THE CHOW LINE

Again this year, I stood in the “Chow Line” at the annual Golden Corral free veterans dinner with men and women from all five branches of military service, many wearing baseball caps denoting where they served.

Many years ago I stood next to a sailor who was on the USS Indianapolis and survived being torpedoed and attacked by sharks as they bobbed for days in the water. 

A female Army nurse from the Golf War, a helicopter door gunner from “Nam”, a sailor on the USS Enterprise in the Second World War, a Korean War Air Force fighter pilot, a female radio operator from the Coast Guard, a former POW, a Army MP on the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, a Marine Iwo Jima veteran, a Pearl Harbor survivor, many “GI Joe’s” from the Second World War and Cold War Warriors like me: these are a few of the veterans I chatted with over the years standing in the “Chow Line”. 

A veteran sat down next to me as I ate. 

“What branch were you in?” I asked. 

“Army.”

“Infantry?”

“No, Engineers.”

“Combat or Construction?” 

“Combat.”

“Did you train at Ft. Leonard Wood?”

“Yes.”

“I did too, Combat Engineer, in 1956.”

“You were there before me. I was there in 1961.”

“In the old WWII “temporary” barracks?” 

“Yes, I thought I was going to freeze-to-death in those damm rickety dinosaurs.”

And, we reminisced about: waking-up to ice in the red “butt cans”, cold “C Rations”....

And so it went, all around us as we ate, veterans and families remembering, laughter breaking out here and there. A happy fraternity overshadowing the universal individual losses and sacrifice paid by all.

A common experience and understanding of service, a piece of identity, that gives meaning and purpose to who and what each of us are — a “Band of Brothers” — male and female. 

Carpe Diem 

Carl Rich

Beware...?

I just finished reading Homer’s, The Iliad and started reading The Odyssey. I read both in college. 

Why?

To get what I didn’t get the first time I read it. What did I get? 

To quote Homer: “Beware the toils of War.” The physical and highborn Hubris of Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector and Paris that offended the Olympian gods and soaked the plains of Troy red with blood. Depicted in “R” rated violent vividness by Homer.  

Beware Hubris!

Today, the smug moral superior hubris of those telling us how to think, behave and speak, offending our common sense, heritage and customs, soaking away at the foundations of Western Civilization. 

Carpe Diem,

Carl

Veterans Day 2017

My earliest memories are of War...

...surviving in a cold basement apartment with two younger brothers and just enough food to eat, carefully scraped, by my mother, shuffling pennies and ration stamps, while my father was “overseas”.

Whenever I was downtown in my hometown of Logan, Utah, I watched young men from nearby Bushnell Army Hospital struggle to get off the army bus, with missing arms and legs. 

My Uncle Grant was a radio operator on a half-track in the second wave at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. He survived, returned home, but was plagued with malaria the rest of his life.

My Uncle Don fought across France and into Germany, with Patton’s Third Army, received a Battlefield Commission, returned home with a chest full of medals and what we now call PTSD. 

The day I was married September 18, 1961 my unit, 889th QM CO, was activated during the Berlin Crisis. Three members of my Company were killed in an accident and I returned with a  permanent hearing loss that I live with every day. 

My cousin, Ray G. Jenkins, who I grew up with, was killed February 28, 1968, Ba Xugen Province, South Vietnam as he ran to his helicopter durning a rocket attack. His name is on “The Wall”. 

I currently have a grandson, Ian Hardy, on standby in the National Guard. 

This is just a minuscule piece of the horrendous sacrifices made to keep—

“...our flag...still there.”

When a man with no military service and in the top one-percent in income kneels during the

National Anthem in violation of NFL rules (Sports is about Rules) which he agreed to, and the NFL sits on its hands, I’m no longer a NFL - 49er fan. 

And, I will never attend, or watch on TV, an NFL game again, collage football yes, NFL NO!

“... long may it wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! ”

Carpe Diem,

Carl Rich