Romance in Hawaii in Pictures

Joanie of the jungle - my Valentine!

This year we cashed in all our points to get 2 1/2 weeks in Hawaii.  A few days on Oahu, and then two weeks on Kauai.  It was the first time that either of us had ever been to Hawaii and it turned out to be the best vacation we ever had.  The timing was really good for us; our two boys are in their twenties and quasi-adults so once again we can focus more on each other.  We decided that we wanted to make this an outdoorsy vacation, in particular featuring hiking.  Kauai has some terrific trails, most notably the Kalalau trail on the rugged and picturesque Na Pali Coast.  Here are a few pix:

L to R you have the classic view of the Coast, then a look back to the starting point of the trail at Ke'e Beach, and then a wide-angle shot showing the steep rocky trail coming and going.  Of course we managed to come across some nice beaches as well, as you can see below:

From left to right: snorkeling at Ke'e Beach; Hanakapiai Beach as seen coming in from the 2 mile hike from Ke'e; the restful expanse of Hanale'i Beach; Hanakapiai again, returning from the high point of the Kalalau trail, another mile on.  The changes in lighting throughout the day were also a delight for the eyes; here are a few examples:

I also got some cool telephoto shots with the 16x lens on my little Panasonic pocket-sized camera, below:

On the left are surfers on the Banzai Pipeline, and on the right, a family of whales [if you look closely, you might see five].  And then of course, "Welcome to Fantasy Island, boss!"  But did you know that you could also walk around the side of this waterfall and even behind it?

But all in all, it was just a great place to be happy together as a couple.  A friend of ours asked me about whether we had taken the kids on the trip and I responded that no, it was just for the two of us.  "Aw," she said, "did you guys fall in love all over again?"  Yup, I said, we sure did!

Veterans Day at the Wall

The story of meeting my new friend above is at the end of this post.

My buddy Grady and I planned to meet at the closest Metro stop to the Vietnam Memorial and then head on down there together.  Every Vietnam Veteran knows that it is best to go with someone else, because you never know what powerful memories and feelings may be lurking in your mind that day, waiting to ambush you.  If that happens, it is important to have a buddy to help keep things in perspective and bring you back to the present.

But then a comedy of errors occurred and we never did hook up.  The heart of the matter was that I had dropped my cell phone at home and didn’t notice that the battery had popped out.  So I was incommunicado until I could find a Verizon store downtown and get a new battery.  Once I did so I got three messages from Grady and by then he had given up on me and didn’t call again.  We didn’t catch up until that evening.

So each of us went to the Wall alone.  Based on the call when we did connect later in the day, it sounded like he had a harder time than I did.  Partly, perhaps, because he wasn’t as prepared for the strong cold wind that ripped through the crowds and the tents set off to the side of the Memorial hosted by a variety of Veterans groups.  For me, I was adequately dressed though I wish I had brought some winter gloves; at one point enough fingers had gone numb that I headed back to a coffee shop to warm up before returning.

All in all, it was a powerful and meaningful day for me.  The place was crawling with Vets, naturally, and many of them as adorned as the color guard below.

You couldn’t feel alone, as Grady told me later, because every five feet one of these guys would grab your hand with a hellacious squeeze and say, “Welcome home, brother!”  One of them slipped me the coin below.

I also found the tent for the Memorial Day Writer’s Project, which convenes on both Veterans Day and Memorial Day.  There were poets, singer-songwriters, and prose writers reading their stuff.  Especially interesting to me were the younger Veterans who recited their stories about Afghanistan and Iraq.  One of these was a poignant account of a young Iraqi girl, about 10, who was recovering in the hospital from burns that covered 40% her body suffered during an Al Qaeda attack on their Shiite home.  Deeply religious, she was determined to fast during Ramadan; the doctors insisted that she needed the nourishment from her food to help repair her body.  But she was obstinate.  Finally, an American medic [and the storyteller ] cut a deal with her that he would fast for her, an experience that gave him a whole new perspective on Islam.

But most of the readers were old Vietnam Vets like this one, whose songs went from the bitter and gory to the bitingly satirical - and funny.

The highlight of the day, though was meeting the woman in my first picture.  It turns out that her father was on the same panel* as my friend Dennis and the other fourteen young men who died with him in March, 1968.  Her father died a day earlier but since the names are chronological, he was only a few lines above the March 18^th group.  In fact, another good guy from our Battalion had been killed that day and his name is right next to this woman’s father.

The picture below is an old one with the reflection of my son Tony at the right, next to his cousin Ann.  All the names for March 18 are visible in this picture, starting with George Adams on her upper arm just about her bent elbow and ending with Theodore Zawisza right at the bottom of her shorts.  There are a total of 81 names for that day.

*The Wall is composed of many separate marble slabs; each one is a separate, numbered panel.  The names are chronologically organized, with all the KIA of each day arranged alphabetically.

Country Roads, Xanga Friends, & Memories that Hurt

Okay, so this sounds like three posts in one, yes?  Well, this could be a result of so much time elapsing since my previous post in [gasp!] July.  But there is a common theme, and that theme is writing.  I love writing and I am seeking my freedom and salvation through writing - in my case from my exaggerated survivor's guilt from my tour as an infantryman in the Vietnam War in 1967-68.  I do now have a complete book drafted [actually two books in one, a bit of a problem] and I am in the slow process of restructuring and editing about half of the draft into "Book 1".

Country roads mean so much to me because the country is the best place for me to write.  At least that is where I am most productive, not necessarily where the "best" writing occurs.  Partly, I'm sure, this higher productivity is attributable to the fact that I'm vacationing when in the country and thus generally free of the screaming pseudo-priorities of work.  But the quiet and the soothing irregular natural lines and connection with the earth that comes from country settings combine to put me squarely in the mood to write.  Writing is harder to do when I'm scurrying around the suburban-urban maze of the Washington, DC area where I now live and work.  Occasionally I can get on such a writing roll that I poke away on my smart phone while riding on the Metro to finish a chapter or blend two old chapters together in the restructured book.  But writing surges of this sort occur only after weeks or even months of frustration and head-banging about why I am not writing more, faster.

But no head-banging in the country.  I mellow out, do a few carpentry chores around the summer place, and then ease into the writing, up in my little garret overlooking the trees and the lake.  We were there again the week after Labor Day, getting drenched by the rains that followed the hurricane, but it didn't matter - it was still the country.  Here is Joanie, taking a picture of the rain-swollen Housatonic River, with a flooded road behind her.

That's the other nice thing about country roads - so much nicer to bike around in beautiful settings without mobs of vehicles always bearing down on you.  Here she is again in the very last rays of the sun.

One problem though with country roads after big rains is that they might end abruptly!

The country is also a good place for me to catch up with Xanga friends.  On those relaxing days and nights on vacation I can actually follow my friends. Not like now when it is just a day off and my things-to-do-list contains at least 36 hours worth of activities. Back in the workaday world I sometimes even don't catch a friend's response.  I DO try to get on Xanga often enough to jump to page 7 of recent posts and comments from friends and work forward to acknowledge notes from friends and check maybe one in a dozen posts.  My frustration at not getting to all the posts and staying in regular communications with you friends is second only to my frustration at the slowness of my writing process.

For sure, I do periodically prune my list of friends, but just as soon as I do someone interesting appears!  And I refuse to cut off the ones I really miss, such as The Narrator, Just Me Andy, or Saadia, just in the off chance that they may reappear [like @jerjonji, who just did!] Currently, my friend list has about 50 names but I can't keep up [y'all are just too prolific!] so I may need to trim down to a lower number, as painful as that would be. 

And why are these people so important to me? They/you sustain me and my writing. My focus is now on Xanga friends who themselves write or do other creative stuff.  Not just DO it, but live for it!  That weird creative species that has always somehow been different from most folks.  Those folks with the sensitive antennae who see and feel things most people don't.  You sustain me when you encourage my writing or even when you just show that creative side of you when you post.  Many of you frankly blow me away with your abilities to use words and images more artfully than I ever could.  You inspire me and provide the spiritual food I need to continue my own quest.

That quest can sometimes still be quite painful.  I realized this once again when I went through some of the 500 or so color slides taken in Vietnam by my buddy Earl.  You may recall that he died a little over a year ago; afterward his family loaned me a box of B&W combat pictures, a few of which have appeared in my posts.  Well, tragedy struck again in less than a year when Earl's wife Carol also died [yes, one of those tales about a couple that loved each other so much, perhaps too much].  Soon after her funeral I received from the family these 500 color slides taken by Earl in Vietnam in 1968.  This one really got me.

Yeah, that skinny-assed kid about to walk out of the picture is me [or was me 43 years and 55 pounds ago].  The black soldier in front was a close friend, indeed the only new real friend I made after Dennis was killed.  Ted was a Lieutenant and had been a platoon leader in Bravo Company until he took a bullet through the chest.  He went off to recuperate in Japan for several months and probably could have gone back to the States if he wanted too.  But he chose to return to Vietnam and his first assignment was as the Battalion Civil Affairs Officer, when I was fulltime as the Battalion Civil Affairs NCO.  Ted was fully commited to an Army career and his ambition was to become a black General; to do so, he told me after we had been together in foxholes and other close quarters for just a month, meant that he needed to lead a platoon again to get more combat command time.  I tried to talk him out of it - you have already given this war enough, I told him.

But he wouldn't listen.  At the first opportunity he took a platoon in Charlie Company.  Several months later, Ted, his platoon sergeant, and his radio-telephone operator jumped off a helicopter together at the outskirts of a village in the Trang Bang Corridor.  Within seconds all three of them were dead, full of AK-47 bullet holes.  This picture really threw me for a few days, but then I became grateful to have a picture of the two of us together.

Is writing this book driving me insane?

Here I am on our annual summer vacation once again, amidst the beauty of the Berkshires, chores to do on the summer house, and the cool lake fifty steps away to escape from the current heat wave.  And right in the middle of trying to make sense out of this fracking book that I have been working on for ten years.  All about a year of my life some 44 years ago that still hovers over me like a personal thundercloud.  It can still blow a dark wind into my mind and topple that house of cards that had been my sense of order in this world.

This ominous year, of course, was that of my tour of duty in the Vietnam War.  I have roughly 600 pages of draft, a plan for restructuring and editing this monster and now some time to focus on it.  I have feedback and suggestions from a pro bono editor who has stuck with me all these years, and a small community of local writers that I stumbled into last spring (okay, it was a writing class.)

Am I making any progress?  Who knows.  In terms of crisp, newly edited and deftly moving-the-narrative chapters, the answer is no.  But the fracking creative process is so subterranean and non-linear that maybe I am hatching a massive breakthrough.  Or maybe just going insane.  Sometimes I wonder if there is a difference between the two.

The disquieting dreams are certainly on station.  The nights of this week have produced a bodycount in the hundreds, if not thousands.  Lately, the dreams are about being in the Army again, either about to deploy to Vietnam again or to some other warzone, or to actually be in the midst of the battle.  And nothing is making any damn sense.

My waking hours haven’t been quite as chaotic, fortunately.  But I have had periods of self-doubt (those damn “ceaseless termites” as one group of friends likes to say).   My thinking about what my war experience has meant to my life often gets me into self-pity about my string of “failures” and the “I coulda, shoulda, woulda been champ!” line of thinking.

But this morning I came across a meditation that included these thoughts:

The dynamics of learning include, first, what happens - what we see or read or hear - and, second, what we make of it. So in our observations and reflections we consider what an event means to us….Through time, we deepen and grow stronger as we grow older rather than only accumulating more experiences.

I immediately realized that that was what I have been doing – or at least trying to.  (Wasn’t there a 60’s song about a guy in a straitjacket singing something like “and then they merrily led me away, hee-hee! Haw-haw!)

A Prayer for the Egyptian Couple We Met

We met this Egyptian couple two years ago on January 20, 2009.  Yes, it was the Obama Inauguration.  I had posted about that finger- and toe-freezing day when almost 2 million people crammed into the National Mall.  We found our place on the hill in front of the Washington Monument.  We arrived about 8:30 AM, hours before the event but any later and it would have been impossible to get that close.

One of the things I noticed was the large number of foreigners in attendance.  Perhaps not surprising, since we have all the embassies here as well as many international think tanks, financial institutions, lobbyists, charities and students.  With all the time we had on our hands, I started talking with some of the people around us to find out where they were from, why they came, what they thought of the recent Presidential campaign, and so on (I did this in addition to jumping up and down in vain attempts to warm myself!)

As you can see from the crowd shots below, this couple was right in front of us.

Of all the folks we spoke to, this Eqyptian couple were the ones that I remembered the most.  They were SO excited!  They couldn't believe that Americans had elected a non-white President, and what this could mean for the world.  We had truly inspired them.

And now they have inspired us!  God bless this couple, wherever they are!