Christmas 1944

My family gathered together this Christmas for my father, now 90 years old, to read the Christmas stories he has been reading for 62 years now. Every year we get out the 1947 Giant Golden Book with the beautiful illustrations by Corrine Malvern and his once strong voice falters over the words to “The Cobbler and His Sons”, “The Peterkins’ Christmas” “The Harper”, and finally “The Night Before Christmas.” In recent years we have discussed having one of us younger people read the stories, but his is the voice of them, and sadly will be extinguished sometime in the future.
When St. Nicholas had finally wished everyone a happy Christmas as he drove out of sight, my father raised his hand for silence and said, “We have to remember one of us is not here, but in Korea, and we must think of her tonight. (My youngest daughter, a captain in the Air Force Intelligence is currently on active duty at Osan AFB in South Korea.)
He then continued, “We all have Christmases that stand out above all others. Mine was the Christmas of 1944.”
In the dark of December 14, 1944, the 104th Infantry Division, of which he was a platoon leader, was lying on the ground outside of the German village of Merken, on its drive into Aachen. The village, currently held by the Wehrmacht, was to fall victim to a Time On Target, an artillery operation in which every available gun, from small mortars to the largest howitzer is fired in such an order that the entirety of the fire falls at once. The effect, not only on the buildings, but the people in them is devastating. In the aftermath of the TOT, the 104th scrambled forward into the rubble to clear out any remaining resistance. Coming upon an anti-tank gun in a bombed out house, my father ordered his platoon to cover him while he and another man rushed in, releasing a salvo of semi-automatic fire into the basement where the enemy had taken cover, killing one and wounding another. The remainder of the stunned Germans stumbled out, blood flowing from their noses and ears, to surrender. In the course of the night, he doesn’t know exactly, as shock can deaden pain, he was hit in the knees by shrapnel, probably from a hand grenade and given first aid by a German medic, a veteran of the Russian front, happy to be a prisoner of the Americans, and then evacuated to a MASH for surgery.
“I was in Paris on December 25 and put on a plane with other wounded and flown to England,” he said. “I’ll never forget when we arrived: they were singing Christmas carols. They were singing about peace on earth, and yet we were out in the mud doing just the opposite.” His voice choked for as second and continued. “At that time the Germans we were fighting were often 12 and 14 year old kids. We captured this one young soldier and brought him back to our orderly room. He broke down crying. All he wanted to do was to go home for Christmas to be with his mother.” He paused. “I wonder if he is still alive.” And then he wept.

The Christmas Pageant

In those days a decree went out for children third grade and above, who wished to participate in the annual church pageant, should gather at the church vestry at the appointed afternoon in early December. I do not remember which afternoon, but it was probably a Saturday. Gangs of us showed up, as the prospect of being a shepherd, wise man or angel was as much of a part of getting to Christmas as opening another window of an advent calendar, which, at the time, we did not have.
The annual director was Mrs. Leighton, a woman short in stature, but a giant in spirit and patience. The younger boys were automatically assigned roles as shepherds, the girls as angels. For the latter, the only other option fell to one anointed older girl, that being the part of Mary. For the older boys there was the opportunity to be a wise man or Joseph, but the former was the role to which I aspired because of the cool costumes available.
Along the north wall of the vestry was a bench, which unknown to those of us participating for the first time, opened to reveal a wonderment of costumes made from old curtains and bathrobes, pie tin halos, and interesting things like a brass lamp that appeared to have escaped from Aladdin, a brass incense burner, small jewelry box, two crowns and a fez, probably from antique lodge paraphernalia.
Once a week, we trekked down to the church, each rehearsal a step closer to the great day.
The final product was extremely simple: there were no speaking parts for us. The church, a unique wooden structure from the late 1840’s built in the self-supporting Gothic style, was lined with fir garlands and behind the pulpit a large tree with white decorations. Candles were placed in holders at the end of each pew and lit by the ushers. Then, the Dean of Bowdoin College would climb into the pulpit and the voice of Christmas would resonate throughout the church as he read from the King James bible, with the “lo’s” “Fear not’s,” and “swaddling clothes,” now eliminated from the modern, “relevant” story.
He would begin with the decree from Caesar Augustus, at which point, Mary and Joseph would take places in the front while the congregation sang “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” When he came to the shepherds and the visitation of the angels, we would all take our places in the front along with singing of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”
During the latter, we shepherds would scurry down the side aisles to the back of the church only to troop back up the center aisle to adore the Baby, with the singing of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”
Then it was the turn of the three older boys who played the kings. Each would solemnly pace down the aisle, one to each of the verses. When all the players were in place, the other children in church were invited to bring their gifts down front to place in front of the manger. In my early days, these were still gifts of items like warm socks and small toys which were sent to the recovering countries of Europe. (That’s how old I am.)
The lights would then be dimmed, the church illuminated only by candle light, and we would finish with “Silent Night.” As the last verses fell away, we would put on our coats and head for home, for whatever traditions our families had, darkness would take its deep winter hold, and we would sleep, awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus.

Christmas 1952

The graying December sky and a rare trip to church this morning bring to mind Christmases so long ago to me now that they are almost just a whisper in time.
By December 12 (today) we would be well into the gathering excitement of the season.
The big Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs arrived early with a hint of what was on the horizon.
Coming home from my cousins’ on Thanksgiving Day in the late afternoon, would find the fire department in Brunswick, Maine stringing fir garlands woven with colored lights across the width of Maine St. Santa Claus would have already made an appearance, standing in a cardboard chimney mounted on the back of a Treworgy’s furniture store pick-up truck, as he cruised the streets of town, tossing candy to the kids who lined the way. The store itself would have been transformed. The basement would have found the customary beds and mattresses hidden away to replaced by a toy department with the Big Guy himself sitting on an elevated chair at the far end, awaiting the horde of over-stimulated, runny nosed kids standing in line out onto the sidewalk. Christmas was here!
On Maine Street, the windows were decorated with ornaments, merchandize and snowflakes stenciled from Glass Wax window cleaner. Woolworth’s and Grant’s expanded their toy departments to include anything any kid could want, and the Firestone Store at the end of the street advertised new, shiny bicycles, Flexible Flyers, and sports equipment.
Early in the season we would drive down to Harpswell, which in those days, was driving out into the country and hike through the dense thickets off High Head Road (now Mountain Road) and drag out of the frozen low grounds a spindly fir tree which we would take home and store in the garage. To be Christmas, it could only be balsam fir.
We decorated our classrooms at Longfellow School with paper chains, and snowflakes had drawn names for the party, and soon a Christmas tree would appear in the back corner of each room.
In the afternoon we all gathered around frozen puddles and stumbled between the tufts of grass on our skates or ran and belly flopped onto our sleds to slide across the ice. The sky would become a deep purple as lights came on up and down the street. I used to think of the verse in the Bible about the lion and the lamb lying down together as even the neighborhood bullies became decent for the time, as even the skeptics wanted to make sure they didn’t blow it with Santa Claus.
My first memory of church on Christmas Eve was the candlelight service held at the First Parish Church in Brunswick in 1952. My father had just returned from Germany and his active duty during the Korean War. The church was actually lit by real candles in an event that insurance and fire codes have long since ended. The “big kids” put on the pageant with a reading of the appropriate Bible verses by the dean from Bowdoin College, whose voice, for years, was the sound of Christmas in Brunswick, ME. At the end of the service everyone, even this six year old, was given a candle, with the flame passed from person to person. The congregation filed out to the front of the church and stood on the sidewalk in the lightly falling snow (I remember snow, whether from reality or nostalgia) and sang “Silent Night.” I could not wait until I was old enough to participate in the service.
When the last notes died away, with much “Merry Christmasing,” we all dispersed and came back to our own Christmas tree, with the lights glowing in the darkened room, my father reading the Christmas stories he still reads to his grown grandchildren today, hanging a stocking my mother had dyed red and affixed our names with Elmer’s glue and glitter dust, and wondering if I would ever fall asleep.
Sleep would eventually come and Christmas would pass into another memory.

Political Correctness Run Amok

I’ve waited a few weeks to comment on the events at Ft. Hood in which Maj Nadil Hasan gunned down his fellow soldiers in a processing center there. The inevitable gnashing of teeth, finger pointing and the “how could this have happened?”elicit a big “Duh” from me. For anyone who has served not only in the military but in any other public/governmental agency, it is no surprise: political correctness.
Personnel in Maj Hasan’s chain of command were aware of his radical Islamic leanings, but no one did anything. Why? Simple, it was a matter of self preservation. Had anyone complained about him, his career would have been over. He/she would have been branded racist and if not summarily dismissed, would have been referred to sensitivity training and the resulting comment on their records would have prevented any further advancement.
In the American military, one cannot remain, say, at the rank of captain even if that is the level he or she is most comfortable or competent. All must stand for promotion and if not selected, they are removed from active duty. So absurd is the system that promotions are often based on a mandatory full length picture of the applicant. If one “does not look like a major,” that person can be denied promotion. Thus a comment on one efficiency report can finish a person who has rendered good and faithful service for many years. The easiest way to kill a person’s career, it is said, is to “condemn with faint praise.” Only water walkers need apply.
And what about Maj. Hasan himself? His performance had been described as “inadequate” but he was nevertheless promoted to the rank of major. There are many former officers not promoted thus, simply because it was noted that 12 years before as a brand new lieutenant, their uniforms did not fit exactly as the rater wanted. This in spite of the fact that their service had been exemplary. Again to not promote someone in a minority group would be career suicide for someone.
I often wonder what has happened to our meritocracy, when promotions can be made based on racial quotas rather than skill and quality of performance. Discrimination against any group is wrong. In this case the political correcting of our society has ended the lives of 14 good people and ruined the lives of many more.

The Thoughts Of An Old Army Friend

I thought I would share the kind words of an old Army friend, with whom I was stationed at Ft. Hood and after our tours in Vietnam at the Army Intelligence School at Ft. Holabird, MD. I received it in an email a week or so ago. I am humbled.
"…when I read it, I went into an unusual (for me) slow-down mode. As agonizing as it was to read your experiences (much worse than my being a REMF who only spent about 12 days and nights with ground-pounding units), I needed to read every line carefully to get the full flavor… I loved the book and only wonder why you didn’t call it a memoir rather than a novel. Even though I knew the author had survived, my heart was in my throat every time I started a new chapter. I agonized over every firefight, even every decision you had to make. I had fewer worries about my ability to function under fire, which I had to do a few times. I was less confident of my ability to lead troops without getting anyone killed unnecessarily. I would have been glad to have been led by a leader like you developed into. I know command is not a popularity contest, but I enjoyed the interaction of you and your men. There seemed to be a far smaller asshole quotient in the field, even with your first six, than what you faced in the rear. I anguished over your plight with the 191st and grieved when some soldiers I’d come to respect in your old unit were killed. I share your feeling of helplessness and rage at the injustice…
Your book has inspired me to dig out the series of taped messages I sent my parents during my year in the Nam. Not to write a memoir, but to see what I had to say at that time and recall some names of people I admired as well as those I didn’t."

Political Correctness: Quatsch!

Down at the shore I found a seagull feather stuck upright in the cultch facing, trembling into the southwest wind like a weathervane. The sou’westerly was driving the late autumn gray water up the channel against Wilson Ledge out in the middle of the bay, and the motion of the white caps looked like the white manes of horses racing up towards Brunswick where the ocean ends. And it made me think of how the ancient sea peoples all had beliefs of sea gods and spirits either astride horses or driving them in chariots. Sometimes when the air is more still you can hear the clucking and cooing of distant sea ducks, sounding like human voices. It is easy to see where the myths came from.
But I digress. I can do that, along with starting a sentence with a conjunction, because this is my space, and I am not submitting it for a grade. Besides, my two favorite story tellers, Garrison Keillor and Gary Anderson of the Harpswell Anchor newspaper, do it all the time, much to the enrichment of their tales. Mind you, I have nothing against English teachers. My instructors from junior and senior years in high school, Bob Hart and John Smith, members of the Greatest Generation, were truly inspiring and taught an immature kid how to write and think like an adult, even if he didn’t act like one. (I still don’t!)
But it wasn’t ancient sea myths that caught my attention. It was the fact that as a kid, I would have picked up the feather, tied a ribbon around my head and lit up into the woods to pretend I was an Indian. Now, playing that role was certainly not to denigrate Native Americans. We thought they were really cool. We wanted to be them.
Anyway, that thought led quickly, as my synapses started clicking, to the fact that kids can’t enjoy being kids. Those of my generation remember the excitement of cutting witches, ghosts and jack o’lanterns out of construction paper and plastering our classroom with them. Can’t do that anymore. Inappropriate. It promotes witchcraft. The Germans have a great word for that: Quatsch! It is pronounced, Kvatsch, by the way, and is a polite substitute for “Bull Shit.”
Christmas? The kids can’t even wish each other a merry one. My kids were not allowed to sing Christmas Carols, but they were made to sing Hanukah songs, and the Christmas assembly was watered down to a “winter assembly.” Am I missing something here? As I remember the one Jewish boy in my class, a friend to everyone and all round good guy, had as much fun with it as we did.
Valentines Day? Nope, can’t do that either. We spent days cutting out pink and red hearts, turned doilies into what passed as greetings and had a nice afternoon party. No one was excluded. We all, even us unpopular and ugly ones, looked forward to it. Grade school kids don’t care what you look like. We all got cards punched out of cheap sheets and all ate cake with pink icing, so that our mothers didn’t need to plan for supper that night.
Easter? Forget it. I don’t even need to go there.
The fact is, in our society’s wimpy and pathetic attempts to offend absolutely no one, we have watered everything down to the point where kids of today will have no memories.
I’ve got news: Life has winners and losers. I don’t believe in telling an eight year old he or she is already a loser, but our timid approach to everything is not a learning moment.

Influenza

I think I am the only person of my age who has any memories of the influenza pandemic of 1918. The memories of which I speak, are passed down, for there is no one left alive in my family who was old enough to have actually experienced it first hand. There are, however, vivid reminders of it at my aunt’s house in New Hampshire in the form of a small, white christening dress and a china headed doll, which once belonged to my Aunt Grace.
Grace was the oldest child of my grandparents, a bright, honey haired child, the darling of the neighborhood according to all accounts. In 1918, she and my uncle, who was about four years old and my two grandparents were the beginnings of a family which would, over the years, produce six children. My grandfather was working in Memphis, TN, designing sporting equipment, and my grandmother had returned with the two children to Chicopee, MA to be with her parents while she awaited the arrival of my father, whom she was carrying at the time.
Coincidently, my maternal grandfather was working in Springfield, MA as a civil engineer for the Boston and Maine Railroad.
The epidemic, by all accounts was frightening and ugly, for it cut down children and young adults in their prime, with extreme swiftness. Combat operations in World War I were held up as both sides dealt with devastating casualties, not from bullets but from viruses. It spread with such an alarming speed that it is still not known today, how and why it spread as fast as it did. Many, who would contract the disease, would survive and start to recover only to be stricken with pneumonia, which their weakened bodies could not resist.
Among those stricken were my Aunt Grace and Uncle Jim. My frantic grandmother called the local doctor, who came and made his assessment, “The little girl will be fine, but I’m afraid for the lad.” Grace began to recover but quickly worsened and became a casualty of the great epidemic. My uncle, however, did survive. But in her way, Grace lived on. When I was small, the whole family spoke of her as if she were just someone living too far away to visit, even though Uncle Jim was the only one who had known her. In that doll and small dress, she is still present in the family home.
My other grandfather, in the meantime, fell ill, and while lying abed in the front room of the house he was renting, could see the continuous funeral processions going by his window. Not a comforting sight, I am sure. Every home on his street lost someone.
Now, perhaps to even the score, I have never had the flu at all. In fact, I have only had one flu shot, inflicted on my by the Army in 1968 when there was fear of another big outbreak. In Vietnam, a medic flew out to the field to re-inoculate us against bubonic plague, but not the flu. As a 6th grader (1957-58), the Asian flu swept through emptying out schools. In my class of 25 or so, only Billy Field, who came to school in the winter with no socks, ill fitting hand-me-down shoes and no lunch, and I were the only ones untouched. In the panic of the ‘70’s even though, as a teacher I lived in the bacterial/viral soup that is an old school building, I was unaffected. And, I’m not losing sleep over H1N1. Maybe Aunt Grace is looking out for me. If she is, “Thank you.”

Leaf Peepers

I have spent the last two weekends in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which are well known for the brilliant colors produced by the deciduous trees as one last orgasm before they go into suspended animation for the winter. Maples, poplars, birches and beeches turn from their various hues of green into gold, yellow and bright red. The oaks, meanwhile, less boisterous turn a dignified rust. The mountains, once stripped of their trees for a voracious timber industry have recovered, and are more than eager to show off that they have not been defeated. In the valleys, the small, gravel bottomed rivers are alive with the yellow and red boats the leaves make as they drift away toward the ocean on the gold water.
It is beauty such as this, that people from the world over come to marvel. But do they really see anything? The main highways coming in and out can be bumper to bumper with crawling traffic. But out in the mountains, one can still be very much alone, sometimes within feet of even the inter-state which follows the Pemigewassett River up into the mountains. Why?
The answer is simple: the people who come to see the beauty of nature flock into the several tourist towns along the road to buy trinkets made in the orient and decide which faux Nordic sweater or piece of Scotland they are going to take home with them. I suppose the area needs the business, and retail is what keeps the economy going, but I have never been able to fathom why folks would want to drive into such a special place and just shop. Why not stay home and do it, for God’s sake.
Ah but wait. If those who came for the foliage actually wanted to see it, I would not be able to enjoy the easy solitude of the mountains even on Columbus Day. Keep shopping, people.

The Songs My Grandmother Sang

My grandmother was the quintessential grandmother. She was jolly, rotund, and since we could never get her angry, we never tried. One of the things I will never forget about her, is how she suddenly would burst into song. Sometimes it was a hymn; “Come Thou Almighty King” was a frequent, or songs from long ago wars such as “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the boys are marching;” from the Civil War or “I have come to say goodbye Dolly Gray,” from the Spanish American War, a time she experienced as a child. The frustrating thing about these tunes, was she would usually only belt out the first lines or perhaps, in the case of a hymn, the first verse.
Often the songs she sang were from her school days. “Dicky Bird, Dicky Bird, Dicky Dicky Bird; How I’d like to fly with you; Dicky, Dicky Bird,” would come echoing out of the old camp window into the surrounding beech wood, where she and my grandfather lived. “Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen; We dare not go a’hunting for fear of little men,” I later learned was from a poem by William Butler Yeats. “A hunter on the hill, who gallops forth at early dawn to shoot the startled deer; All fresh at early dawn;” was a German folk song, “Der Jaeger aus Kurpfalz.” Her elementary education predated World War I when things German fell out of fashion.
But there was one little song she sang, and again, only the first verse, that always touched something with me. “Come little leaves, said the wind, one day; Come over the meadows with me and play.” I could always picture the leaves of past summers being blown over the fields as summer ended. Even now I remember the tune, and recently found the entire poem, which I am attaching. If I close my eyes, I can still recall past autumns and meadows, long since disappeared under construction, and hear my grandmother singing to us the lament of a dying summer.
Come Little Leaves
COME LITTLE LEAVES
by George Cooper

"Come, little leaves" said the wind one day,
"Come over the meadows with me, and play;
Put on your dresses of red and gold;
Summer is gone, and the days grow cold."

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,
Down they came fluttering, one and all;
Over the brown fields they danced and flew,
Singing the soft little songs they knew.

"Cricket, good-bye, we've been friends so long;
Little brook, sing us your farewell song-
Say you're sorry to see us go;
Ah! you are sorry, right well we know.

"Dear little lambs, in your fleecy fold,
Mother will keep you from harm and cold;
Fondly we've watched you in vale and glade;
Say, will you dream of our loving shade?"

Dancing and whirling the little leaves went;
Winter had called them and they were content-
Soon fast asleep in their earthly beds,
The snow laid a soft mantle over their heads.

My Grandfather's Favorite Joke

You never think that your grandparents were once young, at least when you are young yourself. However my mother's father was young at one time, and the glimmers of his younger days would creep through in stories in which he usually referred to himself as "an observer."
He was a civil engineer, and oddity in the 1920's being a college graduate from the University of Connecticut in 1912. After working for several railroads and the United Fruit Company in Jamaica he ended up working for the Maine Highway Department, surveying and planning the roads that would push through the distant farmlands and forests to connect Maine's far flung towns. Often the survey crews were gone for weeks at a time, particularly in the winter, when travel home was impossible and they would be holed up in some northern town where the sole source of entertainment was the bar in the local "hotel." Many hotels in Maine, back in the day, were just bars with a few cots upstairs so that they could meet the letter of the law and sell hard liquor. I stayed in one such hotel back in 1964, but that is another story for another time.
At any rate, to fight boredom, the crew would invent things to do, and sometimes form "societies" and "clubs" which required an initiation, something the founders never did themselves, and the new guys were none the wiser. One such club was the Order of the Burning Straw. The initiate, probably well oiled by the time, would be required to drop his pants and hold a broom straw between the cheeks of his butt while it burned down to a stub.
But I digress. I remembered Poppa's favorite joke the other night just as I was falling asleep, and my chuckling forced my long suffering wife to ask why I was laughing at such an odd time.
The story goes as follows: There once was a medical student, who was prone to wild binge drinking, which usually left him hurling violently and then comatose. His friends admonished him telling him that some day he would "puke his guts out."
One weekend came, and after a particularly spectacular spewing event, he passed out. His fellow students went to the lab, and brought back some preserved intestines and organs, which they had been studying, laid them around the inebriate and left.
The next morning he appeared ghostly white and said, "You fellows were right. Last night I threw up my guts, but with the aid of God and a long handled tooth brush I got them back in."

Flatology

Thirty years ago, my wife and I quit secure teaching jobs and moved into our unfinished house in Harpswell, ME along with a newborn daughter. I fancied myself an aquaculture pioneer, who, along with my two partners, were going to be the oyster barons of Casco Bay. We did realize that it would take some time and a lot of hard work before this came to pass, and also knew that we would not be able to pay ourselves for some time. So, for the first months, the time we still call the “winter of ham hocks and beans” we pulled through as best we could, eating copious amounts of soups made of various dried legumes, government cheese obtained from a senior center and beer made from molasses. I worked nights as a “checker” in the warehouse for LL Bean, a great job for someone with OCD and one weekend a month would travel to Rochester NH where I was commander of a US Army Reserve infantry company. I would spend the two weekend nights on a cot in the armory as the drive back and forth was too long. My days were spent on the water tending to our young oysters.
In the spring, when Heather was old enough to be left at a sitter, Susan got a job working for both the Regional Hospital in Brunswick and Bath Memorial Hospital as the infection control coordinator. I immediately assumed her job was to make sure the infections were equally spread between the two, and the doctors referred to her as “The Bug Lady.” One of her first scores was informing a physician he would wash his hands between patients.
One of the first friends she made was another nurse who had the job of continuing education coordinator. She became a dear friend and would come over to the house with her husband for visits.
On one memorable visit, she either had forgotten what it was I actually did, or wanted to find out just what it was I did, for she asked, “What is it you do?”
Without batting an eye, I replied, “I’m a doctor.”
“Aren’t you going to practice locally?” she asked, without hint of skepticism.
“Well, I’m on a hiatus while I try oyster farming. Besides, my specialty is very narrow, suited mainly for teaching hospitals, but I would be happy to come in and do workshops for the nurses, if you like.”
“What is your specialty?” she asked taking a mouthful of blueberry muffin.
“I’m a flatologist.”
At that point the muffin spewed across the kitchen counter in a spasm of laughter.
“I’m serious,” I said. “It is my experience that nurses are woefully trained in a subject that could be used in evaluation of a patient. I’ll bet you don’t even know what the three cornerstones of the science are.”
She allowed that she didn’t, but that I would probably tell her, and I obliged. “Tone, texture and bouquet,” I said. “Think about it. If people could not pass gas, they would blow up and explode. The human race never would have survived one generation. So, if you detect the hint of a rectal zephyr, don’t be grossed out, nay rejoice, for what you are witnessing is a life being saved.”
I never did give the workshop, although delivered the lecture many times to an adoring public, one of whom was my friend’s daughter. She used it as the core of a high school essay and was awarded an “A.” I realized that had I done the same in my day, I probably would have been suspended from school. How times have changed. And, by the way, the plural of flatus is “flati.”

Enterprise and Boxer: The Battle off Maine's Coast

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On September 5, 1813, during the War of 1812, the USS Enterprise, cruising the coast of Maine, encountered the brig HMS Boxer off Pemaquid Point and began a violent, brief battle which has entered US Naval lore and was memorialized in poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Although the Royal Navy had done little to blockade trade north of Cape Cod, as we shall see later, the Coast of Maine was nonetheless open to depredation by British warships and privateers. In once incident, linked to Harpswell, James Sinnett of Bailey Island and his brothers were engaged in fishing when hailed by a large vessel identifying itself as the US warship, Essex. When they came aboard, they were informed they were on the 18 gun HMS Rattler, and were prisoners! The captain loaded the Sinnett’s schooner with 20 Royal Navy seamen, who were then ordered to reconnoiter the coast. After a week, during which the brothers were well treated, their boat was returned and the Rattler sailed south.
In fact the Rattler sailed on into the mouth of the Merrimac River at Newburyport! The communities along the coast began to doubt the efficiency of the US Navy, and in response the Navy transferred the Enterprise to Portsmouth to patrol the area.
The Enterprise had recently returned from a mission familiar to today’s Navy. She had been engaged in combating pirates off the coast of Africa. Refitted as a brig and mounted with 16 guns, she was ready for business. The new captain, William Burrows, had recently arrived from Philadelphia and prepared her for sea.
In the meantime, the HMS Boxer, also rigged out as a brig and armed with 14 guns was making its way southwest from St. John, NB. Off the coast of Lubec, she sighted and captured a small sailing craft, which was “manned” by a group of women out for a sail. Samuel Blyth, the captain, had them brought aboard, informed them politely that perhaps they should confine their pleasure cruising closer in shore and released them, to return with stories of their adventures. By coincidence, one of the ladies was the wife of the militia commander in the area, who was so impressed with Blyth’s chivalrous behavior, that he placed advertisements in local newspapers announcing it. It is a poignant feature of this story is, that despite being at war, the combatants did not seem to hold any hostility towards one another.
Burrows left Portsmouth along the coast testing the speed and handling of his ship as he went. The winds were very calm, and the crew was engaged, from time to time in sweeping, and exhausting task, which involved the deployment of large oars from the side of the ship. On September 4, near Portland, the crew could hear cannon fire coming from the area near Sequin Island, but due to the calm weather, they were unable to close and determine its source.
By the morning of September 5, off Pemaquid, they sighted a ship at anchor in the harbor there. They watched as the strange vessel shook loose its sails and slowly came out to meet them. Lookouts in the masts saw three Union Jacks flying, and the crew of the Enterprise prepared themselves for a battle. But Burrows surprised them. He ordered the Enterprise to pull out to sea away from the approaching Britisher. His crew, spoiling for a fight, was outraged. However, they soon realized what their captain was up to: He was maneuvering his ship to get the wind advantage and test his own speed against that of the enemy. Around 2 PM Burrows ordered the “beat to quarters,” and the battle began with broadsides from both vessels. The black powder from the guns soon turned the area into a manmade fog bank.
Henry Wadsworth Longefellow’s poetic account tells of the citizens of Portland hearing the gunfire from the battle, but that was not true. From the top of the observatory, the keeper with a telescope could see the battle and called down its progress as he could see it. Inhabitants of Edgecomb and Wiscasset could hear the distant grumbling, however.
Aboard the ships life was a hell of fear and confusion. Lethal metal and wood fragments flew everywhere. Blyth was struck in the body and killed. Cpt. Burrows was hit in the groin by a musket ball fired from the Boxer’s tops and fatally wounded.
Using its superior speed, the Enterprise moved ahead of the Boxer, swung to starboard bringing its broadside to bear down the entire length of the doomed ship. The top of the enemy’s mainmast fell, bringing down much of the rigging. Pivoting the other way, the Enterprise raked the Boxer with another broad side.
It was evident the Boxer was finished. Second Lieutenant Tillinghast called across to his adversary asking if they were ready to quit. An officer shouted back they were not, but he was quickly pulled to the deck and a second officer declared they were. “Pull down your colors,” Tillinghast commanded. “We can’t.” came the reply, “They’re nailed up to the mast.” “Send some one up to cut them down. We’ll hold our fire.” And so the battle ended.
When presented with his dead adversary’s sword, the dying Burrows asked that it be returned to Blyth’s family and said, “I die contented.”
The Enterprise with Boxer following under control of a prize crew sailed slowly back passed Halfway Rock into Portland Harbor.
It is now known if any residents of Harpswell were down on the shore, for certainly anyone fishing off Bailey Island might well have been able to see the smoke and the distant thunder of the guns. That information, if it exists is not known.
In Portland Harbor, First Lieutenant Edward McCall, now in command of the Enterprise began the work of repair and personnel matters. He was quite surprised with he was approached by a local business man with a strange request. The gentleman represented a group of business people, he claimed, who had shipped in a boat load of English wool. They had engaged Blyth, while the Boxer was in St. John, and had in fact, given him a £100 note for protection. Their goods were aboard a Swedish vessel, Margaretta, and were escorted by the Boxer to the mouth of the Kennebec where, they had requested Blyth fire off a few cannon to make it appear that they had been chased into port. Would McCall sell them back the note for $500? The lieutenant was incensed at first, but the gentleman, obviously a smooth talker, convinced him that the wool was needed by the Army, and it was for that reason that this group of citizens was using the enemy’s navy for protection.
Yankee and English merchants were not adverse to continue trading with each other and a brisk trade apparently existed between Mainers and British ships hovering off shore. The commander of the fort built at Cundy’s Harbor at the time, for example, wanted to put a stop to it, and ordered all vessels leaving the Harbor pull in for inspection. One fishing vessel owned by a man named Dingley refused, and the guard at the fort fired, holing his boat, which barely made it back to shore. Whether that created more obedience to the rules, we do not know.
There were further prisoner issues to clear up. A group of fishermen from nearby Monhegan Island had approached the Boxer earlier, requesting that the surgeon come to the island to attend to an injured colleague. The kindly Blyth allowed him to go accompanied by two midshipman and an army officer passenger, who wanted to participate in some bird hunting.
Once they knew the battle was to be joined, they borrowed a rowboat to return, but were unable to catch up and had to return to the island where the inhabitants figured it would be a good idea to take their weapons, which were just fowling pieces. The four “guests,” watched the battle from the cemetery up the hill from the landing, and were returned to Portland to join their shipmates in captivity.
On September 9, both captains were buried side by side on Munjoy Hill in Portland with full military honors. The local authorities allowed their British prisoners to march in the parade and accompany their captain to his gravesite.
The Enterprise was repaired and ended her days in the Caribbean aground on a ledge, with no loss of life. The Boxer was also repaired, sold to private interests and ended her days as a merchantman.

The Selkie, for lack of a better title

I like to snorkel. Hovering motionless over a world of waving seaweed and little fish flitting back and forth, it is probably the closest thing I will ever come to flying without the use of a parachute or hang glider. I also spend time floating with my hands behind my head, an ability I inherited from an uncle with an abnormally large lung capacity. He would lie back in the lake in front of his camp with a cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, as easily as if he were on an air mattress. He and my aunt had no children of their own, and with his Irish knack of telling stories and “inventing” the truth, he was a favorite of his nieces, nephews and any other kid who happened by for that matter. But that is another story.
Without a wetsuit, I stay in, until my core temperature reaches a critical point and then climb out on the rocks to sit in the sun. It all feels so natural. Perhaps it is a genetic memory from some bygone era when a webbed footed ancestor first left the sea to soak up the sun and avoid the fangs of some Precambrian sharkodont, or something like that. Or perhaps one of my early Scottish ancestors was a selkie, a mythical creature from Scotland and the surrounding islands, who was a seal while in the water and a man upon the land. I suspect there may have been more truth than myth to the story. My guess is, the creature was invented to explain the unexplained pregnancies in shore clinging communities, caused in actuality by some Norse sea raider, who came, had his way and then disappeared over the seas.
Today the clouds to the west and southwest were dark and foggy. Off shore was Hurricane Bill, too far to bring wind or rain, but he would be felt. While the wind was calm and the boats riding quietly at anchor, floating in the waters tucked away from the open ocean in Casco Bay, I could feel his pull. There was an almost imperceptible current that pulled at me as I tried to hover over a rock, watching the periwinkles cleaning algae, unaware of my presence.
At last the tide withdrew so I could no longer snorkel, the seaweed lay down on the rocks, and the shellfish closed up awaiting the return of the water. The plovers, chatting like a group of old men on the end of the point, removed to the rocks and sand to hunt for their meal. Hurricane Bill moved further off towards Nova Scotia, and I came up into the woods to resume my life on land. I put my webbed feet by the hose to wash off the salt water, and sat down to watch the Red Sox beat the Yankees in good, old Fenway.

Tourists and Other Stupid People

I don’t really care much for idiots. Now, I’m not talking about someone who is ignorant because they haven’t been exposed to something, or someone who maybe doesn’t get it, but is at least giving it a try; what I’m talking about are the people who are so numb they not only don’t know anything, they don’t even suspect anything.
And amazingly many of them end up here in Maine either as tourists or new residents, who have “discovered” us. How they discovered us, when we knew we were already here is a bit beyond me, but maybe I’m stupid too. Anyway, the question has often occurred to me as to how these people got jobs that provided them enough money to get here, and how they found there way here in the first place.
Case in point, the stupidest newcomer of the summer of 2009. It is noon at the Harpswell Anchor newspaper office. It is always that time of the day when they drive into our yard to either buy something, which is good, or to ask for free stuff, which isn’t. They have all day, for God sake, why the stroke of noon when we are a mouthful into our deserved sandwich? A Subaru, good giveaway that the driver is probably and elderly woman, pulls into the parking lot, and a gray haired lady gets out, comes into the office, opens her purse and puts two letters on the table. As we stare in wonderment, she asks, “Aren’t you the Post Office?” When we respond in the negative, she replies, “Well, I saw a flag and a sign, so I figured you were.” Now our sign says, “Anchor Publishing,” which I guess where she came from was close. We then gave her directions, and when she left, I added, the building has a sign in front of it that says “Post Office.” Damn, and you know she probably had a college degree.
When I retired from state servitude, I was asked by a local commercial fisherman, a long time friend, if I would manage his wharf. That entailed weighing up crates of lobsters, filling and salting barrels of bait, and dealing with the occasional tourist who wanted the experience of buying “fresh” lobster. Inevitably, as I pulled a crate of live, flapping lobsters from the water, I would be asked, “Are those fresh?” Duh. “No,” I would reply, “They’re very well behaved.” This was usually greeted with the same expression, you’d get off a board fence.
The business was called “Dick’s Crabs & Lobsters.” One day an out of state car pulled up, a man got out and said, “Are you Dick?” “No,” I replied. “Well,” he said, “I’m a good friend of Dick and his boy, what’s his name,” and he always gives me lobsters at half price.” Yeah, really. “Well,” I replied, “When What’s His Name comes in, ask him.”
Most of the dumb questions involved crabs, and gave me the opportunity for great answers. Two identically attired gentlemen, one afternoon, asked “Where can we get crabs?” Huh, read the sign? “The toilet seat at the bus station is supposed to be a good place,” was my answer. The other common question was, “Do you have crabs?” “My response being, “Not since I used that soap the doctor gave me.”
One morning as I came up from the float, I found an elderly man and his wife in the bait shack going through the pockets of the pants and jackets the guys left to change into when they came back from a day’s fishing. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I just want to see what they carry with them?” was his innocent reply. “Could I go to your house and go through your stuff?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then get the hell off this wharf, do not buy lobsters here, do not pass Go.”
We Mainers aren’t unfriendly, we just don’t like being seen as a giant, open air, petting zoo.

The Woodstock Generation

I have often been asked if I attended the concert at Woodstock, and have been told that it "made us what we are today." To the former, I answer truthfully, "No," and to the latter, I politely reply that it has nothing whatsoever to do with who I am now or was at that time. You see, even if I had wanted to hitch a ride and sit in a rain soaked field to listen to music, I probably wouldn't have, although the free love part seemed intriguing, but I wasn't available at the time. I was in Vietnam, and not just In Country, but out in the middle of the jungle, as part of an infantry unit that basically lived there just as did our North Vietnamese colleagues. We did not watch the news on TV, did not get so see Bob Hope; none of that. That was for the REMF's, the Rear Echelon Mother, (you get the rest) So actually, we did not even know what it was or that it was even happening until the Special Services sent out a Life Magazine, which they did from time to time. You see, other than counting the days we had until we could get on the freedom bird back to The World, and letters from home, which arrived every two to three days, we were absolutely ignorant of anything going on outside of the grid square we happened to be located in at any given time.
It was the rainy season, and in the late afternoon, the skies would darken and open up in a deluge you might experience in a brief thundershower here, but over there, it lasted all night. It was rain that drowned out all sound in the complete darkness that was the jungle at night. Conversation was even difficult above the roar. For days at a time, we were soaked to the skin, covered with sores and depressed. So when the magazines arrived showing pictures of young hippies huddled under plastic bags at an event they voluntarily attended, we were less than sympathetic. There was no "wow" factor, only my medic's sardonic comment, "Ain't that some shit." To which we all responded with our form of agreement, "There it is."

The Joys of Flight

This morning we rose at 4AM, or “oh dark thirty” to get my daughter to the Portland, ME airport for a 7AM flight to Atlanta with a connection to Fort Walton Beach, FL for an Air Force school starting tomorrow. We arrived at 5:30, looked at the arrival board to see her flight listed as “on time.” Not so fast! At the check in there was a group of tired, surly people and a handwritten sign saying the flight was cancelled. No reason given, no weather problems, my guess from the number of people, they just didn’t want to run it at a loss and were going to fill up their other, later flights. A check of the website listed the flight as canceled from Portland but on time to its Houston connection from Atlanta. Hmmm.
So the best we can do is a 3:40 PM, and reservations on the remaining two flights into Ft. Walton, in case something else goes awry. Which of course it did. The flight was boarded shortly after 3 and sat on the runway until five. So my daughter has now been up since 4 AM and will arrive too late to make any connection, which will necessitate spending the night on a bench, and will report in late and exhausted some time tomorrow.
Why can’t we do better than this? Why can’t we have high speed rail like the rest of the developed world? When you consider all the hoohah at the airports, the fact that they are outside of the cities one is trying to reach, the homeland security drills and just being yanked around by the airlines, one could get on a train, say in Boston and be in New York, downtown, in less time and be more comfortable.
That’s my rant, because I have driven to Portland twice today and feel jet lagged myself.

The Origin of New Words

Sometimes I think about how languages change dramatically over the years. I guess that comes from not having much of a life. Consider, my high school German students could more easily decipher Middle German, spoken around 1200, than they could English spoken around 1000. And languages change fairly rapidly. The average person today could not read Old English, but would not find the English of 100 or so years later to be that difficult. In the span of history, that isn’t a very long time, two or three generations. If Old English had been spoken, say in 1909, we would have known people in our younger days who still spoke it. Pretty amazing, I would say, particularly when it just didn’t happen in one tiny village but all over the place. Most European languages that I am familiar with have made dramatic sound shifts at one time or another. German made one around 900AD. Look at the difference between the Spanish and Italian spoken today and the Latin that was its common tongue. The latter did not even have the definite article (“the”) The Germanic languages spoken by the Gothic tribes that invaded the areas during the collapse of the Roman Empire did, however. Perhaps that’s where it came from.
And then languages change on a personal family level. For example, since my oldest daughter Heather was born, the word “banana” has been replaced in our family language by “balana.” Breakfast has become “greface.” Rhododendrons have been replaced with “Road from Denvers.” My second daughter, Laura, interested in sports, introduced us to “lympics” and “nastics” for Olympics and gymnastics. To “train” for her coming Olympic, gymnastic career, she wore “norts” and “lockies,” or shorts and long socks. Even the beloved Red Sox have come into our speech as “The Lockies.” Since we are not important people, these will never make it into the common tongue, although I did hear my brother-in-law ask my sister for a “balana” the other day. If we were royalty maybe in 100 years, people would eat their greface under a Road from Denver.

My friend, Bob Hawkins

When I started working for the Maine Department of Education in the early 1980’s, one of the first people I met and who befriended me was Bob Hawkins. Bob was in his early 60’s at the time, was small, like me, and had been a boxer in the Marines during WWII. This carried over to the way he would dance his boxer’s footwork down the halls of the office building, and jump his way up stairs as if he were jumping rope, just to show off that he could still do it. He had a puckish sense of humor, which he immediately used to get me into trouble with one of the secretaries.
Early on, I realized that I could tell Bob any joke, no matter how politically incorrect without him being offended, and one Monday, after learning the story of a leper in a bar at an Army Reserve drill, I decided to tell him.
A leper walked into a bar and asked the bartender if he could get a drink. When told yes, he gratefully thanked the man, saying, “I usually upset people, so it’s very nice of you to serve me.”
“No problem,” the barkeep replied, “We serve anyone. It doesn’t matter what you are, everyone is equal here.”
The leper then orders a gin and tonic, and as he raises his glass to drink, he notices the barman, go to the end of the counter and throw up in the trash can. When he returns, the leper orders a second drink, and sees the same thing happen. During the third drink, the poor bartender is retching violently with the dry heaves.
He returns to refill the leper’s glass, wiping his pale face with a towel. “I’m sorry, if my presence here makes you ill,” says the leper. “I’ll leave.”
“Oh no,” replies the embarrassed bartender, “It’s not you. It’s the guy next to you dipping his crackers in your arm.”
Bob nodded, and admitted it was a good story and suggested I tell it to one of the secretaries, an older woman, with children about my age. I demurred at first, but he called her over and said, “Bill, has a story he would like to tell you about a gentleman with Hansen’s disease.” Thus began the incident of the two innocents, she not knowing what Hansen’s disease was, and I not knowing that she was going to be totally grossed out. That was my third day on the job.
On my fourth day, Bob told our boss that we would be going over to the State Office Building to pick up a print order and that I should meet people in the other building. That part was true. What he didn’t tell me was that, as a native of the area, he felt it his duty to show me the old granite quarries nearby in Hallowell, so away we went down old single lane, unplowed roads. It was February, and when we tried to turn around we got stuck and he had to call his brother, a retired Army officer to pull us out. Neither he, nor our boss was particularly thrilled, but I didn’t get fired that day either. I think, Fred, our boss, realized there would be some entertainment value to the two of us.
Bob aspired to be a poet. When threatening rain clouds appeared, he would loudly exclaim that, “Those clouds look juicy.” And from this he came up with a little poem I’ve always remembered:
“Them juicy clouds are full of dew;
The rain is going to fall;
You’ll be needing your umbrella;
It’s a hanging in the hall.”
But the poem he always wanted to write and never finished, started with the memorable line:
“It’s a long, long way, I think, do you?
From Keetmanshoop to Katmandu.”
We struggled over that for months, and although I came up with a second line of:
“And farther still, I understand;
From Singapore to Samarkand.”
We were never able to finish what might have been a great poem.
Bob is gone now, and like with so many of his generation, the world is a little more boring without him.

UNH Magazine Online

William K. Millar, Jr. '68

When I graduated from UNH I was told by the ROTC department that, as a German major, I could expect to be sent to Germany as a Military Intelligence officer. Neither I, nor anyone who knew me, could picture me as an infantry officer, but there I was, all 115 pounds of me as a platoon leader in the First Cavalry Division. On the plane trip over to Vietnam, I started writing a journal. The opening paragraphs of my book are actually what I wrote on the plane that night. I maintained the journal until the monsoon rains rendered the paper un-writeable.

In 1974, I was newly divorced, teaching at York High School, in York, Maine, and still feeling the effects of Vietnam. I started writing down my experiences on the backs of unused test papers I pulled from the trash. It was finally completed in 1978. By this time, I was remarried to Susan Collins '71. She was teaching at UNH and represented the Nursing Department on the Faculty Senate. One of her fellow senators was Don Murray. She asked him if he would be interested in reading my book, and so, he took the manuscript, still on the old tests and bound up in four term paper folders. About a week later, he called and asked me to come over to his office some afternoon when I was done teaching. Needless to say, I went with some trepidation.

After trading war stories, Don handed the manuscript to me and asked me what I was planning to do with it. I said I didn't know, and would probably just stash it somewhere. In typical Don Murray fashion, he graphically told me why I should try to publish it. I won't use his exact words, but they were from one infantryman to another. Last year, my eldest daughter decided she would take the manuscript to Lulu.com and make a book for me as a Christmas present, and so here it is.

http://unhmagazine.unh.edu/sp09/bookreviews.html

Thoughts on the Fourth of July: What if.

Yesterday was July the fourth, Independence Day. As I was walking away from watching fireworks over Middle Bay, I pondered the “what ifs,” which I do a lot.
What if there had been no Revolution. After all, the taxes the British government was levying on the American colonists were to defray the cost of their defense, a fair request, in my mind, since the taxpayer in England was doing it for them.
Many colonists felt that way, and while they may not have liked having more taxes laid on them, no one does, they believed that King George represented the legal government. It is a fact, not taught in high school history, that, in fact there was a rather large number of people who remained, at least quietly, loyal to the Crown, and many of the troops wearing red coats, were not brought over from England at all, but were native born Americans.
So what would it have been like if the radicals (as they were seen at the time) had not prevailed? What would the current United States look like today?
I don’t really know, but I can guess, and since this is my space, I’m going to. First off, we would eventually have become a dominion of the British Empire and finally independent as has Canada, Australia, and South Africa. At some point, probably fairly early in our history, a central government would have been created, as was done in Canada. So, we would be pretty much where we are now.
But what would have been different? Settlers would have arrived from other countries, as they were doing at the time, and they would have pushed west towards the Mississippi. But without exuberance of having become a new nation and idea of Manifest Destiny, what would have been their relationships to the nations and confederations of Native Americans they encountered? Perhaps there would not have been the belief in a God given right to drive them out. Many Native Americans did indeed move north into Canada where they found better treatment at the hands of the Canadian authorities.
Would Lewis and Clark have explored the Louisiana Purchase? Probably, but it would not have been the Louisiana Purchase but rather Louisiana Land Grab, taken from Napoleon when he was defeated.
Would the Southwest be part of the US or a larger Mexico? My feeling is, the latter may well have been the case. Without the revolutionary zeal to conquer all of North America, settlers certainly would have moved into Mexican territory, as they were invited by the Mexican government to do, but may well have become Mexican citizens, and would not have been supported by royal government. The Republic of Texas might have come to pass, but may well have remained an independent country. Can you imagine needing a visa to watch the Dallas Cowboys play, and Lyndon Johnson could not have been president of the United States.
As the British Empire abolished slavery in its territories, the Civil War would not have been fought and much of our racial history would have been radically altered.
The US would have entered World War I in 1914 and World War II in 1939. The infusion of US material and manpower at those early stages could have shortened those wars considerably. My father may well have served in the 104th Royal Timberwolf Division.
My grandmother would have been born a native instead of Canadian, as her ancestors evacuated to Nova Scotia with the British troops following the siege of Boston.
But, although I can imagine the Patriots playing the Redskins in a rugby match, I cannot for the life of me picture the beloved Red Sox as a cricket team.

How I lived in a story book

When I was very small, I loved the Golden Book, Scuffy the Tugboat, by Gertrude Crampton. Scuffy, a red painted toy tugboat sulked away in the toy store where he was awaiting a home, refusing to straighten up his blue smokestack, and complaining, “A toy store is no place for the likes of me.” The man with the polka dot tie, who owned the store, brought Scuffy home to his little boy, where they placed him in the tub, but Scuffy still will not sail upright, as it is no place for him.
Finally, exasperated the man and his boy took Scuffy up into the hills and put him in a brook, where he escaped from them, happy to finally be where he should be. As he sailed along, driven by the spring runoff, he became dissatisfied with the size of the brook, and rejoiced as it joined with others and formed a small river, which joined again with other rivers. Because it was spring the water ran high and fast, and Scuffy was driven along until finally he entered a large harbor and before him lay the sea. “There is no beginning and no end to the sea,” he lamented, realizing that he should have been careful for what he wished. It is at this place where the man in the polka dot tie found him and brought him back home to the bathtub, where he realized that was where he should be.
When I was small, I also lived in Plymouth, NH which was my father’s home prior to the War. It lies on the west side of the Pemigewasset River where it joins the Baker. It rises up to the top of a ridge and looks across the river at a parallel ridge occupied by the Town of Holderness. As a child, the view across the Pemi, from Kite Hill, was to heavily forested slopes. Those heights, I was sure, was the mountain the bear, of which my mother used to sing to me, went over. Like the bear, I wanted to see what was on the other side, but when we would get their on Sunday rides, one side looked pretty much the same as the other: steep slopes covered with maples, oak and pine. I saw no curious bears, even though I was convinced Bongo, from one of my other books was up in there with his girl, Lulubelle.
Out in the hills to the north and west of town the streams came tumbling down out of the hills, running quickly with the warming spring. They babbled through the woods and down into the small rivers, the Beebe, and the Mad, where they joined with the Baker and the Pemi, flowing through fields where cows came to drink, just as on Scuffy’s voyage and then into the forests where the wild animals drank or fished. The villages along the streams grew increasingly larger with little mills and factories until it became a larger river in Plymouth. The Pemi there was not like the larger rivers I knew nearer the coast, but I was convinced it would become that way further south, perhaps past Ashland, the next town downstream.
When I would visit my grandparents on the coast of Maine, my grandfather would take me in his 14’ skiff down the bay through the narrows at Gun Point and out to where the sea widened to horizon three sides and the ground swell made the little boat rise and fall. This is what Scuffy had seen at the end of his journey.
Whether specifically chosen by my parents to reflect my life, I do not know, but much of my early life was lived in my story books. I still have them, and I’m still convinced Scuffy started somewhere north or west of Plymouth, NH.

Things We Don't Say Anymore

Shirley Thompson, stopped by the Harpswell Anchor office the other day. Irritated by some “damned fool,” she referred to him as a “piss pot.” Now back in the day before profanity ran rampant, “piss pot” was about as nasty a name a kid could call another. No one uses that insult anymore, even though it is actually used in one of Shakespeare’s plays. (Don’t ask which, I don’t remember). That brought to mind a whole host of terms, one never hears any more.
Does anyone go down street or over town to visit Dr. Green? For those of you too young to remember, does anyone go to town to the liquor store? Do you get there by suburban wagon? And while you’re there, do you stop at the five and ten? Come to think of it, will a nickel buy anything anymore?
My mother used to suffer from “sick headaches.” Does anybody get those anymore or have they been replaced by migraines or something else more exotic, some syndrome, perhaps? Maybe we don’t get them anymore. I certainly hope not, they were not a good way to spend a day unless projectile vomiting happens to be your thing.
How many parents stay awake rubbing Vicks or Bengue or their kids’ legs to alleviate “growing pains.” Maybe kids these days don’t exercise enough to get them?
Stan Freeberg, once named some colors for an automotive manufacturer as “Come and get me copper” and “Thanks vermillion.” Back in the day anyone describing a vague color would tell you it was “sky blue pink.” Haven’t heard that in a long time. I still have a Stan Freeburg record that I can play on the Victrola, though.
How come we don’t go to the pictures on Saturday afternoon or cough up a dime for a funny book? If you didn’t know what flick was playing back then, you probably didn’t know shit from Shinola, but then again, who polishes shoes anymore?
When is the last time you saw kids play a game of alleys? The finger dexterity required would certainly aid their performance on a play station and at the same time teach them about the joys or hazards of gambling and the laws of economics.
As old timers die off and technology changes, so does speech and life. We don’t drive uptown to shop for everything we need on Maine St. Soon, among the many things we won’t hear will be the drone of the planes taking off from the Naval Air Station. Life will go on and someday, someone will write an article about how we don’t hear the term “cell phone” anymore.

How I Got Into The Flag Day Parade And My Father's German American Flag

June 14, 1978 found me riding in a jeep as part of a convoy headed to Ft. Drum, NY for two weeks active duty. The unit, an Army Reserve infantry battalion from Portland, ME had left the day before stayed overnight on the floor of an armory in Vermont, and was on the final leg of the trip. We were stretched out with a proscribed distance between vehicles, trucks, jeeps, ambulances, and fuel tankers, extending for several miles along the road, probably irritating local drivers, as the military was still suffering from its poor Vietnam era image.
At once the radios crackled with a message that we should all pull off to the side of the road as a problem had developed at the head of the column. The problem was that in planning the convoy route, no one had considered the possibility that any of the towns through which we had to pass, would be holding a parade in honor of Flag Day. I doubt that it had occurred to anyone that June 14 was Flag Day at all.
But here we were, outside the town of Gouverneur, NY, and our lead elements had come down upon the start of their parade. Being somewhat far back in the marching order, I have no idea what actually transpired only to know that with some quick thinking, probably on the part of the local officials, we would simply blend into the parade and pass on through town as part of it.
The commander sent a radio message back along the line, that we were to put on our web gear, that is to say our harnesses which held canteens, first aid and ammunition pouches, and replace our caps with our helmets. The convoy was then to bunch up.
When all this was accomplished, we fell into the parade behind the high school band. Ahead in one of the ambulances, Tommy Mullen, a somewhat irreverent medic, who had been awarded the Silver Star as a corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam, substituted a paper Burger King crown for his helmet, much to the delight of the small children.
Several of us practiced our best beauty pageant waves as we progressed through the town, and many surprised residents asked us how we knew about the parade, and what brought us to it. The answers, they received were varied, I’m sure. And so we passed along out of town and on our way to a cold, wet, “fun-filled” two weeks of playing soldier at Ft. Drum.
Which brings me to my father’s story. Toward the end of World War II, the 104th Infantry Division was in an area where combat operations had ceased. The US Army had linked up with the Russians, and everyone was starting to breathe more easily. Not having an American flag, my father thought it would be nice to have one flying over his platoon command post. A local German woman, who spoke English and had relatives in Chicago, volunteered to make an American flag, if he would show her exactly what it entailed. He explained the 13 stripes, the blue field, and told her it would require 48, five pointed stars. To help her, he took a piece of paper and cut out a star as a pattern. She promised to return with it the next day.
True to her word, she returned, but, as she explained, it took longer to make, and she had been up all night to finish it. The flag, she said, did not require 48 stars; it required 96! My father had forgotten: the flag has two sides!
When the unit returned to the states, my father decided the right thing to do with it, was to have everyone in the platoon put their name in a helmet, and the person, whose name was drawn would get to keep it. To this day he has wondered whatever happened to that flag.

My Grandmother's Memories

In November 1898, my grandmother was nine years old, living in Lexington, MA with her family, which had recently moved back to the US from Nova Scotia. With strong ties to the sea, her father’s father and an uncle had disappeared while on a voyage. Her father’s brother, much older than he, became his guardian and took him aboard the ship he captained as the cabin boy. Great grandfather Cann, was so sea sick that by the time the ship reached Europe, he was nearly dead from malnutrition. Upon return to Nova Scotia, his brother apprenticed him to a carpenter named Crosby, hoping he would outgrow his motion sickness and be of value to the crew. Accordingly, Bowman Cann signed on as ship’s carpenter aboard his brother’s ship which sailed a route to Ireland, Liverpool, Bremerhaven and back to Nova Scotia. Once again his sickness rendered him practically useless, so he returned to land and married one of the Crosby daughters, started a family and moved to Massachusetts to leave the then bleak Nova Scotian economy behind.
As Thanksgiving weekend 1898 approached, a massive storm began moving up the east coast, which was to become one of the worst winter storms the area had ever or up to this time would ever experience.
In Boston harbor the steamer Portland awaited its departure time for the overnight run to Portland, Maine. Warned of the impending storm, the captain decided to risk the trip. It is thought he believed he could run ahead of it, and make port before the storm hit the area. He was wrong. The doomed steamer was battered throughout the night by high winds, blinding snow and mountainous seas. The passengers and crew must have been horrified as the captain tried desperately throughout the night to keep the ship afloat. Waves destroyed the superstructure, and most assuredly many passengers were injured as well as extremely ill. Around five AM the Race Point Lighthouse station on the tip of Cape Cod heard four faint blasts of a ship’s horn as a distress signal, and a little later another ship saw the Portland trying to gain open ocean through a break in the weather. She was never seen afloat again.
Bodies began washing up on the shore, clad in life jackets identifying them as from the Portland, but it was days before the disaster was fully known. As the passenger list was aboard the ship, the final death toll was never known, and it is estimated to have been as high as 190.
Meanwhile, my grandmother’s family was huddled in their house in Lexington. Her father brought everyone into the center of the house, as he was sure some of the windows would be blown out. She remembered the family huddling together as the house shook on its foundations. As long as she lived she never forgot the Portland Galee as it became known.
In 1982, as she lay nearing her final days in a nursing home, we went to visit her on a summer day. The room was stifling, and the sweat was pouring off her. We could tell she had been crying. I asked her what was wrong, did she need some water, was she too hot? “No,” she said, “I was just thinking of all those poor people on the Portland.”

D-Day

June 6, 1944. My father was a 1LT, stationed at Ft. Leonard Wood, MO as part of the cadre training up the 97th Infantry Division. As part of the build up for the invasion of the continent, thousands of men, of all ranks, had been levied to be sent to Europe as additional troops and replacements for what was feared would be horrific casualties.
He sailed to England as part of the largest convoy to cross the Atlantic up to that time.
As the invasion began, he was waiting in a replacement depot in England, while his older brother was already ashore, before H hour, assigned to an amphibious engineer unit, whose mission was to destroy obstacles on the beaches to allow for the passage of the landing craft and tanks.
My mother was home in Harpswell, Maine, living in her parents small camp, tucked into a thick woods of beech and fir trees. Communication with the outside world was by radio broadcast, perhaps WBZ from Boston and party line telephone. Communication in the small hamlets, which made up Harpswell, was by telephone or by special signal. Most families had a bell or whistle by which neighbors could be notified in time of emergencies. My grandmother’s happened to be the hand bell from an old one-room school house. Woe betide the child that rang it for a lark.
From across the road she could hear Marion Williams whistling as I remember her signal. My mother rushed out to the road to hear the news she had gleaned from the radio. “The boys are going in,” she called.
With mail taking weeks to arrive, my mother had no idea of my father’s whereabouts. That would come later when his first letters arrived, and she would learn that he had not been levied yet. That would come later in the fall, when he was brought across and assigned to the 104th Timberwolf Division.
I was not born at that time, but the memories of those who survived those times, whether overseas or at home, were so strong I sometimes feel like I actually remember them.

Snorkeling

Just beyond the rocks is my prime snorkeling location.

Uncle Archie

My maternal grandfather was always proud that his family had been in this country almost since the Pilgrims. In fact, they came over from England and settled in the Salem, MA area about 10 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock. A framed certificate hung on his wall proclaiming his membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, through his descent from one Peter Dolliver. He regaled us with stories of life on the frontier during the early Indian wars when one of his forefathers, caught outside in a raid, was brought down on is doorstep when a tomahawk cleaved his skull. The stories often sounded like he was actually there. The stories of this era would always end by him telling us that we were also descended from the last man hanged for horse thievery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Other stories included an uncle, a Wells Fargo man, who was killed during a train robbery. His widow and child, my grandfather’s cousin, had come back east after the tragic event, but later had returned to Colorado.
His own grandfather, one William Augustus Wright, owned a trading company which probably acted as middlemen, bringing goods from not only the US but the Carribbean to England where he had a partner in one Sir Francis Vernon, whence came my grandfather’s middle name, or so the story goes. My grandfather, Frank Vernon, graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1912, and after refusing a lieutenancy in the Philippine Constabulary, took a job as a civil engineer in Jamaica with the United Fruit Company.
In those days, there were no docking facilities in Kingston, and passengers were brought to shore in rowboats, propelled by native water men. As he and his trunk were safely aboard, the old man, about his father’s age, rowing the boat remarked about my grandfather’s name on his luggage. “That’s my name too,” he said.
“And what would your name be, then?” he asked to be polite.
“William Augustus Wright.”
Strangely, my grandfather’s stories, although he was fascinated with the Civil War, never included any relatives of his own. The family was wealthy enough for any male at the time to avoid service, and perhaps that’s what they did.
These stories left me, at the time, almost resentful that my father’s side of the family seemingly had no one, who participated in the great events of our nation’s history, as his father had arrived here in 1902, and having two children at the time, was exempt from service in World War I.
But then, as he grew older, and I had traveled back to Ireland to meet his family, Grand father Millar told me of his Uncle Archie. Uncle Archie arrived in the US at the time of the Civil War and was either drafted, enlisted or paid as a substitute to enlist in the Union Army, and as my grandfather told it, a cavalry regiment, as he was a superior horseman. Frustratingly, he knew little, if anything about his service, save that at the end of the war, he was suffering severely from rheumatism and being heartily sick of the United States, returned home. All he could remember was peeking into a trunk, when his uncle was an old man, and seeing a sword and a “peaked blue cap.”
Sadly only one of his sisters in Ireland had any first hand recollection of him, the others being too young to remember him when he died. They did remember a long lost sword and produced a picture of a handsome, self assured looking gentleman, and told me that local lore said that he was an avid bird hunter as well as horseman, and that, rather than hunt on foot, using a dog to flush his prey, he would gallop across the fields with the barrel of a shotgun resting between the ears of the horse. The poor animal must have suffered chronic headaches after a day of killing grouse. How much of this is true, I don’t know. What has fascinated me over the years, was that here was a man who returned to his native home after finding that the land of promise was not what he expected or even wanted to be a part of. It has never been part of what we were taught in school.

Memorial Day 2000

In May, 2000, I was asked to deliver the Memorial Day speech at my town's parade. Harpswell is a small town of about 5,000, and the speech is delivered from the front of the Old Town Meeting House which was constructed in 1758. It is truly a Norman Rockwell event.
I would like to dedicate my remarks today to Sp4 Clark Douglas of Corning, NY; John Michael Rice of Indianapolis, Indiana; and LT. Brian J. O’Callahan of Alexandria, VA, three friends who will always remain young men in my heart, but who so richly deserved to go on to raise families and suffer the indignities of aging.
People began gathering together on this day, on what was known as Decoration Day to honor the fallen of the Civil War, those brave men, who rushed naively to the colors to save the Union and rid our country of the scourge of slavery. Once they had enlisted, most wondered almost immediately what they had gotten themselves into, and once they “saw the elephant,” their term for going into combat for the first time, they realized that dying for one’s country is not particularly glorious, and they never wanted to see it again.
But war did come again, and the armies passed on in time. We now honor the fallen of many wars and conflicts. The grand armies which spread out across the continent in the struggle to save the Union have become ranks of moss covered headstones. The endless lines of marching men, who fought the First World War from Flanders to the Pacific are now by a faint whisper in time, and the great armies which defended our country from the threat of fascism and communism in Korea are now in the winter years of their lives, and their stories are too quickly falling silent. Even the young men from Vietnam, who invaded the evening news, are nearing the autumn of their lives.
The real tragedy of the losses in all these wars is not so much the loss of the individual, who as the armies pass, is relegated to old photograph albums, remembered by a decreasing few, until none remain who knew him at all. The real tragedy is the loss of potential. We know not what great piece of literature bled away, unwritten, in the trenches of France, or what medical discovery was lost with the life of a young soldier on Okinawa or even Stalingrad, or what technological breakthrough was lost in the Mekong Delta. Perhaps an unborn descendent of one of the lost ones would have had the cure for AIDS or the knowledge of controlling fusion. We will never know what might have been.
If the sacrifice of our fallen brothers and sisters is to have any meaning in a world becoming increasingly smaller, we must also remember those others who fell wearing the jackets of field gray, wearing sandals made from old tires or who were incinerated in their tanks on their desperate retreat back to Bagdad, for like our own, they too had their hopes, their dreams, and their potential for good.
Some would say that on a day when we wrap ourselves in our flag, that what I have just said is inappropriate, but it is fitting and proper that we do this. One of the stories of the early celebrations of Decoration Day tells of a cemetery in which were buried both Union and Confederate dead. The graves of the Union soldiers had been covered with flowers by their loved ones, but when the families of the Confederates approached the local commandant to ask if they could place flowers on the graves of their loved ones, permission was denied.
During the night a breeze arose which blew the flowers from the Union graves, and in the morning the previously unadorned Confederate graves were covered with flowers, a tribute, many said from the Union fallen to their Southern brothers in arms.
In remembering all, we can protect the future and thereby honor the sacrifice of our own.

Frauenberg

In the spring of 1967, a group of us Americans studying at the Phillips Unversitaet in Marburg Germany packed up a lunch of hard rolls, salami, cheese and a bottle of South Tyrolean red wine and took ourselves out along the road, out of town to a small rise in the floor of the Lahn River valley, a place called “Frauenberg.”
After a long, never ending German winter, days of incessant drizzle and darkness, it is easy to see why the Germans in the spring would take to the woods and fields in droves. “Wanderlust” is not a German word for nothing. And unlike the coast of Maine, Germany had a real spring: days when the weather was clear as crystal; the air warm and gentle but not hot; the grass the deepest green, like the fields of Ireland.
The Frauenberg, lady’s mountain, or more probably Mountain of Our Lady, was topped by the stone ruins of a medieval cloister, only the remnants of a stone turret. Around and within were lilacs or some bush of similar type, their buds at the bursting point.
We sat on the grass, opened our bag and brought out the food we had brought with us. One of us, probably me, had a jackknife with which to slice the cheese and salami, while my roommate had carried along a corkscrew and a pair of glasses, which we would share, having been close friends for nearly a year, sharing everything from teabags to germs.
We sat and ate, licking the grease from the salami from our lips and fingers, passing the glasses around to swallow down the bread.
Above the sky was an indescribable, rich blue; the grass below an equally lush green. Birds rode in circles on the thermals rising from the ground. Down the valley, far off in the distance were dots where villages and now and then a tractor in the fields were. They sky and the grass became hazy in the distance until they blended into one on the horizon.
It has been 42 years since that day, and it has never left my memory.

Smelting

Written April 1969 while on leave before going to Vietnam, a strange time for me. Always in the back of my mind was the thought that I might be doing something for the last time, or seeing someone/something for the last time.

The broad Casco Bay narrows itself into one of its small coves bordered by gray, igneous cliffs, crowned with mantles of pine and moss. It is at the quiet end of this inlet, far from the surf and turbulent currents of the great ocean outside, where the sea is docile in the grip of the land, that a small brook chortles its errant way out of the dark woods, across the bucolic tranquility of an open meadow, through an island of aged pines, where, with a final chuckle, it trips over a small fall to lose its identity in the vastness which is the sea.
During that time of year when the earth renews itself, a traveler from the lonely deep returns to the place of its birth with those who came to life with him, intent on starting the cycle again. This is the smelt, who arrives in schools from the salty ocean to find a quiet fresh water stream and there to spawn.
These small green and silver fish, averaging about 8” in length, swim in with the tide during the hours of darkness, deposit their eggs and return to the depths from whence they came as the tide ebbs. To catch these fish, one requires a dip net, a flashlight and patience.
Bob and I set out on this one evening intent upon catching some of these fish, as they afford very good eating. The tide wasn’t due to be high until 11 PM, and the full moon gave promise of an extra flood. We parked our jeep in the field and hiked down into the grove of pines where the brook flows into the cove. All was quiet save for the laughter of the babbling of the brook as it flowed towards its own oblivion and the chorus of peepers.
The moonlight made the cliffs appear as pewter. By the moon we could see the cove open to the bay and the black line of the far shore. There were no lights and no human noise. No boat broke the calm of the silver glass.
Bob perched on a small overhanging rock and every few minutes the beam of his flashlight would play across the water, cutting the dark and making shiny reflections on the opposite cliff. We waited and watched for the arrival of the smelts.
At first there was nothing, only an occasional eel fingerling and the gleam of the mica on the bottom rocks. Then- one, then two and three green fish darted past the ray. We turned the light off and slowly dipped the net into the water, holding it as still as possible. The light went on again, and the water was alive with fish. I gave the net a quick scoop and hauled it dripping from the water into the harsh glare of the light. The twapping sound from the bottom of the net let us know we had caught a few, which we then emptied out into an awaiting pail. I placed the net slowly into the water again, and Bob shined the light over the spot where I had just trapped the smelt. Nothing; only a rock and some seaweed remained.
The beam of light shifted away searching for its elusive prey; the net awaited with hungry, open jaws. Bob spotted them! They had regrouped to run in again. I let the first go by and scooped the net again. A few more fish shared the fate of their ensnared companions.
And so it went on. The fish retreated, we waited, they ran again, and the hungry net struck.
The cold from the water pierced through my rubber boots and my hands were cold from the metal net handle, but I still braced excitedly each time Bob whispered, “Get ready.”
Finally the tide started to ebb, and the fish slowly disappeared. No longer do they run again after every scoop for they have returned to the deep, their task accomplished.
We gathered our equipment, a pail full of fish, which will never return, and headed off for the jeep and home, leaving the peepers to sing of the brook as it chortled away its identity into the retreating sea.

In Praise of the USO

We just returned from San Angelo, Texas where our daughter graduated from the Air Force’s Intelligence School, and without the jokes about Air Force and intelligence, I must say that it was very difficult and the graduates awarded sufficient graduate credit for half a master’s degree.
When we arrived in Dallas, Laura told us to head on down to the USO. Now, despite over 20 years between active and reserve duty, I had never come across a USO before.
According to my father, it was really big during WWII and nearly every train station where troops would be stopping had one. Our town’s recreation center, where I learned the fine points of basketball and tried to avoid the mother mandated fine points of ballroom dancing, was, during the war, a USO building for the air crews stationed at Brunswick Naval Air Station. A fairly massive Quonset hut-like structure made of brick and wood, it still stands and still hosts activities for members of the community.
But during the Vietnam war, I personally didn’t even know it existed. The airports at that time were filled with young men (mostly) in uniform traveling either to somewhere they really didn’t want to be or coming home on leave from the same. Travel in uniform was mandatory, we had either “military reserved” or “military stand-by” tickets, which required us to do so. This was the way until it was discovered that American servicemen in uniform were easy targets aboard hi-jacked airliners. And while traveling in uniform, one was hardly likely to get a friendly greeting from anyone but a family member at arrival. Older folks were the only ones that were not overtly hostile or at best dismissive of the kid in his new army greens.
I guess the USO was there, and perhaps I just never flew through airports that had one. So when Captain Laura advised us to visit the USO because they had “free food,” I went. It is out of the way, in a quiet corner of terminal B. Upon entry, I was asked, as in most military, or military type places if I had an ID. Even my “gray card” for old timers is honored. Inside was a snack bar with various types of sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs, all frozen, but with a micro-wave available. By the micro was a selection of soups, and next door was a well air-conditioned theater with a big screen TV playing a movie to a bunch of folks awaiting their next flight. The fellow behind the snack bar, a really friendly guy, gave me two turkey sandwiches, bags of chips and sodas, so I could also provide for my wife (Man, the hunter) who was down at the gate guarding our luggage. After putting a generous donation in the box and cranking up the microwave, I went my way back to gate B-29 and the flight to San Angelo.
As I grow older I become less bitter about the way we were treated during the Vietnam era and up to Desert Storm, but there is still a lingering sadness to it. What is great though, is there are folks like those at the USO and even TSA, who thank you for your service when they see the retired ID card. The hurt is also eased by the knowledge that the kids (even full colonels were not in high school when I was pounding the sand!) who are serving in uniform are treated with the respect they deserve and the intelligence which they possess.
If you have an occasion to donate to the USO, I thank you.

The Poet as a Young Man

My mother was a gardener, although technically she still is, as much as life in assisted living will allow. On fall days when the sun came down through the maple leaves like stained glass and the dirt side walks were carpeted with soft pine needles, the neighbors would fill the air with the delightful smell of marshmallow roasting bonfires at the edge of the street. That happened at every house but ours, where we obediently stuffed all the fallen vegetation into bags, and dragged them out to the compost pile, where, as my mother instructed us, they would be turned into dirt.
In the spring my parents would go to the hardware or garden supply store and return with bags of peat moss to build up the beach sand which constituted the dirt around our house. The old leaves would be spread on the flower beds, and one year when, for some inexplicable reason, the Memorial Day parade wound its way through the residential streets of town instead of down Maine St. (Yes it was spelled Maine and not Main: Our town boasted the widest Maine St. in the country. Originally laid out by the first settlers, it was called “Twelve Rod Road” referring to its width. Our father’s found that if the road were cleared back to that width, travelers would be out of range of the natives’ bows and arrows, but, again, I digress) When the parade had passed, my mother ordered me to go out into the street with a shovel and pick up the horse manure left behind. Not wishing to be the laughing stock of Longfellow School the next day, I refused, and so, she took the wheel barrow and did it herself.
Along with the lime, and fertilizer was always a bag of a product called “Bovung,” or dried cow manure. We had been around farms a bit, and so I was aware of manure piles, like the one that allegedly kept Shubel Merriman’s barn from toppling over, but I was fascinated by the fact that someone had come up with the idea of colorfully packaging colonic droppings of a ruminant. So intrigued was I that, at the age of 13, I composed a poem about it, which recently came to light in some old boxes.
And so, dear reader, I present to you for the first time in 50 years:
Ode to a Horse Bun
There you lie, regal horse bun,
Product of what some steed has done.
Some, for their gardens, for you will pay,
Mixture of oats, and grass, and hay.
Art some quadruped has wrought,
In colored ten pound bags is bought.
Shoveled from hill and vale and field,
Pasteurized, shredded, packaged and peeled.
Fertilizing, as any turd should,
Horse bun—you never had it so good!

A series of strange events Part 2

At the end of our specialty training, which gave us an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) dabbling in secret, Keystone Cop-like operations, we were visited by a colorless man in a gray suit, who, one by one, took us into a closed room to tell us our fate. He introduced himself as Mr. somebody or other, which I came to feel afterwards wasn’t his real name to begin with.
As I sat down across from him, he informed me that I was going to be sent to Berlin Germany to the US Army Europe Security Detachment. I would not tell anyone that I was an MI officer, and that my orders would show me as being in the Quartermaster Corps. I responded to this by asking why not just send me as being infantry, since I already legitimately had the ribbons and badges that proclaimed me as such. Besides, if anyone asked why a grunt was going to a “spook” unit, I could just shrug my shoulders and say, “You know the army.” He agreed.
He then gave me a name, also fictitious, of someone in Virginia for my parents to contact in case of emergency because the Red Cross would not know my whereabouts. My name would not be on the register of the US Army. I was nobody. Furthermore, when I arrived in Frankfurt, I would be met by someone and not go to the replacement depot. I felt like Scrooge being told I would be visited by spirits.
We were cramped aboard a Trans Caribbean Airlines 707 headed to Germany when the career E-7 beside me asked where I was going. His question to my response was as I had predicted, “What are you doing going to a spook unit.” My pre-planned answer set everything right.
Upon landing in Frankfurt, we dragged our duffle bags down the corridor following signs pointing us to the replacement depot, when two young men in civilian clothes stepped forward, and said, “Captain Millar, please come with us.” The E-7’s jaw dropped, and we said good-bye.
Without introducing themselves, and obviously not enthusiastic about working on a Sunday, they took me outside to a van, and drove to a nondescript apartment building, where I was instructed to change into civilian clothes, and spend the rest of the day the way I wanted. I conned 5 DM, about $1.50, off them and walked around until 5 PM, when they collected me for a trip to the train station to board the 7 o’clock duty train for Berlin.
The duty train had been created by the agreements between the Soviet Union, England and the US at the end of the WWII, and was allowed to pass through East Germany unmolested by either the Russians or the East Germans. It was the only way, I found, that I would be allowed to leave West Berlin, unless I chose to fly.
While I was hanging out, waiting for the train to leave, along with a multitude of uniformed Americans, a somewhat scruffy but unremarkable young man approached me and asked if I spoke English. I told him I did. He began to regale me with the classic story I had heard from many deadbeat hippies when I was a student. “I’m going to school here and my father has just had a heart attack. I need five marks to get out to the airport.” Not wanting to give him anything, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a US quarter, guaranteed to not get him on the bus. “That’s all I have,” I said. In a flash, he grabbed it, held it up in front of me and palmed it. “I’ve gotten everything I need,” he said, “Believe me, you don’t know how much I dislike doing this.” And then he disappeared into the crowd.
Short a quarter I boarded the train and forgot about it.
Several months later, in Berlin, I was in the parking lot of the US Consulate, where our unit was stationed. As I was entering my duty car, this same person approached me with the same story. “I’m a student here, and my father’s just had a heart attack. I need $2 to get to Tempelhof Airport.” I stared at him a moment and replied, “That’s funny, in Frankfurt it was 5 marks to get to the airport.”
With that he blanched. “You know me,” he said. “I do, and if I see your ass around here again, I’m turning you over to the MPs.” Several weeks later I saw him again, headed straight for him, and when he saw me, he disappeared at a dead run.
I’ve often been told that you’re not paranoid if they really are following you, but when I returned to the States, living with my ex-wife and attending graduate school, the local police chief, to whom she had been recommended as a possible school crossing guard came to the trailer one night to talk to her. Caught up in his own importance, he told us how he had driven by, done a license plate check, and realizing that I was 26 years old, ascertained I was probably a veteran and contacted the Army’s counter-intelligence office in Portsmouth, NH. “I should have gone there first,” he said to my wife. “They not only had everything on him, they had a whole file on you.”
At that point I turned to him and said, “That’s really odd…… We weren’t married until after I was discharged.” His face revealed he had talked too much.
I’ve often wondered who that young man was. The coincidence of him hitting me up in two cities, particularly in an area of Berlin where tourists didn’t hang out, was pretty far fetched. That leads to question, then, of what was he doing? Several former intelligence people to whom I have related this story believe he was working for another of our agencies. And why me? I’ll probably never know.