad someplace.  If you look for reasons to be depressed you can find – or make – them, but why would you do that?

What I take a bit personally is the rotten information being generally believed about Iraq.   I could sum it up like this, “Let’s call our victory a defeat because it was harder than we thought.”  There are movies and TV programs about Iraq, none of them show our troops in a good light.   An episode of ER was on my flight’s entertainment center.  It featured a crazy, drug addicted and mistreated vet.  It turned out that he had gone nuts because he had seen so many Iraqis abused.  What kind of crap is that?   I saw a variation of that on “Law & Order” a couple of months ago.  We have to call attention to this.  Some people in the media seem to be working up the same type of slander they pulled on the Vietnam vets, only this time they pretend to care about them as victims. 

The true story of our success in Iraq would be more interesting.  We have heroes.  It is not even very hard to find them if you try. 

Our troops are not victims and they certainly are not perpetrators.  They are doing their duty in a difficult environment and doing it well.  For most, their time in Iraq gives them valuable insights and makes them better citizens.   It is a hard thing to do. Doing the hard things reveals character.

I blame the politically correct culture for these problems.   We essentially have to downgrade heroism and bravery so that we don’t imply those not exhibiting these traits are not as good. We let people revel in victimhood.  In fact, it is legally enforceable.   Somebody claims victim status and it becomes legally hazardous to give him/her a hard time – even when they have it coming. Who knows how the lawsuit will go with a credible (if deceptive) victim?  It certainly is considered bad manners to tell the truth and it is politically dicey.

When Phil Graham made his whiner comments, the whiners came out in force and whined that they were being called whiners.   Of course, politicians distanced themselves from this and listed the many reasons why whining was appropriate.   

Is this the way it is going to be?  I don’t think so.  Most of the Americans I meet are still self reliant.   Most of us still take care of ourselves; we pay our mortgages on time; 95% of our workers have jobs and they dutifully go to them.  We grumble about how things are (grumbling is not the same as whining), but we understand that OUR efforts will improve our situations.  But many of us have the impression that we are part of a small and dwindling minority that practices these virtues.  We do indeed look like a nation of whiners, not because most Americans are whining, but because the whiners dominate the debate and everybody is afraid to say anything, sort of like the bystanders in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” story.

We all have to make choices and we never can get everything we want.  This is probably a good thing, but no matter whether we like it or not, it is just how things are.  It is nobody’s fault.   I understand that I run the risk of becoming a curmudgeon, but I just don’t see the crisis the media tells me about.    We face challenges – as always – which we will overcome and meanwhile life is not bad.  It is just not perfect.   If you find yourself is a perfect world, check your pulse.

Who of us would want to live permanently in a different time or a different place?  We live in a great country and it is a great time in history to be here.   To pretend otherwise is dishonest and to believe otherwise is silly.

Above are Mariza & Chrissy at Mariza’s new place in Baltimore.

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Hot Lanes & Direct Democracy

Above is the interchage at 495 and 66 – Richmond or Baltimore.  That building in the middle is the Dunn Loring Metro Station, so you get to see several parts of the transit puzzle.

They are building “hot lanes” on I-495 near my house.  Hot lanes are special lanes where people pay a premium to drive.  The price is based on the traffic conditions.  When there is a lot of traffic, the price is higher.  This means that people choose to trade time for money and travel time is more predictable. 

We need to address traffic congestion and building more or wider roads won’t work.   Charging for use based on demand makes so much sense.   Currently we allocate space on the road by making people wait in line.  It is the same way the Soviet Union distributed bread with the same result.     

I am interested in these kinds of innovative traffic solutions, so I went down to the Virginia Dept of Transportation (VDOT) information session at Luther Jackson Middle School not far from my house.  There were around 200 people at the meeting.   The most boisterous among them (us) expressed outrage at the hot lanes.  Nobody wants any new roads in his neighborhood and people complained that hot lanes were just ways to let the rich avoid traffic.   

It is a challenge of direct democracy.   We experienced the same sort of thing in New Hampshire.   Our community wanted to put in a sewer system, but some of the old guys figured out (correctly) that they would not live long enough to justify the initial investment, so old Mr. Parker or old Mrs. Winthrop got up and complained.   Nobody wanted to cross them, so nothing happened.    Some of my neighbors at the VDOT meeting wanted to stop this project.  Fortunately, the VDOT people are made of sterner stuff, or maybe they don’t care as much re public attitudes.    Hot Lanes WILL be built in N. Virginia.  There are already hot lanes on I-394 in Minneapolis, I-25 in Denver, SR-91 in Orange County,  I-15 in San Diego & I-10 in Houston, Texas, but Virginia’s  is evidently going to be the biggest private-public partnership for hot lanes in the world.  Read more about Virginia hot lanes at this link.

Actually, I am not sure what the real attitude of my fellow Virginians is re hot lanes.  The loudest people complained loudly and used the pronoun “we” very liberally.  After the meeting, I talked to some people who seemed less opposed.   Nobody likes a new road in their yard, but many people are reasonable and understand that this particular project is good. 

It reminds me of the old joke.  The Lone Ranger & Tonto are fighting a group of Indians and losing.  The Lone Ranger says, “It looks like we are surrounded, Tonto.”  Tonto replies, “What is this ‘we’ Kemosabi?”

Chrissy attended a similar meeting at the same time I was doing the hot lanes.  Hers was re new buildings near the metro.  We (CJ and I) favor density near the metro.   It is good for the environment and good for our community, but current residents are often against it.  They want to shut the door behind themselves. 

Our  views on development generally make Chrissy and me as popular as skunks at a garden party, at least among the activists who just assume the local residents will toe the anti-development line.   But I think we are doing the right thing.    Greater density near the metro and hot lanes are solutions that address the problems of traffic and congestion.  Developing where we are means saving farms and forests farther away and helps use all that expensive infrastructure.   The alternative, just opposing change, solves no problems, although it might make our lives temporarily easier.  But it is sort of like the Mr. Parker or Mrs. Winthrop attitude.

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Is This Heaven?

I got an email from my colleague in Iraq telling me that they are experiencing “the mother of all sandstorms.”  Since we are still working out of tents, it is doubly bad.   I go back to Iraq tomorrow.  I expect that my can will be covered in dust and that I will have to shovel off my bed before I can take a nap.   I don’t look forward to returning to those gritty 110+ degree days, but you can get used to anything, I guess. 

That goes for the sweet as well as the bitter.  I spent my penultimate morning in Virginia walking/running around my neighborhood.   I probably covered around ten miles.  What a pleasant place.   But we have gotten used to it and don’t really appreciate what we have.   If you listened to all the complaining, you would think our country was a horrible place.

I advocate the mental experiment of imagining you have lost everything.  Now imagine you got it back.  How happy are you?   I have not lost it all but when I am in Iraq I really appreciate what we have in America.   America has delivered on the promise to protect the natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   Sometime we are just too fat and happy to recognize that we are fat and happy.

Below is part of one of my running trail

I think America is a great place.  Let the dogs of cynicism howl.  (Actually the word cynicism comes from the Greek word for dog.   Cynics saw themselves are the guard dogs.)   Some people would just call me naïve, but I have seen a lot of the world and my opinion is not based on lack of experience.    In fact, I think it is the experience with different things that helps me see the wonder  and beatuy in the “ordinary” things.

Being an American gives you options and choices.   You get to pursue happiness. You don’t always catch it, but there are plenty of chances.  I understand that there are also plenty of challenges, but overcoming challenges is the fun part of life.  You cannot be happy w/o challenges.  Besides on this earth is perfect.  We have not achieved and never will achieve heaven on earth. 

With all that in mind, I would paraphrase the exchange with Shoeless Joe Jackson on “Field of Dreams”.  When he asked, “Is this heaven?”  I think the response would be, “No.  This is just the United States of America.”  

Back to Iraq tomorrow I go.  High Ho.

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The U.S. Marine Museum at Quantico

Above is the atrium from below. 

After getting to know & admire the Marines in Iraq, I certainly had to take advantage of our new Marine Museum in the Washington area.  It is at Quantico and they just finished it last year.    Please click on the link for real details.   I will supply only my personal impressions.

Below is the atrium from above.

Before I went to Iraq,  I knew some individual Marines, mostly U.S. Embassy guards and military attaches, but I had not seen them in their own environment and I have to admit that most of what I thought came from the media, where You have the heroic “Sands of Iwo Jima” image mixed with less favorable  left wing impressions .   It has become a little hard for me to accurately recall how I felt before I went to live with Marines in Iraq.  When I think back, I do remember that when they told me that it was a Marine COMBAT regiment and that they would issue me protective gear, I was a little apprehensive, both about being embedded with Marines and being issued protective gear.  If they give you protective gear, it might be because it is dangerous enough to need it.   I guess I was expecting to be in that “Sands of Iwo Jima” environment, or at least the one I saw on television news.  Both were kind of scary.  Fortunately, it was a lot more peaceful than that and the Marines were different too.

 In the real life Marines, I found innovative problem solvers.  They take pride in never really having enough resources and improvising to get the job done.  But they are not merely men of action.  Although some don’t like to admit it, many are true intellectuals.   They are widely read and they try to adapt historical experience and theoretic knowledge to their practical problems.   Their jobs give them a unique ability to test theory and the fact that lives are on the line makes them take this very seriously.  There is an old saying that an intellectual is someone who will accept anything except responsibility.   This is where Marines differ from the academic intellectuals who sometimes criticize them.

You can see that I have come to admire Marines, as does almost anybody who has real and sustained contact with them.   They still have a practical belief in honor, virtue and honesty.    Theirs is a tough life.   I don’t think it is for everyone and the Marines certainly agree.   I was fortunate to get to know Marines close up and I wanted to take the boys down there to share some of that too.  Visiting the Museum is not much of an introduction, but it is something.   Maybe the Marines could be an option for them. 

The Museum has very clean architectural lines.      It has a sweep like that of the Iwo Jima memorial.   The exhibits are based on Marine history and actual Marines.   Each of the characters in the dioramas in modeled on an actual Marine including facial features and body proportions.   It is an interesting detail.   BTW – we went with the free docent tour.  I suggest everybody do that.   Otherwise, you might not find out or pay attention to details like the one above.  

I got a slightly different impression of WWII from being in Iraq and visiting the museum helped confirm that.   In the last years of the war, the Japanese strategy was to try to kill as many Americans as possible.  They knew they couldn’t win against the U.S., but they figured that if they killed enough Americans, they could achieve an negotiated peace.   The Marines paid the biggest price, as the Japanese just fought to the death on each little piece of ultimately indefensible land.   We did not give up, but we might have.   People living in the past made decisions as we do today.  They didn’t know they were living in the past and they did not know the outcomes, because those outcomes had yet to be decided.  There is no such things as fate.

The docent talked about the famous picture of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi.   People see that as the mark of victory.  Actually many days of fighting followed the flag raising and three of the men in the picture were subsequently killed.      There is good book and movie about what happened to the surviving men involved called “Flags of Our Fathers.”

In the36 days of fighting there were 25,851 US casualties; 6825 were killed.   And Iwo Jima is a really small place, about the size of Al Asad and just about as featureless.  Or put another way, it is only about 1/4 the size of Milwaukee (only the city, not the whole county).  We have lots of heros in our current generation too, but fortunately we have not faced anything like that in Iraq.   The “greatest generation” earned the title.  

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Arthur Treacher’s, A&W and Other Endangered Gastronomical Delights

The only free standing Arthur Treacher’s I know about is near my house.   All the others have gone the way of the dodo, except a few remnant populations in food courts along the New Jersey Turnpike.   I like the original fish and chips and the offerings of Long John Silver or Red Lobster just do not measure up.  Someday, maybe soon, this one will also be gone.  On that day I shall mourn.  BTW – Notice the pay phone, another endangered species.

A similar fate has befallen A&W stands.  You can still get the root beer at the grocery store, but they are mostly gone as free standing stores with the honest  draft style root beer.  The only one I know about is on HWY 29 on the way out of Charlottesville.   When I was a kid, my cousin Lani used to take me to swim at Racine beech.  We would stop off on the way back at the A&W on Lake Drive.   I think that is some kind of drive in bank these days.   Near Holmen there used to be one across from the Skogan’s IGA.  I could walk to that one from Chrissy’s parents’ house.   It still features root beer and still even has the drive in, but it is no longer A&W.

Of course, all sorts of new chains have come to take their places.   At the Taco Bell near my house, you really cannot order in English and expect your order to be correct.   I guess that is why the numbered menus are so useful.   You can just hold up as many fingers as the item you want to order.  American high school kids used to work at these places, but now you find nothing but recent immigrants.   The other day I went to Taco Bell and was amused to find some Asian immigrants in the back speaking in heavily accented Spanish.   It must be challenging to be the immigrant within the immigrant community.

Duncan Donuts is doing all right, having weathered the low carbs craze of a few years back.   I always preferred Duncan Donuts to the Krispy-Kreme sugar-dough balls.   Krispy-Kreme sailed ahead from its southern bastions until it was wrecked on the low-carbs rocks, taking its customers and sharholders on a roller coaster ride.  Duncan Donuts abides.  Up in Boston, there is a Duncan Donuts on every corner.  There are not quite so many around here.  They do make the best coffee. I don’t like Starbucks as much.   I can never figure out what all the various coffee types are called and which ones I like. 

Speaking of coffee, there is an interesting relationship.   Back when I was a kid, gas cost around quarter.  Everybody looks back with great fondness to those prices, but everybody made a lot less money too, so it was about the same number of hours/minutes worked to fill up.   But coffee used to be a nickel.   Today gas costs $3.39, but if you go to Starbucks or someplace like that, coffee costs about the same as gas, so gas is a much better deal than coffee.Away from Iraq, as you see, my thoughts become more prosaic.  

The great privilege of freedom, BTW, is the freedom to have prosaic thoughts.   When everybody thinks serious thoughts most of the time, you know the country is in trouble.