https://drive.google.com/open?id=17RhbYpC6RRzouV2PKMd2LZpN09bK57P_

I’ve been retired five years. You would think I wouldn’t have to teach this lesson every year then and every year since.

But it needs to be taught because it obviously hasn’t registered in some dark places.

Using a word like “disloyal” is so pernicious. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to Devil’s Island after a court-martial that brought France to the brink of civil war, was accused of disloyalty.

Statelessness would be one of the canards that would be used to excuse the persecution and attempted extermination of European Jewry.  The flip side of that canard is the suggestion that somehow being an American Jew—in other words, an American—requires loyalty to Netanyahu’s Israel, to his particular brand of chauvinism, which has such ironic precursors.

“Jews will not replace us,” the crowd, made up of fine people, chanted in Charlottesville.  Students in an Orange County’s Pacifica High School were recorded, in a video released earlier this week ,giving the Nazi salute.

I don’t understand the kind of stupidity that embraces deliberate forgetting. I never will.

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
—Julius Caesar II.i.18-19

I’ve been reading extensively about laws and legality on Facebook lately. Most of what I’ve read would be funny but the people who write these things take themselves so seriously. Their insistence on obedience to the law, at the expense of compassion and logic, isn’t funny. It’s heartless. And it’s terrifying.

So for all of you legal eagles out there, especially those who specialize in illegal immigration, here are things in the past that have been scrupulously legal:

–The Sanhedrin turning Christ over to the Romans for crucifixion. But Christ had committed sedition, once with such delicacy, by saying “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” not a comment on obeying civil law, but a subtle and very sharp dig at the illegitimacy of Roman coinage, frequently debased, and so at Roman authority.

–The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, required European Jews to wear badges—Stars of David, a precursor to the laws of Nazi-occupied Europe. You can still see bolts of cloth with Stars of David ready for the cutting in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

–A series of laws enacted by the Scottish Parliament in the 1500s and early 1600s that mandated the death sentence for convicted witches. Witchcraft convictions, in duly-constituted civil courts, were particularly common in Scotland and Reformation Germany, where the overwhelming majority of victims were women, immediately suspect in a time of great social and political change.

–The Indian Removal Act of 1830, when gold was found on Cherokee land, was perfectly legal. Until John Marshall’s Supreme Court struck it down. The removal was nonetheless enforced by Andrew Jackson, the present president’s hero, who reportedly said: “Marshall has made his decision. Now let him try to enforce it.”

–Slave codes forbade the legal recognition of slave marriages, making it convenient for slaveholders in the Upper South to break up families for sale to the harsh conditions of places like Louisiana or the Mississippi Delta. One Virginia mother, to be sold South away from her children, defied the law by chopping off her foot with a hatchet to queer the deal.

–The legal justification for the Mexican War was that American soldiers had been killed on American soil. One young Congressman who disputed this was savaged for his lack of patriotism when he urged a series of resolutions, the “Spot Resolutions,” which demanded the government reveal the exact spot—more than likely on disputed territory along the Nueces River—where, more than likely, the war that gave us one-third of Mexico had begun illegally.

The Congressman was Abraham Lincoln.

–The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, required northerners to return runaways to their masters. Thousands of white people flagrantly and shamelessly broke this law.

–In 1872, sixteen women were arrested for breaking the law. They attempted to vote.

–In the South before the civil rights movement, it was illegal for a black driver to pass a white driver on the road. No matter who arrived at an intersection first, the black driver had to yield the right of way to the white driver.

–In 1930-32, the Hoover Administration and local law enforcement officers, including the LAPD, “repatriated” 1.6 million Mexicans rounded up in raids throughout the Southwest. 60% of them were U.S. citizens. Four years later, the LAPD also appeared at the Arizona border to turn away more U.S. citizens, refugees from the Dust Bowl.

–Executive Order 9066, which led to the imprisonment of West Coast Japanese-Americans, was, according to Franklin Roosevelt, completely lawful, despite the objections of two powerful Americans: FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. By the way, it had been long illegal for Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, to become citizens because they were not white people. This was based on law, on the Naturalization Act of 1790.

 

My ancestors came here legally.

That’s because there was no way for them to come here otherwise. They weren’t Chinese, they weren’t Filipinas, they weren’t Guatemalans.

They were from England, Ireland and Germany, so they broke no laws, most importantly the Naturalization Act of 1790. By happy accident, they were white people. That gave them substantial claim to legality and far more comfortable train seats.

Would I come here legally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or by government-sponsored death squads? The latter, by the way, have been a longtime South of the Border custom born, bred, trained and armed by the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

You bet I would. And that’s what thousands of “illegals” have tried to do: To present themselves, under international refugee law–laws drafted in the wake of the ill-fated ship St. Louis and the logical outcome of that debacle, lives swept up in chimneys in places like Auschwitz–at American ports of entry. Most of them, ultimately, would have been denied entry by immigration courts. That doesn’t matter. They’ve been turned away from the immigration courts and they’re sweltering in Mexico today. Those are the lucky ones. The others are in Immigration and Naturalization lockup.

Would I come here illegally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or government-sponsored death squads?

You bet I would.

Would I come here to work illegally slaughtering chickens in the fetid Mississippi heat if it meant my kids had a chance at a college education? Or at surviving to adulthood? Would I be willing to work and live here if it meant paying American taxes and obeying every American law,  except for the one that forbids me from being a better father? Would I try to be someone as devoted to his children as that slave mother had been to hers?

You bet I would.

Whose job am I taking?  There are now too many jobs and not enough white Americans to fill them. I’ll take one of those. As an immigrant, who am I hurting?

No one.

Who am I helping?

This one. Her father loves her more than life itself. She knows that. She feels, at this moment of missing him, a fear so powerful that we can only pray that we will never feel anything like it.

 

None of this matters, the legal eagles cackle—the law being such a splendid shield to conceal moral cowardice.

The law has been used so skillfully to that end from characters as disparate as Henry VIII, who used the headsman to rid himself of embarrassments like Thomas More, and Henry Clay Frick, who used instant deputies, Pinkertons, to shoot down the steel strikers at Homestead.

What if it’s the law—and those who insist on its application, their power disjoined from remorse—who are evil?

So what would you do in the chicken-slaughterer’s place, a man who, more than likely, did come here legally but who’s overstayed his visa?

That reminds me. My car payment is overdue.

 

 

 

The statistics are as somber as Memorial Day itself: for every American infantryman killed in World War II, three were wounded; for every American airman wounded, three were killed.

Twenty-six thousand Marines died in the Pacific; the same number of Eighth Air Force airmen died over Europe.

Other fliers died here. P-38 fighters would have been a common wartime sight over San Luis Obispo County; today’s Santa Maria Airport was an Army Air Forces base that specialized in advanced training of pilots about to head overseas. There were eight fighter crashes near that base in January 1945 alone.

One pilot died when his plane went down in the Oceano dunes. Two fighters collided over Corbett Canyon, but only one pilot survived. Three died—a pilot and two civilians– when another P-38 fell into a Santa Maria café.

Meanwhile, accidents claimed about half the eighteen county airmen killed in World War II. Those deaths seem especially capricious and cruel.

In 1943, Clarence Ballagh, a B-17 co-pilot, was merely hitching a ride north on another bomber for a few days’ leave in Edinburgh. That B-17 flew into the side of an English mountain. Fragments of the plane remain on Mt. Skiddaw today, 5,000 miles away from Ballagh’s Arroyo Grande grave.

Templeton’s Norman Hoover died, ironically, when his bombing mission was scrubbed in January 1945. His B-24 crashed returning to its Yorkshire base. It was the only plane lost that day.

Sgt. Charles Eddy of Templeton died in Idaho. Eddy’s B-24 was on a practice bomb run when it suddenly fell from 20,000 feet. The pilot and co-pilot fought desperately to regain control of the plane. They did, at one hundred feet. When they banked gently to return to base, the bomber plummeted into the ground and exploded.

Three county airmen, combat casualties, remain missing.

In 1943, a German fighter’s cannon round killed Clair Abbott Tyler of Morro Bay in his co-pilot’s seat. His B-17, returning from a mission to Lorient, France, went into the sea and took Tyler’s body with it.

French civilians reported seeing Cholame’s Jack Langston bail out when German anti-aircraft guns set his P-38 afire over Cherbourg in July 1944. His body was never found.

In Germany, near the war’s end, famed San Luis Obispo P-51 pilot Elwyn Righetti was never seen again after he’d crash-landed his crippled fighter and radioed that he was all right.

In a tragic coincidence, Righetti, Tyler and Ballagh all left behind little girls who were just beginning to walk when they lost their fathers.

Details like those are haunting.

Clair Tyler’s mother made wonderful enchiladas and Alex Madonna was the best man at his wedding.

Clarence Ballagh’s wedding band was returned to his wife in 1949. Lost B-17 gunner Donal Laird’s wristwatch was returned to his San Luis Obispo nieces in 2015.

Jack Langston played the saxophone; Lt. Ted Lee, shot down near New Guinea, was a trombonist.

As a little boy, lost B-29 pilot Jack Nilsson had been invited to Patsy Berkemeyer’s sixth birthday. Since Patsy’s parents owned a San Luis Obispo bakery, the cake must have been spectacular.

So is the life of P-47 pilot John Sim Stuart, a retired Cal Poly professor still married to Mary, the girl he met in 1944.

Despite being shot down twice, Los Osos retiree Al Findley, a B-24 radioman, was a joyful man who filled his life with friends. He died, at 96, April 28.

Another retiree, Morro Bay’s Jack Gibson—the father of County Supervisor Bruce Gibson–died in 2016 at 95.

Gibson was a B-29 crewman who got a letter from his mother, a knitter, about socks. Did Jack want argyle, striped, or plain? He wrote back that he didn’t care as long as she was the one who knitted them.

Soon after, the Japanese shot his bomber down. POW Gibson endured beatings, starvation and dysentery, but he survived. When he finally came home, he opened a dresser drawer in his bedroom.

Inside were six new pairs of socks.

 

 

 

My friend Judy Cecchetti–we go back to Branch School together– posted on Facebook about how much she enjoyed the story “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse” from the new book.

That meant the world to me.

 

 

That story happened because of the Elizabeth Letts book The Perfect Horse. Letts has become one of my favorite authors. Lynne Olson (Citizens of London, Troublesome Young Men) is masterful at using the colorful and telling anecdote to bring a historical character alive.  My favorite popular historian is Laura Hillenbrand, whose word choice is so incredibly vivid; her writing also has a marvelous rhythm. You’re so absorbed that it’s stunning to realize how much Hillenbrand is teaching you-about the world of Thoroughbred racing, for example. She wrote Seabiscuit,  which is phenomenal, during an agonizing and courageous struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome–she was in constant pain–and Louis Zamperini’s story in Unbroken.

All three writers, obviously, are young women.

 

 

I hope that the long-overdue emphasis on STEM, on teaching science and math to girls and young women, doesn’t completely overshadow our need for good writers–journalists and novelists and historians– who also happen to be young women. (That’s one reason I’m such a fan of Trib reporter Kaytlyn Leslie, a student of Janine Plassard’s when she taught journalism at Nipomo High.)

 

 

It reminds me, too, that JFK read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about the failure in leadership that led to World War I, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tuchman’s book helped to guide his thinking in October 1962, so it’s not hyperbole to say that we may very well owe our lives to a great historian who happened to be a woman.

 

 

The Sheila story began with me asking if there might be any connection between Varian Arabians and one of the central characters in Letts’s book, Witez II. He was a famous Polish Arabian, a championship stallion, whose story was shaped by World War II, the war that began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.

When I found out that Sheila’s mare Ronteza was Witez’s daughter, I nearly fell out of my chair. My big sister, Roberta, had ridden with Sheila, but Roberta’s Morgan mare was a product of Sid Spencer’s Lopez Canyon ranch. It was Sid who taught Sheila and her Arabian, Ronteza, how to work cattle.

 

 

The story of the American Army’s rescue of Witez and the Lipizzaner, alongside the story of Ronteza and Sheila and their miraculous Cow Palace performance, took weeks to write. It’s so hard to interweave two stories and still keep the narrative logical and understandable, so it took many, many rewrites, too.

So Judy, it’s one of my favorite stories, too. The best part might be that it happened both in World War II Europe and in, of all places, Corbett Canyon, California. And–what a coincidence!–it just happened to be a story, too, about a courageous young woman.

Finally, I am fond of the way that story made up its mind, thanks in great part to the band U2, about the way it wanted to end:

Varian remembered a moment from the Cow Palace competition vividly: at the start of one round, she could feel distinctly Ronteza’s heartbeat through the panels of the saddle. She knew then that her mare was ready. When the signal was given, when horse and rider entered the Cow Palace arena, two hearts beat as one.

 

 

THANK YOU FOR REMINDING US THAT THE COST OF FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.

• A local woman responding to an article I wrote about a World War II veteran

* * *

“That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”

• T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The bullet that kills a soldier passes first through his mother’s heart.

• A veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)

This is a course in history, not patriotism.

• Cary Nerelli, my master teacher, Morro Bay High School

I taught history for thirty years, and I never, never ceased to get angry every spring when I taught the First World War. It was this war and its peace treaty that did so much to make World War II possible. In 2010, I took some of my students to Western Europe’s World War II battlefields but also to Verdun, site of a horrific 1916 battle that lasted over ten months. The stacked bones in the ossuary there once belonged to boys like my two sons, whose parents had cheered when they scored their first football goal.

I made it my business to help all of my students understand that idea—that war cheats us all so cruelly—and so I led them, every year in my classroom, into dark places, like Fort Douaumont at Verdun, so dark that it swallowed the light of five hundred years of Western culture. To go inside Douaumont, where 100,000 young men were killed or wounded, to study war doesn’t mean we glorify it. A few years ago, a student told me the First World War was her favorite unit. (Not mine—I much prefer La Belle Èpoque.)  I asked her why, and she replied, “Now I understand how precious human life is.”

She understood precisely why I became a history teacher.

–From the introduction to World War II Arroyo Grande

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But American artillery units still found many of them there—artillery spotters were nearly incoherent because there were so many targets to call in on their field radios—and the slaughter they inflicted was horrific. Seventy years later, one of the 607th’s soldiers, Frank Kunz, remembered the results in an interview with his hometown newspaper: “Christ help me. There were 6 to 8 inches of bodies and horses ground up on the road. There was nothing you could do. You had to drive through it.” People, Kunz added, don’t understand what war is.

• From a member of Arroyo Grandean Frank Gularte’s 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion, on what happened to the Germans who failed to escape through the Falaise Gap in Normandy. From World War II Arroyo Grande

200 Arabians fled Janow Podlaski and headed west, away from the Soviets. Among them were Stained Glass and Grand Slam, two of Witez’s brothers. The exhausted horses arrived in Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945, just as the Allied command unleashed the notorious fire raid, involving over 700 British and American heavy bombers, on the ancient city.

After a wave of bombers had dropped its incendiary bombs, one of the Polish handlers watched, horrified, as Grand Slam’s tail burst into flames. He held on as best he could to the powerful horse and closed his eyes. When he dared to open them again, the flames that had engulfed Grand Slam’s tail had sputtered out and the bombers were gone. So were over half of the Polish Arabians, incinerated in the fires or asphyxiated by the oxygen-consuming firestorm the incendiaries had been intended to produce. By the time the surviving animals reached their ultimate destination in western Germany, fewer than fifty remained.

• “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse,” from Will This be on the Test?

Two torpedoes struck Northampton in the engine room and stern, and the explosion that followed was so violent that men at their bridge stations on the nearby light cruiser Honolulu reacted immediately. They burst into tears.

• The night action near Guadalcanal that killed Donald Runels of Nipomo, a crewman on Northampton, from World War II Arroyo Grande. The anecdote belongs to Samuel Eliot Morrison, the official United States Navy historian of World War II

That was Hall’s first mission. He was twenty years old when he saw the three Ragged Irregular bombers plummet to earth together. Many members of his bomb group were even younger. Some of them, thanks to crafty misdirection aimed at recruiting sergeants pressured to meet their quotas, were as young as sixteen. Far below them, in German cities like Hamburg and Dresden—or in relatively obscure Japanese cities like Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, or Kagoshima (the seat of the prefecture from which most San Luis Obispo County Japanese had emigrated) the size of Richmond, Virginia—the ashen bodies of schoolchildren stained sidewalks and streets.

• On B-17 crewman Henry Hall of Cayucos, from Central Coast Aviators in World War II

It was yet another battle, like Gettysburg, that seemed to take on a life of its own. After four days of combat, it was Adam Bair and the 60th Ohio’s turn. On the morning of June 3, the Union army, shrouded in mist, moved across the open ground that led toward the Confederate entrenchments.

The 60th was to assault Lee’s left. Unlike the general staff—coordination and communication throughout June 3 would be chaotic, and staff had not adequately scouted the ground to Lee’s front—private soldiers were fully aware of what they were up against; many wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their uniforms.

• Adam Bair, later a rancher in the Huasna Valley, fought with the 60th Ohio at this 1864 battle, Cold Harbor; 7,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded that day. From Patriot Graves: Discovering a California Town’s Civil War Heritage

I met my pilot, Byron Johnson, from Oklahoma; my copilot, James Gill, from California; my navigator, Robert Cramer, from California; my bombardier, Nolan Willis, from California; my engineer, Morgan Fowler, from South Dakota; my nose gunner, Homer Smith, from Texas; my left gunner, Theodore Mabee, from Illinois; my right waist gunner was James Walter…and he was from some eastern state that I don’t recall, and my tail gunner was Johnny Gates—he was from some eastern state, also. That was the crew. Plus me.

It’s hard to fault Findley for not remembering every one of his crew members’ home states. The Los Osos retiree was speaking from memory in 2013, nearly seventy years after he’d met the men who became “very dear” to him.

–Findley could not remember the home states of two B-24 crewmen he had known for two years. They were killed on his 26th combat mission in February 1945. Findley would make the Air Force a career, retiring as a Command Master Sergeant. From Central Coast Aviators in World War II

Once a Bavarian woman approached Mr. Kamin, our [Arroyo Grande High School] German teacher, and his students near Munich and thanked him and them for the kindness World War II GI’s had shown her when she was a little girl. There were tears in her eyes. Of course, many of the young Americans she remembered with such emotion had died before Mr. Kamin’s students were born.

Young Americans, including young men like those soldiers, may be the best evidence we have of the faith we’ve had in ourselves—the faith that we will ultimately do the right thing. In my experience, there are few images more evocative of this than visits to places like the American cemeteries in the Ardennes, at Colleville-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach and in the Punch Bowl on Oahu. Those visits never made me want to wave flags or blow trumpets.

I always think instead of men who were once wavering toddlers, who took their first steps to a little smattering of applause from their parents. They waited expectantly and sleeplessly on Christmas Eves stalked by the Great Depression. When they did sleep, it would be with a dog close by. I think of boys whose hands shook when they tried to pin the corsage on the dress of their prom date. And then they aren’t boys anymore: They’re young men fresh out of Basic whose last moments in America, maybe a few free moments in San Diego or Philadelphia, were marked by ribald laughter and 3.2 beer or poker, by any distraction that would somehow increase the distance between themselves and the troopships waiting to take them into the crucible.

So I never think of patriotism at places like Colleville-sur-Mer. I think of baby shoes and I think of mothers.

–From Will This Be on the Test? Reflections from a History Teacher

 

I got the nicest thank you from the Companions of Our Lady–that’s the widows’ organization at Nativity Church in San Luis Obispo. I have to admit that I really enjoy speaking to older people, although the borderline between “me” and “older people” is eroding rapidly. I’ve made six or seven presentations at senior homes and at least three to the widows/widowers group in the South County.

Thomas was helping me, and the women loved having him. They loved it especially when he won the door prize, a succulent that he promptly named “Frazier.”

I really felt for one woman. She and her husband had lived in the same house on the North Coast for thirty years. They’d come down here and perused some mobile home communities to look for a place to live when they couldn’t take care of a big house and yard anymore.

Then he died, of course. And she still misses him, of course. There was absolutely nothing self-pitying in the way she said this. So she moved into one of the trailer parks down here and she’s having a hard time fitting in. I gave her my card and told her to give me a call for some coffee some time.

Of course, she won’t call. I’m going to have to go backwards and she if I can find out her phone number instead.

It made me wonder if there is something we’ve lost.

In Patriot Graves, the Civil War book, here’s what would happen every Decoration Day (Memorial Day) in Arroyo Grande.

The old veterans and local schoolchildren would start a little parade and then march to the cemetery to honor their comrades who had passed on. Their would be patriotic songs and speeches and recitations–like “Barbara Fritchie,” the poem that Churchill recited once from memory to an astonished FDR– and all the things they made kids do in 1905. They were the kinds of things we still did at Branch School in 1958.

When that was all over, the veterans and the schoolchildren would walk (or ride, for the older vets) back to the IOOF Hall or the Grand Army of the Republic Hall, then across Bridge Street, and have a big chicken dinner.

The thought charms me: I can see the image of an silky-bearded veteran of Chancellorsville or Gettysburg or Missionary Ridge sitting next to an eight-year-old girl missing those top front teeth and both of them getting a little messy eating their chicken.

Maybe that never happened, but I think it did.

The idea of two generations so distant from each other–one ascending the arc of their lives, the other nearing its end–sitting down to table together seems to me to be such a healthy and vital idea.

Civil War veterans suffered terribly from PTSD and from drug and alcohol addiction; a decade after the war, 80% of the inmates in American prisons were veterans. The psychic damage the war had inflicted on them is what brought many  veterans to Arroyo Grande. This was a place where they could start over again. For some, this was their third and final chance to start over:  a third of the veterans buried in our cemetery had moved at least twice before coming to Arroyo Grande or Nipomo. They’d run out of continent.

So they were restless and troubled men and kept most of this hidden, of course.

Marching alongside children and then chatting with them over chicken dinners must have healed, if just a little, so many of the wounds so many of them carried.

Their wounds were invisible, for the most part–although many local veterans died decades after the war from wounds or disease they’d suffered as young men, and they’re not counted among the 620,000 lives we lost in that war.  But, of course, the invisible wounds were deep and painful and, most of all, they were fearful.

Having a child–her littleness next to your relative bigness–sitting next to eat you can either be terror-inducing, or it can be enchanting, once you begin to chat.

Then you weren’t thinking about the eighteen-year-old brother you saw die in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. All your attention would have been riveted, as you smiled with the teeth you had left, at the little girl with the gap in her teeth trying her best to eat her drumstick.

Here’s what children meant to one of those veterans: Richard Merrill, buried in our cemetery, fought at Antietam, the deadliest battle in American history, and at Chancellorsville. He contracted a disease, possibly dysentery, and was, according to a family history, “a great sufferer” for the rest of his life. He married, but his job history is a checkered one. He never joined any veterans’ group. So far as I know, he never talked about the war, not even with his wife.

His last job was at the Arroyo Grande Grammar School, on the site of today’s Ford agency. When Civil War veteran Richard Merrill, the school janitor, died in 1909, the children asked their teachers if they could have the afternoon off on the day of the old soldier’s funeral. Permission was granted them.

“Mr. Merrill,” his obituary concludes, “was a great favorite with the children.”