Author: Dick

When Neil Armstrong took those first historic steps on the Moon I was a 13-year-old securely tucked behind the “Pine Curtain” of Southeast Texas. 

Things were fairly slow filtering through the cultural walls juxtaposed between the Old South and the Southwest. Yet due to the wonders of that little black and white box known as television, I was able to see Armstrong take those first few steps and proclaim mankind had taken a giant leap.

The world is pretty scary for kids. It is even more full of consternation for one entering into puberty. Given the context of the times — 1969 — the world made exceptionally less sense.

A war was raging in Southeast Asia. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were fresh in our minds. All kinds of  radicals lurked about. Less than a month after the Moon landing the so-called “Tate-LaBianca Murders” would take place and we would get a glimpse of that wild-eyed sociopath Charles Manson.

So, that man — specifically American man — had landed on the Moon for the first time was quite a respite for me from all the weirdness that was life.

Much has happened since that day, 40 years ago today. I am 53. Life is still strange and not all that much clearer in meaning. I am sitting here about to publish something over what’s called the Internet. My cell phone is sitting nearby. And then there is Starbucks.

Our last president up and decided we need to go back to the Moon. I never totally understood why we ever left. Perhaps it was a political thing. I suppose it is less easy for nations to get into a snit over territory when  one talks about something floating out in space as opposed to a base built on a natural satellite.

So now we talk about going back. But it appears that won’t happen until 2020. That’s about 11 years or so. It didn’t take that long to get there once we made up our mind to do it. We should have already been on Mars by now, one would think. Now people are bickering over whether we should go back to the Moon or travel to Mars. Maybe we should just bypass Mars altogether and land on Saturn. It looks a lot cooler what with the rings.

Wherever we, mankind, ends up going in space we will probably settle it and exploit whatever resources the body has to the best of our abilities. You will also probably see a Starbucks located at each and every pod on the planet. Grande Caffè Latte anyone?

When I hear people speak generically of their having visited “foreign” countries I am almost immediately tempted to ask: “How foreign were they?”

It should be obvious that some places away from one’s normal haunts exhibit more of an extrinsic feel than others. If you walk into a Starbucks in Vancouver, British Columbia, it would hardly be an alien experience especially if you had visited a Starbucks the day before in Seattle.

I was hardly a world traveler when I made a WestPac (Western Pacific) and Southern Pacific cruise in the Navy. Still it took quite a few port visits until I found a place that really struck me as foreign.

I had only made a couple of trips to Mexican border towns before deploying from San Diego on a destroyer for a year. And even though seeing a Col. Sanders with the brown hue of his Mexican hermanos at a KFC in Juarez, or marveling at a jackass painted with black stripes like a zebra outside a Tijuana bar, the border towns never struck me as being more alien than say a stroll down the French Quarter.

Even the off-base Philippines of Olangapo and Subic Bay, with its street vendors selling monkey meat on a stick or its cocky kids diving into the dark depths of Shit River to retrieve coins thrown in by passing sailors, seemed more an X-rated, hedonistic Disneyland for American sailors than a real foreign country.

Perhaps the one factor which separated alien from familiar was the frequency of spoken English.

My ship spent about two months of its cruise also playing war games with the Kiwis and Aussies and visiting its wonderful ports and people all over New Zealand and Australia.

Those two countries were foreign in one respect. That is the kind and civilized behavior could be so extreme at times as to be taken aback. And being from the South and from Texas, I always thought we were pretty friendly folks.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Jakarta — site of what appears to be the latest Jihadist attack on a pair of luxury hotels — that I found what really struck me as foreign.

The first day there found me on a bus with an Indonesian driver who apparently had no idea where he was supposed to take us. Then, he crossed into what seemed to be a lane for bicycles, sending one poor soul flying through the air. Luckily, I was seated and my vision was blocked by my fellow sailors who were standing who saw the whole sad spectacle. We never found out what happened to the biker. Apparently, the bus driver wasn’t concerned.

This was in 1978 and I am not sure of what was going on politically back then, or if this was just normal, but it seemed one didn’t have to look very far to see trucks carrying soldiers armed with automatic weapons combing the streets.

As memorable as that first day was in Jakarta, the second day would count as scary. I took off by myself for what I believed to be the city of Jakarta’s central business district. It took several hours to find, even in a bustling, cosmopolitan city such as Jakarta, someone who spoke English and who could tell me where I needed to go to get to my destination.

During the time that I visited, at least by State Department figures, Jakarta had somewhere in the vicinity of 5-6 million residents. Today, the population of the city itself is estimated at 8.5 million. It is Southeast Asia’s largest city, the 12th largest in the world and is part of the sixth largest metropolitan area.

Indonesia also has the largest Islamic population in the world and that was the case when I visited. Although I have not read anything as of yet which has sorted out the casualties from the bomb blasts in Jakarta along lines of Mulslim versus non-Muslim. It would seem the chances likely for those of the Islamic faith to suffer wounds from the blasts in what our culture calls in its euphemistic manner “collateral damage.”

What does all of this have to do with my musings on experiencing foreign and the not-so-foreign culture? Nothing at all really. Only, no matter how we walk down the street we are not really so different as to escape what is basically, pure evil. Call the perversion of religious beliefs religion if you want. But it doesn’t seem as if it would fit into much of the larger world’s understanding when it comes to those with individual religious leanings.

I am no religious man and by no means a holy man. But I can’t help but see such evil as foreign to the many who live decent lives in a good world.

Yesterday I was thinking wistfully about my younger days when I was stationed on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I got to thinking particularly about this old guy I knew who owned a couple of bars my friends and I would frequent. This old fellow is surely dead by now, or so I’d think as this was 30-something years ago and at least he seemed to be somewhat long in the tooth, but not wanting to take chances I will just call him “Ben.”

Ben was by all accounts a bookie. This was back before the Mississippi Sound was invaded by casinos. I say he was a bookie. I had no proof back then, just hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The latter came from my watching these shady-looking guys walking in and out of Ben’s office at all hours with racing forms in their hands.

One time I remember Ben holding forth at the bar. I think one of his bartenders was off. He bragged to a bunch of us how the FBI had tried but failed to catch him although he didn’t elaborate. It just so happens that yesterday while thinking about this guy I came across some kind of legal case that involved him. The best I can tell it was some kind of forfeiture suit the FBI had against Ben in the early 1970s in which they had seized some kind of machines including those for pinball that had allegedly been used for gambling. The best I could tell through the legal-speak, the feds lost. I don’t know if that was what Ben was talking about, but this unexpected find certainly seemed to provide some ammunition for his bluster.

Ben would not be the last outlaw I knew. I shared a room once in a barracks there in Mississippi with a guy who got busted for going out on an armed robbery spree one night with one of his friends. There were others I knew who took a walk on the criminal side.

For certain outlaws, such as Ben and unlike my weirdo roommate, it’s kind of easy to have an affinity. You grew up reading stories like those about Robin Hood, you know, the benevolent robber-type. Although unless you are anti-social, one doesn’t normally think much of the outlaws who do enormous amounts of harm such as Bernie Madoff or violent creeps such as Charlie Manson. There are exceptions though.

In elementary school one of my friends and I used to play “Bonnie and Clyde.” I don’t think either one of us were actually Bonnie. I think had we thought it out a little better we would have actually been playing “Clyde and Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.”

It took awhile to learn that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were also murderous, sociopathic creeps although it was slow in coming to me. This was because where I grew up, in Southeast Texas, some of the older folks still saw Bonnie and Clyde somewhat in terms of Depression-era Robin Hoods. Perhaps they were to some extent but the were still cold-blooded killers and bank robbers.

I suppose many members of society at large have a type of admiration for certain crooks, especially those that show some sort of skill and intelligence. What with the entertainment value that “dumb criminal” media have presented in recent years, it seems the smart ones seem even less and less among us these days.

I’ve thought long and hard about crime and punishment. I figure that morality has played some part in keeping me on the straight and narrow, and out of the slammer. But too I would have to say that fear of imprisonment has likewise done its share to deter me from a life of crime.

My title is really more a play on words of the old Willie Nelson song (It’s always about Willie, for me, isn”t it?) “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” But at least in some circumstances there is a little fire popping through the smoke.