history

Lessons of a military life

Eric Saretsky1 Comment

Lesson #1: You’ve got two rights in this world

My early blog post is being retitled and reposted to first in a series of memories that shaped my adult life.  This story is forty years old as of 2018.   

Thirty years ago, a Navy Senior Chief, his name forgotten to history, made a lasting impression on an 18-year old Sailor.  In what was then the Correctional Custody Unit (CCU) at Naval Training Center San Diego, I was a Petty Officer assigned to escort the nearly-bad-but-salvageable characters who were not sent to the brig for various offenses.  On the Monday of the beginning of every other month, a group of malcontent, mostly 18 to 20 year old,  “bootcamps” or fresh recruits and apprentices were lined up at 0700 in the courtyard of a nondescript half-century old building with bars on the windows and a locked front gate.  This was CCU and the Senior Chief, the LCPO.

The Senior Chief was a burly man with a crooked grin, intense eyes and was all-business. He had spent ten years as a combat Marine and then switched services to the Navy as a Gunners Mate.  His deputies were equally salty, the soon-retiring Snipe Chief with weathered skin, alcoholic eyes, missing front teeth — he was busted in the face decades before in a drunken brawl with Shore Patrol in some liberty port.  The  incoming deputy was a hefty Boatwains Mate First Class (“Boats”) who shared the same passion for the Navy and making Sailors out of these men in their charge.

“You’ve got two rights in this world, shipmates”  the Senior Chief bellowed, “One, to live; the other, to die.   And when you F*** up, I’m going to take one away from you!!”   At this, he usually got a snicker from some fool who also had his hands in his pockets.   After an hour of push-ups and eight-count body-builders, while we all enjoyed our coffee, the jokers were then quieter, sweating heavily and not inclined to disrespect their wardens.

 

only the future holds promise

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The dust of history has settled on the year 2011.  Thank goodness, many will agree.  In the next 362 days, new discoveries in science and medicine, art, literature, and the natural world will mark 2012 as their genesis.  The world will welcome millions of new babies, among them future Einsteins or Yitzak Perlman’s,  as well as good, honest, and hard-working future farmers, miners, fishermen and laborers.  In the next year, we will say farewell to many others.  The next 12 months are a cup half-full of promise.

Over the past year, people who engage in politics, economics, and military -backed diplomacy have proved that there will always be tyrants and incompetents,  powerful and the power-seekers, and dreamers and fools.  Middle-Eastern countries we liberated at terrible cost are returned to despotism and chaos; some empires need to be obliterated and not tolerated by a civil society.  After two centuries of upward mobility and American blood spilled to engender an ideal around the world, the American identity is now a weakened vox populi, a bankrupt economy and a powerful State.  Sovietism in America?

In 2012,  new leaders and new visions need to stand up; overcome the noise of the Occupy rabble, the sycophant news media, and the well-connected, and hold the Government to account.   Or the next 51 weeks  may be a cup half-empty.

Art Historian? No, but I slept in a Holiday Inn Express….

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If I had the money to jump on a plane and jet across the country this week for the heck of it, there’s a lecture series I want to attend.  Of course, I have no particular training as an art historian or artist, but I know the subject of this lecturer’s presentation, Edwin H. Blashfield , muralist.  I doubt there is a single one of my peers who hasa clue who he was or what a muralist does.   Forty years ago, I lived a few years on Cape Cod in a mid-18th Century home which at the turn of the 20th Century was the home and studio of this artist.   What began as a curious find of a large book full of his work in pictures and lithograph prints at the house became a small collection of prints and books he wrote today.   In several state buildings, courthouses and libraries from the MidWest to Washington, DC and New England, his work is prominently featured.    Here’s the editor’s new book on Blashfield  edited by Mina Rieur Weiner