Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 11

joe_haldeman @ 2015-09-11T09:39:00

(Judith Clute, while fixing dinner):  "Some things in one's life are as they've been for people for thousands of years.  But they had to catch the chicken and clean it and pluck it . . ."


I remember as a child visiting Oklahoma, how terrified I was about having chicken over at Aunt Kat's, a small farm.  They would catch a chicken, chop its head off, rip out its entrails, dip it in boiling water and then pull off the feathers by handfulls.  Then joint the thing with a cleaver.  Let the cats play with the head.  Bon appétit!

The result probably tasted good, floured and fried in Crisco.  I don't remember.

I had one of those days yesterday.  Started out well; I pedaled down to the Books-a-Million and bought an armload of magazines to  take on the boat trip.  As soon as I started back, though, the heavens opened up.

It was an old-fashioned gullywasher.   Rain coming down so hard I really couldn't see.  Went up some side roads so I wouldn't be near traffic – got lost and had to slowly double back over rutted back streets – a blinded car almost hit me as I turned into my street – and finally I got home thoroughly drenched and shaken.   In an earlier era I would've poured a healthy tot of rum, but was content to get out of my wet clothes and have a small glass of white wine out on the porch.  (Of course the storm stopped abruptly. )

My regular bike's in the shop, so I was wobbling along on the old Trek racer.  Its narrow high-pressure tires were not what I needed!

Had about an hour to relax in the tub, and then we went out to pick up Chuck and Judy Broward to go to an early supper and a play.  Good food at the little Italian restaurant by the theater, and an amusing slight musical about what happened before the start of Peter Pan.  The female lead was a good powerful singer, small body for such a large voice.  Her face was wonderfully mobile and emotional.

I slept soundly, till dawn.


So headed out now to get a haircut and beard trim, then write.  Not going off for holidays for another week, but have become so shaggy it's uncomfortable.

Joe

them's the brakes

You have to watch out for the brakes on old bikes,  The rubber dries out and loses its grip.  If you get on a bike that hasn't been used in years, it's best to replace the brake pads before you go anywhere.  I remember someone saying they "crystalize," but that may be bikespeak for drying out.Joe

Shakespeare to the rescue

Off to take the bike down and attempt to have it fixed again.  Yesterday I tried, but found
that other people thought it was a big holiday.  Of course there will be others waiting.

Back when I had time and no money I would just break out the tools and do it myself.  When I was fifty years younger?  Sixty?  Who would have thought of being old enough to even say that?!

That's a kind of triumph, though I'd rather have the kind that you start with a key.

(Ah, one childhood ambition I guess I'll never achieve.  A sports car.  Not important enough anymore, I guess.  What a sad state is this maturity.)

(But my sports car has an equatorial mounting.  How many light-years per hour does yours get?)

I can see myself, fifty years ago, shaking my head at the old geezer who drives his bike down to the shop because a tube has a blown valve.  "Don't you even have a spare tube to swap out?"  Um, in fact, no.  Used it.  Maybe I should get another one.

Well, at least I did fix a wonderful breakfast, yogurt and fresh fruit.  I'll bet those grease monkeys down at the bicycle shop just wolfed down a bowl of Wheaties and skim milk.  Maybe some bacon and eggs.  A plate of toast with tons of butter and fresh jam.  Then a blowjob from the sexy blond cook.  As they open the envelope with a seven-figure check from the Nobel Committee.

I do not desire this man's art, nor that man's scope.  Unless that man's scope is, like, a 14" Celestron.

Well, enough idle fancies.  On to work.

Joe

joe_haldeman @ 2015-08-29T17:02:00

On Friday, Lore and Gay and I took a bunch of visitors on a walk through Paynes Prairie, out to the lookout tower and back.  Just shy of four miles, a nice walk through the mild clear day, about eighty degrees.  We saw lots of alligators, to everyone's delight.  And one snake.

I almost stepped on it – saw it at the last second and jumped back.  I may have touched it with my toe, a little too close for comfort.  An American coral snake, it's the most toxic animal in North America, and has a cross disposition.   (Not as ill-tempered as the rattlesnake, but its venom is more poisonous.)

I was wearing trainers; left my sandals in the car because of the possibility of snakes.   I shall continue that precaution in the future!

It was a beautiful beast, more beautiful of course because of its menace.  But one doesn't go looking for them.

http:///Users/joehaldeman/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/ig39_Coral_snake_02.jpg


That little frisson of danger added to the merriment.  (Except to me, perhaps.)  We then went on to Micanopy and had lunch at the Old Florida Café, a fine sandwich shop with outdoor tables under the rustling palms.

We had a rest and then went to the Hippodrome Theater, where Lore had engaged the basement floor for a sumptuous feast.  It was a sizable catered affair, with an international combination of goodies, fifteen or twenty heated servers offering an assortment of Mediterranean, Asian, and Mexican fare.  An open bar with a skilled and cute bartender.  About 85 people from all over the country, including Alaska.

The conversation was bright and varied, friends of ours from many different places and times.

Lots of folks got up and told stories about us. Gay and I each gave a little speech, off the cuff, and Lore showed about a hundred slides, illustrating our fifty years and the twenty before – way too cute shots of me and my brother, sepia and black & white in the distant snows of our childhood.  Aw-so-romantic pictures of Gay and me dating and getting married.  A lot of poignant pictures of my brother and me raising various kinds of hell as teens and young men.

It was a wonderful evening, one of the best of my life!  All because of Lore (with a little help from an innocent reptile).

But how could fifty years go by so fast?

Joe

headed home from the world con

Well, the con is drawing to a close.  Gay and I went out after breakfast and enjoyed strolling for a couple of hours – perfect strolling environment, and in this case, an official one.  Stu Segal has been running "Stroll With the Stars" for some years, which we've been doing every year.  About 75 people showed up to chat and walk.(There were three or four other writers and artists going in their own groups.)
You couldn't imagine a better environment for it.  A lazy well-landscaped river with a well-maintained walkway, thoughtfully populated by attractive young joggers.  Some not so young, but younger than me.  Gay and I just walked along and answered questions and, as always, it was over rather before I was ready to stop.  Much preferable to dragging along waiting for it to end.
The Hugo ceremonies were less acrimonious than I expected, but with David Gerrold in charge, I should have known they would have gone smoothly.  The Sick Puppies, or Queasy Cats or whatever, did their protest thing, and were passively tolerated, and went away.
The ceremony was pretty plain, as opposed to recent high-tech presentations.  I was just as glad.  Walked from there to a lovely book store, Auntie's, where they had tons of food and drink, including fancy cheeses and pastry and good wine.  I could have stayed there for hours, one of the best book stores in a lifetime of haunting same.But duty calls, and we went on in a fleet of taxis to a big mansion that George Martin had taken over for a lavish blow-out, more food and drink, but this time with music and dancing.
I don't dance and the music was rather loud for me.  I should throw a competing party, with cool jazz.  Maybe a hookah in the corner for those who prefer to relax with opium or hashish – oops, no.  It's not really California.The whole show was enjoyable for both of us.  I wasn't overworked – my hardest day had five events, and I only had a half-day of writers' cramp after the signing party.
So there will be the necessary excruciation of a day of airports and airplanes, with a little extra excitement, since we're flying into Hurricane/Tropical Storm Danny.  With two more storm systems coming behind it.  Part of the fun of living in Florida.
But seriously, we are moving into the half-year that's the best part of living in North America's Penis.  Or Dangling Participle.   From October through May it's pretty nice.
Joe

support

Googling after your note, thewayne, I found a set of pie charts (http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/download/csipubs/mcgrath_op23.pdf) showing the "tooth-to-tail" ratio of American forces in various wars.  In Vietnam in 1968, only 35% of the soldiers were classified as combat, as opposed to support, logistics, and administrative.  Now it's slightly less, one in three.

Of course you have to wonder what the reality is on the ground . . . would I have been a tooth or a tail?  I was totally "in" combat, walking through the jungle and getting shot at, but in fact I never fired my weapon; my function was totally support of the infantry, blowing down trees so helicopters could land to extract the wounded.  So I was a tail, but I was armed to the teeth.

You could say the same, in extremis, about the cooks.  Their basic function was to provide horrible food, but every now and then you have to put down your spoon and pick up a gun.  ("All right, men, it's time to go kill some people on purpose . . . . ")  Come to think of it, one afternoon we did have a cook stuck out on a hill with us overnight – the poor sod had come in with a chopper delivery of "hots" and was stranded with us overnight, white apron and all!

Speaking of Vietnam! – I just heard a chainsaw fire up in the side yard.  Some guys have come by to remove a tree on the west side of our yard.  A welcome invasion, as one of its large branches looms over our bedroom.  Better go watch!

Joe

answer to the wayne

(A little trouble getting through.)

I've read about that -- women who pilot the drones half a world away from the action, doing 9-to-5 in North Dakota.  Winding up hospitalized from stress disorder. We noted back in Viet Nam that the guys who were stuck in base camp seemed to have it worse psychologically than those of us out in fire bases and the boonies.  We figured it was because we could at least shoot back.  It was probably a complex of factors, though, up and down and sideways.  Not the least of the positive ones was that the officers were in at least as much danger as the men.joe

snipng and PTSD

(from sff.net)

My feeling of it, which is reinforced by my reading, is that most soldiers who
kill people under orders are not completely freaked out by it. But most of
us kill at a considerable distance. A book I read (_On Killing_) claimed, with
reasonable evidence, that the psychological damage a soldier sustains from killing
strangers is an inverse function of the distance between the soldier and his
victim. Snipers were pretty detached from the death of their target -- squeeze
the trigger and the tiny image of a man falls down -- but people who are a social
distance away, close enough to speak to or even touch the man they killed --
are more or less profoundly damaged by the experience.

The people I killed were usually miles away when they died, and I usually didn't
have to deal with their bodies. So it's kind of an abstraction, even though
you're ultimately causing the death.

I'm glad I had that emotional insulation, but of course the men are just as
dead as if I had throttled them to death. If one had a philosophical bent,
one could get bent oneself.

Joe

a long shot

Following some odd lead, I wound up Googling Carlos Norman Hathcock, one of the most successful snipers in U.S. military history.  He managed to dispatch at least 93 enemy soldiers – those were "confirmed kills"; he estimated the actual toll was three or four times that many.

His most strange success was hitting an enemy sniper in the riflescope; an instant later, the man would have probably squeezed the trigger and, perhaps, killed him first.

In 1967 Hathcock set the record for the longest sniper kill. He used a M2 .50 Cal Browning machine gun mounting a telescopic sight at a range of 2,500 yd (2,286 m), killing a Vietcong guerrilla.  The record stood until 1992.

The North Vietnamese army reportedly had a $30,000 bounty on his head.

The antepenultimate paragraph of the article linked Hathcock's military career to mine:

Hathcock's career as a sniper came to a sudden end along Route 1, north of LZ Baldy in September 1969, when the amtrack he was riding on, an LVT-5, struck an anti-tank mine.

We might have shared the same unlovely hill.  I was in and out of a place called LZ Baldy for a few months in 1968, when my platoon was attached to the 175th Engineers.  (I think; we were swapped around a lot.)  Here's a picture that looks familiar, for people on LiveJournal.

Following some odd lead, I wound up Googling Carlos Norman Hathcock, one of the most successful snipers in U.S. military history.  He managed to dispatch at least 93 enemy soldiers – those were "confirmed kills"; he estimated the actual toll was three or four times that many.

His most strange success was hitting an enemy sniper in the riflescope; an instant later, the man would have probably squeezed the trigger and, perhaps, killed him first.

In 1967 Hathcock set the record for the longest sniper kill. He used a M2 .50 Cal Browning machine gun mounting a telescopic sight at a range of 2,500 yd (2,286 m), killing a Vietcong guerrilla.  The record stood until 1992.

The North Vietnamese army reportedly had a $30,000 bounty on his head.

The antepenultimate paragraph of the article linked Hathcock's military career to mine:

Hathcock's career as a sniper came to a sudden end along Route 1, north of LZ Baldy in September 1969, when the amtrack he was riding on, an LVT-5, struck an anti-tank mine.

We might have shared the same unlovely hill.  I was in and out of a place called LZ Baldy for a few months in 1968, when my platoon was attached to the 175th Engineers.  (I think; we were swapped around a lot.)  Here's a picture that looks familiar, for people on LiveJournal.

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http://www.donutdolly.com/575

Ah, memories.  Can't say I miss the place.

Joe

An astronomical loss

I may have written about this before; forgive my creeping senility.  I've been thinking about it for awhile.

When I was ten or eleven, my mother secretly wrote to the Palomar Observatory, which had only been in existence for a few years, and got a set of large (I think 18X24) black-and-white photographs of nebulae and star clusters, mostly taken with the 100" Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world.  She carefully glued them into a large artist's notebook – by far my favorite Christmas present that year.  For many years it was one of my favorite possessions.

I left it at home when I went off to college, though.    When my father cleaned out my room to rent it, he threw out the big book (along with any science fiction I was improvident enough to leave at home).

No matter, I suppose, in the long run.  I was imprinted pretty strongly.

Joe