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About Us
VETERAN'S DAY NOVEMBER 10, 2013
Please, don't bother reading my blog but do contribute to the inspiring heroes of Soldier Ride and The Wounded Warrior Project.
They're doing great work helping those who've been wounded to get back
to the business of living the lives they've fought and sacrificed for
so gallantly.
I don't really feel worthy to write anything about any person who
has served in the military, let alone been killed or wounded on the
job, because I didn't, unless you count a few years as a Brooklyn, New
York teenager in the Civil Air Patrol, the civilian auxiliary of the
United States Air Force, even joining the drill team and being under
the "care" of an active duty Marine drill instructor whose name I
cannot recall.
I'll never forget doing push ups in a real deluge of a
storm, water pouring off my cap and mingling with the deep puddle into
which my face kept going in and out of as we "gave him twenty" for some
transgression, real or imagined. He was a force to be reckoned with and
I had no idea of why he was so intense since he was no longer in Viet
Nam; now I know.
Like Amy and I like to say, we have two speeds: on and off, and so
did this professional soldier. He was either training you to be a
soldier/machine so that you would survive combat or he was off duty -
there was no middle ground for teenagers because he had joined as a
teenager and he had fought teenagers alongside other teenagers and some
of those teenagers had died for you and me, some of them losing life or
limb saving other teenagers. In fact, a lot of our soldiers, especially
our combat soldiers, are and have always been teenagers. So there was
no mercy shown us and we didn't bother asking for any.
The Viet Nam war, or the USA's part of that long, long struggle,
was raging in 1968, the year I turned eighteen. By this time I had been
thrown out of my father's single-parent home because he wanted to lead
the bachelor life unimpeded and make up for lost time and I had, after
my ejection, finally started to smoke marijuana like the other
teenagers I was rooming with in my "on the road" period. To not have
done so would have been problematic and besides, once you start doing
drugs you keep doing drugs.
Around the same time that I was doing push ups in the rain and
doing "Stack The Deck" in drill competitions, I read in a James Bond
novel that the Japanese have an expression: "The man drinks the first
drink and the first drink drinks the second drink" and that is as
perfect a description of drug addiction as you need. They're called
drugs because they do what they want, not what you want them to do.
I now think of drugs as "Slave food," the stuff you give to people
you want to keep down and controllable. However, at the time - and what
a time it was - I was uninformed enough to think that drugs were a part
of the spiritual quest. There are many in this and other cultures who
still maintain this and to them I say you are wrong, I don't care if
you're a shaman or stock Charmin bathroom tissue on the shelves at
WalMart. Drugs are slave food and you can't become one with your
essential being in any meaningful, lasting way by using drugs as your
vehicle to enlightenment - it's not just bad because it is trying
to cheat and take a short-cut, any state you reach using drugs is not
even real, it's drug-induced, and it doesn't count as spiritual
development because it doesn't last and neither do your "enlightened
realizations." It's like thinking that riding a roller coaster makes
you ready to drive an Indy 500 race car or fly a fighter jet. If you
want to link up with your essential being, you have to do it on your
own. Period. That's the nature of reality, you have to do it the real
way, the hard way or it doesn't count. Your mother and father, your
guru, your books, they can't do it for you and neither can drugs, just
as in combat your sergeant or your buddies can't always save you,
though you can bet your life that they'll try.
My essential being is that of a warrior and I say that humbly and
slightly shame-faced because I did not fight in any military actions.
However, all my life I've fought for truth in my way and I've defended
people who've been attacked physically on several occasions throughout
my life starting in childhood (it's in one of my earlier blogs, the
story of me defending a woman being beaten by a man when I was about
six - my father the NYPD cop helped!) I've tried to help people and
save them from harms's way. Spiritual warrior though I am, I'm still
not qualified to do anything but thank those who've served and
sacrificed so that I could fight my fight in the pages of our books and
in my interactions with everyone I meet.
Drugs helped me hide my essential being as a warrior from myself
or else I would have served and fought in Viet Nam, though I probably
would have survived unscathed, not because I'm such a bad-ass, but
because I have one of the luckiest as well as one of the most difficult
astrological charts you'd ever see. I'm obviously luckier than lucky
because of the life I have been able to build for myself with Amy (and
little Zane, our drug-free shaman cat) despite a fairly rocky head
start of a childhood with difficult parents raising myself during the
very scary days of the 1950's in gang-war scarred Brooklyn where, once
again, having an NYPD sergeant for a father helped mightily!
My father had volunteered for the Air Force before World War II
even started and had become one of their first high-altitude flight
technicians, training airmen for combat at a base in Alabama, I
believe. I think I inherited my luckiness from him because he never got
shipped out, didn't even come close, and his knowledge of oxygen helped
save a lot of lives and cured a lot of hang-overs - he told me they'd
line up to get a whiff on Sunday mornings! He even invented a
flame-retarding fuel tank for bombers that was in tests when the war
ended
Dear, sweet people, I've dedicated my life to
making the world a better place, to love, light and laughter, but I'm
not so naive as to think that the time and necessity for combat and
combat deaths and injuries is over. That attitude is unfortunately not
only naive, it is suicidal for us as a nation to think that we are not
under attack for our freedom and our accomplishments. Just think of any
jealous, hateful people you know and think how they'd be with a gun in
their hand and and the authorization from "god" to go forth and slay
the infidels. It also does a huge disservice to every person in the
military and those who've come before them.
Everyone has the right and the duty to protect themselves from the
aggressive actions of others and, unfortunately, there are at the very
least hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in this world who
wake up thinking about how they are going to bring down America and
Americans. This is not a theory, it is a fact. Whether you believe that
we're justified being in Iraq and Afghanistan or not, we're there and
saying that our being there militarily is a waste of human lives is
adding shameful insult to catastrophic injury, death and loss suffered
by our nation's military and those who love them. Dissent may be
patriotic, but doing it without sensitivity to the realities of the
situation is simply idiotic.
War is hell, as the Civil War Major General William Tecumseh
Sherman said so famously. Easy to say, not so easy to live through, as
he was the first to acknowledge. I didn't endure war because I had a
birthday of January 22 and there was a draft lottery in 1968 that was
based on your birthday. I told you I was lucky. I was 333 out of 366
and the Communist Chinese Army would have had to be landing on the beach at Coney
Island before they would have drafted me.
But they didn't draft me and I'm here, lucky as ever, writing on
Veterans Day, a holiday that you don't celebrate or at least you
shouldn't celebrate without pausing and giving thanks for the
incredible contributions of so many people who've given their lives,
been injured, or sacrificed in myriad other ways to keep us free to
celebrate - and don't forget their families.
SO, PLEASE, Please contribute to Soldier Ride and The Wounded Warrior Project,
they're doing great work helping those who've been wounded to get back
to the business of living. And give some thought to dedicating your
life toward making our nation great, toward helping those who deserve
it, and toward doing random acts of kindness. That's my way of saying
thank you to the millions of people who've given their all so that I
can enjoy the lucky part of my astrological chart with Amy and Zane and
my friends and family. I still don't feel worthy of saying anything but
"Thank you." |
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