I was so much older then...

I wanted to mention and turn you towards this post . I started it some time ago so thanks to the magic of Blogger it's now buried down the page.

I started thinking and writing about it because I came across this webpage about my old Panama duty station, Fort Kobbe (I can't help the cheesy music; it's the Web and let's face it, you get what you get). And because freighted with child and house and struggle for the legal tender I don't get to travel to cool places like Millicent does.

BUT - I, too, was once a jaunty young rogue and had my day of peeking about in distant lands. And the thing about that is that once you've been East (or south, west or north) of Suez you tend to remember those journeys and think of the places you were and the people you were - and who and where you are now.

I was a lot younger then. Jellybean Ronnie was napping through his days in the Oval Office, The Bangles were playing in MTV, and Michael Jackson seemed a lot less wierd than he...okay, no, actually, he was just as whack then as he is now.

As Suzanne Vega would remind us, there were also troubles then much like there are troubles now. Time and distance has helped us forget that our elected ninnies were just as stupid back in the day. Their dead are just as dead and the maimed as maimed. Their crimes just as nasty and brutish. We've just forgotten them, that's all.

Back then I was untroubled by the worries of the world - a paratroop sergeant, a medic in the old 2nd Battalion, 187th Infantry. I rode to work in one of these:

an M782 Gama Goat ambulance, a piece of work and worth a post all in itself. Who but a military contractor would think it was a good idea to built a vehicle designed to swim (so the bottom was completely sealed) with the main wiring harness routed below the engine block, so that to replace or even work on the wiring system you had to pull the entire fucking power pack?

But I didn't post this to bitch about a thirty-year-old ambulance. I wanted to talk about a journey. And I wanted to ask you to take the time to page down and read my thoughts about a place I once both loved and hated:

Panama.