The Manual Typewriter Goes the Way of the Buggy Whip.

The Manual Typewriter is Dead! Long Live the Manual Typewriter!

When I was a kid, my mom had one of those traveling style manual typewriters which was kept in a carrying case much like a suitcase. I used to open it up and play with the keys, imagining that I was actually using a computer with the lid of the case serving as my screen. The funny thing is that this make believe computer didn’t have a mouse. It is probably best to remember that the apex of technology at the time was the Atari 2600 and the Apple IIe’s that our schools had. We used them to make simple programs that would draw pictures and play Lemonade Stand.

The Manual always frustrated me, even after I learned how to type in high school. I could never build up any real speed because the keys would lock up with each other. Of course, the machine is specifically designed to slow you down for just that reason.

As for automatic typewriters, I learned to type on IBM Selectrics. For the record, I actually failed the second half of Typing One in High School. Once I learned the basics I found that I wasn’t terribly interested in the other aspects of the course, such as how to type a myriad of business letters. I suspect that I sensed that the need to know precisely how to craft such things would soon fade.

When I joined the Army, I allowed myself to be talked into MOS 31C, Single Channel Radio Operator. It was also known as radio teletypist. No recruiter ever used the second term because I suspect they knew that it wouldn’t appeal to 17 year old recruits. Instead, they showed laserdisc videos of soldiers assembling satellite dishes and fiddling with digital readouts. In my mind, that looked pretty cool. They also showed soldiers carrying radios on their backs with combat teams, a dangerous job but not the one I actually got.

Instead, when I got to Fort Gordon, Georgia in October of 1989, I found a piece of equipment that more closely resembled the props needed for a 1950s science fiction movie than a one set in the 21st Century. Depressed and missing my girlfriend of the time, I signed up for an accelerated typing class in an effort to cut two weeks off my training and get out of there early.

I passed the training with no real trouble. The downside is that the Army kept me for the additional two weeks where I got to pick up trash, move pile A over the pile B and the like.

Fast forward to my year in Korea. I used my paycheck to buy the first and last typewriter I would ever own. I used that Panasonic to keep a detailed journal of my experiences in Korea. In actuality, I used it to vent my spleen about my growing frustrations with the unit I was assigned to. However, even though I have since destroyed the inch and a half thick journal, I did gain from the experience by practicing my typing and my composition skills.

I do not miss typewriters. I don’t miss the need to properly align the page in the machine. I don’t miss losing a page of work because of a series of typos. I definitely do not miss correction tape.

When I got home, I purchased my first desktop computer, a Dell 386 33 mHz computer with WordPerfect 5.1 installed onboard. I hooked an HP 500 inkjet printer (the best thing HP ever made) and saw miraculously clear, clean print materialize with the click of that mouse button I had forgot to imagine as a kid.

I was hooked.

There is a fair amount of modern technology which I find irritating, cellphones, texting, and PowerPoints are three good examples. There is also a fair amount of old, reliable technology which I admire, such as bicycles, horse and buggies, and the landline telephone. That said, I won’t miss the typewriter.

Not one bit.

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