This Post is Not About What It's About

It started with a piece of paper I noticed in the front flowerbed.

I'm used to dealing with such things. Plastic grocery bags snagged on shrubs, door hangers wedged between perennials, sheets of newspaper crumpled at the foot of a tree.

The wind always blows a lot around here and it leaves behind remembrances in the form of once airborne garbage.

I was sweating, but for tidiness sake I took the time to pick up the piece of paper. I began walking back to the house.

When I hit the sidewalk I could contain my curiosity no longer. I stopped, wiped my brow, turned the envelope over.

There was something funny about that Franklin D. Roosevelt stamp. I hadn't seen one of those in a long time. For that matter it had been decades since first class postage in the U.S. was only 6 cents.

The postmark told me that the piece this mail had passed through the post office in 1970.

The other thing was that the letter wasn't mailed to my town. It had either blown in from somewhere far away or one of my neighbors (possibly) had possession of it for some reason and then tossed it in the trash and then the wind pried it loose.

I was still sweating. I hurried indoors.

I set my find on the kitchen table and began examining it.

A thank you note.

I opened it up.

Right away I noted the unusual names. From another era: Nim, Edna, Van, Sue.

Ah, thank you for the baby gifts!

I wondered what had happened to the "darling" silver spoon, fork and cup.

A bigger question: what happened to that baby? Did it turn out to be a he or she? (In 1970 it wasn't possible to know in advance with a sonogram). Now 41 years later, could that child be one of my neighbors? Live in another town? Be deceased?

What about the "favorite" aunt and uncle? What had happened to them? Or that mom who was so thoughtful and correct in manners to send out a thank-you note?

What I had was a tangible piece of evidence that something once surely happened. The rest consisted of unanswerable questions.

It seems like I have a lot of unanswerable questions in my life, especially (and obviously) since I started the Van Winkle Project.

Soon I will receive answers to a few big questions like what happened in Arizona in January, the Middle East in February, in Japan in March, in the American Midwest this spring...

But I don't expect to get an answer to the mystery of the Merkel, Texas thank-you note that the wind deposited in my yard. That's all right with me. At least it brought a man hungry for news some old tidings that he could  chew upon while he awaits the main course.

A man who continues sweating every time he goes outdoors, a man who continues being grateful for the air conditioning indoors.

You see, the really inescapable news for anyone living in these parts isn't a piece of trash or such. It's that we're having the worst heat wave in anyone's memory. I allow myself to look at the corner of the front page of the local newspaper when I retrieve it in each day. I figure that's not a violation of the VWP since this is news I'm living in the midst of.

Here's what I see:

As far as anyone knows these days of 100+ degreee F. heat are not going to end in the foreseeable future. This is a  problem. Since there's been no rain, every field of burnt up grass could potentially spawn a wildfire. The wind has been averaging 15-20 mph every day. When the wind catches the flames, the fire spreads...

The awful weather is the reason why I was sweating in the front yard where I found the windblown piece of mail. I was trying to keep the landscaping alive in the flowerbeds by hand watering with the garden hose. Due to water restrictions, I can only use the automatic sprinkler system on Thursdays and Fridays.

In this heat, the plants need water every day.

But at this point I have to say many of us humans seem to have wilted as much as the lillies. There has to be some way, some place to cool off...

Fossilized walrus ivory carving with gold nugget
by Keith L. Haley.

You know what? Next time you hear from me I'll be writing from Alaska. Seriously. - V.W.

COMING: Impressions of a Northern State

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Chance Meeting - Two Veterans

When I created this blog I vowed that there would be no political or religious opinions expressed herein. The reason for this is that I feel such material tends to divide people from one another wherever they are in the world.

Instead, I'd rather write about everyday wonder and memories and what strikes me as humorous. These are things that humans can mutually love and appreciate and they might bring us closer.

But I suppose it's possible something historical and harsh can bring us together as well. If nothing else, I hope in the wake of what I'm about to share we can stand shoulder to shoulder and affirm that the pain some military veterans still suffer is worthy of concern and grief. 

What follows then, in true Van Winkle style, isn't likely in the news headlines that I've forbidden myself to consult. Instead, it amounts to a wholly accidental, face-to-face discovery. I sat down to eat dinner and I ended up hearing the tale of Margaritte and Tyrone (names changed to respect their privacy), a husband and wife who were caught up in a horrific war.

There was no agenda as they told me their stories. It was an outpouring, as if they felt, "I have to finally tell someone what happened over there."

He fell in love with her hands...

AN INNOCENT QUESTION
So I am at a writing festival this past Thursday-Saturday and it is on the campus of a college which happens to be a few miles away from a major U.S. Air Force base.

At dinner on Friday night I see a neatly dressed twenty-something couple sitting by themselves at one of the tables in the Theater Building. I get my shrimp cocktail, sit down beside them, and we introduce ourselves.

Margaritte works in the human resources department. Her husband Tyrone, who is wearing a sport coat and tie, has just begun his first week at a new job with a technology based organization.

Margaritte and Tyrone have not come to attend the writing festival. What happened is that Margaritte got an email earlier in the day from the festival organizers saying there was extra food and the university staff and spouses were invited to join us at the dinner at no charge.

So she told Tyrone about it and there they are--a free delicious meal is before them; it's a smart thing to do.

I finger a shrimp and begin to ask the first of my get-to-know-you questions.

":How did you two meet?"

"In the Army."

"Oh, really. What did you do?"

"I was a dental assistant and x-ray technician," Tyrone says.

"I was trained in heavy weapons and chemical weapons detection," Margaritte says.

"We met," Tyrone says. "when I took x-rays of her hand."

"Yeh, I slipped in the shower and I thought I broke my hand. It hurt!." Margaritte laughs. "Then I get it x-rayed and Mr. Suave here tells me I have beautiful hands."

I tell them that's a nice story. Then I do it.

It's like stepping on a mine. Except at first it doesn't go off. If anything maybe there's just a little "click." The "click" is in their eyes when I ask, "Did you ever go to Iraq or Afghanistan?"

They're thinking. Should we tell this stranger or not?

INVASION
Margaritte: I moved up to the Kuwaiti border 48 hours before the deadline we gave Saddam expired. I was inside a tank. The deadline came and went and we rolled in. It took us a week and a half and then I was in Baghdad.

VW: Did you think you would find weapons of mass destruction?

Margaritte: No. But we tried! We found stuff. All of it was ours.

VW: What do you mean ours?

Tyrone: The U.S. gave Saddam weapons in the '80s when he was fighting a war with Iran.

Margaritte: We knew he had it. We gave it to him.

VW: If it wasn't about WMD, why did you think we were invading the country? Was it for the oil? Or bad intelligence?

Margaritte: We wanted to have a government in there that would be friendly to us and do what we told it do. That's all. It was regime change.

EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR
Margaritte: At first they wouldn't let us shoot unless we were shot at. We couldn't believe it. It was crazy!

Tyrone: Saddam had his Republican Guards, but most of the Iraqi army was just a bunch of men who they found and stuck guns in their hands. A million of them. All of these people are suddenly out of work. And we're surrounded by them.

"We were told to do things we had no training for..."

Margaritte: The Army told us we had to go on patrol. We were told to do things we had no training for. They should have called in the scouts, but they'd tell me to go clear a house. I have no idea how to clear a house. I refused.

Tyrone: I'm a dental assistant. They put me on street patrol. There was looting going on and we just watched it. They told us to report it. So we'd get on the radio and tell them where the looters were and where they had moved to next.

Margaritte: One of the myths was that women weren't in combat. I was walking around with a rifle in my hand. Before that I was manning the 50-caliber machine gun on a tank. I was in a fire fight. After three hours I couldn't hear anything. I could only see the tracers and RPGs going by. It all appeared in slow motion. We'd move to a new position, they'd find us and start shooting again. After 24 hours I couldn't do it anymore.

Tyrone: There was no "insurgency." It was all various tribes fighting us and each other. They started sending women suicide bombers to check points because they knew Americans wouldn't pat them down the same as men. After one week when 9 Americans got blown up that way the higher ups changed the plan. Now we could shoot and ask questions later.



"It was totally misreported..."

 Margaritte (still thinking about the women's role in the Army issue): That Jessica Lynch thing. It was totally misreported. She was injured all right, but she ended up in an Iraqi hospital. The Iraqis tried to give her back to us twice. But we wanted to stage a rescue to look good for the folks back home.

Tyrone: And they didn't report, too, that the Iraqis after they killed everyone else in that convoy, they beheaded the bodies and buried the heads in the sand. They thought it would keep them from going to heaven. I know. Because I was involved in identifications. You know, dental records.

IT GETS REALLY BAD
Tyrone: We met some special forces from Macedonia. I said you're from Macedonia? What are you doing here? And they told us. We don't follow the Geneva Convention. That's why you want us here.

Margaritte: Abu Ghraib that was all misreported. You can look today. None of the military personnel they identified as the perpetrators are in jail. You look at those photos and you know these people didn't do this torture because they were just sitting around and felt bored.

Tyrone: Yes. Look at the photos. It's all done according to the textbook. The torturers were trained. Then they left and the reservists were fall guys.

Margaritte: That's why I got out. I couldn't take any more of the Geneva violations. The stuff we were willing to do.

Tyrone: You want to know about the Surge? The Surge isn't what stopped the bombings and the violence. Adding those troops wasn't enough to make that kind of difference. What happened was that they turned loose the special forces and they went out in  assassination teams. At Fallujah they surrounded the city and they let out the women, the very young, and very old. They made the males age 9 to 60 stay inside. Then they killed them. All of them.

VW: If the media failed to cover this, why didn't soldiers speak out about some of these things. Or at least tell their families? They had access to the Internet and...

Tyrone: The Army controlled what you sent on the Internet or said on the phone.

Margaritte: If you were standing in line to use the phone and someone ahead of you said something they shouldn't, they'd suddenly say the phones were down. In the whole country! Once I sitting around while some officers were talking and I had a notebook. I was doodling in it. An officer came over and took it away from me. Even after I showed him I hadn't written anything.

GOING HOME
After the couple got out of the Army it was clear that Margaritte suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something the Army has been reluctant to acknowledge is a legitimate combat caused disorder. She is now part of a class-action lawsuit (Sabo v. United States) to receive benefits and care for this injury. She admits, "No one thinks you have it. You look normal on the outside. But you're not normal on the inside."

When Margaritte enrolled in college one of the first classes she took was history. She dreaded the possibility that the class might reach the Iraq War as it moved forward in time. It did. When she spoke out about a few things she experienced she was told by two 18-year-olds, "You were never there!" Another student took another line of attack and called her a "baby killer."

Hearing that I understood why the couple was so reluctant to speak in the first place. But I couldn't help thinking they deserved to be heard. Maybe they weren't eyewitnesses to everything they claimed, but they actually had their boots on the desert ground while the rest of us were sitting at home in comfort. They put their lives in harm's way every day.

I'm sad to see them end up this way. Conflicted about what they did. Feeling used and abandoned by the people in power.

I hope they are successful in what they're trying to do nowadays. Move on, raise their son, and forget about those bad years of their lives except whenever the nightmares still overtake them in the dark. - V.W.

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Tow My Heart Away

"The Reaper - After Millet"
by Van Gogh ( Sept. 1889),
Private Collection, UK

A little scene took place in the driveway on Thursday. It lasted about ten minutes, but it represented the end of a relationship that had endured almost a decade, one that began when our son was still a toddler back in those few remaining months before September 11 ceased to be just another date on the calendar.

I said goodbye to our emerald green 1997 Toyota Corolla which we acquired in April 2001 from a college student. I watched as a decade of our life was chained up to the back of a tow truck.

It was time. The car, while still driveable and trustworthy, was dated. Anyone have use for an in-dash cassette player these days? And when you started the engine it vibrated so much that it felt like one was behind the wheel of a Kenworth.

I wasn't sentimental about this car like I was when we finally parted with our Swedish car that so effectively reminded me of days in Alaska. The Corolla was about basic, around the town, mundane transportation. In a given year we hardly put 5000 miles on it.

I thought about taking a picture, but why bother? This wasn't a grand separation.  It was nothing like the things the aged tow truck driver told me when I innocently asked him how he got into the towing business.

Now here was a story! I was standing in the presence of an old, slightly stooped, graying man who had lost the love of his life. He was the man who used to cut the wheat.

The Harvest
 

Bringing in the harvest with a high-tech combine.

For 45 years Lonnie (I'll call him) followed the grain belt. He started in the south and he worked his way north all the way into Canada.

He stood out there at the curb, hooking up my car, and simultaneously fondly recollecting the life he'd been squeezed out of by crush of the new economics, which involves so much money that a man catches his breath. And it involves something else: the persistent pattern of technology replacing human beings.

"When I first started out I had a combine that cost $6000. In the end each machine was $320,000. Course the old ones didn't even have a cab, much less air conditioning. The new-uns, they have a row of monitors in the cab  that shows everything going on outside."

A lot of what Lonnie told me involved numbers like this. It's not weather that changes a man's life. One can forge past weather. It's not always illness or injury. With the grace of God one can recover. But numbers! You can't fight the numbers once they cease to be in your favor.

"We had 5 combines and 12 people and a vehicle when we went out. Today to have that many machines would mean I'd have $3 million tied up just in equipment."

"I read last week about someone who bought 60,000 acres of wheat in Canada. Paid $40 million. That's what? $700 an acre? Used to be you could buy land for $45/acre and make $80 acre for the wheat you grew on it. The wheat paid for your land."

"I found an old receipt from 1973. I paid 27 cents for gas and 19 cents for diesel. Nowadays diesel is how much? Way over $3."

"My son is driving a truck these days. He says he'd like to go back to combining, but I tell him not to. It's too hard to make a living...last year we had a good harvest, but the price of wheat was bad."

A Life After Wheat
So Lonnie has been moving along on his gimpy leg for the past six years and driving a tow truck. "I have more money now than I did back then," he tells me. His job? To pick up vehicles like mine that are being donated to charity or, more often, to haul away wrecks after insurance companies have decided they're totaled.

If the air bags "blew," it's quite likely totaled and Lonnie
will be taking it to auction to be sold for parts and scrap.

"Doesn't take much to to total a car these days," he observes. "If  you're in any kind of accident and the front air bags go off, it's $3000 right there to replace them with factory ones."

So there are plenty of cars for Lonnie to haul to the grim place beside the railroad tracks where they'll be broken into parts and scrapped.

At least he doesn't have to pick up vehicles being repossessed from their owners by the bank.

'I know a guy who did that for a while, then quit. He got shot at too many times."

The Way It Was
All things must come to an end. I know this because my grandfather was a farmer. He had some dairy cows, then he grew old and it got too hard to get up and milk Bessie. He got himself some heifers. He continued to raise beef, some alfalfa, and wheat on his little 110-acre farm until he was in his seventies.

This is what it looked like when my grandfather harvested the wheat
on his Oklahoma farm in the 1960s.

I remember going out into the wheat field when I was a kid and following the orange Allis Chalmers combine as its wooden paddles turned and pulled in the tall golden grass. The separated chaff blew out a stack on the side of the combine. The wheat kernels poured into a bin.

Those kernels reminded me of some form of tiny bright treasure. The warm grainy scent was like inhaling a wealth of sorts. You just knew that with such things sprung from the earth, humanity always could always find flavor and sustenance.

All that's left of our '97 Corolla...
oil spots on the driveway.

In Memoriam
It's not what anyone would call tragic to see one farmer like my grandfather or Lonnie retire. It's not desperately sad to part with a car that I don't need anymore.
What does move me to concern and something beyond a cloying form of nostalgia is pondering if an important way of life is being lost.

When the machines become enormous and complicated, and as expensive as a mansion, we drive away the people who once placed their calloused hands tenderly upon the things we long to consume.

What was once of the earth has become a product, a commodity, removed from the smooth, wheaty kernels I remember digging into and letting pour through my fingers.

I'm sorry. I don't want technicians or robots harvesting my food. I want someone like Lonnie who cares about what he's doing. But I don't think that's going to happen as much as before.

You see, we've reassigned Lonnie to the same fate as that man Van Gogh painted over a hundred years ago, the man who had to put down his scythe. Instead of going out into the field to bring in the treasure, the harvester now gets paid to handle the chains and haul off  our dented and smashed trash.

That's quite an inversion and, unfortunately, it's the kind of "news" that's happening every day. Whether I choose to read about it or not. - V.W.


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