070507-N-4856G-026 PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (May 7, 2007) - Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Mike Mullen speaks to the Sailors of Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Pasadena (SSN 752). Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (MCPON) Joe R. Campa Jr. and CNO are touring major fleet concentration areas to observe regional business practices and to address issues concerning Sailors such as rating mergers, Individual Augmentees (IA), retirement plans and the future of the Navy. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ben A. Gonzales (RELEASED)
Consistent with my theory about the first space shuttle flight, I have symbolic and artificial memories that I was in a wheelchair while at the U.S. Naval Academy. That was probably after I fell out of the space shuttle during landing on 4/14/1981 and I would have been attending the U.S. Naval Academy at the time. I might have recovered enough to only need crutches to get to my F-16 by the time the Operation Opera strike occurred on 6/7/1981. I am thinking that the parachute harness almost ripped my legs off. This theory is reinforced by what I wrote a year ago of those artificial memories of watching a plane almost crash, which symbolized the shuttle landing. It would have crashed if I had not fixed the landing gear just in time. I followed that “memory” immediately with a reference to the Tom Cruise film “Born On The Fourth Of July,” which is about Ron Kovic, who had to use a wheelchair after being injured during the Vietnam War.
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Re: Journal May 26, 2006
The fox hunt organizers and the adult field judges were complimentary about my performance because I really got out there and scored the dogs. Micheal laughed during my first fox hunt when I asked if we used a shotgun or a rifle to shoot the fox. I can remember early on after I started judging, when I was still traveling with an adult, I hauled ass across this open field to get the number of a dog out by itself. We hadn't seen much that day and I wanted to score something. The dog came over to lick my hand and I disqualified it. Another time, we were around a campfire one cold night and I was lying on my back on the cold ground and he told me I was going to get sick. We always wore coveralls when we were out there. I have kept a set of those coveralls in all the years since. I think even in my Jeep until I lost it last year, I had a set of those coveralls. I can almost remember feeling naked without them. At one event, the shocks failed on my blue truck and someone commented later he thought I was going to bounce off the road because the chassis was shaking so much from any pothole I hit. Another time something went wrong with the brakes and they were screeching incredibly loudly. I can think of a lot of things like that happening. The frustration of waiting for the gas station to open up, my step-father telling me about how he had almost run out of gas in his truck.
There was that dialog with Donald Gene after I wrecked my Ford. I said: You all right? He said: Yeah, you all right? Yeah, I said. Let's get the hell out of here! I think his door opened but I had to crawl through the window because mine wouldn't open and gas was pouring out next to me.
There was something about a time in my '67 Ford with the muffler. Someone, Micheal I think, told me I could make it backfire if I turned off the ignition at some point. Why that was cool, I don't know, I guess it was a 16-year-old thing. I did it a few times and the muffler exploded. As I was writing this earlier, I found myself thinking about how curious it was that I chose the word "explosion" to describe that event. Micheal told me when I got home that my truck sounded like a log truck coming down the road.
Denzil commented on what a good shot I made on that 9-point deer I killed, I think that was 10th grade, which would have been around 1982 in my memory. I had actually missed it three times before I gave up on using the scope. Since I had raised sights on my rifle, I just switched to iron sights and nailed it. It probably went no more than a body length before it dropped. My mother was bragging to another mother whose son had shot a deer with fewer points. As I thought more about this event, I remembered some other details that leave me confused about what this event represents. One of the hunters that was out with us that day told me he had been scared because I had been yelling, screaming was the word that came to mind later, so loudly. As I remember it, it seems unusal that I was behaving like that, although it makes sense when I consider what a trophy, a glorious trophy, that deer was. Later today I was remembering my History teacher commenting on the bruises on my neck that one day, and then I started thinking about a photo of that deer hanging from a tree, soon to be skinned, with me next to it. That was off Highway 108 if I'm not mistaken, in front of Ambrus Chauncey's house.
Some time soon after mom and Denzil got married, Denzil was teaching me to drive his gray Ford pickup, which was actually a company truck. I had some problems driving it, but my red Ford was much easier for me to operate. My mother commented on how well I operated the clutch, compared to problems I had in Denzil's truck. And thinking about it more reminds me of how much I did enjoy driving my Ford. I'm not sure if I touch on this later in my notes, but I think it is obvious that Ford's are representive of Fighter's. My second truck was a Chevrolet, but I think it still represents a fighter aircraft. I have this feeling it was an F-14 and my first one was an F-16. The -14 is dual-exhaust and the -16 is single-engine. When I first got my '67 Ford, I remember it staying in the shop for a frustrating long time because it had a pre-existing problem with the steering column and Denzil wouldn't let me drive it until it was fixed.We always went to this truck stop diner in Ashdown called Macs before we went hunting. The place was a dive but the food was good.
Could Ashdown symbolize Academy? I was thinking earlier today about the way the name Amanda sounds kind of like Annapolis. There is also that history I discovered about the name Burgess and how the first Burgess in that line was a governor of Maryland and from what I remember established a place called Londontown, which I later read has something to do with Annapolis. That would be consistent with my memory of living on Wexford in Taylors.I was thinking there is probably some symbolism to my memories of playing sports in school. I also get the impressive I must have excelled at varsity sports. My first year of school football was the 7th grade and I was a guard, left I think but not sure, and number 62. The next year, I was 72 and a tackle, on the same side as when a guard. The next year, we moved to Ashdown and I was on special teams as well as Tight End and then Defensive End, number 46. The next year I was on the baseball team. The next year was junior year I think but I didn't do anything. The senior year, I had to take PE and we had a mixture of basketball, tennis, and some others.
I'm pretty sure I was 14 when we moved to Ashdown, which may correlate with F-14. At 16, I got the red Ford. I was probably 17 when I got the Chevrolet, but it features more prominently in my mind when I was 18. I had turned 18 early into my senior year, something to do with me being one day too young to start with the previous class.I remember one time, with my red Ford, driving to the junior prom. I had a problem with the shifting rods that I never got fixed. It was a 3-speed manual with the shifter on the column. Sometimes the shifting rod linkage under the hood got stuck and I couldn't shift gears. This one day, I was standing there in the middle of town at a busy intersection in my white tux with the hood up to get the linkage unstuck. It wasn't so much embarassing as just annoying.
Earlier this morning, I started remembering something from long, long ago. I had completely forget about this. For some reason, remembering this memory makes me think of two things. One thing it does is to remind me that I did have an iterest in flying as a kid. For some reason, if someone would have asked me if I had been interested in flying when I was younger, I would have responded that I never had an interest in flying. And the memory was about the Canadian Air Force. For some reason, I wanted to fly for the Royal Canadian Air Force. I have no idea what that means. There was this one jet I liked, but I can't remember which model it is. I have this memory too about the Saudi's flying it as their main fighter. Now I'm thinking it wasn't Canada, it was Saudi Arabia, as in I was associated with them somehow that I can't remember now. I also remembered that Sabre driver from Korea that was something like a hero to my when I was very young. They called him Mac I think, McDonnell or McConnell, would have to look it up. I think he was a triple-Ace from Korea.
I made some notes again about that one bad fight I remember from long ago. I have been trying to keep these thoughts in sequence I made the note, but this is kind of jumbled up as more and more details have been coming back to me today. The key part to note is the detail that came to me last, at about 2 pm today. The fight was a result of me getting shot down by a chick in a bar. It ended with me standing toe to toe with this one guy. I hit him square on the jaw and left him with a noticeable bruise and I knew he remembered it for a few days at least. But then he proceeded to beat the living crap out of me. I noticed in the mirror today that I still have some kind of scar, lumpy mass, whatever, under my right eye from that. I think that is from where I was kicked in the face after I was down on the ground. I remember now telling Liz, that chick that reminds me of Picards wife from that lost world, and she told me it was barely noticeable.
Later, I was remembering how my parking spot next to our house on Hicks Road could easily symbolize being lauched off a carrier. It was dangerous because I couldn't see if there was another car coming as I powered my way up and out onto the road and some of those other people really flew down that road. I pulled out at an angle to the road, although some times I went straight up and out, depending on the direction I was heading.
The guy I remember riding with me when I crashed my red Ford was named Donald Gene. The Radar Operator from the Wainwright who was killed by his wife also had the initials D.G., as in David Gugel.
I wrote in my notes at this point, wondering what the code "winchester" meant in the Navy.Donald Gene's father was named Ambrus Chauncey, or A.C. AC is the Navy rating designation for an Air Controlman, as I just looked up. That rating is also listed as Air Traffic Controller.
Before I got my red Ford and while we were living on Hicks Road, I got in trouble for driving my mother's Bonneville (also a 1978) too fast. That was a car that Randy Romine bought brand new for her when they were married. This car had some kind of alarm built into the dashboard. It you went above a certain speed, I believe it was over 80, the alarm would go off. I'm thinking I did that several times when driving my sister and Michael to church. In other words, I wanted to speed so they buzzer would go off. I suspect this is related to that catchphrase from Top Gun about the need for speed.
There is that song, by America?, about going through the desert on a horse with no name. That song features prominently in my memory from the time after I returned from the Persian Gulf, which was in 1988 according to my memory, but is probably some other time.
Today some station showed a clip from the first Terminator movie and it reminded me that Arnold S. in that movie resembles Mogge when he was younger.That bad fight I remember occurred when we were away from our home port when I was on the Taylor. Oh yeah, I thought later that Taylor has a big number 50, or five-oh, on its hull. Anyway, I think this fight occurred in Fort Lauderdale. There had been some other fighting going on. Apparently a gang was luring sailors into fights and this one guy, I didn't know him well, but he was on my ship, had his face slashed with a knife after talking to a girl.
Could the U.S. Air plane crash I remember from Charlotte represent Micheal's crash? There are some common elements in my memory. One was the path of destruction, the trees that were knocked down or damaged. There was the sudden, heavy, violent thunderstorm that kicked up right before the crash. With the Charlotte crash, I wasn't that far away at a bar where, if I had been standing at the door way could have seen that plane coming in, and it also went right over my apartment at Whitehall. I could remember the precise time of the crash and what I was doing at the time.All of this, All of this, it is my reality, I am absolutely convinced I was once, among other things, an aviator in the Navy. I just can't remember it. But I know these details I remember represents that time.
OH SHIT!! hahahahaha!!!! For some reason, I find this memory funny:One day, I "launched" my '67 blue Chev. out onto Hicks Road. Earlier, I had been doing something with the front wheels and apparently, I forgot to tighten the lug nuts. I got about a half mile down the road and the front end started shaking violently. Just as I was about to cross over this small wooden bridge, I saw the left front wheel shot up and away down to the edge of the creek I was about to pass over. The truck dropped over to the left a little bit and I managed to keep it from running off the bridge where I stopped on the other side. I left a groove in the road from that incident.That happened again sometime later on the way to school. Micheal had told me something looked wrong with the left wheel but I drove anyway. Shortly after that, I saw that familar sight of the wheel shooting up and away to the left as the front end slammed into the pavement. This time the spindle had broken off because it hadn't been greased. Mt future-brother-in-law went out into the field and got the wheel for me. Then a schoolbus came by. My buddy who was later an Air Force mechanic, gave me a ride to school in his midget car. Not sure what kind of car that was. Denzil was at home on vacation that day and he sent out a tow truck to get my truck.
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Re: Journal May 26, 2006, Supplemental
Feeling very bad right, on edge. Very mixed feeling. Wish the damned hell I was out of this damned place!!!!!!Earlier in my notes, I remember a time when I got out of boot camp, the same day I think. Three of us, still wearing our dress whites, rented a car and headed to the beach for the weekend. I was driving but didn't know how to get to Daytona. The next thing I remember, we were at the gated entrance to some facility. The security guard asked if we were "lost." We were at the entrance to Cape Canaveral.
After that event with the 9-point deer I shot, we went home and Denzil wanted to do some work on the roof over the garage. It was not so much a garage as a patio for my mom's car that we added on to the house after we bought it. The part I remember from that is how tired I was. It was excruiating trying to stay awake. I don't remember actually doing any work on the roof though, but I remember that something was being done to it. I remember standing there feeling miserable wishing I could be somewhere else. And why were we doing this after what I had just done?! Something else here I can't quite remember.....
On the night of that bad fight, where I was shot down in the bar, I had gone out by myself that night. I have been thinking more about that today and something seemed unusal, uncharacteristic, about that, as I never went out by myself. Something had happened the night before but I can't remember what it was, other than just a memory that something happened.
There was another time, a buddy of mine from further down Hicks Road, was complaining one day when we were driving. He was saying something about how I always got the best locations during our organized hunts. He wasn't so much envious as just complaining that I didn't take more advantage of the situation, whatever that means.
This one day, I remember my mom crying because she thought I was probably lying dead somewhere in the woods, one particular hunting season. I had got out of class early, something to do with final exam and not having one that afternoon, before the school year ended. I told them where I was going to go hunting that afternoon, but then at the last minute, I changed my mind and went somewhere much farther away. When I got out there, I made the mistake of trying to drive down this corridor in the trees, it was some kind of underground natural gas pipeline and they had a narrow corridor cut through the woods. As soon as I pulled into it, I got stuck up to the fenders in mud. I didn't thing it was a big deal because I had a wench and chain, and decided to sit there for a while and wait for a deer to come out. But something nagged me about and I kept looking back down at the truck. And then it dawned on me: my chain isn't long enough to reach the trees, damnit. Eventually, it got dark and I had to try something new. So I put my gun behind the seat, remembering some kind of rule that I forget now, and started off to find a house. I was pretty deep in the woods but I remembered a house a few miles away from the other direction I came in. It was so dark and I had no lights that the only way I knew I was still on the gravel road was to listen for the crunching of rocks under my feet. The first house I came to, the guy there wouldn't drive out to pull me out, he needed his truck for work and didn't want to damage it. The next house I went to was a young couple that I knew from church. The husband has something like an old souped-up Chevrolet pickup that he drove me out and eventually got me pulled out. When I got back home, Micheal was, I'm not sure how to describe it, but I knew I had really pushed my luck on this one. I was expecting some serious shit to come down on me. He told me mom thought I was dead and they had the whole neighborhood out searching for me. But of course, they weren't even looking anywhere close to where I really went. Eventually, mom and Denzil got home and I just remember mom looking like she had been crying, she didn't even look relieved, she just looked....devastated....is the first word that comes to mind. I can't remember what Denzil said to me, but they didn't ground me for that and I got to go hunting the next day. But I knew I needed to watch myself from then on. I think there is probably a lot more to this story, but this is the most I can remember right now. And I think some of these other events I am remembering are all part of some event in reality. This event represents only part of it and while the issue seemed to be resolved, I think it gets covered in other events.
I even have memories of something associated with "calling the ball." There's probably a lot more memories to dig up here, but basically, I was umpiring a baseball game, calling balls and strikes. I wasn't doing it very well though, is the first way I want to describe. But I don't think that is true. I think the memory is constructed around the other people that would be there to support my landing and catching the wire.
This one other memory came up with a time when Denzil told me I had made my point. I think he wanted me to come back home because my mother missed me. She and I had an argument over something I can't remember. I decided to move out, going out on my own. I moved into a motel in town. It was close to the end of my senior year. I remember people telling me their opinions and I didn't really want to hear it. One guy was telling me how great home cooked meals are, Micheal telling me I was crazy. My physics teacher said something about to me in class one day but I can't remember what he said. Micheal drove up to where I worked after school and took Denzil's dog box that I had in my truck. They were large wooden boxes that filled the bed of the pickup and that we put the hunting dogs into for transport. There was one point there after that where my mother was extremely angry at me. I had snuck into the house one day to get my clothes and they were taking a nap and I didn't want them to know I was there. Something was wrong with my Chevrolet and my girlfriends father let me borrow his El Camino. I enjoyed driving his car, because it had a lot of power, but I didn't care much for the quasi-pickup chassis, it just didn't look right. She showed up at the place I was staying not much longer, slamming her door, yelling at me. Eventually, I saw Denzil some time later, I was still staying at the motel. I was paying my rent one day and the owner said he had wanted to meet me. Anyway, Denzil told me I had made my point and that I should come back home because mom missed me. I saw her sometime after that in Wal Mart. She said she was buying some black socks for me, that I would need for the Senior prom that was a few days away. I moved back in with them until I graduated, and acccording to my memory, left for boot camp in Orlando.
I wonder about the significance of an event in 1989. I went with my roommate, from Hollywood, and his hometown girlfriend, Phyllis, to the movie to see the release of Batman. I think it was that night we were out in a diner and I said something about a 5 dollar bill, later feeling dumb because I had been drunk and felt stupid for saying something silly. Anyway, when we got back to the apartment from the movie, I realized I had lost my wallet. I went back to the theatre and remarkably, found the seat I had been in and my wallet was still there.
That guys name was something like Ryll, pronounced something like "rill." He probably represents someone I was with with I was getting stomped into the ground. Something, something, something, can't quite get it.........
The memory of me going to OK to help my father build a house one winter. Something there maybe.
Ah.....well before that.....that set of concrete steps. There was this large structure, concrete steps for the front door to a trailer house, but the lot was empty. For some reason, I took a sledge hammer and demolished it, left nothing but a pile a rubble to what had once been, in my memory, that new and unused set of stairs. I have often wondered about that, why no one ever said anything about it to me.
At one point, though, the guy in the trailer next to the empty where I was destroying the steps started making some noise, but I ignored him. It took me two days to complete the job. At some point, his kid started crying about something. He rushed out and immediately blamed me for hurting her, but she was no one around me and I don't know what she was crying about.
