12th
The World According to Dad
Two years and one day ago, my father died.
He died on July 11, 2007, which was four days removed from what some folks were calling “the luckiest day in the universe.” The seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the millennium, you see. I figure if you apply the Vegas rules to that sort of numerology, eleven is still a pretty lucky number, but Vegas rules apparently didn’t apply to my old man.
He was eighty seven years old when he died, which is a pretty long tenure on earth for anyone. In case you are making an attempt at doing the math, he was fifty four years old when I was born. When I’ve been at the booze I tell people that I was the last sperm to parachute out of the plane just as it was blowing up in mid-air.
Some people would think that having a father who was old enough to be your grandfather is sort of weird, but I didn’t mind. For one thing, I became a history dork at a very early age, and I found my dad to be a fountain of not only information, but some pretty amazing stories of firsthand experience.
He did some pretty cool stuff for a kid from Nowhere, Michigan. He grew up in the Great Depression. At the age of eleven he started caddying at a golf course, carrying bags for Ford and Chrysler executives for one round and caddying for members of the Purple Gang the next. It was just as prohibition was winding down, and the Purple Gang had made millions smuggling booze just over the lake from Canada. According to the old man, the gangsters tipped way better than the Ford and Chrysler folks.
At the age of fifteen he lied about his age in order to join the Michigan National Guard so he could make some extra money. The next year a budding group called the United Auto Workers staged a series of sit down strikes where they locked the doors and took over auto plants all over Michigan. The governor, who thought an eight hour day, a living wage and weekends off reeked of communism, called in the National Guard. So at the age of sixteen, my dad witnessed the birth of the modern American labor movement, although he was pointing a machine gun at the factory doors rather than fighting for the workers.
After graduating from high school and college, my old man joined the Air Force when it was still the Army Air Corps. He was in the Air Force before it was the Air Force. He wanted to be a pilot but his vision wasn’t good enough, so he ended up being a navigator. He missed out on World War II, as he was training other navigators in Texas when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Shortly after the War ended, my dad was navigating on a plane that was ferrying diplomats over to China in order to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement between Chang Kai Shek, the leader of Nationalist China, and Mao Tse Tung, leader of the Communist revolutionary forces. My dad’s plane was normally in charge of dropping off the folks who were negotiating with the communists. The way my dad told it, the Communists had zero interest in the negotiators, but they were really interested in the planes that brought them. The pilots and navigators were treated like rock stars and the negotiators were treated like an afterthought. During this time my Dad met and posed for a photograph with Chou En Lai, Mao’s second in command and the future premier of Red China.
Once that was over with, he was stationed in the Phillipines, who had just had their first democratic elections after the war. Their first president was a guy named Manuel Roxas, and he had only been in office a little under two years when he came to give a speech at Clark Air Force Base, which was where my old man worked. Everybody on the base was standing at attention in sweltering heat when Roxas grabbed his chest and went “urk” in the middle of the speech and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. My dad always said that if that wasn’t a perfect omen for how things were going to go for the Phillipines, he didn’t know what was.
Shortly after that he had to go to Korea. A lot of people don’t talk about that particular war, mainly because it just wasn’t as sexy as World War II, but it was a particularly heavy one. Communist forces from the north stormed practically all the way down the length of the entire country and were slowly beaten back by South Koreans and troops under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations. My old man’s job was to be a navigator in the 307th Bomb Wing, which meant that every other day he had to suit up and get the plane to the target which would then (hopefully) obliterate whatever they were told to obliterate with their stick of bombs. As a navigator, he was the only one on the plane besides the pilot and the co-pilot that didn’t have access to a gun, and it drove him crazy.
The UN forces beat back the communist troops practically all the way up to China, which got the Chinese involved. My dad’s plane was flying overhead when about half a million Red Chinese troops came storming over the Yalu River to begin the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. From about 13,000 feet, my dad said it looked like a swarm of ants heading south. After that they rolled down to the 38th parallel and set up the DMZ, which is still there to this day, with South Korea on one side of about 500,000 land mines and North Korea on the other.
Once the Korean War was over my dad hung up his navigating tools and went to work in Air Force Intelligence, flitting all over the world but for the most part staying at Strategic Air Command in Nebraska, who were in charge of everything nuclear in our arsenal. Land based bombers, ICBM’s, the works. It was about as cold as the cold war could get.
He worked his way up to Lt. Colonel, and ended up serving as an aide for General Curtis LeMay, member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Air Force and stone cold psychotic. The General’s nicknames, unbeknownst to him of course, were “Stone Age” and “KTB,” which stood for “Kill the Bastards.” His solution to every problem, no matter how major or minor, was an enormous show of strength. He actually believed that a first nuclear strike was a valid strategy, and he also believed that being on the receiving end of a retaliatory strike was survivable.
Dad had followed Curtis LeMay to the Pentagon and was only there for about eight months when the Cuban Missile Crisis started. The Russians were trying to move nuclear ICBM’s into Cuba right under our noses, which would mean that Castro’s Cuba (and by proxy the Russians) would be able to lob nukes pretty much anywhere within the borders of the continental U.S.
My father told me once that this was one of the most terrifying times of his life, and considering that he had spent two years locked in a B-17 while all of North Korea was trying to blow him out of the sky, that’s saying something. For a little under two weeks, my dad was looking at photos and putting together briefings that he knew would be used by Curtis LeMay to justify carpet bombing Havana, which would then mean nuclear war. No two ways about it.
Fortunately cooler heads prevailed. Robert McNamara (despite the idiocy that was Vietnam) ran a pretty tight ship as Secretary of Defense and the Russians turned around and brought the nukes back. But after that my dad took early retirement as fast as he could.
So in case you are keeping score, my old man was there, LITERALLY THERE, for the Great Depression, Prohibition, the birth of American Labor, the birth of the Peoples Republic of China and the shaky start to the Philippines. He was a direct witness to our one open military conflict with China as well as the start of the current schism between North and South Korea. He was also right there when the entire planet came within one lost argument of total nuclear annihilation.
So when dad talked about stuff, I listened. And he had a real knack for explaining things so a kid my age would be able to understand. He NEVER sugar coated a damn thing.
I remember when I was about ten years old the United States was in the midst of some fresh bout of nonsense with the Middle East. A suicide bomber had driven an explosives laden car right into the Marine Barracks in Lebanon. I had really no idea what the hell was going on over there or why we were involved in the first place, but the news kept showing terrifying footage of rubble and bodies and crazy guys with white ZZ Top beards.
I asked my dad what all this stuff was about and he gave me an explanation of the entire Middle East that I think still holds up today. It went like this:
“Do you remember last Saturday when you were watching that old show ‘The Beverly Hillbillies?’ You know how that guy Jed was hunting for opossum in his backyard and accidentally struck oil? Ok. So Jed and his family are well meaning and friendly rednecks, and even though they live in a big mansion in Beverly Hills they still can’t let go of what they are. They still drive around in that crappy car and eat squirrel and wear crappy clothes. You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Got it? Ok. So imagine that instead of being nice and friendly well meaning rednecks, imagine what the show would be like if the Clampetts were hellfire and brimstone preaching tent revivalists, who not only believed that every word of the Bible was completely true but that going against it was punishable by death. Imagine if the Clampetts believed in witchcraft and that the Devil was loose in the land and tempting all of us. And imagine if those Clampetts didn’t just hit enough oil to move into Beverly Hills, but hit enough oil to buy everything from California to the Rocky Mountains. And also, imagine if these hellfire preaching Clampetts had some equally crazy neighbors that found the exact same stuff in their backyard? That’s pretty much what’s going on in the Middle East.”
Word.
You have to put up with a lot of bad stuff once you get a habit for something. A lot of my friends who are pot smokers routinely complain about having to spend time with people who they wouldn’t get 100 yards down wind of in order to score some weed. Our whole nation has been going through an extreme version of the same stuff for decades now. We roll with and placate people who are, to put it mildly, Stone Age superstitious buggy ding dong crazies and we do so because we are too lazy to come up with an alternative to SUV’s.
And what the hell do we have to show for it? Holes in the ozone layer? A warming planet? A population that is fat and lazy because they would rather drive the three blocks to KFC instead of walking or riding a bike? Empowering guys who think nothing of chopping off people’s heads in soccer stadiums and don’t allow their women to learn how to read? People who fly planes into our skyscrapers and strap bombs to retarded kids and then send them wandering into crowds?
I know that I am painting with a broad brush. I know that there are millions of folks in the Middle East who think that the way things are over there is just as psychotic and bass ackwards as I do. But none of those reasonable folks are in charge of the oil or the military. 100 years ago these guys were living in tents and fighting over water holes and matters of clan, and damn near all the money in the world hasn’t really altered their thinking one bit. And if we simply got it together to stop buying what they sell, I have no doubt that they would revert back to that sort of thing within twenty years. That whole region would be nothing more than a curiosity to be watched on The Discovery Channel rather than this damn albatross that is now chained to our collective necks.
I’d love to see that happen, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if it does, I will be about the same age as my dad was when he died two years ago. But maybe I’m just being cynical.
