Author: chaskemp

I suddenly remembered that this happened – 54 years ago in 1967.

We had been in a days-long battle, part of something called the Hill Fights (near Con Thien). It’s kind of a blur, but it seems like I spent most of my time there with 1^st Battalion, 9^th Marines, mostly hooked up a machine-gun team. When it was over for me I was taken back to Dong Ha, kind of a front of the rear place where they had things like a mess hall, hospital tents like a MASH unit, occasional rocket attacks, a little post exchange, and other stuff I guess. I went to the post exchange, but they wouldn’t let me in!!! Said I wasn’t squared away or some kind USMC BS – and they said I had to unload my weapon! My flak jacket had (someone else’s) blood on the front and it had got to smelling bad and I surely smelled bad on my own, too, with sweat and smoke, etc. But still, I was unhappy. I needed some goddam cigarettes.

It was evening by now and I went over to the hospital tents where there were piles of discarded equipment from men who’d been shot or whatever and I was shuffling around in all this gear like helmets, packs, boots, flak jackets, web

 

gear, and so on. Some of it was pretty bad, too – blood, shit, everything on it. Seems like it was a misty evening, but I can’t be sure. Even at the time I could see how surreal this all was. I found a cleaner flak jacket and left mine behind. I’m sure I got some smokes, though I don’t know where from.

I’ve never been able to keep it straight what happened when in the Hill Fights. I know it was April into May, but I wasn’t there the whole time. I remember the mortar fire; how glad I was to be using an M-14 vs M-16; the un-fucking-believable volumes of fire, incoming and outgoing; the man who died as his guts fell out of his back when they turned him over; the man lying there covered in blood, smiling and shooting me the finger because we’d just saved his ass and he had what looked like a million dollar wound; the helicopter spinning around and hitting the ground hard; carrying the last dead Marine out of the downed chopper while the NVA were firing at us and the chopper coming in to pick us up; I keep kind of fixating on a trail that followed the contour of a hill, but it was just a trail. And now I remember about the piles of gear.

I know this: when Jeff and David and I were in Vietnam in 2005 we were happy to visit Thuy Bo (Dodge City to us, near Hill 55) where our company had operated for about six months and where some serious fire-fights happened. But where the Hill Fights were, Khe Sanh, 861? “No. Those are killing fields,” Jeff said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hill_Fights

 

He was surely one of the few students at his high school to ever flunk the last English paper of the senior year, but he just could not get it together to write the paper. He thus flunked the paper, the course, and the year. It was a fitting end to a sometimes dismal high school experience.

He left home without telling anyone anything and took a bus to Grand Saline, Texas with a “plan” of working in the salt mines (he was kind of a dramatic kid). The salt mines had been closed for some time when he got to Grand Saline, so he got a cheap hotel room. The room was up a long, straight flight of stairs and there was a loop of wire in lieu of a doorknob or lock. It was a very cheap room.

The next day he hitched a ride on out of Texas to Shreveport and a lonely bus station. From there, a man picked him up and drove him to Baton Rouge. In Baton Rouge he ended up downtown in a bar, where a man told him he could stay in his room. Clearly, the man had plans other than sleeping and the kid said he would just sleep on the floor. At some point in the night he was awakened by the man leaning off the edge of the bed fondling him. He remembers shouting very loudly and grabbing his already packed stuff and running out of the room. He doesn’t remember where he spent the rest of the night.

In the morning the kid was walking along a downtown sidewalk when a police car pulled over. The cops put him up against the wall and searched him and dumped his suitcase out on the sidewalk. Oops, there was a pistol in there, so he got a ride to the parish jail and a few nights room and board.

Jail wasn’t bad for him. He had some cigarettes, which he shared with an armed robber, who was a badass, so the kid was pretty safe. The food was typical jail fare – peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast with astonishingly bad chicory coffee, bologna sandwiches and Kool-aide for lunch, and he doesn’t remember what was for dinner. There’s nothing to do. Talk, scheme, worry, pace, space out.

The charge was vagrancy. He went to see the judge, who asked him what he was doing in Baton Rouge. He told the judge he was looking for a job at a golf course. The judge asked him if he was a golfer and when he said, yes, the judge asked what a “round robin” is and the kid gave the right answer. “Not guilty.” The suitcase and its contents were not registered in, so apparently the po-po got a pistol.

Not far from the parish jail there was a Toddle House – a 14 stool café serving breakfasts, hamburgers, waffles, and so on. The kid was sitting there trying to decide whether to have his hamburger with or without lettuce and tomatoes (five cents more with and he was pretty much busted flat, enough that a nickel made a difference) and when the waitress took his order he blurted out “with!” It was a really, really good hamburger and decent cup of coffee. While he was sitting at the counter the waitress and cook were talking about needing someone to work nights. The kid joined in and volunteered that he could do the job. The cook/manager, Chuck let him work that day to get a sense of what he could do. He did okay and the waitress, a sweet Cajun woman named Jenny liked him, and so he got the job.

Chuck took him to the Florida Street rooming house where Chuck and his partner, Vince lived. He got a room for something like $12 a week and just like that he was set up with a job and a place to live. He worked as cook and counter man and everything else 7 pm – 7 am usually seven nights/week for $0.85/hour to start and eventually to $1.35/hour. He was in a weird place in his mind and working like that was no problem. On days when Chuck and Vince were both off, the three of them would go out drinking at one of those bars that open at 6 or 7 am.

Photo from https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2014/03/02/toddle-house/. Thank you!

Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues

You can tell by the way she smiles

We’ve passed the half-way point in this 12 week journey through vertebral fractures – Less than six weeks before Jean can hang up the brace (part-time, anyway), start exercising, driving, and doing all those activities that are part of daily living. The pain is better, though still present. For the first 4-5 weeks, there was a lot of work to do every day, throughout the day. I was flat-out too tired to cook along with everything else. Like the pain in Jean’s back, the work has lessened. Saying that is the purpose of writing this.

We tried to send thank you notes to everyone who brought dinner or otherwise helped out, but have realized that when writing letters by hand, one does not then have a record of what was sent. Haha, I’ll just have to rely on my memory.

Here and now, we are again saying Thank You! Thank you friends, family, and colleagues – who came through in so many ways. In particular, thank you for the many meals left on the porch, for the brief get-togethers outside, for the shopping, for the support that had effects beyond the doing.

What happened with the meals you brought and the shopping you did was that I could help Jean rather than expend energy on cooking, clean-up, shopping, etc. Thus I was fresher and more able to keep the house in passable shape, stay up on laundry, run essential errands, give Jean cannabis balm massages (part of the comprehensive pain management program going on over here), do all the things that require lifting, bending, carrying, etc., and in the past few weeks go for walks on the MLK Middle school track (up to three laps now).

Jean is doing more and I’m more rested. Thank you! What a year we’ve all had!!!

Thinking about all you’ve gone through in these past few years… nights and days in the hospital, procedures, anesthesia, exotic medications (and my God, the number of med changes and always getting it right!), hair loss, pain, uncertainty, pandemic, the fires, social distancing (you, who thrives on socialization), trump, insurrection, so on and so forth (and leaving out some significant things for several purposes).

We come to what may be a transition point – Vaccination Day! – and I reflect on what you’ve gone through and how you’ve done it and what can I say? What can I do? Except to write this small tribute to my partner, my lover, my Shaman Princess. Except to sing this song of gratitude…

I’ve been there/here throughout.

I’ve seen you in the fire.

I’ve seen you when hope was far away.

I’ve seen you put your head down and march forward.

Forward!

We’ve both been afraid.

Some good loving throughout.

Some good times woven all through.

Together!

And here we are,

Forward into our future, into our Golden Light!

As I said earlier, some things have been left out, yet the sum remains the same. This is a beautiful life and I am filled, suffused with gratitude and respect.

 

This is the first of a series or maybe just a couple of posts on experiences in ageing in America.

I was deeply involved for many years with caring for older people in hospice and community health. I often discussed with patients/families how they could mobilize their personal resources such as family and church for help in their illness or disability. My wife, Leslie and I were concrete resources for many people. I have also published material on this in books, journal articles, and have presented info at national conferences. So I know what I’m talking about – but, alas, I didn’t really know, though I gave accurate information.

Here is some of what I’m learning in the crucible of ageing:

The most common refrain among those who need help is “I don’t want to be a burden.” Now I realize (actually, it got real-ized for me) that:

Being old in America means becoming a supplicant

And a supplicant is hardly ever a good thing to be.

It’s like being a beggar.

Some people, myself included, don’t often ask because they don’t like being a supplicant, a beggar – and that is what it sometimes feels like. Right now I’m on the phone and internet trying every avenue I can think to get a covid vaccine for my wife and me because we’re 70+ years old at high risk for complications of the disease and the treatment. I’m even working on signing up at the VA! And that, my friends is quite a comment on vaccination clinics through county health departments here in the Bay Area and my provider, Kaiser Permanente.

Next up will be Getting old: being a refugee in my own country, America.

Warning: Boring Alert (but there’s a pandemic going on, so your calendar may not be full).

This is a short story of a van.

I’ve been in Berkeley five years now and because of a stellar public transportation system and Jean’s sharing nature, haven’t needed a car. However, except as a necessity, buses and trains aren’t at all a good idea these days. So I got a California DL and a 2020 Toyota Sienna van. In more or less order:

Get van. Get three part folding mattress that fits cargo space when second and third row seats are removed.

Take out second and third row seats. The third row seats can fold down inside a cavity in the van, but I took them all the way out to get extra storage. A difference between 2020 Siennas vs. 2021 is that in the latter the second row seats don’t come out because of airbag placement.

Build a sleeping platform with storage underneath. Someone had given me some nice ¾” cabinet grade plywood, and I collect scrap lumber, including some nice redwood. I built a sleeper/couch/storage platform designed to accommodate 12” high storage boxes. One nap showed us this was too high and our travel plans have changed, so I changed parts of the sleeper to give us 8” high storage space and enough headroom to sit on the “couch” or sit up on the bed when the couch becomes the bed. The floor is weird and lumpy from some hardware that is impossible for me to remove. I’ve leveled the floor some and Jean donated a small Turkish rug, but the floor is still a little lumpy.

Make curtains – Jean used some Indonesian ikat for curtains between front seats and sleeping, etc. area. We got precut light blocking panels for other windows for complete privacy when we want it. Just the thing for stealth cam

ping. Candy pointed out that we should have a God’s eye. She’s right.

We don’t currently plan on doing much cooking. I have a Jetboil water heater that I used backpacking. It quickly boils 2 cups of water, which is enough to make two cups of strong coffee or two servings of oatmeal with fresh or dried fruit or two freezer bag meals. http://ckjournal.com/backpacking-food

Get portable chemical toilet and put it in. Will use bungee cord to secure it when traveling. We don’t expect to travel any four-wheel type roads, so sloshing shouldn’t be an issue. Brand is Serene Life.

In couch mode, there is plenty of room with the toilet and ice chest present. With the bed extended, it’s tight with the toilet and ice chest, so for sleeping we’ll advance the front seats as far forward as they will go – another 10-12 inches (below photo).

Test run. We’ll likely go

to some friend’s place near La Honda. But right now California is locked down pretty tight because of covid, so it will be a few weeks before we can go.

Vehicles of mine I’ve slept multiple nights in:

The VW van was a true magic bus. We didn’t need much storage space because we didn’t have much to store. Had a mosquito net big enough that I just draped the whole thing. Another night near Hippie Hollow, our little ghost town in Nevada, Oklahoma while terrible tornados whirred and buzzed and roared all around…

The Campry was a Toyota Camry with the back seat partially removed so I could put my legs through a hole into the trunk and thus sleep lying down, not the most comfortable bed, but fine for a night at a trailhead, in RMNP, Weminuche Wilderness, Wind River Mountains …

… and here I sit, in my Campry, dry and warm as can be. It rained all night and I was cozy and semi-comfortable. http://ckjournal.com/wind-rivers-2009-north 

The RAV4 was a cozy home for me sleeping at Keo’s hospital, Jeff’s land, Jim’s lake house, Bryce’s ranch, and psytrance gatherings in Texas and Oklahoma.

Now the Sienna.

She was softly crying when we awoke. We held one another for a long while and then Jean told me she’d had a dream – she didn’t know what happened in the dream, except she was alone. We lay there awhile, then I picked up my phone by the bed and played An American Tune by Paul Simon as we continued lying there in this foggy morning where smoke and fog mixed to hide the Bay and even the hill near our home. This deep sadness.

And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees

(From An American Tune by Paul Simon)

We talked of life and love and death and aloneness. We talked some about David, Jean’s husband and Leslie, my wife. We talked about aloneness. We talked about here we are, tears, sadness, and love mixing…

Here we all are – David Leslie Jean me; Leslie me Jean David; Jean me David Leslie… for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part…

And I dreamed I was dying
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying

Into the sweet bye and bye.

 

 

Trump says the US Marines who fought and died at Belleau Wood were “losers” and “suckers.” Here is part of what happened at Belleau Wood: In fighting beginning June 1, 1918, Marine and French forces were outnumbered by Germans. The French ordered the allies, including Marines, to fall back to a trench line. The Marines declined the order and continued to fight – Marine orders were, “Hold where you stand.” This where a captain in 5^th Marines said, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.” Over the next 26 days, United States Marines attacked the Germans six times, finally securing the woods on June 26, 1918. Marine Corps casualties numbered 9,777, including 1,811 killed in action, and buried where trump declined to visit. They were not “suckers” or “losers.”

 

On July 9^th I posted the following re coronavirus infections. It took the United States:

99 days to go from zero cases to 1 million cases

43 days to get to 2 million cases

24 days to 3 million cases

15 days to 4,000,000 documented cases of coronavirus infections in the United States.

So in 7-9 days, another million; 4-6 days, another million; 2-3 days, another; 1-2 days another and then the numbers really start to grow (the exponential part).

What can I say? How will this play out as people sicken, the healthcare system is overwhelmed, supply chains broken (food, medicine, people, anything), and everything is up for grabs? By everything is up for grabs, I mean political, cultural, and social norms and balances are crumbling and something will take their place.

A Grateful Dead song comes to mind.

Death Don’t Have No Mercy

You know death don’t have no mercy in this land
Death don’t have no mercy in this land, in this land
Come to your house, you know he don’t take long
Look in bed this morning, children find your mother gone.

I said death don’t have no mercy in this land.
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land,
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land, in this land!

Whoa! come to your house, you know he don’t stay long,
You look in bed this morning,
Children you find that your brothers and sisters are gone.
I said death don’t have no mercy in this land.

Death will go in any family in this land.
Death will go in any family in this land.
Come to your house, you know he don’t take long.
Look in the bed on the morning, children find that your family’s gone.

I said death don’t have no mercy in this land.
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land,
In this land. Whoa! Come to your house,
You know it don’t stay long, you look in bed this morning,
Children find that your brothers and sisters are gone.

I said death don’t, death don’t have no mercy in this land.

(Gary Davis)

—————-

BUT, to put things into perspective: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” Anne Frank

 

I ran out of steam sometime in March. These sad and horrible times. No writing other than some personal things. I also deleted about 150 people from my FB friends list.

I’ve been thinking about the (literally) 1000s of RNs and NPs I taught, as well as doctors, social workers, chaplains, and volunteers. Today, many of them are absolutely on the front lines of this pandemic. Many are in critical care, emergency, or primary care, though many others are in other acute settings or in community health and a few in international health. I am proud of them, I am proud of my work with them, and I grieve for what they have lost and are losing as the nightmare unfolds.

Grieving for what we’ve all lost in these dystopian/trumpian pandemic days when humans are little more than pawns in this grotesque game. When life loses its value (131,000+ dead as of this moment) and the fireworks show goes on, America leads the world in cases, the economy is “shattering all expectations” (another lie from the liar-in-chief), when fucking statues are more important than people (to this president), when the plan literally is chaos! When we, our lives are the ultimate prize in this demon’s game.

We’re living in a movie to be known as Apocalypse Slow. And it is a little slow, at first. But the action will pick up as the plot unfolds. The coronavirus pandemic is quickly growing, worsening. The danger of infection grows day by day for each one of us individually and our communities. Our nation is being gutted. Suffering and dying.

They are burning out several generations of nurses and doctors. Used – sacrifices to an orange demon, orange, the color next to red, red, the color of the devil’s skin. Swollen with pride and greed. UNMASKED! He ain’t even in much of a disguise.

November 1963 (from Dylan’s new work, Murder Most Foul)

The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
The age of the Antichrist has just only begun”

He loves it. The chaos, the suffering. The only thing that’s touched him on a human level, at least visibly, since this began is when he held a rally and there were all those empty seats. The lonely trudge from the helicopter – there’s your president.

Wants to cancel health insurance for 20 million people in the midst of the worst health crisis in the last century! There’s your president.

—————-

It was a good day to be alive,

It was a good day to die. Dylan