Eight Feet Deep

Old Squeaky. You could hear him a mile away.

That was me today. You know how new shoes somehow tend to squeak when you first walk in them? Well multiply that sound it makes by a factor of about five and that should let you know how squeaky I really was.

The shoes I wore are one of two new pair of Ambulator Diabetic Shoes I was given by the VA in an attempt to lessen the pain from my peripheral neuropathy that makes my feet feel as if they were shot, stabbed and set on fire. I have only had worse foot pain once than I am having nowadays. That was the Night of the Cruel Shoes.

My friend from college, Clay, had a very nice and large wedding when he married Katie about 12 years ago. Another friend, Warren, had been Clay’s roommate in college and Warren and I were two of the six or seven groomsmen attending the groom. Of course, we were wearing the rented tuxes which, unfortunately, came with rented shoes.

Now as I mentioned, my friend, Clay the radiologist, had a very nice wedding so this is nothing to take away from the wedding. But the shoes turned out to be living hell as time went on. Warren and I went on to call them “Cruel Shoes,” which is the name of the best-selling 1979 book written by comedian, actor, etc., Steve Martin as well as the title of one of the book’s very funny essays. Needless to say, or perhaps not, that the rented shoes were not black and white pumps with two left feet and …

” one had a right angle turn with sepa­rate compartments that pointed the toes in impossible directions. The other shoe was six inches long and was curved inward like a rocking chair with a vise and razor blades to hold the foot in place. ”

Our cruel shoes were black and rented. God only knows how many feet had been tortured in those shoes I wore in Dallas that night. That’s all right though. The bride and groom know how much we care for them and would endure pain to make their wedding a most wonderful experience. I still hadn’t seen the videos.

My diabetic shoes aren’t cruel from what I can tell. Just squeaky. At least the pair with the Velcro straps are. The other pair has shoestrings. They don’t look too bad. They are definitely more expensive than I would pay for — here is the shoe on a retailer’s site — all but probably hiking shoes. Thinking about hiking shoes makes me sad because I don’t know if I am ever going to hike again with this constant pain. But if the new shoes aren’t cruel shoes and help get me through the day then I guess I can handle the squeak until they get broken in properly.

It’s amazing how a trip back to Beaumont from Houston, all of 90 miles or so, wears me out. Or maybe it was all the sitting around I did at the DeBakey Veterans Affairs Hospital this morning in Houston? Or maybe combine all that with the 15 minutes I spent finding a place to park at the VA hospital?

Well, one thing about it, you could never mistake going to the VA hospital with fun.

I would have never known that they added 160 parking spaces in February at the DeBakey hospital. But that’s what their press release says.

“We know parking at the DeBakey VA is a serious concern for Veterans seeking health care,” said Adam C. Walmus, the hospital’s director. “The current situation is unacceptable and we are taking immediate action to alleviate the problem.”

I tell you what Mr. Director, I don’t think the 160 extra spaces were a drop in the bucket at least when it came to my driving around trying to find a spot this morning and finally parking more or less perpendicular to the VA Regional Office which is a lot closer to Holcombe Avenue than is the hospital. What I am saying is it was a good hike. Great for someone whose major problems include feet pain from walking for extended periods of time. In other words, the situation is still unacceptable.

Now I am sure the hospital folks would say: “But we have free valet parking.” True but one would spend as much time waiting to pull your car up to the hospital entrance, not to mention the waiting time for your car to be retrieved, as it takes to park your vehicle out in that mess that’s known as visitor parking.

The VA plans to increase parking spaces by the summer by 500. But that and the spotty enforcement seems like plugging up a hole in a boat made of Swiss cheese. One of the main problems cited by the Houston VA is that, since parking is free for visitors, this has led to jacking spaces by those who work elsewhere in the Texas Medical Center. Those employees simply park and hop on a bus or ride a bike over to the other hospitals. The VA has had its police checking to see if some of those cars actually belong there but that just seems fruitless.

My solution is to shoot these scofflaws who steal parking spaces from America’s veterans! I guess that’s a little harsh but I don’t even know if the total 1,200 spaces they hope to add at DeBakey when they build by 2016 some kind of structure over one of the existing parking lots will do much good.

There must be some kind of solution to the problem other than merely reshuffle the existing spaces. The task is providing parking, not brain surgery. I realize that is an oversimplification, especially since the government is involved. You add the frustration that you get trying to park with the frustration you have sitting around for hours on end waiting on appointments plus the frustration when you have to deal on occasion with one of the asses who needs to be working in something other than in contact with the public and you got yourself a real s**t storm. Seriously, it is surprising you don’t hear about more violent episodes than you do at the nation’s VA hospitals. It’s not just Houston’s.

It seems like if the Department of Veterans Affairs are serious about wanting to provide the best care possible, they could start when you park your car. The approach that is being taken is just too little too late.

A few quick observations before I head for an overnighter in Houston later today.

Geez lady, chill out! Oh, sorry, that’s chill out ma’am.

The U.S. Navy has relieved of command undoubtedly its worst captain of the year and it is a woman skipper. Or is that a skipper woman? Just skip it. Though I wonder if she ever heard of Prozac?

Where there’s smoke: Part 1

I’ve been listening to Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio all morning while driving out in the woods on business. The talk today is all Ben Roethlisberger. The two-time Super Bowl-winning Steelers quarterback once again finds himself in scalding hot water with Georgia police looking into allegations he sexually assaulted a 20-year-old college co-ed. This isn’t the R-Man’s first rodeo when it comes to sexual misconduct complaints. You have to begin wondering, you know … ?

Where there’s smoke: Part 2

Driving down a Texas Farm-to-Market this morning I did a double take when I saw a sign advertising a carton of Marlboro’s. Only $49. Forty-nine dollars! Is that some kind of a joke? Since I quit smoking — 10 years ago this October — I haven’t really kept up with cigarette prices. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have to do so as part of my part-time job, but I record the price and go on. After all, I don’t buy cigarettes. Well, I bought some for my ex-girlfriend a couple of years ago. Note: Ex. Anyway, I know that taxes and all have made cigs go through the roof. But $49 a carton? You could buy a nice dinner with that amount. I never bought cartons. Well, when I was stationed on a ship and we could get cheaper smokes outside of the U.S.A. waters, to the tune of $2 a carton (this was 1977-78) but I hardly bought cartons during the rest of the years I smoked because they tended to make me smoke more, or so I rationalized. But gosh almighty folks. Holy smokes, or rather, unholy smokes. Quit before you go broke.

Deja vu log truck

I had a flashback this morning, back to mid-teens when I took drivers education. Actually, the very first day that I drove in drivers ed. My instructor and I drove a backwoods dirt road in East Texas to pick up another student. As I came around a curve, which had a huge culvert in that curve, a fully-loaded log truck came around from the other direction. It was my first test under fire, so to speak. I did fine. I just eased off the gas, moved a bit to the right and let the big honker pass. Out of the corner of my eye, however, I saw my instructor almost stomp his instructor’s brake through the floor board. That was followed by the teacher downing what looked to be a whole roll of Rolaids. The same happened this morning on a dirt road in East Texas. Well, my instructor has been dead for a number of years and I’ve been driving legally now almost 40 years and I take Prilosec for acid reflux. But this big honker of a log truck came around the curve and we all managed to coexist. I did later fear for my safety as some young woman came flying around a curve on that same dirt road going faster than she should have been going.

Time to skedaddle.

From time-to-time I like to check out our local GI Surplus store here in Beaumont. Granted, the store isn’t of the Col. Bubbie’s magnitude — which apparently survived or came back from the wrath of Hurricane Ike in 2008 — but few military surplus stores I have seen match Bubbie’s level.

I like browsing through the various military and paramilitary garb these days. Of course, they have camo clothing out the wazoo at my local GI Surplus as well as the pocket-laden BDU-style pants the entire military and many of the country’s police are wearing these days. The store I visited had a hot sale going on winter clothing such as the big heavy foul weather coats and flight jackets. The prices weren’t bad.

But it’s some of the stuff not for sale, items on the hard-to-reach top shelf which really makes my trip worthwhile. These items included various guns, military garb and decorations, a sled that was dropped from a plane for soldiers trapped in the snow, and of course they have the missiles and the big gun outside. One could almost imagine loading that sucker up and putting a few new potholes in the middle of U.S. 90. Talk about mayhem! Of course, I would never do something like that. That’s just fantasy all you NSA, FBI and other more local agencies out there scouring the Internet for trouble makers.

I suppose that visiting GI Surplus helps bring out the little kid inside us, inside me. I used to love going to these stores when I was a child and I still like going every once in awhile.

Growing up with family whose lives were heavily affected by World War II, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of my favorite pastimes as a kid was playing soldier.

I would be occasionally fighting the Krauts, especially on the dunes of Algeria after watching the “Rat Patrol” on TV.

But most of my war was fought on some nameless island in the South Pacific against the Japanese. That’s where a couple of my uncles served during the war. My father also sailed in the North Pacific, to Russia, and he used to talk of his ship enduring Japanese fighters on the trip to Vladivostok. I suppose some of the younger people, now parents, who grew up without any close family members who were sent to war might be aghast at such play. But then, what would you want your kids to pretend they are when they’re playing, stockbrokers? Bernie Madoff perhaps?

You would think with such a background and such a lifelong fascination with things military and war-oriented that I would have been a gung-ho type in the service. You would think wrong.

I was part of the Vietnam Era-Post Vietnam military and I guess, perhaps, I might have been a little bit of a stereotype of that time. I would grow my hair, beard, mustache or anything else I could grow to the limit. I was a bit of a slob. But the thing was, I performed my job very well and my superiors would let me slide on my appearance most of the time. It was all teenage rebellion as I joined the Navy in my teens. I was also touched by the anti-war movement. Sometimes we were treated like s**t by the civilians and so I took it out on the establishment. I know. It was kind of dumb. But I was lucky that I was so diligent in performing my job. I managed to escape Captain’s Mast or perhaps even the brig on several occasions.

The truth is, the military has been an important part of my life, especially in the first 25 or so years. I was surrounded by World War II veterans as a kid. Later as a reporter, I interviewed many who fought in that war. Also, my Dad was in the Merchant Marine during that war. Two of my older brothers served in the Navy before me in the early to mid-1960s, one brother spent a tour in Vietnam.

So I come by my military fascination  honestly. I also like looking at and firing big things which go “boom.” I’m 54 years old right now, so I don’t expect to change. At least for that part of said intrigue, I won’t grow up either Mr. Pan.

Is the United States of America an empire?

One could have a lot of fun and spend a considerable amount of time debating, researching, learning or whatever one might fancy in an effort to determine an answer to that question. Even then, ultimately, an answer could be lacking.

Author Robert D. Kaplan, national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, raises this question which keeps popping up from time-to-time in our American discourse, in his book “Imperial Grunts.” But probably more important Kaplan writes in his book that today’s irregular U.S. military forces — the Marines and special forces — are an extremely capable and amazing instrument of a foreign policy whether intentionally or not crowns the American Empire.

Kaplan travels to global spots such as Mongolia, the Philippines, Colombia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq where he looks at how the nation-building that U.S. special military forces are doing is as central to empire-building as military might. For those who thought “winning the hearts and minds” of a people ended after U.S. troops tried it in Vietnam, Kaplan delivers a more modern view of how this is being done as routine military fare.

Empire and nation-building, foreign policy and the George W. Bush-era version of military usage, however, are not as important and as aptly portrayed in this book than the author’s insightful exposition of the mostly young men who are at the heart of the new American military.

Kaplan draws the distinction between the “Big Army,” in which tons of regulations and layers of bureaucracy rule their world and the small teams and ease of operation which is the hallmark or the U.S. Army special operations. At the very heart of the latter is a society of soldiers ranging in rank from major down to senior non-commissioned officers — traditionally from the religious South or U.S. Heartland — whose most important attributes are their ability to adapt and adjust than strictly their use of M-4s or explosives. The special operators’ penetrating knowledge of local peoples who they must both teach and sometimes fight is also an important aspect of the American arsenal. As one special forces soldier in Afghanistan said of the Afghans: “These people like guns and fighting. Give them beer and a mobile home and they’d be just like us.”

Also very different in books about today’s military, Kaplan presents an almost uncensored view not seen in most media of the U.S. national guard troops who also serve as special operators. These citizen-soldiers are more open about their view of the military world because it is not their full-time job. One guardsman, for instance, said his civilian job was just a way he could pay for his special forces habit.

There are a number of Kaplan’s conclusions of which I am either unsure of or with which I disagree. But this is one of the best books I have read about today’s soldiers. I suppose my reason for saying so has to do with my past experience covering the Army as a reporter. Kaplan had the luxury — not a very apt word if you read about some of his lodging in the book — of accessing high-ranking SF types who helped him into some otherwise difficult places to report on these soldiers. Once he got to these places he was on his own and had to win the trust of the operators. But he also was able to stay with the soldiers for extended periods and build trust.

Thus, Kaplan had a more honest and open view of what was going on. This in sharp contrast to my having interacted with soldiers who were usually under the watchful eye of some public information officer types. I did my best but you can guess what makes much better reading.

If you are looking for their opinions of what the soldiers of the empire-or-not do, this is the book. If you want to know about their feelings for things other than work, then you should look elsewhere.