Decoration Day 2026

 

As is my wont this day, I left North Portland early to visit Willamette National Cemetery and spend some time with my Army brothers.

It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.

The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.

Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.

So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007. 

I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.

As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway. 

And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished. 

I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.

 
And then I left. 

Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.

To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.

And then I went home.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.

But I'm still here. 

Not dead yet.

And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?

I will.

Until then?

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

------- 

As always on this day; this.

Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

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.

Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

Dunnage

 

So.

Turns out that the "silence" of the night, the cease-fireworks I mentioned yesterday?

Had nothing to do either with the City rules or the fire-safety inclinations of the good people of Portland, but, just like in the movies, the "it's quiet...too quiet" silence before the French and Indians attack.

Last night the first ranging shots were fired before sundown, and by full dark the streets were exploding with all the illegal-goodness I thought the City had shut down. 

Mortars, Roman candles, fire fountains...all the bounty of mainland China was bursting in air to celebrate the 247th birthday of the Land of the Free.

Which, by the way, I remarked only through the front windows. It was a hot sultry night, and I wasn't arsed enough to go sit out in the heat and mosquitoes to watch the fire-for-effect. It was pretty ferocious, though, as the traditional scattering of dunnage at the intersection of North McKenna and Amherst Streets testifies.

Which kind of got me thinking about the whole "why-do-I-hesitate-to-wave-the-flag" thing I also wrote yesterday.

Because I opened up the phone today to read something about how some Republican nitwit had lead off his Fourth paean to Ammurica with a made-up Patrick Henry quote about how we owe our independence to Christians.

"America is a Christian nation".

How many times have you read some "conservative" saying or writing that?

By which they mean that if you're NOT "Christian" (or something their idea of "Christian" hates, like queer or poor or Samaritan or liberal or something...) you're not really "American".

Which is, well, just shitty.

The entire promise of this country is based on an idea, not a religion or a language or a kind of food or clothing. The idea of "equal justice under law"; that if you believe in and defend the rights of all your fellow citizens who are equally committed to the ideals of the nation as expressed in the founding documents then you ARE an American.

So you can be an atheist-American, or an otaku-American, or a gay-, lesbian-, liberal-, conservative-, Rule34-American. If you buy the ideals expressed in things like the Declaration and the Constitution, you're an American.

Period.

That's something pretty awesome, when you stop to think about it.

There are people who have lived in Japan for generations and still aren't considered "Japanese" by the majority of Japanese.

There are people who have lived in Great Britain, or Poland, or Argentina who aren't considered, or treated, as true citizens of those nations, because they look or speak or act "differently" from the Platonic Ideal of a Briton or a Pole or an Argentine that's fixed in the public mind.

But the promise of the United States - and I say "promise", mind, not "reality" - is that if you believe in the promise you can be American.

The Founders made sure of that by making sure they didn't write religion in to those promises.

Too many of their ancestors had beat cheeks out of Britain because of the ugly remnants of the 16th and 17th Century Wars of Religion had made their kinds of "Christianity" (or lack of Christianity) something between rebellion and treason.

And they'd seen what the unholy marriage of political power and religious sectarianism had done to both politics and religion.

It was bad. 

For both.

So yes; a hell of a lot of the people who were responsible for the design of this country were Christians.

But no; they explicitly designed the country to include all blends and shades of belief - including no belief at all - by making religion a personal, not a political, choice.

Which leads me back to yesterday.

It seems to me that we are on the cusp of having to make a hard choice, a choice foisted upon us by people like the Republican nitwit cited above (Josh Hawley? Sound like the sort of Christopathic fathead who would say something like that).

We the People can choose to become the nation our Constitution promises us we can be; a nation open to all who believe in those promises.

Or we can become the nation people like Josh Hawley promise us; a nation open only to those who believe and act like they do.

I know which nation would make me proud.

Do We the People?

Of that, I am honestly unsure.

When you're unsure that your own country truly believes, and wants to make true, the promises that you love about that country?

It's hard to be vigorous about waving its flag.

All you can do is police up the dunnage.

And hope.

Independence Day 2023

 I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.

For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.

I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".

I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).

But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today. 

And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.

And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.

I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.

It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.

Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.

So. Happy Birthday, US. 

May you always be right. 

And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.

(And Charlie Pierce says all the same things, and better, than I just did. Worth a read.)

As for me?

Well. Couple of things.

Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.

I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing. 

Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.

Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...

So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.

We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.

I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.

Well.

Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.

We filed.

Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.

Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.

Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.

So. Good.

Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.

Oh! Almost forgot this.

So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.

But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.

Last night?

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.

So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?

Given my general opinion of We the People?

My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?

So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.

Decoration Day 2023

My first since retirement, and so freighted with a very odd feeling of ordinariness; when every day is a holiday none are.

Instead of choosing to make the long drive down to Willamette National Cemetery I left the quiet house and crossed the big river into Washington, to the little graveyard outside the old Vancouver Barracks.

The old post cemetery isn't the original burying ground set aside in the 1840s. That space was built over when the post expanded in the 1880s and as many of the bones as could be found were removed to the current location, just north of the busy street that is 4th Plain Drive.

It's a very odd little spot. There's a couple of paved loops but no parking area, giving a weird "drive-through" feel to the place. Like everyone else, I just pulled the little car off the road in as gentle a fashion as possible to spend some time with the dead.

As always in these federal plots, the identical stones testify a wide variety of shades; obviously GIs and their families, but also the legacy of the frontier post - civilians working for the Army, traders and travelers, native (probably) laborers. There's even a handful of POWs from the Second World War, German and Italian prisoners buried far from their homes.

I did the same thing I always do.

Wandered among the gravestones, nodding to the GIs as I passed, pouring out a libation in their memory. Most of those buried around me appeared to be guys who'd died between the big wars, in the 1920s ans 1930s, veterans and timeservers alike only in sharing the Army blue or khaki, or OD green. Or the tree suit I wore at the end of my time.

As so often these latter days, I felt the slow loss of the kinship I once felt with my nation and my service. That We the People had soldiers fighting overseas seemed like another age instead of just two years ago.

At the end of my stroll I found myself next to what remained of 1SG Ewart, who'd been topkick in the 1st Infantry back in the day. It seemed like an old First Shirt would be a good sort of person to entrust a cold beer, so I left mine with him and turned for home, my moment with the dead done and another lazy retired sort of day before me.

I'm no longer certain what this day means, to me and to my nation. We seem more than ever a house divided against ourselves.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Today, for the first time in twenty-one years, my country isn't making veterans, at least not in any "official" foreign wars.

Oh, sure. Hundreds of GIs of one stripe or another are doing the nation's dirty business - some of it dangerous, as well - in various unpaved parts of the world for some nebulous "national interests" that your average Joe and Molly Lunchpail couldn't identify if they sat on their hands and thought about it for a fortnight.

But the "big wars" of the post-9/11, Post-Gulf-War 1 era?

Done.

And, look! 

Suddenly all that "support the troops" guff? 

It's disappeared like magic, melted like a fallen ice cream cone on a hot summer sidewalk. I didn't see a single Veterans Day ad, didn't hear so much as a whispered "thank you for your service" today. 

Those who gave their youth and strength in the wars their fellow citizens either helped gin up or were at least indifferent to those who ginned them up? 

As invisible as Marley's Ghost was to the suffering poor.

It is as it has always been; "Danger past and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted".

But that's fine. 

That's what happens after wars, if there is an "after" to the wars. The worst part about the "War on Terror" was there never was an "after". 

For years and years I wrote on this day of the seemingly endless trickle of maimed and dead that we brought home, unresolved, and the fields of maimed and dead (and widowed and orphaned and sown with ruin and merciless hatred) we left behind us abroad.

That was the most awful thing; that for years my nation learned nothing and yet forgot nothing, carelessly devouring its' own and others' children like the Titan Kronos.

Well. that's done. 

For now, anyway.

Mind you, I don't expect that my fellow citizens have learned anything from the dark and bloody tale of our Adventures in Politics By Other Means. The next time some irksome foreigner pokes us in the giggy I'm sure the Great American Public can be counted on to rise in righteous wrath, wrapped in the flag and roaring that gawdawful "God Bless The USA" song, demanding that someone - someone else, mind you - go smite the dusky foe.

But at least, for now, we're nominally at peace.

And I'll take that.

Because, as Herodotus wrote: "No man is so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."

I wish you and all of yours a peaceful day full of small joys.

And to those of my brothers and sisters who also once wore the particolored clothes; 

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.

Decoration Day 2022

 I visited my Army brothers down in the Deep Southeast today, as has been my tradition this day for the past several years.

The big graveyard on the slopes of Mt. Scott hasn't changed. It was just like it always is, neat, tidy, orderly, quiet. Everything, in other words, that war and fighting are not. We like our wars to be distant and iconic, if we can make them so, and so Willamette National Cemetery plays its part.

Today was, as it always is, busy. Cars and truck-loads of families coming to visit their lost ones, "...not gone but marching far away". Older adults my age visiting parents of my parents generation, middle-aged kids of Vietnam-era parents, and young adults or actual kids who looked mostly to be grandkids or even great grandkids of the people who were there waiting silently for their living remainders.

The absence of truly young adults, the peers of the young men and women whose stone dates ended in our recent wars, was marked; at least I marked it. We've managed to make our dead disappear much as we made them disappear while they lived and fought the wars we wanted kept out of our lives.

I had to walk among the dead for a bit, not an unpleasant task on a warm spring day in a pretty garden spot, until I found one of my own generation; another platoon daddy, SFC Groome, who was only four years older than me but had done much hard service in the Gulf Wars. He'd also died a dozen years earlier, so it seemed like a good spot to stop and share a drink.

It wasn't a Bud or a Rainier pounder - when I go visit the dead I tend to drink like a grunt - but it was a fine malty draft, and after sharing I sat with him a while. I hoped he'd had a good life. I also apologized for the Iraq service his stone testified; for not being a better citizen and letting fools and knaves abuse his trust. 

I hoped that he'd had a decent tour, had time for a laugh or two, and had come home sound. And wished him a loving family to come and visit him now and then, to remember fondly his empty chair, and to keep his spirit alive in their hearts.

On the way back to the little Prius parked up the hill two lovely douce matrons asked me to take their photo; it seemed odd to want to pose over someone's grave, but they were kindly and I was obliging, so I snapped off some shots and made sure they checked their camera to ensure I'd done right. They thanked me sweetly, we exchanged courtesies amongst the orderly dead, and I resumed my climb, back to the car, then back down the hill, then back across the cloud-dappled Portland Monday to North and home.

As always on this day I felt ever more disconnected and adrift from the country that made this day a holiday for me and mine. 

Every year it seems less and less the country I'd hoped for when I was young and strong and proud in my own Army blue.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

 

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

Frankly, I can't say it better than Jim Wright did, so instead of wasting your time blathering on about this, my forty-second Veteran's Day, I'm just going to hand you over to him.

I do want to emphasize Wright's point about the politically dangerous business of "heroing" soldiers in a notional democracy.

To lionize the military as we do, to exempt soldiers - because that's what "hero" does; it takes the object of that veneration out of the sordid business of daily living and makes them a shining object of veneration - from criticism and scrutiny is to make them the idols of your society. 

That's not "democracy". It is "militarism", the heart of totalitarian doctrines like fascism and soviet-style-communism.

Like Wright, I'm not vauntingly proud of what I did in the Army.

I did my time, and did it well. I had some good times, some bad time - though not as bad as the troops who had to fight real wars had - had a good laugh and came home sound.

Which is a damn "good war" all things considered.

I'm good with my past.

But I'm concerned for my and my children's future. So I want you to think - just as it made me think - about what Wright says about this day.

For as he has said elsewhere; if you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.

A view from the high hills

The only official national cemetery in Portland is down in the deepest Southeast, home of the New Copper Penny and every third you-pull-it junkyard in the metro region, so it was to there that I sailed down I-205 on a sunny morning to have the drink with the dead I share on this day.

 
Like every military cemetery I've every walked in Willamette is overwhelmingly tidy, dominated by the dress-right-dress-and-cover-down orderliness that we're taught in our training, as if by the sheer force of design and construction it can overwhelm the bizarre and random nature that has been what happens every time people have met each other with deadly force since the first homo erectus picked up a rock.

Willamette is perfect for that peaceful illusion. It sprawls high over the northern slope of Mount Scott, and the wooded hillside lifts you far above the workaday grime of the Southeast. 

Especially on a gorgeous early summer Monday the hillside really is perfect; shining green grass curving away with the tiny forest of red-white-and-blue flags (interrupted by the white service banner of the Coast Guard - for some reason the Coasties have sent their flag-planters out to set their dead apart from the uniform ranks and files of flat stones around them) disappearing into the dark green firs that shade the older subdivisions that surround the field, and beyond that the skyline of Portland under a bright blue sky.

Up on this shining hillside there's no fear. No hate, or boredom, no frustration, or anger, not even the exaltation of rage and the power of holding life and death in your hand that war can bring. None of the things that make war what it is, so great and terrible.

There's nothing but a sort of unreflecting quiet, where the hiss of tires and the sound of the wind that stirs the thousands of tiny flags are only passing thoughts.

I've parked at the bottom of the hill, and my knees are bitching at me for that as I climb between the rows of stone.

The remnants around me are almost all from my parents' generation.

That's the thought that follows me up that green, green hill; how many people buried here lived through the last Big War. No wonder we're still followed by their unquiet ghosts, even today. 

They're all "veterans", though. Survivors. The dates end in the Eighties and Nineties and Oughts, the time of the dying-off of the generation that saw so much war; Europe and the Pacific in World War II, Korea, Vietnam.

The war dead of our small wars are tucked away in Sections X, Y, and Z, lost amid the crowded memorials of the older generations. They seem to have more flowers and other mementos of living grief, raw and unassuaged. The families walking among them are younger, with only the occasional middle-aged father or mother to remind us that the tragedy of war is that, soldier or civilian, American or German or Iraqi or Vietnamese, fathers and mothers bury their sons and daughters.

Maybe it's the oppressive orderliness. Maybe it's just me; maybe I've lived too long with the weird not-war warring my country has waged that makes me feel so hollow and unmoored. I share a whiskey with my dead brothers, but I don't feel the connection I usually do to them this day. My pledge seems empty.

I trudge slowly back down the hill wondering what it means, this day, to my country, to me.

What does it mean? To die in a war that your own people don't understand, that to the vast crowd of them is no more than a noise just below the range of human hearing, a fire far away that is no more than a sullen glow on a dim horizon, utterly distant from the shining green hill and the blue skies dreaming over the peaceful city below?

 
I'm troubled, because I just don't know.

It's still a lovely morning all the way back up the freeway and then the busy side streets back to North Portland. There are lines at the Starbucks and wheelbarrows creaking through the rock and gravel store, and mattresses on sale, and the busy life of a big city goes on below that shining green hill and those tiny bright flags stirring softly on the warm breeze that carries me home.

As always on this day: this.

These truths

I'll have a longer rumination on Happy Treason Day, but although I didn't really pay much attention to Benito's oration at Mt. Rushmore the other day, it sounds like it was a really juicy serving of red meat to the Base. "BLM is a commie conspiracy against Good White People (probably masterminded by antifa) and we're NEVER going to surrender on our love for Treason in Defense of Slavery!"

Kreegah, Tarzan. Fucking bundolo. It's a wonder that apes aren't the only ones who understand that shit. Yeah, well, racist goobers, so not a dime's worth of difference, but, still...

What makes this intriguing is that at my stage-struck daughter's request we streamed Hamilton last night (wonderfully luminous art, sketchy history...) and the contrast couldn't be sharper between the two visions of America.

Both include a huge helping of myth and fantasy.

But the one myth is hopeful, broad, innovative, expansive, inclusive...

and the other is narrow, angry, resentful, purblind, intolerant, and vicious.

We the People have a seismic-level event this November that will determine which of those myths we embrace.

I have NO confidence that We will chose the hopeful one.

And yet...the promise of this nation, the standard We set for ourselves, regardless of how often we failed to live up to it, is a truly aspirational one. If we were the nation we say we want to be, we would, indeed, be a shining city on a hill.

But more on this subject tomorrow. Until then, enjoy my favorite Hamilton guy, George the Third, tell us about his love and longing...

Died in vain

I was talking about this with my Bride today. She said that she didn't see how it made a difference where, when, or how you died in war; whether you died storming the Normandy beach to crush Nazis or blown up by an exploding latrine while waiting for orders in the War of Jenkin's Ear.

I replied that it was all part of the implied bargain that we the troopers made when we raised our hands.

We promised to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. With our lives, if it came to that.

They - the Constitution in the form of our People, our government, our Army, and our officers - promised to hoard those lives and ensure they were spent as frugally as humanly possible.

The Old Lie is one thing.

The Old Lie, when the lie is part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?

That breaks the bargain.

And that got me thinking of how many bargains have been broken in the Plague Year.

So I posted this to my FB page today:

"Pandemic Timeline, Day 157: It suddenly seems utterly weird to be having a "day" about dead American soldiers when EVERY day hundreds and even thousands of Americans are dying all around us. Weird. And wrong."

And a dear friend immediately spoke up about his disgust that the federal government had decreed an official day of mourning with the national flags flown at half staff for the dead of COVID-19; "Couldn't have waited another few days to let us honor fallen soldiers?"

And I understand that. I do. I know he and his family have a very dear friend who was killed in Iraq, and I'm sure they still feel the pain of that loss.

Our dead are with us always.

But this was my reply:

"But these poor suffering bastards are dying for their country - in the sense that they're dying because of decisions their government made - as much as anybody who got killed at Bataan or Fallujah.

As an un-fallen soldier I'm as angry and grieved at these losses as I am about the lives we threw away in the Middle East or Vietnam. Even the rhetoric - "heroes" - is the same, whether we send GIs into the streets of Basra with hillbilly armor or nurses into the plague ward with homemade masks and re-used gloves.

I understand how you feel, my friend. But I'm too sick and too cynical to feel the outrage. Our country has decided that we are all expendable. So let the poor sods have their flag. We're all being driven into the minefield now."

And with that, I find that today I have nothing more to say.

Except, as always, this.

Mary Asks for a Miracle

"behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
—Luke 2:48

How do you approach a miracle? She forgets her son
has sky spilling out of his mouth, so she doesn’t look
in the temple, where he’s practicing a prayer
that sounds like the only rose-colored feather
on the wing of a desert finch. She searches the road,
with the revellers, the travellers, returning home,
but the miracle is a beak that snaps the pinyon pine
shell apart like a lever, releasing its heart from its case.
The miracle is a set of questions made by the river
that clips its blue leash to the sea. The miracle is
only partly a boy, only partly a bird or a beach.
She forgets the part that is made of fire and wind,
the part that opens what’s closed or finds what’s lost.
She is sad and worried in her unremembering.
What do you say to the miracle you’re missing
when the miracle tells you it is already home?

~ Linda Dove

This evening we celebrated Christmas Eve with all the traditions of our family; lazy idleness, videogames (for the Boy), desultory exercise (for Mojo and myself), and a meal of honey ham (because honeybaked ham...), scratch mac n' cheese with sharp Tillamook cheddar because the Boy - whose diet generally consists of whatever is on the "prohibited" list published by the American Diabetic Association - specially requested it, and a garden salad because it symbolizes the rebirth of Sol Invictus or Christ, whichever comes first, or who takes two out of three thumbwrestling.

I won't pretend that this winter solstice doesn't feel dark and dim, and not merely because we're into the Dark Ages here in the Pacific Northwest, the rainy months when we see the sun only randomly from week to week. To me it feels like the December of 1860 must have; a tense, louring time vibrating like a tightening string, turbulent with anger and danger. The election of 2016 has made evident what has been true since 1980; that We the People are a house divided against itself, that we are in a cold civil war, and the the only thing left to question is whether we will continue in this tortuous state or break out into open struggle to become all one or all the other. I can neither effectively fight that struggle or win it; all I can do is try and turn it from me and mine.

So I hope you and yours are together, and safely ensconced in love and light. The night is long and dark, and we are our own candles, flickering bravely against the cold outside the glass.

May all of us find our way home safe tonight.

Can you see..?

The morning of the 242nd Independence Day is cool and cloudy in Portland. The little house is quiet; everyone, including Nitty Kitty curled on the hard planks of the deck outside, is still asleep. I'm at the table in the front room with my coffee and my work laptop, listening to the muted sounds of the summer morning and wondering about my country.

Or, to a great extent, how much there is of "my country" that remains this day in the New Gilded Age.

Almost two years ago now I wrote about my anger and fear of the terrible course my country had embarked us all on.

"I am now too old to really hope or fear for my country. But I have hope, and fear, for my children's country. And if, having listened to the foolish ranting of this president-elect, having seen the parade of grifters, unhinged racist loons, incompetents, and Bush-era retreads he has threatened to employ, you are "happy" about that, Jim, then I'm afraid I will have to sadly lower my opinion of the pre-VOLAR SF officer selection process.

Had I lived in 1896 or 1916 I would hope that I would have been attacking the Pinkertons or the troops suppressing the striking workers. I hope I would have been writing flaming rants in the pages of the Socialist press, and excoriating the bosses and the corrupt politicians like Trump who suckle off them. I hope I would have been unhappy - hell, I hope I would have been furious! - that millions lived and died in poverty and misery so that a handful enjoyed luxury in the "land of the free".

And in 2016 I see that we have been handed over to those who would love to return to those Gilded Age days. I am unhappy and furious about that, and if it shows through the screen from this place, well...then I have done good work here."

Since that time I have seen everything I hated and feared about the unmitigated rule of the GOP come to pass. Just this past Saturday Nazis - actual Nazis! - fought street battles in my home city, not much different than the brawls the Spartakists and the Freikorps fought in the Weimar cities.

The fuck..? I have fucking freikorps in my home?

All of this leads back to the other evening when I went to a Portland Thorns match against the NWSL team from New Jersey. I got there a little late because I had work that ran long, and I was in the line for a beer when I heard the tannoy announce the entrance of the teams and the preparation for the Patriotic Ritual that We the People have - to my mind freakishly - decided with which to begin every meaningless sporting event.

And my weary thought was, well, fuck. I'm glad I don't have to stand for that and pretend to be a Hearty Patriot.

Because my nation sure doesn't feel much like the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to me right now.

And, worse, because there seems to me to be nothing but disastrous choices open to fight the "conservative" scum whose ideal is a return to the ways and times of 1929, or 1899. I am too old and fragile - and too central to my family's security - to fight, actually fight, the Nazis in the street. My vote, coming as it does from distant blue Oregon, seems a frail reed, flattened in the storm of plutocratic, racist nativism my enemies are bringing to the battle. All I have is my words on this page, and those seem now like shouting into the empty air, unheeded and useless.

All this past month I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, her popular history of the pre-WW1 Western world. In it I'm reminded of why the New Dealers did the New Deal. The original Gilded Age and it's comet-tail that lasted until 1932 was an unspeakable horror for people like me, people without money and power, people who would have been forced to beg and scrape for a living knowing that once we were too old, or too damaged, or simply unlucky we were ensured a slow death from poverty and immiseration.

That's why the first Gilded Age was full of violent rage. Presidents, kings, ministers of state were murdered by "anarchists" who were, largely, simply men who were furious at the knowledge of that coming slow death and chose, instead, to visit quick and violent death on others they felt were responsible.

The lives and homes of most people like me were in the ever-present shadow of sickness from foul air and filthy water, from disease and injury for which they could not afford treatment. The great and the good would glide past them in effortless majesty, sleek, replete, shining and happy - at least, from afar - and healthy while all the then-me could have done was shake with impotent fury that they should be born to unearned happiness and I to relentless toil.

A friend of a Facebook friend had a snarky comment the other day about how people like me weren't "willing to give President Trump's policies time to work..." and my immediate response was "Because we don't have to give them time because we've already seen how they work, you fucking stupid Trump-humper!"

"Unlike you goddamn FOX-addicted morons we've read the histories of where the Trumpkins of the GOP want to take us. We already know what's gonna happen, how this shit ends, because We the People have done it before. Trade wars, nativism, racist immigrant-bashing, plutocracy, authoritarianism? Fucking "duh", you nitwit, where the hell else are we going when Orange Foolius and his GOP's "policies...work"?"

I feel this day much as many another generation of Americans must have felt in the 1850s, watching as a cabal of greedy, foolish, venal, ignorant, and, yes, evil neighbors drove their nation into bloody war.

And I wonder. Can this nation endure, half-FOX and half free? Or are we, this day headed where they were, where, in the words of the man who was perhaps most strongly charged with steering the nation through the ruinous result:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

All I can say is; I do not know.

But the prospect makes me sick at heart, and leaves me with nothing by a mournful longing for the past, and the foolish innocence of my younger days, on this Independence Day.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

I had an incandescent rant all ready to go for today, similar to the one I put up here last November 11th. I wrote it out. I looked at it, and I just couldn't find the heart to publish it.

What's the point?

You all know as well as I do what I was going to say. War is a racket. We - me, everyone I served with, the people serving now, the veterans of tomorrow and next week and next year - are just the bailiff's men, serving our country's liens in places and on people all over the world. No, we don't do sweet fuck all to "defend your freedoms". We kill people and break shit that our "leaders" have designated as inimical to our national interests. We're the button men and women for Donnie "Five-Deferment" Trump and his crew of racketeers just as we have been for every President and every Congress since 1945.

Now there's some honor and decency serving as an imperial legionary. Not all empires are pure Evil. But to pretend that we're still the Arsenal of Democracy of Remember Pearl Harbor? To tell ourselves that the people who wore the uniforms in the 1980's and 1990's and Oughts and now the Teens are somehow like the Greatest Generation that saw off Hitler and Tojo? That's just foolish, the self-deluding mumbling of an idiot child needing the comfort of a kindly lie.

I won't pretend that I didn't enjoy my Army days. I won't pretend that I'm not proud that I was a good soldier and then a good sergeant. When my days are done I'll gladly slope off for a pint in Hell with my old pals from Division, from my Reserve and Guard outfits, and maybe if we're lucky with the hard boys of the Legio X Fretensis, and the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the Légion étrangère. Here's to us. Who's like us. Damn few, and they're all dead.

I know who I am, and what I did. I'm not ashamed of it, but I'm not vauntingly proud, either. I didn't hold Bastogne or Guadalcanal. I did the dirty work of geopolitics and I'm okay with that. I served with good people, had a laugh, and came home sound, and no legionary can ask more than that.

No, it is you, my friends, my fellow Americans, who need to look into your hearts and souls and ask why you have been happy to be lied to, gleeful to parrot the nonsense taught you about "freedom" and "fighting them there", eager to pretend that you have not sent, or been willing to let others send in your name, young men and women into harm's way for nothing more than a handful of dollars, or a passing bit of geopolitics, or some fancy of "national honor", or some fantasy about dangerous enemies, where there is nothing but ruin and impotent anger that our own nation has grown from the seeds of our own ignorant hate and fear while pretending to be the victims ourselves.

I just don't have the heart to rant about this. I am just tired, and a little grieved, for the foolish waste of it all.

On this day I offer only the cold comfort that our nation's ideals promise that We the People can choose to honor our veterans by choosing not to make more of them unless it's for a truly fucking good reason.

For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none.