March 9, 2020

The second night of our Florida junket was the night of tragedy in Tennessee. We checked on family and kept those victims, the well-off in East Nashville and the less-well off in Putnam County, in our prayers. Tornadoes don’t discriminate, but news directors do, and within 24 hours the networks had turned their attention back to the coronavirus and “super Tuesday.”

Trucking from Savannah to Sarasota, we were waylaid at the Florida welcome center by the state transportation department, which threatens gullible tourists like us with tickets and fines if they don’t buy a “Sunpass” to pay tolls electronically. We spent an hour fumbling with the vending machine that sells the pass and the computer terminal that registers your user name, password, license, etc., costing us $45. We learned later that the locals don’t fall for it–they pay the tolls in spare change.

We spent a couple of days with friends Bill and Gina in Sarasota, wishing that were longer. On a boat ride at Myakka River State Park we looked at the alligators sprawled along the riverbank. They seldom move a muscle, enjoying the attention. We did hit Venice Beach after battling snowbird traffic. The air was warm, the water chilly. We stared out at the Gulf’s weird aquamarine shades, the reflection of sunlight on the shallow sandy bottom. Bill treated me to a visit to a spot off the tourist route, the Sarasota National Cemetery, nearly 300 acres of exquisite solemnity. We walked through the delicately engraved pillars that honor the nation’s warriors. When we left town the next day Sandy and I detoured back for a second visit to take in again the quiet beauty of the place.

Interstates are interstates, but I-275 took us soaring up that monster Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, aptly named, since you see only sky on the ascent, then only water on the way down. The highway to New Port Richey then winds through the St. Pete and Tampa suburbs, the downtown skylines gleaming on the horizon through a thin haze that even in early March advertises that classic Florida summer heat. The trip becomes a long slog along U.S. 19, one of those hundreds of six- and eight-lane roads across America lined with auto dealerships and fast food and chain restaurants, and divided every mile by traffic signals. Since it’s the South, here and there you see a small church perched amidst the retail jungle.

Our friend Tricia arrived on the Gulf Coast from Virginia 10 years ago and established herself as a savvy real estate agent. The local market is booming, she says. Thousands are moving in daily, filling new subdivisions and gated communities and jamming the roads, even while the immigrant oldsters meet their Maker or return north. We walked through New Port Richey’s brand-new city park, snapping photos of the egrets. The modest downtown is wedged between high-rise condo towers along the water and older ranch-type homes on the east side. In the evening we trooped to the nearby Tarpon Springs waterfront, settled by Greek fishermen whose descendants harvest natural sponges from the Gulf seabed. Dozens of shops around the harbor sell them, along with Tarpon Springs tee-shirts, knickknacks, Tarpon Springs anything.

We quit being tourists the second day in New Port Richey. I helped with chores: crawling through the attic looking for water damage, laying roofing tar, recaulking the tub. It was mundane, nuts-and-bolts stuff, but I enjoyed it all, glad to be useful, recalling all the odd maintenance projects I’m wrestling with at home. More normalcy: we trooped into Tampa that evening for an Orioles-Yankees spring training game at George Steinbrenner Park, which sits next to Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the junction of three traffic-choked local roads. It was a peaceful evening watching mostly non-roster players try to make their teams without the manic electronic cheerleading of big-league parks.

It was a rushed visit, as they always are. Tricia fielded calls the way real estate people do, weekdays, evenings, weekends. She left for a while to show a house, we kept busy. Then more chores, more local tourism, more Florida. Yesterday we said goodbye to New Port Richey and headed for Edgewater, on the Atlantic coast, to see my cousin Eugene and his wife Jean, who winter there. We cruised U.S. 54 out of Pasco County, past acre after acre then mile after mile of newly excavated swampland, sites of soon-to-come subdivisions.

Hitting I-75, then I-4, we relapsed into wondering what’s next. Probably not Florida. The mild weather is a nice break, but summer is rushing in here, with its relentless tropical humidity. The rush-hour traffic reminds us of I-95 at home. This place, for me, is for visiting, in midwinter, once in a while.

But our ties to Virginia have loosened. Friends and family have uprooted themselves with no regrets. The Woodbridge running group members, those still around, are planning escapes to sunnier, cheaper places. I’m painting our hallways and bathrooms, sprucing up the yard, checking the plumbing and electrical. We’re talking to the home-repair people and to friends who’ve done it already.

We know any place, its local attractions, and climate and tax situation are a distraction, a sideshow. The Tennessee tornadoes seem to be still with us, although it’s 32 years since we left friends and family there. Others are in Florida, but they’re also in South Carolina, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Seattle, elsewhere. We’ve seen all those places.

We know, really, what we want and need. It’s not complicated, it’s what everyone wants and needs: the human connections that create the sense of–well, the sense of being in the world, meaning finding the way to hold those connections close, to watch the kids and grandsons grow to be themselves, then to start summarizing things, meshing the lessons we can still take from what’s past with what remains ahead.

March 2, 2020

We loaded the van Saturday night, then yesterday headed down I-95, destination Florida. We were due, after a rough week. The anticipation has been building since last weekend, when I volunteered at a monster trail event, the 71-mile Reverse Ring out in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains. Brutally cold, around 15F at the start. Only 29 runners showed up, the running club’s hard core. Maybe the others are catching on to how tough that thing is.

The early cold hung with us as I sneaked through my 71st birthday on Tuesday. Our youngest daughter sent a card showing a farmer looking at a field of wheat and saying, “This wheat looks great, but I could’ve sworn I planted corn.” Me, too.

We observed Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the season of repentance. By then the whole world was repenting—scratch that, panicking.

You can watch the evening news, but you can’t do anything about the virus, nor about the crashing markets. That’s life, in all its tragedy and strangeness; we’ve bumped up against the outer limits of medical and financial expertise. No one really knows what’s happening. Best to think of other things.

Florida is one. We’re visiting friends and family there. But Florida, as I wrote a while ago, is a kind of metaphysical destination, an otherworldly, faraway place to shoot for when you know you need to change the scenery, and maybe other things along with it.

The trip is a bit of wishful thinking. In my imagination it mimics the Road Trip we embarked on in August 2018, which gave birth to “On the Road.” The original idea was that the blog would be a journal of the trip. I’ve been short on reporting on places that take us beyond our present predicament. The Montauk, Long Island junket back in October qualified, although I had been to Montauk as a kid, that is, a lifetime ago. So did Chadd’s Ford, Penn., at Thanksgiving, when we walked the battlefield at Brandywine, where in September 1777 the British guessed smartly and General Washington did not.

The point is the experience, the newness, but only a certain kind of newness. We’re tourists, like people who go for river cruises in Europe, who like museums, cathedrals, statues, fountains. We’ve all done it at some point, to some degree.

But admit it, you’re trading away something to gawk at all that antiquity. It’s not just the expensive tickets, the herding along with the crowd. It’s becoming a hostage to your “bucket list,” in the cliché.  You’ve paid all that money and are finally in the famous place or looking at that famous painting or statue. You’re also lugging the brochures, snapping cellphone photos, mostly forgettable, ducking or not ducking the souvenir vendors and buying overpriced stuff at the gift shop, standing in line at tourist restaurants. You’re vulnerable to airline delays and other travel nightmares. The local people want your money but otherwise wish you’d go away.

Sorry about the grumpiness. Lots of people put up with all that. My instinct: if you want history, read it.

For the Florida trip we looked at airfares from D.C.’s three airports and car rentals through the car rental companies, “Priceline,” etc. We added in the costs of a cab to and from the airport and of checking a suitcase. We thought about the petty officiousness of the TSA gauntlet, the conveyer belts, the scans, the drudgery of the boarding ritual, the sense of helplessness at flight delays and cancellations, and now, more than ever, the germ incubator that is a commercial aircraft.

Our Road Trip had one bottom line: freedom. We stopped in odd places, put up our tent, and cooked our dinner. We walked around a bit, snapped some pictures (many forgettable), then crawled into the tent for the night. In the morning we gulped our cereal, threw the gear in the van, and took off. It wasn’t all hard duty, we holed up in a few roadside motels. We saw Athens, Ohio, Seymour, Ind., Sumner, Ill., Shamrock, Tex., Williams, Ariz., Meridian, Miss. We rushed through Austin, San Antonio, Galveston, as the clock ticked down on my biopsy appointments. We did pick up some brochures. But we were free.

We left before dawn yesterday for our overnight stop in Savannah. Just ten miles out, the angled spire of the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico beckoned, a graceful steel metaphor of that iconic photo of the flagraising on Mount Suribachi.  Then Fredericksburg, Richmond, Roanoke Rapids, Fayetteville. The exits and rest stops flew by.

Memories sneak back. Twenty-odd years ago I drove this route in our snug little Buick Skylark with our son and two younger daughters to Kiawah Island, just south of Charleston, for a free week’s vacation at a house owned by an old friend who had offered us the place. To ease the car crowding, Sandy flew. Michael was 15, the girls were 13 and 10. At Florence, S.C., I left the interstate and let Michael drive. For hours we chugged through forests and swamplands along U.S. 52, skirting the Francis Marion National Forest and giant Lake Moultrie, the mangroves draped in thick Spanish moss. We saw by accident the vernal, hidden corners of the Carolina Low Country, beauty side-by-side with poverty. The kids still talk about it.

In Savannah we got dinner at the loud but easygoing Crystal Beer Palace, the former Gerken Family Grocery. At dusk we walked past the lovely gardens on Harris Street to the Cathedral. The air was clear with a gentle chill, reminding us that it’s still winter, the winter they endure in this genteel Southern place.

But we’re skipping side excursions this time. This trip has a rushed aspect, as if it’s long overdue, a reunion with friends and family long distant, busy with their own lives. We’re keeping our promise to ourselves to see them in our own deliberate way, detouring around the glitter, the pizzazz, the myth of the place that lures millions. Not our scene.

We’re looking forward to all of it, the recharging, the renewal, the lessons to be learned from change and discovery. It won’t last forever, it won’t last long.  But then, no reservations, no waiting. Then a wave goodbye, and a course set for home.

February 24, 2020

2020 is a year of 75th anniversaries of the cataclysmic events of 1945, the last year of World War II. Yesterday, February 23, the Marines who raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Pacific atoll of Iwo Jima had theirs. Last year, the Marine Corps Historical Division at Quantico, Va., ably reported on the battle for Iwo, and on the controversy over the identities of the Marines who helped raise the flag.

On June 15, 1944, Navy aircraft of Task Force 58, the Navy’s primary force in the Pacific, attacked Japanese fortifications on Iwo Jima (the Japanese called it Iwo To). The purpose of those attacks was to determine how well the island was defended at the time. Once the Mariana Islands fell to the Marines in August 1944, the U.S. started long-range air attacks against Japan’s home islands. From Marianas airfields, those raids meant the bombers had to make a 3,000-mile, 16-hour round trip. Japanese radar on Iwo could warn the home islands of the coming raids. Iwo Jima, only 660 miles south of Tokyo, had to be taken.

The invasion by the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, originally scheduled for Jan. 30, was put off to Feb. 3 and then to Feb. 19. Marine General Holland M. Smith demanded 10 days of pre-invasion naval bombardment. The Navy advised that the ships available had to conserve shells for the upcoming Okinawa invasion. He was given three.

On the 19th Marines started landing on color-coded beaches, aiming at capturing two Japanese airfields.  It didn’t go as expected. The Japanese commander had abandoned the usual tactic of defending beaches. Since July 1944 he had built 16 miles of tunnels and bunkers across the island, some blasted through solid rock and equipped with lighting, ventilation, and a water supply system. For the first time in the Pacific, the Japanese laid antipersonnel landmines and buried 500-pound aerial bombs along lanes from the beach. The Japanese commander accurately predicted the sites and direction of the landings.

The Marines’ armored vehicles bogged down in the sloping, loose volcanic soil just off the beaches, which made it nearly impossible to dig foxholes.  As the Marines moved forward from the beaches the Japanese opened fire, using machine guns in pillboxes and artillery that popped out of covered firing pits, then retracted. American dead littered the beach. Despite the heavy losses, the Marines were able to land some 30,000 men that first day.

Over the next three days Marine losses mounted even while they advanced, destroying Japanese positions at the base of Suribachi. On D₊4, Feb. 23, Lieut. Col. Chandler Johnson, commander of 2nd battalion, 28th Marine regiment, 5th Division, sent a reinforced patrol, about 50 men, to climb the slope and if possible raise a flag at the top. First Lieut. Harold Schrier got his men to the summit without encountering resistance. They attached a small 3×5-foot flag to a piece of water pipe and raised it about 10:20 AM.

The flag was seen on the beach below and by Navy ships offshore. Marines cheered and ships’ horns sounded. A photo was taken by Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery. As Lowery headed down the mountain, he was met by Associated Press photographer Joseph Rosenthal. Lowery told Rosenthal he could get some good shots at the top.

About two hours later, the Marines raised a second, larger flag, and Rosenthal snapped the photo that has become immortal. The flag-raising did not represent victory on Iwo Jima. The battle raged on. The 4th Division faced hellish opposition at the northern end of the island.

By D+4, the day the flags were raised, 2,778 Marines had been killed or wounded. The Marines landed their strategic reserve, two regiments of the 3rd Division. By February 27 the Marines had encountered the main Japanese force near airfield No. 2. The Marines by now were aware of the extensive tunnel system that concealed the enemy, which made it impossible to conduct forward reconnaissance. Instead they moved forward to try to attract fire in order to identify enemy positions. The Marines began to use bulldozers and flamethrowers to dislodge the dug-in Japanese. The fighting, including hand-to-hand combat, caused grievous losses.

By early March the Marines were effectively eliminating remaining resistance, but fighting continued. On March 16, without consulting the senior Marine commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Navy’s senior flag officer, declared Iwo “secure,” even while the Japanese kept fighting.   The Army regiment expected to act as an occupying force was deployed early for combat alongside the Marines. Losses continued around “Bloody Gorge” at the north end of the island. The Japanese launched a final attack on March 26, breaking through an Army-Air Force perimeter and causing heavy casualties among pilots and aviation support personnel. The Marines repulsed the assault. Soon after the Army started mop-up operations that continued into June.

In 2019 the final Marine Corps investigation of the identities of the Marines who participated in the second flag-raising on Mount Suribachi concluded that those who appear in the Rosenthal photo are: Corporal Harlon H. Block; Corporal Harold P. Keller; Sergeant  Michael Strank; and Privates First Class Harold H. Schultz, Ira H. Hayes, and Franklin R. Sousley. All six are identified specifically by their positions in the photo.

Strank and Block were killed in action on or about March 1. Sousley died on or about March 21.

In 36 days of combat, the Marine Corps suffered some 24,000 casualties, including 7,000 killed. The Japanese lost nearly their entire 21,000-man force. Only 216 Japanese were taken prisoner—men who either were knocked unconscious or wounded.

In an interview in 1975 with Benis Frank of the Marine Corps History Division, Joe Rosenthal said: “I see those batteries opposing you are not only staggered up in front of you but standing around as you’re coming ashore. The awesome situation! Before they ever reach that peak. … that a photograph can serve to remind us of the contribution of those boys—that was what was important—not who took it. This was a very important contribution to our survival—and they did it. … The important thing is [that] what it is and it does to reflect and remind people that these guys were there.”

February 17, 2020

The young Dominican nun strummed her guitar and sang in a haunting soprano:

Here’s my heart, Lord                                                                                                                  Here’s my heart, Lord                                                                                                                    Speak what is true.

You are strong. You are sure                                                                                                            You are life, You endure                                                                                                                    You are good, always true,                                                                                                              You are light breaking through                                                                                                     

She sang three stanzas, enchanting the modest crowd at our parish church with her melodic, softly turned notes. Although the front fifteen or twenty rows of the church were filled with families with small and medium-size kids, the building was silent.

I sat midway between the altar and the exit, among people I didn’t know.  Families with young children inhabit a different universe than Sandy and me. We get to the early Sunday Mass, the one with no music, the one with the gray heads.  These younger folks show up later, after the Cheerios and Rice Krispies, the cartoons and morning baths, the earnest discussions of which outfit to wear, and so on. The way it used to be for us.

The evening was advertised as a “Family Holy Hour.” I went alone, out of curiosity, Sandy had something else to do. I saw one older couple without kids and an unaccompanied woman. The Dominicans who teach at the nearby Catholic elementary school and the high school near Quantico were putting this on. The parish church was only the venue for the evening. The pastor was there, but as a guest, more or less.

One of the nuns, in her flowing, immaculate white habit, led a decade of the rosary. We heard another song, as beautiful as the first. One of the nuns stood and invited the families to come to the altar and receive the pastor’s silent blessing. She swept her arm forward, the parents in the front row rose and ushered their kids up. They knelt before the priest.

The sister moved up, row by row; at her gesture, families moved to the altar. No one hesitated. Unsure whether I qualified, by myself, as a family, I hung back for a few moments. Finally I moved forward. The woman who had come alone did also. Finally all the nuns, seven or eight of them, knelt together. The pastor led Benediction; we repeated the Divine Praises: Blessed be God, Blessed by His Holy Name, and the rest.

The young nun then stood again and played, this time in sweet, resonant tones that sailed to the rafters. The crowd stood, some sang along, a few young girls swayed with the rhythm. We heard no Scripture readings, no arcane theology, no sermons, only a powerful current of faith in the message of Christ in all its simplicity and clarity, from these women who have given their lives to delivering it. It was there, offered for all, present or not present: unpretentious, uncomplicated, unmistakable.

We stood. It was over. We filed out into the chilly rain. Really, it was no night to be out. But all these folks, with their children, decided they had to be in this place.

Two of our kids went to the Dominican-run elementary school nearby for a couple of years, until the logistics of getting them there became impossible. When we advised the school we had to withdraw them the principal called me—at work—to persuade me to change my mind. The Dominican education is unique, she said. Of course she was right. For years, the nuns who taught at the school lived a few blocks away from us, in a quite ordinary split-foyer. We’d see them, from time to time, on their way to work—that is, to school.

By an odd coincidence, the Dominicans here in northern Virginia belong to the community that has its HQ in Nashville, where we lived for eight years after we got married, and where three of the kids were born. While we were still there the daughter of a cousin of mine entered the order. We visited her at the spectacular St. Cecilia Motherhouse, on a hill west of the city. We walked through the stunningly beautiful halls, getting smiles from those impressive, intimidating white figures hurrying by.

Nashville’s Country Music Marathon course passes the Motherhouse. When I ran the race about 10 years ago the nuns were outside cheering the runners and waving a sign with that line from 2 Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” At that point, around mile 18, it helped.

When my cousin passed away five years ago, I flew down. The funeral was sad yet joyous, as my younger cousin, Sister Bernadette, who had run high schools in Birmingham and Cincinnati, drafted the Motherhouse string ensemble to give her dad a funeral Mass worthy of a bishop, maybe a Pope.

Today other religious orders contract. Catholic dioceses nationwide still reel from scandal. So-called “evangelicals” broadcast their obeisance to the Republican doctrine of Trump worship. Meanwhile, the Dominicans are booming, with communities in 17 states and in Canada, Europe, Australia. Their mission is faith, teaching it, living it. As we walked slowly toward the church exit after their Holy Hour, they smiled and said goodnight. No speeches. No brochures. No collections. Only faith.

February 10, 2020

These cold gray days summon memories. Some memories teach lasting lessons.

Not so long ago, my former boss, a senior Navy aviator who following retirement from active duty headed a small division I worked in at the Office of Naval Research, used the sentence above, time-honored in Navy aviation, to describe his expectations for our team’s response to looming disaster. Looking back at some of the fixes we found ourselves in at ONR between 2005 and 2014, disaster seemed to loom every week.

“Fly the aircraft” describes the responsibility of a pilot who experiences an in-flight system failure that threatens his or her aircraft’s ability to stay airborne. It means simply: do your job, maintain control, execute the mission. Pilots understand it. For non-pilots, a hint of its meaning shows up in a slightly different context in the opening scene of the 2016 movie “Sully,” about the emergency landing of a U.S. Airways flight on the Hudson River in January 2009. Pilot Chesley Sullenberger, recognizing his aircraft has lost both engines, assumes full control with the terse words: “My aircraft.”  His co-pilot replies: “Your aircraft.”

So: this past week: Political cowardice, obscene bluster. Coronavirus. Blizzards, tornadoes, floods across the country; multi-trillion-dollar federal debt. Reminds me of my ONR stint: an out-of-control program director, eventually relieved of duty; backstabbing office politicians; egregious violations of federal human research protections law; indifference, even hostility, of Navy commanders and department heads to policies intended to protect research subjects.

When I think back about it—not often—I remember the lowlights. Sometimes the enemy was shuffling incompetence by mid-grade officers and civilians; often it was gibberish emails and interminable, sleep-inducing staff meetings. “A task transferred (i.e., pitched to someone else) is a task completed” was the operative mindset at HQ. Some of it was sitcom material: Our field “specialists” routinely produced incomprehensible trip reports. A staff attorney recruited the head of the legal department to raid our budget to increase her salary. Then the floodtide of petty stuff: calling Penn State University “U-Penn” and spelling Colombia, the country, the way the name of the Ivy League school in New York is spelled, etc., over and over.

I recall the positives. My boss, brilliant and creative, a Yale Ph.D. and former astronaut, left our team priceless moments, many of which prompted bursts of laughter in the face of bureaucratic insanity. Those walking by our closed-door meetings wondered: Are they seriously disturbed? Good training, he used to say.

“Fly the aircraft”: accomplish the day’s tasks in the face of the BS. Our antidote was carefully thought-out, professionally executed staff work. Often it took hours of rewrites and do-overs. We didn’t lose our cool, send backbiting emails, or lobby outsiders. The default tactic for our team was to take responsibility for the “s—shows” as well as for the winners.

Recognize truth, confront it. Complete the task. When storms threaten, face them sooner, not later. The truth is ground reality, in the dictum, Factum non verbum. What is truth? For a majority of U.S. Senators today, truth is fear of a Trump tweet. Out in the real economy, millions still seek good work, despite the politically jacked-up statistics. The truth is that all work that satisfies an employer who pays for the labor is good work, no work is humble, all work can be a beginning. “Fly the aircraft” applies for those who sit in comfortable corporate offices and those who agonize, alone late at night in front of a laptop, looking for exactly the right word to express truth in honest English, in their job applications or first novels.

I look back now at those nine years as a uniquely bizarre experience, a descent into the Challenger Deep of government management animated by ponderous clichés and governed by policies and procedures routinely ignored. Not to throw stones only one way: I saw the same things on the industry side, where contractors connived to milk the government in ingenious ways, often with amazing success.

This is just my cynicism. Yet that time also offered precious lessons, or one, anyway, in the legacy of a leader who supported good people and knew how to confront crisis. After he retired because of a medical emergency, I pondered the meaning of the aircraft metaphor. I summoned memories of my college-years immersion in Hemingway’s fiction, looking for echoes of common ground. Hemingway pared away adjectives and used three space-bar spaces between words to isolate the meaning of each. He produced spare, austere fiction that won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Many think he pointed to hard truths. Others say he created only delusions.

Eventually Hemingway failed, with a shotgun. But when we think about things that matter, we wonder why we think they matter. We seek truth and joy, but we may instead find doubt, ambiguity, darkness. We hope we respond with integrity. First, faith. Second, good training. Then: “fly the aircraft.”