Blog-novel Archives

Journey of a Dead Man: CDR Abbott, Journal Entry - March 23th 1945

Journey of a Dead Man: An alternate history of the end of World War II.

Previous entries for this 'blog-novel':
Introduction.
March 9th, 1945.
March 11th, 1945.
March 11th, 1945.

Log Entry, Bart Abbott's Personal Journal, March 23th 1945

I managed to secure leave and used it to head over to Elko for a chance to see Mom and the folks back at home in Elko. Elko isn’t San Francisco or New York and the fact is, it’s not some sort of place that you are going to go through on your way to somewhere else. It just happens that my current duty assignment puts me somewhat in the neighborhood, so it would be wrong to be this close and not take an opportunity to get over there if it is at all possible.

I caught a flight up to Wendover last Monday with "Kermit", and some of his crew. We ended up sharing a room at the BOQ as things at the base are a bit tight on space with all the activity we are causing. It wasn’t much a sacrifice for either of us, as I wouldn’t be there for the first week, so it works out well for both Kermit and myself. This place sits out on the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake at the base of the mountains that make up the border between Utah and Nevada. Wendover Field sits on top of what was surely a very nice beach a few thousand years ago, but now it’s a big, flat, blindingly white plain; a frozen sea made of salt with the occasional black rocky outcropping acting like its island counterpart to break of the monotony.

Wendover is in the middle of nowhere - literally. For example, to take the train to Elko from there, you need to ride all the way back towards the east to Salt Lake City on highway 40. if you go that distance in the other direction from Elko, you might as well just drive over to Elko on highway 40 in the other direction instead. So that’s what I did, signed a jeep out of the motor pool and filled up a couple of jerry cans with gas and took off. I could’ve had one of the pilots from the 509th hop me over to Elko but quite frankly; I wanted the time to myself, to help get my mind in the right frame before my return.

No matter where you go in the world today, there’s a reminder of the war everywhere you turn, from the gas ration stickers on the window of your car down to the blackout curtains in every building, the war creeps into everything you see and everything you do. But out here in the high desert, you can actually get away from it now and then. It’s a real luxury to just spend a few hours without any reminders of the war. If you stop for a bit, you can almost see the world as it was before it all went so crazy.

I got to Elko in the afternoon and did my best to be inconspicuous, not that it did any good. Not 10 seconds after I pulled the jeep in front of the house did I have half the street waiting there to shake my hand. It was damned embarrassing and not what I wanted at all.

The thing about the ‘folks back home’ is that any serviceman who passes through town is to the local folks the best way of making contact with the war and more importantly, with their men that are far away overseas. You stand at any train station in the US in uniform and people will say something like “ My sons in the Navy, he’s out on the Enterprise, do you know him?” You just smile and try to give them a sense of reality in your response; that there a millions of people in the armed services of the county out in the war somewhere in the world, and just because you both wear the same uniform doesn’t mean they are closer to their family member. Most of the time you take it in stride, but sometimes the folk will say something that makes you feel just awful, like back in New York recently, a lady stopped me and told me her son was in the Navy, and he was out on the USS Houston. When that happens, you just hang your head and say that you’re sorry to hear that, and sorry about her loss, and move on as best you can. That happens every now and then and I hate it when it does. It makes you pull your cap down low over your eyes to avoid contact whenever possible. The folks see the uniform and for just a moment they also see their kid out there in uniform and a part of their mind gets ahead of reality; that while you stand there on the train platform all resplendent in your uniform, you are just reminding them of what it was that they have lost. Their son will never stand on a railway platform; their son will never have that conversation and that unspoken word will remain forever unspoken between them. That lady in New York will never have her son and there’s nothing you can do to change that fact or to comfort them for their loss. You feel bad, but then you realize that with all the uniforms walking around these days, she probably goes through that at least once a week. Next week, it will be some other poor guy, who will be reminded as I am reminded when it happens to me, that while others keep dying in this war, here I sit safe at home doing my part, small that it is. It does make me feel a bit shameful at times, and I just hope that all this work we are doing on the gadget is going to be worth it in the end.

Returning home after having been gone so long is like a combination of Christmas, your birthday and New Years Eve all at once. All you want to do is to relax, but all the folks you went their to see want you out on “front center stage” to put on a show for hours on top of hours telling your travelers tale’s. Everyone talks at once, eats too much and tries to do too much. In the end everyone gets to be disappointed as your return isn’t quite what they expected it to be.

They are disappointed because you haven’t got any news of the war that they don’t have, because frankly you haven’t been in the war that they read about, because that war is always going on somewhere over the next hill, the next river or next continent from where you have been, so there’s a real let down right off the bat. Its worse for me because I’ve spent my war in far off exotic locales like “Washington D.C”. and half a dozen other places I can’t really talk about, but its not France, England or the Pacific or any of those places that fill the newspapers every day. I can’t even really talk about what I do, I just tell them I work for the Navy Ordinance department, and then talk about how big the guns are on the New Jersey or the Missouri and so on. They politely nod like they know what you mean and then find another subject to talk about.

Of course, if you tell them you’ve been to Washington a few times here and there, they all think you had lunch with the President himself and again, are somewhat disappointed when you tell them that all you did was meet with some of the eggheads of the ivy league.

Mom of course doesn’t really care about the stories about what I’ve been doing; she just holds my hand and hangs on every word, happy just to have me back for however long it will be. That’s the thing about moms, you could have actually had lunch with President and been a guest of the first lady herself and no matter how old you are, her first thought will be whether or not you used proper table manners, kept your elbows off the table and ate with your mouth closed. You can be a “captain of industry”, the chief of staff of the army or a dare I say even President of the United States and I guarantee, no matter who you are in life, your mother in completely and totally unimpressed with your accomplishments. That’s not to say that she’s not proud of you, but it is to say that she hold you in a context that other people cant really hold you. She’s seen you at your worst, watched you come up from crawling to walking to running, from washing once a week all the way up to shaving every day and no matter how old you get or what you accomplish in life or what station you achieve, there will always be a part of you that she sees as that little ‘crumb cruncher’ who kept her up late at night with a toothache; that kid who wouldn’t do his homework or ran away to join the circus and got halfway down the street before he realized it was dinner time and that the circus could wait another day.

This is all that I have in common with the great men of the world; that no matter how great our accomplishments in life, the unique reward of a polite pat on our heads from our mothers with the welcome words “that’s nice dear” is probably worth all the medals of all the armies in the world. Whether we are making finger painting at the kitchen table or liberating the people of France from tyranny, a kind word from you Mom, promptly followed by a polite suggestion to not eat with your elbows on the table is likely to be our most valued reward. The world may hate you or love you, it might think you are terrific person, or a horrible evil little creature, but to your mom, you are always her little boy and if you think about it, that’s not so bad.

As the day wore on, she managed to shoo off the neighbors and we finally got to sit on the together on the porch and enjoy some quiet time together catching up on events. Who was marrying who, and the various movements of the boys I had grown up with in Elko. We listened to the radio and caught up on the war news. She pointed out that President Roosevelt hasn’t been on the radio much as of late, since his return from the conference with the Russians at Yalta, and Vice President Wallace has been making more of an appearance than he has at any time before. She’s not a big fan of the Vice President but keeps her opinions of the man to herself “for the duration”. Occasionally, they still leak out.

She also said that my friend and our neighbor "Beanie" Alonzo had made it home from the war, but that he wasn’t the same as he was when he left. She asked me to be sure to stop by and say hello when I get a chance to him and his mother. She said that she can hear him wake up screaming at night. She worries about the effect of this on his mother. They have both been friends forever, having raised their families next door to each other and having moved through widowhood together and the shared dread of having their sons away at war.

Many of the kids I grew up with have gone to war and some like Beanie have come back, and there are some who wont ever come back. I used to think that dying in war was the worst thing, but as time goes on, I realize that there is more than one way to die and not all men die on the battlefield. Some men come home from the war, but the war comes home with them and they die a little every day until in the end all that is left is a shell of the man who once left home and went off to war.

Its funny how people live in your memories, back in the “eye of your mind”. Of all the experiences you have with a person, your mind picks one snapshot of time for you to hold on to as an image of that person above all others. In my mind, I can see Beanie when he was about 15 years old, standing on the porch one fall in his football uniform with his leather helmet and covered from head to toe in mud and tossing the football from hand to hand, chewing gum and just smiling loudly from ear to ear. He had been playing with a few of the fellahs from school and they needed to get few more of us guys into the game to make it a real show, so he came down the street to get me. It was a grand game, and became an annual tradition from then on. Every year after Thanksgiving, we would have “The Mud Bowl” and the game would quickly go from American Football to English Rugby before the 4th quarter.

Now that kid who only lives in the back of my mind is in reality a war veteran, just back from the battlefields of France, out of the war with an honorable discharge with a wound on both his body and his soul. Where there was once a young man of promise, now stands a broken man in body and spirit, but in my mind Beanie is still standing there with his football under his arm and his gum in his cheeks. The reality of person of Beanie, is now very different from the memory Beanie that I hold.

On Monday morning, I went out for a walk; down the street to the market to get a few things for mom was the excuse, but it was really just a chance to get outside for some solitude. I was halfway down the street when Beanie came out to greet me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hand went up instinctively for a salute and I waved him down before he met his forehead and shook his hand and smiled. He’s not in uniform anymore, and I’m not much for the whole formal military honors thing when I’m in my home town. At home, we are just “Beanie and Bart” not Navy Commander Abbott and Army Private Alonzo. By my way of thinking, Beanie outranks me. He’s seen the war; he’s been in combat. While other men like Beanie have been out fighting the war, people like me have been at home at risk of nothing but the occasional shortage or cold shower or case of food poisoning.

Beanie walks with a cane now as he’s left a part of his left foot back in France. Where there were once a set of kid-brown eyes, are a now a couple of dark sunken pits that have seen too much for a 22 year old to see. The smile and the gum cracking is nowhere to be found, replaced instead with a nervous tick and a wandering glance. You would never know from looking at him that a few years ago this man with a limp and a cane was just another kid at Elko High School, playing varsity fullback.

As we walked down the street, the street where we both grew up and went to school, his eyes now darted about and it almost seemed like he was on the look out for unseen German snipers. It’s clear from the moment you meet him now that there is a part of Beanie that’s still in France.

I hadn’t seen Beanie since before the war started, so we caught up on the elements of our shared history. Unfortunately, catching up quickly turned into a list of the kids we knew from school and their various fates and of course, the ones that aren’t coming home. There were more than I knew and after a bit I had wished that I didn’t know.

I asked him of his plans now that he’s out of the war, and he said as soon as hes better, he’s going to work on his uncle’s ranch out on border with Oregon. Its open country out there, its a place where a man can really put the war behind him, you couldn’t ask for a better place for Beanie to heal. I sure hope so, for Beanies sake.

When we walked back home from the market, we barely said a word to each other, each of us reaching deep to find that part of us that used to walk down that street carrying our cleats home from school and now not finding more than a shadow of what once was between us. We had taken our youth for granted, and now there was no getting it back, too much time had passed; history had ground down the bedrock of our shared experience. Too many horrors had been seen to leave much space for the memories of our shared past. Where there had once been two kids living and reliving a post Thanksgiving football game, was now replaced by two men in the grips of middle age and one of them struggling with the memory and the horror of war.

The walk to the market and back had left Beanie quite winded and he began to falter as we got closer to our homes. Beanies mom was waiting at the gate, and she guided him through to the house, concerned for the fatigue that could clearly be seen on his face. Beanie just looked over his shoulder at me, gave a small smile and half salute and went inside. His mom and I talked for a minute there at the gate, polite small talk mostly and told me how happy she was that I came home for a visit, but as she walked away she stopped for a second and said

“ ...You know, he always looked up to you”.

Then she quickly went inside, half hiding a cry in her hand.

It ripped my heart out. I don’t think that was her intent but I think she felt that she needed to say it, to help bleed that wound that she had suffered right along with Beanie. In some way, she blamed me for the loss of her boy, for that the change that she saw in her beloved child; that all of this was somehow started by a chain of events instigated by me going to the Naval Academy and not by that paperhanger in Berlin or the Emperor of Japan. I was the older of the kids on the street. I was two years ahead of Beanie. I was the first to go away and join the service before the war; a decision that was met at the time with disdain by Mrs. Alonzo and a few of the other Elko townsfolk. Mrs. Alonzo was an isolationist before the war, back when we could all afford such luxuries in our thinking.

As her words hung darkly in the air, I stood there stunned for a second, at the same garden gate where as a very young child I had once stood and asked Mrs. Alonzo if Beanie could come out and play and I felt truly sorry for her, for Beanie and felt for myself all at the same time. She wasn’t looking for an answer from me to what she had said, which is a shame because she will never know how much had always I looked up to Beanie, and how much I looked up to him now more than ever. My war, my contribution would never measure in value next to his. None of that would matter to the ears of a mother who has lost her son, which is why I’m glad I didn’t say it. It would only have made things worse if I had.

Most of all, I simply wanted my friend back, and back as the wisecracking kid he once was. I knew now that aside from the memory of what he once was, I would never have him that way again and the truth of it is that neither would she. The childhood games we played would now and forever go unplayed, the gate would remain unanswered and the mail would remain unsent. The intentions of what we meant to do with our lives were now meaningless.

Afterwards, I just sat on the porch of mom’s house for a few minutes, to collect my thoughts. I came to back to Elko to come home, to somehow get out of the choking, smothering, olive drab sameness of the war, but the home I came to see and the life I used to live in it, didn’t really exist anymore. No bombs had fallen on Elko, no armies had marched through this part of the world, but the war and the splash of its acidic horrors had spread its corrosion on the people here just as it had the people everywhere else in the world.

That memory of my friend Beanie, back before the war standing there on the porch in his mud covered football uniform was now supplanted by new sight of Mrs. Alonzo walking into her house, with the Blue Star on the front window of their home. What was also now a part of me and my thoughts of home was the sight of so many Gold Stars in Elko and the understanding of their true meaning.

Beanie has paid for his Blue Star, but I’m not too sure I’ve paid for the one sits in my mothers front window. That thought has been bothering me much more than I had realized. In an odd way, I feel like a fraud and that I’ve gamed the system for my own benefit.

I came home to get away from the war, but the war is closer to me now than it has ever been. The war isnt at the distant island of Iwo Jima or the beaches of France anymore, the war lives next door at Mrs. Alonzos house.

Posted @ March 23, 2008 03:55 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Journey of a Dead Man: Hometown Paper Clippings March 1945

Journey of a Dead Man: An alternate history of the end of World War II.

Previous entries for this 'blog-novel':
Introduction.
March 9th, 1945.
March 11th, 1945.

Clippings from Commander Abbotts hometown paper, The Elko Daily Free Press from March 1945.

Authors Note: 'Bart' Abbott is a fictional character and a literary device, but the men referenced in this post are not. It is the authors intent to treat the story of their time with the respect it deserves, in order that their sacrifice and the impact of their loss will be understood by a modern audience.

The posts on this blog are written in recognition of the fact that without the sacrifice of the lives of these men and millions of others in the defense of liberty and freedom, that this story, and the basic freedoms that we live with today would not be possible.

Posted @ March 14, 2008 11:36 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Journey of a Dead Man: CDR Abbott, Journal Entry - March 11th 1945

Tokyo Japan March 11th 1945. The Firebombing over two days from 279 bombers killed 100,000 people and destroyed 25% of the city.

The introduction to this series can be found here.

Previous entries:
March 9th, 1945.

Log Entry, Bart Abbott's Personal Journal, March 11th 1945

Hot today. Not Georgia swamp, moldy mildew hot, oh thank the lord, but good old, dry desert “welcome home Bart” hot. Had coffee at sunset out on the porch on Dr. Daghlian’s house. Caught up with a few niceties and particulars that happened during my absence and got welcomed back to camp by Dr. Daghlian’s wife, who took up the opportunity to make a small coffee cake to share. I always feel a bit like the out of town relative when I’m around some of the professors, but a few of them are the kind of folks you could meet anywhere. Daghlian and his wife are that kind of folk. If you met him and her, you would think he made watches for a living and she was a housewife in suburban Chicago playing canasta with the girls on Tuesday afternoons and doing the shopping every Thursday like clock work. It was an informal bunch of “us folks” out on the patio tonight, no ties, all relaxed and neighborly, only half the men had nobel prizes and a fair number of the wives had Doctorates in advanced mathematics. I sat there on the porch in the company of these men like a Neanderthal with his spear,capable only of the occasional "head nod" and polite grunt in response to some question. We sat outside and enjoyed the sunset while Mrs. Dahlgren tuned in the radio. Out here in the desert in the evening you’d be surprised what we can pick up, New York, Los Angeles all the way out here. At 6:00, we heard an announcement from the War Department that Tokyo had been heavily bombed during the last few days, largely destroying the Capital city of the Empire of Japan. It seems this sort of thing is happening fairly regularly; last month it was Dresden’s turn and now its Tokyo’s turn. General LeMay and the B-29’s are now able to act with impunity against even the best defended the Japanese cities. At this rate, the Germans and Japanese are losing a city the size of Chicago every 15 days. Yet, the war goes on and the dying continues.

Had a funny thing happen out there on the patio, as the sun went down, and Mrs. Daghlian turned down the radio, you could just hear a bit of what sounded like some sort of “drumming” out on the hills. Some of the professors were saying that it was “injun joe” again, somehow giving the sound a persona and story all of its own; their european-born imaginations run wild now that they are here at work in the “wild west”. I suspect it gives them something exotic to tell their wives when they go back to their cosmopolitan New York lives since so much of what they actually do is unspeakable and top secret. I smiled when I heard the various theories to the nature of “injun joe”, they were quite elaborate, each one outdoing the other with some layer of assumed knowledge of the local indian tribes, to which they really didn’t know a damn thing but acted like experts to each other. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the “injun joe” they had created out of whole cloth was really just our Dick Feynman with his bongo drums, working off a little steam in his own unique Feynman way of doing things.

I got word today that I will be going out to Wendover next week to meet with Deak and Col. Tibbets. Col.Tibbets needs to review readiness for the 509th. I will try to take some time and visit the folks back home in Elko while I’m out there. It would be wrong to be that close to home and not make a little effort to stop by. Wendover is a hell of a place for the uninitiated and its quite a kick when some of the Air Corp folks find themselves dealing with life in the high desert for the first time. As a native of those parts myself, there’s few guilty pleasures I enjoy more than watching some east coast ivy league 90 day wonder shavetail, who thinks he knows everything about anything and never shuts up telling you so, and 30 minutes after he touches down at Wendover he’s telling you everything he knows about it like you never saw it before, which is always wrong and always in a superior-than-thou voice and sure enough, you take you eyes off him for 30 seconds and he’s passed out flat on his back from the heat in mid sentence. Welcome to High Desert, picklehead! Now pick up your bag and get over to the flight surgeon so he can treat you for heat stroke, you silly bastard.

In preparation for this meeting next week, I went over some details on the gadget arming process with Dr. Daghlian over at his lab. When I went over today, I found him outside, shaking like a leaf with no color at all in his face. I helped him light a cigarette and he just smiled like his just had the literal hell scared out of him by something like it. I don’t know what he does in the lab, but whatever it is, it made Dr. Daghlian looked like a schoolboy sitting in the principals office getting read the riot act, but the principal doing the reading was in fact, Mephistopholes himself. He gave me a weak smile and a pat on the back when I came over this evening, it was as if I had shared some deep personal event with the doc, and I had no idea what it was that happened in the lab. He knew, and frankly I think it scared the hell out of him.

Tensions are high around camp, people slamming down books and just snapping at the wrong time and saying the wrong thing. There’s a real rush on to get the test going to see if the damn thing actually works. Funny thing is, even the folks at the top of the pyramid have no idea if it will work or even what it will do. In light of what we are already doing in places like Tokyo and Dresden you have to wonder what the big deal is about this thing. It’s a bomb (I think?), but so what? Don’t we have a hell of a lot of those already and don’t they work pretty damn good? I think the folks in Tokyo and Dresden could give us an assessment on that if we really wanted one.

Posted @ March 11, 2008 10:34 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Journey of a Dead Man: CDR Abbott, Journal Entry - March 9th 1945

Richard Feynman - Manhattan Project ID Badge

The introduction to this series can be found here.

Log Entry, Bart Abbott's Personal Journal, March 9th 1945

Another day, another dollar, safe and sound back at Professor Oppy’s dude ranch once again. After a month in the land of indoor plumbing, I’m finally back at the site after the conference in Washington. It was a real pleasure to ride in a real cab and eat real food off real tables with real silverware and tablecloths. One morning I instinctively looked all over the room for my security badge before I realized that I didn’t need one to go into the Pentagon. Its funny how fast you adapt to the un-adaptable.

It was good too see Deak again, we had dinner and met with a few old friends from the Idaho, who are now “big brass” assigned to the CNO himself, but he and I both knew them when they were wetnosed ensigns back before the war. We both had to laugh at all the “pomp and circumstance” of these Washington types. He and I hardly wear ties out at the site except for special occasions, but in Washington, you don’t go four hours without a shoeshine. Deak and a few others will be joining us out here soon as things are beginning to draw to a crucial point in the tests.

As a favor, Deak asked me to fly into Albuquerque rather than right to the site, to pick up supplies and as a way to help out one of “our fellas”. Dick Feynman goes down to visit his wife in the tuberculosis sanitarium as often as he can, and he will very often, just hitchhike down without any real plan to get back to the site. A few of us out here working under Deak try to look after him and help to make sure that there’s someone in town at just the right time to get him a decent ride back. When he first came out here, Oppy asked Deak to help out “Young Feynman” wherever he could he could as Deak being Navy had access to things that even Oppy couldn’t get a hold of. Deak found the guy to be a real kick and soon we all just sort of adopted him. Hell of a guy really, he tends to talk your ear off, which makes the long drives back from Albuquerque just fly by. He’s got a real thick Brooklyn accent, which is refreshing as all hell with all the ivy league folks around.

On this trip, I brought his wife Arline some flowers, which gave me a chance to come in and politely gather him up and get him back on the road to camp. They love each other deeply, but I think she’s sometimes happy to see him go. The poor girl doesn’t look much too good, but Dick is right there by her side as much as he can be. He doesn’t talk about it at the site, just keeps his head down and does what he needs to do all through the week but as soon as he can whenever he can, he’s right out the front gate and on his way down to the sanitarium. Whenever he does his disappearing act, we give him a day or so, and then we invent a reason to get someone to go down into town and get him. We always know where to find him, right there in the room with Arline.

We asked Groves if it would be ok for him to take his own jeep from the pool, but he wouldn’t have it. He said it was hard enough to keep him onsite, his own jeep would mean he would probably leave every day. Oppy said it was a bad thing all the way around and that we should just try to help Dick and Arline as much as possible without forgetting what it was we were all here to do. It seemed almost like Oppy for once agreed with Groves, which is an odd thing to witness.

Our troops crossed the Rhine the other day. Now we are in Germany proper. In my experience, men fight for all sorts of good and bad reasons, but universally they fight for their home in a way they never fight on foreign territory. I fear that the fighting will get much worse before too much longer. After what we saw in Holland last year and what we learned in Belgium over Christmas, no one is stupid enough anymore to say out loud “the war is going to over soon” even though it’s the first thing on their minds every day. The consensus is that it will be over when its over and not a moment before. I just can’t see Hitler surrendering but it’s hard to see where this is going to end without a surrender of some sort.

The fighting on that little bat crap pile of an island called Iwo Jima is still fierce and the scuttlebutt about how it is going out there is not promising at all. The Japs are not like the Germans, but little Iwo is a lot like crossing the Rhine, for the first time, they are fighting for what they think of as Japanese home territory and not some outcropping guano in the middle of the Pacific, not that it matters much, they fought like hell on Attu and Kiska too and they had no business at all being there.

For all the talk about “after the war”, it’s clear to everyone that for now at least, the war is still very much at work killing people all around the world without any sign of letting up. But I should say that picture of the Marines on Suribachi was a good shot in the arm for the folks around the site. Heck, I still get all choked up every time I see it.

Busy week ahead. Lots of progress going on all the way around.

Posted @ March 09, 2008 11:51 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Journey of a Dead Man: An Alternate History of 1945-1950.

“Alternate history” is a way of exploring the consequences of various actions in recorded by performing a sort of “what if” exercise with the events of the past. In human history, we see repeated examples of where the fate of millions rests on the acts of a few. For example, what if Churchill had been killed in his 1931 visit to New York? What if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been killed in the attempt on his life in February 15th 1933? What if Hitler had 300 long range U-Boats at the start of the war instead of the 22 that he did have, or what if his application to the Austrian art school had been approved, or if during his time in the trenches of WWI, he had been shot or severely wounded during his service to the German Kaiser.

It’s through this form of literary “thought experiment” that we can expose on the significance of seemingly small events in recorded history by shining light on the event from an angle that was not previously available. It needs to be understood that the history that is recorded is not the result of a guarantee, nor is it the product of precise planning or some form of pre-destination or subconscious collaboration on the part of the people living through that time. The history we live today and that we create today is often the flotsam and jetsam that results from of a thousand near misses and errors. For most of the events of our lives, our actions don’t seem like history, but they often are a part of history. We just don’t know them as historically significant at the time they happen.

The purpose of this literary exercise called “journey of a dead man” is to give the reader of this blog an understanding to the fluid nature of time and the role of individuals in establishing the tide of history as it ebbs and flows around our lives.

For this story, the readers of this blog should think of themselves as time travelers. You have been sent to retrieve the written journal of a person living at a key time in human history. What follows is the recovered written diary and journal of a man living in the confluence of two mighty rivers in history. This person who wrote this journal that we are reading is US Navy Commander Bartholomew "Bart" Abbott. In reading his journal, we shall explore the past together.

Since Commander Abbott lives on another timeline than we do, we can learn from his daily observations and thoughts what the key events were that will lead to both his version of history and that of our own.

The journey we are about to begin takes place in March 1945. The place? Alamogordo New Mexico, United States of America. As near as we can tell, Abbott’s timeline and ours are almost the same up until this point in time, with a few crucial differences. Our mission is to discover where the two timelines diverged from the world that Commander Abbott lives from that of our own and most importantly, what specifically were the events that caused the divergence.

Posted @ March 09, 2008 11:37 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Privateers - A Blog Novel (Ch.2)

Chapter 2: The Potters Wheel

Sunday Morning

Baltimore-Washington D.C.

Commuter trains on the weekends are desperate, haunted places. They have none of the natural rhythm or timing that makes up its natural environment on the weekdays. You just know you’re not supposed to be on a commuter train on the weekend. It’s like wearing a business suit on Saturday afternoon or a pair of shorts to the office on Monday, there’s nothing technically wrong with it; it just feels wrong.

Despite the fact that it was Sunday morning, David Hastings sat in his usual seat on the train. It felt odd, but it was as if he was required to sit in the same regular spot among all the suburbanite tourists on their way to visit the museums in the Capital as he did Monday through Friday with all the other commuters on their way to the cubicle farms in that same city.

David Hastings woke every day at 5:00 am, even on Saturday and Sunday. He never used an alarm clock; he simply willed it to be. Monday through Friday, his pattern was the same. Wake, shower, shave, eat, work out for 45 minutes either by running or the elliptical trainer in the converted garage of his Condo; read the email that had arrived from his contacts in Europe from the night before and by 7:00am be out the door to catch the train. Even though today was Sunday, the routine was the same.

Like his father before him, at 17 years of age, David Hastings had joined the Marines to get away from life at home. His father, Sam Hastings had been in the Marines for only 5 years before an unfortunate accident that occurred while on duty had stripped him of the one thing he loved; the service. The shame of how Sgt. Sam Hastings was removed from the service would feed a lifetime addiction to alcohol and violence.

The eldest of five bothers and sisters, Dave has been the default parent in a dysfunctional household for far too many of his very young years. One too many fights with the old man, one too many arguments over trivial things that ended up with either himself or his siblings in the hospital or cowering in fear in the corner of their rooms had finally brought Dave to the decision point.

After an argument over whether Dave should surrender his earnings from his after school job to the family, Dave decided it was time to go. He cut school that day and went to the Marine Recruiting office. Afterwards, he went to the bank and took out all of the savings he had accrued over the years lawn mowing and other work that he had performed since the age of 12. For all that work for all those years, it was just 150 dollars.

He placed the money on the kitchen table, and told his father to sign the papers that would allow him to join the Marines. He could have the one if he could have the other. Sam Hastings laughed out loud. Slovenly, unshaven with a beer in hand, took the money and signed the paperwork. He looked at Dave, pointed smiling with his unfilled hand and said “The will eat you alive you little punk. I loved the Corp, and they screwed me for it, they’ll screw you too, just you wait and see.”

Dave had stared his father down many times before; he had lost his sons natural fear of his father long ago. Rage had long replaced the parts of his mind where the fear used to live.

After that day, Dave never again sat face to face with his father. When he left for boot camp, he avoided his father, never looking him in the eye or shaking his hand as left for the airport. He said his goodbyes to his mother and siblings and never returned to his home.

His father would drop dead of a heart attack, while sitting at a barstool just two weeks after Dave completed boot camp. Yet, while his father was long since gone, the image of that day with his father mocking him at the kitchen table would live in his mind for the rest of his life.

Unlike his father, David Hastings made a home of the Marines. He made a fetish of the discipline it provided to his life. The irrational uncertainty of living as the child in the household of an alcoholic had toughened him for the very worst deprivations of military life and rather than be shocked and beaten down by it as most normal men were, he reveled in it.

He became an NCO and moved on quickly to become an Officer. He was the very definition of a “Maverick”. His work as a Battalion level intelligence officer in Lebanon brought him the notice of his current boss, Hugh Teale.

In those days, Hugh Teale worked as the Section Chief in Beirut, but later Hugh Teale would go on to be the Deputy Director of the CIA.

As Beirut Section Chief, Hugh Teale found a Marine intelligence officer that was always informed, inventive, good with a bribe, actually bothered to get to know the local language and customs, and knew more about how to get around in the alleys than his own men did.

After crossing his path many times in Lebanon, Hugh Teale made David Hastings an offer that would change both of their lives. David Hastings would leave his beloved Marines and come to work in the CIA.

That Sunday morning, David Hastings would ride the train to meet with his friend and mentor for the last time.

Hugh Teale

Hugh Teale was old money, old world and old school. Raised overseas at embassy postings around the world, Hugh Teale was very much his fathers’ son. His father came from the intelligence community before the CIA, before the OSS, back when serious people actually said “Gentleman don’t read other Gentlemen’s mail”. Hugh Teales’ father William Teale, actually did read other “Gentleman’s mail” long before it became fashionable and a regular part of government policy to do so.

Hugh Teale was the sort of man that could walk in his underwear across a crowded ballroom in the middle of a waltz and no one would take notice. He was by his nature and style, invisible. He rarely spoke just above a whisper, always wore a hat and overcoat, always leaned forward to talk to you and looked directly into your eyes and poked you with his long dangling, nicotine covered, claw like fingers while he did it. He was the sort of person you always think you see out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, is always someone else instead.

He was in every sense of the word, “spooky”.

Au Bon Pain – Grand Central Washington D.C.

He sat at the edge of the platform at a table furthest from the customers, a pile of the Sunday paper laid out in front a cup of coffee in the old fashioned style sitting before him. Dave caught site of him as he left the train station below. He knew that the only reason he saw his friend is that in this case at this time, he simply wished to be seen.

As Dave approached, Hugh arose from his seat and delivered in his continental accent a quiet whisper that said; “Good morning David, it’s good to see you again”. He smiled and shook his Dave’s hand and motioned for him to sit down.

Dave smiled and sat down opposite.

“This couldn’t wait for Monday, Hugh”?

Teale Smiled and leaned forward. “By this time tomorrow David, I suspect that you will be very busy indeed. I read your plan. I was very impressed David. I’ve read it half a dozen times since you delivered it two weeks ago. Frankly, I haven’t though about much since I first read it. You’ve outdone yourself, you really did” He laughed and nodded his head and then looked up.

“There are plans that are created to mark time, there are plans designed to make their bosses look good. There are plans that exist to give cover to the fact that the author wasted government money for a year just to repeddle the already known facts as new facts, and then there are plans like this one.

This is the kind of plan that is immediately fed into the shredder.

Why? Because this is the one sort of plan that this town absolutely hates and cannot tolerate. This town hates two types of things more than any other, Failure and Success. Failure gets hunted down because everyone wants to be the big scalp hunter that removed the scourge of failure from the land. It’s an easy kill and it’s easier to hunt down a failure than it is to make something work of your own. But by far the most hated thing in this town is what looks to be a shot at success. Success changes the game, once the people of this country find that its possible to actually “do something” they will start to clamor for it more often, and we cant have that now can we, Dave”?

Dave smiled and wondered where this was all going.

“So good plans, I mean really good plans are smothered in their cribs before they can do any harm to the bureaucracy at large, which as you know must be protected at all costs. I immediately fed your plan into the shredder the first time I read it Dave, It is truly that good”. Hugh sat back in his chair as Dave sat across from him flummoxed, not quite knowing where to go next.

“Hugh, the thing is, after 20 years of working with you, I can never tell if you are insulting me or praising me from one moment to the next”

“Occupational hazard dear boy. My apologies” Hugh said, grasping Dave’s upper arm.

Hugh started again “ I discussed the basic theory of this, ahem, plan of yours with a couple of friends from college who are staying over the weekend in Camp David”, he said with a wink.

And? Dave said askance with a wave of the hand.

“The plan that you have created, to say the least my friend, was received with great interest. David. This is a plan that will change the game. Plans that are actually going to change things cannot be executed from within the company. The company is rotten with corruption from stem to stern. This plan, if it is to survive, must be done from the outside if it is to have any chance of success at all. That’s why I’m meeting with you now, here on a Sunday”.

David, your lovely, plan has been “approved” and that my boy is why I’m going to have to ask you to resign. You see, you’re the only one who can see how this plan will work and I will need you on the outside to do it, and you need to start right away. The longer this thing sits around the bigger the chance that someone will come to see that it never sees the light of day".

Hugh Teale, leaned back and looked at his protoge and friend David Hastings right in the eye. He leaned over to the table took his cup of coffee and said “ Here’s to 'privateer' my boy"” and tipped his Styrofoam cup with a small salute.

Dave Hastings had put it all on the line with one simple plan. Before the plan had started, it had already cost him his career with the CIA; but it would be worth it if the plan worked.

It was, as Hugh said; "a game changer".

(Note: Chapter 3 will appear on Sunday, Feb 25th)

Posted @ February 22, 2007 10:05 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (6)

Privateers - A Blog Novel

Chapter 1: Mud.

Rain in the desert has the effect of being both welcome by the inhabitants and particularly cleansing for the surroundings and yet totally disruptive to both things at the same time. A host of things that may have survived intact for a thousand years or more in the dryness of the desert can be washed away into total obscurity with just a few moments in the rain. Once those small seemingly insignificant drops of water join together, the force can move the mountains and redefine the borders of countries. Rain, it has been said, by its absence or abundance can change the history of man.

Rain, and its ability to hide and obscure the actions of man would serve once again as the process by which change would come to the deserts of the Middle East.

The Iranian City of Ilam

For six days, a slow moving warm front had lingered across the mountains that span the western provinces of Iran, turning the ground of the desert into a literal quagmire. Mountain streams, creek beds, and finally the rivers had their fill of the rain and began to overflow. The populace as well, had more than had its fill of the most unseasonable rain. Because of the rain, because of the number of washed out bridges that occurred through the region, because of the mud making mire where once was once a road; ground travel in the western part of the Islamic Republic had come to a stand still at the worst possible time of the year.

The rain and its after effects on the desert were making the annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Samarra more difficult for the Shiite inhabitants of Iran than it had been for many, many years. Throughout the western provinces, the followers of the Shia sect of Islam had found themselves delayed on their spiritual journey not by politics, war, pestilence or disease, but by of all things, the unlikely abundance of water in the desert.

The monotonous thumping drumbeat of the helicopters of the Iranian Revolutionary Army moving about the countryside around the city of Ilam replaced sounds of trucks on the highway, reminding the local inhabitants of all the small towns of the western provinces that not everything in the world had come to a complete standstill because of the rain. The Islamic Revolutionary Army was still on duty, defending the faithful from the infidel, both at home and abroad. The thumping sound on the horizon was a constant reminder.

Each time the blades of the helicopters bit into the air with the characteristic “THWAP-THWAP-THWAP” as they moved about, the sound was to the man in the streets of Iran a reminder of their place in the world much like the bark of dogs to an intruder. Police dogs, prison dogs, military helicopters; the impact on the psyche of the populace at large was the same, and as such largely ignored except when noted by their absence.

In the pre-dawn hours just after a passing line of thunderstorms that precipitated out of the unseasonable warm front, the population of Iranian city of Ilam heard and all but ignored the sound of helicopters as they moved across the city and into the mountains just east of town. Like a great magic trick where all is in clear view to the audience and yet no one sees a thing, the inhabitants of Ilam had all failed to take any notice of this act of deception that was cloaking the actions of people who were working behind the scenes to disrupt their lives.

What the inhabitants did take notice of occurred an hour later when the electrical power that fed into the city of over 30,000 suddenly ceased to be. When the authorities noticed this and tried to call other parts of the Islamic Republic to find out why such a thing had occurred; they also noticed that the telephone exchange for their region was also no longer functioning.

It was going to be a long day in halls of government of the city of Ilam, and yet, the sun was not even completely above the horizon. When the helicopters returned from the mountains just east of the city and passed directly overhead and turned south, no one on the ground in Ilam made the connection that the two events might somehow be connected.

There was no reason to take notice of the helicopters. The military commander of the local garrison watched as they flew low over the garrison compound and half-heartedly waved at them as he had done a hundred times before. The pilot of the lead aircraft looked down, smiled and half-heartedly waved back, just has a hundred other pilots had also done before. And why not, they were just five helicopters of the Iranian Revolutionary Air Force, clearly marked and of the same 1960’s vintage American Bell 204 “Hueys” that had made up the core of the Iranian Armed Forces Helicopter ranks. They flew over the garrison fortress on the edge of town as per standard procedure and then along the highway going south along the border with Iran and Iraq, just as they always did hundreds of times before.

The garrison commander should’ve looked closer at the helicopters, but he had no reason to. That was the whole idea; only he didn’t know it at the time.

After six days of rain turning the region into an impassable mess, the city of Ilam was full of Shia pilgrims on their way to Samarra, trying to cross the border into Iraq to travel to the shrines of the Shia Imams. Now to complicate matters, the power was out, as well as the phones. The Islamic revolutionaries of Iran had often touted themselves as a way to return the faithful to a world much like the glory days for Islam of the 9th Century. It was at times such as this that the populace was reminded of just how easy it was to accomplish this so called “revolutionary” goal.

Military helicopters, their comings and goings, simply didn’t raise an eyebrow by anyone in this part of the country, in this time of year, in this type of emergency.

Morning prayers would have to come first. The military governor would have to be advised in person of the situation with the power and the loss of phone connections to headquarters. The inhabitants of the town could only prepare to survive yet another humid day that was now matched with the monotony of listening to their neighbors gas powered generators as they all conspired to rattle the plaster off the walls of their homes, desperately trying to keep their refrigerators and televisions working. The clatter and the exhaust from all of these individual machines in all the homes around the city would make life in the city unbearable in a very short time.

Yet by noon, an entirely different set of helicopters would visit the garrison compound in the city of Ilam. The agenda of the men who would arrive that afternoon by helicopter would be along an entirely different course than that set in motion by the almost entirely unnoticed, yet very significant helicopters that were last seen moving south along the highway from the city.

(Note: Chapter 2 will appear on this site Feb 21th.)

Posted @ February 18, 2007 06:15 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (1)

Announcement

Ok,

As we all know, I've been suffering from a big bout of 'blog-block' over the past month.

It's been very frustrating, but I think I've found what the problem is and I'm going to make a small change in direction for a bit.

From here on out, from time to time I may make a quick comment about something in the "world o' politics", but for the most part, I'm finished with that whole process. It's just not that interesting to me anymore. I've made the same arguments for the past three years, over and over and frankly you either get it or you dont. If you don't get it, one more deeply linked essay from me isnt going change your mind.

If you do get it, then you dont really need to hear it again, now do you?

So just to sum it all up -

(The condensed cream of three years of blogging) -

- It's way to early for me to talk about 2008, I really cant get up the steam to go on about that considering the last election just happened. All I can really think about is how old I feel compared to the way I felt in 2000. It seems like a billion years ago that we were arguing about 'dimpled chads' and 'talking down the economy'.

- Yes, everytime I think the Democrats have reached bottom, they get out the backhoe and continue to dig a new basement.

- Yes, whats left of the Republican party seems as out of place and hard to fathom as a man dressed in a 1940's grey pinstripe suit, with belts and suspenders wearing a pair of brown shoes with white socks and highwater pants at an elegant black tie dinner at the Playboy mansion. You wonder who let him out of the house dressed like that and if he knows that his zipper is down and that that there is a big piece of spinach stuck in his teeth.

- Yes, John Kerry made blogging easy and now that he's gone theres hardly any sport in it at all. The minute he opened his mouth it was as if you could hear carnival music and your vision was filled with the sight of a line of target ducks that would walk right in front of you. You Blogging BB-Gun would begin to plink almost out of instinct rather than thought.

"John Kerry reporting for duty"
Ker-plink
"I voted against it before I voted for it"
Ker-plink
"I still have the hat"
Ker-plink, ker-plink, ker-plink...
Ok, I wont run for president.
Ker-Ah man! I can't shooot a defenseless animal...!"

- Yes, European Governments (for the most part) really arent our friends. I dont think I need a post a week to make this clear to you after all that weve been through.

- No, I dont want to laugh at the crazy female astronaut. Mental illness, the real kind - is not terribly funny to me. This woman was a professional of the highest order and there is no second act in her life. This is a tragedy, nothing more, nothing less. I wish someone would look at that, but the fact that she "wore Depends" seems far more interesting to most people.

- The New York Times is not interested in truth, its only interested in ratings. The only thing thats really surprising is that they have managed to create conditions at that newspaper that ensure that they can deliver neither of those things, despite having a near monopoly in their market.

- No, I dont want to make fun of Anna Nicole Smith, dead or alive. She just doesnt seem funny to me, her life or her death. Although I have to notice that once the HUGE fortune that was beqeathed to her began to finally come into being; people all around her who would be in line to get the forture if, something 'bad' were to happen to her, seem to have started dying fairly quickly soon after. Shades of Shakespeares Richard III?

- Yes, I still think Bush is a great President. I think that now more than ever. Most of what people say they know about President Bush usually hasnt happened. I spent an hour last week arguing with a friend over the "Bush wont let the Park Service say how old the Grand Canyon is" canard. Even when I pulled the article for Michael Shermer ( who both started and ended the baseless controversy ) as evidence that it simply wasnt true, it didnt matter. The narrative was there, and that was all that mattered. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere. It's not what you actually do in history that matters, its what people who fake the history later for their own purposes want you to do to fit their biases and bigotry that really matters the most. (Funny? isnt this exactly the sort of thing that they accuse the President of doing? Its like a 'hall of mirrors' or something, The Bush Presidency is sort of like the end of 'Lady From Shanghai' or something. Help! I'm caught in an endless loop of BDS...aarrrrggghh!)

- Yes, I think that invading Iraq was 'worth it'. I sometimes feel like an abolitionist arguing against slavery in the south before the civil war, but I do think that liberty, freedom and democracy are worth fighting for and are noble causes and the pursuit of such things for the world serves the nation well. I also think the aberrant, Jihadist Islam is worth fighting against whenever and wherever possible. We are in Iraq if not for any other reason than thats where the war is at the moment. If it were to move, I would hope that we would move as well, but as of late, I have my doubts. We seem to be a society thats moved to the next shiny object in our line of vision.

- Whats the biggest surprise since 2001? That most of the war against the terror would actually be in political wars against my own countrymen. Should we fight or not, should we use our intelligence services or not, should we interrogate or not should we bother to do anything with them at all or not, all those battles - and in a political sense they were very messy indeed - were fought at home. In 2001, I would never have guessed that what has happened would have happened. It was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Al-queda, the actual object of our righteous anger, seems to have been smashed to bits, something I doubt that anyone on the left wants to admit had everything to do with the way that President Bush so steadfastly brought the war to them.

And that about wraps it up. It took 813 posts to say that and less than a paragraph to sum it all up. That says everything there is to say about the self-absorbed world of blogging.

So, where do we go from here?

Well, starting tommorow I will begin posting something new. I call it a "blog novel". I started this blog simply as a way to teach myself to write, and there is a great deal of speculative things that I want to think about and write about. Simply providing links and essays on the subject only goes so far. So, write is what I set out to do, and thats what I'm going to do now.

I've written the first 15 posts for the first of these 'blog novels'. The first post of this new form will be online tommorow evening. I will post a new entry each Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. I will use the narrative form to explain some portion of the 'war on terror' or some other subject, rather than write an essay, I will use this new form to illustrate my point.

I hope its both instructive and entertaining.

We will just have to see how it goes.

(And thanks for everything...)

Posted @ February 17, 2007 11:15 PM | Blog-novel | Comments (5)