9/7/2026

 Monday, September 7, 2026

70 The Roman army under General Titus occupied and plundered Jerusalem. 

1812 Battle of Borodino: Napoleon won a pyrrhic victory against Russia in the most ferocious battle of the Napoleonic era; 70,000 were killed

1940 Beginning of the Blitz as the Luftwaffe bombed London for the 1st of 57 consecutive nights, losing 41 bombers as the Nazis prepared to invade Britain

1963 American Bandstand moved to California

1986 Desmond Tutu became the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town

2019 Donald Trump said he had canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban for peace talks at Camp David

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:40, rested for 'vitals' till 5, but w/ intense back/right flank pain & BP at 160, back to bed till 5:30 till pain abated; 0540 203.4 120/71/61 118; 59/75/59, mostly sunny.

Morning meds at 2:15 p.m.  Entresto at 6:15 a.m. and p.m.

LTMW at 7:30, I see chickadees, finches, sparrows, cardinals, doves, and woodpeckers feasting at our feeders, while beyond, the front lawn glistens with thousands of blades of grass twinkling with tiny drops of dew, looking like a field of diamonds.

Every Effort.  I have often written in these pages about the harm the US visited upon the Vietnamese people, most of whom were peasants who feared both the VC and the Saigon government.  Thus, I found on page 216 of Barbara's book an interesting article by Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Times Magazine on October 3, 1971:

   Since President Nixon took to decrying the mistreatment of prisoners, the list of imprisoned and missing men has lengthened by more than 300 . . .  It has been the distinquishing characteristic of the outcry in this country over the prisoners of war and their suffering families that it has gone on in nearly perfect abstraction from other facts about the war and even as an escape from them -- My Lai, the free-fire zones, bombing, napalm, defoliation, relocation programs, the toll among the Vietnamese.  Much has legitimately been said about the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, little about the Geneva Convention  on the Protection of Civilians. . . 

The title of his article was "POWa: Missing or Dead”.

I did some searching on ChatGPT and found this:

What Lelyveld was really writing about

It wasn't primarily an exposé of torture in North Vietnamese prisons. It was an examination of the American POW/MIA families movement and its increasingly complicated relationship with the Nixon administration.

That distinction is important. Lelyveld was examining several intertwined questions: What actually was known about the treatment of American prisoners? How many of the men listed as MIA were probably dead rather than prisoners? How were wives and other relatives coping with years of uncertainty? And to what extent had the Nixon administration encouraged the POW issue as a means of building public support for its Vietnam policy?

His conclusion about the last question was quite nuanced. As later historians quote him, Lelyveld concluded that the Nixon administration “did not start—and probably could not have prevented—the campaign by the wives,” but that there was no doubt the administration “helped orchestrate their efforts.”

That is significant because the Nixon administration had deliberately changed American policy. Earlier, families had generally been encouraged to maintain a low profile out of fear that publicity might worsen the prisoners' treatment. Beginning in 1969, Nixon officials instead encouraged families to speak publicly about North Vietnam's treatment of POWs. The State and Defense Departments conducted a 20-city tour briefing about 1,400 POW/MIA relatives, helping connect previously scattered family groups into a national movement.

The difficult MIA question

The title “POW's—Missing or Dead?” gets at one of Lelyveld's most uncomfortable subjects.  Families understandably resisted assuming that a missing husband, son or brother was dead when no body had been recovered. But the government's public rhetoric increasingly tended to blur the distinction between known POWs and MIAs whose fate was unknown.

That could create the impression that North Vietnam was secretly holding very large numbers of American prisoners. In reality, many MIA cases involved aircraft that had been seen crashing or exploding under circumstances in which survival was improbable, although there was no recoverable body or eyewitness confirmation of death.

This subsequently became one of the central controversies surrounding the POW/MIA issue: When does refusing to declare a missing man dead preserve legitimate hope, and when does it create false hope for his family?

Treatment of the prisoners

Lelyveld did not suggest that reports of mistreatment were simply propaganda. American POWs had indeed experienced beatings, torture, prolonged isolation, inadequate food and medical treatment, and coercion intended to produce statements or confessions. By 1971, considerable evidence about such treatment had emerged.

But the political question was different: the Nixon administration made the mistreatment of American POWs a major public issue, while simultaneously using the POWs as part of its argument for continuing the war and insisting that withdrawal had to be accompanied by release of American prisoners.

That produced a division among the families themselves.

The dominant organization became the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which generally supported the administration's strategy of maintaining pressure on Hanoi.

A dissident organization, Families for Immediate Release, argued essentially the opposite: that continuing the war was prolonging the men's captivity and that the surest way to bring them home was to end American involvement in Vietnam. Contemporary reporting documents considerable conflict between these groups.  [This was Barbara's group, with her a leader.]

One notable participant in the dissident movement was Delia Alvarez, sister of Navy pilot Everett Alvarez Jr., who had been captured in 1964 and ultimately became the second-longest-held American POW. She even appeared with Jane Fonda on The Merv Griffin Show in April 1971.

Why the article is historically interesting

Reading Lelyveld from the vantage point of 1971 is different from reading later accounts of the POWs.

He was writing before Operation Homecoming, when nobody knew how this would end. The 591 prisoners who eventually returned in early 1973 had not yet come home to describe their experiences. Families genuinely did not know whether missing men were alive, dead, prisoners whose existence Hanoi had concealed, or men whose remains might someday be found.

And Lelyveld was writing at precisely the point when “POW/MIA” was becoming a single powerful phrase in American political culture, even though POW and MIA represented quite different factual situations.

That may be why the article interested you. For someone who had actually served in Vietnam and knew men who subsequently became casualties or MIAs, the uncertainty Lelyveld was describing wasn't an abstraction. A pilot could simply fail to return from a mission, and “missing” described the limits of what anyone actually knew, rather than necessarily indicating that he had been captured.

There is one further avenue that might be particularly worthwhile: I* can look closely at the full Congressional Record reprint and reconstruct Lelyveld's discussion of what families were told about the likelihood that particular MIAs were dead. That bears rather directly on cases such as Marine aviators lost over Laos, where there might be compelling circumstantial evidence of death but no remains. *The "I" here is the constellation of algorithms constituting ChatGPT, not a person.]

This was a very long search of many digitized records in many locations, but I was most interested in this:

Beginning in 1995, joint U.S.-Vietnamese teams interviewed former members of the North Vietnamese 10th AAA Battalion, which had been operating near Ban Ka Tok.

Their accounts contain striking similarities.

In August 1995, former battalion commander Bui Minh Tan recalled an aircraft being shot down around April or May 1966. He said the pilot ejected and landed in a tree, and that his men found the body three days later and buried it.

Another former officer, Tran Van Duc, specifically remembered April 29, 1966. He said several aircraft were shot down, that one pilot parachuted down about 300 meters from the unit, and that troops subsequently found and buried the pilot. Most intriguingly, he remembered that they found a beeper on the body. The American analyst noted the obvious possibility that this was the beacon SAR aircraft had heard in 1966.

Another former battalion officer, Luu Van Mao, remembered an incident in approximately April 1966 in which an American pilot ejected, came down several kilometers away, and was found dead four days later, still wearing his parachute.

By 1999 the accounts became more specific—and more clearly connected to Mullen.

Hoang Dinh Than said the incident occurred on April 29, 1966. He said the battalion searched for three days and found the pilot's body in a tree, impaled by a branch. Among the personal effects were maps, watch, compass, money and an identification card. Than remembered the name approximately as “Captain Moo-len or Moo-low.”

Nguyen Van Hung also remembered April 29. He said the aircraft caught fire and crashed several kilometers away and that troops found the dead pilot three or four days later, entangled in his parachute.

Pham Hang Hai remembered an A-4 being shot down, the pilot ejecting, and the body being discovered three days later. He recalled equipment bearing the designation “A-4” and the rank “Captain.”

And Le Duc Viet said he personally participated in the search. He remembered finding the pilot's body three days later at the bottom of a tree, still wearing the parachute. His party collected a revolver, knife, blood chit, receiver, survival gear, map and watch before burying him nearby.

Eventually several of these veterans accompanied investigators into Laos and identified what they believed was the burial area. By October 1999 investigators thought they had located a potential gravesite near XD 1261 9184 and recommended excavation.

How much weight should we give testimony collected 29–33 years later?  This requires caution.

Individual memories after three decades can be wrong. The witnesses disagreed about aircraft types, the number of aircraft shot down, precisely where the pilot landed, whether his parachute opened properly, and exactly how he died. Some testimony was hearsay rather than firsthand. The Defense Department itself cautioned that several aircraft had been shot down in the area, creating a possibility that witnesses were conflating different incidents.

But there is an important difference between saying one witness remembered this thirty years later and what we have here.

There were multiple former members of the same antiaircraft battalion, interviewed at different times, giving accounts that overlap on several unusual details:

an American aircraft was shot down around April 29, 1966 → the pilot ejected → came down near their position → remained missing for several days → was found dead with or near his parachute → survival/personal equipment was recovered → the body was buried locally.

And eventually one witness remembered a name resembling Mullen, while others remembered details consistent with an A-4 flown by a captain.

That convergence substantially strengthens the evidence.

The particularly interesting connection: the beeper

To me, this is where the two independent bodies of evidence become most persuasive.

In 1966, American SAR crews recorded an emergency beacon coming from the area. They approached it repeatedly and were fired upon. They lost the beacon that night and never heard it again the next morning.

Nearly thirty years later, a former North Vietnamese officer told investigators that his troops found a beeper on the dead pilot.

If that testimony genuinely concerns Mullen—and that remains an if—it provides a remarkably coherent explanation of the 1966 evidence.

It could mean that the Americans were in fact hearing Mullen's survival radio, but that Mullen himself was unable to answer.

More than 280 Americans remain unaccounted for in Laos. The Peace Agreement in 1973 was signed on behalf of the governments of the  U.S., South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the VC.  It did not include the government of Laos, where so many American airmen had been shot down, with some declared KIAs, but many, like Bill "Moon" Mullen, declared MIAs and unaccounted for.

Back to the book, I teared up a little as I read this on p.235: 

It had been a clear auturmn night like this in 1959 when Bill took me to that first Marine Corps birthday ball . . .  at Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station in southern Japan. . . .A Japanese band accompanied a sultry American vocalist who sang "Love Me Tender" ' just for us, we were sure.  Before the evening was out, Bill had taken her place at the microphone.  He strained for the high clear notes: "Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes . . .  A hush had come over the hangar by the time he reached the second verse: "I'll come and find the place where you are lying. . ."

Barbara understandingly didn't include the full lyrics, which Bill always sang:

But when ye come, and all th e flowers are dying,

If I am dead, as dead I well may be,

Ye'll come and find the place where I am lying,

And kneel and say an Ave there for me. 

Today's will be my longest daily journal because I've reprinted the long AI information re "Moon" Mullen, and the following long reprint from a year ago this date, incorporating some of my memoir:

The Un-Orthodox.  I took a break from dealing with the basement to watch episode 3 of this series on Netflix.  It is painful to watch the suffering of the young woman protagonist of the series.  Much of it flowed from her inability to experience sexual intercourse without pain, and the failure to get pregnant and produce a child, a scandal in their ultra-orthodox Jewish community, which viewed itself as reproducing the 6 million Jews lost in the Holocaust.  It reminded of my parents.  From my memoir:

Until I wrote these memoirs, I never thought in any focused way about the first years of my parents’ marriage.  I knew that they were very young and that they were working class people with little money.  I knew they lived in very modest circumstances.  I assumed that they were reasonably happy until my father returned from the war.  I have come to question that assumption.  

Since I started this writing project, I have learned that my father was jealous of my mother, that sexual intimacy was painful for my mother, that my father worked in a war industry and could have, but did not, request a draft deferment, and that my mother wrote to him very seldom while he was away.  These perhaps unrelated facts hardly lead inexorably to any conclusion about their marriage, but they support – though inconclusively – a hypothesis that the marriage was strained before my father left for the Marines in early 1944.

The jealousy matter does not come as a total surprise.  My mother was pretty, full of life, vivacious and outgoing, with many friends and an openness to new friendships.  She sang, she danced, she smiled and laughed easily.  People liked her, both men and women, and she generally liked them back.  My father, on the other hand, was then, as he is now, shy and unsure of himself in social settings other than the familiar.  He came from a family to whom laughter and joyfulness and openness to life did not come easily.  If my paternal grandparents had any personal friends other than one neighbor from across the alley, I never saw them or heard them spoken of.  It is not surprising that my father had a pinched and rather sour view of life and I suspect that his attraction to my mother was based in large part on the fact that she did not look at life through the same myopic lenses he did.  His friends in his adulthood were, with few exceptions, friends from his youth in Englewood: Chubby and Al Hawes, Al Braley, and Don and ‘Toots’ Rashcka.  Beer was his lubricant and catalyst for social interactions.  His zones of social interaction were family gatherings (i.e., with his parents and sister), get-togethers with the friends from ‘the old neighborhood,’ and familiar taverns.  His only good friends, not from his childhood, were Marty and Marie Rohan, fellow habitués of Andy’s North Pole Tavern.  Considering their profoundly different personalities, it is not surprising that what my father found attractive in my mother before their marriage, he found threatening after their marriage, especially after the two years of separation due to his conscription.  Jealousy and mature, loving relationships are mutually exclusive, which suggests to me that the marriage was challenged from the beginning.

The painful intercourse matter could be a problem in any marriage, of course, but a much bigger problem in a marriage in which the male is young, insecure, and jealous.  Painful physical intimacy can lead to feelings of rejection and inadequacy on the part of the male, contributing to the problem of jealousy.  Was this the case with my mother and father?  I can only guess, but my guess is that it was.  My father, like most insecure people, was prone to resentments, i.e., to taking things personally.  He had a habit of saying “I resent that,” where other people might say “That bugs me,” or “I hate that,” or “That really pisses me off.” For example, high prices for goods or services he would “resent.”  For a long time, I thought he was simply using the term loosely and incorrectly, but on reflection, I think he may have been using the term accurately.  He never had much money but this fact was attributable mostly to his own behaviors, e.g., dropping out of high school when he didn’t have to, never getting a GED or further education or training, though it was available, and alcoholism, all compounded by the effects of PTSD after the war.  The high cost of restaurant meals, for example,  for him may have been a reminder of his inability to pay the cost easily which causes him ‘resent’ the prices, to take personally what others would shrug off, perhaps disgustedly or even angrily but not resentfully.  With such a husband, having a physical problem that could be interpreted as rejection could also earn one resentment.  So could popularity and sociability.  

Of the 16,000,000 men who served in the military during World War II, 6,000,000 were volunteers and 10,000,000 were draftees.  The draft began in October 1940, a couple of months after my parents married.  The term of service was 12 months, but that changed after the war started.  All men between 18 and 45 were eligible for military service, but occupational and hardship deferments were available.  Farmers, auto workers, munitions workers, and many others whose work was important to the war effort were not drafted.  My father’s job at Johnson & Johnson was making sanitary dressings for combat wounds; he was employed in a war industry.  He had one small child and, after November 1943, another on the way.  When I asked him recently why he didn’t apply for a draft deferment, occupational or hardship or both, he just shrugged.  Was his passivity prompted by patriotism or something else?  It may have been patriotism, of course; there was of lot of it afoot during the war, and there is no reason to think that he was any less patriotic than the next guy.  It may have been pride and a fear of being considered a ‘shirker,’ one who failed, as the Irish would have said, to “do his bit” while others were fighting and dying.  It also may have been, however, at least in part, a desire to get away, to escape the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood.  He had just turned 23 when Kitty was conceived and he was to be the father of two by age 24.  Did he want to get away, to live among other young men, with no wife or children about?  It certainly would not have been an unusual desire for one who had married and become a parent at so young an age.  If he didn’t desire to be drafted, for whatever reason or reasons, why did he not seek an occupational or hardship deferment, like hundreds of thousands of other draft-age men?  Did he and my mother discuss the possibility of deferment, especially when she became pregnant with Kitty?  As it was, when he was drafted, she was left at age 22 with me 2½ years old, and Kitty on the way, and precious few resources to rely on.  Could either patriotism or pride make up for the difficult situation she was in?  Was he using the draft as a way to run away from responsibilities, rather like walking away from the responsibilities of high school to make a few bucks as an unskilled worker?  If so, each decision represented seizing on a short-term solution to an immediate frustration, with long-term negative consequences.  Though I am only guessing on the basis of very inadequate evidence, and perhaps projecting, my best guess is that that was what was going on between my parents in 1944. 

My guess about my father’s draft status is supported by the knowledge, based on my father’s statement to Geri that my mother seldom wrote him during his service.  Neither my father nor my mother was a letter writer, but that would not explain long periods of silence from her.  She was too responsible and loyal to everybody close to her for her to ignore her husband once he was gone unless perhaps she believed herself to have been abandoned by him, left in the lurch with a toddler and a baby on the way by an immature and selfish husband.  Perhaps it is only my loyalty to my mother that causes me to put this ‘spin’ on the scant evidence available to me, but I don’t think so.  All of her actions after the war and for the rest of her life demonstrated beyond question what kind of person she was; there was no way she would have ignored her husband after he was drafted unless she  believed that he had walked out on her, with the local draft board providing the cover.  (Another possibility, of course, is that my father overstates the lack of mail issue but, whatever his faults and weaknesses, I have never known him to be anything other than truthful and I take him at his word.)

If the parting at the beginning of 1944 was beset with troubles, the reunion at the end of 1945 must have been even more so.  My parents had been separated almost two years with little communication, my father was suffering from PTSD compounded undoubtedly by anger and resentment about the paucity of letters and further compounded by rampant alcoholism.  The man who returned from the war was not the man who left and the family he left was not the family he came home to.  At my age, I would have had virtually no memory of him from two years earlier and Kitty at 15 months of age had never seen him.  He was a stranger to us and, especially in his condition, undoubtedly an unwelcome intruder into our home and our hitherto uncomplicated relationship with our mother.  

Even without the PTSD, his relationship with my mother must have been terribly strained.  With the PTSD and the drinking and the living in the basement shoebox, the situation must have been at times nearly intolerable.   For him, the insecurity and jealousy problems must have been doubled and redoubled by the lengthy separation and lack of letters.  For her, the challenges of raising two little kids with hardly any money were compounded by having an angry, resentful, sullen, withdrawn, beer-benumbed husband to deal with.

His haven was the North Pole Tavern with other drinkers.  I don’t know where my mother found a haven, perhaps with our good next-door neighbor, Ann Semrau. I doubt that she found much succor with the other Clausens, since (1) they were dealing with Monica’s divorce and the need to raise her three small children without help from their father, and (2) my father may have poisoned the well, especially with his mother, with complaints about my mother’s not writing.  I believe my grandmother had little if any, affection for my mother ever.  Late in her life, my mother returned from one trip to Florida with my father to visit his parents and told Kitty that she would never return.  Grandma Clausen had had too much to drink one day or evening and laid into my mother.  It hadn’t been the first time this had happened, but my mother was resolved that it would be the last.

While I was writing these reflections, I watched an interview of Larry McMurtry on CBS Sunday Morning.  He was discussing his writing the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain.  One of his observations seems apt here:

Life is not for sissies.  You need strength.  Love is not easy.  It’s not easy if you find it.  It’s not easy if you don’t find it.  It’s not easy if you find it but it doesn’t work out.  The strong survive, but not everybody is “the strong” and many people don’t.

In another interview of a woman whose identity I can’t recall, she reported being very unhappy about some event or condition in her life.  Her mother told her: “Look, daughter, being happy is hard work.  Get to it.  Shape up!”  She was right.

I have mentioned before that I don’t remember any friends visiting us in the basement apartment, other than one visit by my father’s Marine Corps buddy, Theron (Mac) McClain. Not even Chubby Hawes or Al Braley.  Other than Grandpa Dennis and Uncle Jim, I don’t remember any family members coming to our home. Not even Grandpa or Grandma Clausen or Aunt Monica.   It wouldn’t have been the waterbugs or the hot water pipes or the cramped space that kept people away, but rather the tension within the space, the persistent unhappiness.

    At Passover seders, Jews sing a prayer of thanksgiving called  Dayenu, a Hebrew expression meaning “it would have been enough.”  The dayenu verses relate 15 great blessings God conferred on the Hebrews, after each one acknowledging dayenu, it would have been enough, though yet another blessing followed.  “Had he (only) brought us forth from Egypt, and not (also) destroyed their idols, Dayenu, it would have been enough for us.”  Dayenu can also be used negatively and sarcastically in referring to misfortunes piled on misfortunes. I am reminded of dayenu in writing that Iwo Jima was enough to extinguish joy in my father’s life.  It would have been enough.  As it turned out, a brutal crime against my mother in 1947 completed the job. 

Reading these words that I wrote 20 or more years ago is painful.  They remind me of the saying, attributed to Robin Williams, "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about."  I like the saying and believe it is packed with wisdom.  We don't know one another, even those we think we know well.  We don't know their history, all the forces and conditions that contributed to the person we think we now know.  Most of all, we don't know our own parents, or even our own siblings, though I suspect that it may be our siblings that we know best of all.  I stress "may be."  I have never been closer to anyone, except perhaps Geri, than I was to my sister Kitty, but I learned only when we were in our late 50s or early 60s that she had been molested by our maternal grandfather when she was a child.  It happened once and wasn't repeated.  I don't know how he molested her; she didn't say, and I didn't ask.  It was probably some  "inappropriate" touching, but it frightened her, she resisted, and he stopped.  She never told our mother, and she told me only after reading my memoir, which turned out to be distressing and painful for her.  How much else about her life did I never know, and she about my life?  Bill Clinton was famous for telling voters, "I feel your pain."  Pain is personal.  We can sympathize, we can empathize, but we can't feel another's pain.  The chances are great that we don't even know of the pain.

 Kitty

9/6/2026

 Sunday, September 6, 2026

1941 All Jews over the age of 6 in German territories were ordered to wear a star

1985 Midwest Express Flight 105 crashed shortly after taking off from Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field for Atlanta. All 31 passengers and crew aboard the DC-9 were killed.

1997 Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was held at Westminster Abbey in London

2022 A fire in a karaoke bar near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, killed at least 32

2023, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for a major reduction in the country's birth rate to avoid a catastrophe, from more than two million to 400,000 a year

2023 Mexico's Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide

2025 Around 890 people were arrested at a demonstration against the ban on the group Palestine Action in London, England. 

In bed at 9, up at 5:14; 0530 204.0 (204.4). 110/69/67 125;  63/74/63, mostly sunny/partly cloudy.  Rough night's sleep w/ bladder.

Morning meds at 8:50 a.m.  Entresto at 6:35 a.m. and p.m.

Text to Deirdre Keenan this morning:

Good morning, Derry.  Kate provided me your telephone number some time ago by text message, or so I thought.  I looked for it and couldn’t find it.  I thought I must have somehow deleted it.  It turned out that Kate had emailed it, not texted it, and I found it this morning.  I’m afraid I have become a bit, and perhaps more than a bit, addlepated in my old age.  My phone number is 414 801-1905 and I would love to reconnect with you.  It’s been so long.  For some reason, I thought for a long time that you were back in Traverse City.  I would love to see you again so if you haven’t written me off, please text or give me a call.  Geri and I live in Bayside now, at 9581 N. Wakefield Ave., 53217.  We’ll celebrate our 40th anniversary in the Spring.  Sarah has lived in Germany for the past 15 years and is married to a good German fellow, Christian Kovacs, into whose family she has been warmly accepted.  Andy got a law degree in Marquette’s part-time program, married a Vietnamese American girl with a wonderful family, and lives in Bayside, with his wife Anh, and their three children.  Steve Kevil and his wife Nikki live in Chicago, where she practices family law, and David lives in Fox Point, with his wife Sharon and daughter Ellis.  

Every Effort.  I'm making progress in Barbara Mullen Keenan's book, past p. 200 of its 351 total pages.  I've been surprised to learn of the deep, passionate division in the MIA/POW movement, between those stayed loyal supporters of Nixon throughout the years of his keeping the war going and expanding it, and those who wanted him to end the war NOW and bring the troops, and the POWs home.  As I wrote yesterday (?), those were the years (1968 through 1971, where I am no in the book), of Tet, expanding then shrinking numbers of troops in the war, expansion of the war in Cambodia, Kent State, Sterling Hall, massive anti-war demonstrations, and growing opposition to the war in the rest of the world.  I'm surprised by Barbara's description of the real enmity between the two groups of MIA/POW families.  She belonged to and indeed was a significant leader of the 'Bring them home now' group.

My Facebook offering today:

What we might expect from a guy who let some other guy go to Vietnam in his stead, perhaps to be one of the 58,220 KIAs, 153,303 WIAs, or 2,600 MIAs, or 766 POWs, or the millions who may have left Vietnam, but Vietnam never left them.

9/5/2026

 Saturday, September 5, 2026

1906 Saint Louis U. quarterback threw the first legal forward pass in the history of American football for a TD at Carroll College, Waukesha, Wisconsin

1938/1939. Jimmy Cummings born to Scotty Cummings and Monica Clausen Cummings

1960 Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] beat the 3-time European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski to win the Olympic light heavyweight boxing gold medal at the Rome Games

1972 Eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed by the Palestinian Black September group at the Munich Olympics

1922 Jimmy Aquavia moved to Alexandria

2023 Former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol

2025: The Trump administration deployed ten F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to take part in military action against drug cartels in Venezuela and Latin America. 

In bed at 9, up at 5:45; 0600 205.0  127/77/58, 0612 124/71/58;  69/75/66, haze, mostly cloudy day ahead.  

Morning meds at 8:20 a.m.  Entresto at 6:45 a.m. and p.m.

 I'm grateful for my wife, who gives me a reason to live each day.  We have partnered for 40 years, the last half of our lives.  Just from watching he, she gives me daily lessons on how to live.  While I tend to live in the past and to fear the future, she lives each day as it comes, each moment.  While I tend to keep a distance from other people, even friends, she forms friendships easily, and no day goes by without her talking on the phone and chatting in the yard or on the street with one or more of her friends. The older and the more hobbled I get, the more I depend on her, and the more she carries the load of keeping us going.  I am a lucky guy, make that a very lucky guy.  I wrote and read a tribute to her for her 80th birthday dinner that I will post here if I can find it, which, so this morning I have been unable to do.

Vengeance, Trump Moves to Strip Tax Exemption from Schools that Aid Minority Students.  From the NYTimes 2 days ago:

The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.

The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.

Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s effort to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students. Trump officials view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.

Proving again the bitter truth in an old cynical adage: no good deed goes unpunished, especailly in Trump's Republican America.

Peggy Noonan's weekly column in the Wall Street Journal is titled "25 Years of Thinking About 9/11."  She concludes, "I’ll never get over it, none of us will."  She's right, at least for those of us old enough to remember it.  I had just turned 60, and was visiting my Dad in Florida, washing his windows, sharing meals, and going to the VFW, where he had paid for my life membership, where hs name was on a wall plaque with other WWII vets, and mine with other Vietnam vets.  We were watching the Today Show on NBC with Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and later Tom Brokaw.  Lauer interrupted another story to announce a terrible accident at  about 8:51, but then came the news of the second collision a few minutes after 9.  By 10, the South Tower collapsed, and about half an hour later, the North Tower collapsed.  My Dad and I watched most of it live, all except the initial flight into the North Tower.    I don't remember that we talked about it, or whether we were too stunned.  We say 'life turns on a dime,' and it did that day.  It triggered the start of the government's "War on Terror," with all of its terrible and illegal excesses.  It led to our 'forever wars' in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It led to the deepening of divisions among Americans, not over the horror and wrongfulness of what had happened, but over the government excesses that it led to. CIA torture, rendition, domestic spying.  It set the stage for the world we live in today. 

In these pages, I've often compared where we are now with the terrible 60s and early 70s, when Johnson and Nixon led the government.  I always opine that that earlier tumultuous time was a much better time because, as a nation and a government, we were on our way up.  The civil rights acts of the  60s, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, Food Stamps, and many other programs under Johnson, and the creation of OSHA, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Environmental Protection Act, and Social Security COLAS under Nixon.   The Nixon administration even pursued, unsuccessfully, a national health insurance program.  Today, of course, Richard Nixon would be called a RINO, despite or because so much good legislation and good social safety net programs were initiated or expanded under his administration.  Compare that to where we are now, with a radical, even criminal, administration hell-bent on destroying much of the good that has been accomplished between the FDR administration and the coming of the Reagan Revolution.  Even Reagan strengthened Social Security and oversaw the passage of a major Immigration Reform Act that provided citizenship to millions of undocumented residents.  Again, compare that to where we are now.  Is there a causal thread (or rope) between 9/11 and where we are now.  I believe there is.

9/4/2026

 Friday, September 4, 2026

1957 Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School

1970 Marxist Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality of votes in Chile's presidential election

2016 Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican

2017 US President Donald Trump announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be stopped

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:05; 0520 205.8 116/69/59  97;  74/77/67, cloudy, thunderstorms early.

Morning meds at 5:50 a.m. and/or 2 p.m., and Entresto at 6 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 2:30 p.m.  I may have double-dosed my morning meds today.  Memory problems, confusion.

Internet outage due to severe storm damage overnight.😡 It didn't come back on until about 3:40 this afternoon after being out since before 6 a.m.  During the severe thunderstorm this morning, I missed TV weather coverage showing the extent of the storm, its probable duration, etc.  I didn't remember to connect through my iPhone "hotspot" until sometime this afternoon, or to connect to local TV stations, MS NOW, CNN, etc.

During the outage, I made a banana bread, but I managed to screw it up in all kinds of ways.  Memory problems again, absent-mindedness, etc.

Every Effort.  Through Barbara's book, I'm learning a lot more about Bill Mullen and his buying-the-farm crash in Laos.  'Buying the farm', I understand, is a term that originated during World War II as a euphemism for crashing a military aircraft, but it's now usually used to denote not simply crashing but dying in a crash, especially in a military aircraft.  When Bill was shot down, there was persuasive evidence that he ejected before his A4E crashed and that he survived on the ground.  His ejection radio beeped his location, but there were no voice transmissions.  He followed instructions from a rescue aircraft, but shortly thereafter, there were no signals, leading to the belief among his squadron mates and Barbara that he and his radio had been captured.  In my memoir, I wrote:

I suspect most, perhaps all, of us thought Moon was probably dead; I did.  We may have even hoped that he was dead rather than living as a captive in a cave in a mountain in Laos or sick and abused in a jungle prison.  I don’t know what we thought because we did not talk about it.  We didn’t talk about it, but we all thought about it, about him.  We thought of him as we drank each night at the officers’ club.  We thought of him as we watched the gung ho grunts go through their training before heading south, some to die, some to lose limbs, some perhaps to be among the missing, most to return alive but many messed up in their heads and hearts to one degree or another.  

I'm chastened to re-read my words about perhaps wishing Bill were dead rather than captured while reading of Barbara's and his family's desperate wishing that he was still alive.  By this afternoon, I was up to 1971 in the book, with Bill unheard from for more than 5 years, and Barbara still acting on the belief, not that he had died or been killed, but that he had been captured and was still alive.  It is painful to read of her life without her husband, but living with the belief that he was alive and would be coming home after the war was concluded.  

Reading this book is an emotional journey for me.  When I started to write these words, I had just finished her chapter 7 titled "My Country, Right or Wrong," dealing with July, 1967, when she was living in Addison, a suburb of Chicago, and working on the Eugene McCarthy campaign to end the war.  I had been discharged from the Marines on June 1, 1967.  She describes the friction within her own family over her work for McCarthy, with accusations from her brother that she was being disloyal to the country and to her presumed-captive husband.  At that time, I was going through the same kind of internal struggle between supporting McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and supporting the war, which I was convinced was unwinnable.  However, I was still in the Inactive Reserves for two years, subject to recall, as a recently discharged Marine officer, and I had many friends still in the service, mostly in the Marines and the Navy.  And, though I wasn't a practicing Catholic at the time (and hadn't been while overseas), I was still a cradle Irish Catholic, 'born in the bosom of the Church' and raised to respect authority, civil and ecclesial.  I couldn't identify with the long-haired, authority-defying anti-war protesters.  "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  That first year back from Vietnam (1966-1967) was something of a nightmare for me, for several reasons, and the second year wasn't a whole lot better.  For Barbara Mullen, and for Bill if he was still alive, these years were a whole lot worse.

She then wrote of the fraught (too wimpy a word) years after 1967,  from the nightmares of 1968 (Tet, Conkling's assessment, the assassinations, the Democratic Convention, etc.) through the nightmares of 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Sterling Hall in Madison, etc.) to get to 1971, where I am now in the book.

Banana Bread Fail.  I massively screwed up my attempt to bake a loaf of banana bread this afternoon, while Geri was visiting her walking buddy, Barb, and helping her to learn about cable stitching.  I relied on my memory about how much flour to use, 356 grams vs. 256 grams, then misfigured how much flour I had to remove from my measuring cup, so I have about 45 grams too much flour in the batter.  Then I misread the directions about when to mix in the flour with the wet ingredients.  Then I added too much baking soda. Then, I forgot to push the “start” button on the oven to preheat it to 350 degrees.  Then, I undercooked it.  The bottom half-inch of the loaf is raw dough.  Did I mention I didn’t have enough bananas?  A true clusterf--- of a baking experience.   A throwaway.  I've been baking banana breads for years, never with a complete breakdown like this.  Not a good sign.   Geri asked me if she should save me the pain of throwing it in the garbage.  I said, yes.

9/3/2026

 September 3, 2026

1965 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Mysterium Fidei

1967 Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was elected President of South Vietnam under a new constitution

1978 Pope John Paul I was officially installed as the 263rd supreme pontiff

2017 1.4-ton WWII bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany with 60,000 people evacuated, the largest postwar 

In bed at 9:15 and up at 4:05; 0420. 205.4. 118/65/64 109; 70/86/69, cloudy, thunderstorms, rain.

Morning meds at 6:45 a.m. and Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and 6 p.m.

 Spooky.  I finished reading the interesting, but sometimes tedious and always challenging The Breakup by Kurt Andersen.  I pulled up my entire collection of Kindle Books to see whether I had purchased another book that I wanted to read after this one (other than Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir) and discovered, among my books already read, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene. Only yesterday, I wrote that I had never heard of Max Frisch but now that my memory is jogged, I see that I read one of his books only a little more than a month ago.  ChatCPT has a much better memory than I do.  Here is our exchange about this:

Today 7:41 PM

Yesterday you drafted an obituary for me in which you mentioned my interest in Max Frisch.  I was surprised by this, thinking I had never heard of Frisch.  Today I discovered that I apparently read Frisch's book Man in the Holocene, but I remember nothing about it.  Can you tell me about when I read it, and what, if anything, I wrote about it?

Yes. You read it quite recently—at the end of July 2026, only about a month ago—which makes your having no recollection of it today rather striking.

On July 31, you wrote in your journal:  “I've given up on [Virginia Woolf's] To the Lighthouse and started Man in the Holocene, a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.”

You were reading it in the context of thinking quite a lot about aging, loss of mental acuity, usefulness, and memory. In that same period you wrote that “The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have to even try to express,” and referred to sometimes experiencing days of “semi-brain fog.”

You subsequently finished the book, and we discussed it. Your reaction was decidedly mixed. You told me:  “I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's confusing, unsettling, like Geiser's mind itself. Not easy to read or to comprehend. Not pleasant.”

That is actually a perceptive description of what Frisch is doing. The protagonist, Herr Geiser, is a 74-year-old widower living alone in a Swiss valley, increasingly isolated by torrential rain and landslides. As his memory and perhaps his cognitive faculties begin failing, he starts clipping factual information from books and encyclopedias and pasting the clippings on the walls of his house, as though accumulating facts might hold his disintegrating world—and himself—together.

You also asked me specifically about a passage near the end involving Geiser climbing the Matterhorn with his brother, wondering whether he was hallucinating or confusing memory and present experience. That ambiguity is very much part of the novella: Frisch progressively makes it difficult for us to know precisely where Geiser's recollection ends and his deteriorating perception begins.

Most significantly, when we talked about Geiser himself, you said you weren't sure how you felt about him, but acknowledged that you “uncomfortably identified with him, because of age and diminishment of faculties.”

So my mentioning Frisch in yesterday's obituary wasn't based merely on your having once mentioned his name. You had actually engaged rather personally with Man in the Holocene. The book's central concerns—aging, memory, solitude, the erosion of one's capacities, and the question of what remains of a person as those capacities disappear—overlapped considerably with things you were writing and thinking about at the time.

There is an irony here that Frisch himself might have appreciated: a month after reading a book largely about the unreliability and disappearance of memory, you had forgotten not merely the book but apparently Max Frisch himself.

And I should add one correction to yesterday's obituary: describing Frisch as an “interest” of yours probably overstated matters. From what you've said, Frisch wasn't a continuing literary interest; you read one Frisch novella that happened to touch you at a particularly relevant point in your life. That's a rather different—and more accurate—description.

Go a little further with Frisch - Reconstruct your July 31 reading notes?

yes

 Here is the fuller reconstruction of what you were thinking when you began Man in the Holocene on Friday, July 31, 2026.

The important thing is that Frisch did not appear in isolation. You had been trying to read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, had reached roughly page 51, and found her syntax difficult and the characters unengaging. You abandoned it and wrote that you had “started Man in the Holocene, a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.”

More revealing is what surrounded that reading note in your journal. You were already preoccupied that day with old age and the question of usefulness. A Washington Post story about the economic costs associated with an aging population had led you to think about several films dealing rather starkly with societies disposing of their elderly—The Ballad of Narayama, Plan 75, and Eskimo. From there your thoughts became personal. You wrote that you had “outlived my usefulness” and asked, “Why go on?”—in the context of wondering about purpose and meaning in advanced age.

Elsewhere in those entries you were thinking specifically about your own intellectual life. You worried that using Blogger's copy-and-paste capability could substitute other people's words for your own thinking. You wrote:  “The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have”

and described “sometimes days going by in at least a semi-brain fog.”  That makes your choice of Man in the Holocene almost uncannily appropriate, whether you deliberately chose it for that reason or simply happened upon it. Geiser is an aging man desperately trying to preserve knowledge while becoming uncertain of his ability to retain it.

What I cannot establish from the surviving July 31 material is exactly when you finished the book. But I can recover from our subsequent conversation that you did finish it and then asked me about the ending—specifically whether Geiser was hallucinating when he seemed to be climbing the Matterhorn with his brother.

Your strongest reaction came afterward:  “I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's confusing, unsettling, like Geiser's mind itself. Not easy to read or to comprehend. Not pleasant.”   And when we discussed why it had affected you, you said that although you weren't sure how you felt about Geiser, you uncomfortably identified with him because of age and diminishment of faculties.

 So there is a rather remarkable sequenceJuly 31: You are writing about having “outlived my usefulness,” wondering about purpose in old age, and noticing periods of “semi-brain fog.” You abandon Woolf and begin a novella about an elderly man confronting precisely those problems.

Early August: You finish it. You find the experience confusing and unpleasant, but recognize that you identify with Geiser's aging and diminished faculties.

September 1: I mention Max Frisch in the obituary I drafted for you.

September 2: You tell me you think you have never heard of Max Frisch, then discover that you read Man in the Holocene only about a month ago.

That last development changes how I read your July comments somewhat. There is something almost Frischian about it—but I don't want to make too much of a single forgotten book and author. We routinely forget books, particularly books that didn't give us much pleasure. Still, the coincidence is striking because memory slipping away is one of the very things you recognized yourself in Geiser.

It also makes me think yesterday's obituary accidentally stumbled onto something more poignant than I realized when I wrote it. Frisch himself isn't especially important in the story of your intellectual life. Your encounter with Man in the Holocene may be. It caught you during a period when you were consciously examining what it means to grow old while remaining intellectually alive—and then the book itself disappeared from your memory.

Do I now remember reading this book only a month ago? Yes.  That's a good sign.  It means that the memory isn't gone forever, irretrievable.  It was "just" buried deep in my brain, needing to be excavated.  But this phenomenon is more than just a temporary "name retrieval" problem.  The problem I had with Frisch and Man in the Holocene I also have with TV programs.  "Have I/we already seen this?," I'll ask myself or Geri many times.  Or I will have already seen a program or series and remember nothing of it, no plot line or anything.  I've lived with the poor memory problem for quite a while now, and it started with name-retrieval, but I find this particular memory lapse pretty distressing.  Losing memory is losing one's sense of self, losing one's self.  Who and what am I if not a constellation of memories of myself in childhood, in a family, as an active adult: student, Marine, professor, lawyer, husband, father, friend, sinner and saint?  It's all those memories aggregated that comprise our sense of self.   As these memories disappear, so do parts of ourselves.  I think, of course, of my dear, now-gone, brother-in-law Jimmy, who at the end confused his daughter with his sister, who didn't remember who his sister was when she visited him.  I think of Zeke Emanuel's article in The Atlantic, Why I Hope to Die at 75.  I suppose I'm catastrophizing, but the evidence of diminishment aggregates as memories disaggregate and disappear. /s/ Denny Downer.

The Breakup.  What do I think of it?  Bottom line: I'm glad I read it, the whole 576 pages of it, but I wish it had been a lot shorter.  The Irish might describe Andersen and his novel as "too clever by half."  Confession: I did not read the whole novel closely or carefully.  For some passages, my eyes glazed over, and I skimmed.  It became too much to deal with, especially in the first 60% of it, or so.  Too mucha, too mucha.  Too much tortoise cognition, too much AI, too much robotics and exploding technology.  I almost set the book aside after I had already read about 300 pages of it because it became tedious, not good for a writing intended to appeal to a mass audience, most of whom are not scientifically or technologically oriented or knowledgeable.  That said, I'm still glad I stuck with it.  The story of Asher and Natalie and their daughter Logan was interesting, and it took center stage in the last 40% or so of the novel.  The critique of contemporary American culture and society was also worthwhile.  Natalie referred to the period between Trump's first appearance as a serious national political figure and the civil war of the mid-2030s as "America's Thirty Years' War," the 17th-century European religious wars that devastated central Europe.  For a pessimist like me, the comparison seems apt.  Like all of us, I suffer from 'confirmation bias,' and The Breakup provided ample confirmation for my pessimistic biases.

Read and weep.  From this morning's NYTimes:

The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.

The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.

Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s effort to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students. Trump officials view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.

Every Effort.  I returned to Barbara Mullen Neenan's memoir about her life after being notified that her husband Bill, whom we knew as "Moon," had been shot down and was missing.   I'm very early into the book, where she has moved from her "Youper" hometown of Marquette, MI, to move in with Bill's family in Brockton, MA.  I've learned that he and I had something in common: we were both 2nd-generation Americans.  His dad was the child of Irish immigrants; my mom was the child of Irish immigrants.  Geri is also the granddaughter of immigrants from Italy.  It's no wonder we are so hostile to what Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Markwayne Mullin are doing to immigrants of all kinds.  I've also learned that there was a lot of music and singing in Bill's household when he was growing up. This sheds some light on why he was so willing to sing Danny Boy a cappella on demand at the Marine Officers Club in Da Nang.  When he sang, the whole room became silent and listened.

I'm still uncomfortable reading Barbara's reporting verbatim of conversations that occurred close to two decades before the book was published, but I suppose she concluded that she had to reconstruct those conversations as well as she could to make the story hold together.  Reading her words brings home to me the torture of loved ones of all the MIA.  It's crushing.  Waiting, hoping, praying, waiting, hoping, . . .

Our Gliberal.  I watched J. D. Vance glibly lying through his teeth at the White House press conference today.  He did manage to announce that he is a "devout Catholic."  He also managed to say that he wouldn't call Trump's war on Iran a war.  Full of smiles, full of bonhomie.  Full of shit.  Our shameless hillbilly.

9/2/2026

 Wednesday, September 2, 2026

1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from France (National Day)

1945 V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan signed aboard the USS Missouri,  the end of World War II

1983 Yitzḥak Shamir (Likud party) was endorsed by Menachem Begin for Israeli Prime Minister

2025 The US conducted a precision strike and sank a Venezuelan boat reportedly used for smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. The Trump administration reports it currently has no plans to attack the Venezuelan government. 

2025 A Bolivian court sentenced two Spanish Jesuit priests to a year in prison for failing to report child sexual abuse by a fellow priest, whose posthumous diary revealed he abused at least 85 minors between 1972 and 2000. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 7:35; 0655 204.2 120/73/63 97;  72/85/71, cloudy, thunderstorms expected this morning.

Morning meds at 8:15 a.m.  Entresto at 7:45 a.m. and p.m.

Homo hominis lupus.  Knowing what we know of human history, and knowing what we know of current history, how can we not believe this old adage that man is a wolf to man, that we prey on one another, are beasts to one another.  Not everyone, of course, and not always, but as a species, it is we who are the most beastly.  I thought this again this morning as I listened to the New York Times headline stories on my iPhone and then watched the beginning of Morning Joe.  What the Russians are doing to Kiev and to he rest of the Ukrainians, what the Israeli settlers, supported by their government, are doing to West Bank Palestinians, what the Iranians powers have been doing to their own people, and to their Gulf neighbors, what we are doing to the Iranian populace, what is and always seems to be going on on the African continent, what Trump and his myrmidons are doing to the whole world with tariffs and the war against Iran.  The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.  God help us, but of course, we shouldn't count on it.

After 286 Days at Sea, 5,000 Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln Dock in Thailand: A beach resort town in eastern Thailand welcomed crew members who will enjoy their first R&R after months deployed in a war zone, in this morning's Wall Street Journal.  I first saw a report of the carrier landing in Thailand on Morning Joe and thought about what mixed feelings the government and people of that port town must have to have 5,000 horny, thirsty American sailors arriving in their town.  The owners of whore houses, massage parlors, bars, and restaurants are jubilant.  The people who work in those establishments must have some mixed feelings.  Local law enforcement personnel and Navy Shore Patrol folks are preparing for a lot of calls.  I think back to the week of R&R I spent in Bangkok in early 1966. From my memoir:

My other trip out of country was a Rest and Recreation trip to Bangkok.  R&R trips did not begin until some months after I arrived in Vietnam, after President Johnson decided that we were in the conflict for the long haul.  R&R destinations were added a few at a time:  Hong Kong and Manila at first, then Bangkok, Penang, and eventually Taipei, Japan and   Australia.  When I became eligible for R&R, after 6 or 7 months “in country,” I had a choice of Hong Kong, the Philippines, or Bangkok, my destination of choice.  R&R leaves were for 5 days, but that could be extended day-by-day if there were no aircraft space available for the return trip to Vietnam.  Therein lies the unusual story of my guided tour of Bangkok brothels. 

In January or February of 1966, I flew from DaNang to Bangkok on an Air Force transport plane with a planeload of Marines, airmen, and a few soldiers and sailors.  There was a gaggle of taxi drivers who met our incoming plane with offers of exclusive taxi service for the entire 5 days of our R&R.  The drivers were as much personal tour guides as chauffeurs.   Most of us servicemen had money to burn since there was little to spend our pay on in Vietnam and goods (booze) and services (haircuts and mamasans who did laundry and swept our tents) were inexpensive in any event.  I hired my driver/tour guide who took me to the small hotel I was staying in where I started my R&R by taking a nap.  It was great to be in a real room with a real private bathroom and a real mattress on a real bed and no need for mosquito netting.  I slept until my driver returned at the time we had agreed.  He told me that his last client, whom he had deposited at the airport before picking me up, had been unable to obtain a flight back to Vietnam.  Would I mind sharing the taxi with his previous client for a night?  I said that would be fine.  I of course did not know a soul in Bangkok and was happy to have another American to talk to halfway around the world from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

The previous client turned out to be an Army doctor stationed at the big base in Nha Trang, between DaNang and Saigon.  We had dinner together and drank and schmoozed and got along well.  He told me about the medical facility at Nha Trang and I told him what I knew of I Corps.  In the course of the evening, I have no recollection of how the subject arose, he told me that he was a virgin.  He was 27 years old and unmarried.  He had come to Bangkok intending to have his first experience of sexual intimacy (in a manner of speaking) but had not succeeded.  He wanted to try again that evening.  I think the fact that he had someone with him – me – stiffened his resolve (no pun intended.)  I wasn’t in the market for the services he desired (oh, those impure thoughts and impure deeds!)  but I accompanied him as the driver/tour guide took us from brothel to brothel in the red light districts of Bangkok.  As with my arrival at Chu Lai and my encounter with the killer barber and Chinese assassin in DaNang, I failed the dauntless test.  The driver took us down dark streets and alleys and into dimly-lit bordellos where he spoke Thai to the Madame.  It was creepy and not-a-little scary.  I was no more experienced in this kind of adventure than the virginal doctor.   The doctor was clearly not eager to engage any of the women who came forward for his inspection, but after a number of stops he finally took a young woman back to the hotel where we were staying.  I bid him adieu at the hotel and went to another bar or night club with the taxi driver.  I knocked on the doctor’s door when I got back to the hotel.  He said he had company and would see me in the morning.  The next morning, he came down to breakfast while I was in the dining room, and sat with me.  “Well?”  I said.  “No go,” he said, “we talked all night.  She is very nice.”  The driver took him back to the airport after breakfast where he caught a plane back to Nha Trang, his virtue intact.

I cannot place too much emphasis on notions of virtue or moral purity in describing this strange night.  Bangkok was a commercial sex center even in early 1966.  Every R&R port was, or became, a sex center.  All those American servicemen with all that money and pent-up hormones and greater or lesser fears of dying sure can disrupt a local economy and corrupt a culture.  Prostitution thrived in all the R&R ports as did the drug trade and trafficking in crude pornography.  There was, however, a rumor afoot that servicemen were being infected with a strain of venereal disease that was highly resistant to antibiotics and highly destructive of the structural integrity of the male organ.  The not-so-funny jokes were that if you caught ‘the black syph,’ “you and your _____ [insert any of hundreds of slang terms for penis] will rotate back to the states in separate aircraft” or “You’ll be able to take your [whatever] back in its own box.”  Not that there were lots of opportunities for sexual adventures in Vietnam, but I didn’t know any officers, almost all of whom were married and older than the enlisted troops,  who indulged in that kind of activity before DaNang was placed off limits for American servicemen.  Religious sensibilities and marital vows played some roles, but so did fear of the notorious “black syph.”

After spending the first night touring the bordellos of Bangkok with the virgin surgeon, the rest of the R&R figured to be something of an anticlimax, and it was.  I toured the famous floating market, and visited more Buddhist temples than I can remember, took a trip into the countryside to visit Ayudiah, an ancient ruin.  I ate by myself, or with my driver, two or three meals a day.  I had Baked Alaska for dessert at one restaurant, my first and last time.  I bought some sapphire and ruby rings to bring home to your mother, and lengths of Thai silk.  I visited a large snake farm and had my picture taken with a 10 or 15 foot long python or anaconda draped around my neck and shoulders.   What I remember most is being alone and lonely, having no one to share the exotic touristy stuff with except my driver.  And, as each day passed, I knew I was one day closer to returning to DaNang and the grim business of the war.  I got some rest, and I got some recreation, and was glad for the experiences, but all in all, it was a remarkably sterile and joyless ‘vacation.’

The Abraham Lincoln will tie up at  Sattahip, the port facility near Pattaya, a resort and tourist town.   From ChatGPT:

The consequences were dramatic. Economists who subsequently studied the phenomenon found that areas surrounding Thai bases used by Americans developed much larger sex industries than comparable areas around Thai bases that Americans did not use. Remarkably, that difference persisted decades later: districts near former U.S. bases were found to have roughly five times as many commercial sex workers.

So the connection between American servicemen and the growth of prostitution is not merely anecdotal; there is unusually strong historical and economic evidence for it. 

There unquestionably was prostitution involving minors in Thailand during and after the Vietnam era. Poverty, rural-to-urban migration, trafficking, debt arrangements, and families sending daughters into employment all created circumstances in which adolescents entered the sex trade.

How openly did the military tolerate prostitution?

The U.S. military did not officially operate brothels or issue prostitutes to servicemen, and prostitution was formally illegal under Thai law. There were also military VD-control programs, medical inspections and warnings about sexually transmitted disease.

But at the practical level, prostitution was open, ubiquitous and plainly understood by American commanders to be a major part of the R&R environment.

There is little evidence that commanders seriously attempted to prevent servicemen from patronizing prostitutes. The concern was much more often venereal disease, robbery, fights, drugs, black-market activity and incidents embarrassing to the United States than the sexual transaction itself.

 I have a ton of sympathy for the sailors and Navy officers arriving in Thailand.  I noted too in the Wall Street Journal report of their arrival and it wasn't only the Abraham Lincoln that tied up, but also a guided missile destroyer named the Frank E. Petersen, after my friend and fellow Nancy Wilson fan at NAS Willow Grove.  It warms my heart that a Navy combat ship was named after him, especially now as Trump and Hegseth are working to stop the Navy from naming a ship about to be christened after a Black sailor who was a hero during the Pearl Harbor attack.  There is scuttlebutt about naming the ship USS Trump.  Words fail me.

Anniversaries.  I note that today is the anniversary both of the Japanese formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri battleship, and the date that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent of France's colonial rule.  Of course, Ho tried to get US support for his independence movement from the US and, no surprise, the US wouldn't deal with him because he was a Communist.  The French played FAFO with Ho and his military leader Giap until Giap eviscerated them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when we picked up the battle until we 'cut and ran' from the unwinnable war in 1973, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975.  

 A pencil drawing I did of my granddaughter Lizzie from a photo her mom took on the opening day of school this year.  I messed up her beautiful smile badly, but I  think I'll nonetheless try to make a portrait painting from the photo..