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| Margo, Bob and Captain Emily |
Up and gone today to Windsor, CO to
visit with Emily’s friends Bob and Margot Iwanchuk, professional meteorologists
who came to this part of the country from Bedford, MA. Margot’s brother Duncan was
Emily’s beau in bygone days. Duncan and Emily new each other in Boston in the
late seventies. The both had the unfortunate experience of having severe
strokes in their early thirties.
Bob was a student at Kent State
University during the late sixties and early seventies when the horrific
shootings on May 4, 1970 of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio
National Guard occurred during a mass protest of the Vietnam War. Twenty-eight
guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine others. After this tragedy four million students staged strikes across America and
hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed. People rose up in
opposition to war.
I was a first classman (senior) at the
Virginia Military Institute in 1970. What a time to be a student at a military
college. While I was learning to fire a 50-caliber machine gun, drive tanks and throw a hand grenade my cohorts at the University of Virginia
were protesting the war. These were tumultuous times in America, a contentious, unsettling and sad. Where were you on May 4, 1970?
The sixties were war years, like so many
before and after. During the Vietnam
War era, every evening American news anchors reported the number of American
soldiers killed that day, the body count. In the end, over fifty-eight thousand
American soldiers died. Rarely mentioned were the 1.1 million Viet
Cong and North Vietnam soldiers or the 250,000 South Vietnam soldiers or the
two million civilians who died in the conflict, or the 4,900 dead from
Thailand, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight was a
particularly eventful year.
In February, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a National
Police Chief, executed Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém. War journalist Eddie Adams photographed the
execution. The picture made its way around the world and help sway US public
opinion against the war. Adams received a Pulitzer prize for his reporting.
People around the world condemned Loan for his brutality. The
underlying story, one that did not get much attention, was that Lem was responsible
for killing the wife and six children of a South Vietnamese military officer. A
few months after the execution picture, a Viet Cong soldier seriously wounded
Loan in a fire fight and a field surgeon had to amputate Loan’s leg. In 1975, during
the fall of Saigon Loan fled South Vietnam. He moved to the United
States and opened a pizza restaurant in the Washington, D.C. suburb
of Burke, VA where he died in 1998. You cannot make this stuff up.
In March the My Lia massacre happened.
United States Army soldiers killed somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese
civilians in South Vietnam. The victims included men, women, children and
infants. Some of the women were gang raped and their bodies mutilated. Three US
serviceman tried to halt the massacre and rescue hiding civilians. Some US
Congressman denounced these heroes as traitors. It was only after thirty years that
our government recognized and decorated them for shielding noncombatants from
harm in a war zone.
In April James Earl Ray assassinated
Martin Luther King Jr.in a hotel in Memphis Tennessee.
In June, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated US
presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy at a hotel in Los Angeles.
In August Private First Class James
Anderson Jr. became the first African-American marine to receive the Medal
of Honor for heroism while serving in Vietnam. In a fire fight in December
1966, Private Anderson covered a grenade with his body to save his teammates. The
grenade exploded and killed him. He was twenty years old. If that doesn’t make
you cry nothing will.
In December the Apollo 8 spacecraft entered
orbit around the moon and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William
Anders become the first human beings to ever see the far side of the moon.
Margo and Bob were fabulous hosts. They
fed us well. The next morning, after a scrumptious breakfast, we drove to
Denver to visit another old friend and have the van serviced. The brilliant and
talented graphic artist Wendy Ray picked us up at the car dealership and
whisked us away to her condominium, where we spent the afternoon visiting,
eating Colorado peaches and admiring her art.
Wendy drove us back to the dealership and
after goodbyes we drove to Colorado Springs and checked in at the Garden of the
Gods Motel and Cottage. Some place. A perfect Tom Waites hang out. All manner
of colorful people coming and going. Had dinner that night at Rudy’s Country
Store and Barbecue Hang Out. Perfect. |
| The Insuppressible Wendy Ray Holding a Picture of the Equally Insuppressible Lester Bowers |
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| Samples of Wendy's Art |
The next morning, we drove to the Air
Force Academy’s Falcon Stadium to see a football game between the Keydets of
the Virginia military Institute (VMI), my alma mater, and a far superior
Academy team.
The Virginia Military Institute is the
only school in the nation to have had its students, while actively attending
the school, sent into battle. On 15 May 1864, two hundred and forty-seven members
of the VMI Corps of Cadets fought as an independent unit at the battle of
New Market during the Civil War. General John C Breckinridge, the
commanding Southern general, held the cadets in reserve until Union troops
broke through Confederate lines. Breckinridge sent the VMI unit into battle
and, as history tells the story, asked for God’s forgiveness for doing so. In a
matter of minutes, the unit suffered fifty-five casualties with ten cadets
killed. But the cadets pushed forward, capturing a Union artillery emplacement. The Union troops withdrew,
and Confederate troops held the line. A heavy price indeed to pay for
holding a line in a field in the Shenandoah Valley. These remarkable VMI cadets
were about the same age as Private First Class James Anderson Jr. who covered that grenade with his body to save his teammates in Vietnam. Six of the ten
fallen cadets are buried on VMI grounds behind the statue "Virginia Mourning
Her Dead" by sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a VMI graduate who was also
wounded in the Battle of New Market.
VMI has a simple and straightforward
honor system. It says, “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate
those who do.” The system does not recognize degrees of honor. The sanction for
any breach of honor is dismissal. Leaving aside the impracticality of
implementing such an austere code in day to day living outside an institution
like VMI,
wouldn’t it be nice if we did not tolerate politicians who lie to us? That would be
an effective way to get rid of most of them. Just dismiss the charlatans!
I was a cadet at VMI in 1968 when the
Institute admitted the first African-American cadets. In 1997 VMI finally
admitted women, shamefully the last military college in America to do so. VMI
resisted the whole way. It took a 7 to 1 decision in the US Supreme Court that
found that it was unconstitutional for a school supported by public funds to
exclude women to finally compel VMI to admit women. Following the ruling, VMI
contemplated going private to avoid the ruling. State and federal dollars drive
much of VMI’s military programs so when cooler heads ran the numbers and
concluded that road would be a dead-end, VMI finally relented and admitted
women, who of course have gone on to excel at VMI, in the armed forces and in
civilian life. When money talks nobody walks.
VMI is a southern school through and
through. Many of its heroes are Confederate generals. To this very day when
fourth classmen, ‘rats’, exit barracks through Jackson arch they must salute a
statute of Stonewall Jackson just outside of the arch. This is a time in
America when many people are contemplating the allegiance we have to these southern Civil War heroes or at least to monuments to them throughout the South. Just across the
Blue Ridge Mountains in Charlottesville the city council voted recently to remove a
statue of Robert E Lee from a public park, formerly called Lee Park, now renamed Emancipation
Park. Is VMI next?
Schools need big money to fund their
athletic endeavors. This game between fine young men on both sides illustrates the
influence of money on scheduling in college sports. On this day the VMI
football team were severely overmatched. They gave it their all but
predictably came up on the losing end. However, the school got a substantial
chunk of money just for showing up. Final score of today’s match? Air Force
Academy – 62, VMI – 0. It might have been a money maker for VMI but I’m not so
sure about a morale builder for the brave VMI players. The VMI team did not win
a single game this season. One must wonder whether opening against a fare
superior team and getting shellacked in this way contributed to that losing
season. Big programs like the Air Force Academy get big, fast, talented
athletes. VMI athletes have big hearts but not comparable talent, size and
speed.
Football games at Falcon Stadium are festive events, complete with jet flyovers, marching bands, precision parachutists, and an appearance by the team’s mascot, yes, a falcon. Late in the first half medical personnel took the starting VMI quarterback off the field in a gurney after an opposing defender administered a violent hit.
Football games at Falcon Stadium are festive events, complete with jet flyovers, marching bands, precision parachutists, and an appearance by the team’s mascot, yes, a falcon. Late in the first half medical personnel took the starting VMI quarterback off the field in a gurney after an opposing defender administered a violent hit.
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| VMI Team Praying that Nobody Gets Killed |
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| Precision Parachutists |
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That's a Big Flag
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| The Air Force Falcon |
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| Valiant VMI Quarterback Leaving After Violent Hit |
We couldn’t take any more of the
slaughter so we left the game at halftime and drove west on route 24, skirting
Pike’s Peak, passing through Woodland Park, Divide, Florissant, Glentivar,
Hartsel and finally to Antero Junction, where we crossed Trout Creek Pass at
9,487 feet and went north on route 285 to National Forest road 433 where we entered
the Pike National Forest for a little sweet dispersed camping, with eight spectacular
fourteen-thousand foot and many lesser, but not much lesser, mountain peaks in
the Sawatch Range of Colorado’s Central San Wan Mountains just to the
west.
Tomorrow Salida, CO
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