Ten Days Left

“Loadin up on guns, gas, mudgrips, and some Copenhagen to prepare for the next four years.”

-Post Election Tweet-

I suppose I would be out seeking employment as a Walmart Geezer if 47% Mittens had won.  My tweet, were I a Twitter Tweeter, which I am normally not ever, would be something like: ‘Shooting all my pets, selling my truck, renewing my VIA Senior Pass and eating the residual dog and cat food as a dietary supplement.  Can somebody give me a ride to the Food Bank?’

My sincere empathies to the Twit-er-Tweet twit who left his opinionated stool on my Ethernet stoop.  I at least know the overpowering despair of dashed hopes and dreams.  They are not the privy of the White Man’s Party of Oliphants.  All of us have the option to either wallow in them; or learn from our fear of uncertainty.

I made the mistake of listening to one of those talk programs on the raddy-o last night.  Before I could kill the station, I listened to some Tea Party biggie explain to the raddy-o audience how the decisive win by the Democrats was an affirmation of the country’s desire for the ultra-conservative bent!

Citing three Senate wins and continued grip on the House, he recalled the glory of 2010 yesteryear when the Tea Party came into its own.  In the ensuing two years, they have asserted themselves as the Kaopectate of due process.

Talk about encapsulated in La-La Land!  They rammed their conservative garbage down the RNP throat at convention time, which practically guaranteed that the Republicans would piss off every voting bloc they needed to win the election.

Who did this idiot blame?  Why, what he kept referring to as ‘big government Republicans’ who control the party, that’s who.

I wonder when it might dawn on him and his ilk how much he has angered some of those groups who were so blithely disenfranchised from his Big Red Planet?

Put aside for a moment the women, the gays, the blacks and such; just take a look at the Latinos:

Probably the fastest growing segment of our population, they rejected the squirrely non-position of Mitten’s immigration reform.  Instead, they are presenting an I.O.U. to the Obama Administration that they expect to see a fair and equitable reformation of the immigration laws in 2013.

In other words, now.

Oh boy!  I can’t wait to see the fireworks when the ‘Ultra Conservatives’ go to stonewalling each and every proposal on this issue brought before the House.  Besides the obvious finger-pointing that will invariably ensue, I believe the Latinos will begin to form around something like a middle-class version of La Raza Unida; and march en masse with scythes and pitchforks to capture every political office that comes up for re-election in 2014.

At last, the Latinos have sufficient numbers to be a little more than a mere voting bloc.  Further, they have the inherent cultural pride of never backing down from a fight. 

So, good luck and all for the future, you Redneck Mothers.  Learn to hold your breath before the flash flood of Latino opposition to your arcane polemic washes you away. 

It’s coming.

Whew!  That felt soo good!  After absorbing the venom those people have been interjecting into the landscape for the last two years, I just had to spew a little of it back.

I woke up in my bunk at Tien Sha; it was May 28, 1970, with only ten days left in-country.  Ten Days!  How was I to occupy myself for that long?  I lay there, sweating and thinking.  The events of the past few weeks paraded forth to obscure my ruminations about the future.

I thought about losing the hooch.

A few days after Bullethead arrived, I showed him my hooch.  Was I trying to impress this unimaginative prick?  Perhaps I was.  At the height of my insanity over Hong Kong and being short, I couldn’t sort my motives for anything I did or was going to do.

Two days after the Grand Tour, I ran up to my hooch to rescue the next pack of cigarettes from their captivity.  The hasp was missing.  Puzzled, I opened the door, and there sat Bullethead and one of his lifer cronies.  He looked at me and said, “This is mine now. Clear out your clothes.”  I stared at him and saw that crony was grinning maliciously.  Stripped of my position as Skimmer Coxswain, the totality of my powerlessness finally hit home.

Without another word, I stuffed all my things in my duffel bag, and caught the next cattle car down to Tien Sha.  There wasn’t much more than fatigues and cigarettes left in there; the little TV and my stereo system had already been shipped back to Rockville (The tape deck held a half pound of weed in the chassis—a little welcome home present awaiting me).

Despite my loss of interest in the place, all my buddies being back in the world and all, I couldn’t avoid the feeling of resentment of this asshole exerting his majestic authority to summarily comshaw my hooch without even asking me first.

In retrospect, I need to remind myself that eight months of my tour went by in which I was held above the plight of most sailors by virtue of my appointment to HQ Staff.  Everyone else cringed, unable to avoid the shitty ‘oarders’ being handed out with nauseating regularity by the fucking lifers.

It would be another sixteen years before I learned to count my blessings with gratitude for all the life events that composed…and compromised my feeble existence.

I lingered in the barracks until morning chow was about over before walking to the mess hall.  As I ate in the practically deserted place, the gook women lined up for their meal.  I noticed that they left most of the food we indulged in—meat, eggs, potatoes and such—to build trays up with fruit and vegetables.  They sat together, munching lettuce and celery without salad dressing, and stuffing most of it in their bags, their conical hats and their tunics.

I knew this was thievery, but knowing the food was going to feed their families later made it the act of The Good Thief.  God knows, helping their own to survive by ripping off a little of the limitless bounty of the Americans was paltry payment to supplement their meager salaries.

Walking to the gate, to hitchhike to China Beach, I passed the clinic and felt relief from the encounter with a Navy corpsman. That was three weeks ago.

After eleven months in-country, inhaling whatever was down in the holds of those fuel barges, my childhood hay fever erupted with a vengeance.  I also developed a rash all over my face and upper body to play along with the violent unrelenting sneezes and runny nose.  Joe took one look at me and dispatched me to the Tien Sha clinic.  It was my intention to score a script of Ornade or some other belladonna-based antihistamine.  That had always worked before.

Sick call was pretty much over by mid-morning, so there was no waiting to be seen.  A corpsman in fatigues that had never seen dirt or grease said calmly, “Oh, that’s an awful rash.  We’ll have to put you on medical hold.”  Medical hold was sixty days.  It would be August before I got out of there.

Fighting down a panic attack, I reasoned with him that I would be homeward bound soon and could seek further treatment back in the world, if it came to that.  Would he just give me something for the SHORT time I had left?  The word ‘short’ must have resonated somewhere in his tiny cranium; he relented and handed me some pills to take twice a day.

Maybe it was just the mountain of paper work involved with a medical hold; whatever, I was off the hook and the countdown went on its slowpoke way.

I caught a ride from a passing truck headed down Marble Mountain Road towards China Beach.  

Hitchhiking was a given courtesy accepted by all.  We would wave at any vehicle going our way; the driver would pull over and we’d scramble aboard.  No one had to worry about whether any of their passengers were armed and dangerous—except for us REMF’s; everyone was armed and dangerous—just not directed at our own guys. 

Going to China Beach without an errand was like going to a mall stateside when you didn’t have anything to do. There was nothing left to purchase.  Cameras, b&w TV, stereo system (Mine, not Dad’s) and all such accouterments had long since been shipped home.  I didn’t want a milk shake from the snack bar.

What I wanted…was a drink.

The truck I was on passed through, headed further north up the road.  I knew where to go.  It was a place that Earl had discovered.  The Pearl was almost as resourceful as I used to be. 

There was a Special Forces in-country R&R bivouac removed from China Beach proper.  It had a bar.  Coming level with the short trail just under Marble Mountain, I thumped on the cab roof and my cab pulled over to let me alight.

The bar was almost deserted; only two guys sat at a table sucking on beers.  I ordered a cold one and slouched at the rail.  From past experience, I knew this to be a hotspot for none-of-my-business, more so than some places. 

I no more wanted to coax war stories out of those guys than they wanted to hear me sound off about the woes of being an REMF. 

Silence reigned; the only disturbance an occasional phish as a church key opened the next can of beer.

It was noon. I didn't know it then, but that beer and that Special Forces bar, in the shade of Marble Mountain, was the beginning of a ten day bender; and when it was over, I’d never want another like it.  Not even close.