A Look Back, Part IV

   

Lt. Carey in his government-
issued glasses, Vietnam '67

     When the wheels rose on Charley's plane leaving Saigon, a tremendous ovation went up among the servicemen.  They had made it out alive.

     Just shy of a year in Vietnam, Charley arrived at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, to brief generals and colonels about his helicopter rescue unit that picked up pilots who'd been shot down throughout Southeast Asia. After several days, he arrived at Travis Air Force Base in San Francisco.

     He'd been forewarned that anti-war protests were at their height on campuses throughout the U.S. Although there was no debriefing or counseling available for returning servicemen in '67, word spread quickly among them that they should take off their uniforms before they reached their final destination or they might have rotten eggs, tomatoes, etc., thrown at them.  Charley flew to New York City in civilian clothes.

     In '67, Lester Maddox was the Governor of Georgia, wielding an ax in front of his Atlanta store to keep black customers out.  Having just finished graduate school at Columbia Teachers College, I had obtained a teaching position in a middle school in Warner Robins, where we'd been assigned.  It was the first year the schools had been integrated.  A gigantic wooden paddle hung in the assistant principal's office for use on the backsides of unruly students. I refused to send any of my students for paddling!

     There was no curriculum guide for English teachers in that school district in '67.  I spent several months on a committee which wrote Warner Robin's first guide for English teachers, grades 7-12.  Each of my students received one literature anthology for the year. With the help of my students, I organized car washes and bake sales to buy paperback novels and collections of poetry for each pupil.    

Correcting student papers

     The year 1968 was deadly for our Allies and Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. Without front lines, many support troops (as Charley had been) saw combat.  The men in the field, however, saw the full horrors on a daily basis: suffocating heat, months of tropical downpours and flooding, rocket and mortar attacks, booby traps, terrorism, sandbag details, bad or no food, loneliness, boredom, fatigue, lost purpose, and lost comrades.

     At home, '68 was a traumatic year for our country, with protests and political unrest, riots, the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.

     Charley was sitting in his office on base and heard thunderous cheering and whistles coming from the troops in the warehouse early on June 6, '68.  He went to investigate.  "What's going on?" he said to one of his enlisted men.

     "That son-of-a-bitch Robert F. Kennedy got shot last night, Captain!" the man said.  The clapping continued while Charley retreated to his office.

     At one party, Charley and I made the mistake of engaging in a political debate with law students from a university in Macon.  Within a short time, the students yelled at us, "Yankee, go home!"

     It was not uncommon for my white students to cross the street if they saw a black student from their class coming toward them on the sidewalk.  Laundromats had become a target for protests.

     It was our habit to do our laundry on weekends.  Since we only had one car, Charley would drop me off with my basket of soiled clothes and linens at the end of the strip mall.  Then he'd proceed to do errands or go to the base to catch up on paperwork or calls from his helicopter unit in Vietnam.

     One afternoon he parked directly in front of the laundromat and stormed in to get me.  "Why are you using this laundromat?" he blurted out.  "Don't you see what's on the window?"

     The front window read, "WHITES ONLY."

     "Yes, I saw it," I said,  "but I only bring my white laundry here!"

     And that is a true story.



   

A Look Back, Part III

     From Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, as well as during travel to air bases throughout Vietnam and Thailand (where we couldn't acknowledge we had troops), Charley supplied parts for the Sikorsky "Jolly Green Giant" search and rescue helicopters, which were picking up pilots who had been shot down during '66 and '67. Caught in a firefight in the highlands of Pleiku, he was grateful for a bunker overnight.

     In Saigon he lived off-base with four other officers. Each kept a gun under his pillow at night, despite barbed wire fencing and triple locks.  One night a rat as big as a cat ran across Charley's chest. However, there were no cats to feed on the vermin, since the population considered cats a delicacy.  Rats were rampant.

     A local Vietnamese mamasan cleaned their villa and cooked for them.  Another did their laundry. When the men discovered their beers were disappearing from the refrigerator, one of them appeared unexpectedly during the day to expose the black market convenience store mamasan #1 was running out of their refrigerator.

     Following a squelched raid by the Viet Cong from both inside and outside the base one night, Charley viewed enemy bodies lined up on the way to work the next morning.  He recognized them as the barbers who'd cut his hair in the barbershop on base.

     His villa was across the street from a school.  Four months after Charley rotated home, U.S. forces obliterated the school during the Tet Offensive.  The Viet Cong had been hiding there at night to direct attacks at the air base.

     After we met in Honolulu in the spring of '67, we were anxious to receive Charley's stateside assignment for September.  "Since you're among the first troops to be engaged here, you'll have your choice of bases when you go home," Charley heard from the personnel officer.  "Fill out this form for your first, second, and third choice of bases."

     Charley and I had decided that since we had no kids, we'd like to see the west coast of this country.  We'd selected two bases in California, and one in Washington state as our top choices.

     "Do you really want to go to those, Lieutenant?" asked the sergeant filling out his form next to Charley.

     "Absolutely."

     "Then you have to play their game.  Don't list those, because you'll get stationed as far away as possible.  Look at my form.  I want to go to Europe. I put down Thule Air Base, Greenland."

     "How can you be sure you'll get Europe instead of Greenland?" Charley said.

     "Trust me, Lieutenant.  I've been around for seven assignments and that's how it works."

In my Vietnamese silk Ao Dai

Saigon, '66-67

     Charley didn't have the guts to put down a base in Greenland, or anything but the west coast. When he received his orders, they were for Warner Robins, Georgia, about as far from the west coast as possible! He would be the liaison officer attached to the same search and rescue unit he'd left in Vietnam, sending parts daily from the Georgia warehouses to the helicopters. The sergeant had been right on!  The year in Georgia would be our last in the military.

TO BE CONTINUED...

           

A Look Back Part II

   

     We took Charley to JFK Airport in New York to see him off to Saigon in August, '66.  The "we" included my parents, his parents, his aunt and uncle, and me. He would stop in San Francisco before landing at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where he'd be attached to the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Wing.

     There were no smiles at the airport.  In fact, there were few words.  Everyone was too depressed.  My parents had ordered trays of cold cuts and salads for a lunch buffet at their house in Connecticut for all of us after Charley left. It never happened.

     Charley said he hardly moved from his seat for six hours to the west coast.  He couldn't focus to read. During the second leg of the trip to Vietnam, meals arrived every four hours.  Noticing that Charley was refusing all his meals, the master sergeant next to him asked, "Your first tour over there, Lieutenant?"

     "Yeah," Charley said.

     "This is my second."  The stripes up and down his sleeve and colorful bars on his chest confirmed he'd seen combat. "You going to eat your meal?"

     "Probably not, Sergeant."

     "Mind if I have it?"

     Thereafter, every meal Charley passed up the sergeant gobbled down.

     We communicated by writing letters every day, which were sent without postage to an APO number overseas.  In addition, we recorded cassette tapes, since we each had a recorder.  I sent my tapes to our pilot friends, who carried them on their planes, along with care packages, to Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

     A third method of communication was by satellite phone.  We'd designate a date and time for the phone call, allowing for the fact Charley was eleven hours ahead of East Coast Daylight Saving time.  It was usually around midnight for me when the call came through.  He would stand in line at the USO for the phone, since there was no method to communicate like Skype (no personal computers) or cell phones.  When the call went through, the conversation was bounced off satellites by ham operators. It went something like this:
   
     "Hi, honey, how are you?  Over."

     "I'm great and it's wonderful to hear your voice!  How are you?  Over."

     "I'm OK.  It's the end of rainy season here, so the monsoons are less frequent.  Still 100 degrees, though. Over."

     "We've got a chill in the air and the leaves are starting to turn.  Grad school is keeping me busy. Over."

     It was real personal!???!  If the conversation went beyond five minutes, those waiting behind Charley would get all over him.  "Enough, Lieutenant!  How 'bout us?"  A bouncer actually monitored the length of the calls. Eventually we gave up on them altogether.

     Aside from a serviceman's date of return, the most anticipated day of the year was when a week's R&R (rest and recuperation) began outside Vietnam.  Six months into his tour, I met Charley in Oahu, Hawaii.

     I made my plane reservations and booked a room at the Ilikai Hotel (famous from  the opening shots of "Hawaii Five-0").  Charley's plane was supposed to arrive in the morning, so I arrived the evening before.  I put my hair in curlers and smeared a mud mask over my face so it would be clean and smooth the next morning. Then I went to bed.

     Around 4:00 a.m., there was a knock on the door.  "Who is it?" I said.

     "It's me, honey!  Open up!"

     I pulled a few curlers from my head but the mud mask remained, cracking during the kissing.  So much for beauty treatments!  While I washed my face, Charley told me, "I saw the sunrise twice - once in Saigon and once over the Pacific.  I actually got here in negative hours by crossing the international date line.

Honolulu, April '67

     "It took forever to get debriefed, then I got a taxi here.  When I gave your name to the desk clerk, he had no record of you!  I didn't know what to do, it was 3:30 a.m., but I was sure this is the hotel you told me.  So I asked him to check under my name.  Nothing!  Then I asked him to check again for your name. Finally he found you, under 'Paula Carry!'"

 
 The rest of the week was pure heaven.








   

A Look Back

To commemorate a BIG wedding anniversary this June, some friends asked me to write a little about our first married years together.  The next several blog posts will do that.

I married Charley two weeks after I graduated from Colby College in 1965.  A Lieutenant in the Air Force stationed in Dover, Delaware, he'd graduated from Colby two years ahead of me.

Maine is a long way from Delaware! We wore out the tires on Charley's VW, going up and down Route 95 during my last two years at Colby.  Somehow I planned a wedding my senior year, while studying for comprehensive exams. Comprehensives were exams that covered four years in our major field of study, and if you failed you didn't graduate - simple as that!  A week before graduation, students who failed had to inform their parents that they need not come to Maine.  Those students could return to take the exam at specified times over the course of the year.  Colby no longer requires "comps," but thankfully I made it through on the first try!

We owned nothing but his car when we got married.  What we did own was debt - to Colby for student loans.  We lived in an officer's duplex on Dover Air Force Base, where Charley was a supply officer.  We got all the Air Force furniture we needed to furnish our "home."

I worked as the Information Director for the Delaware Department of Education in the state capitol offices. A year into our married life, we knew Charley would be reassigned.  Our friends and neighbors were pilots who were getting assignments to bases in Southeast Asia.  We expected the same.

The personnel officer called Charley into his office.  "Lieutenant, I have your assignment here.  You're going to Prestwick, Scotland, for two years.  You'll be reporting there in three months."

"Are you kidding me?" was all I could say when Charley told me.  He would be second-in-command of the base!  We began  planning our vacations all around Europe.

I gave notice at my job.  We hired movers to transport our wedding gifts, a few pieces of hand-me-down furniture, and our car to Europe.

Four weeks later, President Lyndon Johnson went on television to announce a build-up of 50,000 troops in Vietnam.  Charley's orders to Scotland were cancelled the next day.

"Vietnam?  Where the hell is that?"  we asked each other.  We got out the Atlas.

The personnel officer called Charley in again.  "Lieutenant, you're going to Saigon for a year. You'll be reporting one month from today."

I made plans to take the Graduate Record Exam and applied immediately to graduate schools.  A short month later, I was living with my parents again in Connecticut, and Charley had arrived in Saigon.  We'd been married fifteen months. While I commuted to Columbia University in NYC, Charley supplied parts to the "Jolly Green Giant" rescue helicopters, which plucked  pilots from the jungle who'd been shot down throughout Southeast Asia.  Our travel plans to Europe were on "hold" in favor of plans to meet in Hawaii six months into his tour.

To be continued.....

The Little Brother/Sister Syndrome

This blog post is by friend, mystery writer, and pharmacist Don Weiss.

They say the two unavoidable constants in life are death and taxes. There is however a third, which I call the little brother/sister syndrome.

No matter how old one gets, if you’re the last to emerge from your mother’s womb, you are forever tarred with the stigma of being the little brother or sister.  My 102-year-old aunt still refers to her 94-year-old brother as her "little brother." My own brother will be 69 years old. I will forever and always be his "little brother," even though I’m three inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier.

The first born is the experimental child. Mother and father are learning how to be parents. By the time the last one comes around, they’ve practiced enough on the first born so that (and I quote from older siblings) “you got away with murder.”  As a little brother, I don’t think I got away with murder - maybe involuntary manslaughter.

Of course you also suffer from the sin of comparison, especially when you're just young enough to have some of the same teachers as your older sibling. And if you’re not quite as good in arithmetic or science and you have a tendency to have notes sent home from school, well, you really suffer from the sin of comparison.

It’s not all bad being a little brother or sister. You tend to compartmentalize the negative and "accentuate the positive":  the countless Saturday matinees, the visits to the science museum, the time he helped you paint your model Corvette or protected you from a neighbor hood bully.  These outweigh the multiple times he jumped out from behind a doorway and scared the hell out of you, especially after you just watched Boris Karloff in the movie "Frankenstein." You remember the time he saved you from choking on a piece of licorice, which far outweighs the number of times he conned you into cutting the grass and doing the dishes when it was really his turn.

Little brothers and sisters also serve other purposes. Having a cute little brother who has lost his two front teeth is almost as good as having a puppy when it comes to your teenage big brother trying to charm a teenage girl into making out with him at the movies. The cardinal rule for little brothers is to keep your mouth shut and you'll get as much popcorn and soda as your seven year old bladder can hold.

As you grow older, some of the big brother—little brother gap closes. You share a beer together when you turn sixteen. You stay up late reminiscing into the small hours of the morning on the night your big brother’s daughter is born. Or two years later you rescue your niece from a house fire and for one brief shining moment little brother becomes a hero. Sometimes the roles reverse, like when your mother dies and you have to assume total charge of everything, including the eulogy.

All my first cousins have lost at least one brother. Me—I’m pretty lucky. In my sixties I still have a big brother alive and well, for whom I will forever and always remain—his little brother.

The Most Important Conversation You're Not Having

A friend of mine recently told me this story about her mother, age 97.  My friend said she hadn't yet discussed the subject of whether her mother wanted to be buried (and where) or cremated.  To bring it up in a roundabout way, my friend said, "Mom, I've decided I want to be cremated.  What do you think of that?"

To which her mother said, "Write down everything you want or I'll never remember."

Most of us think we'll live forever.  Or our parents will.  Although death and estate planning can be a sensitive topic for families, not having a plan in place can become a nightmare.

Does your family know where your wallet is?  Who your primary care doctor is and his phone number? Where your financial accounts are and their numbers?  Where your safety deposit box and key are?  Where your will is located and who your attorney is?  Where your power of attorney, living will, and medical proxy are? And finally, what your burial or cremation wishes are?  A list on the refrigerator helps.

"There's a big misunderstanding that estate planning is for wealthy people," says Matthew McClintock, an estate planning attorney and spokesperson for EstatePlanning.com.  "But it's about making sure whatever you own goes where you want it to go in the most efficient way possible with the minimal amount of stress on the family."

Keep copies of all legal and financial documents!  Five essentials you need to prepare are listed below. Please consult pages 121-147 of my book, Elderly Parents with All Their Marbles: A Survival Guide for the Kids, for descriptions of documents.

1.   An updated will or trust.
      A will ensures your wishes are carried out after you die.
      Everyone of legal age should have a will.  Without one, the courts
      can't know what your intentions are for your possessions.

      A trust is an entity holding assets until a later date.  It allows
      the beneficiary to bypass probate.

2.   Durable power of attorney for property.
      This gives someone authority over your financial matters or
      specified legal affairs, in the event you're hospitalized, disabled,
      or incapacitated while you're alive.  Power of attorney dies with you.
      Usually people choose a close family member they can trust with their money.
      Forms giving powers of attorney are state-specific,
      unless a universal form has been authorized.  Free printable forms
      are available at www.LegacyWriter.com.

3.   Power of attorney for medical care.
      This legal form gives someone the authority to act on your
      behalf regarding health-care decisions, if you become incapacitated
      or unable to communicate.  This form is specific by state.
      Free printable forms are available at www.LegacyWriter.com
      or found via an internet search for "medical power of attorney."
   
4.   Updated beneficiary forms
      Beneficiary forms for accounts will, in most cases, over-
      ride your will.  If you've experienced a major life change
      such as a birth, death, marriage, or divorce, fill out a
      new form and keep a copy.

5.   Living will.
      This legal form documents your health-care preferences, in
      the event you are unable to speak or communicate your wishes.
      In general, it delineates the terms for use of, or elimination of,
      life support.  This form is specific by state and not valid for EMS.
      Free printable forms are at www.HCDecisions.org or do an
      internet search for "living will" to find state-specific forms.



   
 

A Birthday in School

In the late 70's when our older son celebrated his birthday in school, I stayed up the night before baking for the class.  I suppose I could have run to the only bakery in town and bought two dozen cupcakes or cookies or a sheet cake.  They certainly weren't available in the grocery store. But I didn't return to the work force till our older son turned ten and enjoyed exchanging recipes with the neighbors.

For one birthday, I made a sheet cake shaped like a rocket ship.  For another, a baseball diamond in honor of his Little League team.  Another was a hockey rink to celebrate his love of ice hockey. There were also Mickey Mouse cookies. I only used chocolate recipes, since that was his favorite flavor. If the other kids didn't like chocolate...well, they could pass.  Our younger son's birthday was during the summer, so he was out of luck in school.

Yesterday one of our granddaughters celebrated her birthday.  In her school there were no cakes, cupcakes, or cookies for the celebration.

There were too many allergies: dairy, citrus, nuts, eggs, soy, cocoa, lactose, gluten. We didn't even know such things existed in the '70's!  We discovered our sons' allergies when one was bitten by a bee and both sneezed uncontrollably on newly-mowed ball fields.

Yesterday our granddaughter dressed in her favorite shirt with a big star on the front. She had kept five pigtails in all night so her straight hair would curl.  She wore a new Peace necklace and a new starfish bracelet, both gifts.  She couldn't sit still during breakfast.

"How will you celebrate in school today?" I said.

"I get to sit in the teacher's chair at her desk," she said.  "And spin."

"Will it make you sick?"

"No, I'll do seven slow spins."

"Why seven?"

"Because that's how old I am today, silly grandma!  And I get to lead the class in a game."

"What game?"

"The clapping game, and then they all sing to me."

"Sounds like fun!  Will you eat anything?"

"No.  I don't like sweets anyway.  It's more fun to spin."

At least her mother didn't have to stay up baking.  And there wouldn't be any kids bouncing off the wall from a sugar high.