Tuesday, June 11, 2024
In bed before 10, up at 3:30. Read the papers, did some puzzles, let Lilly out, and cleaned out leftover wax in votive light holders. Noticed how bright and warm our seldom-used living room is with the early morning sun shining in on Geri's sheet music and on the fireplace.
Prednisone, day 30, 20 mg. day 8. I took my pill, the last of the 20 mg. size, at 5:05 with a muffin. I have many 10 mg. pills and am still waiting for the 5 mg. pills Dr. Ryzka ordered.
At the Bayshore Apple Store, I traded in my iPhone 12 for $376.66.
Videoconference with Jill Hansen re "freestyle libre" CGM, appointment on Friday at 1 p.m.
Videoconference with Dr. Spalding's Healthy Aging Group.
Anniversaries. First, sugar rationing didn't stop until this date in 1947! I remember my mother kept our ration stamps/books on top of a cupboard in our kitchen. I wonder how rationing anything would go over in our society today. I know, remembering the reaction to any activity during the COVID-19 pandemic even as people, especially old people were dying by the thousands.
Second, I remember too when the Buddhist monk killed himself by setting himself on fire in Saigon. It was 4 days before Anne and I were married at St. Gregory the Great Church in South Euclid, Ohio with me wearing my Dress Whites and an honor guard of my NROTC buddies on the steps of the church. LBJ wouldn't send in the 3rd Marine Division until March 1965, 21 months later. Tom Devitt, Jerry Nugent, Ed Felsenthal, and I would all serve 'in country.' It should have been clear from the self-immolation of Thich Quang Ɖuc in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country ruled by the Catholic Ɖiem family put in power by a Catholic American president advised by Catholic Cardinal Spellman, military vicar of U.S. all U.S. troops, that our efforts there would not end well.
Lastly, in 1971, we finally gave Okinawa back to Japan, in a manner of speaking, a quarter century after the end of the big war. I spent 3 memorable months on the island's north end in 1966. From my memoir:
Poor Okinawa! So beautiful, so peaceful, so undeserving of her fate. The Ryukyu Islands comprised an independent kingdom until 400 years ago when it came under the hegemony of the Japanese. It was incorporated into Japan during the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s. Japan wanted it for the same reasons the Americans wanted it after the Second World War: its strategic location. The Ryukyus lie 330 miles southwest of the southernmost Japanese main island, Kyushu. Further south are Taiwan, the Philippines and Southeast Asia; to the west lies the Chinese mainland. The islands are mountainous and volcanic and more seismically active than western California. The Ryukyus are about the same size of California, but with much more coastline. They lie at about the same latitude as Nashville, Tennessee and the weather is generally warm. There is little tillable land. Much of the food comes from the sea, both in the form of fish and in the form of vegetables.
The people are traditionally gentle and peaceable. Many of them were traders, merchants of various sorts to seafarers from the Asian mainland and from other Pacific islands. They were not ethnic Japanese but rather a blend of Malay, Chinese and Japanese. Their Ryukyan language was not understood by Japanese speakers. The Japanese, as historically racist a culture as any, considered the Okinawans an inferior people, not as inferior as the despised Koreans, for example, but still pretty much like supercilious Euro-Americans considered Native Americans, blacks, Mexicans, immigrants from Asia and eastern and southern Europe: inferior people.
The United States targeted Okinawa for invasion to use it as the jumping off place for the invasion of the Japanese home islands in November, 1945, if the atom bomb under development in New Mexico had fizzled. The Japanese government committed a tremendous amount of resources to the defense of Okinawa, knowing that Kyushu or another home island was next on the Americans’ target list. The Battle of Okinawa, which started less than a month after Iwo Jima was secured, killed more than 12,000 Americans, an estimated 109,000 Japanese troops, and an estimated 150,000 Okinawans, about one third of the civilian population on the island. As awful as the battle was for the combatants, it was mostly the Okinawans who were slaughtered.
It was not out of character then that as the defeated Japanese government lay prostrate at the feet of the Americans at the end of the war, they handed over poor Okinawa as the principal ‘Japanese’ land to be occupied by the conquerors. The military occupation of Japan proper lasted until 1952 but the military occupation of Okinawa continued for another 20 years, including the few months during which I lived there. Indeed, although the American presence there is not legally an ‘occupation’ any more, it has continued interrupted to this day although some big changes are occurring. When I arrived in 1966, Okinawa was very much under American legal control and physical occupation. American bases, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, comprised 25% of the island. The Marines had many bases on the island, principally Camps Hansen, Butler, and Courtney, and the Futenma air base in the south, and, much further north, Camp Schwab, my home for the next three months.
My friend and fellow Marine in DaNang Jack whose last name I can't recall. We also served together at Camp Schwab where this photo was taken by another Marine. Hard to believe but I'm the guy on the right. Though I can't recall his last name, I have a warm spot in my heart for Jack. In my memoir, I relate an incident involving Jack and a dog in the local ville that reveals how low we were after our months in Vietnam during only the first year of the post-invasion war. Jack was a good man, as were in my experience the other Marines I served with in Vietnam and elsewhere, not heroes, not monters, good and responsible citizens, ordinary Americans, and deceent human beings.
We watched Atonement tonight.
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