Friday, August 28. 2026
1979 Lord Mountbatten was killed along with three companions, two of them children, by the IRA when his boat was blown up near Sligo, Ireland
2008 Barack Obama became the first African-American to be nominated by a major political party for President of the United States
2025 Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese announced the closure of the Australian embassy in Tehran, the expulsion of Iranian ambassadors from Australia, and designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization after an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation investigation links the IRGC to at least two antisemitic attacks, including the 2024 Melbourne synagogue attack and an arson attack on a kosher restaurant.
In bed at 9:30, up at 5:15; 0530 203.8 112/69/62 103; 60/80/60 sunny
Morning meds at 9:10 a.m. Entresto at 6:40 a.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Today is Anh Hoang Clausen's 48th birthday. Anh was born in 1978, during Jimmy Carter's presidency. She was the last and only child of De and Bac Tuyet Hoang, born in the U.S., her brother and sisters all having been born in Vietnam. De (and perhaps Bac Tuyet) was born in what became North Vietnam and fled to South Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Accords split the country in two. He was a devout, practicing Roman Catholic his entire life, and only in South Vietnam could he practice his religion. He settled in Da Nang and was a high-ranking police officer there when I was stationed at the huge airbase outside the city for 8 months. He and Bac Tuyet had 6 children there: Hung, Mai, Truc, Lan, Vung, and Vi. De fled with his entire family after the Communist victory in 1975, going first by boat to a refugee camp in Thailand, then to a resettlement camp at Camp Pendleton, CA, and then to Appleton, WI, where they were sponsored by St. Joseph's Catholic Parish. Anh was born in Appleton. I am so thankful that Andy's marriage to Anh made me a shirttail member of the Hoang mishpucha. De and Bac Tuyet are heroes of mine, exemplars of courage, resilience, and how to lead a good, purposeful, meaningful life, despite what, for most of us, would be insuperable challenges. Their children, including Anh, have inherited their virtues, and her children, my grandchildren, will strive to emulate De's and Bac Tuyet's purposefulness, courage, and goodness. Happy Birthday and thank you, Anh, for your purposefulness, courage, and goodness and for all the blessings you have brought into my life.
Today is also my cousin Doug's birthday, age 94. We haven't spoken since the last time I saw him in Florida, which was either around the family get-together for my Dad's 80th birthday in 2000, or when Kitty, Geri, and I gathered to move my Dad from his house in North Port to our house in Milwaukee and Kitty's house in Phoenix, in 2002. Doug has been burdened throughout his life with bad karma. He was a bedwetter and difficult even as a child, a thrower of temper tantrums, and somehow always different from his brother Jim, his sister Christine, and from his close cousins, Kitty and me. I was probably the closest to him during childhood since we were almost exactly one year apart in ages. As we grew old, we grew apart, following very different paths. I finished high school, went on to college, and 4 years in the Marines; Dough dropped out of De La Salle High School to join the Navy (as his brother Jim had), got in trouble in the Navy, spent time in the brig, and eventually got the boot. He spent time in a penitentiary in California, though this was never spoken of within the family. He got himself arrested during the family get-together for my Dad's 80th birthday, and his brother Jim & I had to bail him out of the Sarasota County Jail. His life reminds me of lines from Robert Frost's poem, The Death of the Hired Man:
“Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.”
and of William Blake's lines from Auguries of Innocence:
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
I have so many memories of growing up with Dough, as best buddies, so very alike and so very many ways, yet our lives took such divergent paths. Was it because he was a bad guy and I was a good guy? Not hardly, as we used to oxymoronically say. Chromosomes, genes, biochemistry, circumstances, and simple luck all played a role, I'm sure. I'm drawn back, as I so often am, to the perplexing issue of free will vs. determinism, to the question of how responsible we really are for who and what we are.
The Breakup by Kurt Andersen. I'm still struggling with whether to continue pass the midpoint of this novel. I started looking for reviews of the book and found this current review in the New York Times:
Our docents through this new American life are a family called the Zimbalists, whose own lines of fracture mirror the nation’s, as they are very much aware. In 2044, the family moved from Tennessee to San Francisco so that Asher Zimbalist could take a job running a hazily defined “Institute” on behalf of a person who may be that most elusive of species, the altruistic billionaire. But Asher’s wife, Natalie, couldn’t bear the culture shock. She’s a poet, of all things, though one who has earned some cultural infamy as a sort of plainspoken, Lionel Shriver-coded abuser of liberal pieties; six months ago, she moved back to Tennessee.
So have they broken up for good? Is politics to blame? They themselves aren’t sure (nor are their two children), and now their hand is forced by the imminence of a long-planned tour of prospective colleges for their younger child, Logan. This tour will take them through the newly reconfigured heartland of America.
It’s a good setup. What’s puzzling is that more than 300 pages of the novel go by before the engine of the Zimbalist family car, and thus of the novel’s plot, finally turns over, and the much-touted road trip begins. Before that comes a vast and dramatically static stretch of what speculative-fiction circles often call “world-building” — a full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of Andersen’s vision of the next 19 years of American history. It’s fun to read,
Until it becomes simply tedious. I have to put a book aside when I'm this far into it, but I'm still struggling.
They also serve who only stand and wait. These are lines from John Milton's Sonnet XIX, On his blindness. "When I consider how my light is spent." I am reminded of them because I received in today's mail Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir, Every Effort. Barbara was the wife of my friends in MWHG-1 in DaNang, Bill "Moon" Mullen. Moon was shot down over Laos attacking forces on the Ho Chi Minh Trail on April 28, 1966, by which time I had been transferred up to MACS-6 on Okinawa. We learned of it only by scuttlebutt, but reliable scuttlebutt. He was 31 years old and his remains have never been recovered. He left back in Massachusetts where he was from his wife Barbara and two sons. Barbara wrote Every Effort about her harrowing experiences after receving the telegram informing her that he was missing. I wrote about this more than 20 years ago in my memoir, but learned only recently where I could get a copy of Barbara's book, which arrived today. I have frequently written, both here and on FaceBook about the suffering of the loved ones of those of us who have served in the military, the parents, spouses, children, siblings and others. The KIA, WIA, and MIA statistics are always understated because they never list the loved ones who are hurt when a serviceman or woman is a casualty. I learned this most intimately and intensely when I served as a CACO for north Philadelphia when I returned from Vietnam myself. The book came with a photo of Barbara.
Moon Mullen was well liked and highly respected by all of us in the headquarters squadron in DaNang. He regularly flew missions with his old A4 squadron based in Chu Lai though he was assigned to the Intelligence section of Wing headquarters. Unlike some others, he never looked down his nose on those of us who were not aviators. He was a captain and a few years older than most of us. He had just turned 31 when he was shot down; most of us were first lieutenants in our mid 20s. When we could talk him into it, ‘by popular demand,’ Moon would stand up next to the bar or his table at the officers’ club and sing, always the same song –
Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,—
Oh, Danny boy, O Danny boy, I love you so!
But when ye come, and all the 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 Avè there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
When Moon sang Danny Boy, we all shut up. The juke box would be turned down or unplugged and the Righteous Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Mamas and Papas would give way to Moon Mullen, a capella.
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 messed up in their heads and hearts to one degree or another. I think of Moon every time I hear Danny Boy. For many years, I hated to hear the song. My eyes would start burning when I heard it, especially the lyrics If I am dead, as dead I well may be, Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying . . .” It would take me a while to ‘come back’ after hearing it, and I never sang it, though it had been one of my favorites before May, 1966.
I think Moon Mullen was for us emblematic of the ambiguous character of the war itself. He was neither alive nor dead, just ‘missing.’ He went down in a country (of sorts) where our government wouldn’t even admit we were fighting, though every Tom, Dick and Harry knew we were. The terrain he was bombing was not land that we would ever in any sense ‘take’ or ‘capture’ or ‘seize’ or ‘hold.’ It would be used for years as a principal line of communication and logistics between North Vietnam and forces in the south, and for years pilots would fly missions trying to slow the flow of men and materials southward and for years pilots would be shot down over that land. Indeed, when Nixon’s so-called ‘peace with honor’ was negotiated in Paris in 1973, there was no written agreement for the identification and repatriation or return of the bodies of pilots shot down over Laos. The treaty only bound “the parties hereof and the signatories hereto,” which did not include the government of Laos which was not ‘officially’ involved in the war. What happened to Moon Mullen and his family, the long, inconclusive waiting, the deceptions, the ultimate loss, was a microcosm of what was happening to American, and to Vietnam. I believe we knew that as we poisoned ourselves at the club each night and as we looked on those infantry Marines so intensely preparing for what awaited them in Vietnam. More Danny Boys, more Moons.
GOING AFTER CACCIATO
Tim O’Brien
They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know what villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai – tales passed down from old timer to newcomer – but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
Around the time I found out about Moon, I received orders back to the States, to I&I (Inspector-Instructor) duty with a reserve unit near Philadelphia. I would leave Okinawa on June 10, 1966, a little less than a year after I had arrived at Iwakuni. The normal Far East tour was 13 months; I was going home a month early because they needed me at my next duty station. If Moon Mullen had had the same good fortune, he would not have been on his mission over Laos on April 29th. He was shot down only two weeks before the date on which he was to return to the States. I am reminded of John Kennedy’s wisdom:
There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.
I was finally going home, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It had been a year since I had seen your mother and her family and my family. I had spent a year in the company of men, not just men, but Marines. I had lived in a tent, a ‘tin hut’ and BOQs and spent just about every night I wasn’t working at an officers’ club smoking and drinking and gambling and week by week becoming more skeptical of the likelihood of achieving success in our Grand Mission and more contemptuous of our government. I hadn’t been engaged in close combat, like the grunts and the pilots, but there was no pretending that we were not engaged in the death and destruction business. I was not a different person from the one who had left a year before, but I was surely a changed person. I was sadder inside and deeply cynical about our government, its truthfulness and its competence, its goodwill and its good faith. I had no faith in the war or in our government or in the government of South Vietnam, even in the middle of 1966. I still had a deep sense of identification with the Marine Corps, or perhaps more accurately, with Marines, which I have even to this day (‘Once a Marine, always a Marine’ and all that), but I increasingly despaired that any good would come from all the killing. And, of course, I had just learned that Moon Mullen was (or was not) dead. I was not ebullient as I left Camp Schwab to return to the States – unsettled and anxious would better describe how I felt.
The Odyssey. I went up to the North Shore Cinema this afternoon to watch this flick, my first visit to a theater in a year of more. The last one I saw was Oppenheimer, another magnum opus. The movie is almost 3 hours long, but I only stayed for the first 90 minutes or so. There is some pretty stunning cinematography in it, but the plot, notwithstanding its nature as a Homeric classic, and the dialogue just weren't my cup of tea. On top of that, I found it impossible to understand some of the dialogue, indeed all of the dialogue spoken by the women in the cast. I did enjoy the shipboard scenes, but that was about all.
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