It’s not that nobody is home. It is just that I’ve been calling the wrong number and can’t yet remember the correct number.
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Re: Journal May 27, 2006
Ah...."bat lady," of course. I found something like a bat-shaped fishing lure that I really liked when I was a kid, but one of the older neighborhood kids said it was his and took it from me.
Andrew. That was Mogge's middle name.
I was thinking about these times when the hood flew up on my red Ford as I was traveling down Hicks Road. It was lucky we didn't crash.
The woman holding the torch during the intro for Columbia pictures looks a lot like a girlfriend I used to have.
1980. That was the year we moved from DeQueen to Ashdown. I think it was '81 when we moved onto Hicks Road. I started school at Ashdown Jr. High in '80. We had our 10 year reunion in '94 at the junior high school. I was teaching myself how to read Russian that year. Received a Science award. Started shaving. 14 years old when we moved there. Michael and I constructed a tall television antenna to get better reception. We put an American flag at the top. As we were admiring our work, Michael commented something similar to: "we sure are some patriotic s.o.b.'s aren't we?" Mom made us take it down, might have been the landlord, and she told us we were supposed to take it down every night. The school bus stop was a long ways from the house and our landlord, who was next door where we lived in one of the two houses on their farm, let me drive one of their cars to take my siblings and their kids to the bus stop. One day, I parked the car at their house but left it in neutral without the parking brake engaged. As I was walking away, the landlady yelled out that the car was rolling away down the hill. I dropped my books, swiveled around and sprinted for the car. I got the door open, jumped in and got it stopped right before it went into the pond. I think my mom chastised me for that, but I didn't know if it was for not setting the brake or for jumping in the car as it was about to go into the pond. Started going out into the woods a lot there in that place. All I had at first to carry with me was a BB gun. I very much enjoyed just getting out there and exploring. I never got lost despite how much terrority I covered, which was a lot. People at school were really getting annoyed at hearing me reciting Poe's The Raven, as I was trying to memorize it for some reason, in my memory it wasn't a class assignment. Denzil and mom gave me a 20 gauge shotgun for my birthday that year. I think Denzil traded a guitar for it. They left the gun and a camo hunting vest on my bed. The gun had a problem though but they tried telling me I was operating it wrong. They said I was "shortchanging" the action, but that wasn't it because I did what they said and it still wouldn't work. Finally, the guy Denzil got it from disassembled it one day and apparantly found the problem because I don't remember any other problems with it. Eventually I traded it to Michael for a knock-off Franchi semi-auto 12 gauge he had. That was a mistake because it was a piece of crap and would always jam after the first round. I bought a 35-caliber lever action rifle that I used for deer hunting that I absolutely loved. For some reason, I would proud that it wasn't a 30-30, but why I was proud of that is a mystery to me. There was a guy named Dino who was the star of our 9th grade football team. I remember him because I ran into his sister some years later. It was weird because she was working at that same bank in South Carolina. Small world. I remember getting dragged through a swamp during junior high as part of an initiation into Future Farmers of America. Made a chess board in shop class. It snowed on Thanksgiving day of 1980. Went to Camp Couchdale in the summer of '81, after graduating 9th grade. Tried to organize a panty raid on the girls buildings on the other side of the compound, but the staff was obviously listening and showed up at the screen door of our building with a big dog. Tried to start a food fight in the cafeteria but no one else got into it. Met a girl named Phoebe, took her out on the lake in a boat and paddled around. We wrote letters for a long time afterwards.
After we moved to Hicks Road, Michael and I shared a room with bunk beds. I was thinking yesterday about how similar it was to an officers stateroom on a Navy ship.
I always hated preparing the hunting dogs for the fox hunt competitions, as it was very boring. We bleached or painted numbers onto the sides of the dogs and we had to keep them from lying down until the process finished so they wouldn't smear the numbers. There may be some symbolism here in this memory about keeping the dogs "on their toes."
I was selected for TARGETS class in the 10th and then again in the 11th. I think the acronym was something like "towards a real goal of excellence for talented and gifted students."
I don't think I got my red Ford until the end of 10th grade, but not really sure. That sounds right the more I think about though.
The last time I saw my father was in 1981. We went up to the plains of North Oklahoma to stay with him one summer. He was working as the manager of a cattle ranch during that time, although in memory that was the only job he had as other than a truck driver. I brought my 20 gauge with me and bagged a lot of those big jackrabbits. I remember zipping around the fields in my brothers go cart. One day it was very windy and we stood there and watched a plane almost crash into a field very close by. Went exploring this really big ravine that started near my dad's house. I think of that ravine when I see those kids playing war at the beginning of the movie Born on the fourth of July.
When I was leaving for the Navy, Denzil told me I was going to be an Ensign. I corrected him that the lowest enlisted rank was Seaman Recruit, although after boot camp, I would be automatically promoted to E-3, Seaman, because I was in the Advanced Electronics Field. And actually, I think I was being paid as an E-3 even in boot camp, they just called everyone a Recruit in boot camp.
I was talking to Mogge a few years ago when I was working here at Microsoft and he was working at our Charlotte office. We were talking about our time on the Wainwright. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of another guy there in the office had been part of that Blackhawk Down event, as known from the movie of that name. I didn't really believe him for some reason. I mentioned at one point about the letter of commendation for the Wainwright CO and he said something that made me doubt my perception that everyone in Missile Plot had got a similar letter. He told me he still had his, it was there somewhere in his desk drawer, but then he started reciting from the Joint Unit Meritorious award which was given to all of us in the unit. I thought something was odd about that and decided that maybe I was the only one that had gotten an individual award.
There was some other stuff, adventures, that Micheal and I got into but too tired to write about it now. He did have that shotgun explode one time when he was out duck hunting, that was pretty scary.
I wonder if the bicycle I remember riding after I crashed my red Ford is supposed to represent a propeller driven aircraft?
There was the American Legion award I got, it was an actual medal, not unlike a real military medal, when I was in the 11th grade.
Ah, and how could I forget working for Donald Mills at his store and then for him when he was mayor of Wilton. At one point, I was the supervisor of a group of kids as we were fixing potholes on the Wilton town roads.
Phoebe told me to "never forget" that dance where we met, because she never would.
They lined up all the girls at the start of the dance and told me to pick who I wanted to dance with. I still remember thinking about how she just seemed the right choice. She was laughing, kind of delighted, kind of frightened, that one day in the boat on the lake when I saw a snake in the water and started chasing it for some reason.
Something I read in a newspaper archive reminded me again about a girlfriend in high school with the initials R.R., but she went by the name "Becky." She gave me some photos of her and the memory flooded back about the captions she put on the photos. One was "here ya go, something to remember me by." Another was "here I am, doing what I do best." I remember Denzil seriously chewing me out one night after Becky and I had been out on a date. I was supposed to pick up Michael and Donald Gene and take them out to the woods where we were fox hunting that night. But Becky and I had been making out in my truck in front of her house and I stayed there longer than I expected. Something in my memory that seems important, I left the engine running of my Chevrolet pickup when we were making out and there seems to be something important about the smoke from the exhaust. After I left, I knew I was late, so I decided to just skip stopping by the house on Hicks Road and head straight out to the woods, thinking D.G. and Micheal would have just given up on waiting for me and headed out there on their own. For some reason, that seems important. It seems important that they did wait at the house for me. As I was traveling down this familiar stretch of open road that I liked driving down, I saw headlights approahing and for some reason I can't explain, I knew it was Denzil. I pulled over and he turned around and came back. He was chewing me out, but I was feeling quite proud of myself, so I didn't understand why he was hassling me. I remember at one point declaring "No, Sir!" I can't remember for sure, but I think I went back to the house and picked up the other two guys and we went on with the hunt. I seem to recall they were kidding me the rest of the night for "smooching" with Becky.
…
That day I remember getting into the middle of a swamp with snakes dropping out of trees all around me must be from some battle. They were everywhere. I had seen plenty of snakes in my day, usally lying right in front of my path, but this one day was just insane. This one place I used to go squirrel, down in this heavily wooded creek in a valley was just crazy with snakes, but the squirrel hunting was the best around. I figured that was probably why the hunting was so good, because no one wanted to get in there with the snakes. Anyway, there at the end of that really bad day, I had to cross over this submerged wooden bridge. I couldn't even see the bridge because the water was so dark. I could just see myself dropping through the bridge into the water below, where it was writhing with snakes. The snakes represent either, or both, AAA flak or missiles. Marginally, there is some symbolism with Sidewinders, but these were cottonmouths. Maybe that is the distinction, they were just as deadly as Sidewinders, but were a different type.
There was good hunting in the front yard, they were red squirrels and I enjoyed those the most, but there wasn't many of them and that section of woods wasn't very expansive. In the back yard, with the creek and valley, there was a lot of room to explore, but there was only gray squirrels back there.
It was in the woods in front of the house that I figured out that if I swept away the leaves from a small area where my feet which be, I wouldn't have to wait as long for the red squirrels to start moving again. Before that, they always heard my feet rustling the leaves and wouldn't move.
Sometimes I would see a squirrel, gray I think, hopping around the tree in our front yard, but they usually stayed away.
We used to go to Sonic every day for lunch when I was in high school.
That memory of kissing Becky in my truck. There was one maybe two smoke trails rising up behind the truck and I was annoyed seeing the smoke. I can still see that in my mind, but I can almost see something else too, I can almost see the reality. They replaced my memories of reality with other images with the same symmetry.
June 2002 Vol. 85, No. 06
In one spectacular engagement in the skies over Lebanon, modern airpower took a dramatic leap forward.
The Bekaa Valley War By Rebecca Grant
In June 1982, Israeli ground forces pushed into Lebanon in an effort to put an end to cross-border terror attacks. Operation Peace for Galilee, as Israel dubbed it, led to a prolonged conflict with Lebanon and produced mixed overall results.
However, the initial phase of that operation included a spectacular moment when the Israeli Air Force destroyed 19 surface-to-air missile batteries, with no losses, and downed a huge number of enemy aircraft. With real-time intelligence and careful exploitation of adversary weaknesses, the IAF dealt modern air defenses their first major defeat.
So startling was the IAF success in that Bekaa Valley air war 20 years ago this month that it ever since has stood out as a critical turning point in the deadly duel of fighters and SAMs.
