In the Footsteps of Cabrillo

San Diego Harbor

I’ve lived in some cramped quarters in my younger years. There were studio apartments around the University of Minnesota that stretched the definition of small and compact. Micro apartments were going macro and closets became weekend accommodations. In some cities space-wise living hasn’t changed a lot since them.



Recently my wife and I stayed in just such a condo in San Diego. We were there for the weekend at the invitation of friend from the desert. Our unit was next to theirs. I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say it was like an expanded closet or even rivaled our walk-in back home. Despite the cozy quarters, their building was right on a bay full of sailboats and wonderful harbor sights. There was nothing to complain about.

We spent our first afternoon walking along the harbor with great views of downtown San Diego.

Then we drove up through the Point Loma Ecological Reserve to the Cabrillo National Monument. There we learned about the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo who became the first European to set foot on land that later became the west coast of the United States. The lookout there had a great view of San Diego bay and Coronado Island.

We had lunch at the Hotel Coronado as all the tourists do and strolled the beaches there. It was your typical weekend get-away until my wife went shopping. From that point on what I remembered most about our trip would be a lost memory to my host’s husband… even if I was a better man for it.

The next afternoon our host announced that she wanted to go shopping with Sharon. She suggested her husband and I could entertain ourselves. I’d seen her husband on several occasions and even been partnered with him during social events at our house. Somehow I’d gotten a reputation for being nice to him and he liked me although he thought my name was Michael and couldn’t remember where we first met.

Our host’s husband is a little different. In social settings he can make some folks uncomfortable. Not that long ago he was diagnosed with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. He’s slowly losing his mind…and he knows it. “Can’t remember’ has become an all too familiar refrain coming from him.

For some reason he and I clicked; go figure. I somehow found a connection with him that had eluded all the others. I called it banter and bullshit.

It was a deliberate effort in our conversations to interject more bantering back and forth. What others might describe as nonsensical sayings, phrases and mind-games that we didn’t mind playing with each other. It was totally devoid of posturing and positioning. But the ring of honesty settled well with him and he enjoyed the journey of a wordsmith.

We found a place along the bay to sit and watch sailboats at play and skateboarders sail by. But our bantering lasted only so long and silence began to creep in between us. Then almost by accident I mentioned my time in the service and the proverbial light bulb went on.

He’d enlisted in the Army about the same time as I was getting discharged. But for two service-men reliving the life of olive drab and khaki little had changed. Remarkably his memories of that period were quite lucid.

We spoke in acronyms and chopped jargon-laced sentences. I knew that strange lingo from my own time in the service as well as the research I’d done for my novel “Love in the A Shau.” Turns out, it was a language he remembered well and the memories came tumbling forth.

I asked if he remembered his bag drag (his last day in country-Vietnam) when he dragged his duffel bag of junk and memorabilia toward that waiting airplane? He certainly did.

When did the eagle shit? At the end of each month. Some of his pay went directly home and the rest ended up in his pockets for beer and cigarettes.

Was he a grunt? Damn straight he was and proud of it.

Did he encounter any Donut Dollys? (American Red Cross Volunteers) Not where he was stationed…just care packages in the mail.

I asked about his hooch (living accommodations). He swore a bit and described six cots in a stifling, smelly, moldy old tent. He was never sure if it was the accommodations or his bunk mates that smelled the worse.

Did he experience the pucker factor? In a firefight once but that was all he would say.

He said he flew in Spooky once (a C-47 with 7.62 mini guns mounted in the side windows.) But even with ear plugs he was nearly deaf for a day afterwards.

What about Puff the Magic Dragon? (An Air Force AC-47 aircraft with side-firing mini-guns and flares to support night operations.) He wanted to experience puff but he never did.

What was his happiest day in the Nam? When he became a single-digit midget because he only had single digit days before he shipped out for home.

We exchanged war stories and bravado-laced adventures for a long time. I had my tall (slight exaggerated) tales to tell and he had his. It was a curious combination of straight talk, bullshit, embellishment and exaggeration shared between two old work horses put out to pasture.

When he finally got tired, we went back to the condo for some beer until the ladies returned. But for that brief moment in time he was back ‘in country.’ The memories flowed and painted delicious portraits in his minds-eye. Once again he was young and brash and full of piss and vinegar. And scared…like the rest of us. But it was all good.

Turns out he gave me a wonderful gift that weekend by the bay. A trip back in time when we were both carefree and oblivious to life outside of our own. Before reality and responsibilities dragged us back to the real world. He was alive once again that afternoon if only in his mind.

And I was a better man for taking him back to that Big PX in the Sky.

Breaking the Enigma Code

Memories are a curious kind of phenomena.

I can’t remember a lot about growing up in our single parent household with just my sister and mother. Not because it was sad or traumatic which it wasn’t. And I don’t think there were any incidents that might have repressed certain memories. Recollections of that period in my life are simply few and far between.

On the other hand, my sister has vivid memories of that period growing up. Sometimes she can recall in great detail little incidents and events that seem totally foreign to me. It’s as if I was never there in the first place.  

The same thing happened with some old college friends that I’d recently gotten reacquainted with. Most of them had vivid memories of events that occurred back in school. Some events I can remember while others seem like an empty dream. Really, was I even there?

Granted that was a very crazy period in my life. I’ve already blogged about that decade in ‘My Lost Years.’ I’ve tried to document my life in the military, living in Europe, sequestered in the Amazon, traipsing around the country, falling in and out of love and other sordid adventures before they all escape my memory bank. Trying to recall those glimpses into my past often brings up just vapid images and faint recollections. If it wasn’t for old photographs those mental images might be a total blur.

It’s funny how memories of past relationships and/or friendships can sometimes paint rainbow images in your mind. Yet when confronted with reality your memories don’t always match those of the other party. It’s an interesting paradox. What really happened back then and from whose perspective?

And it isn’t just a question of ‘he said…she said.’ In reality, it’s a present day memory-story of what the other party really meant verses what was or wasn’t stated in the first place. Turns out, you just thought you knew what was stated or implied between the lines.

The paradox that’s seldom addressed is ‘what kind of baggage were you both carrying at the time?’ Have you ever had the experience of thinking you know someone else pretty well and then they turn out to be quite different from many of your expectations? Or reflecting on a past relationship, you could never figure out when the hell it went south and why.

Cretin High School Reunion

 I’ve already waxed philosophically about those folks who have entered my life for brief periods of time and then exited as quietly and subtly as they entered. There has been a plethora of acquaintances from school, the military, past jobs, social organizations, neighbors or other passing friendships. They came and went in a rhythmic pattern but always leaving behind fleeting impressions, temporary feelings and sometimes great memories; real or imagined.

I was at a retirement party recently. These were folks I’ve known (some well, some not so much) for a long time. Most had retired by now while a few were still hanging on. But we were all at that critical juncture in our group lives. Yet most were unaware that what used to be was about to change. Upon her retirement, my wife told our friends that we were ‘moving on.’ Turns out that retirement party was the beginning of the end to the old gang. Some got it. Many others didn’t.

There was once an enigma in one of my past lives. She was a swirling tornado of vivaciousness that swept me off my feet and rendered all logical judgment null and void. It was for me a period of elation and excitement, confusion and disappointment, deep feelings and unmet expectations(at least on my part). Then ultimately that infamous five minute phone call that ended it all. I could never figure out what happened…until now.

My wife would say that it’s a gender thing. She believes that women are much more likely to know and understand what another person is thinking. She claims that most women have an intuitiveness that can detect if another person likes them or not. They can read body language and subtle hints in conversations that paint a pretty clear picture of true intentions and interest.Men aren’t so well equipped. She would be less kind and simply say ‘we’re clueless.’

Upon reflection, I figure most of my fleeting friendships could be explained away simply be-cause of my focus on self, thoughtlessness or just plain immaturity. That would explain high school and a few of the years after that. But after the service it was a little different. Not that I was any more mature. I just think I had a little better handle on other people. The service did that to me. 

 

The friends I made in the service (if ever so briefly) were an entirely different breed. We were both caught up in a time and place not of our making. We were trying to make the best of that situation. I’d venture to guess that if I met them today we would have absolutely nothing in common other than that fleeting window of shared experiences back then. It would probably be a very quick ‘yeah, remember’ with a smile and then as quickly ‘now you-all have a good life.’

On the other side of that relationship spectrum would be the high school and college friends I’ve become reacquainted with after an absence of many years. Not surprisingly, we usually spend the first twenty minutes doing an edited version of ‘So what have you done for the last fifty years?’ interjected with a few comments from (fill in the place here such as high school or college). Then the real fun begins with a genuine focus on the present and future.

Thankfully, none of these reunions have been a rehash of our ‘Glory Days’ but rather a reconnection of the bonds that brought us together in the first place…a long time ago. I’d like to reconnect with a lot more old friends like that. 

Oh, and that enigma from one of my past lives. She became an East Coast ex-pat. Now after fifty years I think I’ve finally broken that enigma code. That realization (or assumption at this point) brings clarity to our past lives and a better understanding of what really was and wasn’t happening back then. 

That’s OK; it’s all good.

As a writer and one always hungry to better understand the human condition I can mine this new discovery to better explain the behavior of one of my characters in ‘Debris.’ It would seem to be a plausible explanation for this character’s confusing behavior toward the one she supposedly cares about.

Great character drama even if it’s fiction. 

Unlike in real life.

Last Chance Gasp

It was my olive drab trilogy.

Three Army bases that formed the nucleus of my two years of military service. In those three strikingly different environments, were three motley collections of soldiers who each came with their own unique storyline and take on life. They were either fellow draftees, R.A.s (Regular Army) or lifers who walked the walk and talked the talk. Among them all were the irascible characters whose actions and backgrounds are the stuff of legion and became fodder for a writer’s imagination.           

Presidio of San Francisco

Fort Polk, Louisiana

Fort Lee, Virginia

The Army bases came in three distinct flavors. First, the Presidio of San Francisco was the high point of my career there. Then Fort Polk, Louisiana during the summer of ‘65 became the lowest point. Sandwiched between that summer in hell and an early discharge came Fort Lee, Virginia.

Fort Lee provided the least memorable of my military experiences and yet in retrospect still garnered some poignant memories as well as some sad ones too. It was the last six months of my military life so it didn’t really matter where they sent me. Anyplace was better than months of ninety degree weather with matching humidity. Besides, autumn in Virginia can be pretty nice.

Fort Lee represented the last phase of my military existence.  It was all coming to an end and somehow I understood there was no going back to what used to be. My outlook on life had changed along with a renewed focus on education, travel and personal growth. Those changes were permanent.

By that point in my brief military career, the marching and inspections and KP were pretty much over. We couldn’t march outside because it was wintertime. There were few inspections and I was a sergeant by then so KP was a thing of the past.

My Army buddies and the assorted souls that inhabited that time period could fill the scrapbook of any aspiring writer. They were real and alive and as crazy as any comic book character. Some of them tortured souls and others just putting in their time. Each came with their own unique story to tell.

After I jumped the rabbit fence and made my way north, I heard from several other friends who had also escaped Fort Hell.

Max Camarillo (Mad Max) got out early to go back to school. He was one unique operator who truly knew how to game the system. He was Trapper John from ‘Mash’ and John Belushi’s (Bluto) from ‘Animal House’ wrapped up in one colorful character.’ In the Nam, he would have been a ‘dog robber’ providing much needed goods from unnamed sources. If you wanted it Max could probably get it…for a price. There were no moral scruples here. It was strictly business for Max.

Not surprisingly, there were no fare-well parties or blow-outs for Max. I’m told he simply was there one day and gone the next. No surprise. Nothing vanishes faster than a man who’s done his time in the Army.

There were several others that left around the same time. With them there was usually a brief flurry of activity, a few over-the-shoulder goodbyes and then silence as more empty bunks filled the barracks. There is no place more somber and solemn than a barracks room empty of old friends.

Another friend, mad-man Cornelius got an occupational discharge. Corny left even faster than Max. He didn’t even bother to get all the necessary discharge forms signed. He just signed them himself and left his bunk untouched. Minutes after his departure, it was stripped clean. His blankets, sheets and pillow became barter material for the newest resident ‘dog robber.’

45 Days to go before discharge from the Army

Like a lot of other servicemen, I’d promised myself I wasn’t going back home while I was on leave. The pain of having to leave home again wasn’t worth the few weeks spent there.

Staying true to that promise, I opted to spend the Christmas holidays with a friend in Pittsburg. Perhaps not the smartest decision I made since there was someone back home at the time. But I was young and dumb and pretty thoughtless when it came to relationships.

And like my weekend sojourns to Beaumont, Texas when I was in the southland I spent many a weekend in D.C. mingling with the masses and pretending to be a civilian. That was when you could traverse the mall at night or journey into the darker parts of town in search of a cold beer and not worry about getting mugged. The art galleries and Smithsonian and bookstores all provided a welcome relief from a year and a half of khaki blandness.

There was one Grey Line tour of New York thrown in but that only proved to me that the Big Apple was too big a bite for a Midwestern neophyte like me.

Every base has its own select group of entrepreneurs. Ours was no different. There was one lifer whose family lived in D.C. Every Friday night he would park in front of the mess hall and wait for eager recruits clutching their weekend pass. The cost was $25.00 bucks for a round trip passage to downtown D.C. Then a pickup nearby on Sunday afternoon.

The van driver was making a fortune each weekend just by driving home to see his own family and girlfriend. At $25.00 a head, five bodies each weekend, four weekends a month, he was clearing $500.00 a month and no taxes. And that was in 1966.

You could always tell when someone reenlisted. There was usually a new car, often a Chevy super sport or similar muscle car, prominently parked in the enlisted men’s lot. What most of those poor saps didn’t know was that their next assignment was usually Vietnam or Korea where their new cars would never follow.

Two friends stick out in my mind while I was at Fort Lee. Both were deep in their own inner turmoil brought on by reckless decisions and deep regrets afterwards.

 

The first was my friend Jerry or Gerard as he was known in his native Ireland. He had been in the U.S. Army for several years in Germany then left when his enlistment was over. His dream was to be a full-time playwright and novelist. But he said there were more playwrights in his native Dublin than regular people so he wanted to give New York a try.

He did so for a while and then decided he wanted to visit Vietnam as a reporter. So naturally, he enlisted again in the Army at age thirty. I could never wrap my understanding around why he re-upped. He was a brilliant guy, very quiet and probably gay which would have put him on unsteady ground in the 60s…in the military. Why he didn’t travel to Vietnam on his own, I’ll never know.

Nevertheless we had wonderful conversations at night, sitting around the office or sharing a coffee at the post restaurant. When I first meet him he was bidding his time at Fort Lee before his new papers came through and he was off to Southeast Asia. The times we shared talking theater and writing and story-telling still linger with me to this day.

While writing this blog I looked him up on Google. I came across a number of dispatches and newspaper articles Jerry wrote for Stars and Stripes from 1966 through 1967. I have no idea if he was transferred back stateside after that, got killed over there or just disappeared into that vast caldron called past friends and acquaintances. He was one of a kind. I treasure the few pictures I have of us together.

Another friend’s story whose ending remains a mystery to this day had to do with one hasty decision and six years of regret.

One of the first guys I met in my office was the staff photographer. We both shared a love of the Beatles, rock and roll music, travel and pretty girls. The Beatles we could listen to each night. Rock and roll followed us on his transitory radio. Travel for me were exaggerated tales of that city by the bay and my summer in hell. He hadn’t done much traveling at all.

The pretty girls were a figment of our lusty imaginations. At least for me it was. With exception of the girl back home, the imagination had to suffice where real wasn’t around.  His was a much sadder story.

Upon their graduation from high school, his girlfriend had traveled to Florida for summer work before college began. He stayed home and dreamt about their time on campus in the fall. When she returned she was two months pregnant from a foolish encounter on the beach with a hand-some lifeguard. My friend was devastated. His entire world had just blown up in his face.

Without talking to anyone, my friend marched down to the nearest recruiting office and joined the Army for a six year enlistment. Less than a month later, his girlfriend was back in his life begging for his forgiveness and understanding. She was willing to give up the baby if that’s what he wanted.

But it was too little too late at that point. By then my friend was in his first week of basic training and ready to kill himself.

Fortunately he survived that drama in his life and by the time we met he had resigned himself to five and a half years left in the service and the girlfriend back home who had betrayed him. We’d stay up late at night talking smack and expressing fond hopes for the future. I was always careful not to mention his remaining time in the service or that girl back home.

I never did find out if he got together with his old girlfriend again…or if he found someone else to fill that void…o somehow found peace with his five and a half years left in the service. I hope something worked out for him. He was a great guy; one of the nicest I’d met during that period in my life.

Several weeks before my discharge, the captain called me into his office. With patriotism and confidence written all over his face, he reminded me that I had volunteered for duty in Vietnam back in 1964. Smiling broadly, the captain assured me…no, he guaranteed me…that with my reenlistment I would be on my way to Vietnam within the month. He quickly pointed out that as a newly ordained sergeant this was my last great chance to continue a stellar career in ‘this man’s army.’

 I politely declined his most generous offer.

Going Back into the A Shau

There are many ways to die in the A Shau (pronounced A-Shaw) Valley in South Vietnam. It could be a clean shot from a sniper, a slow painful death from a poison bunji stake or the instant flash and demise from a claymore mine. I survived a number of firefights and battles in the A Shau Valley but now it looks as if I may have to go back there one more time.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way… or so I thought. After writing “Love in the A Shau,” I assumed I had put that part of my fictional past behind me. I thought I was done falling in love freshman year, feeling the exhilaration and angst of that first romantic entanglement, harboring wonderful fantasies of our future together and ultimately experiencing the painful realization that it wasn’t meant to be.

I thought I was done reliving that long, monotonous bus ride from Minnesota down to boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. A reflective ride in the middle of the night when my sweetheart and all my friends were safely ensconced in their beds, dreaming of a bright collegiate future ahead of them.

But much to my surprise and chagrin, my journey as author and protagonist wasn’t over yet. For reasons that gradually began build in my subconscious, I slowly came to realize that I had to return to the A Shau and rewrite the story there. My journey back in time wasn’t over yet. 

And I’m very grateful for that. 

With the advent of POD (print on demand) and the help of several very talented associates, I am now able to go back to change, edit, improve and hopefully enhance the story of Daniel and Colleen in “Love in the A Shau.”

It will be labeled as the second edition and I think the changes will be subtle enough as to not rob my first readers with any changes that resemble a different storyline. But it will resolve my desire to make improvements that bring final closure to this story.

Since the first publication of my novel “Love in the A Shau” last fall, the feedback I’ve received has been encouraging but also surprising at times. Overall, there seemed to be two consistent messages from all the comments I’ve received.

Readers loved the segments on Vietnam. This was especially surprising coming from my female readers. I worried that the graphic descriptions of war and the profanity of military talk would turn off my female readers.  I feared they might see it as just gratuitous profanity used for shock value. But the opposite was true. As one friend mentioned out to me, quite pointedly. “Oh, come on, Denis, give us credit. We’re much smarter than that. We understand the violence of war and the profanity-laced dialogue that comes with the territory. It just added to the flavor of the moment and painted a vivid picture of the profound changes your protagonist was going through.”

Since then, I’ve found even more relevant bits of dialogue and details I’d like to add to the Vietnam segments if I were to do a rewrite.

But it was the second message that gave me pause. Most of the reviewers found the storyline interesting and quite engaging…after a while. The red flag for me as a storyteller was the comment: “after a while.” 

They said the storyline was compelling…after the first section of the book which they found a bit slow. I was never able to pin-point exactly where the story began to pick up speed until a friend pointed out where she felt the story actually began to accelerate. So I finally had a roadmap for a rewrite. At that point, I decided that with the clear advantages of POD, I could, indeed, go back into the A Shau and correct those earlier writing flaws. 

There were also a couple of segments I had deleted from the first edition that in retrospect, I wanted to put back into the second edition. With POD, it was a simple exercise in rewriting those segments that needed work, adding those segments that had been left out, changing some font sizes and including a quote that struck me as timely and relevant.

“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”

It might be a tough trip back because I tend to get very vested into my characters. Yet it’s not often that I get to go back in time and revisit the bloody battlefield and detail the death and gore and dying all for the sake of adding realism to that moment in time.

Or to go back on campus and enumerate the enounces of campus life where most of the women

were virgins and manual dexterity with the boys didn’t refer to their working on cars. 

And re-examine a love lost amid the dissipation of fragmented moments and changing personalities. Proving once again that in fiction you really can go back to what once was and change it for the better. It’ll be an interesting journey back in time once again. But I think the journey will be well worth the effort if I can keep my fear of dying in battle and conflicting emotions of love in tack.

It’s all fiction anyway.

In the end, reality is a lot more realistic.

Just not as interesting.

Click here to visit the website for 'Love in the A Shau'