Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Mouthful of spit

Since late winter I've been dealing with muscle tremor.

First my left leg - occasionally, then steadily - now my left hand.

I saw a neurologist in midsummer. He did some physical "tests" - write this, hold this, walk there - and concluded that the shaking was likely "essential tremor", a relatively benign symptom of brain function desuetude that accompanies aging.

But he wanted to see me again this winter to rule out Parkinson's Disease.

Well, the shaking has grown slowly worse. Not shocking or scarily so...

...until last weekend. When I realized that I was salivating. Constantly.

The fancy name for this is "sialorrhea", and it's just plain old drooling. It's to the point where I have to carry around a spit cup like some goober sucking on a bag of worm dirt (that's "snuff" for you non-Eighties-GIs).

Point is...the drooling is strongly - as in reeeeeally strongly - associated with Parkinson's, or other severe neurological issues like ALS.

So.

It's VERY likely I have Parkinson's.

I'm going to call the neurologist Monday to try and get seen ASAP. While Parkinson's has no cure there are treatments that can help quality of life. 

It's going to kill me.

But I won't go easy. I'll fight as long as my life is worth fighting for.

But I thought I'd just say this here and now, so you few remaining readers would know where I'm coming from. It's...not a good place.

"I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction"

 

The only disappointment is that it took a century too long.

I can't really add anything to the indictment Eric Loomis posted at LG&M, but I agree completely that the bipartisan tongue-bath this evil fuck received from both sides of the aisle as well as the political media is a thorough rebuke of the United States' political culture.

Kissinger himself was an amoral scumbag.

The fact that the scumbag was welcomed in every corridor of power outside the Dirtbag Left is worse than "amoral scumbag". These were people who weren't committed to Kissinger's vile agenda of bringing murderous dictators to everywhere he could reach so long as those dictators would do his bidding. There was no reason to cross the room to do more than spit on the sonofabitch.

But you wait and watch; the sucking-up will continue even after the nasty shitbird has finally been terminated. He'll be called a "great statesman" and "diplomat" even though Ribbontrop would be green with envy at the raw number of people that Kissinger's works butchered.

Update 12/1: Worth a glance at this post over at (again) LG&M, which goes into some detail about what an utterly shit "statesman" ol' Hank was using the example of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War:

"At every step of the crisis, the two men appear to have been driven as much by their loathing of India — West Pakistan’s rival — as by any cool calculations of power."

As the post details, this "loathing" wasn't remotely political. It was largely driven by, as Lemieux points out, by the fact that "Nixon greatly enjoyed the company of the jockish (Yahya) Khan (then-dictator of Pakistan) and needless to say despised Indira Gandhi."

This would have been a stupid prize for stupid games even if the political calculations had been correct. Getting a big bro-hug from your locker room buddy? Fuck me runnin' but that's a goddamn dumbass logic.

But in fact the calculations were utterly, completely, disastrously wrong. India was the obvious heavyweight in that fight, as it proved by mopping the floor with the Pakistani armed forces. As Pakistani historian Ali Tariq wrote in 1997: "Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army"

To think that the Pakistanis would have done better, given the massive economic, demographic, and military-strategic imbalance? That's Austro-Hungary in 1914, Hitler-declares-war-on-the-US-in-1941, Israel-in-Gaza-level stupid.

The blood-trail this slug of a putative human left behind him is more than enough to have convinced any humane American, let alone the "leaders" of the nation supposedly concerned for its reputation, to shun him.

But to have piled those corpses so high, for so many repeated and disastrous failures?

Even on "pragmatic" or "realist" grounds - the supposed metric by which Kissinger was measuring his results - the man was complete and utter shit.

Long lived the Queen

Every so often I'm reminded that "hereditary monarchy" probably seems like a good idea when you're, say, a corn chandler in York, living around a shitload of heavily armed aristocratic assholes bred to consider the lack of ruthless ambition a character flaw.

Ensuring the rules say that you have to hand the keys to the national Volvo to the last boss' kid - even the stupid gormless one - as soon as the old driver croaks so these greedy bastards don't descend on each other and in the process you tend to find that your home and livelihood have been pillaged and burnt, your sons hauled off to dig siegeworks, your daughters and wife (and you, depending on how things go) raped and murdered, and your entire life pretty much destroyed and gone to shit probably seems like the lesser of two evils.

To spend a fairly large chunk of change to maintain this idea as your Head of State in the 21st Century, however, seems pretty silly when you think of it even for a moment.

Mind you, I live in a nation that "elected" Donald Fucking Trump as Head of State, so I should probably be humble at throwing shade on the Brits about that.

Spending money on pretty soldiers and fancy cribs when you could be, oh, I dunno, paying off oil sheiks? Not really an "investment".

But, still...as the placeholder of a fundamentally silly and pointless "job" Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (ok, "Windsor", fine...) seems to have done as good a job as you'd want anyone to do if that's what you wanted someone to do. 

She also seems to have been as decent a person who ever did this particular job, although her country's diplomatic and military decline during her tenure meant that she was unable to do some of the appallingly awful things some of the former employees of the Firm got into even if she'd wanted to. 

But she never seemed to want to, much.

(Mind you...there's some fair amount of disagreement about that; I don't have enough knowledge to make a sensible observation so I'll simply recommend you go read the linked article. Suffice to say that there are more than a few people who live were the British used to rule who have a veeeeery different view of QE2 and what she stood for.

There's also the issue of what Liz "stood for" as the figurehead for British aristocracy, as well as the whole weird anachronistic "above the law" thing that might have made sense to the corn chandler but seems just another damn entrenched-inequity thing now.

And as this obituary from the European Politico reminds us, the whole "queen" thing was not easy on the person of Elizabeth Windsor. To live as the "queen" meant she had to kill "Lilibet Windsor" as dead as any Kenyan rebel.)

Anyway, she had damn near a century as the rich person in the fancy headgear who was the notional symbol of her country.

Mind you, the end of a reign that doesn't include a vulturine crowd of glittering courtiers hovering around and plotting over the Royal Deathbed eagerly and anxiously anticipating the final gasp, and a dissolute Heir who, while roystering away in some bucolic hunting lodge surrounded by his hangers-on, bravos, and a trollop or three, is surprised while pawing his busty wench by a begrimed messenger leaping from his saddle shouting "The Queen is dead! Long live the King!" as the trollop is unseated and all the dissolute mob bays "LONG LIVE THE KING!!!" with flagons spilling just...doesn't seem quite right.

Ah, well. We live in sadly diminished times.

Flown Away

Last Sunday I was bringing the Boy back from his first kendo class when I got the text message on my phone.

"Am at grocery store. Need you go home now. Missy just found Spots dead."

Spots Pecker Violet, as he was originally known, came home with the Girl back in November of 2013. He was a "hand-reared" blue-phase parakeet who was born in the little "BiZee Bird Shop" out in Beaverton.

Now my experience with pet birds up to Spots was limited to the Bride's companion, Oxey the Cockatiel, who blended in with me and Lily the Cat and Quinn the dog when we first moved in together back at the turn of the 21st Century, and a nastier, more snappish creature never lived.

He seemed to dote on mi esposa, clambering onto her shoulders and nibbling on her earrings, but he would hiss and bite everyone else, including his stepfather (that is to say, me...). He was grossly cagebound and nasty about it, and when he would get out of his cage he was nasty about that, too.

He could fly about as well as a paper airplane, fluttering madly while losing altitude until he ran into a wall or a window, whereupon he'd float to the ground and scrabble about on the floor, hissing and biting. He was so nasty that even the cats seemed intimidated. He really was a pill.

So I wasn't prepared for how sweet and personable the little budgie was.

He loved to climb on you, just as the cockatiel had. But he never bit. He would nibble; he loved the Bride and Missy's long hair, and he like to perch on my reading glasses and pull my eyebrows, which was incredibly ticklish but kind of fun. He was very patient, and would sit with you for hours, chirping and nuzzling.

He was a good little companion, and Missy was a good caretaker; playing with him and giving him the greens that he savored. We had to be careful, because the cats were unsurprisingly fascinated by him, especially Drachma, who would have caught and killed Spots if he could have.

Rotten cat...

Spots was Missy's beloved pet all through her childhood. He was her treasure, she was diligent and kindly, ensuring he got his playtime and healthy food and was kept safe and happy.

But children grow, and sometimes they leave their childhood joys behind. Missy is now a middle-schooler, a theater kid, has interests and friends outside the house, and slowly found herself visiting and caring for her little bird less often. Somethimes Spots could go days without leaving his cage, joining us only though his voluble chatter from his cage in the far corner of Missy's room.

Too late, she said afterwards, she'd idly noticed several days earlier that his chatter seemed less animated, and his movements less energetic.

But she told herself she'd check in on him later. And later became later until finally when she did go to him she found him lifeless in the bottom of his cage.

She was bereft.

There were shared tears, and we gave her lots of hugs and kisses. We grieved over him, and wrapped him in a soft cloth, and buried him out in the side yard, under the star magnolia, in what we call "Bryn's Garden". We got flowers for him, and still are pondering what to do with his vacant cage, a sad and empty reminder of the small life that is no longer with us.

And perhaps the most difficult part is that the Girl blames herself for not being more attentive, for not checking on little Spots sooner, for not saving him when he could have been saved.

And all I can do is hug and kiss her and tell her I love her.

Because she's right.

She could have, and that's a wound of the heart she will have to carry with her always, just one of a thousand tiny agonizing piercings, like the crown of thorns around the icon of the Sacred Heart, that will linger as long as she does, to remind her of that small moment of carelessness that led to her little pet slowly dying alone on his perch in the quiet of the empty room.

We are none of us guiltless.

But it is not the guilt itself; far too many of us stroll through life careless and reckless of the harm we do.

It's the knowledge of that guilt that weighs some of us down so heavily.

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Happy Day, you Mothers

Funny how it never really occurred to me until afterwards.

But you were always there for us, even when we - well, I - were rotten little bastards. You loved us, cared for us, corrected us when we were wrong and praised us when we did right.

You were a classic Fifties corporate wife and mother, but at the same time you were your own self; amateur actress, teacher, social liberal, mentor, confidant. Cubs fan - my childhood summers will forever be narrated by the sound of Jack Brickhouse drifting out of the big windows on the sunporch where you knit and listened and cursed the Amazin' Mets.

You did all that a worthy person does; you lived an upright and honorable life, you raised your children to do and be the best they could do and be, and you died full of years and honor.

I love and miss you, mom.

Margot Carol McMillan Lawes, 1926-2018

The Transfiguration of St. Nittnatheus

Well, in the end, I think she went pretty well.

Remember how Nitty Kitty seemed determined to make her last days a sort of middle finger to "death with dignity"? Yeah, well, that was a thing, for a while.

But we took her to the vet, got her some medicine to help with the nausea and constipation, we made her get out of her litterbox and sleep on the nest of soft towels and a rice bag, combed the litter out of her fur, and otherwise tried to make her comfortable and happy.

She continued her round of alternating sleep with frantic begging for food, and climbing into unoccupied laps, and seemed to recover, a bit. She was still desperately stiff and creaky - the cat was about ninety-eight in people years, for Heaven's sake - but she got around as well as she ever had.

The weather let up a little, so she could enjoy her outside-time, something she very much loved. But, slowly, every day, she got a bit slower and weaker.

Last Friday was my company's "winter holiday" thing. Mojo and I went and had a very good evening, but we returned to find a distraught daughter and a very, very weak Nitty on our bed where the Girl had lifted her, having found her curled, nearly motionless, on a pile of laundry in the bathroom. Once on the bed the Nit was too weak to get up, and she had pissed herself and our bedlinens.

My Bride changed the sheets while I made up a soft towel-bed for Nitty, intending to move her out to the living room to the couch where she had been sleeping. I gently moved her, frail and as light as a memory, just fur over sharp bones, onto the towel, carried her out, and put her down.

And the Nit, true to her crotchety self, immediately go up, struggled up onto the television stand and laid down, ignoring my attempts to herd her onto the towel.

Even that wasn't right, because she flopped down to the floor, tottered over to my wife's sewing table, squatted down and pissed on a bolt of fabric that the Bride had left on the floor, and then shuffled under the table and laid down to die.

The whisper-thin remnant of her lasted through the night. Unmoving, barely breathing. I got up several times; she was still barely living at four, but, as so many others do, she fled before the light.

By Saturday dawn she was cold.

The Girl was inconsolable, wet-eyed and grieving all through the day. We went to the local stone seller and bought a flat marker and a little cup-shaped headstone. I dug a shallow grave in the sunny spot near the front fence that Nitty had always slept in when she was outside and the weather was fine enough, and we petted her goodbye, folded her in her cloth shroud, and laid her down. I gently put the cold spring soil back over her, and then her stone one top. We spend a few moments there, and then I had to go about my business.

I returned to find this:

Between them my Bride and the Girl had created this little shrine, complete with saints and flowers and offerings. I simply warned them that if the miracles occurred that they would have to figure out what to do with the pilgrims.

You were a funny little soul. Whether you were Cypress - the name they gave you at the shelter - or Francesca, the ridiculous name my Bride hung on you but that we never used - or Fat Nitty, from your early days as a glutton of all things cat-food - or just Nitty; morning crier, lap-cat, patient companion, quiet, gentle, and affectionate...you were a good cat. You died as well as anyone can; full of years, peaceful, surrounded by your home and those people who loved you.

You were not just a good cat, you were good company, dammit, and I'll miss you.

Death, be not proud

It was almost six years ago when we last had to take leave of one of the cats that have the run of this place, and I still have a small empty place in my heart where little Miss Lily used to be.

Now the time we will have to pet Nitty Kitty farewell is fast approaching.

She has been getting thinner and weaker all this past year - she's well over 15 years old, which is something like 140 in cat-years - but was doing as well as an ancient cat could be expected to until this past weekend. We had a nasty, rainy couple of nights and the Nit, who loves to stay outdoors in the vilest weather, was outside, as usual. She came in looking like pure hell; filthy, wet, covered in her own wastes.

We cleaned her up, but she insisted in returning to the rain. Finally the weather turned frigid and we brought her inside for her own safety. We made up a little cat bed, filled a litterbox, and plied her with food and medicine.

She didn't improve, growing shakier and more ragged by the day. Finally my Bride and Little Miss took her to the vet and discovered the inevitable. She's dying, ridden with some sort of awful ancient-cat-cancer. All we can really do is decide how long to palliate her dying, how long to ease her with medication and love (and cat food) until she can go on in this life no further.

Nitty, being the iconoclastic cat she is, has decided to thumb her nose at death by being the most obnoxious cat she can be. After complaining vociferously about being kept indoors she proceeded to ignore the soft cozy bed that we made for her and chose to sleep in her litterbox.

Cat...

Then again, I suppose she'd doing what I hope we all can do in the end; flip Death the finger and go to hell in our own unique fashion.

Dammit.

I'll miss you, cat. You were always a goofy critter, but we will be the lesser for the loss of you.