Year 2011 – Fall Semester, Week Four Updates.

The Teaching Front

We’re midway through the French-Indian War in my American History 120s, having blasted through Early Colonialism as rapidly as possible. There are important components which I will pick up later, namely triangular trade, mercantilism and the like when we approach the American Revolution. I didn’t waste any time on the Salem Witch Trials (I never do). On the other hand, I spent a significant amount of time laying down the foundation of slavery in America.

At our present pace, we should arrive at the first exam dates by the end of week five, start of week six. This is later than my peers, probably because I spend a lecture day or two talking about the nature of history in general. On the other hand, I’m further along on the timeline than many of them.

Not that it is a competition. Each teaches there own way. Fortunately for me, the majority of my peers recognize and respect this concept.

In American History 121 I’ve got a split between my two evening classes. One of them is about to fight the Spanish-American War after we spent time on the concept of Imperialism. Prior to that we used Andrew Carnegie as our focal point for the Second Industrial Revolution. And of course, we covered Reconstruction. In the other class we are just about to emerge from Reconstruction. Hopefully we’ll pick up speed over the next two weeks.

I’m building new exams for all classes this semester, generating new essay questions as we move along. I’ve been using the same essays for a couple of years now and it seems to be long past time to switch things up.

Once we clear the first exams I’ll proceed forward to the Pre-Revolutionary Era and Theodore Roosevelt respectively. I think I’ve got at least two to three good classes with the potential for a fourth if I can weed out the dead weight or get them to see the light. The first exam almost always serves as a wake up call for many of them. They’ll make a decision to double down or bail out based upon what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this period is that I provide ample warning for what is coming down the pike. It isn’t an ambush by any means, instead it is perhaps more akin to a carefully scripted training exercise. They are given metrics by which I will grade the exam in the form of commonly made mistakes. In many ways, it is another history lecture for the students, a history of their predecessors and how they tend to react to the first exams in my classes.

Sadly, they frequently ignore these warnings and advance to contact expecting to get through without too much trouble.

They are often sorely mistaken.

Lastly, I had a guest visit my classroom to see how I did business. She was there on the day we killed General Edward Braddock, a bastard in need of frequent killing if you ask me. Later when I talked with my guest, she said if she had more history instructors like me, she might have chosen a different discipline. She gave me high marks for getting my students to class on time, keeping their attention and moving forward at a brisk pace.

I’ve got to say, I always appreciate positive feedback concerning my teaching. Thanks!

The Writing Front

I was able to get fiction writing done on three separate instances this week. Next week, the plan is to increase that to four days a week, Monday through Friday, probably around the two pm time frame. That isn’t my strongest time creatively but it is open and the campus is relatively quiet.

I also transcribed some of the longhand material, tweaking and refining as I went. I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

The goal is to have a finished product ready by semester’s end. Perhaps I might sign up for the National Novel Writing Month competition. This is slated to become a novella sized project and I think the subject matter I’ll address warrants that much coverage.

It feels good to be back in the saddle again. This wouldn’t be possible without the support of the Woman I Love, Trinity, who got her vehicle back to operational status, freeing me from transport duties.

Thank you very much.

The Fitness Front

The transportation freedom mentioned above has given me the flexibility to focus on my efforts in the swimming pool. This week the goal was to complete 4000 yards by today. I fell short by a 1000 yards since I didn’t go today.

On the other hand, my weight is now down to 190.5 pounds, more than twenty pounds less than my January 2012 high of 212 pounds.

My energy levels are good on a relatively consistent basis. On the rare instance when I am late to class and I have to drop for push ups (I believe in paying for breaking my own syllabus rules, believe it or not) I can easily pump out more push ups than are actually required. In fact, I got applause in one class for pumping out twenty without too much effort.

Not bad, given that I had swam a thousand yards with a 25 push up warm up a mere thirty minutes earlier.

The only downside of the renewed fitness condition is that I often underestimate how much projection power I have.

I’ve become known as “The Loud One.”

Other Fronts

The new glasses came in to replace the pair I busted last week. Now all we need to do is just count the days down to the next two pay days on the 22nd and the 1st respectively. Those resources should, finally, after ten months of economic misery, lost sleep and bubbling anger, allow us to patch the last of the major holes in the budget. Barring anymore disasters, we can move forward with getting our fiscal house in order.

I continue to read Dario Cirello’s Aegean Dream, a memoir of the time Dario and his wife spent in Greece. It is strange to be reading this while I am taking Spanish. The commentary on language troubles matches my own efforts at trying to speak Spanish intelligently.

Finally, the new Kindle arrived to replaced the dead one. I’ll pick it up from the landlord’s office tomorrow before I head off to training with the Lifeguard Company I work for.

So it goes. Things are getting better by the day, barring an exception or two. May the upward climb continue.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

The General Sunday Ponderings: How I Became a Soldier.

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

Tearing Down Tuesday is now available for purchase as an ebook at Amazon.com.

Tearing Down Tuesday is now available as an ebook at Amazon.com for three dollars American. The story should be accessible on any e-reader out there.

Right now I’m just experimenting to see how things work. I figure Tearing Down Tuesday was the perfect test subject given that it has been published twice and that I do not have any remaining obligations to the previous publishers. Bangar from Down Under was asking if there should be a dedicated day to generate a sales spike and I advised holding off.

In other words, here is what I’m thinking.

If you missed a chance to read Tearing Down Tuesday at Interzone or Apex and you want to read it badly enough, here is your shot.

On the other hand, if you have read Tearing Down Tuesday then I’d advise waiting a bit. I want to offer readers and supporters something more than just the same old story. I want to bundle TDT with my unpublished story Maternal Soldier along with some additional content. I’m still thinking on what that content might be but I don’t think I’ll be able to get to it until after the semester ends.

That bundle, by the way, will be called A Murphy Double Tap and I believe I’ll be selling that for five bucks American.

I have readers. I have fans. I have supporters. Perhaps not many, but enough that they have made their voices heard during the two initial publications.

I figure this is a way to see if we really don’t need editors and publishers anymore. Maybe we still need gatekeepers.

And maybe we don’t.

If we don’t, then I think I just might bypass them.

So it goes.

Other Fronts

Today was testing for the Third Quarter in all classes. Here in a bit I’ll run my 120s through the scantron to see what I get. Tomorrow, Veteran’s Day, will be nothing but grading, grading, grading.

Then it will be time to prep for evals, which are next week. The suit is at the cleaners for the event and I’ve got funds set aside for a fresh haircut.

We’ll see how it goes.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of Tearing Down Tuesday and The Limb Knitter
North Kansas City, Missouri