Veterans Day

As an eight year veteran of the U.S. Army I always feel conflicted during Veterans Day.  Whenever I hear about a business that is giving away something free to veterans on November 11th, I never take advantage of it.  My former cohorts go out every year and get their free breakfasts or free movie passes, but not me.  I have an immense feeling of guilt, almost like I'm stealing from those who deserve it more than me.  Those who did more, gave more or even those who never got to come home.  

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother's friends coming back from Vietnam.  As I grew up, I watched them fall apart and turn into old men.   Some couldn't keep a job.  Quite a few got divorced or sabotaged their relationships and almost all were alcoholics.  They clung to each other as if they were the only ones who understood each other.  They never complained or asked for a hand-out.  When they were together they always had a good time and they kept each other from straying "too far" over the line.  It's when they were alone that they got into trouble.  They couldn't deal with the outside world like the rest of society did and therefore spent a lot of time in the police logs and sometimes in the obituaries. I remember at least one suicide.  

If Memorial Day is for honoring the Nation's fallen dead, then it seams (to me) that Veterans Day is for honoring those who came back with only half their lives intact...and that's not me. I'm fine.  My small insignificant sacrifice on Veterans Day, is to not use their sufferings as an excuse to get something for free.  I usually stay home on November 11th and spend time with my wife and kids if possible.  It's the one thing almost all of my mom's friends would have wanted if they could get any part of their lives back.  That's how I choose to honor them.

At the end of this post there is a link.  It is a short film directed by the famous John Houston (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen) that was banned by the U.S. Government in 1946.  It shows the mental condition of soldiers returning from the European Campaign of WWII.  They used the term “psycho-neurotic” back then.  During Korea it was called “shell-shock” and then “battle fatigue” during Vietnam.  Today we call it “post traumatic stress disorder" or PTSD for short.  Whatever you call it, the politicians and leaders of the 1940s buried as much evidence of it as possible.  Many of these veterans were locked away and hidden from society, instead of being given treatment.  This was all done so that the civilian population wouldn’t have to interact with them. The problem was easier to ignored and deny for the “good of the country.”  The soldiers of that war suffered just as much as the soldiers of today, but society (and Hollywood) would have us think differently.  It’s good to know that the government doesn’t have the same level of censorship as they did back then. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/248336/

'Bigfoot' Fights Permit Rules In High Court - New Hampshire News Story - WMUR New Hampshire

I don't know why I'm posting this other than the fact that it's just a really weird story.  
'Bigfoot' Fights Permit Rules In High Court - New Hampshire News Story - WMUR New Hampshire

Like Robinson Crusoe...as primative as can be.

Ah the joys of spending a week without power.  If you're my age or older the title of this post should have brought to mind the theme from Gilligan's Island.  That has been the state of my life for the past week or so.   If you’re a fellow New Englander, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  

 It started on Friday October 28^th.  I was aware we were supposed to get some snow, but twelve inches before Halloween is a rare thing.  I took it somewhat seriously, but not really.  I got home from work and did some basic preparation.  This includes bringing in a couple days worth of firewood into the garage, covering the fire-pit with a tarp and bringing in the tiki torches; so long autumn.

At 5 p.m. I discovered we had a leaking furnace.  I started the mop-up and had my “furnace guy” on the phone when the power went out.  The good news was that without electricity, the burner couldn’t fire and therefore the leak problem had solved itself, for now..  The bad news was…well…the power was out.  I was shocked that there was only about a quarter of an inch of snow on the ground at the moment the lights went out.  I thought this was New Hampshire, not Florida. 

We grilled, we ran the wood stove and skipped showers.  My little Coleman camp stove is a late-night life saver.  The kids ran around in the dark with their flashlights as they always do until somebody falls and cries.  At times like these I always hear my mom’s voice, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt!” and I choose not to regurgitate that line from my childhood.  Instead I just dry the tears and ask, “What did you learn?”  My hope is that it will help the lesson sink-in instead of just being brushed aside.  It doesn’t seam to be working yet, but I’m hopeful.

The next morning revealed about 20 inches of snow, and trees snapped in half everyplace.  It wasn’t the light fluffy stuff either.  This stuff was wet and heavy.  It stuck to the autumn leaves and pulled the trees down with a vengeance.  We lost six trees in our yard alone.  One of them was across the driveway.  It was described by one reported as “absolute tree carnage.” 

My back yard looked like the frozen version of Narnia. If you look at the hand rail on the back deck you can almost get an idea of how much snow we got.

As the day passed (and my shoveling muscles inflamed) it became evident that the power-line situation was really bad.  Electricity wasn’t coming back any time soon and even the local cell towers were not functioning.  I’m also in a town that has no municipal water department and every house has a private water well.  Without electricity those water pumps don’t function.  This means no lights, no stove, no water, no toilets, no phones and no cell phones.  We’ve been through this before (minus the cell phone issue) but only for a couple of days. All the tree damage to the power lines was overwhelming. 

Another blow was dealt when the temperature climbed into the fifties the next day.  The content of my fridge usually survives these outages on my back deck while packed in snow, but not this time.  Over the course of the week we lost over $300 in frozen foods. 

On the second or third night my wife fell asleep in front of the wood stove with the door open and almost burned the house down.  –sigh.

I eventually started lugging in buckets of water from the farm down the road.  They had a generator and were kind enough to let us draw water from the hose in their horse corral.  This allowed us to flush the toilets, wash the out of control stack of dishes and de-funk our bodies.  The wood stove did a good job of heating the water as well as provide us with toast, bacon, eggs, soups, pasta and waffles.

On day five the lights came back on.  Normally this is when I stop to relax, but now I had a leaking furnace to deal with.  Turns out the expansion tank failed; in lay-terms that means $400 . 

I heard on the news today that parts of New Hampshire will not have power until the 11th.  Poor bastards!   I hope everyone’s week was better than mine!