Sunday, October 11, 2026
1962 Second Vatican Council (21st ecumenical) was convened by Pope John XXIII
1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev opened talks at the Reykjavik summit
1991 Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her
2002 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former President Jimmy Carter
2025 Six people were killed, and 14 others were injured after an individual opened fire at the Leland High School homecoming gathering on a main street in Leland, Mississippi, United States. No suspect was taken into custody
In bed at 2:30 a.m., up at 7:45. 200.2 130/80/65 108;59/70/52, mostly sunny. I went to sleep with my sunglasses from yesterday still tucked into my Honor Flight polo shirt, which I wore to bed. I didn't discover them there until noon today.
Morning meds at 9 a.m. Entresto at 7:45 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. I missed my evening dose yesterday again.
Text exchange with SCC this morning:
+49 176 - - - - - - - How was your day yesterday?
Me: Hi, Sweetie. Thank you for caring and for asking. It was an almost overpowering, warm experience, and one that I suspect I will be reflecting on and trying to sort out for the rest of my life. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. It was also the longest day I’ve had since I don’t know when: up at 4 a.m. yesterday, home around 1 (or 1:30?) today. I suspect I will try to do a long reflection on the day for my journal/blog today and I’ll send it to you and probably post it on FB. I didn’t get to bed until 2:30 this morning and this morning I am, as one of my law school faculty used to put, “dragging major butt.” Thank you so much for your very kind letter in my “mail call” package I received at the end of the day. It was vey touching.❤️
+49: - - - - - ❤️
Me: BTW, I take my weight and BP every morning when I get up because of the heart failure condition. If my scale is right (and I think it may be), I lost 2.8 pounds yesterday.😳🙃
+49 - - - - - : Wow! Did you get some walking in?
Me: Almost none. Andy pushed me around in a wheelchair all day and we covered some distance, especially around the various memorials and monuments between the WWII memorial and the Wall. I can’t walk for any serious distance anymore because of some pretty severe arthritis in my back, muscle weakness, balance problems, etc., old age stuff. Poor Andy may be feeling some of it himself today. It was a long day for him, too.
Text exchange with LOA:
Charles Clausen: Hi, Buddy. Here’s an ‘interim report’ on the flight yesterday. Thank you for the kind letter you sent for my “mail call” at the end of the trip. You’re too kind, and I attribute that to your very good parents and your good Wisconsin Synod upbringing. BTW, I was surprised there were only 6 Marines on the flight, out of 105 vets. This is an exchange I had with Sarah in Germany earlier this morning: [omitted]
Larry: With all those doggies in the group will they still get you to the Memorial?
Charles Clausen: It was our first stop and I was duly moved, remembering my Dad down on the landing beach where his JASCO comm unit was stationed, looking up and seeing the flag raising and my Mom and Dad visiting the Memorial decades later, wondering what each of them was going through looking at it.
Larry: All true American heroes. I can’t really relate to what they went through. All the 03 training I had active and reserve would not have prepared me for that.
Charles Clausen: Marines suffered roughly 25,800 casualties in all, while the Japanese garrison numbered about 21,000–22,000, nearly all of whom were killed or captured. Official Navy history specifically describes Iwo Jima as the only U.S. offensive in the Pacific War in which American dead and wounded exceeded Japanese casualties. Roughly 6,800 Americans were killed, while nearly the entire Japanese garrison died. Hard to imagine, but who would want to?
Text exchange with CBG:
Me: Good morning. Here’s an ‘interim report’ on my trip yesterday, a copy of an exchange I had with Sarah this morning: [omitted]
Caren: I’m so glad you did it. I’m sure it is something you sort out for a long time and I’m happy it was such a warm experience. You are a hero — then and now.
Charles Clausen: Thanks for those kind words and I know you wouldn’t say them if you didn’t mean them, but I’m no hero except in the sense that each of us is ordinary and extraordinary in some ways on some days, and each of us is a saint and a hero in some ways on some day, and not on others. I was mindful of that again yesterday, spending the day with 104 old vets and their caretakers (they call them ‘escorts’ and ‘guardians’, but they’re were there to take care of us and most of us, at least, knew that.). I had very similar feelings and emotions yesterday to what I so often experience at the VA Medical Center, surrounded by so many old, surviving, ferkrimpter military veterans, blessed to be counted one of those ordinary, extraordinary, unique, saintly and heroic ordinary Joe Blows, Joe Palookas, Moishe Pipiks.
Some thoughts on yesterday's Honor Flight. Before offering any specific thoughts about yesterday's activities, I should acknowledge that I experienced two seemingly contradictory impulses throughout the day: first, that I was speechless, utterly unable to describe all that I was experiencing; and second, that I could write an entire book about the thoughts and emotions passing through my mind.
A couple of preliminary reflections seem appropriate.
First, I know that I'm not long for this world. I'm into my 86th year. I've outlived all the members of my birth family, most of my good friends, and many of the people I worked with and admired over the years, as well as roughly 75% of those born, like me, in 1941, before Pearl Harbor. I'm more likely to join those who have gone before me five minutes, days, or months from now than five years from now, and that's OK by me.
Since I began keeping this journal more than four years ago, following the death of my dear sister, I've become increasingly reflective about my past and present life. Sometimes that's been a good thing, other times not so good. But I've also noticed that I've become more emotional, more susceptible to moments of awe and deep appreciation for life, for nature and beauty generally, and especially for the beauty in what people do that is good, caring, and saintly, in the sense of Matthew 25:31–46.
I mention all this by way of explaining that I'm more inclined to tear up now than I ever was earlier in life, to feel my eyes grow moist and that familiar tingle in my tear ducts when I encounter something good and wondrous. And yesterday, that happened more than once.
Secondly, I should acknowledge that I do not feel good about, or proud of, my personal participation in the war against the Vietnamese. I've written about this many times in this journal. At least for guys like me, participating in that war was wrong, something to be regarded with deep regret, if not deep shame.
Thus, it seems to me entirely fitting that we have not been treated as conquering heroes upon our return home. I certainly don't mean to suggest that it was acceptable for returning veterans to be personally reviled, as too often happened, especially as the war dragged on and on. But neither do I believe that we deserved celebratory welcome-home parades.
For me, participation in that war inflicted what is now called a "moral injury." And I fear that some of today's military personnel may come to experience something similar as a consequence of participating in military operations ordered by our nation's current rulers, including the destruction of boats and the killing of people in the Caribbean Sea, and perhaps other lethal military adventures yet to come.
Yesterday, I noticed an inscription high above the western entrance to the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery, leading toward the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is a line from the Roman poet Horace (Odes, 3.2.13): Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori — "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
The inscription dates from the First World War era, before Wilfred Owen's magnificent poem Dulce et Decorum Est had become known. Owen wrote his poem during the war, and it was published posthumously in 1920. In it, he savagely condemned the romantic glorification of death in battle, famously denouncing Horace's maxim as "the old Lie."
There is a powerful retrospective irony in the juxtaposition. At Arlington, Horace's words proclaim the nobility of dying for one's country. Owen, having witnessed the horrors of the trenches, took those very same words and turned them into one of the most searing indictments of the glorification of war ever written. Sitting there in my wheelchair as an old Marine who had long since come to regret his participation in another war, I found myself much closer to Owen than to Horace.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
My heart is with Wilfred Owen and with those of whom he wrote, and not with Horace or with the militaristic nationalists who decided to put Horace's words at the entry to the Memorial Amphitheater. That fact colored my whole experience of yesterday's Honor Flight.
That said, what about yesterday's experience that brought my old eyes to tears and my old lips to near blubbering was all the kindness that was bestowed on the other guys and me from the beginning of the very long day to its end.
Preliminarily, I report that our Honor Flight consisted of 105 veterans ranging in age from 70 to 89. I was among the oldest and also the most wheelchair-bound of the group. We were accompanied throughout the day by a medical team of 3 volunteer physicians equipped with medical supplies, and by many Stars and Stripes volunteers, more than I could count. Indeed, the whole organization is staffed entirely by volunteers, all terrifically dedicated to their mission. Our seats on the aircraft were pre-assigned. I had seat 1F, a window seat in the first row, for both flights. Next to me was a 70-year-old Air Force vet named "Boots" from Richfield, WI, and in the aisle seat was "James," an old and pretty frail African American. Our "guardians" were seated directly behind each of us. Boots and I each had a son as guardian; James had his daughter, or perhaps his granddaughter. All three of us were wheelchair bound throughout the day. The photo shows me, Boots, and a little bit of James in Row 1, with Andy directly behind me.
Each of our two flights to and from Washington featured a need for medical attention. On the way out, I had a nasty pain problem with my old and oft-battered bladder that was resolved when I got to Dulles Airport, but the doc who tended to me told me later that the medical team was prepared to catheterize me if needed, even on the aircraft or on a bus, if necessary. On the return flight, we experienced a considerably more serious problem.
In mid-flight, I was resting with my eyes closed when I heard and felt a commotion next to me. Boots had leaned forward and was talking to one of the doctors. James's arm was behind Boots's back, and Boots was explaining that James appeared to have suffered some sort of seizure, thrashing about, apparently convulsing and vomiting.
James's right hand was next to me, and I held it as two doctors attended to him. One, standing in the aisle, checked his blood sugar and his pupils' response to a light shone into his eyes. The other, standing in front of Boots, checked his blood pressure. Meanwhile, James's daughter or granddaughter rubbed his head and tried to get his attention, but he remained unresponsive.
For a time, it wasn't even clear to us that he was alive. Finally, he came around and said he was OK. The tense situation continued for some time, and we were all profoundly grateful that those doctors were right there to care for James in his distress, the cause of which we never learned.
James was the first of us to be taken off the aircraft when we landed in Milwaukee. The memory of his ordeal, and of those anxious moments when we didn't know whether he would survive, will remain with me for a long time.
As will the memory of what awaited the rest of us when we entered the Mitchell Field terminal — AT MIDNIGHT!
We walked, or were wheeled, through an incredibly long honor guard that included bikers in their Harley gear, Navy officers in full uniform, members of groups I couldn't identify, parents and grandparents, children of all ages, cheerleaders from two different high schools, and countless others, stretching as far as the eye could see. A bagpipe ensemble provided the music.
This was a repetition of the reception we had received at Mitchell Field early that morning, and of the even larger receptions that greeted us at Dulles Airport in Washington, both upon our arrival and our departure.
It was during these receptions that I spontaneously teared up, profoundly moved that so many people would make their way to a busy airport, on a lovely Saturday morning or late at night, simply to welcome and salute a ragtag bunch of old military veterans. And at Dulles, we weren't even from their part of the country, nor were we personally known to most of them.
I could scarcely believe my eyes.
In Milwaukee, when we finally made our way through the concourse and into the terminal proper, hundreds of family members were waiting to welcome us home.
Including Geri!
More tomorrow. Now for the Brewers and Dodgers.
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