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Twenty years ago this week I was coming to the realization that I had survived my first and last war. In retrospect, that war was a forgone conclusion. Military historians have ascertained that the reasons for the defeat of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the hands of the Coalition Forces of Operation Desert Storm can be traced to poor leadership, poor planning, lack of motivation among the opposing forces, and perhaps an overinflated assessment of the capabilities of Soviet technology.
It was a war that lasted, in terms of ground combat, four days.
It changed everything.
How did I come to stand on the razor’s edge of history? Granted, I didn’t have any effect on it through my personal actions. I was a mere cog, a little tiny bit of the war machine, one that could have been deleted without a second thought. In fact, if I were writing a novel on the Persian Gulf War, which would probably need at least one fire fight to satisfy the readers, I would pick someone other than myself as an example. I saw a lot of things, but in terms of actual battlefield changing actions, I did very little.
I bore witness, and that is about it. As wars go, I got off pretty easy in the initial assessment. So easy that many of my peers, including one particular prick in South Korea, frequently stated that it wasn’t a real war at all.
Tell that to the Iraqis we killed.
I am not a repentant veteran. I never have been. I offer no apologies for my service nor make any excuses. I do not experience any great discomfort at what happened. Perhaps I experience a very real regret that people I bore no personal grudge against were killed and I often wonder about the living that survived the dead.
I wasn’t particularly eager to go to war either. I was not the kind of soldier who sat around masturbating to the latest issue of Guns and Ammo while whispering sweet nothings to my weapon, named after some woman whose pants I failed to get into. I did not volunteer for Airborne training, in fact I actively turned down an opportunity to go. I did not have any particular affinity for elite infantry units such as the Rangers, who seem still to this day to be not much different than Marines. Technology interested me more than living in the mud and if the Air Force had offered as much for enlistment as the Army had, I probably would have been an airman.
Instead, I joined the Army. Money was part of the motivation, family lineage in the Army was another, and finally the lack of any real prospects was a third. Perhaps patriotism figured in at some point though I can be just as cynical as the next American about my home nation. Lastly, if nothing else, I knew I was a fighter. I had spent my teen years fighting. I would spend my Army years fighting and I’d fight some more after that.
It is perhaps a strange thing then that I was influenced by what is essentially an antiwar documentary which was aired in 1983 on PBS. Each night I would sit down in front of my small black and white television set in my bedroom, which was a big thing in my book, having a television, to watch Gwynne Dyer hold for on the futility of war.
The documentary, entitled War, was designed to educate the public on the futile nature of warfare as a means of resolving differences. Like many products of the Reagan Era, it was designed to scare the living shit out of anyone with an ounce of sanity about the probability of a nuclear war.
Here is the installment entitled The Deadly Game of Nations.
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The music with the intro, along with the images, embedded themselves into my teenage brain. Unlike my peers, I never saw anything you might call glory in warfare. I knew it was a bloody, horrifying, dirty business. I knew it came with horrendous costs, all I had to do was look at my Vietnam Era father to see that. From reading the history books along with science fiction novels, I knew that the next World War, the one we still haven't fought and hopefully never will, was going to be the last.
Dyer's job was to talk me out of enlisting. He wasn't a dick about it. He was a veteran of military service himself steeped in a solid background of military education. He was antiwar without disrespecting, demeaning or insulting the soldiers.
In my case, he failed.
To be fair, my father failed too. So did my mother, at least the first two times I signed an enlistment contract. Each time I managed to come up with sufficient justification for enlistment. Threats to crack my kneecaps not withstanding, I signed the dotted line. I should point out that I nearly did so again in 2004 in order to go to Iraq, not because I felt a need to prove myself, but because I felt a need to back up my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by virtue of direct participation.
Perhaps some perspective is in order.
In March 1989, when I signed the Delayed Entry Program contract, these facts were known.
1. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia actively targeted civilian population centers with enough ordnance to destroy the planet many times over.
2. The danger of dying in such a war was no less or great at Fulda Gap in Germany than it would be if I stayed in Kansas City, Missouri. What difference does it make if a T-72 gets me, nerve gas or a ten megaton nuke chucked at Downtown KCMO? Dead is dead, no matter where the dying transpires.
3. The two Super Powers had managed to keep the genie in the bottle. I had a belief, perhaps a naive one, that no one would go so far as to chuck nukes around like so many hand grenades.
4. On a personal level, the economy sucked. My job prospects were awful. Four years of active service bearing witness to the failures of my civilian counterparts only serve to reinforce the notion that I had made the right choice.
5. I had to pay for college somehow.
So I signed up, knowing that I was signing a contract. I promised to go fight, and if need be, die. In exchange, the United States of America would feed, clothe and house me. They'd provide a rudimentary if not great medical care program and if I made it to the end of my first four years, they'd give me money for college.
If I could pick up an honorable discharge.
All I had to do was agree to go kill anyone the United States of America declared the Enemy of the Week.
It turned out to be the Iraqis.
If a war was to be fought, I expected it to be at Fulda Gap in Germany. Or maybe, in my wilder moments, perhaps Columbia fighting some Vietnam do over in an attempt to control the drug trade. I didn't expect Iraq and I don't think the Iraqis did either.
Dyer's series is useful for a lot of reasons. Aside from laying out the mindset of a soldier, he captures the attitudes of the early 1980s regarding the military.
1. Soldiers are obsolete.
2. They are preserving an obsolete way of doing things.
3. The equipment they use is expensive, fickle and will probably fail them at the worst possible moment.
4. The Soviets have more of everything, which will lead us to use nukes.
It turns out Dyer was wrong, perhaps sadly enough. He was wrong on every front. We still use wars to solve our problems. We haven't blown the planet up yet (and I probably just jinxed us by typing that). Our weapons are expensive and fickle yet they are also far more effective than anyone could have possibly imagined.
In one respect, I'm glad he was wrong. If he had been right, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be in a grave somewhere, long moldered away to nothing, the victim of a futile effort to dislodge an invader from another country.
In many ways, Dyer convinced me that it didn't matter where I was. Stay at home and catch a nuke or go for a soldier and take your chances. This series did the convincing.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
It has been a busy week for yours truly. So busy that my fitness program, which had been running pretty consistent since the start of the new year, got a bit derailed as I dealt with one issue or another.
Let’s get to it.
The Teaching Front
We’re advancing to our first exam, which is far later than normal due to the snow days we’ve had. I’m behind in all of my classes as well, which is yet another struggle. Further, due to the disruptions, it has been difficult to build up momentum and bond with the students. As a result, things are not working quite as smoothly as I’d like. Fortunately, I have no real disciplinary issues on the table.
On the other hand, I see a lot of my students using their textbook and their study guide during the lecture to hunt down terms. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, right? At least they are paying attention to something.
Well, actually, it is a bad thing. It is a sign of a time crunched student, or worse, a bored student, who is attempting to work through the study guide while I lecture. More often than not students believe that the lecture material is not important for the test. I often get students who ask how much of what I lecture on is in the textbook.
Less than you’d think. The lectures are often specifically designed to go deeper into the topics at hand or they are designed to operate hand in glove with the textbook.
So an example would be the lecture on the Pre-Revolutionary Era of American History. The traditional way of teaching this is to start with the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the This Act and the That Act and rest assured that is exactly how it sounds to the student. They are merely memorizing bits of info for regurgitation and that is the last thing you want them to do. Memorization is just an early step towards true understanding.
Rather than lecture on those acts, I make the student responsible for reading the textbook’s coverage of those acts. What I do instead is lay out the case for why the Colonials believed that their only recourse was to declare independence from Great Britain. I lay down the grievances and I fill in the background for the Colonial’s historical understanding and perception of events.
How does that work out? Well, I’m two semesters into using that method and if you are a student who does what I told you to do, take notes on the lecture, tie it to your reading and form a synthesis of the two, then they do fine.
Test results aren’t much different between one strategy of coverage or the other, I might add.
In any event, they are doing their homework while I lecture. I think I’m going to put that on the Why Did I Fail The Test? section of my syllabus for next semester.
The Student Front
I’ve not had a chance to update either the Pondering Tree or Playing with Genesis.
We’ve moved into the actual writing of the novel. The group I am in wrote a combined first chapter this last week.
We’re in a computer lab and to be honest, I am growing to believe that this was not the best choice for the class. It is hard to get into an effective group in order to get any work done. The computers serve as a frequent distraction. Given that I was using my laptop on Tuesday, even I am guilty of this, though I had a reason (which is not the same as an excuse) for having that computer out. If nothing else, the clickety-click-click-click of the keys on my laptop are relatively quiet.
In fact, in terms of technology in the classroom, I think it ought to be banned. No videos, no slides, no powerpoints, none of it. Just a board to write on and comfortable chairs for the students to sit in with a large desk to spread out their things. On C-Span this morning (and what a wonderful discovery that is, a place where people discuss without drama or shouting or Jerry Springer like behavior) an education pundit was talking about a high tech public school on the East Coast which cost a pretty penny to equip with the latest and greatest in technology.
The performance at that school? In the toilet. Students surf the net, IM each other or spend their time trying to get the tech to work in the first place.
Banish to the Computer Science Department and leave it there.
I’ll provide a proper update to Playing with Genesis that covers the actual course material and progress later this weekend.
Research Project Number – 05
The Client was on deadline this week, which was something of a surprise to me. I wasn’t aware of the deadline. No matter. I sat down with the backlog I could most effectively contribute to and worked over the material. By deadline time, I had most of the storyline components covered. There are a few lingering errors in the manuscript but I will catch them later.
It is going to be a pretty big novel, folks. I’m looking forward to seeing how the trilogy ends.
The Writing Front
In the Early Morning Rain by Berry Henderson and myself is currently out to market. We haven’t heard anything back yet so we’re hopeful. It is a new market open to e-subs so I’ll be looking over my inventory to see what can be polished up and put into the wind. Many of the valuable things I have learned in World Building will be helpful in that respect.
On the novel front I was able to drag out the manuscript for the first time in a couple of weeks to give it a going over. What I have right now are a bunch of cobbled together, pasted together scenes which are loosely linked together. In looking over the manuscript I think some major work is needed to better define the roles of the various characters.
There is also one glaring problem, the same one I noticed with my previous novel effort, Convergence Point.
When I have the space to spread out and more specifically, work on a military topic, I tend to let the action and strategy dominate the narrative. It is a natural strength of mine as a storyteller and an historian. Unfortunately, without significant character depth and development, no one is going to care about that action. It will be nothing more than a series of cardboard targets getting cut down on the battlefield.
So that part of it needs significant work. It is the sort of thing I can probably hammer out in a week of concentrated effort.
As for the World Building in the novel, I think some refinement of various structures and institutions are necessary. I definitely want to redefine the family structure of this society based upon what I have learned in Melissa Eaton’s Cultural Anthropology side of the course.
If things go according to plan, I’ll use my time during Spring Break in tandem with Trinity’s Spring Break (which is at the end of the month) to get the project ready for submission to market.
Other Fronts
Over the next few days the Great Summer Job Hunt will commence. Now that I am lifeguard qualified I should be able to, hopefully, get a decent job at around 25 to 30 hours a week maximum. Even more ideally, it will be a posting to an outdoor pool.
Trinity is making plans to travel to California to see her eldest son and wife for a week during her Spring Break. I should be able to polish up the novel while she is out there. I’ve got to say that I am glad to see that fences have been mended with that particular component of her family.
Lastly, March 10th is my father’s birthday. He’ll be sixty-nine years old if my math is correct. No one thought he’d get this far given that he has prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, stage three lung cancer and a heart muscle that more closely resembles a chunk of hamburger than a heart.
I chalk it up to sheer cussed stubborness myself.
Trinity and I are going to see about getting some barbecue for tomorrow night so we can celebrate a bit early. Both of us will be tied up during the week with our respective college obligations.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Trinity and I went on a tour of a Kansas City icon, Boulevard Brewing Company, this past Sunday. Sadly, neither of us remembered to take pictures. Fortunately the internet provides an alternative.
I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.
Free samples of their wares await you at the end of the tour. That said, it was a real thrill to take the tour and see how a brewery works.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
So, I cook. But sometimes, the hard part is the harvest of the ingredients.
That said, I am a stubborn man and the meat ended up in the oven after a protracted struggle. Here is the menu.
After a few mishaps in the kitchen, I managed to produce something edible.
And since it is Trinity’s birthday, there must be cake.
No, I didn’t bake the cake. Why do you ask?
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Once upon a time when I was still a grad student, I wrote for the campus paper, the University News. They weren’t all that thrilled to have me because I am . . . well, I’m an unrepentant combat veteran who doesn’t hold the right views on many things. On the other hand, they were willing to let me write food reviews for the paper.
It was a hell of a gig. Maybe I would take a friend along and we’d eat at places like Jalepeno’s down in Brookside or Chubby’s, write up a review for the paper and get reimbursed for the meal. In addition to reimbursement for the food, I’d get paid for the article. Thirty bucks per article wasn’t much but frankly, writing them was pretty easy. I crapped the articles out in less than ten minutes most of the time.
So it is no secret that Trinity and I like to eat out. Perhaps we like it a bit too much. With this weekend being the last before school starts, we decided to go to a few places and sample the wares.
The Westport Flea Market
I’ve been here twice now, once early in the summer on a Sunday when the rain prevented us from doing anything else. The other time was yesterday around two in the afternoon when Trinity’s friend and one of my former students arrived to see what was what.
We both ordered the Mini Market Burger, five ounces of burger while Rodney went with the 10 ounce version. Simple and as American as you can get. Rumored to be the best burger in Kansas City according to many, I thought my burger was pretty good.
Was it the best?
Well, it was pretty good. Best? I think the jury is still out. Winstead’s often serves up a pretty mean burger, one recommended by Calvin Trillin no less.
Service was first class though I had to haggle about the onion rings I was supposed to get. That said the kitchen staff took the initiative and made sure I had the onion rings. If you’ve got time they have a flea market next door but Trinity’s recon report was not promising.
“Nothing I want.”
Well, that is the danger you run with a flea market.
Afterwards we sat around nursing full tummies and adult beverages while shooting the breeze. It is the sort of thing places like Westport Flea Market were meant for.
The Original Arthur Bryant’s
I always wanted to eat there at the original location near the Historic 18th and Vine Jazz District. We were driving by around five or so arguing about whether or not we should eat there.
“We can get it to go,” Trinity said.
“But are you hungry?” I asked. I couldn’t make up my mind, which isn’t a typical state for me. Usually I make a decision and that is it. Eventually I did meander my way to deciding that we could indeed get something to go.
While I like Gates BBQ I have to admit that the “HI, MAY I HELP YOU!?!” has always been a bit much for my ears. They are more restrained at Bryant’s, which was slammed with hungry people not more than a few minutes after we got in line.
“Perfect timing,” Trinity said.
What to get, what to get. I had the burnt ends at the Ameristar Casino Arthur Bryant’s but I just wasn’t in the mood for that. Trinity wanted pork ribs. The gentleman behind the window convinced us that a slab of pork ribs was cheaper and in this way I was convinced.
I had no idea what I was in for as we unwrapped our package at the Pod. Loading up my plate I expected a standard evening of dealing with chewy, difficult meat still stuck to the bone. But I was wrong. The first bite came straight off and kicked the living crap out of my tongue for being such a doubting Thomas. The rub and the sauce brought the full power of the pork forward before melting away any lingering second and third thoughts.
“Wow,” I whispered. “This is the most incredible rib I have ever tasted in my entire life.”
“Pretty good, huh?” Trinity replied.
The perfect beverage for the ribs was a Boulevard Pale Ale, which we had restocked on yesterday. Toss in the pickles and the bread and it was possible to cleanse your pallet completely before taking another bite. And you want to cleanse that pallet because you do not want to miss an ounce of that flavor. You want the rib meat to explode in your mouth again and again.
My only regret?
We didn’t get a second slab for later.
We B Smokin’ BBQ in Paola, Kansas
Yeah, this one isn’t in Kansas City and didn’t we have enough BBQ yesterday? Well it just so happens that we were not going for BBQ, we were going for breakfast. I had some pretty good intel from Terri Lowry that the breakfast at this joint was first class.
Located at the Paola Airport, it is part pilot’s lounge and part BBQ shack. Planes and pull up on the tarmac and disgorge hungry patrons who flew in specifically to eat there. Trinity went with a single pancake which arrived with a crane that lowered it to the table. Having her back, I helped her work over the pancake but at the end of the day, the remains of the pancake beat us out.
It was good, by the way. That pancake.
I had the We B Smokin Breakfast of three eggs over hard (no running on my plate, damn it), hash browns (not brown and crispy enough for me) and bacon.
Bacon. Australian writer John Birmingham was horrified to learn that Americans will eat an entire plate of bacon. I know I’d eat a plate of this bacon because it was infused with what seemed to be maple syrup and brown sugar. A close contender with the ribs for best meat of the weekend, the bacon made up for the hash browns.
Speedy service like a well oil flight line crew, we were back on the road by 1000 hours with a note in the log to try it again for dinner sometime.
Finally, to top it all off, lunch at the Pod. We had a french baguette from Bloom Bakery in the River Market in desperate need of attention. I sliced off a couple of pieces and added some Corrollo’s Italian Deli Genoa Salami to the mix. We have to buy that stuff a half pound at a time because if we buy more than that, we’ll eat it all before two days are out. It is that good.
So I’m sitting here with a belly the size of a tractor trailer tire while Trinity naps off the breakfast. The ceiling fan is going, the windows are open and the sun is shining. By tomorrow it will all be over.
The Fall Semester comes.
Summer 2010, so long and happy journey, my friend. Pass your ways onto your successor in 2011.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Those that done said stuff