May 27, 2024

In September 1973 I was on leave after a yearlong tour on Okinawa with the Marine Corps. I drove from my folks’ home in New Jersey out to Madison, Wisc., to visit a friend who then was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin.

As I walked across the campus to meet him, I ran into a group protesting the school’s use of non-union lettuce in the dining hall. Some of them, I could see, clearly were not students. They noticed my Marine Corps haircut, impossible to miss in that crowd, and opened fire with barrages of curses. “Fascist!” was one of the milder ones. I said nothing and hurried past, quick-time.

Fifty-one years have passed. And now, on Memorial Day, I wonder about those people. What have they been thinking all these years? Then I move on from the thought, as if it didn’t matter. But it does matter.

So many Memorial Days have passed, burying the rancor of the 1960s and early 1970s. Since Vietnam America’s men and women under arms remained on call: Lebanon, where 241 Marines died in the 1983 terrorist bombing, Iraq 1991, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq again in 2003, then still Afghanistan.

War never ends, which is why Memorial Day matters. Americans willing to fight for their country keep making that ultimate sacrifice, right now, in places many civilians can’t find on a map: Niger, Syria, the Gulf of Aden. Americans guard the free world.

It is a day for solemnity. At Quantico National Cemetery and at dozens of other sacred places, families gather. Veterans march forward carrying the Stars and Stripes and their ancient unit streamers. All rise. At Quantico the local Marine band plays the national anthem. A senior Marine officer, following tradition, cites the litany of great battles: Gettysburg, Antietam, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Normandy, Bastogne, Khe Sanh, Hue, Fallujah. The list could go on.

The climactic moment is the silent one, when a bugler pipes a solo “Taps.” Marines raise their weapons and fire the ages-old salvo in salute to those interred at that sacred place, and all such places.

Through American history some 1,064,000 American servicemen and women have given their lives, from the Revolution to the present, including combat and non-combat deaths, but not including 290,000 Confederate deaths during the Civil War. In 1917 for the first time, Americans fought in Europe. Twenty-three years later the country began to recognize its new role, defined by FDR nearly a year before Pearl Harbor as the “arsenal of democracy.”

In the decades since 1945 America stepped up further. The U.S led the establishment of NATO in 1949. Through the Cold War and even while Vietnam burned hot, thousands of U.S soldiers waited in Europe for a Soviet attack. Now Europe is again at the brink, with Ukraine in a death struggle against Russia, which under Putin has reincarnated the USSR.

The nation moved to an all-volunteer force in January 1973 when the draft was ended. Today America’s active-duty armed forces stand at 1.2 million. Another 766,000 serve in reserve components.

That may not be enough. Korea is a powder keg. The Peoples’ Republic of China, the PRC, is threatening Taiwan. Japan, Australia, and other Pacific allies are on edge. Army teams are operating in Central Africa. In the Middle East, the Navy and Air Force are trading fire with terrorists. War never ends.

The U.S. Navy today counts 296 deployable ships. In 2016 it said it needed 355. This past March it increased the number required to 381. Under a best-case scenario, the 381 goal won’t be reached until 2042.

Good people can debate the services’ roles and the numbers of personnel needed to fulfill their missions. They can dispute the rightness of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and question the scope of the America’s role in the world. That is already happening. Senior leaders can trade theories about the right number of Navy ships and types of ships.

What does not change is the ideal of service, the calling of the American under arms, and with it, the honoring of the immortal ones who have given their lives in the jungles, on the beaches, and across the deserts of the world.

At the cemeteries, service personnel and volunteers have placed American flags at each grave. Following the ceremonies, autos line up to pass through. Family members place flowers and mementoes before their loved one’s headstone or marker. They may stand or kneel for a while. Fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters who lie at rest are remembered and honored. That is the way it should be, and must be, on Memorial Day.

May 20, 2024

The first and second battles of Bull Run, in July 1861 and August 1862 respectively, both Confederate victories, sums up the important history of what is now Prince William County, Virginia. Two White men were lynched in Manassas in 1892, adding an unsavory note, and a departure from the epidemic of lynchings of Black men throughout the South.

From there on, Prince William puttered to late last century, when it earned its reputation as a practical place for working people to lay their heads, including thousands of active-duty military personnel. The county is bracketed with sites of respect, Manassas National Battlefield in the west and Quantico National Cemetery in the south.

To accommodate commuters, subdivisions spread like Levittowns in the 1950s to where the place is today. To carry them to work, I-95 went through decades of ugly renovation, the high-occupancy vehicle or HOV system was invented, the Virginia Railway Express line went in from the north to Manassas and Fredericksburg.

Now, at our old Prince William home and up and down the street, the dandelions and clover are blooming and spreading. The row of camellias we planted are engulfed by vines. The hostas are dwarfed by clusters of invasive greenery. The backyard lawn merges with a tangle of waist-high weeds.

The East Lake Ridge subdivision, on a bright May afternoon, shows the thick vernal growth of spring. Lawns are lush but slightly scruffy, thanks to last week’s heavy rain. Here and there landscaping crews ride their mowers or wave their gas-powered weedwhackers, creating an ungodly whine.

The county has an exhausted look to it. The main thoroughfares are clogged with commuters. A massive, multi-story healthcare facility has risen in Woodbridge, the vast parking lot already paved. It’s a workday, no pedestrians stroll the sidewalks. Some lucky folks work remotely, but moms now are commuting to offices or to retail or restaurant jobs, homes are mostly empty.

The grasping reach of the city has stretched, almost greedily, to 60, maybe 70 miles in every direction, and with it the gridlock and the commercial support system, all lit by neon at least a half-day. Columns of autos line up at every traffic signal, old restaurants now deal in fast food, established autocare centers have evolved as stop-and-go quick market/pump outlets.

We went to the old church, the few people we recognized looked just like us, weathered by the last three years. Maybe they wondered where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing.

Four years ago the place was changing in strange ways, more lawns overgrown, more unfamiliar autos lining the curbs, black mold showing through shingles on more roofs, more unfamiliar pedestrians. Longevity creates staleness, weariness, indifference. The neighborhood was long in the tooth, like us.

The ferocity of sprawl presses in on these half-dozen streets of fifty-year-old residences. The steady, steadfast tenor of suburban existence, maybe always a delusion, now teeters on the quiet chaos of neglect. Our former next-door neighbor, or maybe his successor, has erected a small house in the backyard hard against the property line to accommodate renters, once a zoning violation, now unnoticed by the county.

Vast economic and social pressures are descending on these places with brute force. Human life is flowing to the outlying and farther-outlying, once-rural environs, bulldozing forests to throw up more civilization, more subdivisions, more roads, malls, offices, schools. Transformation is relentless, at the pace of the financing and the availability of construction crews.

Thousands have escaped, others still are escaping down the congested interstates to southern places. Those who stay adapt to the six-lane avenues that once were two-lane roads. Old U.S. Route 1 south of Woodbridge, once a trail along Potomac River swamps, now passes miles of Macmansions and condos. On Old Bridge Road in Lake Ridge a historic marker, “Woodbridge Airport,” recognizes the airstrip built in 1961 and operated until 1987. The marker notes it closed because of “encroaching suburban development.”

The site is now a strip mall backing up to acres of townhomes. The strip mall is the usual: a Gold’s Gym, a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and so on.

The suburbs that encroached are being encroached upon, the term doesn’t fit what they have become, beehive-like midget cities that form webs, links to cities, Arlington, Alexandria, Springfield, where highrises have been piled for decades, and farther out to Fredericksburg, Luray, Strasburg.

The locals may be as shell-shocked as their visitors by the gridlock, the bulldozing, the metastasizing overnight retail, a half-dozen counties recreating themselves. But they bear up. This is home, reshaped by bleak economics, but still home. Rushed conversations, since everything is rushed, may touch on relocating somewhere quieter, but the work is here, the jobs are here.

Forty years ago the place was a frontier, the old-timers laugh when they talk about it. No traffic-choked Prince William Parkway, Woodbridge to I-66, no HOV lanes, no massive windowless data centers. Reagan was president, pushing for growth, fast growth, crazy growth here and everywhere. The place started exploding when the parents of today’s children were children themselves.

Still, the parklands are green, the churches mostly well-attended, the schools are considered pretty good. NOVA kids, most or many of them, go off to college. Some hang around for community college and local jobs. They and their parents are out there on I-95, inching forward, growing up, talking about getting away.

May 13, 2024

The big South Carolina schools, Clemson and University of South Carolina, were caught up in the student Palestine protest movement sweeping the country. Small groups demonstrated, mostly peacefully, coordinated by an outfit called Upstate Voices for Palestine.

A couple of people were arrested at USC. Local TV news did a short squib on it. As elsewhere, the central crisis, the right to free speech versus the right to freedom from violence and antisemitism, was submerged in atmospherics like demands for “divestment” from Israel that ignore the complexities of how endowments are managed.

The Israeli-Hamas war explodes from ancient, intractable hatreds. The campus turmoil recalls the 1960s-1970s Vietnam antiwar protests, when schools nationwide shut down, buildings were bombed, people killed. U.S. forces were nearly all withdrawn from Vietnam by late 1972.  North Vietnamese troops overran South Vietnam’s capital, then called Saigon, on April 30, 1975. The war ended, the protests ended. The country moved forward from historic tragedy.

 America has victims of the current carnage, families of casualties and hostages. But news producers and editors know the Middle East conflict barely touches the lives of their audience.

What does? Cancer, now and forever. The American Cancer Society estimates that one in three Americans are affected by cancer, either as a patient or by disease of a family member. ACS projects that in 2024, for the first time, new cancer diagnoses will exceed two million, or 5,500 cases per day. More than 611,000 deaths are projected. That is 1,600 per day.

Because of earlier detection and a nationwide decline in smoking, annual cancer deaths have decreased over 20 years. But the ACS journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians forecasts an increase in cases of six of the 10 most common cancer types: breast, prostate, endometrial or uterine, pancreatic, kidney, and melanoma. (The other four are lung, colon and rectum, bladder and non-Hodgkins lymphoma.)

One in eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Also increasing are liver cancer in women, oral cancers associated with human papillomavirus (HPV), cervical cancer in women ages 30-44, colorectal cancer in people younger than 55. Four of the cancers found to be increasing are “screenable”: breast, prostate, colorectal, and cervical. Endometrial, liver, kidney, and breast cancers are linked to excess weight.

The ACS provides grants to researchers, maintains a National Cancer Information Center, and conducts public health education campaigns like Relays for Life and Great American Smokeout.

While millions are spent on cancer therapy research, cancer remains what it is: malignant cells that multiply and overwhelm healthy cells. The vicious reality is that treatments: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy, frequently are as traumatic as the disease.

Chemo is what it sounds like: drugs that cause toxic side effects at recommended dosages. The Washington Post report last week that a Food and Drug Administration initiative called Project Optimus, started in 2021, aims at lowering dosages to reduce side effects while maintaining drug effectiveness.

The FDA effort acknowledges that many cancer drugs cause side effects so debilitating that patients skip doses or stop taking the drugs, allowing their cancers to resurge. For example, a lung cancer drug, sotorasib, manufactured by Amgen, is prescribed at doses that cause severe side effects. The FDA required Amgen to conduct a study that showed that lower doses were effective against tumors, with fewer side effects.

Cancer drugs are based on chemotherapy, which destroys healthy cells along with cancer cells. Surgery, radiation, and immunotherapy offer hope of longer life for some patients, but fail for others. My year of immunotherapy cost my insurance hundreds of thousands of dollars for no benefit.

Cancer patients have powerful allies. The American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) carries out groundbreaking studies and research. The ASCO Foundation has provided more than 8,700 research grants in 88 countries. The American Association for Cancer Research (ASCR) supports and funds critical research, and publishes the journal Cancer Research.

Community action matters. Outside the medical research world, order-of-magnitude smaller local organizations across America work to raise hope. In our town, the Neighborhood Cancer Connection, formerly the Cancer Society of Greenville, provides holistic physical and emotional support, medical and non-medical financial assistance, at no charge, for cancer patients and their families.

Founded in 1965, the non-profit NCC offers counseling for patients and family members and nutritional products and medical equipment like wheelchairs, walkers, prosthetics. The group spends more than $200,000 annually for nutrition support to patients It supplies toilet and bath-assist items, gloves and masks, wigs, hats, turbans, and others.

Fighting cancer is big business. At the end of 2022 ACS, which operates nationwide, raised and spent nearly $2 billion. The NCC’s ongoing capital campaign aims at raising $4.5 million.

NCC walks a different path, devoted to core values at a local level. The organization’s mission statement declares that “We focus on creating, expanding, and connecting a robust community of patients, survivors, volunteers, family and friends, and donors to create the strongest, most consistent support system we can.”

The statement continues: “For us as companions and citizens, to love is to serve. We actively seek for ways to assist, support, and provide hope to our own neighbors facing the emotional and financial toll of cancer. Because we are able, we are responsible.”

May 6, 2024

The weather grew warm, I had an idea for a trip somewhere, something different. The big six-person tent was stashed in the garage, where it had been packed for three years.  I hauled it to the back yard and lay out the heavy canvas base next to the poles, cord, and pegs. After a struggle I was able to put it up. I hauled one of the camper cots inside.

I last put up the tent in the yard during our first South Carolina summer, 2021. It stood for a couple of days, high winds and heavy rains brought it down. It took days to dry. In fall 2020 I put it up in our Virginia yard for the heck of it, on the top of the backyard hill. We actually spent the night.

Before that? We used it in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains in mid-May of 2017, 2016, and 2013. It was always cold. Then once at Bull Run Park near our place, and once in the Catoctin hills near Frederick, Maryland. Once or twice in mid-state Pennsylvania.

One fall day we drove with the tent to a park near Richmond to camp along the James River. It rained with monsoon ferocity, we slept in the van. In the morning we saw the river had crept within feet of our parking spot.

Sometime in those years we bought a two-man pup tent, easier to erect. I used it a couple of times in the Shenandoahs on solo hikes.  A while back, on an impulse, Sandy bought two small tents from an online company that advertised they could be assembled in three seconds. Not really.

We used one of the small tents on the Wyoming road trip two years ago. We camped five nights of the two-week trip, on the others we stayed in hotels or at daughter Kathleen’s place in Colorado Springs. Early on the second morning, in Blue Hills, Missouri, we were chased by a thunderstorm. Two nights later, in the Black Hills, wind blew the tent over, we shivered through a freezing night in the van.

When Michael was about ten I took him camping at Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park. A few years later we went on a week-long Boy Scout junket in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We slept in a tent on our Canadian fishing trip in 2010. He and two of our daughters live in cities and like it that way. Kathleen is an outdoors girl who will pitch a tent in a Rocky Mountain forest.

The big tent and the pup tent stayed packed. As years pass, camping is less of a thing. Instead you want a warm hotel room.

But still. You walk through REI or Outdoor World and admire the high-tech, although expensive camping gear. Two years ago we took the grandsons to a family reunion near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We stayed in a heated cabin with running water. But the park visitor center maps showed dozens of adventurous trails. How about it?

Right now Upstate South Carolina is a hot spot. Yankees as well as folks from Georgia, Alabama, and Texas are stampeding here, sold by the booming economy, reasonable cost of living, and nice weather. In Greenville and its suburbs builders are bulldozing wide tracts of red Carolina soil for new subdivisions, apartments, and industrial sites.

But away from all that, this corner of the Southeast still is mostly empty. A few farms and remote retirement communities are enveloped by mountains, hills, wild rivers, waterfalls. The North and South Carolina boundary region is the vast Sumter, Pisgah, and Nantahala National Forests, the Chattooga Wild and Scenic River Area, the Jocassee Gorges Management Area.

Along the northern South Carolina border are Oconee, Keowee, and Table Rock state parks, in North Carolina, there’s giant Gorges State Park. A half-dozen trails converge at the northern tip of the lakes along the state boundaries. Upper Whitewater Falls, the highest cascading waterfall east of the Mississippi, is on the state line, a long, winding drive on U.S. 130 from anywhere.

No one transits these gorgeous, rugged places except the hardcore wilderness people, the ones who trek with 70-pound packs, study the wildlife and forest richness, and sleep in the woods. And you find very few of them. Hours of hiking the remote, rocky trails and along the clear rushing streams that penetrate this world are mostly silent and alone.

The local roads spider through the rough country, north to tiny Rosman and Brevard, N.C., and west to Wahalla and Seneca, beyond Lake Keowee. The forests close in along the wild, beautiful Chattooga, the Georgia-S.C., boundary. Farther west along U.S. 76 in Georgia is more near-empty country, Warwoman Wildlife Management Area and Black Rock Mountain State Park, then Clayton and Lake Burton, a pretty vacation spot.

Highway 76 crosses Georgia’s segment of the Appalachian Trail. Beyond Blairsville, 76 passes through the 867,000 acres of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, which encompasses Springer Mountain, southern terminus of the AT, and merges across the North Carolina line with the Nantahala.

After Blairsville state road 19 leads into North Carolina, then U.S. 74 passes into Tennessee and through the Ocoee River Basin, the scary whitewater river where the Olympic kayakers train. The highway teeters on a precipice above the plunging rapids, occasionally you see some daredevils racing downstream. The river eventually calms down as it enters the hidden gem of Lake Ocoee.

Old folks have their memories. With a little imagination we could rouse ourselves, pack the big tent, the sleeping bags and air mattress, ground cover, camper stove and cookware, lanterns, batteries, ponchos. Then the tools—first-aid kit, hammer, hatchet, flashlights, matches. We could drive west or east or north or south.

The idea simmers. We talk about it once, twice, then change the subject. No plan emerges from the talk. Outside in the yard, the tent is standing, the guide ropes tight and taut. We could do a dry run, it’s been so long we need one. Then the sun sets, evening falls. Although it’s early May, a chilly breeze rises here in our suburban subdivision, 30 miles from the nearest forest. I glance out at the tent, and close the back door.