"And my China doll down in old Hong Kong, waits for my return."

Why would a sane person leave Knotts Island for three weeks on the cusp on the most beautiful season of the year??!!



May I introduce you to Sarah and Margaret (John not pictured.)

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"And we would all go down together"

Forty years ago, I was a Lance Corporal serving with a United States Marine Corps infantry company in Gio Linh, South Vietnam. Gio Linh was a coastal outpost hard on the DMZ that separated the two Vietnams.

I remember two things about Gio Linh. First, forty years ago last Saturday, I scrambled into a bunker during an enemy artillery barrage. The bunker, which we had been reinforcing, sustained a direct hit and, incredibly, barely held. Being on the receiving end of a direct artillery hit is, well, indescribable, so I won't try.

My second recollection of Gio Linh was the ongoing the aerial spraying of the dioxin laced defoliant Agent Orange around us, on top of us - everywhere. Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had decreed that the entire DMZ be defoliated so that enemy penetration could be monitored.

Where was Rachael Carson when we needed her?

This past weekend also marked the annual Knotts Island Hunters' Feast - several thousand men wandering around the bay eating all manner of meat and game, drinking beer, and generally having a good time. It is a fundraiser for a local children's home. The gross this year was over $100,000. The weather was spectacular.

Several years ago, Terry Tillery decided that he would use the Hunter's Feast as a destination for our Charlie Company brothers. This year we attracted brothers in arms from California, Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia. We had a blast.

The group began arriving Wednesday. I spent the morning having routine blood work done at the Veterans Administration in Hampton, then beat it over to Norfolk airport to begin grabbing the guys. By Thursday evening we were assembled in a small hunting lodge not far from my garage. Knotts was and is a serious place for duck hunters.

I thought it might be fun to have everyone over to show off my new grill, but I was seriously trumped by Johnny Barnes, son of the lodge proprietor, denizen of the pool house without a pool (across the way from the lodge), and without argument, griller extraordinaire. It would be easier to describe the aforementioned 155 mm enemy artillery round than to even touch that which Johnny produced for us over the following days.

Thursday was fish - fried fresh (like just pulled from the water) scallops, ma hi ma hi, some things I wasn't sure of, and grilled fresh tuna steaks with a freshly made crab sauce. Add to that corn bread, cole slaw, beans, etc. All but the tuna were deep fried. The tuna was cooked in a cast iron skillet over flame (this is all outside, now.) We stayed up most of the night dancing and keryokiing to an Eagles concert CD on John's home theatre setup (we're still in the pool house without a pool.)

Friday morning was bacon, hash browns, and eggs on the skillet (I'm sure I forgot something.) Friday night was steak night. Pound upon pound New York strip thrown on the Green Egg (oval green grilling device heated with some special wood.) Baked potatoes, backed beans and - well - please forgive any gastronomic details that I may have overlooked.) Somewhere in there we spent several hours with a tape recorder laughing and mostly crying about the grand young sons with whom we served. Each year it becomes increasingly unimaginable for me to process that these were all teen aged boys.

Saturday was the Hunters Feast on nearby Blue Pete Haven. It was a glorious day.

As the sun set, after a needless stop at Pearl's Bay Marina, we struggled back to Johnny's to be greeted with Egg fired Italian sausage slathered with his outrageous caramelized onion thing that he does on the skillet.

Incredibly, we all eat again and that is that.

Nobody moves.

Nobody speaks.

The Eagles concert is running on a closed loop, but few are singing.

We've all been had.

Sunday, the trips to the airport began anew. My last drop was Tuesday morning. Limping back to Knotts Island, I stopped by the post office to say hi to Bonny and pick up my mail for the first time in a week. I was greeted by two envelopes. I opened the one from the Veterans Administration without interest or curiosity to scan my lab results from the previous week.

Several sentences on the second page struck my eye, "your diabetes is directly related to you Agent Orange exposure..." "you will get a meter to check your blood sugar at home," I've referred you to our diabetes support group."

Blah, blah, blah.

I have diabetes.

Forty years ago this week, as I ran for cover, all of our young lungs absorbed the deadly dioxin around us. I survived an enemy artillery attack, but my real enemy was in the air, just as surely as if it had been a 500 pond bomb.

Forty years from today, a 60 year old Iraq/Afghanistan combat veteran is going to walk into a local Veterans Administration Hospital because he doesn't feel right.

Then it will be his turn.

This does not stop.

As long as we insist on fighting wars in strange faraway places, we will expose our troops to strange faraway ailments - like those eminating from the dioxin laced defoliants and napalm manufactured by the Dow Chemical Company of Midland, MI, USA.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Days of Future Passed"

I was in the second grade at Brayton Elementary School in Summit New Jersey in 1955 when the day came to get our polio shots. Our class was summoned to the auditorium and stood frozen with fear in a line that wound into the nurses office. I recall a conversation with a friend in which I said I'd rather risk polio than get the shot (I hated shots.)

Foolish?

Completely.

Polio was the scourge of the 20th century. It was one of the most feared of many childhood diseases that, to a great degree, no longer exist. Polio epidemics crippled thousands of people, mostly young children. All related to polio was horrific. In April, 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk announced the development of a vaccine and, within a year, nearly every American child had been vaccinated. Within a decade, the disease was largely eradicated from the United States.

Those were the days.

We were the first wave of the baby boom. Our fathers had defeated the Japanese and saved Europe. Anything was possible. We would have men on the moon and bring them safely home prior to my college graduation. To us, the power of American scientific achievement and (occasionally blind) hope for the future wasn't really amazing, it was assumed.

Five years after my first polio shot, while having a Coke at a diner across from the Strand movie theatre in Summit, I made the idiotic decision to have my first cigarette. Not long into my tenure as a smoker, the Surgeon General of the United States announced that there was a direct link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. I remember saying to a friend at the time that, by the time I got lung cancer, science would have found the cure. It was not a preposterous assumption, given the times. It was my own blind hope for the future. It also allowed me to continue smoking cigarettes in full denial of the personal repercussions (and, as we've come to find out, the significant second hand smoke repercussions of those that were around me.)

Unlike polio, however, lung cancer was not cured. Our school headmaster, who announced the Surgeon Generals report to us at an assembly in 1963, died of lung cancer nine years later. He never quit. My father died of lung cancer twenty years later. He quit only near the end. These were two intelligent and accomplished men. Several years later, I finally quit. Science was not going to win this one.

Smoking = death. It still does.

So much for blind faith in the future.

I was in denial about polio (I'll take my chances rather than the shot) and cigarette smoking (science will figure it out.)

Man defeated polio, cigarettes defeated man.

So now I am thinking of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is one of history's great individuals - on a par with Da Vinci, Gandhi, or Shakespeare. He was an accomplished diplomat, farmer, scientist, architect, inventor, and author. We all know Jefferson as the drafter of the Declaration of Independence.

"All men are created equal."

Jefferson was also a slave owner and fathered children by at least one slave (Sally Hemming.) He was not a wealthy man. He felt that he needed slaves to live a life that permitted him to be all of the things that he was and aspired to be. Many historians agree that Jefferson, although tormented by the institution of slavery, felt that, over time, it would die a natural death in the United States. This hope was based on my aforementioned cigarette argument. Somebody would think of something.

The ideals which Jefferson espoused were incompatible with his personal behavior. And, as far as his prognostication about slavery, he could not possibly have been more wrong. Slavery did not did a natural death. Its hideous end cost hundreds of thousand of lives and very nearly destroyed all that Jefferson envisioned.

Because the cure for polio came at my young age, I had reason to believe that lung cancer too would be defeated. Jefferson had drafted the Declaration, defeated the British, and achieved almost unimaginable personal accomplishments during his young lifetime and yet died alone as the owner of slaves.

So what?

Days when I drive the 25 miles from Knotts Island to Virginia Beach to do errands, I pass several enormous sand quarries with holes in the earth that are nearly unimaginable in scale. Sand is used for everything in road and housing construction. This is where it comes from. Sometimes I pretend that those holes contain granite, or oil, or coal, or all of the other natural resources that we consume to an unfathomable degree. The end products are in the skin of my car, my tires, the gas, the book on CD to which I listen, and the very the road upon which I drive.

Dr. Jonas Salk is nowhere to be found to cleanly solve that which we are bringing upon ourselves.

Like Jefferson, we will all be dead prior to the time of reckoning.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Food Glorious Food, Hot Sausage and..." organic chicken?

My sister Ruth can cook.

The other day she told me that she had made three kinds of soup, a batch of spaghetti, and some chili. My stomach grumbled. I asked that she send some over, but alas she lives in Oregon. However, she said it was easy, really.

All I had to do was take an organic chicken, throw it in a pot with a lot of water, cook it until "you have nothing better to do", stop cooking it, take the bones out, throw in anyting that is in the fridge, plus barley, carrots, onions, celery, squash, spinach, garlic, and mushrooms.

Ruthie says that it is good for whatever ails me and lasts a long time - two weeks at the least.

Great.

She wasn't too far into the instructions before it became apparent to me that this simple exercise would certainly require a stove. For all of its hospitable amenities, the Tillery Garage on Knotts Island does not have a stove. Given the space limitations of the "kitchen area," the garage would, in all liklihood, never have one either. Such an addition would require the elimination of either the bathroom or the Harley Davidson motorcycle workshop. I knew better than to even ask.

What to do?

I headed 25 miles up the road to look at gas grills. All this talk about boiling an organic chicken had me starved for a completely inorganic rib eye steak.

My first stop was Home Depot, as it was the closest. After some casual looking around, I had three wonderful revalations. First, gas grills don't have to cost a lot of money. I set my budget at $300 (gas can not included) and actually stayed within it. Neat. Second, most grills now come with a separate gas burner on the side. That meant that I could grill my steak and boil an organic chicken at the same time. Wow. The third point was heaven. All of these stores now assemble the grills for free!

My now son-in-law Brad Elmer and I once undertook to assemble a new gas grill right out of the box at night by flashlight in the middle of winter. We were guys. We were hungry. How hard could it be? Nearly impossible, as it turned out. I finally completed the assembly in the spring, months after Brad and his appitite had departed. Throughout the winter and early spring, as I toiled away, I'd occassionally call Brad with revelations that I felt certain would be as astounding to him as they were to me (hey, Brad, remember that funny screw that was left over after we realized we'd put the upper assembly on backwards again...?)

Having set my budget, identified the necessary features (4 main burners, 1 side burner), I set out to find my grill. Those who know me will not find the following behavior to be out of character. I left Home Depot grill-less, headed across the lot to Wal-Mart, went up the street to the new Super Target, went around the construction fence to Costco, drove down the road to Sears, and finally marched into a Lowes store which I was sure had not been there two weeks before. In point of fact, not one of these stores had been there even a year ago.

Despite my rigid "I'm a guy who knows what he's doing, don't fuck with me" exterior, a pleasant and knowledgable sales associate appeared and, within minutes, had sold me a Char Broil Gas Grill (Commercial Grade!!!) for $299 (gas can not included.)

Two days later, I drove back up the 25 miles to Lowes and picked up my grill. Planning ahead, I had already swung by Costco and purchased $234. worth of steak, pork, and chicken, and everything else on hand that might relate in some way to a grill. I also grabbed a case of plastic freezer bags to store it all in.

Within the hour, back at the garage, the grill was unstrapped from the back of the car (I might ask for help, next time), the can was connected, and the tank turned on.

With the turn of a dial and the push of a button...

...woooosh…

I was in business.

Thanks for the inspiration, Ruthie.

Thanks to the rest of you for visiting.

Jack

"Beautiful Boy"

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While your busy making other plans,

Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,
Darling, Darling,
Darling Sean.
John Lennon "Beautiful Boy"

An early morning phone call from an old friend can set the stage for a terrific day.

Plans to be made?

Laughs to be had about old times?

Old friends provide a unique leveling balance.

Such was not the case this morning. Vietnam buddy Terry Tillery called to tell me that Sean Mecham, the 31 year old son of our former Navy Hospital Corpsman, had died yesterday. The cause of death was reported to be a staff infection run wild.

I had breakfast, put on a jacket, and went for a walk.

I am in Cheshire, Connecticut. Although it was bright and sunshiny outside, one glance at the tightly closed rhododendron leaves told me that it was very cold. Undaunted, I turned down the street, and headed off in no particular direction while thinking of the Beautiful Boy that I had never known.

After years of searching, I’d reconnected with Mac four years ago. He was living in Sacramento, not far from his childhood home. He was happily married, had two grown children (a boy and a girl), and had a good job. On the surface, all was well – even better than well. We loved having each other back in our lives.

I walked through Cheshire’s suburban neighborhoods, cut through back yards, was stymied by several dead ends, and was soon largely lost. My mind was elsewhere. How does a 31 year old man just die from an infection? We have become so inured to the miracle of modern medicine that early natural death is nearly incomprehensible.

I pointed myself back in the general direction of Cheshire’s Main Street and, some time later, reemerged a mile south of town between the 7-11 and Dunkin' Donuts. Braced against the wind, I headed north, up the hill towards the center of town. As surely as he had lived, Sean Mecham was now dead. I could not walk away from that terrifying fact.

Once back in town, I noticed a curved wall in front of the brick City Hall. It was the Cheshire War Memorial. It contained the names Cheshire residents who had served their country in conflicts going back to the Civil War. It is impressive. To one side, was a bronze plaque honoring 1st Lt. H.C. Barnum, USMC, a son of Cheshire who had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for service with the Third Marine Division in Vietnam the year before Mac Mecham and I arrived in country. I knew Barney, as he is known. He and I had met on occasion in Washington and had friends in common, including Bill Negron, Mac’s and my company commander in Vietnam.

Wow, I thought, small world.

Prior to our recent reunion, I had last seen Mac in the summer of 1968 at the Oakland Naval Hospital where he and other comrades were recovering from horrific wounds suffered while our unit was under heavy attack months earlier. Mac recovered, met and married Lise, and several years later, had their first child – a boy - who they named Sean.

I never met Sean, but knew that he had had a difficult life. He suffered from severe addictions that had torn at his family, friends, and community for most of his adult life. Mac and Lise struggled as parents in ways that few of us can imagine. Some times it was scary, some times it was a nightmare, but at all times it was their beloved son, struggling with unspeakable demons deep within his soul.

Standing in the cold, staring at the bronzed name of my friend Barney Barnum, I realized that towns do not build memorials to young men like Sean Mecham. His brief life, unlike those commemorated on the Cheshire Wall, was one that we as communities try to forget rather than extol.

Where is the glory in the life of a young man who clawed every minute of every day to get past the inbred monsters that precluded him from living a normal life? In 31 years, he never even got to the starting line that the rest of us assume and expect.

This day, we rightfully continue to honor Barney Barnum as we have for 43 years. His service was extraordinary and stands as a paragon. Mac and I were Marines. Barney was a great Marine.

May we now add Sean Mecham and the thousands like him living and passed who so inspire us all, often by executing such seemingly simple tasks as getting out of bed each morning, dusting themselves off, and trying to get back in the game.

That is how I define courage.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"You did not desert me, my Brothers in Arms"

Bill Negron called to remind me that it was the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. Every day is now the 40th anniversary of something that happened to us in Vietnam.

Our company was fortunate during Tet. We were near Con Thien doing bridge security at a position we called the "Washout." Cam Lo, a small village several miles south of us, was the northernmost civilian location in South Vietnam.

Vietnam veterans often did not get the positive recognition that veterans of America's other wars received. Today, in honor of Tet, I'd like to recognize Corporal Larry Leonard Maxam, then a 20 year old boy from Glendale, California. He was my Brother in Arms.

Days after the beginning of the Tet Offensive, I accompanied a sergeant on a trip down to Cam Lo to get a situation report for the Skipper on some recent activity. Two squads from Delta Company had been sent down from the Washout the previous afternoon to bolster security following the NVA ambush of an Army convoy.

We had stood lines in Cam Lo for several days shortly after my arrival, so I was familiar with the layout. Nothing, however, could prepare me for what I saw on this sunny February morning. Coming into the tiny village, we spotted six U.S. Army trucks on the side of the road, still smoking from the rockets that had leveled them the previous afternoon. Their frames were twisted. Several were on their sides. Blackened bodies lay in the cabs, burnt into the seats, all but irremovable.

We paused for a brief moment, and then moved on. There was nothing there for us to see and nothing there for us to do. As we drove around the corner, another horrific sight came into view. There before us was a pile of dozens upon dozens of dead bodies stacked as high as they could be thrown.

Gooks?

Yes, thank god they were all gooks.

The Marines from the two squads of Delta Company that had come down from the Washout the day before to provide security were now methodically grabbing body after body from the barbed wire that encircled the small perimeter that they had established. The only sound was that of our idling motor. The only smell was the omnipresent stench of cordite – the detritus of modern battle. The bodies had only been dead for short hours. It was a remarkably surreal scene - indescribable and instantly etched into my permanent memory.

Years later I was sure that it had only been a dream.

The previous evening, those two squads from Delta Company had held off a vastly superior force of NVA that had targeted the previously defenseless Cam Lo village as part of the Tet Offensive. In one night, these thirty-five boys confirmed 160 N.V.A. dead (with dozens of others certainly carried away.) Enemy body counts in Vietnam were routinely inflated by the higher ups. In this case, however, you could walk over and count them one by one. Thirty five other NVA were captured along with several enemy trucks and a flag signed by all of the troops that was to have been raised over the village after their anticipated victory.

Delta Company lost one Marine killed.

Nearby, the Army lost several more in the passing convoy that had been ambushed to begin the attack.

The entire scene was so far beyond anything that my sane mind could comprehend that, after a time, I forgot the incident but for recurring nightmares that continued for decades. Like many grunts, I had dozens of such memories that hung between the real and the surreal. They became part of our DNA. Therapy could bring some out over time. Most however were destined to remain right there, deep inside, as surely as if they inhabited a bone. They would not depart my body before I did.

A Delta Company Marine, Corporal Larry Leonard Maxam, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor that night. It was awarded posthumously. The citation reads as follows:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a fire team leader with Company D, First Battalion, Fourth Marines, Third Marine Division in the Republic of Vietnam.

On 2 February 1968, the Cam Lo District Headquarters came under extremely heavy rocket, artillery, mortar, and recoilless rifle fire from a numerically superior enemy force, destroying a portion of the defensive perimeter. Corporal Maxam, observing the enemy massing for an assault into the compound across the remaining defensive wire, instructed his Assistant Fire Team Leader to take charge of the fire team, and unhesitatingly proceeded to the weakened section of the perimeter.

Completely exposed to the concentrated enemy fire, he sustained multiple fragmentation wounds from exploding grenades as he ran to an abandoned machine gun position. Reaching the emplacements, he grasped the machine gun and commenced to deliver effective fire on the advancing enemy. As the enemy directed maximum fire power against the determined Marine, Corporal Maxam s position received a direct hit from a rocket propelled grenade, knocking him backwards and inflicting severe fragmentation wounds to his face and right eye.

Although momentarily stunned and in intense pain, Corporal Maxam courageously resumed his firing position and subsequently was struck again by small arms fire. With resolute determination, he gallantly continued to deliver intense machine gun fire, causing the enemy to retreat through the defensive wire to positions of cover. In a desperate attempt to silence his weapon, the North Vietnamese threw hand grenades and directed recoilless rifle fire against him, inflicting two additional wounds.

Too weak to reload his machine gun, Corporal Maxam fell to a prone position and valiantly continued to deliver effective fire with his rifle. After one and a half hours, during which he was hit repeatedly by fragments from exploding grenades, and concentrated small arms fire, he succumbed to his wounds, having successfully defended nearly one-half of the perimeter single-handedly.

Corporal Maxam's aggressive fighting spirit, inspiring valor and selfless devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and the Marine Corps and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”

Corporal Maxam was just one of us. He had been a corporal, a fire team leader, a veteran of December 6, 1967. Until the day before, he too had been at the Washout, digging pissers, burning shitters, filling sand bags, and going on endless perimeter patrols. He was now the recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, as surely as if he’d been Audie Murphy himself.

In point of fact, Corporal Maxam could have been any one of us. This realization and the horror of what our Delta Marines had endured, snapped many of us in Charlie Company back to the reality that, although times were slack, the war was all around us, and it a matter of minutes we could again be in the very thick of it.© Jack McLean 2007 All Rights Reserved

Thanks, Larry. We all miss you a lot.

Semper Fi and God bless.

Jack

"Sunshine Superman"

SUPER SUNDAY!!

O.K., it's not Christmas or the Fourth of July, but it has been around long enough to conjur memories.

This is my first Southern Super Sunday in years (I don't aknowledge McLean, VA to be Southern.) I've been invited to Bill and Barb's pool house next door to watch the game. Chili and beer will be served. Excellent.

An interesting insight into Knotts Island is that one need not have an actual swimming pool to have a pool house. Bill and Barb do, but Johnny Barnes down the street does not (Johnny is just completing a major renovation of his pool house to include a small bedroom.)

Pool Houses are places where guys go to drink, watch football, and fall asleep in big lounge chairs. They are decorated to look like island tiki bars. I wasn't introduced to the concept until I was too old to get away with it in my own life. Happily, however, I now have an entire garage that serves as my personal pool house. All my stuff is here and I can fall asleep with the TV on and no one gets on my case.

It is warm. Pool house doors are open, guests are arriving (see photo above), grills are being fired up, bags of ice are being dumped over buckets of beer, and all seems right with the world. I'm looking forward to the game and am glad that Bill and Barb invited me over. Who wants to be alone on Super Sunday!?!

I spent my first Super Bowl Sunday in the South and I was, for the most part, alone. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the sprawling east coast anchor for the United States Marine Corps. I was a Private First Class, attending supply school, and learning the one transferrable skill that I took from the Corps - typing.

That Saturday morning I was granted a 48 hour pass and decided to visit Andover friends that were attending the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I rose early, took the base liberty bus (known as the "vomit comet") into the neighboring town of Jacksonville, and boarded a Greyhound bus for Durham. Eighteen stops and 6 hours later I arrived to transfer and take the final three stops to Chapel Hill on a connecting bus.

I was young, excited, and free so have little recollection of the journey. I arrived, found some friends, drank a lot of beer, and flopped on a dorm sofa. Had I remained on base, I would have found some friends, drank a lot of beer, and flopped on my rack. The contrast seems less obvious to me now that it did at the time.

Sunday morning I was given a brief campus tour that included the college basketball stadium. I was stunned. Basketball was nothing at Andover. Even with the Glory Celtics, basketball was nothing in New England either. Hockey ruled! And yet, here was the home of the legendary North Carolina Tar Heels - a college gym bigger than the fabled Boston Garden itself.

I felt as though I was in a foreign land. Why ever would so many people want to watch a basketball game. Even my former classmates had been converted. Twenty years later, I moved with my young family to Charlotte. Several months after that, I began to understand the allure (the Tar Heels suck - a subject for a future blog.)

Super Bowl I must have begun around 3 in the afternoon as it was being played in L.A. It wasn't all that big a deal. In fact, it probably didn't become known as Super Bowl I until the next year when some genius decided to call the second rendition Super Bowl II. The Vince Lombardi Packers were playing the Hank Stram Kansas City Chiefs. Everybody was a Packer fan.

At halftime, I had to head back. I took a cab to the bus station, retraced my steps to Durham, and after a wait, boarded a Greyhound bus for the eighteen-stop six-hour journey back to Jacksonville. This trip I remember vividly. Every stop.

Raleigh. Zebulon. Bailey.

We reached Wilson at twilight.

I was now the only white person on the bus. It was a foreign country. We'd stop every few miles. People would get on and people would get off. I was miles removed from the Marine Corps and an entire light year from Andover or Chapel Hill, for that matter. The towns were small and ramshakle and the ground was perfectly flat. A single naked light bulb marked the bench that comprised the bus stop in each town.

Goldsboro, Kingston, New Bern.

New Bern?

My great-great grandfather came to the United States from Scotland with his brother. They were stone masons. When they arrived, my great-great grandfather went to Patterson, New Jersey (birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and consequently the epicenter of brick) and his brother came to New Bern, North Carolina. New Bern had been the capital of North Carolina prior to present day Raleigh. I made a point to return to New Bern in the daylight to review my great-great uncle's work. I've yet to go.

Pollocksville. Maysville. Belgrade. Jacksonville.

I disembarked with several other Marines who had joined the trip along the way. The Comet arrived around 11pm and we made the lonely last leg to Mountfort Point, Camp Lejeune. I flopped on my rack and during the brief instant before I fell aspeep, I wondered about what a long strange trip it had been.

Seven hours later, I was sitting tall in Sgt. Lerma's Monday morning class.

"Type 'A', you worthless motherfuckers, type 'A'.

It was good to be back.