A legend passes on

I said these words on FB shortly before John McCain passed on. I meant every word.

An American hero is apparently going to depart us in awhile. Senator John McCain, a Naval Academy graduate who was shot down over North Vietnam and spent years in the Hanoi Hilton being beaten and tortured to the extent that he can't lift his arms above his shoulders even now. He later famously forgave his captors, which undoubtedly freed his soul. He was offered to be sent home early in his incarceration because his father was an admiral but he refused because he wasn't next on the seniority list of POWs, opting to stay with his men. This is true loyalty, displayed in the true American way (McCain embodies American greatness which has never gone anywhere, despite trite and mindless slogans). 

Later he became a U.S. Senator from AZ where he served with honor and distinction, despite some political miscalculations (he always admitted his actions were never perfect and he made mistakes, a refreshing political attribute). He mentored newer senators, both Democratic and Republican, worked on campaign finance reform before the despicable Citizens United USSC opinion unleashed a deluge of corrupting dark money upon the U.S. political system. 

Before this year, he's the only Republican I have voted for in this century, in 2000, because the Grand Old Party is now a stifled, merely self-aggrandizing and mostly corrupted party otherwise. Famously McCain defended Barack Obama as an honorable, loyal American citizen to mindless, misguided supporters of his even as he ran against Obama's candidacy in 2008. 

Check out his concession speech after that election, a healing, uniting bit of elocution that I have always thought was under appreciated. I'm glad John is still with us and when he departs I will mourn his passing.

An era has passed.

Goodbye to John McCain, who served our country with honor, always.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas.

Greetings.

At church on Sunday the priest, John, discussed the reading from Luke 1:26-38, where Mary hears from the angel Gabriel that she would bear the Son of God.  First John warmed the congregation up by telling an uplifting story about an obese woman who discovered running and ran her first triathlon.

She was on the third leg, laboring mightily and running near the very back of the pack when an octogenarian man caught up with her.  They ran together for awhile and the woman expressed her fear to him that when he ran on, she would be the final finisher.  What a way for her first triathlon to end, she said bitterly, coming in dead last.  What would people say about her then?

The man said simply, "They'll say you're a triathlete."  The church audience murmured appreciatively at the story.

Then John launched into his sermon.  "What were the angel's first words to Mary?" he asked.

"'Greetings, favored one!'  Greetings!  Not something from on high like, 'Listen now to God's command' no, a more friendly opening that would show Mary that her beauty, both within and without, came from God and was indicative of His love for us all."

There was more to the sermon, of course, but I was already in a reverie about the two stories.  Dead last.  Greetings.

After the service, as is customary, John spoke briefly with each parishioner as he or she filed out.  When my turn came, I considered telling him my associations with both of his parables.  John is not a runner, and being at least a dozen years younger than me, he didn't come into manhood during the Vietnam era.

Looking at the serious priest looking earnestly into my eyes, I decided against telling him that another thing that persons might call the overweight triathlete coming in last is "DFL."

No, I went with telling him that the association I thought about when the angel Gabriel opened with Mary by saying," Greetings," was that when letters from the selective service arrived telling you that you were being drafted, they started out famously with "Greetings."  You're a favored one who is going off to Vietnam for a tour of duty!

John looked at me severely and said sternly, "That was the association you made from that passage?"  Uh, yeah.

Two Days, 12 Miles

After my Memorial Day 3K race, I took Tuesday off.  Wednesday and Thursday I ran with L on the Mall from Union Station to Lincoln and back again, about six miles each day.

Wednesday we did a mini-Memorial Day run, six miles at an 8:41 pace not counting walking and waiting breaks, stopping to walk through the WW2, WW1 and Vietnam memorials out of remembrances of past sacrifices of soldiers for us.  At WW2 I took L by the names of battles people close to me had fought at carved on the walls.

"Battle of the Bulge is where my friend's Dad fought, in a tank killer with Patton's Third Army.  Sicily is where my Uncle Bob flew over, he was a B-26 pilot.else I knew is over on the Pacific side.  Peleliu and Okinawa are where my Dad fought.  The Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf and Tokyo are where his older brother, my Uncle Harry, fought.  He was a Marine Gunnery Officer on board a light cruiser and he also was offshore at Peleliu, Okinawa and Iwo Jima when the Marines went ashore, bombarding the islands.  Manila is where my Uncle Bill served with the Army."

L is a good sport and acted interested as I related these tales.  She professed when we walked by it that the Vietnam Wall is her favorite memorial.  I love it too but as I really don't know anyone who served there, and knew a lot of WW2 vets, I'm attracted to the WW2 and Iwo Jima memorials.

Thursday at noon we just did the out and back run, in 54:02 not counting wait breaks.  That seems to be a 9:00 pace to me.  I'm happy with where I'm at currently as I have dropped 15 of the 20 extra pounds I came back from Dallas with in December.

Where is the one following W?

Number two has dropped off the board. I used to think, because of his folly in getting us into the quagmire in Vietnam, that LBJ was the worst US President ever. Nixon, who was also a war-mongerer, was a close number two. (He didn't create the mess.)

Somehow, Nixon has achieved stature as a strong president. I always thought he achieved his foreign policy "advances" by the world notion that he was a little crazy. Can you imagine being in a neighborhood where a neighbor is on the street waving around an AK-47? And all you have in your nightstand drawer is a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson? You're not going out there to confront the bully. Unless you're a tough North Vietnamese and you want the bully off of your block.

Then along came the Decider, with his stolen two elections, W (for Worst ever), who is by all measures the worst president ever. Remember Mission Accomplished? How's your IRA? Can you spell Katrina? Did he fix New Orleans like he promised he would? Helluva a job Dubya!

So number one is locked into place. Did you vote for him, ever? If so, you didn't do your homework, and you should be waterboarded. Like to breathe? Not being able to breathe, that's not torture? Darth Vader says it's not.

I was running with some thinking Americans awhile back before Obama's triumph (including a Vietnam era veteran) and we rated the presidents as we ran. The VN era vet said, hands down, the worst president was James Buchanan because he brought us the Civil War. (We disqualified the Decider because he was still president.)

Well, I guess the Civil War was worse than the VN War. Maybe my friend is right. Because after watching all the high drama involved in bringing America into the 21st century by giving all of its citizens access to adequate health care, as is common to the rest of the civilized world, I have to admit that LBJ bringing us Medicare in the sixties was a notable achievement.

Although they'd like to dismantle it, now the GOP defends Medicare as if they had anything to do with bringing it about. They're more than a little hypocritical. It was an accomplishment that LBJ brought us, senior serenity (the Great Society), along with the VN war. So now I insert Buchanan into position number two, as the worst ever after the Decider. Perhaps LBJ has dropped out of the bottom five list even.

The fatal shot

Last summer I was in Dallas and I visited Dealey Plaza, the spot where President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The goodness that flowed into America out of the magnitude of its effort to overcome the badness of World War II seemed to filter through that moment in time, and nothing was the same thereafter. Vietnam, Watergate, Irangate, trickle down (ketchup as a school vegetable!), Monica, W. We still don't have universal health care. (Right: Dealey Plaza. The Grassy Knoll is in the exact center of the picture. JFK had only a few seconds to live when he unsuspectingly encountered this vista.)

Driving down Elm Street in Dallas, as soon as I topped the rise leading down into the Plaza I recognized it instantly. The wide expanse of the split-roadway slope leading down to a highway underpass has been seared into the memory of every American who was a school child in the early 60s through countless published photographs of the event. Like a suddenly developed Polaroid photograph, there it all was. The Texas School Book Depository with its sixth floor sniper's perch, the broad roadway flowing past and under that window, the Grassy Knoll beyond.

I believe something more was going on that day than just a lone-wolf political-nut shooter taking out the President by a blind convergence of luck and circumstances. Additional shooters? I didn't know. My nagging doubt always centered upon the difficulty, nay, impossibility of three shots being fired with such great accuracy from a bolt-action rifle at such extreme range. The difficulty of distance was what impressed me from the numerous pictures I had seen of the place. (Left: The Texas School Book Depository is behind me. Although I am not in the roadway, imagine a sniper with a scope in the right corner window one level below the top row, trained upon me. Completely doable. A slow moving car in a parade procession would be traveling directly away from the shooter, not across his front, so he needn't swivel the barrel to track the target.)

In person I instantly saw that it was very possible. Actually seeing the site, the distances compressed. For a good shooter with a stable platform, that was a likely shot. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine sharpshooter.

In the next post I'll disclose the official Dallas version of the shooting, to which I am now privy.

Boom, down. More Books.

I have a friend who can't believe the books I read. "What war book are you reading now," she'll ask. "Lots of people dying in them?"

I don't think she thinks it's a good thing I read histories and political tracts. "When was the last time you read a fiction book," she asked. I had to think awhile. October, it was. The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. A great movie and a very good book. I'm currently reading another McMurtry book, Terms of Endearment, but I keep misplacing it. My 1100 page Korean War history, having so much more heft, is so much easier to keep track of.

I always list a classic American novel in my profile book section. Two years ago it was my favorite American book of them all, The Scarlet Letter, a book filled with gorgeous writing. Last year it was Moby Dick. Call me Ishmael. This year's favorite is The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald could certainly write. I love his Tender is the Night, too.

I pay homage to great biography too. Two years ago it was Russell Baker's Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography, Growing Up. Last year it was U.S. Grant's Personal Memoirs, the best war memoir ever written. This year I'm listing Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester's memoir of the Pacific War. A Marine who was grievously wounded on Okinawa (a Japanese shell burst nearby and shrapnel and bone fragments from the man blown apart next to him were driven into his body), thirty years later he traveled back across those gory Marine battlefields, the Canal, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. The range of emotions that passes through this journalist as he describes his younger self experiencing his first lay, his first drunk, his first death, his first kill, is incredible and unforgettable. My father was a Marine at Peleliu and Okinawa.

Replacing J.M. Coetzee's book Waiting for the Barbarians as just great literature is Tim O'Brien's novel In The Lake of the Woods. I first became enamored with O'Brien's writing when I read The Things They Carried, his Vietnam opus. O'Brien was there and walked the walk. He explained the grunts' war effort thusly:

They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point . . . . It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

After reading this elegant book, I read In The Lake of the Woods. It is a terrific book, a puzzling, haunting mystery, a whodunit love story about relationships gone bad that has no resolution, only suggestions and suppositions, where events in the past blur into the present and may, or may not, point to the future. A brilliant work in my opinion.