Wasting Time Magazine

A post-election update: this blog thread is probably at an end but not my blogging about how to meet the demands of the new situation. Tune in again at a different thread TBD! Last post-election thoughts below.

2024-11Nov-11mon, Veterans Day

The Veterans for Harris t-shirt has been put away, the bank account is slowly recovering from daily purchases at big boxes, the browser is configured to replace the president-elect’s name with the word “Smith.” I have no regrets for the effort I put in: the tornado of conversations–warm, satisfying, community-building even with people who disagreed–was priceless. Now the long fight begins.

And fight we must. Vet the Vote observed this in an email this morning:

“Just a week ago, our feeds were flooded with messages that sowed doubt and division.  Abruptly, they’ve largely stopped.  Those who seek to undermine our self government will try again. “

Best of wishes to all and good hunting.

Statistics

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When a certain person made a goofy picture in Arlington Cemetery, a place for somber reflection, this veteran decided to return to “service.” Wearing the shirt and a hat with various military impedimentia that establish my bona fides, I dove into a part-time job of visiting WalMarts, Home Depots, Costcos, Safeways, Harbor Freights and such. I will be purty much daily blogging my interactions with the most recent interactions at the top. Emendations and additions will be frequent as memories* cascade.

*You know: one sparks another, with your control of them** pretty much the same as in a dream.

**Witnessing that without judgement is a common core practice of meditation.***

***Ok, I’ll stop now. But this stuff just writes itself. Jeez. 🙂

And about this “GrocerySpy^TM” business below: just a cartoony moniker that I use as a goofy (albeit omniscient) character and pseudonym in my art.

About me and service:

• I served three years in Aschaffenburg, Germany in the 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division. Thank you, citizens of Aschaffenburg, for your nearly-infinite patience with us. We called you “rads,” short for comrades.
• 
• I was in the Combat Support Company, in which at the time were concentrated specialized weapons like the TOW missile (which was one of my jobs), radars that could tell when somebody was walking up in the night, mortars bigger than the “line” companies had, etc.
• In 1976-1979, we didn’t need to fight: that’s what deterrence should do and did, the Russians, namely the First Guard Tank Army across the East German border from us, going home after we just tuckered them out, I guess. (P.S. Perhaps said Tank Army should have stayed at home, as their lineage going back to Stalingrad days did not save them from having their asses handed to them early in the invasion of Ukraine.)
• So “the portfolio of my manhood,” as this New Yorker cartoon puts it, does not include combat. But we sure practiced, in itself kinda dangerous. And now that same battalion is at Hohenfels, Germany’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center, the Harvard of infantry combat. They can pretend to be any opposing force (“opfor”) your visiting battalion or brigade needs to practice against. Arab population? They do that. Russian? They do that. They probably know every ravine in that place, and how and where to drive over your commo wire in the middle of the night, showing up behind you when your field kitchen is trying to make you eggs.
• 
• We had M-1113s, a lightly armored tracked vehicle that could even swim across rivers like the Main River. Like, in the middle of the night, with no lights, bobbing and crabbing our way. Fun and scary. (Later models lost this ability due to some up-armoring, losing what we called the “surfboard,” a wide extensible panel on the vehicle’s front which prevented water from sloshing into my driver’s hatch, glug.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M113_armored_personnel_carrier#/media/File:Allied_Spirit_I_150126-A-LO967-001.jpg
• The diversity of our unit was really high. Don’t know if I lived with a “white” guy most of the time. Black Muslims from Trenton, Rastafarians, Mexican-descent (horse thieves, tee hee) from Austin, Puerto Ricans, etc. Even an odd concentration of Navajo/Four Corners dudes in our Redeye manpad platoon. A Rastafarian! Fun mostly, sure a wake-up call for white guy from North Seattle. The service, all of them, is where Americans can go to meet America in a rich way that I don’t know is replicated elsewhere in society.
• I left the service because I wanted to go to school and have a life and did so. Thank you GI Bill. The service never quite left me tho, new knowledge of how much can be accomplished in tough circumstances especially. Stranded in Edmonds late night and home is seven miles away, sheesh, I’ll just walk there. We did twenty-five in Infantry School overnight and slept on the company street when we got back.

2024-11Nov-08fri

Well, well, well, looks like service is still needed for the probably difficult and chaotic days to come! As an infantry vet, within a half-hour of learning the result, I had a three-point concrete plan for the short-term. As a Buddhist, I view the election results as a thing I am “averse” to but my practice counsels patience/equanimity, treating the results the same as as a thing I am “attached” to (that I desire).

More on my practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojong

More on my beliefs about what is to come: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable I believe we have moved into “Extremistan.”

2024-11Nov-01fri

A nice Costco like-your-shirt to round off this campaign but R, a Costco checker still clearly frosty about it despite agreeing that my September 30th challenger was a great example of American womanhood: she took me on despite being a third my age. Well worth defending a country which raises such young women!

2024-10Oct-27sun

2024-10Oct-24thu

Safeway: Complimented for my “patriotism,“ that’s a new one, by an old Navy vet (dog tag still on his key chain) who served aboard these interesting craft: amphibious transport docks, delivering Marines and supplies to beaches, not by grounding themselves, but by being a mother ship from which smaller vessels easily depart. These smaller vessels, amphibious vehicles really, are a scary upscaling of an M113’s capacity and seaworthiness. An AAV (Assault Amphibious Vehicle) can have two dozen dudes in it and can function in Douglas sea state 5, yikes indeed to those of us given to seasickness. If you don’t have a vivid picture of what “service” is, picture the pitching, yawing interior of one of these filled with guys, some of them seasick, water inevitably sloshing around (c’mon bilge pump!). And that’s just in training. We ask a lot of our young people. And they answer.

A passing but always-welcome likeyourshirt. 🙂

2024-10Oct-22tue

Oy, big slowdown since Saturday: I gotta code…a cold. Cough! Ahem. First one in five-ish years, just thankful it isn’t Covid. Thank you to all those who masked during those years, it helped drive down flu and colds, at least in my personal experience, though recently not as much nationally as that first year (geek out to CDC FluView). The B/Yamagata lineage of flu was driven extinct!

But did meet an Air Force vet, a rear-seater in F-4’s, the guy running the radar and the weapons. GS^TM was the object of an F-4’s attention at Hohenfels Germany, it screaming freakily low directly over our TOW missile position, becoming a dot as it climbed away, from our vantage point being pulled straight up on an immense yo-yo string . The vet was also an airbase’s “provost,” which I had to look up: policing, access control, security.

[2024-10Oct-20sun GS^tm must confess that it’s hard to see the efficacy of this campaign. Thus added emphasis on just plain reaching out to those who seem to be suffering, surely something that a certain Presidential candidate has increased. You look like you’re in pain in the YouTube comments?, yeah, GS^tm will see if there’s something consolatory to reply. Try it! The recipient sometimes replies that they do feel better. (Big not-so-secret: you’ll feel better too, more integrated into the web of your society.)]

2024-10Oct-17thu

Kaiser Permanente Complimented for both service and sanity, a new class of accolade from a gray-beard waiting for pharmacy services: “My pleasure.” Plus a like-your-shirt.

Seattle (Market) Showbox Not a single comment, tho ’twas mostly dark as Unwound played. Uhh, what?, you’re unaware of them? Olympia’s discordant, cathartic, searing band that is closer to many hearts than Nirvana? Thank you Unwound (go look for God’s sake) for the songs that touched us who didn’t exactly find the world easy to emotionally navigate.

2024-10Oct-16wed

Not so many errands = not so many comments, but here are some tidbits: brothers G & W at 4th & H in Tumwater are now up to full speed Halloween-izing their yards into a forest of skeletons and a zombie-scape. Full-size candy bars, y’all, just sayin’. Paused to say hello to them and J the mailman. | Mom and daughter peppered by checker with guesses about which agency they worked for, Corrections? Attorney General? Sec of State? Nope: L & I. My Ecology service was honored by them; told them to hang in there, the State figures out a way to keep you productive even when you’ve got problems (and who doesn’t?). Day 20-to-go.

2024-10Oct-14mon

All quiet on the Tumwater front? Well, I’m a bit hobbled and not getting out as much. I did overhear, however, at Safeway, a sotto voce remark to a husband: “Like his shirt.” That’s new!

2024-10Oct-11fri

Home Depot/Costco/Safeway, it’s all a bit of a blur at this point:

Satisfying fist-bumps with W. | An 11D. | A Vietnam-era truck driver bringing up-country the vital food of a modern armed force: POL — Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants. We didn’t have “gas stations” in Germany, we had “POL points.” He sat in a bunker for fourteen days during the Tet Offensive wondering if he’d live or die. All lived, although 122mm rockets, bane of the fixed bases, landed daily, missing half a million gallons of flammables. Read up on the history of our wars, folks, it helps the older veterans to know that younger people care to know their struggle, right or wrong. We both agreed that keeping the nuclear codes from a certain candidate made sense, lest our arsenal be unleashed because Taylor Swift dissed the dude during a performance. | Brothers G and W at the bottom of the hill going all in on Halloween, skeletons abounding in one yard, zombies abounding in the neighboring one, G quizzical about my support of Harris but we sure agree on zombies. Because America! | Oh, three like-your-shirts and four tilapia. 🙂

2024-10Oct-10thu

Kaiser Perrmanente:

Met E in the parking lot — like your shirt! — he sporting a Willie Nelson shirt that said something similar. E was a door gunner on a Chinook helicopter in Vietnam, not as perilous then as being one on a Huey but he avers that they still came home with holes in them.

A, medic in a Ranger battalion, shared a picture of a skeleton “cooking” a skeletal cat and skeletal dog on a grill in his front yard, a sly reference at Halloween to you-know-what. 🙂

2024-10Oct-08tue

A “nice-shirt” (once I revealed its lower level to my interlocutor across the ILK bar) was followed by a conversation re: whether the Russians are getting their asses handed to them or not. We all agreed that if one uses aircraft carrier crew as infantry, one’s ass is being handed to them. Signed, a fully muscle-memory-trained ex-NATO infantryman.

2024-10Oct-07mon

Kabooms from JBLM, 10:25 PM mortar practice again. Do you need to practice at night? Yes, you need to practice at night.

Vic’s Pizza in Wildwood: “Nice shirt” led to nice conversation, emphasizing The Long Game, that it might take years to turn a person’s viewpoint around. And that it’s important to verbalize our beliefs so that a person in a bubble knows that alternatives exist, even if they don’t produce change right away.

Safeway: Met a Vietnam vet, infantry, deployed in 1970, still wearing an Army t-shirt, dang, service sure sticks with us a long time.

2024-10Oct-06sun

In the ‘hood at the bottom of my hill: CSM W, even though I could tell he might not care for my shirt, gave me his extra set of instructions on how to set up the twelve-foot tall skeleton from Home Depot that we both have, because that’s how command sergeant-majors roll: this soldier (me) wants to succeed, how can CSM W help him do that? The non-commissioned officer corps of the Army (sorry, don’t know the other services) is our Army’s superpower. Officers know why to do a mission; sergeants know how to do the mission; enlisted (me) do the mission and stay alive if we have heeded our sergeants. Thank you CSM W.

Walmart: Navy destroyer vet did agree that walls become floors on such vessels but wished to disengage ASAP, hmmm. Otherwise adopting Plan B (making sure that people feel noticed as human beings rather than disposable consumers, a form of soft power):

• Sought advice on the sewing aisle re: fusible and recall to the person I shared that section of the aisle with that I had a dream a few days ago in which I learned on the planet Mars how to use a serger, I swear to God.
• Chatted up G in men’s clothing re: pyramids and HP Lovecraft.
• Witnessed a family leaving self-checkout singing and snapping their fingers to the Addams Family theme. Quizzed checker T and she agreed: Gomez was the very model of a loving family man.

Fred Meyer: No comments, but a new Carhart hat in fetching desert tones purchased, a replacement for the cap above, now lost somewhere on the battlefield. And some wound dressings, let’s not go into it! 🙂 Temporary, I promise.

2024-10Oct-04fri

Olympia Arts Walk: Haha! Not a single comment. Interesting: must’ve passed a thousand people. Logical conclusions? They all either agree or are in the happy state of bouncing from fun thing to fun thing with their friends, joyous to be Olympians, too busy to think about politics for a blessed moment. Your call.

J at ILK told a tale from serving in the infantry, a cautionary one for all those who expect perfection from their military: his squad had to skedaddle from being shelled by our own side, entreaties to the artillery unit to stop being answered with “rounds are in the weapon, sorry, gotta fire them!” Whenever a military screwup happens, remember, these are fallible human beings, give them a bit of slack.

2024-10Oct-02wed

Home Depot: I’ll be famous in the internal-only blog of HD. at least for fifteen minutes, a picture having been taken of an associate and me wearing these fantastic-seeming merino wool gloves. (The index and thumb fingers may both use the face of a touch screen.) They were enthusiastic about my art/political project and I can’t wait for the need to wear the gloves. Wool everything plus unbreathable plastic for the win. My desire to wear them means rain in this climate but as a Norwegian saying goes: there’s no wrong weather, just wrong clothes.

Agreeable disagreer? Wow, a 25-years of service 11B across-the Kuwaiti-2003-berm guy in Home Dept. Shook his hand. Twice. Didn’t say he liked my shirt, but did say he was glad we were both served. He decoded my hat from right to left easily: blue circle = infantry; diagonal stripes = “broken TV” = 3rd Infantry Division, but didn’t know the left-most bit, my battalion, 1/4th Inf. It’s remarkable that American infantryman can have a 25 year career; the average time between when a Russian infantryman reaches deployment and their becoming a casualty is said to be 4.5 months, although some, mere days. Remarkable that this elite American warrior loves arugula and had a mess of it for breakfast that very morning. Equally remarkable that an excellent infantry squad could seemingly be formed in an hour or so at Home Depot, complete with a senior sergeant.

Costco: a Marine who was in on the latter stages of the siege of Khe Sanh. To have met two in a few weeks is remarkable, see below. Historical context: for the Marines, it’s like being at Iwo Jima. P.s. One way to think about Vietnam; the US wasn’t beaten in Vietnam, it got tired of the failed government of South Vietnam and went home.

Spoke with a charming three-generation family, little M was the only one of grandfather-daughter-granddaughter trio I learned the names of. But I’ll remember their enthusiasm for this kooky project. His father wouldn’t sign the paper for him to go at 17 years old, unlike my father.

A like-your-shirt from an Area 51 Security guard, at least that’s what his hat said (gotta get me one of those but not at the cost of driving there to get it, as he did) We compared notes on the desolate beauty of the American Southwest and deserted highways. Hadn’t served, but tried and was given medical discharge; school, wife and life intervened.

Haul for the day: two agreeable disageers, 5 like-your-shirt’s and some PVC pipe and merino wool gloves.

2024-10Oct-01tue

Well, well, well! A neighbor turns out to be a 12B, Combat Engineer. See below for what means. And here I just thought they had nicer nasturtiums than I did.

J at ILK again, guess he’ll have to drop out of the story, because I can tell we’re going to talk to each a lot: from infantryman to child psychologist, didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Met a remarkable trans person at a big box, engaging and witty*. “Like your shirt!” That’s all it takes to start a conversation with me. 🙂 Well. This person –and I couldn’t tell transit starting-point or -end point and it don’t matter–said that the danger of hassles was palpably rising over the last year. Like, bad. That is the wrong direction–the historical direction is quite clear: love thy neighbor no matter what flag they fly under. I left them with what I hope was a consoling reminder, that many vets have a strong urge to protect vulnerable people, and don’t care what kind of vulnerable, speaking for myself. And there are vets everywhere, you don’t see them because they look like you. They are you.

*Pro tip: If you want to help a woman out of a bad situation, pretend you’re their high school mate: “Hey!, it’s been so long. Do you want to go for a drink right now and leave your ‘friends’ for a bit?”

Safeway self-check was where an elderly non-vet who liked-my-shirt told me that his father trained for World War I but missed it because the war ended before deployment! War is weird, my father missed dropping bombs from a B-24 because the war ended before his training did. Time is also weird, 97 year-old Mom having spoken as a young girl to an elderly Civil War vet.

2024-09Sep-30mon

A combat engineer at Costco asked me where I’d got my shirt (Amazon, where else?), one of the jobs that’s even more hair-raising than infantry: Infantry: “Hey, engineers, please build us a bridge, yer gonna be under fire ’cause they fer sure know you’re coming and take out that barbed wire and mines so we can drink water and eat MRE Skittles on top of those guys’ positions?” Combat engineers: “Sure, what could go wrong?”

A submariner a few minutes after, the same. He was on subs in the Cold War; they’d get underneath Soviet ships and take pictures of their bottom through the periscope, determining what underwater devices they had, sonar perhaps. Submariners also have hair-raising dangers besides the sea itself: US deaths in WWII were 20%, German 75%. Yikes.

A “double hater” and I exchanged views at checkout, she believing that Biden/Harris started too many wars, where Trump didn’t. Some things in Harris’ book appeared to her to be lies. (How much of her life Beryl overlapped with was one. Appears to be 31 years? Not sure what that’s about.) We’re in too many imperial wars, I agreed, thinking she might be referring to African stationing of our troops but will try to figure it out. Let’s keep the nuclear button away from “that asshole,” she said in a withering tone. Agreed! We left friends and knowing each other’s names, although I could tell it was stressful to start the convo with me. Passionate!

Walmart:

• Might have been nervous glances, I don’t know, I was too busy looking for hair oil, what the heck does it even look like!
• The lesbian couple in front of me at checkout were surely in love, perhaps married, good on them, they were pushing each other in odd ways and smooching (<- check this article out!) just reveling in their joy. Which I would not interrupt, no-sir! Didn’t get a chance to say hi even.
• A gentleman was with his mother in the canned vegetable aisle and he had this on the back of his hoody. Euler’s number. Wow. On the canned vegetable aisle. Hmmm.
• 

Safeway: Shonda appears on board with the Smile-Off. See below for this hare-brained idea to spread joy.

A little afraid to check my credit union balance, this everyday purchase of a few things is kinda adding up. An investment I’m so willing to make. You should see my fridge! 🙂 Thank you, America, for the Social Security check.

2024-09Sep-29sun

Phew, three hours. Three big box stores and migrating slowly home on the bike through garden and street corner conversations. Costco’s three like-your-shirts and one cool-shirt-dude were welcome. Walmart’s nervous glances also welcome. Safeway’s checker, in a somewhat related note, agreed that a Smile-Off between two smilers at the Custer location versus one mega-smiler at the Trosper location would be an interesting match that could go either way. All three are adding joy to their customers, something in short supply in a certain presidential camp.

2024-09Sep-28sat

3rd and Mercer in Seattle: “like your shirt.: That’s all. (That’s enough. 🙂 )

Agreer: “Hey, I like your shirt.” Artillery guy. Kaiser Permanente lot (flu and covid in the same arm, starting to hurt)

• Artillery “King of battle,” so-called bc it causes 80+% of the casualties in modern wars, just ask the Ukrainians.
• Infantry? “Queen of battle.”
• Not sure where that leaves the tank corps in this royal lineage of lore and tradition. Their comm shop better get on it.

Anarchist Book Fair, Seattle Center

A Palestine-oriented tabler called GS^tm to account, angrily, angered, did I mention she was angry? : how could you support blowing up all those civilians in Gaza? I said that I had, as an infantryman, no matter how distant the training, a visceral reaction to October 7th: “protect those Israelis!” And that I was sure other types of professionals and volunteers were taking care of the civilians, however much they could. She countered with: “Well, October 7th was but the latest in a long series of injustices that the Gazans have suffered.” True. I’ve read Joe Sacco’s excellent account of further-back history. I asked, how may I balance these two urges: protect people vs. get those guys in the tunnels? IDF has killed far too many, what’s going on? I know that many of those Israeli infantrymen are shit-scared; we, as a clan, I think, don’t want to hurt people, we want to protect people. We parted peacefully, to both our relief I’m sure, because America. Hmmmm. Big poser here. Dilemma. False dilemma? One that even later occasioned a rare argument–voices lifted, interrupting each other–between two life long friends. We parted speaking of dinner menus, friends again, thank god.

The fair was probably the biggest concentration of double-haters I’ve talked to. Pretty reasonable reasons that I heard. (I would like to see the popular vote be so large that a certain candidate can’t ignore or weasel out of it). By far. In 1979, my anarchist friends would have fit around a dinner table, but there were like 300 people there!

Interesting canvassing people on the ethics of wearing a keffiyeh, also known in Arabic as a hattah (حَطَّة, ḥaṭṭa), thank you Wikipedia). Is it cultural appropriation? Nobody thought so, one remarking that a Palestinian neighbor A-OKed it. GS^tm got his years ago and they are the single most useful piece of cloth he owns: beach towel, bath towel, gift wrap, berry gathering, cold scarf, shade scarf, sweat rag, tablecloth, rolled up pillow, you name it. Plus they’re just beautiful.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Reina91

Like your shirt: a Marine patron of ILK Lodge. 🙂

2024-09Sep-27fri

Talked to J at ILK , who once served in the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry, JBLM (we hear kabooms from their training here in Olympia, crummy windows even rattle a bit), a unit with an even longer lineage than the 4th. Said that hashish was smoked by servicemen in his Afghan deployments, so he well knew our mid-seventies predilections in Germany, soldiers being soldiers. 🙂

2024-09Sep-26thu

Talked to a guy who wasn’t wearing clothing identifying him as a veteran but he hopped out of car in a veteran spot at Home Depot so I gently accosted him and asked how he served and it turned out that he was a Ranger. A long time serving Ranger one of the original “plank holders” of the 2nd Battalion, who were going to have their 50th reunion soon and said he knew an ex-coworker of mine who was a Ranger who had to get out because of a bad break during a practice jump. He also knew of the death of Mark Yamane during a parachute drop at Port Salines. I told him of my connection to the Yamane family and he knew of Mark’s sacrifice jumping onto an “undefended” defended airport. Once again, that Ranger knew all about what happened that day. Fallen soldiers are memorialized in part by the institutional memory of their unit.

Also at Home Depot I stopped a vet who had worked on radios and communications gear and in the early 70s in Vietnam. I told him yeah that’s where our army outperforms other armies, in logistics and communications. The Russians are relying on cell phones and walkie talkies and Hezbollah on (explosive) pagers. And that I heard a high British defense minister of some kind say that they could not keep up with us on weapons, they were struggling to keep up on communications and interoperability. So anybody thinking our services are weak–and there are some–don’t have enough context in my opinion.

2024-09Sep-21sat

Agreer: A guy in a food truck said “I like your shirt,” so I walked over and his cousin was actually the vet and she had been on Navy destroyers* for 8 years like my uncle had been in the fifties. She said that on a destroyer (in which a wall might become a floor because the boat rolls mightily in heavy sea conditions), which she drove as part of her duties, there’s a wire above the helm position that you hang on to so that you can swing with gravity regardless of what the ship is doing and still steer the ship. Plus she was part of the 5% that never got seasick even in what she said were 90 ft swells. Mediterranean duty mostly, sometimes out into the Atlantic. Destroyers are the backbone of the fleet, racing here and there to put out fires and protect bigger vessels with their air defense and anti-submarine weapons, demonstrating freedom of navigation through the Taiwan Straits and elsewhere, and doing, well, everything. Three destroyers are collaborating with other navies in the Red Sea and around Yemen to protect shipping, unfortunately not perfectly, but so astoundingly successful that many militaries are looking at return policies for their anti-ship cruise missiles.

*Yeah, creepy name. From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer : In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast, maneuverable, long-endurance warship intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet, convoy, or carrier battle group and defend them against a wide range of general threats. They were originally conceived in 1885 by Fernando Villaamil for the Spanish Navy^[1][2] as a defense against torpedo boats, and by the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, these “torpedo boat destroyers” (TBDs) were “large, swift, and powerfully armed torpedo boats designed to destroy other torpedo boats”.^[3] Although the term “destroyer” had been used interchangeably with “TBD” and “torpedo boat destroyer” by navies since 1892, the term “torpedo boat destroyer” had been generally shortened to simply “destroyer” by nearly all navies by the First World War.^[4]

2024-09Sep-17 tue?

Met Anthony in the Walmart parking lot, just a dude in a parking lot wearing BDU pants, hey, where ya get those pants? The hard way? He didn’t get my joke right away. (The hard way to get BDUs is to join the Army, the easy way is to get Wrangler BDU-looking things for $15 that don’t have all the bizarre pockets and reinforcements that were designed in due to bloody experience and tortured knees. We didn’t have BDUs in ’76, we ran around in cotton pants that looked like pants.) He said Goodwill! And that he had been a 22-year vet of the Rangers. Knew of Mark Yamane’s death, how, when, where, why, what, see above for more.

2024-09Sep-13fri

Agreer: Guy touched my shoulder as I leaned over a display of fish at Costco, conspiratorially whispering “Agree with your shirt.” I thought, why are we whispering! haha. He had “won” the draft lottery in 1969. “Whaddaya win?” Well, the Marines were coming out of Vietnam then, so he stayed in Camp Pendleton in California for his entire enlistment! He said that draft dodgers were not to be voted for. And agreed with my assessment of which one I wanted as a platoon sergeant. Thought I wasn’t born yet in 1969! “Uh, yeah, I was born in 1958.” 🙂 Didn’t have a draft card, tho older friends did.

Agreer: Checker at Walmart: another sotto voce “Agree with your shirt.” Got to trade stories: he, Navy civil affairs, attached to Marines in Baghdad, paid money to sheiks “so they wouldn’t kill us.” Me, peacetime infantry: maintain our vehicles, drive around beautiful German countryside, tell each other stories and listen to Earth, Wind and Fire records. Him: “Haha, peacetime sucks!” like he kinda meant it. Not sarcastic. Hmmm.

Agreeable disagreer: an old Marine. While thanking him for his service I suggested–he looked like a Trumper, whatever useless stereotype that is–you might not agree with my shirt and put my hands over it laughing and it turned out: yeah! he didn’t! but we quickly–very quickly–got to “and because we served we can talk to each other and disagree because this is America” and I pointed to his Marine Corps hat and said that’s the reason we can talk about this and he said same to me. 

Disagreeable disagreers: at a construction site I rolled in on my bike to gawk at the stuff going in. Said loudly to one guy a ways away, the archetypal construction worker, burnt skin, skinny, older guy, “Hey are you guys having fun”? And very pointedly, I thought, he ignored me and another guy came up and I asked him the same thing and he said “They are” (turns out he’s from excavation company, not the electrical) and I say I just came in to see infrastructure being built, you hardly ever get to see it, there’s a book called Infrastructure–and he cuts me off and says “can we get you to leave the site please? They don’t want you on site.” And of course I left, yeah, good site hygiene, moving vehicle potential, etc, but…seemed like there was disapproval of me as a person. Social animals, we have a highly developed sense of that. But have-a-good-days were said on both sides. As I pedaled away, I thought about my sense of being put down by construction workers but then I remembered: Oh yeah! “Infantryman” beats “Construction Worker” every day in the Village People male dominance hierarchy, whatever the hell that is. Of course, if one subscribes to that hierarchy, with what status should one regard a construction worker who has also been an infantryman? Ridiculous.

Agreeable disagreer: I stopped a Marine wearing a red jacket with Marines on it and “Semper fidelis” and told him thanks for doing that for me, and told him I’d been Army infantry. And his story came out that he had fought in Khe Sanh! “Whoa!” Before the real siege began. I dredged up my memory of the early phases of that–he named the hills they assaulted after a Special Forces camp was overrun–861, 881. Nothing but respect for the North Vietnamese Army, “real diggers,” “Yup, French found that out at Dien Bien Phu.” Asked me if I was voting for Reichert, I said no, Ferguson this time and Harris and we once again arrived at saying that our service made it possible to agreeably disagree. My final “thank you for your service,” which I get to say with I think a different tone than civilians can deliver, was humorously responded to with: “Keep your head down!”

2024-09Sep-13fri

Agreer Hospital lobby, vet waiting for surgery and his wife. Needed distraction to pass the time and if there’s one thing that the editor of Wasting Time Magazine knows how to do, it’s pass the time. And the service is made up of armor, weapons and plenty of stories to each other. And cigarette buts, ick. 🙂

2024-09Sep-12thu

Agreer Bellingham. Lady in a grocery store go cart: “Like your shirt!” She got so dysregulated and worked up talking about Trump that she was shaking. I knelt and told her that vets were worked up too and–grandiosely added–that when infantry show up, the fooling around is over. Made her feel better at least. Jeez, where do I come up with this stuff?

2024-09Sep-11wed

Agreer First interaction. Grocery Store. Woman and a man on crutches, his leg gone below the knee. Her: “Like your shirt!” I was kinda dumbfounded. “Uhh, I hadn’t counted on people liking it! I was kinda hoping to talk to people who didn’t like it!” They laughed.

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